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Global corporations are colonising India’s retail space through e-commerce and destroying small-scale physical retail and millions of livelihoods.

Walmart entered into India in 2016 with a US$3.3 billion take-over of the online retail start-up Jet.com. This was followed in 2018 with a US$16 billion take-over of India’s largest online retail platform, Flipkart. Today, Walmart and Amazon control almost two thirds of India’s digital retail sector.

Amazon and Walmart have a record of using predatory pricing, deep discounts and other unfair business practices to attract customers to their online platforms. A couple of years ago, those two companies generated sales of over US$3 billion in just six days during Diwali. India’s small retailers reacted by calling for a boycott of online shopping.

If you want to know the eventual fate of India’s local markets and small retailers, look no further than what US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in 2019. He stated that Amazon had “destroyed the retail industry across the United States.”

Amazon’s corporate practices

In the US, an investigation by the House Judiciary Committee concluded that Amazon exerts monopoly power over many small- and medium-size businesses. It called for breaking up the company and regulating its online marketplace to ensure that sellers are treated fairly.

Amazon has spied on sellers and appropriated data about their sales, costs and suppliers. It has then used this information to create its own competing versions of their products, often giving its versions superior placement in the search results on its platform.

The Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) published a revealing document on Amazon in June 2021 that discussed these issues. It also notes that Amazon has been caught using its venture capital fund to invest in start-ups only to steal their ideas and create rival products and services. Moreover, Amazon’s dominance allows it to function as a gatekeeper: retailers and brands must sell on its site to reach much of the online market and changes to Amazon’s search algorithms or selling terms can cause their sales to evaporate overnight.

Amazon also makes it hard for sellers to reduce their dependence on its platform by making their brand identity almost invisible to shoppers and preventing them from building relationships with their customers. The company strictly limits contact between sellers and customers.

According to the ILSR, Amazon compels sellers to buy its warehousing and shipping services, even though many would get a better deal from other providers, and it blocks independent businesses from offering lower prices on other sites. The company also routinely suspends sellers’ accounts and seizes inventories and cash balances.

The Joint Action Committee against Foreign Retail and E-commerce (JACAFRE) was formed to resist the entry of foreign corporations like Walmart and Amazon into India’s e-commerce market. Its members represent more than 100 national groups, including major trade, workers’ and farmers’ organisations.

JACAFRE issued a statement in 2018 on Walmart’s acquisition of Flipkart, arguing that it undermines India’s economic and digital sovereignty and the livelihoods of millions in India. The committee said the deal would lead to Walmart and Amazon dominating India’s e-retail sector. It would also allow them to own India’s key consumer and other economic data, making them the country’s digital overlords, joining the ranks of Google and Facebook.

In January 2021, JACAFRE published an open letter saying that the three new farm laws, passed by parliament in September 2020, centre on enabling and facilitating the unregulated corporatisation of agriculture value chains. This will effectively make farmers and small traders of agricultural produce become subservient to the interests of a few agrifood and e-commerce giants or will eradicate them completely.

Although there was strong resistance to Walmart entering India with its physical stores, online and offline worlds are now merged: e-commerce companies not only control data about consumption but also control data on production and logistics. Through this control, e-commerce platforms can shape much of the physical economy.

What we are witnessing is the deliberate eradication of markets in favour of monopolistic platforms.

Bezos not welcome

Amazon’s move into India encapsulates the unfair fight for space between local and global markets. There is a relative handful of multi-billionaires who own the corporations and platforms. And there are the interests of hundreds of millions of vendors and various small-scale enterprises who are regarded by these rich individuals as mere collateral damage to be displaced in their quest for ever greater profit.

Thanks to the helping hand of various COVID-related lockdowns which devastated small businesses, the wealth of the world’s billionairesincreased by $3.9tn (trillion) between 18 March and 31 December 2020. In September 2020, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s executive chairman, could have paid all 876,000 Amazon employees a $105,000 bonus and still be as wealthy as he was before COVID. Jeff Bezos – his fortune constructed on unprincipled methods that have been well documented in recent years – increased his net wealth by $78.2bn during this period.

Bezos’s plan is clear: the plunder of India and the eradication of millions of small traders and retailers and neighbourhood mom and pop shops.

This is a man with few scruples. After returning from a brief flight to space in July, in a rocket built by his private space company, Bezos said during a news conference:

“I also want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this.”

In response, US congresswoman Nydia Velazquez wrote on Twitter:

“While Jeff Bezos is all over the news for paying to go to space, let’s not forget the reality he has created here on Earth.”

She added the hashtag #WealthTaxNow in reference to Amazon’s tax dodging, revealed in numerous reports, not least the May 2021 study ‘The Amazon Method: How to take advantage of the international state system to avoid paying tax’ by Richard Phillips, Senior Research Fellow, Jenaline Pyle, PhD Candidate, and Ronen Palan, Professor of International Political Economy, all based at the University of London.

Little wonder that when Bezos visited India in January 2020, he was hardly welcomed with open arms.

Bezos praised India on Twitter by posting:

“Dynamism. Energy. Democracy. #IndianCentury.”

The ruling party’s top man in the BJP foreign affairs department hit back with:

“Please tell this to your employees in Washington DC. Otherwise, your charm offensive is likely to be waste of time and money.”

A fitting response, albeit perplexing given the current administration’s proposed sanctioning of the foreign takeover of the economy, not least by the unscrupulous interests that will benefit from the recent farm legislation.

Bezos landed in India on the back of the country’s antitrust regulator initiating a formal investigation of Amazon and with small store owners demonstrating in the streets. The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) announced that members of its affiliate bodies across the country would stage sit-ins and public rallies in 300 cities in protest.

In a letter to PM Modi, prior to the visit of Bezos, the secretary of the CAIT, General Praveen Khandelwal, claimed that Amazon, like Walmart-owned Flipkart, was an “economic terrorist” due to its predatory pricing that “compelled the closure of thousands of small traders.”

In 2020, Delhi Vyapar Mahasangh (DVM) filed a complaint against Amazon and Flipkart alleging that they favoured certain sellers over others on their platforms by offering them discounted fees and preferential listing. The DVM lobbies to promote the interests of small traders. It also raised concerns about Amazon and Flipkart entering into tie-ups with mobile phone manufacturers to sell phones exclusively on their platforms.

It was argued by DVM that this was anti-competitive behaviour as smaller traders could not purchase and sell these devices. Concerns were also raised over the flash sales and deep discounts offered by e-commerce companies, which could not be matched by small traders.

The CAIT estimates that in 2019 upwards of 50,000 mobile phone retailers were forced out of business by large e-commerce firms.

Amazon’s internal documents, as revealed by Reuters, indicated that Amazon had an indirect ownership stake in a handful of sellers who made up most of the sales on its Indian platform. This is an issue because in India Amazon and Flipkart are legally allowed to function only as neutral platforms that facilitate transactions between third-party sellers and buyers for a fee.

Under investigation

The upshot is that India’s Supreme Court recently ruled that Amazon must face investigation by the Competition Commission of India (CCI) for alleged anti-competitive business practices. The CCI said it would probe the deep discounts, preferential listings and exclusionary tactics that Amazon and Flipkart are alleged to have used to destroy competition.

However, there are powerful forces that have been sitting on their hands as these companies have been running amok.

In August 2021, the CAIT attacked the NITI Aayog (the influential policy commission think tank of the Government of India) for interfering in e-commerce rules proposed by the Consumer Affairs Ministry.

The CAIT said that the think tank clearly seems to be under the pressure and influence of the foreign e-commerce giants.

The president of CAIT, BC Bhartia, stated that it is deeply shocking to see such a callous and indifferent attitude of the NITI Aayog whch have remained a silent spectator for so many years when:

“… the foreign e-commerce giants have circumvented every rule of the FDI policy and blatantly violated and destroyed the retail and e-commerce landscape of the country but have suddenly decided to open their mouth at a time when the proposed e-commerce rules will potentially end the malpractices of the e-commerce companies.”

Of course, money talks and buys influence. In addition to tens of billions of US dollars invested in India by Walmart and Amazon, Facebook invested US$5.5 billion last year in Mukesh Ambani’s Jio Platforms (e-commerce retail). Google has also invested US$4.5 billion.

Since the early 1990s, when India opened up to neoliberal economics, the country has become increasingly dependent on inflows of foreign capital. Policies are being governed by the drive to attract and retain foreign investment and maintain ‘market confidence’ by ceding to the demands of international capital which ride roughshod over democratic principles and the needs of hundreds of millions of ordinary people. ‘Foreign direct investment’ has thus become the holy grail of the Modi-led administration and the NITI Aayog.

The CAIT has urged the Consumer Affairs Ministry to implement the draft consumer protection e-commerce rules at the earliest as they are in the best interest of the consumers as well as the traders of the country.

Meanwhile, the CCI it probably will complete its investigation within two months.

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Colin Todhunter is an independent writer and analyst specialising in development, food and agriculture based in Europe/India. 

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

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In the wake of a remarkably successful Taliban offensive capped by the takeover of Kabul, the responses of corporate media provided what may have been the most dramatic demonstration ever of its fealty to the Pentagon and military leadership. The media did so by mounting a full-throated political attack on President Joe Biden’s final withdrawal from Afghanistan and a defense of the military’s desire for an indefinite presence in the country.

Biden’s failure to establish a plan for evacuating tens of thousands of Afghans seeking to the flee the new Taliban regime made him a soft target for the Beltway media’s furious assault. However, it was Biden’s refusal last Spring to keep 4,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan on an indefinite basis – flouting an aggressive Pentagon lobbying campaign – that initially triggered the rage of the military brass.

The media offensive against Biden’s Afghan withdrawal advanced arguments that the military could not to make on its own – at least, not in public. It also provided the military with important cover at the moment when it was at its most vulnerable for its disastrous handling of the entire war.

Among the most disingenuous attempts at salvaging the military’s reputation was a Washington Post article blaming the Afghan catastrophe on an over-emphasis on “democratic values” while ignoring the the tight alliance between the U.S. military and despotic warlords which drove local support for the Taliban.

Playing the al Qaeda threat card

On the eve of the Taliban takeover of Kabul, the New York Times’s David Sanger and Helene Cooper fired the opening salvo of the Beltway media’s assault on Biden’s decision. Sanger and Cooper began by acknowledging that the U.S. military had “overestimated” the results of its intervention for years, and that the failure of the Afghan government to pay soldiers for months had sapped the will to resist the Taliban.

But they then homed in on Biden’s refusal to keep troops in Afghanistan for counter-terrorism purposes. Recalling that Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley had tried in the Spring to compel Biden to maintain 3,000 to 4,500 troops in the country, Sanger and Cooper cited “intelligence estimates predicting that in two or three years, Al Qaeda could find a new foothold in Afghanistan.”

That speculation was based on the assumption that the Taliban would allow such a development despite its well-established record of opposing al Qaeda’s use of its territory to plan terrorism abroad. In fact, the Taliban’s policy went back to before 9/11, when Osama bin Laden formally agreed to honor the Taliban’s restrictions while secretly plotting the 9/11 attacks in Germany rather than in Afghanistan.

In the wake of the U.S. withdrawal, the Taliban has an even stronger motivation to prevent any jihadist organizations from planning international terror attacks from Afghan territory.

To support their broadside against Biden’s withdrawal, the Times’ Sanger and Cooper turned to the retired general with arguably the greatest personal vested interest in an indefinite U.S. military presence in Afghanistan: former U.S. commander in Afghanistan Gen. David Petraeus, who oversaw the war effort from 2010 through 2011 and has since led a group of former commanders and diplomats lobbying for an endless US presence in the country.

Petraeus asserted that Biden failed to “recognize the risk incurred by the swift withdrawal” of intelligence drones and close air support, and thousands of contractors who had kept the Afghan Air Force flying.”

Next, Sanger and Cooper turned to Richard Fontaine, the chief executive of one of the most militaristic think tanks in Washington, the Center for a New American Security (CNAS).

As The Grayzone has reported, CNAS has reaped millions in funding from the arms industry and US government institutions to advance Pentagon and military thinking inside the Beltway. Among the many Beltway media insiders that enjoy writers in residence fellowships at the think tank is the New York Times’ Sanger.

For his part, Fontaine compained that the Biden administration had failed to continue providing the contractors that the Afghan Air Force depended on keep its planes in the air. But he failed to acknowledge the obvious point that contractors would be unable to function in Afghanistan without sufficient U.S.-NATO troops to provide military protection on the ground.

On August 16, after the US-backed Afghan government was eliminated, the liberal interventionist magazine, Foreign Policy, chimed in with another attack on Biden featuring interviews with “a dozen people who held posts in Afghanistan.”

According to Foreign Policy, current and former diplomats anonymously expressed “deep anger, shock and bitterness about the collapse of the government they spent decades trying to build.” Several currently-serving officials were quoted — again off the record — about their considering resigning in protest, citing an “overwhelming sense of guilt and fear for the lives of former Afghan colleagues and local staff whom the American government left behind.”

That same day, the New Yorker’s Robin Wright expressed similar anguish over the harrowing images of U.S. defeat in Afghanistan. In an article subtitled, “It’s a dishonorable end that weakens U.S. standing in the world, perhaps irrevocably,” she lamented that the United States “is engaged in what historians may some day call a Great Retreat from a ragtag army that has no air power….”

The U.S. retreat from Afghanistan, Wright asserted, is “part of an unnerving American pattern dating back to the 1970s,” starting with Reagan’s pull-out from Beirut and Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq in 2011. Echoing those insisting on an indefinite U.S. military role in Afghanistan, Wright claimed that because the Taliban had “won a key battle against democracy in Afghanistan,” the country would “again, almost certainly become a haven for like-minded militants, be they members of al Qaeda or others in search of a sponsor.”

Meanwhile, during an August 21 panel on PBS’s Washington Week, Peter Baker of the New York Times, Anne Gearan of the Washington Post and Vivian Salama of the Wall Street Journal formed a one-note chorus blaming Biden’s hasty withdrawal for the crowds of anguished Afghans desperately seeking to escape the Taliban at Kabul’s airport.

The implicit – and clearly fanciful – premise of the discussion was that the United States could have somehow embarked weeks or months earlier on a sweeping program to rescue tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of interpreters and other collaborators with the U.S. military, and that it could all be done cleanly and efficiently, without triggering any panic.

A second theme pressed by the New York Times’ Baker was that Biden had been heedless of the risks of his policy to U.S. national security. Baker said Biden had made up his mind a decade ago that the U.S. must withdraw from Afghanistan and was determined to do it “regardless of what Gen. Milley and others might have warned him about the danger of a collapse.” Baker made the same argument, along with the others embraced by his big media colleagues, in a long-winded August 20 news analysis.

Flournoy obscures the real cause of military failure

The Washington Post’s national security reporter, Greg Jaffe, took a different tack from most of his Beltway colleagues in his coverage of the Afghanistan endgame. In an August 14 article, Jaffe implicitly acknowledged the widely-accepted fact that the war had been an abject failure, contradicting claims by military leaders. Unfortunately, the reporter offered space for one particularly credibility-deprived former official that was obviously designed to deaden popular hostility toward those responsible for the fiasco.

Among the most questionable characters to lay into Biden’s withdrawal strategy was Michelle Flournoy, who was expected to be appointed as the next Secretary of Defense until Biden froze her out because of her role in advocating the failed troop surge in Afghanistan during the Obama administration.

Flournoy had been Obama’s Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and was responsible for supporting the commanders in the field from the Pentagon. Prior to that role, she co-founded CNAS, the arms industry-backed, Democratic Party-affiliated propaganda mill for the Pentagon and military services.

In a revealing interview with the Post’s Jaffe, the former Pentagon official blamed the failure of the U.S. war in Afghanistan on an excessive commitment to “democratic ideals,” arguing they supposedly blinded the policymakers to the realities on the ground. It all started, she claimed, with “the Afghan constitution that was created in Bonn and…was trying to create a Western democracy.” The policymakers set the bar “on our democratic ideals, not on what was sustainable or workable in an Afghan context,” she added.

But the problem was not an excessive U.S. concern for promoting democracy, but the way that U.S. policy sold out “democratic ideals” to support a group of warlords who represented the essence of anti-democratic despotism.

In explaining the Obama administration’s decision to more than double the totals of U.S. troops, Flournoy claimed that she and other U.S. officials only discovered the festering wound of Afghan corruption when it was too late, fatally dooming the military strategy. “We had made a big bet only to learn that our local partner was rotten,” she insisted.

However, Flournoy deliberately obscured the crucial fact that the U.S. war was based from its very inception on an alliance with a group of corrupt and murderous warlords. The military leadership, as well as the CIA, relied on the warlords because they had militias and were ready to oppose the Taliban. The warlords offered a steady supply of militiamen as police in the provinces and were given well-paid contracts to provide security for the constant flow of convoys to and from U.S. and NATO bases.

But the militia-police maintained their loyalty to their respective warlords, rather than to any civilian government in Kabul, and in return were given a free hand to steal from Afghans, falsely accuse them of crimes, torture them and release them only for a ransom. In many cases, the police extorted money from local families by abducting and raping their wives, daughters and sons — a pattern of abuse documented by Amnesty International as early as 2003.

The Taliban easily ousted the U.S.-supported regime from large parts of Afghanistan’s Helmand province beginning in 2005-06 because of the local population’s hatred of the lawless warlord militias designated by the U.S. military as police. And when U.S. troops re-occupied those districts in 2009, the militias returned to their brutal ways — including abducting and raping pre-teen boys, prompting bitter complaints from the local residents to the U.S. marines and threats to support the Taliban if the U.S. didn’t intervene to stop them.  But the U.S. military never moved to disturb its cozy relationship with the warlords.

So Flournoy’s claim that senior military and Pentagon officials were unaware of the corruption of their Afghan allies until after the Obama administration’s massive commitment of troops is simply devoid of credibility. When she and other key policymakers made their “big bet” later in 2009, they were fully aware that the U.S. was backing a group of powerful warlords whose militia-police were committing heinous abuses against the population that forced Afghans to support the Taliban as their only defense.

The patent falsehoods peddled by the Beltway press corps in response to the Biden withdrawal reveals just how tightly they have become linked to the interests of the military and Pentagon. And its flamboyant opposition to a pull-out favored a solid majority of the American public is yet another factor that will accelerate the decline of an already cratering corporate media.

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Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist who has covered national security policy since 2005 and was the recipient of Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2012.  His most recent book is The CIA Insider’s Guide to the Iran Crisis co-authored with John Kiriakou, just published in February.

Featured image is from TheFreeThoughtProject.com

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A U.S. drone strike purportedly targeting a suspected ISIS-K vehicle in a residential neighborhood of Kabul, Afghanistan killed at least 10 members of a single family—including six children—as they were getting out of their car on Sunday.

Relatives of the victims told the Washington Post that the strike—which was the second attack the U.S. carried out in Kabul over the weekend—”hit a nearby vehicle” that the Pentagon claims was an “imminent” threat.

The civilian victims of the U.S. strike were all “from a single extended family,” the Post reported.

Samim Shahyad, a 25-year-old journalism student, told the New York Times that the U.S. attack killed his father, his two brothers, four of his young cousins, his niece, and his sister’s fiancé. Shahyad added that three of the victims were girls who were just two years old or younger.

“The American aircraft targeted us,” said Shahyad. “I do not know what to say, they just cut my arms and broke my back, I cannot say anything more.”

One neighbor at the scene of the attack said in an interview with CNN that “not much is left of their house and nothing can be recognized, they are in pieces.” The person estimated that as many as 20 people may have been killed in the U.S. drone strike.

“Yet another reason why the U.S. must leave Afghanistan,” said Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “The military presence, and the civilian deaths it’s brought, has become a key recruiting tool for terrorists.”

Too many children have already died from US drone strikes. We cannot accept one more, let alone 6. #GroundTheDrones https://t.co/RWLlZ5FriS

— CODEPINK (@codepink) August 30, 2021

Capt. Bill Urban, a spokesperson for the U.S. Central Command, acknowledged in a statement that “there were substantial and powerful subsequent explosions resulting from the destruction of the vehicle” that the U.S. military claimed to be targeting.

Urban suggested that “additional casualties” from the U.S. strike may have been due to “a large amount of explosive material inside” the targeted vehicle.

“It is unclear what may have happened,” Urban added, “and we are investigating further.”

Launched in the wake of a deadly ISIS-K attack on Kabul’s international airport, the drone strike came just two days before the August 31 deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan after two decades of devastating war and occupation.

Despite officials’ claims that the drone assassination program is highly precise and targeted at militants, U.S. strikes have killed hundreds of Afghan civilians in recent years. According to documents leaked by former Air Force intelligence analyst Daniel Hale—who was sentenced to nearly four years in prison last month—nearly 90% of the people killed during one five-month period of a U.S. drone operation in Afghanistan were not the intended targets.

In 2019, the United Nations released a report accusing the U.S. of killing at least 30 Afghan civilians—including 14 children—and violating international humanitarian law with a series of drone strikes in May of that year.

“Maybe now would be a good time to retire phrases like ‘targeted killing’ and ‘precision strike,’ since these phrases have nothing at all to do with what we’re actually doing,” said Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

From Common Dreams: Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

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Featured image: Ajmal Ahmadi weeps alone in a room after members of his family were killed in a U.S. drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan on August 29, 2021. (Photo: Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times)

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Groundwater from at least six Defense Department sites in the Great Lakes region is contaminated with high levels of the toxic “forever chemicals” known as PFAS, according to DOD records obtained by EWG.

The chemicals have seeped into the Great Lakes, adversely affecting wildlife, and potentially harming residents’ food supply and livelihoods if they consume fish contaminated with the chemicals. The contamination underscores the need for swift PFAS cleanup by DOD, which used these chemicals in firefighting foams for decades and knew of their harms.

DOD’s records reveal levels of PFAS, including the notorious chemicals PFOA and PFOS, ranging from 5,400 parts per trillion, or ppt, to 1.3 million ppt, in the groundwater at the six sites. There is no enforceable federal drinking water limit for PFAS, but Michigan’s groundwater cleanup criteria and drinking water standards are 8 ppt for PFOA and 16 ppt for PFOS.

The highly contaminated DOD sites include:

• Wurtsmith Air Force Base
• Alpena Combat Readiness Training Center
• Selfridge Air National Guard Base
• Duluth Air National Guard Base
• Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station
• General Mitchell Air National Guard Base

The records also show that PFAS may be present in the groundwater at several other bases near the Great lakes where DOD has not tested to confirm the presence of PFAS, including:

• Great Lakes Naval Service Training Command
• Fort Sheridan
• Gary Army Aviation Support Facility

PFAS cleanup lags at Great Lakes military bases

DOD’s efforts to clean up PFAS at the affected bases are still in the earliest stages, according to EWG’s review of the department’s records.

PFAS from these sites could be harming the Great Lakes’ wildlife, including lake trout, walleye and smelt, posing potential health risks to anyone who consumes the contaminated fish.

There are no federal guidelines establishing a safe level of PFAS consumption.

PFAS are known as forever chemicals because they build up in our bodies and do not break down in the environment. Studies show that exposure to extremely low levels of PFAS can increase the risk of cancer, harm fetal development and reduce vaccine effectiveness.

Testing fish for PFAS contamination

No national standard exists for testing fish for PFAS. But the Environmental Protection Agency, collaborating with the Navy, aims to finalize a test method this year.

In 2019, the Food and Drug Administration also created its own tests for the presence of 16 PFAS chemicals in foods across eight mid-Atlantic states, focusing on the most commonly consumed foods available in grocery stores, not locally caught or raised foods. The FDA detected PFOS in half of the seafood sampled. Fish from the Great Lakes was not included.

Some studies have found troubling levels of PFOS in Lake Erie trout. A recent study found PFAS concentrations in Great Lakes trout increased from west to east, with the highest concentrations in Lake Erie. The average concentrations ranged from 11 nanograms per gram, or ng/g, in trout from Lake Superior to 136 ng/g in Lake Erie. Other studies have found PFAS in Great Lakes salmon, round gobies and other aquatic species.

The European Food Safety Authority, or EFSA, set a consumption threshold of 4.4 ng/g per week. For a 160-pound person, a safe level of exposure to PFAS in food for an entire week would be 332 ng/g. One 8-ounce serving of lake trout, at 11 ng/g, would be more than seven times this weekly limit, and one trout from Lake Erie with 136 ng/g of PFAS would be almost 100 times more than this weekly limit.

EFSA lowered its level for PFAS in food because new research shows that exposure to PFAS reduces vaccine efficacy. In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, EFSA scientists considered that to be the most critical human health effect.

