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SPOOKS, RUSSIA, AND DISINFORMATION

By Paul Robinson | IRRUSIANALITY | January 20, 2022

Jeremy Morris has an interesting post on his Postsocialism blog about the malicious role played by Western intelligence services in shaping narratives of Russia. I’m somewhat sceptical about his thesis – or at least the extent of the phenomenon he describes – but as if by chance, today I also came across a story that kind of backs him up.

Morris complains of two “elephants in the room,” who together distort our understanding of Russia. The first is the “clear leveraging of latent public sympathy abroad for the Russian regime by our friends at the English-language offices of RT.” I guess that would be me.

The second is “academic and think-tank contacts with the security services in the West.” Given my former involvement in the intelligence world, and the fact that I’ve taught courses at the University of Ottawa with members of the Canadian security and intelligence services, I guess that would be me too.

Double elephant!

I imagine that Morris thinks that elephant number one distorts things in favour of Russia, and elephant number two distorts them against. That must make me some sort of push-me-pull-you doing both at once. Perhaps that explains why I always end up occupying the middle ground!

Anyway, I digress, because this isn’t meant to be about me. Back to the point.

“If you underestimate the hidden motives of those that comment on Russia – from both elephants, then you are guilty of the ‘fallacy of insufficient cynicism’,” writes Morris. I must confess myself guilty as charged. I can be pretty cynical, but I don’t think that everybody has “hidden motives.” People who write what one might call “pro-Russian” articles for RT aren’t doing it for the money or because the FSB has got some dirt on them any more than people writing Russophobic stuff for think tanks are doing it because they’re taking orders from the FBI, MI5, or CSIS. People tend to believe what they’re doing.

In any case, I worry less about spooks and more about the military industrial complex and its funding of think tanks and the like, all of which work together to inflate threats, keep us in a state of fear, and justify increased defence spending and aggressive foreign policies. But even there, the think tankers etc believe in what they’re doing. The problem is that believers get funded whereas non-believers don’t. I don’t think “hidden motives” are the issue.

That said, Morris has a point, in that security and intelligence services do maintain contacts with chosen favourites and feed them information that they hope will further their chosen narrative. The story I came across today illustrates how this works quite well.

A while back, I mentioned a law case in the UK involving Guardian journalist Carol Cadwalladr and British businessman Arron Banks. Banks is suing Cadwalladr for libel for having claimed that the Russian government offered him money for use in the Brexit referendum campaign, and that he lied about his relationship with the Russians. The case is now before the court, and Cadwalladr’s defence is becoming clear.

The Guardian journalist isn’t claiming that what she said about Banks was true, merely that given the evidence she had at the time she had good reason to believe that it was in the public interest for her to report it. So what was this evidence, and where did she get it from? This is where it becomes interesting. For as the Guardian reports,

In her written evidence statement, she [Cadwalladr] said she had obtained two intelligence files from an organisation contracted to undertake work countering Russian disinformation in Europe on behalf of a government agency, one file of which raised concerns about Banks’s Russian wife.

In other words, British intelligence fed the information to her via another source.

The accusation that Banks took Russian money to fund Brexit received widespread coverage. It was even repeated in a parliamentary report. Yet no evidence to support the claim has ever been produced, and as we have seen, Cadwalladr isn’t trying to say that it was true. In short, it was disinformation. And yet, what prompted it was in part documents leaked by British intelligence to a third party “contracted to undertake work countering Russian disinformation” and then in turn given by that organization to Ms Cadwalladr.

Doesn’t that strike you as a bit iffy?

In the first place, the story reinforces what I have said several times before, namely that the “disinformation industry” set up to “counter Russian disinformation” is itself a major source of disinformation. And second, it reveals an excessively cosy relationship between the media – supposedly an independent guardian of the truth that holds the state to account – and state organizations, including secret intelligence.

Personally, I find it more than a little disturbing.

Maybe Mr Morris is right after all!

January 20, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

Was Peter Daszak Working For The Central Intelligence Agency?

An EcoHealth Alliance whistleblower steps forward

Dr. Shi Zhengli, Dr. Peter Daszak, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology
Kanekoa TheGreat | January 18, 2022

“We found other coronaviruses in bats, a whole host of them, some of them looked very similar to SARS. So we sequenced the spike protein: the protein that attaches to cells. Then we… Well, I didn’t do this work, but my colleagues in China did the work. You create pseudo particles, you insert the spike proteins from those viruses, see if they bind to human cells. At each step of this, you move closer and closer to this virus could really become pathogenic in people. You end up with a small number of viruses that really do look like killers.”

This statement was said by EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak at a 2016 forum discussing “emerging infectious diseases and the next pandemic”. Daszak, who received more than $118 million in grants and contracts from federal agencies, including $53 million from USAID, $42 million from DOD, and $15 million from HHS, appeared to boast about the manipulation of “killer” SARS-like coronaviruses carried out by his “colleagues in China” at the now infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology.

According to investigative research done by independent-journalist Sam Husseini and The Intercept, much of the money awarded to EcoHealth Alliance did not focus on health or ecology, but rather on biowarfare, bioterrorism, and other dangerous uses of deadly pathogens.

EcoHealth Alliance received the majority of its funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), a State Department subsidiary that serves as a frequent cover for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Their second largest source of funding was from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), which is a branch of the Department of Defense (DOD) which states it is tasked to “counter and deter weapons of mass destruction and improvised threat networks.”

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has a long history of acting as a contract vehicle for various CIA covert activities. With an annual budget of over $27 billion and operations in over 100 countries, one former USAID director, John Gilligan, once admitted it was “infiltrated from top to bottom with CIA people.” Gilligan explained that “the idea was to plant operatives in every kind of activity we had overseas; government, volunteer, religious, every kind.”