Several states, including Michigan and Wisconsin, are now offering guidelines to limit consumption of fish contaminated with PFAS. Michigan has started to issue an annual guide for the fishing community that includes the location of contaminated fish populations and the amount of each type that is safe to consume. High PFAS levels in smelt in Lake Superior have led Wisconsin officials to issue a fish consumption advisory.

Decades of contamination at DOD sites

Although PFAS contamination of the Great Lakes is suspected from hundreds of industrial sites throughout the region, DOD sites are a major contamination source.

The potential threat to Great Lakes wildlife from PFAS contamination at DOD sites is a local example of a national problem. The chemicals have been detected at more than 300 military installations across the U.S., and they may be present at hundreds of other military sites.

The primary source of PFAS at military bases is aqueous firefighting film-forming foam, or AFFF, developed by DOD in the 1960s and first required by the Navy and the Marine Corps in 1967. Legacy formulations of AFFF, used for decades, contained PFOS and PFAS precursors that can break down into PFOA and other toxic PFAS.

DOD has long known about the toxic effects of PFAS pollution. In 1973, an Air Force report cited the toxic effects of AFFF on fish and recommended the use of carbon filters for drinking water to prevent contamination. Subsequent Air Force and Navy reports, in 1974, 1976 and 1978, also cited the toxic effects of AFFF on fish.

In 1983, animal studies financed by the Air Force found that some PFAS were toxic. In 1985, Navy experts again cited the toxic effects of AFFF on fish and, in 1989, called for better management of AFFF waste.

In 2000, DOD learned that 3M planned to stop making AFFF, after internal studies showed evidence of its health hazards. A 2001 DOD memo concluded the main ingredient in AFFF was “persistent, bioaccumulating, and toxic.” Months later, an EPA official reiterated to the department the risks posed by PFOS and the entire class of PFAS.

But DOD officials waited another decade to issue a risk alert to service members. It did not take steps to begin to replace AFFF until 2015 – despite a 1991 Army Corps of Engineers recommendation to use nonhazardous substitutes.

Push for PFAS testing at DOD sites

Newer PFAS in replacement foams have been linked to many of the same health effects as those from PFOS, leading Congress to direct the department to phase out the use of fluorinated foams altogether by 2024.

Many viable alternatives to AFFF are already on the market, and already meet the international aviation foam standards used by airports all over the world. As of April 2019, more than 100 fluorine-free foams were available, from 24 manufacturers.

Last month, DOD’s inspector general faulted the department for moving too slowly to address the PFAS contamination crisis.

And earlier this summer, the Senate Armed Services Committee included provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2022 to set deadlines for PFAS testing and reporting at DOD sites but failed to set deadlines for cleanups.

The House Armed Services Committee will take up its version of the bill on September 1. Panel members from Great Lakes states include Reps. Jack Bergman (R-Mich.), Mike Gallagher (R-Wisc.), Lisa McClain (R-Mich.), Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) and Michael Turner (R-Ohio). Slotkin and Turner have introduced legislation to address PFAS contamination and DOD sites and are expected to offer several amendments to the bill.

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Immediately following the Biden administration’s decision to offer 79 million acres of the Gulf of Mexico for oil and gas leasing, environmental and Gulf groups today filed a challenge to the lease sale in court.

Earthjustice filed the lawsuit in federal court in the District of Columbia on behalf of Healthy Gulf, Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth and the Center for Biological Diversity. It was filed against Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management following the notice of lease sale 257.

“In the aftermath of Hurricane Ida, it is clear that we need to be doing everything we can to transition away from fossil fuels to reduce the impacts of climate change such as stronger, more frequent hurricanes,” said Cynthia Sarthou, executive director of Healthy Gulf. “Continuing to sell leases that allow business as usual is a bad decision.”

“This lease sale is deeply disappointing. The Biden administration has folded to the oil industry based on its campaign of disinformation and political pressure, ignoring the worsening climate emergency we face,” said Brettny Hardy, an attorney with Earthjustice. “Our planet cannot handle more stress from oil and gas production and yet the Biden administration is plowing ahead with a lease sale that will have impacts for decades into the future.”

“We’ll invite more disasters by selling off more of the Gulf to the oil industry,” said Kristen Monsell, oceans legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “As Louisiana recovers from this unprecedented extreme hurricane, it’s obscene to allow business as usual in offshore leasing. Climate change is rapidly intensifying Gulf storms, fueling uncontrollable wildfires in the West and threatening numerous species with extinction. We need to end offshore oil drilling, not burden future generations with this dirty and dangerous folly.”

“Despite campaign promises to be climate and environmental justice champions, the Biden administration has opted to resume oil and gas lease sales,” said Hallie Templeton, deputy legal director at Friends of the Earth. “To add insult to injury, federal officials have violated federal law by relying on outdated and flawed environmental analysis while continuing to treat the Gulf of Mexico as a sacrificial zone to Big Oil. To say we are disappointed is a gross understatement.”

“Frontline communities of the Gulf have been sacrificed to fossil fuel interests for far too long. As Hurricane Ida ravages the Gulf Coast, it’s never been more obvious that these communities deserve better than business as usual and yet another sale of millions of acres of Gulf waters for oil and gas extraction,” said Devorah Ancel, a senior attorney with Sierra Club. “At the very least, the administration has an obligation to evaluate new information on climate change before taking such reckless action. Failing to do so is completely out of step with President Biden’s stated commitment to meaningfully address the climate crisis.”

The environmental analysis of the proposed sale relies on improper modeling to conclude that not having the lease sale will result in more greenhouse gases. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected this approach last year. Just a few weeks ago, a federal district court in Alaska found that the same conclusion was deeply flawed after the Department of the Interior tried to rely on it again for a large oil development project in Alaska’s Western Arctic.

The analysis is not only flawed but also out of date. The Interior Department last looked at the environmental impacts of a lease sale in 2017. Since Interior completed its environmental analysis, significant new information has emerged that demonstrates, among other things, the dire state of the climate crisis and the potential for increased harm to endangered species, including the Rice’s whale, one of the most endangered whales on the planet, that is only found in the Gulf of Mexico.

Background

The plaintiff groups had previously sent a letter to Sec. Haaland on legal alternatives to this lease sale. That letter can be found here: Letter to Sec. Haaland, et al. from plaintiff groups on legal alternatives to offering Lease Sale 257.

Last month the United Nations affirmed that the climate crisis is “unequivocally” the result of human influence and that this influence now has a strong hand in climate and weather extremes. The Gulf region has been feeling these extremes as just two days ago the region saw one of the strongest and most rapidly intensifying hurricanes ever to make landfall.

Interior’s own estimates show that the sale will lead to the production of up to 1.12 billion barrels of oil and 4.2 trillion cubic feet of gas over the next 50 years, which will contribute substantial greenhouse gas emissions. Gulf leasing complaint.

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A Letter to the Vaccinated

By Dr. Angela Durante, Prof Denis Rancourt, and et al., August 30, 2021

Giving up civil liberties in exchange for a false sense of safety is futile. We must not accept a descent into medical apartheid in Canada and around the world.

Kabul Is Not Saigon. Afghanistan: Drug Trade and Belt and Road

By Peter Koenig, August 31, 2021

As reported by RT, US military leaders knew “hours in advance” that a “mass casualty event” was planned at Kabul airport. However, accounts from the troops in harm’s way suggest that nothing was done to protect them or the airport. See this.

The Fake “Delta Variant” and the Fourth Wave: Another Lockdown? Upcoming Financial Crash? Worldwide Economic and Social Sabotage?

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, August 31, 2021

There is a sequence of outright lies and fabrications used to justify far-reaching policy decisions in the course of the last 18 months. The biggest lie, which is firmly acknowledged both by scientific opinion and the WHO is that the RT-PCR test used to “detect” the spread of the virus (as well as the variants) is not only flawed but TOTALLY INVALID.

Scandal Behind the FDA “Fake Approval” of Pfizer Jab

By F. William Engdahl, August 31, 2021

What is not being revealed is the cesspool of corruption and conflicts of interest between the FDA and the major drug companies, including Pfizer, that stand behind the rushed approval. And it’s not full approval for Pfizer’s jab, only for BioNTech’s legally different vaccine.

Where Are the Autopsies of People Dying Post COVID Vaccine?

By Dr. Joseph Mercola, August 31, 2021

Since autopsies are so incredibly important in the identification of disease and pathological processes, why haven’t healthy people who have died after the COVID jab been autopsied?

Canada: There Was No COVID-19 Pandemic: Dr. Denis Rancourt

By Prof Denis Rancourt, Marine Baudin, and Jérémie Mercier, August 31, 2021

We find that there is no extraordinary surge in yearly or seasonal mortality in Canada, which can be ascribed to a COVID-19 pandemic; and that several prominent features in the ACM/w in the COVID-19 period exhibit anomalous province-to-province heterogeneity that is irreconcilable with the known behaviour of epidemics of viral respiratory diseases (VRDs).

The United Nations and Western Governments Endorse Shocking Vaccine Mandates, Violating Human Bodily Integrity and Autonomy

By Carla Stea, August 31, 2021

United Nations Staff members refusing the vaccination are threatened with six months leave WITHOUT pay! On August 13, the UN Secretary-General issued mandated requirements.

“Where Have All the Flowers Gone”?: “Something Surreal” About the Afghanistan Troop Withdrawal Scenario

By Renee Parsons, August 31, 2021

The credibility of the entire withdrawal tragedy relies on the US government’s open door communications as well as trading messages with its newest best friends, the Taliban as if they are partners in some otherwise malodorous project that defies definition.

Farewell to Canada, “Not with a Bang but a Whimper”

By Mark Taliano, August 30, 2021

Canada will be, arguably already is, totalitarian, and most won’t notice. The jab will kill and injure multitudes more and most won’t notice. The Truth will continue to be rejected.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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***

As I write, 9/11 truth attorneys have appealed a dismissal by a Manhattan judge who, days ago, denied standing to plaintiffs who lost loved ones in the September 11, 2001 attacks. The surviving family members seek to present evidence before a Grand Jury that explosives were used to destroy the World Trade Center.

The 9/11 attorneys and the structural engineers who stand behind them are prepared to prove in court that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the government agency tasked to investigate the collapse of Building Seven (WTC-7), covered up the controlled demolition of the building. Assuming a discovery process happens in a courtroom, anything is possible. The truth may emerge. The question is: will the 9/11 attorneys be granted due process under the US Constitution to introduce the evidence? 

Some of this evidence came to light recently during an independent assessment of NIST’s final report on WTC-7 by a team of engineers at the University of Alaska. 

While visiting Fairbanks in August 2018, I was fortunate to meet the team’s lead engineer, professor Leroy Hulsey. At that time, the team was nearing completion of its work. As we chatted over coffee, Dr Hulsey explained that his engineers ruled out fire as the cause of the WTC-7 collapse early in their investigation. NIST had argued in its report that building fires on the lower floors weakened a critical column (#79) in the northeastern portion of the building, causing it to fail. This allegedly caused two nearby columns (#80 and #81) to fail, setting in motion a “progressive collapse.”

Hulsey’s team found, however, that NIST misrepresented key structural details of WTC-7, invalidating its fire-induced collapse model.

I asked Dr Hulsey if he had access to the original blueprints. He replied that his team had something better, namely, the actual construction records and diagrams. These tell the full story because contractors do not always follow blueprints exactly during construction. Modifications are common.

When Hulsey’s team incorporated the actual structural details of WTC-7 in a computer model and ran simulations of NIST’s collapse scenario, the building did not collapse. The tower withstood the loss of three major columns due to the steel-frame’s redundant strength. The loads were simply transferred to other columns.

His engineers then ran more simulations, each time subtracting another column until they induced a collapse. However, instead of collapsing in the manner that was observed on 9/11, the building tipped over to the southeast. Numerous videos taken from different angles show that the 47-story steel frame tower dropped straight down into its footprint.

After repeated trials, Hulsey’s team concluded that NIST’s progressive collapse scenario was not feasible. At this point, they began exploring other collapse scenarios in an attempt to duplicate the actual event captured on film. There was only one match: the simultaneous failure of every core column, followed 1.3 seconds later by the simultaneous failure of every perimeter column. The pattern should be recognizable because this is the standard sequence employed in controlled demolitions.

Free Fall

The excellent work done by Hulsey’s team reinforces the case for explosives, which was already compelling by 2008. In August of that year, the public was allowed to comment on NIST’s WTC-7 draft report at an open hearing. A physics teacher named David Chandler took advantage of the occasion and asked probing questions that proved so embarrassing that NIST was compelled to modify the language in its final report, released shortly thereafter. In it NIST concedes that WTC-7 dropped in a free fall acceleration. It was a damning admission because the agency had previously acknowledged that free fall is the signature of a controlled demolition.

As we know, Building Seven housed the CIA, the Department of Defense, major securities traders, and the offices of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), where the records of many ongoing SEC investigations into corporate crime were stored, including Enron. All of these records were destroyed on 9/11. The SEC subsequently tabled all of these criminal investigations, which turned out to be very convenient (and profitable) for corporate America.

NIST claims it never found evidence of explosives at the World Trade Center (WTC). The reason, of course, is because the agency never looked, even though this is a standard protocol after large building fires, not to mention the worst terrorist attack in US history.

Independent scientists did look. In 2007, a physicist from Brigham Young University, Dr Steven Jones, reported the discovery of tiny flakes of unexploded thermate in WTC dust samples collected immediately after 9/11.

Thermate differs from its cousin thermite in that it contains elemental sulfur, which has the effect of greatly lowering the melting point of iron. Thermite is composed of iron-oxide and aluminum and is occasionally used in demolition work. Sulfur is sometimes added to speed up the reaction. Jones also found an abundance of tiny iron-rich microspheres in the dust, hard evidence that steel had melted. Other researchers also reported finding microspheres.

The announced discovery of thermate in the WTC dust should have been headline news nation-wide. Yet, there was no mention of it in the New York Times or Washington Post. And the rest of the US media followed their silent “lead.”

Jones continued to study the WTC dust and later co-authored a more detailed paper with Niels Harrit, a Danish chemist, and other scientists. Their peer-reviewed article appeared in an online science journal in 2009. To this day, it has never been rebutted.

The authors identified the constituents of the tiny flakes and found them to be thermitic in nature. The grains of iron-oxide were extremely small, roughly 100 nanometers across, indicating the use of the more explosive form of thermite known as nano-thermite or super-thermite. When the authors ignited the flakes, they found they were more energetic than conventional explosives. These reactions also produced iron-rich microspheres like those found in the WTC dust. 

Nano-thermite was developed by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and was available by April 2000, seventeen months before 9/11.

But nano-thermite and thermate were probably not the only explosives used to bring down the towers. The box columns that supported World Trade Center One and Two were seven inches thick at the base (as reported by NIST). And many of these massive core columns had been severed at or near ground level. In the years after 9/11, a debate raged within the 9/11 truth community about what kind of additional explosives had been used. Many believed thermate/thermite could not reliably have done the job on the gigantic columns.

The powerful blasts that destroyed the core columns just before each tower fell shook Manhattan. The explosions caused a cloud of dust to rise from street level; this was captured on film. And the stupendous noise of the explosions was heard and felt by many thousands of New Yorkers (and recorded) at least as far away as Hoboken, on the west shore of the Hudson River. Yet, all of the eyewitness accounts were dismissed as the wild ravings of conspiracy kooks.

These tremendous explosions no doubt also help to explain the large quantities of molten steel found beneath the WTC ruin. The heat must have been incredible, because, in the days after the attacks, New York City fire fighters pumped millions of gallons of water onto the smoking piles, to no effect. Dogs brought in by first responders to help locate survivors in the wreckage suffered serious burns, and some of the dogs died. Workers on site said their rubber boots melted. Clean up crews were still reporting molten steel as late as February 2002.

Building fires and burning jet fuel cannot explain the iron microspheres and molten steel. Not even close.

An air quality study produced additional evidence. After the attacks, a University of California (Davis) physicist, Dr Thomas Cahill, brought a team to New York and set up air monitoring stations across lower Manhattan. Cahill’s team documented the most toxic air he had ever seen over the course of his long career. In his write up Cahill mentions an anomaly he could not explain: an abundance of nano-sized particles spewing from the WTC ruin. Ordinary building fires do not produce large quantities of nano particulates, which are evidence of extreme temperatures.

After analyzing the data, Cahill issued a dire health warning. Nano particles of glass, chemicals and heavy metals easily infiltrate the human body. They damage the heart and other organs, and even cross the blood brain barrier. Cahill predicted a continuing health crisis for local residents and for clean-up workers, many of whom did not wear protective masks because they were told the air was safe to breathe. In subsequent years, thousands of first responders, firemen, and construction workers suffered life threatening leukemias, other cancers, as well as ischemic heart and lung disease. Many more Americans died as a result of the toxic fumes than perished in the attacks.

Although the evidence I have summarized is legally conclusive, I am in contact with a physicist who has gone even further. He has attempted to arrange for materials scientists to conduct radio-isotopic studies of WTC steel samples. Unfortunately, so far, none of the labs in Europe or Japan have agreed to run the definitive tests, probably because they were warned off by US officials.

Stay tuned. 9/11 attorneys intend to pursue this historic case all the way to the Supreme Court, if necessary. In the coming days, Americans will learn if the US judicial system is capable of delivering justice to the families of the victims. Only the truth about the 9/11 attacks can heal our nation.

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Mark H. Gaffney is the author of two books about the September 11, 2001 attacks: The 9/11 Mystery Plane (2008) and Black 9/11 (2nd edition, 2016). Mark can be reached for comment at [email protected]

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***

As the United States continues its descent into tyranny – due in large part to widespread complacency, sad to say – the time has never been more urgent for patriotic Americans to take a formidable stand against it.

Sharing articles and videos on social media is no longer cutting it as governments, large corporations and school districts continue to tighten the noose with Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) vaccine mandates – which, by the way, are completely unconstitutional.

Appearing on a recent episode of “Brighteon Conversations” with Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. of Children’s Health Defense (CHD) issued a call to everyone in America who still cares about freedom, our Constitution and everything this country was built upon to do something while we still can to stop this nightmare from advancing any further.

“They are so close to completely enveloping us with this totalitarianism that we all need to resist,” Kennedy told Adams and viewers. “And one of the ways that we can resist is that if you refuse and get fired, then you sue. And we want thousands and thousands of people to do this and get the Supreme Court on this.”

Kennedy went on to explain, while visibly trying to hold back tears, that everything our forefathers fought to give us is just about completely eroded away, thanks to the Chinese Virus “Trojan Horse,” which has become the world’s biggest excuse to usher in absolute authoritarianism.

“This is a battle for our country,” Kennedy maintains.

“It’s a battle for our Constitution. We had people who gave us our constitutional rights who were willing to die for it, who believed that there were things worse than death, including living like a slave. And we all have a duty to put our livelihoods on the line, and whatever we need on the line, and say ‘We are going to resist.’”

Be sure to watch the interview from Brighteon below:

Resist all forms of covid medical fascism, even if it costs you

The longer Americans sit around and do nothing in response to the Fauci Flu tyranny that really is enveloping our nation – and the rest of the world, for that matter – the worse things are going to get.

Eventually, things will get so bad that many will come to the stark realization that it is no longer worth living in this kind of system. They will then wish that they had done something sooner to stop it, but by then it will already be too late.

Kennedy and Adams both recommend, as do many patriots, that people step up to the plate now by refusing to support any businesses that require “proof of vaccination” in order to enter. If your employer demands that you get jabbed in order to keep your job, threaten a lawsuit.

Do whatever it takes to stop this, whether that means talking to every single restaurant manager who tries to push the shots on patrons, or even just talking to people on the street about why it is important for the U.S. to always respect medical freedom and the right to bodily autonomy.

Stage protests, boycotts, demonstrations. Be like the French and hold picnics in the street or on the sidewalk in front of restaurants that demand “vaccine passports.” Show the tyrants that you exist, and be as vocal and present as you can possibly be in defense of freedom and liberty.

This is our last chance, America. Make your voice heard again, and again, and again – as many times as is needed to prove that there are still Americans out there who value our country and our constitutional rights, no matter the cost. Otherwise, those rights will eventually be gone.

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Featured image is from NewsTarget.com

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***

On August 13, the UK government published a response to a freedom of information request in relation to the Medicine and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) — the UK’s equivalent of the FDA. The question it was in response to enquired as to whether or not the agency had received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The answer was yes:

We do receive funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as well as other sources outside government such as WHO. This funding mainly supports work to strengthen regulatory systems in other countries…

The current level of grant funding received from the Gates Foundation amounts to approximately $3 million. This covers a number of projects and the funding is spread across 3-4 financial years. We are an executive agency of the Department of Health and Social Care.

The story didn’t attract much attention at the time. In fact, not a single newspaper or broadcaster even bothered to cover it, perhaps because there didn’t see much in it. After all, $3 million (with an “m”) is not even that much money these days. And the Gates Foundation (GF) is a charitable organization — the biggest of its kind, with roughly $60 billion in assets — so what could possibly be wrong with it granting funds to an organization in charge of deciding which pharmaceutical products and medical devices reach the market and which don’t? Well, quite a lot, actually.

Blatant Conflict of Interest

Firstly, $3 million may not be a lot of money to the GF but it’s still a substantial sum to the cash-strapped MHRA. Secondly, the Gates Foundation’s roughly $60 billion in assets include, among other things, shares and other forms of investments in some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, whose products the MHRA has to regulate on a regular basis. Those companies include Sanofi, Merck, Eli Lilly and Company and Abbott Laboratories, all of which have developed or are developing covid-19 treatments and/or vaccines that are yet to receive authorisation in the UK. They also include Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, which together have developed and marketed the most profitable vaccine in history.

This is a blatant conflict of interest. It’s also worth noting that the MHRA’s former CEO, Ian Hudson, now works as a senior advisor at the GF.

When it comes to global healthcare, the GF is anything but a disinterested third party. Its co-founder, Bill Gates, is as committed as ever to intellectual property rights. In January we learned that Gates had played a key role in convincing Oxford University to drop a prior commitment to donate the rights to its vaccine to any global drug maker. The idea was was to provide the vaccine to poorer countries at a low cost or even free of charge. But Gates persuaded the British university to sign a vaccine deal with AstraZeneca instead that gave the pharmaceutical behemoth exclusive rights and no guarantee of low prices.

We have also learnt that Gates was instrumental in blocking attempts by a coalition of countries led by South Africa and India to bring a patent waiver proposal to the World Trade Organization’s TRIPS (Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) Council. A waiver would allow poorer countries to produce the vaccines themselves. And that would massively accelerate global take-up of vaccines, which could help in the global fight against Covid. But Gates argued that poor countries were not prepared to scale up manufacturing. A waiver would also eliminate incentives for future research, he said. His argument won the day and even today the TRIPS waiver is still under discussion at the WTO, going nowhere slowly.

In an article for Wired magazine Mohit Mookim, a former researcher at the Stanford Center for Ethics in Society, asks whether we should be surprised that a monopolist-turned-philanthropist maintains his commitment to monopoly patent rights as a philanthropist too?

“Throughout the last two decades, Gates has repeatedly advocated for public health policies that bolster companies’ ability to exclude others from producing lifesaving drugs, including allowing the Gates Foundation itself to acquire substantial intellectual property. This continues through the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Now we learn that the foundation, with its vast holdings in pharmaceutical companies and substantial intellectual property interests, has also been helping to fund the MHRA for the past four years. In other words, an organization that has poured billions of dollars into the research and development of vaccines, other novel treatments and medical devices has also been funding the UK agency responsible for approving those vaccines, novel treatments and medical devices. .

The MHRA is not the only public health agency in the UK to have benefited from the foundation’s largess:

• Public Health England, a health watchdog set up by the Government in 2013 to protect and improve health and wellbeing and combat health inequalities, has received $7,785,336 from the Gates foundation. The agency is set to close in the coming months and will be replaced by the Orwellian-titled “UK Health Security Agency”.
• Health Data Research UK has received $3.5 million from the GF since the pandemic began. The organisation has courted controversy in recent months for its role in bringing together the health and biometric data of all 55 million of the NHS’ patients. That data was then supposed to be flogged to any interested third parties, but the plan was scrapped at the last minute due to public opposition.
• The GF has also partnered with the UK Government’s UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), which began life in 2018 with a budget of £6 billion, ostensibly to support science and research in the UK.

Funding Crisis

As I wrote last week, the UK Government is ramping up its plans to privatise the NHS. This is leaving many parts of the health system starved of funds, which in turn opens up fresh opportunities for private-sector companies, trusts and foundations. The MHRA, like the FDA, is primarily funded by the “user fees” it charges its “customers” (i.e., the companies it regulates).

In the US, user fees fund account for around 65% of the FDA’s operating budget for regulating prescription drugs. In the case of the MHRA, 100% of its budget for regulating medicines comes from user fees. Its other activities are funded by a combination of private and public sources. The MHRA’s regulation of devices is primarily financed by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), with approximately 10% of its revenue derived from fees. The National Institute for Biological Standards and Control (NIBSC) raises around half of its revenue from fees charged for services.

Nonetheless, the MHRA is facing a funding crisis. And it’s largely a result of Brexit. Before the UK’s departure from the EU, in January this year, the MHRA formed part of the European system of medicines approval. Under that system, national regulators can serve as rapporteur or co-rapporteur for any given pharmaceutical application, providing most of the verification work on behalf of all members. It was an important source of fee-income but now it’s dried up. And the government is not replacing it.

As a consequence, the regulator has announced plans to lay off between a fifth and a quarter of its 1,200-strong workforce as part of cost-cutting measures. According to the FT, the goal is to transform how the MHRA operates by redeploying staff to new areas of regulation and science. Documents leaked to the British Medical Journal reveal that the MHRA is offering early redundancy packages to staff from its divisions on vigilance and risk management of medicines (not exactly comforting), licensing, devices, inspection enforcement and standards (also not comforting), as well as its committee secretariat. The document, marked “official sensitive,” also notes that the MHRA’s income is forecast to fall by 15-20% in the next financial year and beyond.

Despite the drastic downsizing, the MHRA says it wants to still serve as a world-class regulator that delivers positive outcomes for patients while modernizing the services it provides to industry. With 15-20 percent less operating income and 20-25 percent fewer workers, that’s likely to be a tall order.

User Fees: A Principal-Agency Problem

User fees are being used more and more to fund medicine regulators around the world. They are seen as a way of shifting some of the financial burden to manufacturers who stand to benefit from the sale of of medicines. But they also raise serious ethical issues. In a 2017 blog post for the BMJ, Joel Lexchin, a professor emeritus at the School of Health Policy and Management at York University, warned that the widespread introduction of user fees had created a principal-agent problem.

When the FDA’s operating budget used to be funded exclusively by the government (up til the early ’90s), there was essentially one principle and one agent in each interaction. Each of their roles was relatively clear. The principle needed something done (in this case, patients in the US needed effective, safe medicines to be approved and ineffective and/or unsafe medicines to be blocked) and the agent (in this case, the FDA) was contracted to do the task. However, since the introduction of user fees a new principal has been added (the pharmaceutical industry) and now the regulatory agency has two principals with directly competing values:

In the case of the public, the primary value is to have effective and safe drugs, but in the case of the pharmaceutical industry, its primary goal is to get its products through the approval system as quickly as possible and to sell those products to as wide an audience as possible. At times, it seems that regulatory agencies prioritize the latter at the expense of the former. Shortly after Canada introduced user fees, the head of the part of Health Canada that regulates prescription drugs issued a memo in which he said that “the client is the direct recipient of your services. In many cases this is the person or company who pays for the service.” The one page document focused on service to industry and relegated the public to the secondary status of “stakeholder” or “beneficiary”…

User fees are reauthorized in the US on a five year cycle. When they came up for renewal in 2007, a number of prominent American commentators, including Marcia Angell, a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and Jerry Avorn, a leading pharmacoepidemiologist, opposed its reauthorization and instead called for increased Congressional appropriations in order to allow the FDA to undertake its responsibilities free from any apparent conflict-of-interest.

“Safety in a world of user fees” is of paramount concern, concluded Lexchin. That was was back in 2017. Four years on, we are in the biggest health crisis of our lifetimes and the tasks performed by medicines regulators are more important than ever. New experimental vaccines and therapeutic treatments are rolling off the line in record time. But they’re also being authorised in record time — in some cases despite scant evidence of benefits (e.g., Remdesivir).  And they’re earning record profits for their manufacturers. At the same time, promising repurposed off-patent medicines that do not offer lucrative financial returns are largely being ignored or are even being demonised by our medicines regulators.

In its quest to remain globally relevant as it loses money and staff and in the absence of increased government support, the MHRA will need to raise even more funds from the companies it regulates. Further handouts from the likes of the Gates Foundation will also be welcome, one can imagine. But that, one can imagine, will come with even more strings attached.

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“Let us resolve that never again will we send the precious young blood of this country to die trying to prop up a corrupt military dictatorship abroad. This is also the time to turn away from excessive preoccupation overseas to the rebuilding of our own nation. America must be restored to a proper role in the world. But we can do that only through the recovery of confidence in ourselves…. together we will call America home to the ideals that nourished us from the beginning.”—George S. McGovern, former Senator and presidential candidate

It’s time to bring all our troops home.

Bring them home from Somalia, Iraq and Syria. Bring them home from Germany, South Korea and Japan. Bring them home from Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Oman. Bring them home from Niger, Chad and Mali. Bring them home from Turkey, the Philippines, and northern Australia.

It’s not enough to pull American troops out of Afghanistan, America’s longest, bloodiest and most expensive war to date.

It’s time that we stop policing the globe, stop occupying other countries, and stop waging endless wars.

That’s not what’s going to happen, of course.

The U.S. military reportedly has more than 1.3 million men and women on active duty, with more than 200,000 of them stationed overseas in nearly every country in the world.

Those numbers are likely significantly higher in keeping with the Pentagon’s policy of not fully disclosing where and how many troops are deployed for the sake of “operational security and denying the enemy any advantage.” As investigative journalist David Vine explains, “Although few Americans realize it, the United States likely has more bases in foreign lands than any other people, nation, or empire in history.”

Don’t fall for the propaganda, though.

America’s military forces aren’t being deployed abroad to protect our freedoms here at home. Rather, they’re being used to guard oil fields, build foreign infrastructure and protect the financial interests of the corporate elite. In fact, the United States military spends about $81 billion a year just to protect oil supplies around the world.

The reach of America’s military empire includes close to 800 bases in as many as 160 countries, operated at a cost of more than $156 billion annually. As Vine reports, “Even US military resorts and recreation areas in places like the Bavarian Alps and Seoul, South Korea, are bases of a kind. Worldwide, the military runs more than 170 golf courses.”

This is how a military empire occupies the globe.

After 20 years of propping up Afghanistan to the tune of trillions of dollars and thousands of lives lost, the U.S. military may have finally been forced out, but those troops represent just a fraction of our military presence worldwide.

In an ongoing effort to police the globe, American military servicepeople continue to be deployed to far-flung places in the Middle East and elsewhere.

This is how the military industrial complex, aided and abetted by the likes of Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and others, continues to get rich at taxpayer expense.

Yet while the rationale may keep changing for why American military forces are policing the globe, these wars abroad aren’t making America—or the rest of the world—any safer, are certainly not making America great again, and are undeniably digging the U.S. deeper into debt.

War spending is bankrupting America.

Although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world’s population, America boasts almost 50% of the world’s total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined.

In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety.

The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth.

Since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $4.7 trillion waging its endless wars.

Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $32 million per hour.

In fact, the U.S. government has spent more money every five seconds in Iraq than the average American earns in a year.

Future wars and military exercises waged around the globe are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.

Talk about fiscally irresponsible: the U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on a military empire it can’t afford.

As investigative journalist Uri Friedman puts it, for more than 15 years now, the United States has been fighting terrorism with a credit card, “essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”

War is not cheap, but it becomes outrageously costly when you factor in government incompetence, fraud, and greedy contractors. Indeed, a leading accounting firm concluded that one of the Pentagon’s largest agencies “can’t account for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of spending.”

Unfortunately, the outlook isn’t much better for the spending that can be tracked.

A government audit found that defense contractor Boeing has been massively overcharging taxpayers for mundane parts, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in overspending. As the report noted, the American taxpayer paid:

$71 for a metal pin that should cost just 4 cents; $644.75 for a small gear smaller than a dime that sells for $12.51: more than a 5,100 percent increase in price. $1,678.61 for another tiny part, also smaller than a dime, that could have been bought within DoD for $7.71: a 21,000 percent increase. $71.01 for a straight, thin metal pin that DoD had on hand, unused by the tens of thousands, for 4 cents: an increase of over 177,000 percent.

That price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire is a sad statement on how little control “we the people” have over our runaway government.

Mind you, this isn’t just corrupt behavior. It’s deadly, downright immoral behavior.

Americans have thus far allowed themselves to be spoon-fed a steady diet of pro-war propaganda that keeps them content to wave flags with patriotic fervor and less inclined to look too closely at the mounting body counts, the ruined lives, the ravaged countries, the blowback arising from ill-advised targeted-drone killings and bombing campaigns in foreign lands, or the transformation of our own homeland into a warzone.

That needs to change.

The U.S. government is not making the world any safer. It’s making the world more dangerous. It is estimated that the U.S. military drops a bomb somewhere in the world every 12 minutes. Since 9/11, the United States government has directly contributed to the deaths of around 500,000 human beings. Every one of those deaths was paid for with taxpayer funds.

The U.S. government is not making America any safer. It’s exposing American citizens to alarming levels of blowback, a CIA term referring to the unintended consequences of the U.S. government’s international activities. Chalmers Johnson, a former CIA consultant, repeatedly warned that America’s use of its military to gain power over the global economy would result in devastating blowback.

The 9/11 attacks were blowback. The Boston Marathon Bombing was blowback. The attempted Times Square bomber was blowback. The Fort Hood shooter, a major in the U.S. Army, was blowback.

The U.S. military’s ongoing drone strikes will, I fear, spur yet more blowback against the American people. The latest drone strike reportedly killed seven children, ages 2 to 10, in Afghanistan.

The war hawks’ militarization of America—bringing home the spoils of war (the military tanks, grenade launchers, Kevlar helmets, assault rifles, gas masks, ammunition, battering rams, night vision binoculars, etc.) and handing them over to local police, thereby turning America into a battlefield—is also blowback.

James Madison was right: “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” As Madison explained, “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”

We are seeing this play out before our eyes.

The government is destabilizing the economy, destroying the national infrastructure through neglect and a lack of resources, and turning taxpayer dollars into blood money with its endless wars, drone strikes and mounting death tolls.

Clearly, our national priorities are in desperate need of an overhauling.

At the height of its power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not stare down a collapsing economy and a burgeoning military. Prolonged periods of war and false economic prosperity largely led to its demise. As historian Chalmers Johnson predicts:

The fate of previous democratic empires suggests that such a conflict is unsustainable and will be resolved in one of two ways. Rome attempted to keep its empire and lost its democracy. Britain chose to remain democratic and in the process let go its empire. Intentionally or not, the people of the United States already are well embarked upon the course of non-democratic empire.

This is the “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex” that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us more than 50 years ago not to let endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

Eisenhower, who served as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, was alarmed by the rise of the profit-driven war machine that emerged following the war—one that, in order to perpetuate itself, would have to keep waging war.

We failed to heed his warning.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, there’s not much time left before we reach the zero hour.

It’s time to stop policing the globe, end these wars-without-end, and bring the troops home.

*

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president The Rutherford Institute. His books Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State are available at www.amazon.com. He can be contacted at [email protected].

Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Featured image is from The Grayzone

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***

Afghanistan is not exactly history quite yet as there still will be a lot final adjustments on the ground as well as the usual Vietnam-syndrome war of words that inevitably follows on yet another American-engineered foreign catastrophe. But the recriminations will go nowhere as there is certainly enough mud to stick on both major political parties that make Washington their home, and neither wants to be embarrassed to such an extent that anyone will actually demand change.

Regarding Afghanistan itself, I often recall hearing from a CIA friend of mine who served as the last Chief of Station in Kabul in the 1970s before the start of the Mujaheddin insurgency against the Marxist-Leninist government that was then in place eventually forced the US Embassy to close. He remarked how liberated the city was, full of smartly dressed attractive women and well-turned-out men going about their business. Though there was considerable repression in rural areas, education was highly prized by the people in the cities while many aspects of fundamental Islam were made illegal.

All of that came to a crashing halt when the United States and Saudi Arabia supported the Mujaheddin and eventually created al-Qaeda in a bid to damage the Soviets, who had intervened in the country and were backers of the Kabul regime headed by Babrak Karmal. Zbigniew Brzezinski was the “brain” behind the plan, in part to do payback for the Soviet role in Vietnam and in part because Zbig apparently had difficultly in separating his attachment for Poland, at the time part of the Soviet empire, from his role as national security adviser for Jimmy Carter, President of the United States of America.

To be sure, wars that are unsuccessful, like Vietnam and Afghanistan, do generate a certain blowback. It was regularly observed that the 1990-1 US-led Desert Storm operation followed by a victory parade down Fifth Avenue in New York City helped the United States recover from Vietnam fatigue. That meant that it would not hesitate to again use armed force to enforce its often touted “rules based international order,” best translated as US global hegemony.

Some might suggest that the best thing to do about Afghanistan is to learn from it. Hold senior officials and officers responsible for the egregious errors in judgement that led to disaster. But that will never happen as the top levels of the US government operate like a large social club where everyone protects everyone else. A Marine Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Scheller who has called for accountability at senior levels has already been relieved of his command and is leaving the service, a warning from above to others who might be similarly inclined to be outspoken.

So, with all that in mind, the best was to make Afghanistan go away is to begin preparations for the next war. Since that is so, how lucky is President Joe Biden to have a visit at this very critical moment from Israel’s new Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who presented the president with a “new strategic vision” for the Middle East. In preparation for the visit, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that the prime minister’s visit “will strengthen the enduring partnership between the United States and Israel, reflect the deep ties between our governments and our people, and underscore the United States’ unwavering commitment to Israel’s security.” Psaki, who conflates the deep ties between the Democratic Party and its Jewish donors with a “partnership,” predictably said everything demanded of her, only stopping short of turning in her application to join the Israel Defense Force (IDF).

Bennett met on the day before the White House meeting with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley and also separately with Secretary of State Antony Blinken. It is not known how many standing ovations were given to Bennett by the simpering US officials, but it is presumed that they were necessary as filler for the event because Austin and Milley in particular are notably inarticulate and poorly informed. The lumpish Austin did, however, echo Psaki in coming out with the usual message, telling Bennett that the Pentagon is absolutely “committed” to ensuring Israel can “defend itself” against the Iranians, that “The administration remains committed to Israel’s security and right to self-defense. That is unwavering, it is steadfast and it is ironclad.”

Bennett was engaged in delivering his timely message that the fall of Afghanistan has actually made everything in that part of Asia more dangerous, meaning that the US and Israel should prepare to fight Iran when it seeks to take advantage of the situation. More to the point, Bennett also made time to meet with the omnipotent Israel Lobby as represented by the head of its most powerful component, Executive Director Howard Kohr of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

The actual discussion with Biden and who-knows-who else in the room was also predictable, minus only that Biden did not feel compelled to go down on his knees as he did with visiting outgoing Israeli President Reuven Rivlin and his chief of staff Rivka Ravitz in early July. Perpetual victim Israel was presented by Bennett as facing hostilities coming from its southern border where Hamas controls the Gaza Strip. Neither Bennett nor Biden mentioned the enormous advantage in military power that Israel already possesses, as was evident in the conflict that took place three months ago, an 11-day war that left 265 dead in Gaza, including many targeted children in apartment blocks, while only 13 died in Israel.

Bennett had two principal objectives. First, he was looking for a commitment from Biden not to re-engage with Iran in the nuclear proliferation treaty Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) unless it is greatly “improved” to include peripheral regional issues as well as eliminating any uranium enrichment. As Iran is prepared to accept the status quo ante and nothing more, Bennett knew perfectly well that his insistence on a broader agreement would be a game-breaker. And second, as a consequence of that expected commitment, he wanted assurances that the US will not withdraw its remaining forces from Iraq and Syria and would support Israel fully if it should choose to attack Iran.

Israel’s Ambassador to the US Gilad Erdan has also been pushing the White House to admit Israel to the so-called Visa Waiver Program, which would allow Israelis to travel freely to the United States without having to obtain a visa. The program usually requires reciprocity which would mean that Israel would in turn have to admit all American travelers, but the Jewish state insists on reserving the right to block Arab and Muslim Americans for no reason whatsoever. It is presumed that Bennett discussed the issue with Blinken.

On the other more important issues, Biden appears to have bought into at least some of what Bennett was selling. In comments made after their meeting, with the Israeli standing beside him, the US President said that “We’re putting diplomacy first and see where that takes us. But if diplomacy fails, we’re ready to turn to other options.” Bennett was pleased by what he was hearing, elaborating on it, “I was happy to hear your clear words that Iran will never be able to acquire a nuclear weapon and that you emphasize that you will try the diplomatic route, but there’s other options if that doesn’t work out.” The other “options” include, of course, intensified covert action intelligence operations, assassinations and a hoped-for bombing attack on Iranian nuclear facilities and weapons sites. Attacking Iran will also have the benefit of demonstrating that Biden is a “tough” leader, surely a consideration at this point when his approval ratings are sinking.

The prime minister also surfaced another proposal for all his interlocutors, including Biden. He wants to upgrade his fleet of F-15 fighter bombers to give his military planners more options if there should be a war with Iran. The US-produced F-35 is the primary fighter for IDF, but the older F-15 can carry significantly more weaponry and bomb load. Bennett has asked Washington to provide an advance on its annual $3.8 billion military assistance package to pay for the improvements. In other words, Israel wants to start a war and have the United States pay for it, possibly in addition to actually doing much of the fighting.

Israel has, in fact, been warning that a war is coming for quite some time, a message that was delivered yet again in a timely fashion as Bennett winged his way to Washington for his meetings. As the prime minister was landing in the US, IDF Chief of Staff Aviv Kohavi held a press conference in which he advised that the Israeli military advancing its “operational plans” against Iran. He observed that the country’s new military budget had funds earmarked specifically to improve IDF capabilities against Iran. Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz also warned on the same day that “The State of Israel has the means to act and will not hesitate to do so. I do not rule out the possibility that Israel will have to take action in the future in order to prevent a nuclear Iran.”

So, the new Israeli premier has laid down the gauntlet and, for the moment, Joe Biden has only tentatively moved to pick it up even if he has in a sense pledged total support for Israel no matter what the Jewish state decides to do. The Israel Lobby meanwhile will be working hard to bring Joe totally into line. And to be sure Biden will have to reckon with the fact that there is a new player in town in the form of a bunch of progressive Democrats who are not in love with Israel, backed up by shrinking public support for Israeli actions resulting from the recent slaughter in Gaza. Nevertheless, a weakened and disoriented Biden will have only limited ability to stand up to an increasingly assertive Israel and its powerful lobby.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from TUR

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The Globalization of War: America’s “Long War” against Humanity

Michel Chossudovsky

The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-6-0

Year: 2015

Pages: 240 Pages

List Price: $22.95

Special Price: $15.00

Click here to order.

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***

All flags are on half-mast in the US of A. The cause are the 13 American soldiers killed in this huge suicide bombing outside Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul on Thursday, 26 August. 

As it stands, at least 150 people – Afghans, including at least 30 Taliban – plus 13 American military – were killed and at least 1,300 injured, according to the Afghan Health Ministry.

The Islamic State (ISIS) claimed responsibility for the bombing via Amaq Media, the official Islamic State (ISIS) news agency. The perpetrators, the message says, were members of the ISIS-Khorasan, or ISIS-K.

As reported by RT, US military leaders knew “hours in advance” that a “mass casualty event” was planned at Kabul airport. However, accounts from the troops in harm’s way suggest that nothing was done to protect them or the airport. See this.

RT further reports, “The bombing provoked the US into launching two drone strikes, one targeting an alleged “planner” and “facilitator” with the group responsible, and another supposedly wiping out “multiple” would-be suicide bombers but reportedly annihilating a family and children alongside them.

Why was nothing done to prevent this bloody, atrocious attack? In fact, the Pentagon announced just yesterday that another massive attack was likely, meaning they have information that another mass-killing may take place?

In the meantime, the US Central Command (CENTCOM) confirmed that the last three US military transport planes have departed the Hamid Karzai Airport just ahead of the August 31, 2021 deadline, officially ending the American withdrawal from Afghanistan.

“The war is over. America’s last troops have just left Kabul airport,” RT’s Murad Gazdiev tweeted from Kabul, adding that the war lasted “19 years, 10 months and 25 days.”

What he didn’t say is that the monetary cost of the war was at least 3 trillion dollars, that about 241,000 people have been killed in the Afghanistan and Pakistan war zone since 2001. More than 71,000 of those killed have been civilians. These figures include (through April 2021) 2,448 American service members; 3,846 U.S. contractors, and some 66,000 Afghan national military and police. See this.

Twenty years of war – and only ten days to defeat the US military.

Really? Is this really the end of the US involvement in Afghanistan? Too many strange events and occurrences are pointing in a different direction.

Let’s have a closer look. The Islamic State – ISIS claims responsibility. As we know by now and since quite a while, ISIS is a creation of the CIA. The sophistication of the attack, the Pentagon non-interference, despite their prior knowledge, might, just might, indicate that this attack may have been a well-coordinated “false flag”?

Who benefits? Cui Bono?

On August 19, 2021, the Washington Post, referring to President Trump’s Peace Agreement with Taliban in Doha, Qatar, in February 2020, reports –

“As President Donald Trump’s administration signed a peace deal with the Taliban in February 2020, he optimistically proclaimed that “we think we’ll be successful in the end.” His secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, asserted that the administration was “seizing the best opportunity for peace in a generation.”

“Eighteen months later, President Joe Biden is pointing to the agreement signed in Doha, Qatar, as he tries to deflect blame for the Taliban overrunning Afghanistan in a blitz. He says it bound him to withdraw U.S. troops, setting the stage for the chaos engulfing the country.”

“But Biden can go only so far in claiming the agreement boxed him in. It had an escape clause: The U.S. could have withdrawn from the accord if Afghan peace talks failed. They did, but Biden chose to stay in it, although he delayed the complete pullout from May to September.”

See full story here.

So, again who benefits from such an atrociously deadly attack, like the one of 26 August at Kabul Airport?

President Biden, though unjustified, can and does blame President Trump for the chaos he left behind by negotiating this “irresponsible” Peace Deal. Why “irresponsible”?  Wasn’t it time after 20 years without apparent “success” – whatever that means, or may have meant at some point in time – to end this senseless bloodshed and destruction of a sovereign Afghan society – let alone the killing of hundreds of thousands of people, most of them civilians?

It seems that Mr. Trump may have done the right thing. Peace over war should always win, on the ground as well as in the minds of people, and foremost of politicians. However, there are several reasons, why Peace is not welcome. And chaos and destruction and death as demonstrated by the 26 August suicide attack, and who knows, maybe more to follow, might justify sending back US troops?

There are several other irons in the fire about which hardly anybody talks and the bought anti-Trump and pro-Biden mainstream media are silent.

The Heroin Trade

There is a multi-multi-billion, perhaps up to a trillion-dollar heroin trade at stake, for the US and for the US and European pharma-industry – the huge and deadly opioid-market.

As reported by Michel Chossudovsky on 21 August 2021,

“One of the key strategic objectives of the 2001 war on Afghanistan was to restore the opium trade following the Taliban government’s successful 2000-2001 drug eradication program which led to a 94% collapse in opium production. This program was supported by the United Nations. (See graph below) 

In the course of the last 19 years following the US-NATO October 2001 invasion, there has been a surge in Afghan opium production. In turn the number of heroin addicts in the US has increased dramatically. Is there a relationship?

There were 189,000 heroin users in the US in 2001, before the US-NATO invasion of Afghanistan.

By 2016 that number went up to 4,500,000 (2.5 million heroin addicts and 2 million casual users).

In 2020, at the height of the covid crisis, deaths from opioids and drug addiction increased threefold.
It’s Big Money for Big Pharma.”

See the full report here.

The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative

Both, China and Russia have already indicated that they would help the new Taliban regime to gain stability – and to develop towards a newly independent, sovereign state. Afghanistan’s border with China, only about 70 km wide, but it forms a crucial connection to China’s western most Province, the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. It is a vital pivot for China’s Belt and Road, or “One Belt One Road” – OBOR – also called the New Silk Road.

While transit routes already go through Pakistan to the Indian Ocean, an OBOR rail and road transit through Afghanistan would connect China directly with Iran, facilitating among other trade, hydrocarbon transport from Iran to China. OBOR would also be an effective development instrument for war destroyed Afghanistan – a reconstruction and economic development scheme for Afghanistan could bring Afghanistan back to a respected nation state – even through the Taliban.