In 2013, a US cable published by WikiLeaks outlined the U.S. strategy to undermine Venezuela’s government through USAID by “penetrating Chavez’s political base”, “dividing Chavismo”, and “isolating Chavez internationally.” In 2014, the Associated Press disclosed that USAID contracted out a project to develop a rival to Twitter in order to foment a rebellion in Cuba.

From 2009 to 2019, USAID partnered with EcoHealth Alliance on their PREDICT program which identified over 1,200 new viruses, including over 160 coronavirus strains; trained roughly 5,000 people around the world to identify new diseases; and improved or developed 60 research laboratories.

What better way for the CIA to collect intelligence on the world’s biological warfare capabilities?

Source: The Intercept

Dr. Andrew Huff received his Ph.D. in Environmental Health specializing in emerging diseases before becoming an Associate Vice President at EcoHealth Alliance, where he developed novel methods of bio-surveillance, data analytics, and visualization for disease detection.

On January 12, 2022, Dr. Andrew Huff issued a public statement (on Twitter) in which he claimed, Peter Daszak, the President of EcoHealth Alliance, told him that he was working for the CIA.

Dr. Andrew Huff’s full statement below:

Source: Dr. Andrew Huff

Dr. Huff continued, “… I wouldn’t be surprised if the CIA / IC community orchestrated the COVID coverup acting as an intermediary between Fauci, Collins, Daszak, Baric, and many others. At best, it was the biggest criminal conspiracy in US history by bureaucrats or political appointees.”

What exactly did they cover-up?

Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance—financed by USAID, DOD, and other U.S. Government agencies—partnered with Dr. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina and Dr. Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology to conduct gain-of-function research on bat-borne coronaviruses.

Baric successfully created a “chimeric” coronavirus in 2015. There is a well-documented scientific paper trail that details how Dr. Baric and Dr. Zhengli continued to collaborate on gain-of-function research together to create what went on to be a potential precursor to the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Francis Collins, and Dr. Peter Daszak, who were proponents of this type of international collaboration on gain-of-function research were heavily incentivized to cover up the possibility of a lab origin because they previously had funneled U.S. taxpayer money to the Chinese lab.

At the start of 2020, there was a lot of chatter about where the virus SARS-CoV-2 actually originated from. Two papers published in March 2020—one in Nature Medicine and one in The Lancet—controlled the direction of the dialogue on the origin of the virus.

Both papers were repeatedly cited by Fauci, Collins, Daszak, the corporate media, and big tech as evidence to shut down and even censor any discussion of the possibility that the virus originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Only later through redacted emails released by FOIA did we learn that Fauci, Collins, and Daszak were intimately involved in crafting the two papers which dismissed the lab origin hypotheses as “conspiracy theory.”

In February 2020, Daszak told University of North Carolina coronavirus researcher Dr. Ralph Baric that they should not sign the statement condemning the lab-leak theory so that it seems more independent and credible. “You, me and him should not sign this statement, so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn’t work in a counterproductive way,” Daszak wrote.

More unredacted emails have revealed that while these scientists held the private belief that the lab release was the most likely scenario, they still worked to seed the natural origin narrative for the public through the papers published in Nature Medicine and The Lancet.

In April 2020, Daszak opposed the public release of Covid-19-related virus sequence data that has been gathered from China, as part of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) PREDICT program because he said it would bring “very unwelcome attention” to the aforementioned “PREDICT and USAID” programs.

Source: U.S. Right To Know FOIA

In September 2020, scientists were outraged when Daszak was chosen to lead the World Health Organization task force examining the possibility that Covid-19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Despite many clear attempts to cut off a legitimate scientific inquiry into the Wuhan lab origin hypothesis, the theory continued to persist predominantly due to the fact that the Chinese government was unable to provide a single shred of evidence in support of the natural origin theory.

In May 2021, the narrative turned when, Nicholas Wade, a former science reporter at the New York Times published his seminal column outlining the case for the Covid lab-leak theory.

For SARS1, an intermediary host species was identified within four months of the epidemic’s outbreak and the host of MERS was identified within nine months. Yet some 15 months after the SARS2 outbreak began, and a presumably intensive search, Chinese researchers had failed to find either the original bat population, or the intermediate species to which SARS2 might have jumped, or any serological evidence of a natural origin.

Every step of the way, Fauci, Collins, and Daszak have done everything in their power to obfuscate, mislead, and misinform the world about the possibility of SARS-CoV-2 originating at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

If Dr. Andrew Huff is telling the truth, Fauci, Collins, and Daszak are not covering up the lab origin only for themselves, but also for the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, and the U.S. Government.

January 20, 2022 Posted by | Deception, War Crimes | , , , , | 2 Comments

Covid-19 vaccines and treatments: we must have raw data, now

Data should be fully and immediately available for public scrutiny

Peter Doshi, senior editor, Fiona Godlee, former editor in chief, Kamran Abbasi, editor in chief | BMJ | January 19, 2022

In the pages of The BMJ a decade ago, in the middle of a different pandemic, it came to light that governments around the world had spent billions stockpiling antivirals for influenza that had not been shown to reduce the risk of complications, hospital admissions, or death. The majority of trials that underpinned regulatory approval and government stockpiling of oseltamivir (Tamiflu) were sponsored by the manufacturer; most were unpublished, those that were published were ghostwritten by writers paid by the manufacturer, the people listed as principal authors lacked access to the raw data, and academics who requested access to the data for independent analysis were denied.1234

The Tamiflu saga heralded a decade of unprecedented attention to the importance of sharing clinical trial data.56 Public battles for drug company data,78 transparency campaigns with thousands of signatures,910 strengthened journal data sharing requirements,1112 explicit commitments from companies to share data,13 new data access website portals,8 and landmark transparency policies from medicines regulators1415 all promised a new era in data transparency.

Progress was made, but clearly not enough. The errors of the last pandemic are being repeated. Memories are short. Today, despite the global rollout of covid-19 vaccines and treatments, the anonymised participant level data underlying the trials for these new products remain inaccessible to doctors, researchers, and the public—and are likely to remain that way for years to come.16 This is morally indefensible for all trials, but especially for those involving major public health interventions.