Furthermore, Afghanistan might be prepared for becoming an active member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), one of the world’s most significant political, economic and strategic defense organization. In addition to China and Russia and the Central Asian former Soviet Republics, India and Pakistan are already full members, while Iran, Malaysia and Mongolia are, so far, in observer and associate status.

SCO covers almost half of the world population and controls some 30% of the world’s GDP. Afghanistan would be in a solid and guiding association as an SCO member. Afghanistan’s socioeconomic development and improvement of war-damaged people’s standard of living, could benefit enormously.

Washington however dislikes OBOR with a passion. They see it as Chinese expansionism and competition. It is actually neither. China has in her thousands of years of history never had expansionist trends, or ambitions, and always respected other countries’ sovereignty. OBOR, an ingenious idea of President Xi Jinping, is patterned according to the ancient Silk Road, a trading route of 2100 years ago connecting Asia with Europe and the Middle East.

OBOR is an instrument to help develop and connect the world, while respecting each nation state’s independence and sovereignty.

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The hugely profitable Heroin Trade and the further development of China’s OBOR – and particularly bringing Afghanistan under the wings of the east through association with the SCO – would spoil America’s multi-multibillion heroin trade, as well as another Middle East country would orient itself to the east – and away from the fangs of the ever weakening and crumbling Anglo-US empire.

Hence, commanding US-created ISIS to sow chaos and death in Afghanistan, blaming the Taliban, might be a good reason for Biden to bring back US troops – to fight a new kind war – fighting for the continuing highly profitable heroin trade and, simultaneously, fighting against OBOR. On top of it all, it would suit the Biden’s and his globalist agenda’s image – and standing in a totally misinformed world.

*

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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he has worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and  co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020)

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He is also a a non-resident Sr. Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.

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by Michel Chossudovsky

ISBN Number: 9780973714715

List Price: $24.95

click here to order

Special Price: $18.00

In this new and expanded edition of Michel Chossudovsky’s 2002 best seller, the author blows away the smokescreen put up by the mainstream media, that 9/11 was an attack on America by “Islamic terrorists”.  Through meticulous research, the author uncovers a military-intelligence ploy behind the September 11 attacks, and the cover-up and complicity of key members of the Bush Administration.

The expanded edition, which includes twelve new chapters focuses on the use of 9/11 as a pretext for the invasion and illegal occupation of Iraq, the militarisation of justice and law enforcement and the repeal of democracy.

According to Chossudovsky, the  “war on terrorism” is a complete fabrication based on the illusion that one man, Osama bin Laden, outwitted the $40 billion-a-year American intelligence apparatus. The “war on terrorism” is a war of conquest. Globalisation is the final march to the “New World Order”, dominated by Wall Street and the U.S. military-industrial complex.

September 11, 2001 provides a justification for waging a war without borders. Washington’s agenda consists in extending the frontiers of the American Empire to facilitate complete U.S. corporate control, while installing within America the institutions of the Homeland Security State.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

Within days of withdrawing the last British troops from Afghanistan after 20 years of warfare, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) is understood to be undertaking planning in order that the UK can launch airstrikes against ISIS in Afghanistan.  The plans emerged after the Afghanistan branch of ISIS launched a suicide attack at Kabul airport during the chaotic evacuation, which killed a large number of civilians – 90 according to some reports – including two British men, and 13 US troops. Foreign secretary, Dominic Rabb signed a joint statement issued by the US-led coalition against ISIS saying that they would continue to “draw on all elements of national power—military, intelligence, diplomatic, economic, law enforcement—to ensure the defeat of this brutal terrorist organization.”

Head of RAF, Sir Mike Wigston told the Daily Telegraph

“If there’s an opportunity for us to contribute, I am in no doubt that we will be ready to. That will be anywhere where violent extremism raises its head and is a direct or indirect threat to the UK and our allies. Afghanistan is probably one of the most inaccessible parts of the world, and we’re able to operate there.” 

British drone and other aircraft continue to undertake military operations against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, with more than 50 UK airstrikes (or ‘weapon release events’ as MoD now calls them) in first six months of 2021.  In addition, UK Reaper drones have also been engaged in a covert operation about which government refuses to answer any questions.

It remains to be seen whether ‘planning’ turns into actual operations but launching such air strikes continues to kill innocent civilians.  A US drone strike targeting a car carrying alleged suicide bombers in Kabul on 29 July, reportedly killed 10 civilian members of one family, including a number of children.  According to the New York Times:

“Zemari Ahmadi, who worked for the charity organization Nutrition and Education International, was on his way home from work after dropping off colleagues on Sunday evening, according to relatives and colleagues interviewed in Kabul. As he pulled into the narrow street where he lived with his three brothers and their families, the children, seeing his white Toyota Corolla, ran outside to greet him. Some clambered aboard in the street, others gathered around as he pulled the car into the courtyard of their home.

It was then that they say the drone struck.

At the time of the attack, the Corolla was in a narrow courtyard inside a walled family compound. Its doors were blown out, and its windows shattered.

Mr. Ahmadi and some of the children were killed inside his car; others were fatally wounded in adjacent rooms, family members said. An Afghan official confirmed that three of the dead children were transferred by ambulance from the home on Sunday.”

A US military spokesperson said they weren’t in a position to dispute the civilian casualties but were investigating. They were quick, however, to suggest that casualties must have been due to ‘secondary explosions’. Azmat Khan, the investigative reporter who co-wrote the hugely important report, The Uncounted, looking at civilian casualties from US air war in Iraq, put out a helpful twitter thread detailing the abysmal record of US civilian casualty investigations.  See also, of course, the excellent work of Airwars and its on-going tracking and reporting on civilian casualties.

Where UK drones and other aircraft would be based in order to undertake airstrikes in Afghanistan would be an important issue.  According to the Telegraph, Wigston was “in discussion” with international counterparts about long-term plans to base more RAF units overseas, including the Protector drone which is due to come into service in 2024.

What is seemingly not in doubt, despite the humiliating end of US and UK military operations against the Taliban in Afghanistan, is the willingness to embrace violent military action. There is apparently no need to learn any lessons from the tragedy and failure of the last 20 years of western military operations in Afghanistan or to reflect in any way on the effectiveness of air and drone strikes rather than diplomatic and political solutions.  Forever War, apparently, is the only option there is.

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Featured image: U.S. jets bombing Afghanistan. These attacks will not end despite the formal U.S. withdrawal by September 11th. [Source: wired.com]

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***

The US Government regulator for drugs, the Food and Drug Administration, has just announced that it has voted full approval for the mRNA genetic vaccine of Pfizer and BioNTech, or did they? This supposed new status is being used by the Biden Administration and many states and companies to impose mandatory vaccinations. The notoriously conflicted Biden covid adviser, Tony Fauci of the NIAID, using that ruling, is calling for national mandatory vaccination for the country.

What is not being revealed is the cesspool of corruption and conflicts of interest between the FDA and the major drug companies, including Pfizer, that stand behind the rushed approval. And it’s not full approval for Pfizer’s jab, only for BioNTech’s legally different vaccine.

“…final stamp of approval”?

On August 23 as the FDA announced full approval for the Pfizer mRNA gene-edited substance. Or not quite, when the full papers of FDA are studied. Fauci, whose NIAID has financial interest in the vaccine, referred to the FDA decision as the “final stamp of approval.” It is however anything but final or an impartial, scientific rigorous medical evaluation. Rather it is a politically-motivated decision by an FDA that is corrupt beyond the imagination of most people.

Backtracking on its statement in 2020 that it would hold normal FDA advisory committee hearings with independent experts to discuss the Pfizer application for full approval, now the FDA told the British Medical Journal that they did not believe a meeting was necessary ahead of granting full approval of what is the most controversial vaccine in modern history. The BMJ quotes Kim Witczak, a drug safety advocate who serves as a consumer representative on the FDA’s Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee, “These [FDA] public meetings are imperative in building trust and confidence especially when the vaccines came to market at lightning speed under emergency use authorization.”

Witczak continued with the alarming note, “It is already concerning that full approval is being based on 6 months’ worth of data despite the clinical trials designed for two years. There is no control group after Pfizer offered the product to placebo participants before the trials were completed.” Read that again, slowly. Pfizer tests destroyed their own control group mid-stream! And its six month rollout of the mRNA jab worldwide has resulted in catastrophic side effects which have been totally officially ignored. Is this “science” Dr Fauci?

The refusal of the FDA and its Acting Director, Janet Woodcock, to convene its Drugs Advisory Committee for discussion of the Pfizer and BioNTech decisions is even more shocking as in June three members of that same panel resigned in protest for being disregarded in another drug approval. NPR network reported, “Three experts have now resigned from a Food and Drug Administration advisory committee after the agency approved an Alzheimer’s drug called Aduhelm against the wishes of nearly every member on the panel.” One of the three, Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, in his resignation letter from the FDA Advisory Committee (June 10, 2021), wrote:

“For both eteplirsen and aducanumab, the decisions by FDA administrators to ignore the Advisory Committee’s clear recommendations led to their approval of two highly problematic drugs that offered little evidence that they would meaningfully benefit patients…With eteplirsen, the AdComm (Advisory Committee) and FDA’s own scientific staff reported that there was no convincing evidence that the drug worked; both groups were overruled by FDA leadership… “

Now the FDA refusal to convene their advisory committee for the Pfizer decision is all the more astonishing in light of the fact that the Government Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in its official VAERS data bank for recording vaccine negative effects has recorded 8,508 reports of fatalities following the Pfizer mRNA shot in the past seven months, a number more than for all vaccines combined in the past 30 years.  By denying a public hearing the FDA avoided any discussion of these alarming fatality numbers, let alone the tens of thousands of serious side-effects including heart attacks, blood clots, miscarriages, permanent paralysis following the Pfizer-BioNTech jabs. The public declaration by Fauci before approval that he expected it, is also unethical influencing, but that is the least of the crimes.

Faked Approval

It seems the FDA executed a clever ruse in which it issued separate rulings for a Pfizer Inc.-BioNTech vaccine which is widely used in the USA, and another ruling for the similar vaccine of Pfizer’s German-based partner and developer of the mRNA platform, BioNTech of Mainz. It is only BioNTech that got FDA approval, but conditioned on completion of a series of further tests on select groups including infants, pregnant women and youth, by 2027. The US vaccine, Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine, only got extension of its Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), not full approval!

In their separate letter to Pfizer, the FDA stated,

“…On August 23, 2021, having concluded that revising this EUA is appropriate to protect the public health or safety under section 564(g)(2) of the Act, FDA is reissuing the August 12, 2021 letter of (Emergency Use) authorization in its entirety with revisions incorporated to clarify that the EUA will remain in place for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for the previously-authorized indication and uses…”(emphasis added).

Buried in a footnote in the letter the FDA admits there are two legally separate entities and vaccines—Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 Vaccine and BioNTech GmbH of Mainz with its own vaccine trade-named Comrinaty. The FDA writes that “The products are legally distinct with certain differences…” Legally distinct means two separate vaccines. If you find this confusing it is meant to be. Only under an EUA ruling is Pfizer presently exempt from vaccine liability. Some lawyers are calling the FDA ruse a classic “bait and switch” tactic, a form of fraud based on deception.

US vaccinologist and a developer of the mRNA technique, Dr Robert Malone, has accused the FDA of playing a “bureaucratic shell game” with their supposed early approval of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine. He cites the two separate FDA letters,

“There is a letter for Pfizer and a letter for BioNTech. The New York Times and the Washington Post got it wrong. The authorization is not for Pfizer. The authorization is for BioNTech, and it will only be initiated at the time BioNTech product becomes available…”

Adding to the bizarre irregularities, in their two separate letters, one to BioNTech and another to Pfizer, the FDA repeatedly deletes the location of the vaccine manufacturing they approve. Why that? Is it in China where BioNTech has a joint agreement with Fosun Pharma of Shanghai to jointly produce and market Comirnaty vaccine for COVID-19? Why do they need to hide that location data from the public? Would it expose the entire fraud?

FDA-Pfizer Conflicts of Interest

In 2019 Pfizer made a very conflicted appointment to its board of directors. It took Scott Gottlieb, who had just resigned as head of the FDA three months earlier. If this gives an appearance of a huge conflict of interest, it is. Alongside Gottlieb at Pfizer’s Board of Directors sits Dr Susan Desmond-Hellmann, who headed the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation until 2020. The Gates Foundation is behind every single key part of the covid vaccine rush and owns stock in Pfizer to boot.

Another person who links Pfizer and Gates is Prof. Holly Janes, a bio-statistical expert in Gates’ hometown Seattle, at the Fred Huff cancer research center. Janes is also a member of the FDA Vaccine Committee until 2023. Notably, she co-designed the controversial trials for both Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines for Fauci’s NIAID from her Seattle center, which is also funded by the Gates Foundation.

Janes is Professor at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division, known as Fred Hutch. Earlier she received Gates Foundation research money for a six year period when she worked for the Gates Foundation from 2006 to 2012 to develop “statistical and study design support for pre-clinical vaccine performance trials.” Prof. Janes also helped develop the program that tracks vaccine data at John Hopkins University.

The person who runs FDA as “Acting Director” is Janet Woodcock. To call her tainted is mild. She has been at FDA since 1986, almost as long as Fauci at NIAID. Woodcock was Biden’s choice to head FDA, but a massive opposition from 28 groups including state attorneys general and citizen groups forced him to name her “acting,” which does not need Congressional scrutiny.

Woodcock was directly responsible for the FDA approval of deadly opioids over the objections of her own scientists and other advisors. Two decades ago as head of the FDA unit responsible, Woodcock was instrumental in the approval of a powerful opioid, Zohydro, even though the FDA’s own scientific advisory committee voted 11-2 to keep the drug off the market because it was unsafe. The online Drugs.com writes, “Hydrocodone (Zohydro) can slow or stop your breathing. Never use Zohydro ER in larger amounts, or for longer than prescribed. .. Swallow it whole to avoid exposure to a potentially fatal dose. Hydrocodone may be habit-forming, even at regular doses.” Woodcock later approved the sale of a high-strength narcotic pill, OxyContin, as “safer and more effective than other painkillers” based on the false claims of the now bankrupt manufacturer, Purdue Pharma. Some 500,000 Americans have since died as a result of opioid addiction.

Woodcock clearly is the key FDA person behind the duplicitous August 23 Pfizer decision, seeing to it that there were no public advisory hearings to review relevant data. It would be relevant to know what discussions or communications went on with her former boss, now Pfizer director, Scott Gottlieb.

Why?

There are many unanswered question in this twisted tale of corruption at FDA and Pfizer. Was this theater rushed through by the Biden Administration to accelerate the forced vaccination of millions of Americans uncertain or skeptical of taking an emergency or experimental jab? Why is there such an incredible pressure from mainstream media and politicians to vaccinate every man, woman and now child in the US? Are the vaccines really safe if there are so many dire cases of adverse events after the Pfizer jab? Why did the FD refuse to allow its independent vaccine committee to weigh in?

It is worth noting that as of August 14 Pfizer does not mandate vaccines for its own employees. Also the Biden White House does not mandate vaccines for its staff. These are all serious issues that demand serious and honest answers.

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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. 

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Featured image is from NEO

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Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

Author Name: F. William Engdahl

ISBN Number: 978-0-937147-2-2

Year: 2007

Pages: 341 pages with complete index

List Price: $25.95

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This skilfully researched book focuses on how a small socio-political American elite seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival: the provision of our daily bread. “Control the food and you control the people.”

This is no ordinary book about the perils of GMO. Engdahl takes the reader inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms.

The author cogently reveals a diabolical world of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

According to the most recent stats released by the CDC this past Friday, August 27, 2021, their Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) now has recorded more than twice as many deaths following COVID-19 shots during the past 8 and a half months, than deaths recorded following ALL vaccines for the past 30 years.

This has to be the most censored information in the U.S. right now, even though these statistics come directly from official government statistics.

They have now recorded 13,627 deaths, 2,826,646 injuries, and 1,429 fetal deaths from pregnant women who took a COVID shot.

They also report 17,794 permanent disabilities, 74,369 emergency room visits, 55,821 hospitalizations, and 14,104 life threatening events. (Source.)

And all of this has happened in just over 8 months.

From January 1, 1991 to November 30, 2020, the last month before the COVID shots were given emergency use authorization, there were only a total of 6,068 deaths recorded (mostly infant babies) following ALL vaccines. (Source.)

The FDA Has Approved the Pfizer COVID-19 Injection – Deal with it!

I have literally received about 50 emails from people DEMANDING that I change the text on several of our articles that reported the FDA has now given full approval to the Pfizer/BioNTech shots, stating that I am wrong, and that the FDA did not actually approve this shot.

Here is one, for example, that I received just as I started writing this article today:

Subject: your wrong assertion that the FDA have approved the Pfizer injection

Message Body:
The Pfizer injection has NOT been approved by Pfizer. Dr E Alexander former White House Covid adviser to Trump government on the Stew Peters show made it clear that it is not the Pfizer injection that has been approved. It is another vaccine that is not available. He says it is a FDA trick. You need to correct this on your site as soon as possible

No, I am not wrong, and no, I am not going to change our articles. YOU are wrong. Here is the FDA Press Release from their website: FDA Approves First COVID-19 Vaccine

If the FDA says it is approved, then it is approved. End of discussion.

And yes, I do understand that there is a lot of controversy around them approving this, and that it is illegal. This is what we have previously published:

The FDA did approve the Pfizer/BioNTech shots, but they also apparently extended the EUA on existing doses of the shot. So now there are apparently two different “vaccines” produced by Pfizer/BioNTech, one under the EUA, and one approved by the FDA yesterday.

The name of the one that the FDA approved is “Comirnaty.” You can read the FDA press release here.

A letter was sent by the FDA to Pfizer extending the EUA on existing doses, and you can read that letter here.

A letter was sent by the FDA to BioNTech approving the “Comirnaty vaccine,” and you can read that letter here.

It appears that even the “Comirnaty” shot is also still covered by an EUA.

So what?

Why do you people think that this is an issue worth arguing about? Do you think that you can use this information in a court of a law and prevent an employer or school from mandating that you get the shot?

Because if that is your motivation for emailing me and demanding that I retract these statements, then you are the fool.

And it doesn’t surprise me, as the message above I quoted shows, that these are mostly deranged Right-wing Trump supporters emailing this to me. They’ll believe just about anything if Trump or one of his high profile supporters say it is so.

Well I have some news for you from one who has fought against the FDA’s criminal actions for about 20 years now: Almost EVERYTHING the FDA does is illegal, and it has never stopped them before, so why would you expect them to stop now, when the stakes are so high and their bosses in Big Pharma are raking in $TRILLIONS for the COVID shots?

In 2019, before anyone even knew what the word “COVID” was, we published this article: Study: 98% of FDA Laws Are Unconstitutional

Some excerpts:

Angela C. Erickson and Thomas Berry of the Pacific Legal Foundation have just published a new report examining illegally issued regulations at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Their study found that:

Unconstitutional rulemaking procedures are rife at HHS, especially at the FDA.

They analyzed who were the people making these rules at HHS in what they claim is the largest study ever done on this subject.

[This] has never been studied before: a large expansion of rulemakers who are not democratically accountable.

These unaccountable rulemakers are not constitutionally authorized to issue final rules that have the force of law.

But, as this study shows, that hasn’t stopped them.

The results of their study found:

that a majority of HHS regulations were illegally issued by low-level officials or career employees who had no authority to do so. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was the most frequent and clear-cut violator.

The FDA’s illegal rules were so numerous that they skewed the results for the rest of HHS.

Among FDA final rules, 98% were issued by career employees who have no constitutional authority to do so.

Read the full report.

Secondly, the courts have already ruled on whether or not an employer can mandate the COVID shots while they were all still under an EUA, and the employees lost. See this article we published on June 14, 2021: Texas Judge Proves Relief from COVID-19 Bioweapon Shots will NOT Come from the Judiciary – Upholds Mandatory Shots for Hospital Workers

Excerpt:

A U.S. District Judge in “Red State” Texas who was originally appointed to his position by former President Ronald Reagan in 1985, has ruled against 117 Houston Methodist hospital employees who were suspended without pay for refusing to take an experimental, non-FDA approved COVID-19 shot as a condition for employment.

Not only did he rule against them, he wrote a scathing opinion mocking them, proving once again that Big Pharma controls the judiciary as well as the Republican Party and so-called “conservatives.”

In November of 2020, before the COVID-19 shots were even given emergency use authorization, we published an article about a “Stay of Action” that was filed against the FDA for using faulty PCR test results in determining if COVID-19 shots were “effective” in stopping “the virus.” See: “Stay of Action” Filed Against FDA to STOP Approval of COVID Vaccine for Using Faulty PCR Tests in Trials

Dr. Mike Yeadon and other European doctors filed something similar against the EMA to stop this from getting approval.

And what was the result? NOTHING.

Anyone who still thinks that we will push back tyrannical medical psychopaths from implementing their plan to enslave everyone by taking them to court to “prove” all of this is illegal, is not living in reality.

There is only one way out of this: massive non-compliance. And here in the U.S., it most certainly will involve using the 2nd Amendment.

Here Come the Endless COVID “Booster” Shots

So while all of these deaths and crippling injuries that are being reported in VAERS following COVID-19 shots should have put a stop to this madness of mass vaccination of experimental shots a long time ago, the exact opposite is now happening: More COVID “booster” shots are on the way, and are already being implemented in Pfizer’s lab-rat country, Israel.

If you have a “Green Pass” in Israel because you got both Pfizer COVID-19 shots, it will soon expire if you don’t get a 3rd Pfizer “COVID-19 booster shot.”

After being confronted with the fact that widespread vaccination isn’t enough to stop COVID (just look at Israel’s case numbers), public health authorities in the tiny Mediterranean country have decided that the best solution is to double-down on the jabs by defying the WHO and demanding all citizens must get a third jab. Talk about moving the goalposts…

As Israel’s government expands availability of Pfizer-produced COVID booster shots to all inoculated residents age 12 and older, it has also decreed that all those who don’t opt for the third jab will lose their green pass privileges come October, according to a report in RT.

Effective from October 1, the “green pass” required for entry into some gatherings and public places will expire not only six months after the holder receives a second dose, but also six months after their third jab.

Read the full article at ZeroHedge News.

Here is Australia’s Chief Health Officer Dr Kerry Chant stating that Australians need to get used to “COVID vaccines” for years to come:

Dr Chant
“We need to get used to being vaccinated with covid vaccines for the future “ pic.twitter.com/WKkvfvDOE9

— Razorback1111 (@razorback11111) August 30, 2021

Chief Health Officer Dr Kerry Chant said health authorities would likely vaccinate NSW residents on a regular basis in the long term, or until vaccines are developed which provided more permanent COVID-19 immunity.

‘We need to get used to being vaccinated with COVID vaccines for the future … I can’t say COVID is not going to be with us forever,’ Dr Chant told reporters on Monday.

‘As a public health doctor we always want to have diseases go, to be totally eliminated, but that is not on the horizon in the near future.

‘Booster doses and repeat doses will be part of that.’

And here it is directly from the tyrant’s mouth. The CEO of Pfizer has already admitted that they are developing booster COVID shots for future variants that are not even here yet:

Meanwhile, existing, now “approved” COVID shots, will be given to children ages 5 to 11 by September.

And tell me again why it is so important that I need to go back and edit all of our articles that say the FDA has now fully approved the Pfizer COVID-19 shots because they “actually didn’t”?

You fools need to move on and start worrying about your children, especially if you are putting them in schools, because they are the target now, and no court of law is going to save you or your children.

Just ask the people in Florida who trusted that their Red State Governor had ended mandatory school masks.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is from HIN

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

Dr. Jane Orient published a commentary in July 2021, asking why there is no information from autopsies of healthy people who died unexpectedly from the COVID-19 jab

Information from death certificates is notoriously inaccurate; autopsies are needed to inform public health policy and help people decide how they want to proceed with the genetic therapy injection program

As the death toll numbers reported to VAERS mounts daily, it is well over the rate of more than the number reported for 70 vaccines combined over 30 years and 500 times deadlier than the flu vaccine

Treatment for COVID-19 improved after Germany released data from 12 autopsies showing ventilators were likely a contributing cause of death

If you or a loved one took the shot and now regret it, there are options to help protect your health

*

Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, published a commentary July 7, 2021¹ asking an important question about the rising number of deaths being reported to the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) in conjunction with the COVID-19 injection program.

Her credentials² are many: She’s a clinical lecturer in medicine at the University of Arizona College of Medicine. She received her medical degree from Columbia University and is the author of several books. And, as president of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness and chairman of the Public Health Committee of the Pima County (Arizona) Medical Society, she asks: Why haven’t there been autopsies of healthy people who are dying unexpectedly after receiving a COVID jab?

It’s a reasonable and logical question since autopsies often reveal important information about diseases and illnesses — and it’s information that can help guide future medical treatment to reduce the risk of long-term disability and death after the vaccine.³ After all, without autopsy results, the ability to treat cardiovascular diseases,⁴ cancers,⁵ hereditary diseases like hypertrophic cardiomyopathy⁶ and even catch murderers⁷ would be incompetent.

Dr. Dylan Miller chairs the autopsy resource committee for the College of American Pathologists. He spoke with a reporter from The Wall Street Journal, saying,⁸ “We think we always know what’s going on inside our patients, but that’s a fallacy. There’s as much to be gained from an autopsy as ever.”

The nature of an autopsy is diagnosis.⁹ It can help family members come to terms with what caused a loved one’s death, identify unknown diseases and offer clinicians an opportunity for a greater understanding of what happened before a patient dies. It also can provide a valuable educational opportunity for health officials and even students, who study disease processes.

It’s been over eight months since the first COVID-19 vaccine was administered in the U.S. in December 2020.¹⁰ Since then, VAERS reports show there have been over 12,000 people who have died after the shot.¹¹ Since autopsies are so incredibly important in the identification of disease and pathological processes, why haven’t healthy people who have died after the COVID jab been autopsied?

Lack of Autopsy Results May Mean Data Are Hidden

At the time of Orient’s published commentary,¹² she quoted a death toll after the COVID shot of nearly 7,000 people as reported in VAERS. This was in early July. By the end of July that number had risen to 12,366 people.¹³ That’s a jump of over 5,000 people in less than 30 days who reportedly had died after the COVID injections.

Orient comments that while it’s the best system available now for recording adverse events from vaccines, VAERS is likely missing 90% or more of the actual number of individuals who are hospitalized, have suffered anaphylactic reactions, have Bell’s Palsy, had heart attacks or had life-threatening reactions. The lack of accurate recording also includes the actual number of people who have died after receiving an injection.

When it comes to death certificates, data from The Johns Hopkins Hospital were published in the Archives of Internal Medicine in 2001,¹⁴ demonstrating that the accuracy and reliability of the recorded cause of death, on death certificates, was a significant problem, indicating the continued need for autopsies to correctly identify the cause of death.

According to Orient, the death of a 45-year-old mother after receiving the COVID-19 shot that was required for her to start work at the same institution, Johns Hopkins University, will likely not be investigated by autopsy. Additionally, the hospital has not paused their demand for the injection program for mothers and potential mothers who want to work at the university.

In the past, when an individual died without significant medical illness, they were designated a case for the medical examiner, who would decide whether an autopsy was needed. Any evidence that was related to the death was gathered and considered along with the autopsy report.

The most important reason for requesting and performing an autopsy was to ensure quality health care and at one time was required for hospital accreditation.¹⁵ However, that requirement has been dropped, and dropped along with it the number of autopsies routinely performed on patients who have died inside or outside the hospital.

The average rate for autopsies in the 1940s was 50%. That dropped to 41% in 1970, just before the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospitals removed the requirement that 20% of deaths in the hospital were to be autopsied to maintain accreditation.¹⁶

By 2018, experts estimated only 4% of in-hospital deaths were autopsied and only approximately 8% of all deaths. Since an estimated 700,000 die each year in the hospital, this means only approximately 28,000 of those deaths are autopsied. Experts have proposed three explanations for the falling rates, including:¹⁷

• Fear of finding mistakes leading to a malpractice lawsuit
• Lack of reimbursement for an autopsy
• The belief that medical technology has made autopsies obsolete

However, it’s important to note that knowledge of why a person dies after vaccination will not help the family recover damages since the pharmaceutical industry is immune from liability.^18,19 Even so, this information should be used to inform public health policy and help people decide how they want to proceed with the genetic therapy injection program.

Orient also notes that death certificates, which researchers use to gather statistics on the cause of death, “are known to be extremely unreliable.”²⁰ An evaluation of 494 death certificates at The Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions²¹ in 2001 showed 41% had improperly completed forms and the reliability and accuracy of the death certificates listing cause of death was a significant problem.

A study published in the Southern Medical Journal²² also found “major discrepancies” between the death certificates issued in the hospital and the information gathered on autopsy.

In 25% of the cases, the death was erroneously attributed to acute myocardial infarction, while an autopsy showed the deaths were actually from sepsis, cerebral hemorrhage, pneumonia and cardiac tamponade. Autopsy showed there were 52 myocardial infarctions that caused death, but death certificates accurately documented only 27. The researchers concluded:

“1) Death certificates are often wrong. 2) The time-honored autopsy is more valuable than ever. 3) Physicians need to write better death certificates and correct them. 4) Death certificate-based vital statistics should be corrected with autopsy results. 5) Vital statistics should note deaths confirmed by autopsy. 6) More autopsies would improve vital statistics and the practice of medicine.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s document on understanding death data quality, hospitals and health care providers should use the following criteria when filling out cause of death on a patient’s death certificate:²³

“When a person dies, the cause of death is determined by the certifier — the physician, medical examiner, or coroner who reports it on the death certificate.

Certifiers are asked to use their best medical judgment based on the available information and their expertise. When a definitive diagnosis cannot be made, but the circumstances are compelling within a reasonable degree of certainty, certifiers may include the terms “probable” or “presumed” in the cause-of-death statement.”

In other words, data being reported about cause of death can be manipulated with a “probable” or “presumed” assumption if the certifier makes a subjective evaluation and believes the “circumstances are compelling.” This poor degree of accuracy only adds to the already notoriously inaccurate information found on death certificates.

Treatment for COVID-19 Improved After Autopsy Results

As Orient points out, there were tens of thousands of patients who died from COVID disease after being placed on ventilators before a small series of 12 autopsies done in Germany showed that most of these patients had blood clots and using a ventilator may have caused more damage.²⁴

The improvement and treatment modalities for COVID-19 came after patients had been autopsied. Mechanical ventilation can easily damage lung tissue because it forces air into the lungs. Patients with COVID-19 who were ventilated had at best a 50-50 chance of surviving.²⁵

However, risk analysis being reported indicated this chance of survival was higher than what was being seen clinically. China reported²⁶ of 22 patients on ventilators, 86% of them did not survive the treatment. A British study found two thirds of patients on mechanical ventilation died and a study of 320 mechanically ventilated patients in New York showed 88% of them died.

COVID-19 Jab: More Death Reports Than All Vaccines Combined

Imagine if you would, a vaccine so “safe” officials are threatening those who won’t take it for a disease so deadly most people must be tested to know if they have it. Autopsies and accurate death certificates are part of an evaluation of safety for treatment protocols. If a reasonable safety standard had been in place, the campaign to inject the world would have stopped in early January 2021.

The voluntary reported death rate from the shots now exceeds that of more than 70 vaccines combined over 30 years and shows that it’s 500 times deadlier than the flu vaccine,²⁷ which historically has been the most hazardous.

Trial Site News²⁸ reports that Pfizer documents submitted to the European Medicines Agency [EMA] reveal the company “did not follow industry-standard quality management practices during preclinical toxicology studies … as key studies did not meet good laboratory practice (GLP).”

Neither reproductive toxicity nor genotoxicity (DNA mutation) studies were performed, both of which are considered critical when developing a new drug or vaccine for human use. The problems now surfacing matter greatly, as they significantly alter the risk benefit analysis underlying the vaccines’ emergency use authorization.

On the flip side of the risk-benefit analysis is the fact that effective treatment protocols have been developed by infectious disease specialists²⁹ who have a high rate of success and therefore negate the need for emergency use authorization of a dangerous gene therapy injection program.

Unfortunately, people not only are dying from the shot itself, but data now show countries that have launched a massive vaccination campaign have more cases of COVID-19.³⁰ In fact, data from the CDC show 74% of people who recently became sick with COVID-19 in Massachusetts were fully vaccinated.³¹

In a report from CNBC, the reporter announced that “public health experts” point out the majority of breakthrough cases in fully vaccinated people that lead to hospitalization and death are occurring in the elderly and those with comorbid conditions.³²

In other words, the shot has increased the risk for severe disease in the very populations of people the shot is supposed to protect. In addition, the CDC changed how they count breakthrough cases in vaccinated individuals:

“As of May 1, 2021, CDC transitioned from monitoring all reported vaccine breakthrough cases to focus on identifying and investigating only hospitalized or fatal cases due to any cause. This shift will help maximize the quality of the data collected on cases of greatest clinical and public health importance.”

Autopsy on Vaccinated Man Raises Questions

The case³³ of an 86-year-old man who died after his first dose of the mRNA COVID-19 injection, but before he received the second, is posing questions about the safety, side effects, immunogenicity and possibility of antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) after receiving just one dose.

Writing in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases, study authors said the man died from acute renal and respiratory failure. Although he tested positive for the virus two days before he died, his autopsy attributed his death to acute bronchopneumonia and tubular failure. “These results might suggest that the first vaccination induces immunogenicity but not sterile immunity,” study authors said.

In a Twitter feed, however, at least one doctor³⁴ questioned the circumstances under which the patient died, and suggested that the vaccine may set the stage for antibody dependent enhancement (ADE). ADE occurs when antibodies help a virus infect cells, rather than prevent it.

“This is a very important case, as it highlights the difference in the body’s immune response to sarscov2 after vax but before fully neutralizing titers,” AMM MD tweeted. “It also makes me wonder if this isn’t what is happening in breakthrough covid cases (develop covid months after complete vaccination, when immunity is waning). This could all serve as evidence for antibody dependent enhancement.”

What Can You Do if Someone You Love Dies Unexpectedly?

If someone you love dies unexpectedly after receiving the COVID shot, you have the right to ask for an autopsy. The medical examiner for your county is charged with maintaining public health.

If your loved one had no previous underlying medical conditions, there’s a higher likelihood you can convince the medical examiner to do an autopsy that may reveal how the genetic therapy affected the vascular and organ systems of your loved one.

If you or a loved one received the vaccine and you’re looking for information on how to protect yourself, please watch the video above. If you don’t have a chance to watch it in its entirety search for it or bookmark it on BitChute under “How Covid-19 Shots Might Reduce Lifespan — Drs. Vladimir Zelenko And Joseph Mercola” In the interview we talk about the acute, subacute and long-term risks associated with the shot.

As you may know, this article will no longer be available 48 hours after being published. I would encourage you to copy and paste the information so you can share it with friends and family. Although I’ve published several steps you can take to help protect your health, because the information is no longer freely available, I’ll share a list here:

• In the first three months after the shot there is a higher risk of blood clots. A natural anticoagulant with great promise is n-acetyl cysteine (NAC), as it has anticoagulant³⁵ and antithrombotic effects.³⁶ This means it prevents clots and breaks up those that have formed.
• In the subacute phase it’s important to avoid antibody dependent enhancement (ADE). The key is to implement a prophylactic protocol. Any symptoms of upper respiratory infection should be treated immediately. COVID is a multiphase disease. The first phase lasts five to seven days and is most easily treated. After Day 7, it typically progresses to the inflammatory phase, which requires different treatment.
• A combination of a zinc ionophore such as quercetin, hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, plus zinc is an important component of early treatment and prevention. If you want to use either hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin and live in a state that restricts their use, look for online telehealth options.

  The American Frontline Doctors is one resource. Most only charge $90 for a consultation and you will be able to get the prescription that you need. Do not use Ivermectin from veterinary sources as it may be contaminated and is not designed for human use.

• Optimize your vitamin D level in the range of 60 ng/mL to 80 ng/mL year-round. After a blood test to determine your current level, consider the Grassroots calculator to determine the necessary dose.
• Vitamin C is another important component, especially if you’re taking quercetin, as they have synergistic effects. To effectively act as a zinc ionophore, quercetin needs vitamin C.

The take-home message here is that if you’ve gotten the jab, consider yourself high risk for COVID and implement a daily prophylaxis protocol. This means optimizing your vitamin D, and taking vitamin C, zinc and a zinc ionophore daily, at least throughout the cold and flu season.

It would also be useful to do a daily sauna, ideally one that can heat up to 170 degrees Fahrenheit. Additionally, nebulized hydrogen peroxide may help. If you would like to watch a video on this protocol, you can view all of them here on Substack. If you’re having post-vaccination symptoms, you could consider:

• Low-dose interferons such as Paximune, to stimulate your immune system
• Peptide T (an HIV entry inhibitor derived from the HIV envelope protein gp120; it blocks binding and infection of viruses that use the CCR5 receptor to infect cells)
• Cannabis, to strengthen Type I interferon pathways, which are part of your first line of defense against pathogens
• Dimethylglycine or betaine (trimethylglycine) to enhance methylation, thereby suppressing latent viruses
• Silymarin or milk thistle to help cleanse your liver

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Notes

^1, 12, 20 WND, July 7, 2021

² The Heartland Institute

³ Academic Pathology, 2019;6: 2374289519834041

⁴ Human Pathology, 1998;28(12)

⁵ Cancers, 2021;13(3)

^6, 8 Wall Street Journal, March 9, 2015

⁷ Dallas Morning News, April 23, 2018

⁹ Yale School of Medicine, Pathology: Reason for an Autopsy

¹⁰ BBC, December 14, 2020

¹¹ OpenVAERS

¹³ OpenVAERS, July 30, 2021

^14, 21 Archives of Internal Medicine, 2001;161(2)

¹⁵ American Society for Clinical Pathology

^16, 17 Circulation 2018;137:2686

¹⁸ PHE.gov, Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act

¹⁹ CNBC, December 17, 2020

²² Southern Medical Journal, 2006;99(7)

²³ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Understanding Death Data Quality

²⁴ University of Minnesota May 7, 2020

^25, 26 Reuters, April 23, 2020

²⁷ Trial Site News, May 25, 2021

²⁸ Trial Site News, May 28, 2021

²⁹ FLCCC Alliance

³⁰ YouTube, May 13, 2021

³¹ CNBC, July 30, 2021

³² YouTube, July 19, 2021, Minute 00:25

³³ Int J Infect Dis. 107: 172–175. June 2021

³⁴ Twitter AMM, MD. August 21, 2021

³⁵ Blood Coagulation and Fibrinolysis, 2006;17(1)

³⁶ Circulation, 2017;136(7)

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***

When the FDA announced full approval of Pfizer’s Comirnaty COVID vaccine, the media predicted an avalanche of mandates — but the FDA’s own Fact Sheet for the vaccine states it is “your choice to receive or not receive” the vaccine.

On Aug. 23, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued its approval (also known as a license) for Pfizer’s Comirnaty COVID vaccine.

The FDA documents related to the vaccine’s approval are as difficult to understand as the new brand name is to pronounce.

According to the FDA, although Pfizer’s Comirnaty vaccine is now approved, considerable amounts of the vaccine will remain under Emergency Use Authorization (EUA).

Also, the approval of the Comirnaty vaccine was limited to adults over age 16 receiving their first two doses.

Vaccination with the EUA Pfizer-BioNTech or the Comirnaty vaccine in the 12- to 15-year age group, or providing a third booster dose of either, are still considered an unapproved use — however, those uses remain authorized under EUA.

FDA made some clear but cagey statements about the differences between the Comirnaty vaccine and the Pfizer-BioNTech EUA vaccine.

For example:

“The licensed vaccine has the same formulation as the EUA-authorized vaccine and the products can be used interchangeably to provide the vaccination series without presenting any safety or effectiveness concerns. The products are legally distinct with certain differences that do not impact safety or effectiveness.”

What does that statement mean? What, specifically, are the “certain differences” that make the two vaccines “legally distinct”?

The FDA did not explain this in any of the documents provided last week to the public.

Here's my latest with @NassMeryl… Buried in fine print of Monday's approval by FDA of Pfizer Comirnaty COVID vaccine are 2 critical facts that affect whether vaccine can be mandated + whether Pfizer can be held liable for injuries.https://t.co/QtpHufCKDI

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) August 25, 2021

Two important facts about EUA drugs and vaccines   

We know there are some important differences between EUA drugs and vaccines, and fully licensed drugs or vaccines.

We also know these two facts about EUA products:

1. EUA vaccines are designated as experimental or investigational products under U.S. law. As such, they cannot be mandated. You have the right to refuse, without suffering consequences.
2. EUA vaccines have a huge liability shield that protects everyone involved with the product from being sued. If you are injured by an EUA vaccine, the only way to obtain compensation for damages is to apply to the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP), which might cover unpaid medical expenses and lost wages only. However, only 3% of claims made have been compensated, and so far the program has approved no claims for COVID vaccine injuries.

Some say the CICP, which is run through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service and does not give petitioners the right to a judge or jury, withholds due process from injured Americans.

Yet this is the only pathway by which an injured party can seek help after receiving an EUA vaccine or drug.

It’s right there in the fact sheet — FDA says it’s ‘your choice’

Legally, in order to mandate a vaccine, the vaccine must be fully approved. However, once a vaccine for use in adults moves from an EUA product to a licensed everyday product, it loses its liability shield.

We believe it is likely the FDA was instructed to find a way to both license the Pfizer vaccine — so mandates would be legally supported — while also retaining the vaccine’s liability shield.

The FDA could not find a way to do this under existing law. So instead, as we reported Aug. 24 in The Defender, the agency chose to create confusion regarding the legal status of the two Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines.

In a document we discuss here for the first time — the fact sheet required to be given to recipients of either the Comirnaty or Pfizer-BioNTech COVID vaccine — the FDA acknowledges the facts we have just presented.

But the FDA also has added something new — the final sentence of the fact sheet states:

“This EUA for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine and COMIRNATY will end when the Secretary of HHS determines that the circumstances justifying the EUA no longer exist or when there is a change in the approval status of the product such that an EUA is no longer needed.”

According to this fact sheet, the FDA also has designated the licensed Comirnaty vaccine as an EUA product. By doing so, the FDA has guaranteed the Comirnaty vaccine the same liability shield as the EUA Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

However, that means the Comirnaty vaccine cannot be mandated. The FDA admits this in the fact sheet, where it states:

“WHAT IF I DECIDE NOT TO GET COMIRNATY (COVID-19 VACCINE, mRNA) OR THE PFIZER-BIONTECH COVID-19 VACCINE?

“Under the EUA, it is your choice to receive or not receive the vaccine. Should you decide not to receive it, it will not change your standard medical care.”

The fact sheet is FDA’s admission, buried in the fine print, that no one can currently be mandated to receive any COVID vaccine in the U.S., as all remain under the EUA.

This fact sheet for vaccine recipients is key to avoid being forced to accept an experimental vaccine.

We suggest you print it out, highlight the relevant passages and present it to anyone who tries to force vaccinations on employees.

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Meryl Nass, MD, ABIM, is an internist with special interests in vaccine-induced illnesses, chronic fatigue syndrome, Gulf War illness, fibromyalgia and toxicology.

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***

Romania closes 117 Covid vaccination centres — July 7, Associated Press:

Declining demand for coronavirus vaccinations in Romania has prompted authorities to close 117 vaccination centers and to reduce the schedule at 371 others, health officials said Tuesday.

“In the previous week we re-evaluated the efficiency of fixed vaccination centers. About 80% of fixed vaccination centers vaccinate less than 25% of the vaccination capacity allocated to each stream,” national vaccination committee chief Valeriu Gheorghita said at a press conference Tuesday.

Romania halts most Covid-19 vaccine imports as people shun jabs — The Irish Times, July 1:

Romania has halted the import of most Covid-19 vaccines after a slowdown in its inoculation drive prompted the government to sell more than a million doses to Denmark and seek an extension to the validity of tens of thousands of expired shots.

Romania to start destroying expired COVID-19 vaccines as vaccination numbers drop — Romania Insider, June 25:

Romania could start destroying some of the COVID-19 vaccines received earlier this year as they are set to expire while the population’s interest in vaccination has dropped significantly. [Or more likely those who wanted it, already got it.]

As a result, Romania now holds a surplus of vaccines and will start to destroy some of the unused doses received earlier this year as they will expire soon. About a week ago, the authorities asked the suppliers to send fewer COVID-19 vaccines than planned for the same reason.

Denmark buys 1.1m Pfizer doses from Romania — The Local, June 30

Denmark has bought 1.1m doses of the Pfizer vaccine from the Romanian government, potentially bringing forward vaccinations by two to three weeks.
In a press release on Tuesday evening, Denmark’s health minister Magnus Heunicke said that the slow pace of vaccination in Romania had left the country with doses that it could not use.

Delighted to welcome new Romanian ambassador @laur_stefan to Ireland and @TheGoatBar1 particularly the day after @LimerickCLG won the All Ireland! The excellent relationship between our two countries is shown in the 700,000 vaccines we are currently receiving from Romania.🇮🇪🇹🇩🇪🇺 https://t.co/dNaSh6UVuG

— Senator Gerry Horkan (@gerryhorkan) August 24, 2021

Thank you Romania 🇷🇴 for 300,000 doses of vaccines to help Viet Nam fight COVID-19 pic.twitter.com/Da82sJfS7w

— Đỗ Hùng Việt (@dohungviet) August 25, 2021

Romania donates 450,000 Moderna vaccines to South Korea. At the beginning of August, Romania announced it would donate 1.3 million AstraZeneca vaccines to Tunisia, Egypt, Albania and Vietnam.https://t.co/dICwO2fodS

— 정대장 (@clubican) August 22, 2021

Today, the RO🇷🇴 Government approved a donation of more than 100,000 #COVID19 vaccines for Ukraine🇺🇦 &50,000 for Serbia 🇷🇸, which will soon reach both countries with t/support of @DSU_Romania. RO continues to support its neighbours #StrongerTogether @DmytroKuleba @selakovicnikola

— Bogdan Aurescu (@BogdanAurescu) June 16, 2021

Romanian PM doesn’t want different rules for vaccinated, unvaccinated — Universulnet.com, August 28

Prime Minister Florin Citu on Saturday said he wasn’t in favor of introducing different rules for people in public places depending on whether they had had a Covid vaccine or not.

“I am not a fan of the vaccinated, he unvaccinated going separately to the mall,” he said.

“The malls were open last year when we didn’t have a vaccine. It would be hilarious and absurd to close them now, when we have this solution: the vaccine,” he said during a visit to a vaccine center in the northern city of Botosani.

Bulgaria and Romania have low vaccination rates – and low COVID rates — LifeSite News, August 27:

Contrary to the expectations heavily promoted by politicians, media, and public health establishment, Bulgarians and Romanians saw a low number of COVID-19 infections this summer as they continued to refuse to take the COVID vaccines.

In fact, Bulgaria and Romania have some of the lowest rates of COVID infections per 100,000 people in Europe, according to an August 22 statistical analysis of European countries.

“The current vaccination rate in Romania is half compared to that of Bulgaria (0.13 vaccines per 100 inhabitants on average in the last seven days) and 7.5 times lower than the EU average (0.45 vaccines per 100 inhabitants),” according to Romania Insider. “On the opposite end, Denmark has administered 0.94 vaccine doses per 100 inhabitants on average over the last seven days.” Bulgaria and Romania’s vaccination rates since the 2020 release of the jab are not significantly different.

The two countries sandwich Denmark for lowest infection rates on the continent.

While the publication said that “the number of new COVID-19 cases has risen to the highest level since the end of May,” the article fails to provide the necessary context.

Romania’s reported COVID cases peaked at nearly 60,000 in November 2020, before a vaccine was made available.

Through the summer, Romania’s 25 percent vaccination rate did not lead it to experience a surge in infections. “Officials say Romania has received more [than] 16 million doses of several western-made vaccines but less than 55 per cent have been used, as the number of vaccines administered daily has dropped to around 20,000 from 100,000 last month,” the Irish Times reported.

The publication admitted “a slowing infection rate has weakened the impetus for some in Romania to get vaccinated: only 31 new cases of Covid-19 and five deaths were reported on Thursday, adding to a national total of 1.08 million infections and 33,786 fatalities.”

For example, the week of July 5 saw a low of 285 confirmed cases. While the past several weeks of August have seen an increase to almost 4,000 cases in one week, it’s still much lower than pre-vaccination rates and the early months of 2021.

"VICTORY! Here in Romania we, the people, have won the battle against the system's depopulation by "vaccination" program. The Govt has started closing all Vax centres. 70% of the population refuses to get "vaccinated" and all coercive measures have failed."

— Artist X (@educatedpleb) August 20, 2021

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Abstract

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Provocative Title. A review by the Daily Mail. Is mainstream media departing from the fake covid consensus??