Unacceptable delay

Pfizer’s pivotal covid vaccine trial was funded by the company and designed, run, analysed, and authored by Pfizer employees. The company and the contract research organisations that carried out the trial hold all the data.17 And Pfizer has indicated that it will not begin entertaining requests for trial data until May 2025, 24 months after the primary study completion date, which is listed on ClinicalTrials.gov as 15 May 2023 (NCT04368728).

The lack of access to data is consistent across vaccine manufacturers.16 Moderna says data “may be available … with publication of the final study results in 2022.”18 Datasets will be available “upon request and subject to review once the trial is complete,” which has an estimated primary completion date of 27 October 2022 (NCT04470427).

As of 31 December 2021, AstraZeneca may be ready to entertain requests for data from several of its large phase III trials.19 But actually obtaining data could be slow going. As its website explains, “timelines vary per request and can take up to a year upon full submission of the request.”20

Underlying data for covid-19 therapeutics are similarly hard to find. Published reports of Regeneron’s phase III trial of its monoclonal antibody therapy REGEN-COV flatly state that participant level data will not be made available to others.21 Should the drug be approved (and not just emergency authorised), sharing “will be considered.” For remdesivir, the US National Institutes of Health, which funded the trial, created a new portal to share data (https://accessclinicaldata.niaid.nih.gov/), but the dataset on offer is limited. An accompanying document explains: “The longitudinal data set only contains a small subset of the protocol and statistical analysis plan objectives.”

We are left with publications but no access to the underlying data on reasonable request. This is worrying for trial participants, researchers, clinicians, journal editors, policy makers, and the public. The journals that have published these primary studies may argue that they faced an awkward dilemma, caught between making the summary findings available quickly and upholding the best ethical values that support timely access to underlying data. In our view, there is no dilemma; the anonymised individual participant data from clinical trials must be made available for independent scrutiny.

Journal editors, systematic reviewers, and the writers of clinical practice guideline generally obtain little beyond a journal publication, but regulatory agencies receive far more granular data as part of the regulatory review process. In the words of the European Medicine Agency’s former executive director and senior medical officer, “relying solely on the publications of clinical trials in scientific journals as the basis of healthcare decisions is not a good idea … Drug regulators have been aware of this limitation for a long time and routinely obtain and assess the full documentation (rather than just publications).”22

Among regulators, the US Food and Drug Administration is believed to receive the most raw data but does not proactively release them. After a freedom of information request to the agency for Pfizer’s vaccine data, the FDA offered to release 500 pages a month, a process that would take decades to complete, arguing in court that publicly releasing data was slow owing to the need to first redact sensitive information.23 This month, however, a judge rejected the FDA’s offer and ordered the data be released at a rate of 55 000 pages a month. The data are to be made available on the requesting organisation’s website (phmpt.org).

In releasing thousands of pages of clinical trial documents, Health Canada and the EMA have also provided a degree of transparency that deserves acknowledgment.2425 Until recently, however, the data remained of limited utility, with copious redactions aimed at protecting trial blinding. But study reports with fewer redactions have been available since September 2021,2425 and missing appendices may be accessible through freedom of information requests.

Even so, anyone looking for participant level datasets may be disappointed because Health Canada and the EMA do not receive or analyse these data, and it remains to be seen how the FDA responds to the court order. Moreover, the FDA is producing data only for Pfizer’s vaccine; other manufacturers’ data cannot be requested until the vaccines are approved, which the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines are not. Industry, which holds the raw data, is not legally required to honour requests for access from independent researchers.

Like the FDA, and unlike its Canadian and European counterparts, the UK’s regulator—the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency—does not proactively release clinical trial documents, and it has also stopped posting information released in response to freedom of information requests on its website.26

Transparency and trust

As well as access to the underlying data, transparent decision making is essential. Regulators and public health bodies could release details27 such as why vaccine trials were not designed to test efficacy against infection and spread of SARS-CoV-2.28 Had regulators insisted on this outcome, countries would have learnt sooner about the effect of vaccines on transmission and been able to plan accordingly.29

Big pharma is the least trusted industry.30 At least three of the many companies making covid-19 vaccines have past criminal and civil settlements costing them billions of dollars.31 One pleaded guilty to fraud.31 Other companies have no pre-covid track record. Now the covid pandemic has minted many new pharma billionaires, and vaccine manufacturers have reported tens of billions in revenue.32

The BMJ supports vaccination policies based on sound evidence. As the global vaccine rollout continues, it cannot be justifiable or in the best interests of patients and the public that we are left to just trust “in the system,” with the distant hope that the underlying data may become available for independent scrutiny at some point in the future. The same applies to treatments for covid-19. Transparency is the key to building trust and an important route to answering people’s legitimate questions about the efficacy and safety of vaccines and treatments and the clinical and public health policies established for their use.

Twelve years ago we called for the immediate release of raw data from clinical trials.1 We reiterate that call now. Data must be available when trial results are announced, published, or used to justify regulatory decisions. There is no place for wholesale exemptions from good practice during a pandemic. The public has paid for covid-19 vaccines through vast public funding of research, and it is the public that takes on the balance of benefits and harms that accompany vaccination. The public, therefore, has a right and entitlement to those data, as well as to the interrogation of those data by experts.

Pharmaceutical companies are reaping vast profits without adequate independent scrutiny of their scientific claims.33 The purpose of regulators is not to dance to the tune of rich global corporations and enrich them further; it is to protect the health of their populations. We need complete data transparency for all studies, we need it in the public interest, and we need it now.

Footnotes

  • Competing interests: We have read and understood BMJ policy on declaration of interests and declare that The BMJ is a co-founder of the AllTrials campaign. PD was one of the Cochrane reviewers studying influenza antivirals beginning in 2009, who campaigned for access to data. He also helped organise the Coalition Advocating for Adequately Licensed Medicines (CAALM), which formally petitioned the FDA to refrain from fully approving any covid-19 vaccine this year (docket FDA-2021-P-0786). PD is also a member of Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency, which has sued the FDA to obtain the Pfizer covid-19 vaccine data. The views and opinions do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Maryland.

  • Provenance and peer review: Commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

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View Abstract

Author affiliations

Correspondence to: P Doshi [email protected]

January 20, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

The Experts’ “Zero Covid” Plan Was a Total Failure

By Ryan McMaken – Mises Wire – 01/17/2022

The Chinese regime is doubling down in its “zero covid” strategy. In recent weeks, new covid cases have been detected in several cities. In a world of the more-contagious omicron variant, this is to be expected.

But what has been the Chinese state’s response? It’s more of the same. Lockdowns, travel suspensions, and more. NBC reports:

Tianjin, which detected China’s first community spread of Omicron on Saturday, is rolling out a second round of mass testing on its 14 million residents on Wednesday. …The outbreak has already spread to Anyang, a city in Henan province some 300 miles (482 kilometers) away, prompting a full lockdown …Tianjin officials said at a news conference Tuesday that all bus services to Beijing had been suspended. … On Wednesday, 425 flights were canceled at Tianjin Binhai International Airport, accounting for 95% of all scheduled flights… Tianjin authorities on Sunday ordered citizens not to leave the city unless absolutely necessary. Those who want to leave must present a negative Covid test taken within 48 hours…

It’s hard to believe that anyone still believes that covid will go away if government authorities just “lock down harder.” But China is hardly the only example of how this delusion can win many adherents among the technocrats and the expert class.

After all, let it not be forgotten that much of the world had adopted a zero covid policy early on, and this absurd policy endured for months. In Europe, of course, millions upon millions of people were virtually locked in their homes for months on end. As Philipp Bagus reported from Spain in spring of 2020, one wasn’t allowed to go outside without facing the wrath of state enforcers.

In America, the “experts” frequently spoke out in favor of zero covid, stating that lockdowns could eradicate the disease and that people would have to stay on lockdown until that time. For example, on April 2 of 2020, Anthony Fauci endorsed this idea, stating that social distancing requirements could not be relaxed until there are “essentially no new cases, no deaths for a period of time.” Hawaii explicitly embraced zero covid, and adopted a policy in 2020 based on the idea that public schools would never reopen until there was no longer any “community spread” and “no new cases” were detected over a period of four weeks.

Needless to say, those were totally unrealistic goals. They reflected only the plans of technocrats who were more concerned with living out their bizarre fetishes for lockdowns and border closures than with gaining a better grasp of the situation or with respecting basic human rights. Even Australia—an island nation that could perhaps plausibly hope to actually close its borders—has given up on the idea.

In other words, the “experts” in America wanted to recreate Chinese despotism in America. They adopted a lockdown policy that had already long been rejected. Lockdowns were already expected to bring long term side effects, such as surges in mental health problems—some of the worst of it among the young—now being reported by hospitals. The WHO even concluded that lockdowns ought to be rejected because “there is no obvious rationale for this measure.”

But perhaps the media and government officials were so successful at sowing panic in the general population in the spring of 2020 that the health technocrats saw their chance to try a new experiment in social engineering that they had previously considered unfeasible.

Fortunately, though, by the middle of 2020, it became clear that lockdowns simply weren’t going to be tolerated by much of the general public. Most state and local governments in the US abandoned zero covid rapidly, although the usual totalitarians in the media bemoaned the end of the policy, insisting that the abandonment of lockdowns would drench the non-lockdown jurisdictions in blood. This was predicted for US states like Georgia, and for countries like Sweden—where lockdowns were quickly jettisoned or not imposed at all.

As time went on, it became obvious that the non-lockdown jurisdictions did not fare significantly worse than the locked down ones. Some areas—Sweden, for instance—fared better. Some of the world’s harshest lockdown regimes—such as those in Peru, Argentina, the UK, and New York—also had some of the worst rates of deaths per million.

For the zero-covid crowd, reality got in the way.

Neo-Zero Covid: The Pivot to Vaccines

The zero covid mentality endures, however. The second wave of the zero covid mentality came with the idea that with universal vaccination, covid would disappear.

And, of course, once vaccines began to appear, it was hailed as a magic bullet that would ensure that the vaccinated would be unable to spread the disease. This ideology was expressed in a rant by Rachel Maddow who back in March 2020 harangued her viewers with the “fact” that “virus stops with every vaccinated person.” She continued: “A vaccinated person gets exposed to the virus, the virus does not infect them, the virus cannot then use that person to go anywhere else.”

This was all a complete fabrication. The vaccine never stopped the spread, and with the advent of the omicron variant, it’s now apparently the case that the vaccine doesn’t even slow the spread. The virus is quickly spreading among vaccinated.

It’s no longer possible to even pretend that vaccination prevents transmission. The only argument left to supporters of the vaccine mandate is that vaccines help against serious disease and death. That’s excellent, but it has nothing to do with public health because it’s clear the unvaccinated aren’t the reason the disease has not been eradicated.

And then there is the fact that vaccination has, in part, likely contributed to new covid mutations. This isn’t new with covid. The idea that treatments can lead to new mutations is not new, of course, and it’s long been known that under a variety of situations, leaky vaccines can produce vaccine resistant mutations.

This is also known to occur in the case of covid. For example, in an article for the Journal of Physical Chemistry (December 2021), the authors note “vaccine-breakthrough or antibody-resistant mutations provide a new mechanism of viral evolution.” And specifically on covid, they write how mutations are often more common in places with higher vaccination rates:

we reveal that the occurrence and frequency of vaccine-resistant mutations correlate strongly with the vaccination rates in Europe and America. We anticipate that as a complementary transmission pathway, vaccine-breakthrough or antibody-resistant mutations, like those in Omicron, will become a dominating mechanism of SARS-CoV-2 evolution when most of the world’s population is either vaccinated or infected.