I fully concur with the opening sentence of this article:

“They’re the figures that have ruled our lives for the past 18 months; decided our freedoms; deepened our fears.”

What the Daily Mail fails to mention, however, is that the figures pertaining to Covid-19 cases as well as to presumed Covid deaths are totally invalid.

More than a Million Covid-19 cases in July, according to the Daily Mail, (see graph below)

ALL THE DATA PERTAINING TO COVID POSITIVE CASES resulting from the RT-PCR Test are INVALID. This is confirmed by the WHO.

Moreover, data on Covid related deaths are FAKE. No autopsy allowed, no post mortem. 

What this means is that comparisons with other causes of death as outlined by the Daily Mail are meaningless.

The governments are lying.

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, August 31, 2021

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For details and analysis on Covid data including the PCR test and data on mortality see Chapters II and III of  The 2020-21 Worldwide Corona Crisis: Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression, Global Coup d’État and the “Great Reset” By Prof Michel Chossudovsky,

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The Daily Mail Article 

Is It Time to Stop Obsessing over COVID Figures? Statistics Reveal Virus Is Not the Biggest Killer – With Heart Disease, Dementia and Cancer Each Claiming Four Times as Many Lives

They’re the figures that have ruled our lives for the past 18 months; decided our freedoms; deepened our fears.

The Covid dashboard published on the UK Government website has offered the public a window into the state of the UK’s epidemic, displaying daily Covid cases, hospitalisations and deaths, both nationally and regionally, since April 2020. 

Some people have avoided looking at the figures – published at 4pm every day, including weekends. But a surprising number of us have become secretly addicted to poring over them.

Back in January, the dashboard attracted 76 million views in a single day. In more recent months, the dashboard has offered a source of celebration, thanks to the addition of the vaccination tally.

Scientists and politicians alike agree the UK’s Covid dashboard has been a resounding success, allowing the public to draw their own conclusions about the level of threat the virus poses to them.

It’s also been a crucial yardstick for how stretched the NHS is, providing exact figures of how many Covid patients are in each hospital around the country.

But now, with nearly eight in ten Britons protected against getting seriously ill, thanks to the vaccine, are daily Covid figures still necessary?

The Mail on Sunday set about creating our own dashboard featuring the most up-to-date figures for some of Britain’s biggest killers which we compared with the current Covid stats

Our thanks to the Daily Mail

To read complete article, click here

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If it were possible to say with absolute scientific authority that vaccinations are the best way for the planet to escape from the Covid-19 death grip, then it might seem plausible – albeit still highly arguable – for governments to demand proof of ‘the mark’ for participating in the global economy. As things stand, however, nothing to date indicates that there are not more effective and reliable means of moving forward.

The relentless push for vaccine passports by opportunistic authoritarians around the globe took a broadside this week as Israeli researchers discovered what had been suspected by many all along: natural immunity acquired via infection, as opposed to vaccinations, provides the best defense against Covid-19 and its seemingly endless array of Greek-coded variants.

The study, which examined up to 32,000 individuals, found that the risk of developing Covid-19 was 27 times higher among the vaccinated (with the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine), and the risk of hospitalization eight times higher, as compared to those individuals who had acquired natural immunity.

Equally shocking, individuals who were administered two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine were almost six-times more likely to contract the Delta variation and seven-times more likely to have symptomatic disease than those who recovered from the disease naturally, according to the study, which is up for peer review.

“This analysis demonstrated that natural immunity affords longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization due to the delta variant,” the researchers said.

So what grounds are left for forcing vaccine passports on people? The simple answer would seem ‘none.’ As a thought experiment, let’s imagine that a radical new mode of transportation still in the early test stages – perhaps some brainchild from the quirky mind of Elon Musk, for example – had proven to have a better than average chance of exploding for no apparent reason.

Under such grim conditions it is doubtful that governments would coerce their subjects into driving such a flawed vehicle since the product itself would be deemed too dangerous to enter the mainstream. So why isn’t the same sort of logic being employed when it comes to being forced to carry a vaccine passport for a vaccine, which has also demonstrated itself to be dodgy at best, disastrous at worst?

The efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine in treating the Delta strain has been measured at just 42 percent, and in some cases even as low as 17 percent. At the same time, thousands of otherwise healthy people have suffered horrible side effects after taking these jabs, up to and including death.

Australian journalist Denham Hitchcock is one of thousands of people who got much more than he bargained for when he got the shot.

“The first week was like any vaccine. Feeling off,” Hitchcock wrote on his Instagram page.

“But nearing the end of the second week my heart started to race, I was getting pins and needles in the arms, extreme fatigue and a very strange sensation of dizziness…By the end of the third week i was getting steadily worse – sharp chest pain – cold shivers and chills – and the dizziness was intense.

“25 days after the shot and probably a little late to hospital – but here I am – diagnosed with pericarditis – or inflammation of the heart due to the Pfizer vaccine.”

Since being in the hospital, Hitchcock says he’s contacted health professionals in Sydney who told him that while his reaction to the vaccine is rare – it’s certainly not isolated.

“One hospital has had well over a dozen cases like me,” he revealed.

Meanwhile, a coroner this week has determined that the death of Lisa Shaw, who worked for BBC Radio Newcastle and passed away in May, was “due to complications of an AstraZeneca Covid vaccination.”

And lest anyone think the Moderna vaccine is without its own problems, Japan this week removed around 1.6 million vials of the vaccine from use after contamination was reported by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare. While such things do occasionally happen, the ministry revealed that the substance found in the vials “reacted to magnets and…could be metal.”

Moderna suggested the problem may have come from a “manufacturing issue” from a plant in Spain.

“The company is investigating the reports and remains committed to working transparently and expeditiously with its partner, Takeda, and regulators to address any potential concerns,” a Moderna spokesperson told Nikkei, saying the drugmaker believed a “manufacturing issue” at a plant in Spain was to blame.

Incidentally, the very inventor of the mRNA vaccines, Dr. Robert Malone, who could be providing governments much-needed guidance during the pandemic, has largely been shunned from polite society from the Western hemisphere’s very own medical Taliban as a conspiracy theorist who peddles in “misinformation.”

When we finally get past all of this, the legitimacy of both the federal public health infrastructure and the legacy media will have been destroyed. And what happens then? Force your mind to think 9-12 months ahead. What do things look like then, based on current trends?

— Robert W Malone, MD (@RWMaloneMD) August 27, 2021

Getting back to Pfizer, its own lackluster performance apparently means little to regulators as the drug maker just won approval by the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) to administer its vaccine, which will be distributed under the brand name Comirnaty. Now pressure will certainly ratchet up against those who have second thoughts about the magic juice as many public and private institutions – from schools and workplaces to government agencies – push for a mandatory vaccine regime. This would include society’s youngest and most vulnerable demographic, the children.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, for example, is pressuring the National Health Service to begin vaccinating children as young as 12, and despite the fact that the youth have shown amazing imperviousness to the virus. The UK looks set to join the United States, Spain, France and Germany as countries where inoculating the young is quickly becoming standard operating procedure – and with zero democratic debate.

Nobody, however, should be led to believe that things will return to normal once everyone has rolled up their sleeves for the shot. After all, these ‘vaccines’ do not prevent people from getting infected by Covid, and, as studies have shown, may actually precipitate infection. This shocking shortcoming of the jabs, far from sidelining their use in favor of other preventive measures, has allowed the vaccine makers to roll out an endless supply of booster shots, as gleefully discussed at a recent Pfizer stockholder meeting.

Albert Bourla, Pfizer Chairman of the Board & CEO, remarked that “the dynamics in the COVID more and more indicate a potential that we will have a clearly repeated business…Now we still don’t have data about the immunity of our vaccine because it is early. But we do see that the people that have the disease, more and more publications indicate that after several months, the immune response goes down. So there is a need to boost.” Those giddy remarks were made back in February, before the Pfizer vaccine has acquired FDA approval.

In other words, the sky is the limit for Big Pharma as far as profits from vaccinations go. And despite the inherent risks of getting the jab, the Western world’s assembly of petty tyrants, short-sighted leaders like French President Emmanuel Macron, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and U.S. President Joe Biden are pushing ahead with plans for vaccine passports.

Such an initiative, which flies in the face of freedom and liberty, denies individuals the right to refuse medical treatment – and treatment that is loaded with unacceptable risk. And just because one of the drug makers has secured FDA approval for their product, this will not help individuals who are injured, or worse, from the vaccines. The drug makers are indemnified from any lawsuits that may arise from the victims of their product.

This dire situation has placed the citizens of so-called democracies into the unenviable situation where they must choose between signing up to a lifetime of imperfect shots and boosters to participate in a large swath of the economy, or remain something of a social pariah for the rest of their lives. It is a choice that no citizen of a democratic system should ever be forced to make.

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Sunday’s news reports that the Biden Administration mistakenly killed nine members of one Afghan family, including six children, in “retaliation” for last week’s suicide attack which killed 13 US servicemembers, is a sad and sick epitaph on the 20 year Afghanistan war.

Promising to “get tough” on ISIS, which suddenly re-emerged to take responsibility for the suicide attack, the most expensive military and intelligence apparatus on earth appears to have gotten it wrong. Again.

Interventionists love to pretend they care about girls and women in Afghanistan, but it is in reality a desperate attempt to continue the 20-year US occupation. If we leave, they say, girls and women will be discriminated against by the Taliban.

It’s hard to imagine a discrimination worse than being incinerated by a drone strike, but these “collateral damage” attacks over the past 20 years have killed scores of civilians. Just like on Sunday.

That’s the worst part of this whole terrible war: day-after-day for twenty years civilians were killed because of the “noble” effort to re-make Afghanistan in the image of the United States. But the media and the warmongers who call the shots in government – and the “private” military-industrial sector – could not have cared less. Who recalls a single report on how many civilians were just “collateral damage” in the futile US war?

Sadly these children killed on Sunday, two of them reportedly just two years old, have been the ones forced to pay the price for a failed and bloody US foreign policy.

Yes, the whole exit from Afghanistan has been a debacle. Biden, but especially his military planners and incompetent advisors, deserves much of what has been piled onto him this past week or so about this incompetence.

Maybe if Biden’s Secretary of Defense and Joint Chiefs’ Chairman had spent a bit more time planning the Afghan exit and a lot less time obsessing on how to turn the US military into a laboratory for cultural Marxism, we might have actually had a workable plan.

We know that actual experts like Col. Douglas Macgregor did have a plan to get out that would have spared innocent lives. But because this decorated US Army veteran was “tainted” by his service in the previous administration – service that was solely focused on how to get out of Afghanistan safely – he would not be consulted by the Pentagon’s “woke” top military brass.

Trump also should share some of the blame currently being showered on Biden. He wanted to get out years ago, but never had the courage to stand up to the also incompetent generals and “experts” he foolishly hired to advise him.

Similarly, many conservatives (especially neoconservatives) are desperate to attack Biden not for how he got out of Afghanistan, but for the fact that he is getting us out of Afghanistan.

That tells you all you need to know about how profitable war is to the warmongers.

I’ve always said, “we just marched in, we can just march out,” and I stand by that view. Yes, you can “just march out” of these idiotic interventions…but you do need a map!

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Featured image: US President Biden enters Roosevelt Room in the White House to give a statement on US withdrawal from Afghanistan, Aug 24, 2021

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by Michel Chossudovsky

ISBN Number: 9780973714715

List Price: $24.95

click here to order

Special Price: $18.00

In this new and expanded edition of Michel Chossudovsky’s 2002 best seller, the author blows away the smokescreen put up by the mainstream media, that 9/11 was an attack on America by “Islamic terrorists”.  Through meticulous research, the author uncovers a military-intelligence ploy behind the September 11 attacks, and the cover-up and complicity of key members of the Bush Administration.

The expanded edition, which includes twelve new chapters focuses on the use of 9/11 as a pretext for the invasion and illegal occupation of Iraq, the militarisation of justice and law enforcement and the repeal of democracy.

According to Chossudovsky, the  “war on terrorism” is a complete fabrication based on the illusion that one man, Osama bin Laden, outwitted the $40 billion-a-year American intelligence apparatus. The “war on terrorism” is a war of conquest. Globalisation is the final march to the “New World Order”, dominated by Wall Street and the U.S. military-industrial complex.

September 11, 2001 provides a justification for waging a war without borders. Washington’s agenda consists in extending the frontiers of the American Empire to facilitate complete U.S. corporate control, while installing within America the institutions of the Homeland Security State.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

The US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan discussed today in an interview with CBS “Face the Nation” the evolving relationship between Washington and the Afghan Taliban. Three things emerge. 

First, Sullivan disclosed that “over-the-horizon strikes” against the ISIS-K from outside Afghanistan will continue but he ruled out any return to combat missions.

Second, Sullivan claimed that after the complete withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan on August 31st, “we will make sure there is safe passage for any American citizen, any legal permanent resident” as well as those Afghans who had served US interests. 

He said the Taliban “have both communicated privately and publicly that they will allow for safe passage” and Washington has the leverage to make sure that they “follow through on those commitments.” 

Third, most important, while the US embassy in Kabul remains closed, September 1, “we will have means and mechanisms of having diplomats on the ground there (in Kabul), be able to continue to process out these applicants, be able to facilitate the passage of other people who want to leave Afghanistan.” 

Thereupon, Sullivan added: 

“And over time, depending on what the Taliban does, how it follows through on its commitments with respect to safe passage, how it deals with the treatment of women, how it deals with its international commitments not to allow Afghanistan to become a base for terrorism in the rest of the world, we can make further determinations about both diplomatic presence and other issues as we go. But the onus will be on the Taliban to prove out its commitments and its willingness to abide by the obligations that- that it has undertaken and that are imposed upon it by international law.” 

In sum, the US appears to have negotiated a package deal with the Taliban where the logical conclusion in a conceivable future will be the reopening of the American embassy in Kabul. read more

A lengthy dispatch by the Voice of America today with Kabul / Islamabad dateline, based on briefing by a “senior Taliban leader … on condition of anonymity”, reported that the new Taliban government is “in the final stages” of being announced. It seems certain that the announcement could come as early as next week. 

The government is sure to include all the members of its current Rahbari Shura, or leadership council of the Taliban but the Cabinet could have more than 26 members all in all. 

Interestingly, the VOA reported, “In their internal consultations, the Taliban were also discussing the possibility of making either Sirajuddin Haqqani or Mullah Yaqoob (Mullah Omar’s son) the Raees ul Wazara, a position equivalent to a prime minister” — and, “if Haqqani becomes prime minister, Yaqoob could be defence minister, since he currently heads the military commission of Taliban.” read more 

The salience lies in the acceptance of the Taliban government as a compelling reality by Washington. Rhetoric aside, the US is already engaged with the Taliban in a constructive spirit. The US’ major allies Germany and France are also doing the same. 

Simply put, the ostracisation of the Taliban government is no longer an option — except in the highly unlikely event of the Taliban resiling from its commitments under the package deal. 

From the Taliban’s point of view, this is an eminently  satisfactory deal. The Taliban has a consistent record of keeping its commitments to the Americans. Even after the Doha Pact of February 2020 began unravelling, Taliban kept its word on the single most important assurance under the agreement — namely, that it would not attack the US forces. And it did keep its word even in the face of all those ferocious air strikes by the US in the recent months contrary to its assurance to the Taliban. 

Meanwhile, the winds of change are also blowing through the horseshoe table of the UN Security Council. Interestingly, the UN SC statement of August 27 condemning the terror attacks in Kabul delisted Taliban for the first time from the Afghan groups supporting terrorists, and merely said that “no Afghan group or individual should support terrorists operating on the territory of any other country”.

In fact, a day after the Taliban swept to power in the country, the UNSC had said on August 16:

“The members of the Security Council reaffirmed the importance of combating terrorism in Afghanistan to ensure the territory of Afghanistan should not be used to threaten or attack any country, and that neither the Taliban nor any other Afghan group or individual should support terrorists operating on the territory of any other country.” read more

Yet, just 11 days later, on last Friday, there is no more any reference to the Taliban as a terrorist group! Clearly, the US’ new thinking towards the Taliban as a constructive, cooperative interlocutor is rubbing on the UN SC. This is realism with capital “R”. The pathway has to open sooner rather than later to remove the UN sanctions against Taliban leaders. read more

All this must be a bitter pill for the Modi government to swallow, when India also happens to be holding the rotating UN SC presidency through this month. 

Presumably, to mollify India’s sense of humiliation and defeat in the entire Afghan saga, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken had a call with External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar on Saturday. 

The state department readout said the two ministers “discussed a broad range of shared priorities, including continued coordination on Afghanistan and in the United Nations… (and) agreed to remain closely coordinated on shared goals and priorities to deepen the US-India partnership.” 

Diplomatese aside, the Biden Administration expects the Modi government to continue to remain as its loyal camp-follower even as Washington continues to act in self-interests. Prime Minister Modi’s recent prophesy that Taliban has no future failed to make any impression on the Biden White House. 

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Featured image: Jake Sullivan (Public Domain)

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Americans have been shocked by videos of thousands of Afghans risking their lives to flee the Taliban’s return to power in their country – and then by an Islamic State suicide bombing and ensuing massacre by U.S. forces that together killed at least 170 people, including 13 U.S. troops. 

Even as UN agencies warn of an impending humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, the U.S. Treasury has frozen nearly all of the Afghan Central Bank’s $9.4 billion in foreign currency reserves, depriving the new government of funds that it will desperately need in the coming months to feed its people and provide basic services.

Under pressure from the Biden administration, the International Monetary Fund decided not to release $450 million in funds that were scheduled to be sent to Afghanistan to help the country cope with the coronavirus pandemic.

The U.S. and other Western countries have also halted humanitarian aid to Afghanistan. After chairing a G7 summit on Afghanistan on August 24, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that withholding aid and recognition gave them “very considerable leverage – economic, diplomatic and political” over the Taliban.

Western politicians couch this leverage in terms of human rights, but they are clearly trying to ensure that their Afghan allies retain some power in the new government, and that Western influence and interests in Afghanistan do not end with the Taliban’s return. This leverage is being exercised in dollars, pounds and euros, but it will be paid for in Afghan lives.

To read or listen to Western analysts, one would think that the United States and its allies’ 20-year war was a benign and beneficial effort to modernize the country, liberate Afghan women and provide healthcare, education and good jobs, and that this has all now been swept away by capitulation to the Taliban.

The reality is quite different, and not so hard to understand. The United States spent $2.26 trillion on its war in Afghanistan. Spending that kind of money in any country should have lifted most people out of poverty. But the vast bulk of those funds, about $1.5 trillion, went to absurd, stratospheric military spending to maintain the U.S. military occupation, drop over 80,000 bombs and missiles on Afghans, pay private contractors, and transport troops, weapons and military equipment back and forth around the world for 20 years.

Since the United States fought this war with borrowed money, it has also cost half a trillion dollars in interest payments alone, which will continue far into the future. Medical and disability costs for U.S. soldiers wounded in Afghanistan already amount to over $175 billion, and they will likewise keep mounting as the soldiers age. Medical and disability costs for the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could eventually top a trillion dollars.

So what about “rebuilding Afghanistan”? Congress appropriated $144 billion for reconstruction in Afghanistan since 2001, but $88 billion of that was spent to recruit, arm, train and pay the Afghan “security forces” that have now disintegrated, with soldiers returning to their villages or joining the Taliban. Another $15.5 billion spent between 2008 and 2017 was documented as “waste, fraud and abuse” by the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

The crumbs left over, less than 2% of total U.S. spending on Afghanistan, amount to about $40 billion, which should have provided some benefit to the Afghan people in economic development, healthcare, education, infrastructure and humanitarian aid.

But, as in Iraq, the government the U.S. installed in Afghanistan was notoriously corrupt, and its corruption only became more entrenched and systemic over time. Transparency International (TI) has consistently ranked U.S.-occupied Afghanistan as among the most corrupt countries in the world.

Western readers may think that this corruption is a long-standing problem in Afghanistan, as opposed to a particular feature of the U.S. occupation, but this is not the case. TI notes that ”it is widely recognized that the scale of corruption in the post-2001 period has increased over previous levels.” A 2009 report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development warned that “corruption has soared to levels not seen in previous administrations.”

Those administrations would include the Taliban government that U.S. invasion forces removed from power in 2001, and the Soviet-allied socialist governments that were overthrown by the U.S.-deployed precursors of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the 1980s, destroying the substantial progress they had made in education, healthcare and women’s rights.

A 2010 report by former Reagan Pentagon official Anthony H. Cordesman, entitled “How America Corrupted Afghanistan”, chastised the U.S. government for throwing gobs of money into that country with virtually no accountability.

The New York Times reported in 2013 that every month for a decade, the CIA had been dropping off suitcases, backpacks and even plastic shopping bags stuffed with U.S. dollars for the Afghan president to bribe warlords and politicians.

Corruption also undermined the very areas that Western politicians now hold up as the successes of the occupation, like education and healthcare. The education system has been riddled with schools, teachers, and students that exist only on paper. Afghan pharmacies are stocked with fake, expired or low quality medicines, many smuggled in from neighboring Pakistan. At the personal level, corruption was fueled by civil servants like teachers earning only one-tenth the salaries of better-connected Afghans working for foreign NGOs and contractors.

Rooting out corruption and improving Afghan lives has always been secondary to the primary U.S. goal of fighting the Taliban and maintaining or extending its puppet government’s control. As TI reported, “The U.S. has intentionally paid different armed groups and Afghan civil servants to ensure cooperation and/or information, and cooperated with governors regardless of how corrupt they were… Corruption has undermined the U.S. mission in Afghanistan by fuelling grievances against the Afghan government and channelling material support to the insurgency.”

The endless violence of the U.S. occupation and the corruption of the U.S.-backed government boosted popular support for the Taliban, especially in rural areas where three quarters of Afghans live. The intractable poverty of occupied Afghanistan also contributed to the Taliban victory, as people naturally questioned how their occupation by wealthy countries like the United States and its Western allies could leave them in such abject poverty.

Well before the current crisis, the number of Afghans reporting that they were struggling to live on their current income increased from 60% in 2008 to 90% by 2018. A 2018  Gallup poll found the lowest levels of self-reported “well-being” that Gallup has ever recorded anywhere in the world. Afghans not only reported record levels of misery but also unprecedented hopelessness about their future.

Despite some gains in education for girls, only a third of Afghan girls attended primary school in 2019 and only 37% of adolescent Afghan girls were literate. One reason that so few children go to school in Afghanistan is that more than two million children between the ages of 6 and 14 have to work to support their poverty-stricken families.

Yet instead of atoning for our role in keeping most Afghans mired in poverty, Western leaders are now cutting off desperately needed economic and humanitarian aid that was funding three quarters of Afghanistan’s public sector and made up 40% of its total GDP.

In effect, the United States and its allies are responding to losing the war by threatening the Taliban and the people of Afghanistan with a second, economic war. If the new Afghan government does not give in to their “leverage” and meet their demands, our leaders will starve their people and then blame the Taliban for the ensuing famine and humanitarian crisis, just as they demonize and blame other victims of U.S. economic warfare, from Cuba to Iran.

After pouring trillions of dollars into endless war in Afghanistan, America’s main duty now is to help the 40 million Afghans who have not fled their country, as they try to recover from the terrible wounds and trauma of the war America inflicted on them, as well as a massive drought that devastated 40% of their crops this year and a crippling third wave of covid-19.

The U.S. should release the $9.4 billion in Afghan funds held in U.S. banks. It should shift the $6 billion allocated for the now defunct Afghan armed forces to humanitarian aid, instead of diverting it to other forms of wasteful military spending. It should encourage European allies and the IMF not to withhold funds. Instead, they should fully fund the UN 2021 appeal for $1.3 billion in emergency aid, which as of late August was less than 40% funded.

Once upon a time, the United States helped its British and Soviet allies to defeat Germany and Japan, and then helped to rebuild them as healthy, peaceful and prosperous countries. For all America’s serious faults – its racism, its crimes against humanity in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and its neocolonial relations with poorer countries – America held up a promise of prosperity that people in many countries around the world were ready to follow.

If all the United States has to offer other countries today is the war, corruption and poverty it brought to Afghanistan, then the world is wise to be moving on and looking at new models to follow: new experiments in popular and social democracy; renewed emphasis on national sovereignty and international law; alternatives to the use of military force to resolve international problems; and more equitable ways of organizing internationally to tackle global crises like the Covid pandemic and the climate disaster.

The United States can either stumble on in its fruitless attempt to control the world through militarism and coercion, or it can use this opportunity to rethink its place in the world. Americans should be ready to turn the page on our fading role as global hegemon and see how we can make a meaningful, cooperative contribution to a future that we will never again be able to dominate, but which we must help to build.

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Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

Featured image: Millions of Afghans have been displaced by the war. Photo: MikrofonNews

---

by Michel Chossudovsky

ISBN Number: 9780973714715

List Price: $24.95

click here to order

Special Price: $18.00

In this new and expanded edition of Michel Chossudovsky’s 2002 best seller, the author blows away the smokescreen put up by the mainstream media, that 9/11 was an attack on America by “Islamic terrorists”.  Through meticulous research, the author uncovers a military-intelligence ploy behind the September 11 attacks, and the cover-up and complicity of key members of the Bush Administration.

The expanded edition, which includes twelve new chapters focuses on the use of 9/11 as a pretext for the invasion and illegal occupation of Iraq, the militarisation of justice and law enforcement and the repeal of democracy.

According to Chossudovsky, the  “war on terrorism” is a complete fabrication based on the illusion that one man, Osama bin Laden, outwitted the $40 billion-a-year American intelligence apparatus. The “war on terrorism” is a war of conquest. Globalisation is the final march to the “New World Order”, dominated by Wall Street and the U.S. military-industrial complex.

September 11, 2001 provides a justification for waging a war without borders. Washington’s agenda consists in extending the frontiers of the American Empire to facilitate complete U.S. corporate control, while installing within America the institutions of the Homeland Security State.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version). 

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

The aftermath of the Kabul Airport suicide attack is turning into chaos.

In the early hours of August 30th, at least 5 rockets targeted the Afghan capital’s airport. They were all reportedly intercepted by counter rocket, artillery and mortar (C-RAM) interception systems.

However, this underlines the vulnerable position that the US and those that wish to be rescued are in.

This is the second attack, following the bombing that claimed the lives of 170 civilians and US personnel on August 26th.

On August 28th, the first response that came was a US drone strike in the Nangarhar Province of Afghanistan along the Pakistani border. The area is thought to be a stronghold for ISIS-Khorasan, the Islamic State’s Afghanistan and Pakistan arm.

The Pentagon claimed that it had killed two high-profile terrorist planners, and had wounded another, refusing to unveil names or any other information on the targets.

The U.S. response, however, was not over. US air strikes hit Kabul on August 29th, as the US military was preparing its final withdrawal.

The air strikes, which took place on the afternoon of August 29, hit a vehicle in the PD-15 district of Kabul, a few kilometers north of the city’s airport.

US defense sources claimed that multiple suicide bombers of ISIS-K were in the targeted vehicle.

The terrorists were allegedly on their way to attack US troops at the Kabul airport.

Photographs of the munitions used in the air strike were released, and they bore the names and ranks of the US personnel killed in the recent terrorist attack. According to reports, however, the munitions were not used to kill just ISIS-K terrorists. Allegedly, among the victims, there were 4 children, and 2 men who had previously worked with the Afghan Armed Forces.

The U.S. response to ISIS attacks is likely to continue.

However, some revelations were later made in regard to the seconds and minutes following the August 26 suicide attack in Kabul.

US Forces reportedly killed scores of Afghan civilians in “panic shooting” following the attack.

Citing eyewitness and family members of some of the victims, media reported that a significant number of those killed in the attack were in fact shot dead by US forces in the panic after the blast. An aid worker, one of the first responders to the scene of the attack, said that many of the victims had been shot in the chest, suggesting that it was likely caused by US personnel, and not by an explosion or the other attackers.

Still, another attack is expected in Kabul, as the US forces near their withdrawal by sunset on August 31st. Tensions are high, every side is primed for chaos and one misstep in either direction could cause another major incident that leaves scores dead, similar to the ISIS-K attack on August 26th.

The political crisis that’s brewing in the United States following the failed orchestration of the withdrawal is just beginning, and Afghanistan’s political woes are also in their early stages.

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The military has published 13 manifestos in favor of Bolsonaro in the last two weeks.

Where there is smoke, there is fire, goes the popular saying. Most Brazilians and world public opinion know that Brazil is governed by a man of fascist convictions. Bolsonaro always praises the torturers of the military dictatorship implanted in Brazil in 1964 and regrets that “at least 30,000 subversives” were not shot.

Elected president on the wave of moralism triggered by the fraudulent Operation Lava Jato, Bolsonaro appointed to important civilian functions in the government more than 6. 000 military officers; unleashed the orchestrated dissemination of fake news; ignored the gravity of the pandemic, which he called a “small flu”; recommended drugs that lack scientific evidence; delayed the importation of vaccines and, despite the nearly 600 thousand deaths from Covid 19, the Ministry of Health has not yet adopted a protocol for national testing and immunization and, now, is investigated by the Senate, a den of corruption, for the purchase of vaccines at overprice, involving military officers.

Bolsonaro repeats: “only God can remove me from power”. All this despite the 15 million unemployed, the 30 million people in misery, the 19 million suffering from chronic hunger and inflation of more than 8% per year.

There will be presidential elections in 2022. All polls point to Lula as the voters’ preferred candidate. Although many of them regret having voted for Bolsonaro in 2018, and others still refuse to vote for the PT, the truth is that, so far, no alternative candidate to the Lula versus Bolsonaro polarization has been found. There are several names on the agenda, but none that gathers enough votes to threaten either candidate and represent an alternative between the left and the right.

Foreseeing that Lula could defeat him in 2022, as polls indicate, Bolsonaro began to defend the printed vote. For 25 years, Brazil has adopted electronic ballot boxes, and there has never been any suspicion of fraud. Brazil’s electoral past teaches that the paper ballot is vulnerable to fraud. Voters with low education and income are often pressured by “colonels” (militia, police, farmers, chiefs, pastors and priests) to give their vote to a certain candidate in exchange for money, favors or intimidation.

In electronic voting there is no way to verify the voter’s vote. But a paper ballot gives a receipt. There is a paper proof if the voter really voted for the indicated candidate. And this favors electoral fraud, the only recourse Bolsonaro has to try to avoid defeat next year.

For the return of the paper ballot, which would be added to the electronic one (a printer would be placed in the ballot box), a constitutional amendment approved by the National Congress is necessary. The issue should have been voted by the House of Representatives in the first half of July. When the bolsonarista deputies realized they would be defeated, they maneuvered to move the decision to August, after the parliamentary recess.

Brazilian democracy would not be threatened if it depended on the Supreme Federal Court (STF) and the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), which are against the printed vote. However, on July 9, the commander of the Air Force, Carlos Baptista Junior, declared to the newspaper “O Globo” that it is up to the Armed Forces to protect Brazilian democracy. In the same interview, he affirmed: “We will not give up on that”. And he pontificated: “Armed men do not threaten”.

I remember Brazil on the eve of the 1964 coup, which implemented 21 years of military dictatorship. The leaders of the left, in which I militated through the student movement, said that they did not fear a coup, that the democratic institutions were solid, that President Jango Goulart had a strong military backing against the violation of the Constitution.

Now I hear the same discourse of the solidity of democratic institutions and the lack of conjunctural conditions for a return to dictatorship, even from voices on the right. However, no active military officer dared to disagree with the coup threat of the Air Force commander. None has spoken out against Bolsonaro’s repeated coup bluster. And on July 8, the Minister of Defense, General Braga Netto, who commands all three arms, reportedly told the president of the Chamber of Deputies that “if there are no printed and auditable ballots in 2022, there will be no elections.” On the same day, Bolsonaro declared in public: “Either we make clean elections in Brazil or we don’t have elections”. He fears that the Parliament will reject the constitutional amendment to allow the printed ballot.

The civil authorities received the coup demonstrations as a “bluff”, in the opinion of a minister of the STF who did not want to be identified. But, I repeat, where there is smoke, there is fire. The deafening silence of the active military is worrisome. No one dares to disagree.

The Brazilian people have taken to the streets in massive demonstrations against the Bolsonaro government. This is the recourse we have to save democracy. However, the military will opt for a coup d’état, institutionalizing Bolsonaro as dictator.

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Translated by Internationalist 360.

Featured image is from Internationalist 360

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***

.

 

Abstract

We analyzed all-cause mortality by week (ACM/w) for Canada, and for the Canadian provinces, and by age group and sex, from January 2010 through March 2021; in comparison with data for other countries and their regions or counties. 

We find that there is no extraordinary surge in yearly or seasonal mortality in Canada, which can be ascribed to a COVID-19 pandemic; and that several prominent features in the ACM/w in the COVID-19 period exhibit anomalous province-to-province heterogeneity that is irreconcilable with the known behaviour of epidemics of viral respiratory diseases (VRDs). We conclude that a pandemic did not occur.

In addition, our analysis of the ACM/w, by province, age and sex, allows us to highlight anomalies, occurring during the COVID-19 period, which provide strong evidence that:

• Among the most elderly (85+ years), many died from the immediate response to the pandemic that was announced by the WHO on 11 March 2020.
• Predominantly young males (0-44 years, and also 45-64 years) probably indirectly died from the sustained pandemic response, in the summer months of 2020, and into the fall and winter, starting in May 2020, especially in Alberta, significantly in Ontario and British Columbia, whereas not in Quebec.

Our study provides constraints on the mechanisms at play in VRD epidemics.

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Index

Abstract

1. Introduction
2. Data
3. Results / Interpretation

3.1 No detectable pandemic increase in the yearly and seasonal mortality

3.2 Inter-jurisdictional uniformity of pre-COVID-period features in all-cause mortality by time, 2010-2019

3.3 Inter-jurisdictional variations of COVID-period features in all-cause mortality by time

3.4 Analysis of ACM/w by age group and by sex

4. Discussion

4.1 Regarding pandemics

4.2 Regarding the “C”-feature (“covid-peak”) in ACM by time

4.3 Regarding the summer-2020 level and the “2”-feature (“2nd wave”) in ACM by time

4.4 Regarding age group specifics in ACM by time

4.5 Regarding causes of response-induced deaths

4.6 Would there have been fewer deaths?

5. Concluding comments: Missing self-evaluation

References

Appendix: ACM/w normalized by population, and comparisons

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1. Introduction

A viral respiratory disease (VRD) pandemic has two defining characteristics (Doshi 2008, 2011):

1. It occurs everywhere, irrespective of state or jurisdictional boundaries, presumably because there is no prior immunity.
2. It causes excess mortality far greater than that due to non-pandemic (seasonal) VRD epidemics.

In 2008, Doshi (2008) put it this way:

One recent official US death toll projection(ref) suggested that the next pandemic will kill 6 to 56 times more Americans than the CDC currently estimates die in an average nonpandemic influenza season.(ref) The World Health Organization (WHO), in a “relatively conservative estimate,”(ref) predicted that the next influenza pandemic could claim 4 to 30 times more lives worldwide than a typical nonpandemic season.(ref)

One problem, in practice, is that VRD-classed mortality is difficult to quantify. The actual number of VRD-attributable deaths is always uncertain, especially when the deaths are counted in the context of a media-frenzy about “the pandemic”. This is as true today as it was when epidemiology was a nascent science; because a cause of death determination, with many co-factors, and in the absence of an analytical autopsy, is prone to human error, human bias, institutional bias, and even constructed bias as we have seen in the COVID period (Borger et al., 2021).

One solution is to avoid the problem altogether, by studying all-cause mortality (ACM) rather than VRD-classed mortality. A death is a death is a death.

In particular, if there is no discernable excess ACM during the presumed pandemic, above the trend in ACM, of the prior decade, say, then it is incorrect to conclude that a pandemic occurred.

The only alternatives are:

1. to believe that a pandemic occurred but that an extraordinary medical response prevented the presumably new pathogen from killing many people, in just the right amount as to bring the yearly ACM back to the decadal trend value; or
2. to believe that a pandemic occurred but that an extraordinary public-health response delayed the presumably new pathogen in its killing, in just the right amount as to bring the yearly ACM back to the decadal trend value, and then prevented future killing by an extraordinary mass vaccination campaign;

or some combination of the two, or their equivalents.

In science, there is a guiding principle regarding competing interpretations of the same data, called “Occam’s razor” (Gibbs, 1996):

The most useful statement of the principle for scientists is: “when you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better.”

In this article, we ask whether a COVID-19 pandemic occurred in Canada, using the above criteria. Our application of Occam’s razor, in this context, is supported by a multitude of studies showing that public-health measures are ineffective against a VRD, which we have reviewed in several other articles.[1]

 

2. Data

Statistics Canada (StatCan) is the national statistical office of the country. The all-cause mortality (ACM) data used in this article was retrieved from this database and is given by week (ACM/w) and covers the 2010-2021 period (StatCan, 2021). At the date of access, data were available from week-1 of 2010 (beginning of January) through week-17 of 2021 (end of April). In this article we present the data until week-12 of 2021 (end of March) because for later weeks the data for Canada are not consolidated and have the artifact of anomalously small mortality values.

The StatCan data are provided by:

• Provinces and territories
• Age group
  • 0-44 years-old
  • 45-64 years-old
  • 65-84 years-old
  • 85 years-old and over
• Sex
  • Males
  • Females

StatCan specifies that the ACM for 2020 and 2021 is provisional, and that the counts of deaths “have been rounded to a neighbouring multiple of 5 to meet the confidentiality requirements of the Statistics Act”.

3. Results/Interpretation

3.1 No detectable pandemic increase in the yearly and seasonal mortality

The all-cause mortality by week (ACM/w) for Canada, from January 2010 through March 2021, is shown in Figure 1a:

Figure 1a: All-cause mortality by week in Canada from 2010 to 2021. Data are displayed from January 2010 to March 2021. The y-scale is adjusted to show the region of interest. Data were retrieved from StatCan (StatCan, 2021), as described in section 2.

It is important to keep in mind that such graphs are represented using a region-of-interest y-scale. The same data on the full (starting at zero) y-scale is shown in Figure 1b:

Figure 1b: All-cause mortality by week in Canada from 2010 to 2021. Data are displayed from January 2010 to March 2021. The y-scale is not adjusted to show only the region of interest; it starts from 0. Data were retrieved from StatCan (StatCan, 2021), as described in section 2.

In terms of the coarse-level main features (not intra-seasonal details), the usual seasonal pattern occurred in Canada since 2010 into March 2021, which is normally observed in all mid-latitude Northern hemisphere countries or jurisdictions, since 1900 or so where data has been collected.

The said usual seasonal pattern has these main features:

• winter highs and summer lows (here, of deaths per week, ACM/w)
  • summer-low or trough values (deaths per week) that vary monotonically from summer to summer, typically linearly over the course of a decade (we refer to this monotonic variation as the “summer baseline trend”)
  • winter-high or maximum values (deaths per week) that vary erratically from winter season to winter season, in both magnitude and date (or week-number)
• winter-burden deaths (integrated above the summer baseline trend, over a “cycle-year”, from mid-summer to mid-summer) typically (since the 1960s) corresponding to between 5% and 15% of yearly mortality

We have analysed such patterns in ACM by time (day, week, month) for several jurisdictions, including jurisdictions in Canada, in two prior articles (Rancourt, 2020) (Rancourt, Baudin, Mercier, 2020).

Figure 1 shows that there was no excess yearly or seasonal mortality, above the usual values of the last decade for Canada, in either the 2019-2020 winter or the 2020-2021 winter (up to and including March 2021). This is confirmed by calculating ACM per year. We calculated ACM by “cycle-year”, where we define a cycle-year as occurring from week-31 (around the beginning of August) of calendar year N through to week-30 (around the end of July) of calendar year N+1. As such, for example, nominal cycle-year 2018 is centered on the winter of 2018-2019. This definition of cycle-year takes one from mid-summer-trough to the next mid-summer-trough in ACM/w, such as to capture the intrinsic seasonal structure of ACM/w, having winter highs and summer lows. The result is plotted in Figure 2:

Figure 2: All-cause mortality by cycle-year for Canada, cycle-years 2011 to 2020, calculated as described above. The dashed line is a least-squares fitted straight line. The cycle‑year starts on week-31 of a calendar year (beginning of August) and ends on week-30 of the next calendar year (end of July). Data for the calculation were retrieved from StatCan (StatCan, 2021), as described in section 2.

We conclude that there was no COVID-19 pandemic in Canada. It would be difficult to conclude otherwise. Either a pandemic causes a significant increase in deaths, or there was not a pandemic, barring the many unscientific false beliefs in effective public health interventions for VRDs.

Let us make this point further by showing the anomalous province-to-province intra-seasonal variations in ACM by time, which occur in the COVID or nominal-pandemic period (after 11 March 2020, the date the WHO proclaimed a pandemic).

3.2 Inter-jurisdictional uniformity of pre-COVID-period features in all-cause mortality by time, 2010-2019

The ACM/w 2010-2021 (through to March 2021) is plotted for several Canadian provinces, as follows.

Figure 3a: All-cause mortality by week from 2010 to 2021 for, top to bottom, Ontario (ON), Quebec (QC), British Columbia (BC), Alberta (AB) and Saskatchewan (SK). Data are displayed from January 2010 to March 2021. Data were retrieved from StatCan (StatCan, 2021), as described in section 2.

Figure 3b: All-cause mortality by week from 2010 to 2021 for, top to bottom, British Columbia (BC), Alberta (AB), Manitoba (MB) and Newfoundland and Labrador (NL). Data are displayed from January 2010 to March 2021. Data were retrieved from StatCan (StatCan, 2021), as described in section 2.  

The seasonal cycles of ACM/w are extraordinarily regular and display essentially identical winter-season features from province to province for a given winter, up to and including 2019. In other words, up to and including 2019, the seasonal patterns and intra-seasonal shapes of ACM/w are synchronous copies of each other, from province to province, while being scaled in whole-pattern magnitude approximately by provincial population.  Plots of ACM/w, normalized by provincial population, are shown and compared in the Appendix.

We have observed such regularity, from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and including from continent to continent, in all ACM-by-time data that we have examined for many jurisdictions (countries, regions, provinces, counties) in North America and Europe, over the many decades of available data, for example (Rancourt, 2020) (Rancourt, Baudin, Mercier, 2020). Although there are small differences, the main first-level observation is the remarkable similarity in patterns, ratios of winter-to-winter magnitudes, and synchronicity, across all mid-latitude jurisdictions. We note that these robust data (ACM-by-time for North America and Europe, 20th and 21st centuries up to 2019) put into question two paradigms about VRDs (presumed to be the major cause of the seasonality of mortality in mid-latitude countries):

• that a specific VRD-causing virus/variant originates at a localized source and “spreads” across countries or continents by person to person contact or personal proximity (“source-spread” paradigm)
• that there are “pandemics” of VRDs, distinct from non-pandemic epidemics (“pandemic” paradigm)

Regarding the latter point, none of the 1957-1958 H2N2, 1968 H3N2, 2009 H1N1, or 2003 SARS pandemics are detected in ACM-by-time data, as meaningfully distinguished from non-pandemic seasonal epidemics. This is also the case if one analyses estimates of “influenza-classed mortality” rather than ACM (Doshi, 2008). The 1918 surges in ACM in both continents, by contrast, are very large, but constitute a special case involving mass bacterial infections, prior to the advent of antibiotics, killing solely young adults and infants, not the elderly, in societies and economies dramatically reorganized after the end of the First World War.

At the very least, ACM-by-time data imposes stringent real-world constraints on the theoretical or interpretational consequences of using these paradigms (source-spread, pandemic) to explain large-scale epidemiological observations.

Clearly for Canada, which is the size of a continent, Figures 3a & 3b (and see Appendix) show a remarkable regularity up to and including 2019: The provinces, East to West, have the same “fingerprints” of ACM/w. Detailed winter-season shapes, timing of features (synchronicity), and ratios of winter-to-winter magnitudes, are all essentially the same, province to province, 2010-2019, although the amplitudes of seasonal variation are smaller in the low-altitude (non-mountainous) maritime-climate provinces of the Canadian East coast (see below).

3.3 Inter-jurisdictional variations of COVID-period features in all-cause mortality by time

Although, as described above in section 3.1, “in terms of the coarse-level main features (not intra-seasonal details), the usual seasonal pattern occurred in Canada since 2010 into March 2021” (including the COVID-period), nonetheless there were significant anomalies in intra-seasonal features in the COVID-period, which we next examine, and which are relevant to whether a pandemic occurred.

As stated in the Introduction (section 1), a pandemic “occurs everywhere, irrespective of state or jurisdictional boundaries, presumably because there is no prior immunity”.

In particular:

• The pathogen presumed to cause the pandemic — a highly contagious pathogen of the VRD kind — will not stop at provincial borders in Canada.
• The presumed pathogen will not affect the similar populations in different provinces in dramatically different ways; such as killing young males in one province while killing only the elderly in another.
• The presumed pathogen itself, acting at the same time in March-April-May 2020 in two neighbouring similar provinces, for instance Ontario and Quebec, cannot be 2-3 times more deadly (per inhabitant) in Quebec than in Ontario.

We examine these propositions in the following figures.

First, the ACM/w for Canada is represented in an expanded view, from 2019 through March 2021, in order to define key features that occurred in the COVID-period:

Figure 4: All-cause mortality by week in Canada from 2019 to 2021. Data are displayed from January 2019 to March 2021. The dark-blue vertical line represents the week of March 11 2020, when WHO declared the pandemic. The three features are labelled as: C = “covid-peak”, S = summer 2020, 2 = 2020-2021 winter peak (“2^nd wave”). Data were retrieved from StatCan (StatCan, 2021), as described in section 2.

Here, the 11 March 2020 date of the WHO pronouncement of the pandemic is shown as the vertical line, “C” denotes the ACM-by-time feature that we have called the “covid-peak” (Rancourt, 2020) (Rancourt, Baudin, Mercier, 2020), “S” denotes the summer trough in mortality of 2020, and “2” denotes the 2020-2021 winter peak (usually referred to as “2nd wave”).

The Canada ACM/w features “C” and “S” (Figure 4) are anomalous in their own right, as follows.

We have already written extensively about “C”, which is our so-called “covid-peak”, observed in many jurisdictions in mid-latitude Northern hemisphere countries (Rancourt, 2020) (Rancourt, Baudin, Mercier, 2020). It is anomalous in that:

• Everywhere that it occurs, it emerges synchronously immediately following the WHO’s 11 March 2020 pronouncement of the pandemic.
• Its initial rise is exceedingly sharp, with a base to inflection-point time of approximately 3 weeks (2 weeks in ACM by day, ACM/d, data for France).
• Such a large and sudden surge virtually never occurs so late in the seasonal cycle (after 11 March, in March, April, May), which is otherwise always a downslope from the mid-winter (January-February) highs.
• It is extremely heterogeneous by jurisdiction in its magnitude, not being present or barely detected in 34 of the 52 USA states, 6 of the 13 regions of metropolitan France, 7 of the 10 provinces of Canada, 18 of the 21 counties of Sweden, and so on, while being disproportionately large in specific jurisdictions such as New York City in the USA, the Paris region in France, Stockholm county in Sweden, and the province of Quebec in Canada.
• Where it occurs, the degree to which it extends late into the season (into May) is variable from jurisdiction to jurisdiction; ending in April 2020 in France, in May 2020 in Canada and the USA.

The Canada ACM/w feature “S” (Figure 4) is anomalous because its mean baseline magnitude (5.25K deaths/w) is anomalously larger than the summer‑2019 mean baseline value (5.05K deaths/w), and significantly larger than the magnitude predicted by the linear summer baseline trend values for the prior years, as can be ascertained from Figure 1.

This means that some net 200 excess deaths per week were occurring in Canada in the summer of 2020, in a season in which VRDs are not active. Below, we show that the main contributor to these excess summer deaths was deaths of young (0-44 years) males, an age where COVID-19 virtually does not cause deaths (Levin et al., 2020), occurring predominantly in Alberta, Ontario and British Columbia. Whereas, the opposite occurs in Canada for the 85+ years age group: The summer-2020 mean baseline magnitude (ACM/w) is significantly smaller than the 2010-2019 trend value for this age group (Figure 6a).

Figures 3a & 3b show the following points regarding the COVID-period:

• Only ON, QC and BC have significant “C”-features (“covid-peaks”). The other seven provinces do not have statistically detectable “C”-features.
• The “C”-feature in the QC data is very strong, intermediate in ON, and relatively weak in BC.
• Whereas AB, MB and SK did not have “C”-features, they have anomalously large “2”-features, compared to their prior winter-season mortalities since 2010, especially AB.

These observations are easier to make in y-scale expanded views of each province:

Figure 5-ON: All-cause mortality by week in Ontario from 2010 to 2021. Data are displayed from January 2010 to March 2021. Data were retrieved from StatCan (StatCan, 2021), as described in section 2.