This can make things even worse when coupled with other covid mitigation measures. As Vivek Ramaswamy and Apoorva Ramaswamy explained in the Wall Street Journal last week it’s simply not realistic to think vaccines can be constantly adjusted to keep up with new variants. And,

Meanwhile, mask mandates and social-distancing measures will have created fertile ground for new variants that evade vaccination even more effectively. Significant antigenic shifts may create new strains that are increasingly difficult to target with vaccines at all. There are no vaccines for many viruses, despite decades of effort to develop them.

That is, vaccination isn’t making covid go away. The politically correct version of the narrative also completely denies that the failure of vaccines to prevent the spread is even a significant factor in the spread of new mutations. The purveyors of the narrative still insist that only the unvaccinated have any responsibility in the continued existence of the disease. Consider, for example, a recent mainstream media report quoting a doctor who dutifully repeated the political orthodoxy that “Without a large percentage of people being vaccinated, the virus has been allowed to mutate.” Specifically, he further claimed that if “roughly 70% of the population” were vaccinated or naturally infected, this would bring the spread of the disease to a halt through “herd immunity.” But—as the doctor now intones in a forlorn voice—that can’t be achieved because there hasn’t been enough vaccination.

But given his criteria, we should expect places with at least 70% vaccination rates to have halted the spread of disease, right? Not surprisingly, this has not happened. In Portugal, for instance, the fully vaccinated rate—is at 90 percent. In Chile, it’s at 87 percent. It’s 75 percent in France. So, surely the spread of covid has been stopped in all these places? The answer is no. New cases are raging in Portugal, Chile, and France, with all these countries hitting new highs in recent days.

Whether we’re talking about vaccine mandates or lockdowns, it’s clear the zero covid strategy has been an abject failure. They’re still trying it in some places like China where government propaganda is largely unquestioned and where people practice unquestioning obedience to the regime at a scale that makes the all-too-complacent West look downright rebellious by comparison.

Don’t expect the “experts” in any country to give up on their slogans any time soon. But it is clear that reality will eventually catch up with them. Whether or not any respect for human rights remains at the end of it all is another matter.

January 20, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Unboostered Brits Infected and Dying at Higher Rates than Unvaccinated

UKHSA Vaccine Efficacy Statistics: Week 3

eugyppius | January 20, 2022

The UK Health Security Agency has been condemned for literally months now to report incredibly inconvenient vaccine efficacy statistics. How they have struggled. They have composed disclaimer after disclaimer. They filled a whole blog post with special pleading. They have greyed out the inconvenient numbers.

In their latest report, published just this evening, they’ve tried something new and bold. They now only calculate case, hospitalisation and death rates for the unvaccinated and the triple vaccinated. The double vaccinated have been banished entirely from Table 12. This will make the evil negative efficacy go away, right?

Ha, no:

The numbers are unadjusted, it is true; much certainty surrounds the size of the unvaccinated population and therefore case rates within that group. What is more, these are cases, not true infection statistics. Nevertheless, res ipsa loquitur. It does not look great.

In fact, the UKHSA have given us a great gift, in that they finally provide separate case and severe outcome statistics for the triple-vaccinated and the double vaccinated, allowing us to compare rates across all three groups. They don’t do that themselves, of course, but no matter. We can use the raw numbers and rates from last week’s report to derive the total number of double and triple vaccinated, and the rates in this week’s report to derive the triple vaccinated population. A little subtraction then gives us a decent estimate of how many double but not triple vaccinated people there are in each age bracket.

Here is the graph the UKHSA don’t want you to see:

This is plainly a pandemic of the vaccinated.

The double vaccinated death rate is also a problem. You can tell this just from looking at the numbers in each category:

The crucial 70+ demographic is over 90% boostered, and yet the very few double vaccinated in this cohort manage to match or exceed theeir death numbers.

The death rates have the double vaccinated worse than the unvaccinated in the 70+ cohort, and roughly matching the unvaccinated in the 60–69 group:

This isn’t all that surprising, given that Public Health Scotland data has shown across-the-board negative efficacy for the unboostered for some weeks now:

This is also true of deaths, but beware of the extremely low numbers, particularly in the singly vaccinated:

January 20, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Forget the headlines, these are the vaccine facts

By Geoff Moore | TCW Defending Freedom | January 20, 2022

WE were told before the Covid vaccine rollout that it wouldn’t block transmission, but that it would reduce symptoms and therefore hospitalisation. Throughout 2021 we saw many warning headlines like ‘Pandemic of the unvaccinated’, becoming ever more alarmist like this one in the Guardian towards the end of November when Professor Sir Andrew Pollard opined that ‘Getting jabs to the unvaccinated has never been more critical’. The article said that the horrors of Covid are now restricted to those who won’t or can’t have a jab, and further claimed that Covid patients in ICUs are ‘now almost all unvaccinated’. The BBC too was not backwards in coming forwards, in December reporting a spokesman for Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, saying that ’80 per cent of patients we’ve seen over the last few months in general wards and critical care have been unvaccinated’.

In his statement to Parliament yesterday the Prime Minister continued with this narrative: ‘When there are still over 16,000 people in hospital in England alone, the pandemic is not over. And, Mr Speaker, make no mistake, Omicron is not a mild disease for everyone – and especially if you’re not vaccinated.’

So, let’s report what Mr Johnson so blatantly ignored – the latest government data on Covid-positive hospitalisations: the facts, not his opinions. It makes for interesting reading.

Public Health Scotland’s Winter Statistical Report states that 541 vaccinated people were hospitalised versus 168 unvaccinated, see page 36 table 12 (I used December 25-31 as it’s not provisional) which by my count is over three times as many vaccinated.

NHS Wales Surveillance of Vaccine Status states that 433 vaccinated people were hospitalised versus 90 unvaccinated, see page 4 table 4. That’s nearly five times as many.

Northern Ireland’s Vaccination Status of Deaths and Hospitalisations states that 395 vaccinated people were hospitalised versus 289 unvaccinated (page 8 table 1). That’s 108 more vaccinated than unvaccinated.

UK Health Security Agency Covid-19 Vaccine Surveillance Report states that 8,566 vaccinated people were hospitalised in England versus 4,738 unvaccinated (Page 40 table 10).That’s nearly twice as many.

All confirmed in the report of the 95th Sage meeting on Covid-19 which states: ‘For patients admitted after 16 June 2021 the majority of patients had received two doses’ (Page 3 item 3).

I don’t know what Sir Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, University of Oxford and the media were basing their headlines on but it certainly wasn’t this data.

Meanwhile Johnson did his best with something that’s come to be understood with the phrase, ‘lies,damn lies and statistics’, telling us that from ‘our NHS data, we know that around 90 per cent of people in intensive care are not boosted’. Never mind that the totally unvaccinated are the minority in intensive care.

Sir Andrew Pollard might buy that one. Others won’t.

January 20, 2022 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , | 1 Comment

Americans for War

Is the Ukraine/Russia conflict a US foreign policy goal?

Techno Fog | January 19, 2022

Dare I say a dangerous truth, but there are politicians and analysts and journalists who want Russia to invade Ukraine.

Not because these folks are “Putin apologists,” to quote a popular insult they use against the anti-war crowd. But because they see Russian actions as a pretext for U.S. intervention and perpetual U.S. presence in Ukraine, if not elsewhere. (Poke the bear and you’re the antagonist. Get attacked by the bear and you’re the victim.)

How can Russian aggression best be used? For some, it is the justification for more troops and more weapons in Eastern Europe. NATO sees the opportunity to “reinforce its troop presence in the Black Sea and the Baltics.”

Here in the States, former Obama Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Evelyn Farkas advocates “U.S. leaders should be marshalling an international coalition of the willing, readying military forces to deter Putin and, if necessary, prepare for war.” Others argue for an aggressive military response or suggest the option of “U.S. boots on the ground.” Max Boot, a delusional journalist with a large platform, a silly fedora, and an appetite for war, promotes an urgent airlift of U.S. weapons systems to Ukraine. Boot goes so far as to issue a silly warning that Putin is attempting to resurrect the “evil empire.” If Boot believes these words, then he will eventually advocate the most extreme measures to counter Russia. Dangerous rhetoric indeed.

If recent history is any indication, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy certainly sees the current crisis, if you can call it that, as an opportunity. Last June, he tweeted “NATO leaders confirmed that Ukraine” will become a member of the Alliance.” This announcement came days before Biden’s scheduled meeting with President Vladimir Putin. In other words, it was planned. And while Biden’s response last summer was ambivalent on Ukraine joining NATO, more recently he assured Zelenskiy that “Kyiv’s bid to join the NATO military alliance was in its own hands.” This comment came after Putin’s warning that Ukraine’s admission to NATO is a “red line” for Moscow.

Maybe the questions should have been how this crisis, the conclusion of which is unknown, could have been prevented. According to professor Stephen Walt, if the West had not “succumbed to hubris” and kept the promise to not include Ukraine in NATO, “Russia would probably never have seized Crimea.” Maybe it was hubris. Or maybe the U.S. anticipated Russia’s response and saw it as an opportunity to expand American influence?

On that question of influence, and as to Russian concerns about NATO, watch this essential explanation by the late Stephen Cohen:

While those supporting NATO expansion argue it is a defensive alliance, how is Moscow to react if those defensive weapons – with devastating offensive capabilities – are at its border and can strike targets within Russia in a matter of minutes?

Is there any doubt that the U.S. would not tolerate Russian missiles at its border?

These are issues that nations are entitled to answer, no matter if they are democratic or otherwise. (By no means does this ever condone wrongful conduct.) But you can’t observe such things in current America, dare you be accused of moral equivalence – or worse. Tucker Carlson makes these arguments and is branded a traitor by the media. Democrat operatives (with Ukrainian interests) demand he be prosecuted for treason for the crime of questioning our leaders. Even at National Review, a “conservative” publication, we see disgusting charges that “many of America’s most famous ‘nationalists’ don’t seem to be bothered by imperialism, so long as the imperialists speak Russian.” The standard attacks against those who dare challenge U.S. foreign policy orthodoxy.

Let us assume that Russia believes Ukraine will eventually join NATO, or at minimum assesses there is a likelihood it occurs. From the Russian point of view, their response – the seizure of Crimea, the current build-up of forces at the Russia-Ukraine border – is defensive in nature. (Not that it justifies conduct.) There is some irony that Russia is now applying neo-conservative principles of preemptive warfare and use of force to maintain its own national security interests.(1) The further irony is that the neo-conservatives now decry such actions.

Allegations of False Flags

Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby alleges “Russia is already working actively to create a pretext for a potential invasion, for a move on Ukraine.” He claims they are planning “a false flag operation — an operation designed to look like an attack on … Russian speaking people in Ukraine, again, as an excuse to go in.”

Maybe that’s true. Maybe it isn’t. The United States knows something about false flag operations, does it not?

War hawks within the Trump Administration took advantage of a likely false flag operation in Syria to justify intervention. As reported by Aaron Mate, “A series of leaked documents from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) raise the possibility that the Trump administration bombed Syria on false grounds and pressured officials at the world’s top chemical weapons watchdog to cover it up.”

And how are we to assess the Pentagon’s claims about Russia, considering its recent blunders and history of outright lies to Americans?

The events of this past summer do not inspire confidence. General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified there was no intelligence suggesting the quick collapse of the Afghan government to the Taliban. Reporting from the New York Times disputed that testimony, citing classified intelligence assessments predicting a “Taliban takeover of Afghanistan” and warning of “the rapid collapse of the Afghan military.”