Figure 5-QC: All-cause mortality by week in Quebec from 2010 to 2021. Data are displayed from January 2010 to March 2021. Data were retrieved from StatCan (StatCan, 2021), as described in section 2.

Figure 5-BC: All-cause mortality by week in British Columbia from 2010 to 2021. Data are displayed from January 2010 to March 2021. Data were retrieved from StatCan (StatCan, 2021), as described in section 2.

Figure 5-AB: All-cause mortality by week in Alberta from 2010 to 2021. Data are displayed from January 2010 to March 2021. Data were retrieved from StatCan (StatCan, 2021), as described in section 2.

Figure 5-SK: All-cause mortality by week in Saskatchewan from 2010 to 2021. Data are displayed from January 2010 to March 2021. Data were retrieved from StatCan (StatCan, 2021), as described in section 2.

Figure 5-NS: All-cause mortality by week in Nova Scotia from 2010 to 2021. Data are displayed from January 2010 to March 2021. Data were retrieved from StatCan (StatCan, 2021), as described in section 2.

Figure 5-MB-NB-NL-PEI: All-cause mortality by week from 2010 to 2021 for, top to bottom, Manitoba (MB), New Brunswick (NB), Newfoundland and Labrador (NL) and Prince Edward Island (PEI). Data are displayed from January 2010 to March 2021. Data were retrieved from StatCan (StatCan, 2021), as described in section 2.

Most notably:

• The “C”-feature (“covid-peak”) for Quebec is exceptionally large among all provinces. Among other factors, Quebec care-home workers are known to have abandoned their locked-in patients en masse, presumably out of fear, even leading to criminal investigations.[2]
• The “C”-feature (“covid-peak”) for Ontario is also unambiguously anomalous, as a large feature of this magnitude and shape this late in the winter-mortality season. There was also large-scale care-home negligence in Ontario, documented in investigative media articles and a military report.[3]
• The “C”-feature (“covid-peak”) is present for British Columbia, indicating some measures-induced and treatment-induced deaths in care-homes and hospitals, but to a lesser degree than in Ontario and Quebec.
• The “2”-feature (“2nd wave”) is massive in Alberta, which is exceptional among all provinces. The peak is twice as high as any other winter peak for Alberta in the decade 2010-2020. Alberta also has an exceptionally high summer-2020 mortality, relative to its prior-decade trend of summer-trough mean magnitudes.
• Both Ontario and Saskatchewan also have high summer-2020 mortalities, relative to their respective prior-decade trends of summer-trough mean magnitudes, and unusually large “2”-features (“2nd waves”), but not to the degree observed for Alberta.
• Most East coast provinces (NS, NL, PEI, not NB) have small-amplitude seasonal cycles of ACM; and none for which there are data (NS, NL, NB) have ACM/w that exhibits any evidence of a COVID-19 pandemic or disruption, none whatsoever (data is missing for PEI). 

3.4 Analysis of ACM/w by age group and by sex

The plots of ACM/w, from January 2010 through March 2021, for Canada, by age group (age at time of death), for the four age groups (0-44, 45-64, 65-84, 85+ years), are as follows.

Figure 6a: All-cause mortality by week in Canada for the 85+ years age group, from 2010 to 2021. Data are displayed from January 2010 to March 2021. The linear trend-line is a least-squares fit to the summer troughs for summer-2013 through summer-2019, using the following summer trough weeks: 2013-weeks 24-37, 2014-weeks 28-33, 2015-weeks 25-38, 2016-weeks 24-34, 2017-weeks 24-33, 2018-weeks 27-35, 2019-weeks 26-38. The arrow indicates a feature discussed in the text. Data were retrieved from StatCan (StatCan, 2021), as described in section 2.

Figure 6b: All-cause mortality by week in Canada for the 65-84 years age group, from 2010 to 2021. Data are displayed from January 2010 to March 2021. Data were retrieved from StatCan (StatCan, 2021), as described in section 2.

Figure 6c: All-cause mortality by week in Canada for the 45-64 years age group, from 2010 to 2021. Data are displayed from January 2010 to March 2021. Data were retrieved from StatCan (StatCan, 2021), as described in section 2.

Figure 6d: All-cause mortality by week in Canada for the 0-44 years age group, from 2010 to 2021. Data are displayed from January 2010 to March 2021. Data were retrieved from StatCan (StatCan, 2021), as described in section 2.

Several observations can be made about the ACM/w data shown in Figures 6a through 6d, as follows:

• The amplitude (summer mean baseline value to winter maximum) of the seasonal variations in ACM/w, normalised by the summer mean baseline value, varies significantly with age, approximately as: near-zero for 0-44 years (no seasonal variation), 20% for 45-64 years, 30% for 65-84 years, and some 60% for 85+ years. The causes of increased winter deaths are more effective in the elderly, and all the more the older one gets.
• The patterns (“fingerprints”) of ACM/w are essentially identical for the 85+ and 65-84 years age groups, prior to the COVID-period (prior to 11 March 2020). See plots of direct comparisons in the Appendix. This suggests that the causes for increased winter deaths, and their timing, are the same in the two age groups, normally, where only the magnitude for the age group is affected by increased generalized frailty in the most elderly. Stated differently: One age group does not die of different causes than the other, regarding the increased likelihood of death in the winter.
• The latter point, regarding virtually identical intra-season time-structures, for each given season in the two age groups of the most elderly, including in the COVID-period, suggests that the driver of increased winter deaths is synchronized by the same cause(s) for the two age groups, which precludes vitamin deficiency, cancer, heart attacks and strokes, acting alone, but does not preclude weather, sudden societal or economic or institutional changes, sudden geological events, or sudden appearances of high-concentrations of pathogens in the living environments.
• The “C”-feature (“covid-peak”) in the ACM/w of the 85+ years age group (Figure 6a) is anomalous, relative to known ACM by time data of the last many decades for European and North American jurisdictions. Its dramatic drop occurs in a mere 6 weeks (as does its rise), during the weeks of 2 May 2020 to 13 June 2020, to summer-2020 values that are significantly below the linear trend-line for mean summer-trough values for summers 2013 through 2019 (Figure 6a).
• As such, the “S”-feature in the ACM/w of the 85+ years age group (Figure 6a) is equally anomalous. Why would 85+ year olds in Canada become relatively impervious to dying in the summer of 2020, in mid pandemic, between the presumed first and second waves of death? Our interpretation is: The deaths of many 85+ year olds were artificially accelerated, at a time when seasonal VRD transmission is low, so that their deaths were not spread out into the following summer and fall, as would normally be the case.
• Another large anomaly, which should be considered a national public health catastrophe of historic proportion but is virtually absent from the media and government-official pronouncements, is shown in Figure 6d, for the 0-44 years age group. Here, we see a significant increase in deaths, from a pre-COVID-period plateau value of approximately 260 deaths/w to a summer-2020 value of approximately 320 death/w, lasting at least 28 weeks, into the start of December 2020. The peak corresponds to approximately 2,000 excess deaths in this 0-44 years age group in Canada, following the WHO pronouncement of a pandemic.
• The latter deaths cannot be ascribed to COVID-19 because the presumed disease virtually does not kill in this age group, and there is little transmission of VRDs in summer months. A similar but lesser relative increase in summer-2020 deaths occurs in the 45-64 years age group (Figure 6c).

The COVID-period excess deaths in the younger age groups can be further explored by sex, and by province. Relevant plots of ACM/w are as follows, for the 0-44 years age group, first for Canada, then select provinces.

Figure 7a: All-cause mortality by week in Canada for males of the 0-44 years age group, from 2010 to 2021. Data are displayed from January 2010 to March 2021. Data were retrieved from StatCan (StatCan, 2021), as described in section 2.

Figure 7b: All-cause mortality by week in Canada for females of the 0-44 years age group, from 2010 to 2021. Data are displayed from January 2010 to March 2021. Data were retrieved from StatCan (StatCan, 2021), as described in section 2.

Figures 7a & 7b show that, generally in the last decade, young Canadian males are almost twice (approximately 1.7 times) as likely to die of any cause compared to young Canadian females (0-44 years age group).

These figures (Figures 7a & 7b) also show that the excess summer‑2020 deaths seen in this age group at the national level (Figure 6d) is almost entirely due to male deaths. This is also true for all the provinces that exhibit this feature in the 0-44 years age group. Virtually only males contribute to these excess deaths.

Next, we examine 0-44 years age group male deaths by province, as follows.

Figure 8-ON: All-cause mortality by week in Ontario for males of the 0-44 years age group, from 2010 to 2021. Data are displayed from January 2010 to March 2021. Data were retrieved from StatCan (StatCan, 2021), as described in section 2.

Figure 8-QC: All-cause mortality by week in Quebec for males of the 0-44 years age group, from 2010 to 2021. Data are displayed from January 2010 to March 2021. Data were retrieved from StatCan (StatCan, 2021), as described in section 2.

Figure 8-BC: All-cause mortality by week in British Columbia for males of the 0-44 years age group, from 2010 to 2021. Data are displayed from January 2010 to March 2021. Data were retrieved from StatCan (StatCan, 2021), as described in section 2.

Figure 8-AB: All-cause mortality by week in Alberta for males of the 0-44 years age group, from 2010 to 2021. Data are displayed from January 2010 to March 2021. Data were retrieved from StatCan (StatCan, 2021), as described in section 2.

Figure 8-SK: All-cause mortality by week in Saskatchewan for males of the 0-44 years age group, from 2010 to 2021. Data are displayed from January 2010 to March 2021. Data were retrieved from StatCan (StatCan, 2021), as described in section 2.

Thus we see that the phenomenon of excess 0-44 years age group male deaths is present in the large-population provinces, and in Saskatchewan and Manitoba (not shown), but exceptionally not present in Quebec.

Did the presumed SARS-CoV-2 virus decide not to act in this way in the province of Quebec, or is there another explanation? Our interpretation is that the excess deaths in males of the 0-44 years age group arise from the stress of the large-scale and continued societal and economic responses to the declared pandemic, and that the experienced stress in young men is lesser in Quebec because of significant cultural differences with Anglophone provinces, under conditions imposed by all provincial governments.

4. Discussion

4.1 Regarding pandemics

As noted above, the intra-seasonal and inter-seasonal time structures and the jurisdictional homogeneity in ACM by time, up to continental geographical scales for mid-latitudes, in unperturbed societies (unperturbed by sudden changes tied to world wars, or by sudden global “pandemic response” reorganizations), set constraints regarding the possible causes of the seasonal phenomenon having high winter death rates. Precluded causes are: vitamin deficiency, cancer, heart attacks and strokes, acting alone. Not precluded causes include: weather, sudden societal or economic or institutional changes, sudden geological events, sudden appearances of high-concentrations of pathogens in the living environments, or combinations thereof.

We would argue for “sudden appearances of high-concentrations of pathogens in the living environments”. The stability-in-air of aerosol particles is known to be controlled by absolute humidity in mid-latitudes (e.g., see Rancourt, 2020b, and references therein). We imagine summer background population mixing, and faster dry-season population mixing, of continually arising mutations of pathogens that transmit by suspended aerosols (i.e., the entire ecology of VRD viruses), followed by sudden low-absolute-humidity-induced winter-time increases of concentrations (in the built environment – individual homes to public spaces) of aerosols bearing all such pathogens.

The infections from the multitude of co-acting VRD viruses would be accompanied by an array of opportunistic bacterial co-infections, aided by the dry-air stress on respiratory tract tissues.

We believe that the genome-centered view of single unique viral mutations/variants explaining seasonal structures in ACM by time is too narrow and over-emphasized. The contributions from weather and from the large array of co-acting pathogens must be more relevant than the “particular-special-new-mutation/variant virologist’s view”, otherwise pandemics would be observed in ACM by time data, and they are not.

Simply put, the pandemic paradigm is a beautiful theory, which is greatly pleasing to the genome jockeys, but it is not supported by hard epidemiological data, and it has a great potential to cloud public health thinking by directing focus on a presumed pathogen-specific disease rather than identifying and addressing all the important aspects of a health crisis or chronic-disease circumstances.

In Canada at least, in the present article we have shown that no additional yearly or seasonal integrated mortality occurs in the COVID-period (Figures 1 & 2). There was no COVID-19 pandemic in Canada, which can be detected in ACM by time. It would be a fantasy to believe that Canada avoided the COVID-19 pandemic deaths by its hurried, differing and unproven pandemic response, such as to exactly bring the resulting net yearly and seasonal mortalities in line with the trend of the last decade (Figure 2).

4.2 Regarding the “C”-feature (“covid-peak”) in ACM by time

The occurrence of dramatic jurisdiction-to-jurisdiction differences (jurisdictional heterogeneity) in the magnitude (relative to summer baseline) of the “C”-feature (“covid-peak”) in ACM/w by province in Canada is diametrically opposite to all pre-COVID-period ACM by time data that we have examined for many jurisdictions (countries, regions, provinces, counties) in North America and Europe, over the many decades of available data.

Whereas pre-COVID-period integrated winter-burden mortalities (above linear summer baseline trends), normalized by mean summer baseline mortality or by jurisdictional population, are always relatively constant between jurisdictions, the “covid-peak” feature varies widely between jurisdictions in a given country, or between countries, often being undetectable or borderline detectable, versus extreme “hot spot” jurisdictions.

For France, we calculate that, on the basis of region-level jurisdictional divisions, the standard deviation of the “covid-peak” integrated magnitude normalized by population divided by the mean (s.d./mean) is 3-fold greater than the standard deviation for integrated winter-burden magnitude (integrated above the linear trend of summer-trough minimums) normalized by population divided by the mean (s.d./mean) (article in preparation).

We argue that such jurisdictional heterogeneity cannot be due to a VRD epidemic in an unperturbed society, because such a phenomenon has never previously occurred in the many decades since reliable data is available for many jurisdictions. Only an unusually large perturbation of the society can produce such a phenomenon.

We believe that it is not a coincidence that all the “covid-peaks” — in jurisdictions where they occur on both continents — started their sharp and sudden surges immediately (within 1 week or so) after the WHO’s 11 March 2020 pronouncement of a pandemic. We believe that viruses did not suddenly everywhere act on cue in response to the WHO memo, in those jurisdictions where the “covid-peak” feature occurs in ACM by time.

4.3 Regarding the summer-2020 level and the “2”-feature (“2nd wave”) in ACM by time

By-province heterogeneity is also present in the summer-2020 level and in the “2”‑feature (“2nd wave”) in the COVID-period of ACM/w in Canada (esp. for Alberta, Figure 5-AB).

It is unlikely that a same pandemic-causing virus acted alone to produce significant excess deaths in the summer-2020 period, relative to the linear trend of summer baseline values, irrespective of the magnitude of the preceding “covid-peak”: Ontario (Figure 5-ON), British Columbia (Figure 5-BC) and Alberta (Figure 5-AB), but not noticeably in Quebec (Figure 5-QC), for instance.

It is possible that the excess deaths in the summer-2020 period were induced by the societal disruption of the pandemic response (more below), without being associated with any VRD, except secondarily via the so-called “dry tinder” effect following a large “covid-peak”.

More strikingly, the “2”-feature (“2nd wave”) peak for Alberta is massive, compared to any other province, whereas no noticeable “covid-peak” occurs in this province (Figure 5-AB). A pandemic-causing virus cannot decide not to produce a “1st wave” but only a “2nd wave” in one province of a continuously connected country having similar provincial populations. Nothing like this has ever been observed, to our knowledge.

We argue that the “2”-feature (“2nd wave”) peak, occurring during a winter-season of expected increased mortality, has varying province-wise magnitudes because of the province to province differences in pandemic response, and province to province differences in population resilience against the stress of the imposed measures.

In short, like with the “covid-peak”, such jurisdictional heterogeneity cannot be the result of the genome of a particular viral pathogen. Such epidemiological heterogeneity of presumed VRD mortality has not previously been observed in North America or Europe in many decades of reliable ACM by time data. VRD viruses of any mutation or variety do not recognize jurisdictional boundaries and do not act so widely differently on similar populations on continuous territories. The large features of the ACM by time data for the COVID-period can only be explained by appealing to additional causal factors beyond the limited purview of virology. 

4.4 Regarding age group specifics in ACM by time

The ACM/w in Canada for the 85+ years age group (Figure 6a) allowed us to partly unravel the complex and unusual behaviour of mortality in the COVID-period. As mentioned above, the sharp drop in its “covid-peak” connects to a summer-2020 having anomalously small mortality for this age group (Figure 6a).

This is all the more surprising in that the summer-2020 mortality for all age groups is anomalously large (Figure 1). Cumulatively, all ages have an anomalously large summer-2020 mortality, whereas the 85+ years age group has an anomalously small summer-2020 mortality. Mortality of younger Canadians increased, in a season that does not normally carry many VRD infections, whereas less mortality occurred for the most aged Canadians.

In the ACM/w data for the 85+ years age group (Figure 6a), the “covid-peak” followed by an anomalously small summer-2020 mortality, may be a most compelling example of the so-called “dry tinder” effect, in which successive winter-season mortalities are argued to be anti-correlated because a harsh winter leaves fewer frail elderly to die in the following winter. Whereas this postulated winter-to-winter anti-correlation is not easily discerned, except in earlier times when mortalities were larger (see mid-1940s to mid-1950s for France, Figure 1 of Rancourt, Baudin, Mercier, 2020), here (Figure 6a) we demonstrate the effect, within an exceptional year, in current times.

Finally, there is the anomalous mass mortality of young males in Canada, especially in Alberta but not in Quebec, in summer-2020 and into the fall (Figure 7, all parts). This ignored and silent epidemic is most likely not due to any VRD, and merits an independent investigation in its own right.

4.5 Regarding causes of response-induced deaths

We seek to describe plausible mechanisms whereby sudden disruptions in society can induce deaths, or reduce deaths at later times, without necessarily significantly changing the yearly or seasonal death burden compared to a decadal trend, following (Rancourt, 2020) (Rancourt, Baudin, Mercier, 2020).

We propose that there are three large categories of such plausible mechanisms:

• Medical response, treatment and palliative protocols, adopted at the onset of the proclaimed and media-hyped pandemic.
• Pandemic response, public health measures, institutional protocols (esp. schools, care homes, and hospitals), economic upheaval, lockdowns, curfews, self-quarantine, etc.
• Policies of denial of medical treatment, such as refusal to admit elderly persons into hospital care, or transfers of patients out of hospital care.

In France, for example, as in many other countries, starting in March 2020 there were tremendous social and medical disruptions, not planned or previously applied. The national lockdown in-effect was a “stay-at-home” order, including not visiting the family physician, and to call the emergency services only in cases of breathing difficulty, which was by itself a dangerous recommendation as people presenting those symptoms were usually already in a late stage of disease, often admitted to hospital directly into the intensive care unit. This reckless protocol directed by health authorities concerned not only COVID-19, but generally all medical conditions since people were asked to stay at home, to not visit their general practitioners, nor to show up at hospitals (to avoid an unmanageable institutional burden). Another statement from the health authorities was that no treatment exists for COVID-19: people were told to take Doliprane^® (acetaminophen) in case of symptoms; and healthcare professionals were denied using or attempting any medical protocol. This caused abandonment of medical care by the general population and by healthcare professionals, following the official recommendations. The official recommendations thereby may have promoted excessive and dangerous self-medication with over-the-counter substances such as Doliprane^® and analogous drugs. Signatures of the unprecedented perturbation in the healthcare system include changes in specific drug usage and consumption in 2020, such as significant drops in the use of antibiotics and significant increases in the use of psychoactive drugs (Chaillot, 2020) (and our article in preparation). One specific example is the Rivotril^® drug (clonazepam) in its injectable form, which by decree[4] could exceptionally by used from 23 March to 15 April 2020 without marketing authorization to terminate patients affected or likely to be affected by SARS-CoV-2 if their health status justified it, and which showed an increase of more than 200% in April 2020 compared to the mean over January 2017 to February 2020 (Chaillot, 2020).

In the USA, the early over-use of mechanical ventilators is a well-studied aspect of deadly COVID‑19 medical responses (Richardson et al., 2020).

In addition, and in Canada, the unprecedented strict mass quarantine and isolation of both sick and healthy elderly people, together and separately, would have caused the deaths of many of them, and is probably a main cause of the “covid-peak” event in Canada, where a great majority of COVID-19-assigned deaths occurred in care homes for the elderly (Clarke, 2021):

During the first wave of the pandemic (March through August 2020), residents of nursing and seniors’ homes accounted for more than 80% of all reported COVID-19 deaths (ref). […] By mid-December (partway through the second wave that lasted from September 2020 through February 2021), there were about 44,000 cases and 9,200 deaths in nursing and seniors’ homes (ref). As of early March 2021, reports indicated that nursing and seniors’ homes continued to account for the greatest proportion of outbreak-related cases and deaths, representing about 7% of all cases and more than 50% of all deaths (refs).

By the said mass quarantine in care homes and establishments, Canadian provincial institutions isolated vulnerable elderly persons from their families, limited movements within establishments, often confining individuals to their rooms or beds for days and weeks if not months, reduced the staff and allowed staff to be absent, forced staff to adopt extreme measures such as masks, shields and gloves, which can induce a measure of fear or terror, created a general atmosphere of danger, and prevented air circulation by locking doors and windows, and by preventing ingoing and outgoing traffic except for essential services (Campbell, 2020; Comas-Herrera, Fernandez, et al., 2020; Wu, 2020).

This would have both: retained the pathogen-bearing aerosol particles suspended in the air without their evacuation (Morawska and Milton, 2020); and induced psychological stress in the residents.

Psychological stress is known:

1. to be a major factor causing diseases, including immune response dysfunction, depression, cardiovascular disease and cancer (Cohen, Janicki-Deverts and Miller, 2007),
2. to be a dominant factor in making an individual susceptible to viral respiratory diseases, in terms of intensity of the infection (Cohen, Tyrrell and Smith, 1991), and
3. to have more deleterious effects in elderly persons than in younger persons (Prenderville et al., 2015).

Furthermore, social isolation itself, in addition to individual psychological stress, is known to have an added impact on the said susceptibility to viral respiratory disease (Cohen et al., 1997).

Furthermore, there is a longer term “abandonment of life” phenomenon that occurs with imposed extended isolations of elderly persons, the so-called “glissement” syndrome (or “slipping away syndrome” or “geriatric failure to thrive”), which is analogous to depression (Robertson and Montagnini, 2004; Clegg et al., 2013; Steptoe et al., 2013; Ong, Uchino and Wethington, 2016).

The suddenly applied national policy of forced quarantine and the psychological stress it generated on fragile elderly people would have been a contributor in the decrease of efficiency of immune system response to a viral respiratory disease (Comas-Herrera, Zalakaín, et al., 2020) and this is a probable explanation for much of the mortality in the “covid-peak” and in the “2nd wave”. The same mechanism would operate in any setting (facility, group home, home, hospital) where persons with health vulnerabilities are isolated and susceptible to psychological stress.

Whereas care homes are institutional environments that are extremely susceptible to epidemics, whereas VRD epidemics in care homes are common and this is well known (Utsumi et al., 2010), and whereas the best recommendation to prevent the spread of a VRD epidemic in a care home is vigilant and early diagnosis of cases of clinically ill infected individuals followed by rapid effective treatment and isolation/distancing of those individuals (Loeb et al., 2000) (Bowles et al., 2003), therefore it is important to note that the opposite was done in Canadian care homes: no surveillance for emergent clinical infections, no treatment or search for treatment, no targeted removal/distancing or isolation of the clinically ill infected individuals, and universal lockdown of all residents. Even antibiotic treatment of bacterial co-infections may have been in-effect denied, as appears to have been the case in France (as mentioned above).

Rancourt recently summarized the situation this way:[5]

The mechanism that made care homes and institutions for sick and elderly persons into killing fields includes the following elements (refs):

• infection seeding by hospital transfers into the care homes
• universal lockdowns of the care homes
• denied specialized medical treatment to the residents of the care homes
• reduced staffing and staff abandonment in the care homes, and negligence
• collateral effects of the universal lockdown of the care homes: extreme social isolation, psychological stress, reduced aerosol-exhaust ventilation, lost oversight of the institutions by family-members

We can add the use of Rivotril^® (in France), which would have terminated some elderly patients with breathing difficulties, and other changes in treatment practices (see above).

4.6 Would there have been fewer deaths?

Although we have shown that there was no pandemic, nonetheless, there are year to year variations in mortality in non-pandemic years, and a valid question remains: Would fewer immediate and later deaths have resulted in the absence of the pandemic response?

We conclude that the answer is “yes”. The “covid-peak” was palpably induced by the pandemic response, at a