Ask yourself who is telling the truth, and you end up making a decision on which liar is to be believed. I’m not sure which is worse – General Milley lying, or the American intelligence community making such a catastrophic mistake. It’s a choice between personal failure and institutional failure.

Or consider the American drone strike which killed 10 innocent civilians in Kabul. Deaths to be blamed on intelligence reliance on bad sources (which might have been the Taliban) and bad information resulted in no punishment.

Undoubtedly, the worst of it was the thousands of American lives lost in the war in Afghanistan. Young men and women volunteered to fight what our officials promised was a just and necessary war, a war we were allegedly winning. In reality, these U.S. officials were “making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.”

To quote three-star Army General Douglas Lute:

“If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction . . . 2,400 lives lost,” Lute added, blaming the deaths of U.S. military personnel on bureaucratic breakdowns among Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department. “Who will say this was in vain?”

The consequences of the lies and incompetence are still felt today. As the Russia-Ukraine crisis heats up, we have no idea whether American leadership is telling the truth.

(1) “Neoconservatives argued that the United States should use its military power to reorder the international system to suit America’s own national interests, and as Halper and Clarke have argued, ‘from its early beginnings, a proclivity toward the use of force has been an identifying badge of the neo-conservative ideology.’” The Bush Doctrine and the Iraq War at 199.

January 20, 2022 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | 1 Comment

15 Percent of Germans Report Severe Side Effects After mRNA Treatments

Survey shows how common serious vaccine side effects really are

By Terje Maloy | Anti-Empire | January 20, 2022

The German journalist Boris Reitschuster did what really should have been the task of the health authorities and big media. The question is, of course, how common are serious side effects from the vaccinations? Chancellor Olaf Scholz said in his New Year’s speech that “almost four billion people around the world have now been vaccinated. Without major side effects». Although it is of course known that serious side effects do occur, it is very subjective whether you consider the number as “high” or “low”.

Many doubt the official figures. At the same time, a large number of doctors say that many side effects that are at least related in time to the vaccination have not even been registered, because it is too time-consuming and the doctors do not get paid for the work.

Because the large media corporations seem to avoid the question, Reitschuster commissioned a representative poll on the subject from a reputable polling institute. INSA asked 1004 adults in Germany if they had been vaccinated and if they had any side effects. The result is that the official narrative – “hardly any side effects” – collapses and confirms exactly what many medical professionals report from their own experience.

In order to collect the data accurately, INSA first had to ask the following questions: “Have you been vaccinated against the coronavirus?” According to impfdashboard.de, 57.60 million of the 69.4 million adults in Germany have been vaccinated. This corresponds to a vaccination rate of around 83 percent. This is exactly the result of the INSA survey:

60 percent have booster vaccination, 23 percent have two doses without booster vaccination. Another four percent answered that they have been partially vaccinated. 12 percent state that they have not been vaccinated – extrapolated to the population, that is to say 11.8 million people,

Voters from the right-wing party AfD state far more often than voters from other parties that as of today they have not received any vaccination against corona (44 percent). Green voters are the most vaccinated (96 percent), which is also remarkable, because this party is one of the strongest opponents of genetic engineering, and a large proportion of the new vaccines are based on such genetic technology.

There is also an east-west divide. Respondents from the former East Germany state more often than respondents from the Western parts that they have not been vaccinated against the coronavirus (19 vs 10 percent).

And now to the main result of the survey: 15 percent of the respondents stated that they suffered from severe/heavy side effects; Extrapolated to the 57.60 million vaccinated, it is 8.64 million victims. Although the “severity” of the side effects is definitely subjective – the official narrative, where there are hardly any serious side effects, has been shattered according to the results of this study.

And the number corresponds exactly to what many doctors say. A general practitioner Reitschuster asked, confirming that this exactly matches the figures from her practice – although she assumes more than 20 percent cases of serious side effects: “In my experience, young healthy people are prone to side effects, severe headaches, swelling in lymph nodes, fever. And also some thrombosis and pulmonary embolism in the elderly, although this is difficult to prove. Overall, the rate of heart attacks has increased. “

Dr. Gunter Frank comments on the results of the study: “In the 30 years I have been a doctor, I have only rarely experienced red injection sites after an ordinarily approved vaccination, or very rarely a fever that lasts for several days (somewhat more frequently after the swine flu vaccine Pandemrix), and once a rheumatic attack probably related to the vaccination. That’s it, after 30 years. And now this: 15 percent severe side effects after covid vaccination. Just like me and many of my colleagues have experienced for several months.”

The number who report serious side effects is particularly explosive, also in view of the excess mortality that has increased dramatically for several months and cannot be explained by corona deaths.

45 percent of those vaccinated report mild/weak side effects.

Only 40 percent of those vaccinated, less than half, state that they have not felt any side effects at all.

Those over 40 years and over were more likely to have no side effects at all than younger respondents with at least one corona vaccination.

Male respondents with at least one corona vaccination state significantly more often than female respondents that they have not experienced any side effects (48 versus 33 per cent). Female respondents, on the other hand, report mild side effects more often than men (51 versus 39 percent).

Extrapolated to the whole world, it would also mean that with 4 billion vaccinated, there are 600 million people who catagorize themselves with serious side effects.

January 20, 2022 Posted by | Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

True or false? Reuters “fact check” of the Denmark study showing negative VE

By Steve Kirsch | January 20, 2022

Reuters did a “fact check” of the negative Vaccine Efficacy (VE) in the Denmark study and the study author used a hand waving argument to conclude the negative VE is due to a bias. What do you think?

I wrote earlier about the Denmark study showing that vaccine efficacy against Omicron goes negative after 90 days:

There is a Reuters “fact check” that says that the author claimed that the vaccines are fine and that the negative vaccine efficacy reported in the paper was simply due to a “bias.”

Oh really???

Here’s why I think the Reuters “fact check” is garbage

First of all, a hand waving argument supported by no data whatsoever claiming bias is not convincing to me.

Furthermore, I think the Denmark paper was accurate for these 3 reasons:

  1. we see negative VE consistently in MANY other studies.
  2. VE continues to go negative in that study consistent over time… how can they explain that?
  3. if it was behavior differences between vaxed and unvaxed that accounts for the bias, then how come people who got Moderna behave DIFFERENTLY than people who got Pfizer?!?

I am not alone in suggesting the authors claim “there must be a bias” as needed to fit the narrative

One of the commenters on the original paper wrote something very similar to what I wrote:

So assume the results you like (high VE for recent vaccination) are causal, but hand wave confounders at results you don’t like (negative VE for distant vaccination)? Science?

I couldn’t have said it any better myself. This was my reaction too when I read the paper.

What do you think?

So who got it right? Me or Reuters?

January 20, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | | Leave a comment

Fallen Icon: Sir David Attenborough and the Walrus Deception

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | January 19, 2022

In 2019 Netflix in conjunction with WWF broadcast Frozen Worlds, an episode in the Our Planet series and narrated by David Attenborough. The scenes it showed shocked and horrified viewers around the world.

After a brief introduction about the recent loss of Arctic summer sea ice and the ‘inevitable’ devastation this will cause for Arctic animals, it shifts to a series of amazing shots of tens of thousands of walrus, crowded cheek-by-jowl on a beach in Siberia.

The camera pans out to a rocky cliff, which several walrus are attempting to climb. Then suddenly, one after another, the walrus are shown falling off the cliff to their deaths on the rocky shore below.The scenes are shown in slow motion and repeated in order to maximise the shock effect.

As the scenes unfold, Attenborough coolly informs viewers that the walrus would not normally be there, but out on the sea ice instead. But because of man-made global warming, the poor walrus have been forced onto land in crowded conditions, where they will inevitably suffer and die.

But was it all as simple as Attenborough portrayed?

A number of suspicions were immediately evident. Far from these beach haulouts being unusual, walrus in fact regularly use these beaches every year, in order to rest and feed while waiting for the sea ice to move south in autumn.

Walrus also invariably crowd together in these situations, both for warmth and protection from polar bears. Indeed, far from walrus being threatened by climate change, their populations have been growing in recent years, explaining why so many were hauled out that day.

And what made those walrus try to climb the cliff?

Dr Susan Crockford is a professional zoologist, who has specialised in Arctic mammals for many years, particularly polar bears and walrus. She immediately smelled a rat.

Her newly released book, Fallen Icon, tells the story of how she uncovered exactly what went on that day on the Siberian beach. Her detective work reveals how it was polar bears stalking them that forced the walrus up that cliff; how this is a common hunting tactic and how the bears then fed off the carcasses down below.

She uncovers evidence that WWF already knew about this hunting tactic at that particular location, and that was precisely why this beach was chosen for the film.

She goes on to describe how retreating sea ice actually increases the food supply for walrus and how their populations are both healthy and increasing.

And how Attenborough used this horrifying imagery to jump-start a three year campaign against human-caused global warming that included ten documentaries laden with groundless climate emergency messaging, much of it aimed at the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world. Attenborough’s relentless climate activism included a utopian vision of global changes for society eerily similar to the one proposed by the World Economic Forum.

It is hard to disagree with Crockford’s conclusions:

The public’s trust in science and medicine now appears to be at an all-time low. People who had been blind to the abuse of science rampant in the climate change narrative have had their eyes opened by the pandemic response. These things cannot be unseen.

In a worrying trend, traditional scientists struggle to be heard or have their concerns and criticisms published, both for climate change and Covid-19 related issues. Research that features testable hypotheses and reproducible studies seem to be rare birds while predictive modelling projects gobble up grant funds as well as the media attention.

Is science as we used to know it already dead? If so, how much of a role has Attenborough played in this progression? Over the last three years, he has used weaponized science presented to a trusting public in a most egregious manner.

My ultimate goal in writing this book is not to denigrate Sir David but to correct the misinformation he has deliberately or unwittingly promoted in his documentaries and public statements.

I am a traditional scientist standing up for science as it is meant to be – without activism and without politicization – because its loss to society will be incalculable.

Over the years but especially since 2018, Attenborough has shown that he lets others do his serious thinking for him and has often placed his trust where it was ill-advised, as he has done with the WWF. By that I mean he has relied on others to present information to him in an easily digestible manner rather than delving into the literature himself.

And having spent a lifetime taking this easy way out, when he decided he wanted his legacy to be something more substantial than ‘a good storyteller’, he seemed to take on the role of spokesman for others with ideological political agendas.

It appears to me that when he agreed to present the gruesome falling walrus film footage in Our Planet as evidence of climate change, Attenborough compromised his principles to achieve a specific end result. Such noble cause corruption is common in the conservation world but it was new for Attenborough.

I am convinced that what Attenborough has done with the falling walrus episode will be remembered long after he’s dead but not for the reasons he intended. It will go down as another ‘own goal’ for the climate change movement and judged as the moment Attenborough fell from grace as a trusted British icon.

Susan Crockford’s book is now available on Amazon here:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0991796691

Susan Crockford adds:

As I point out in my new book, Fallen Icon, David Attenborough devised a three year campaign on the falsehood that hundreds of Russian walrus died falling off a cliff due to climate change because he also desired what the World Economic Forum (WEF), meeting online this week, say they want: immediate and drastic changes, supposedly to mitigate an invisible ‘climate emergency’ and other societal ills.

Despite the fact that walrus and polar bears are thriving in the Arctic, this fabricated ’emergency’ seems to be the reason that its new chairman plans to make the G7 into a ‘climate club’.

January 20, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | 7 Comments

The Super Hero Film Era: How Political Dissent Is Neutralised

The Dave Cullen Show – Computing Forever | September 23, 2021

BitChute: https://www.bitchute.com/channel/thedavecullenshow/
Gab: https://gab.ai/DaveCullen
Minds.com: https://www.minds.com/davecullen

January 20, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Film Review, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment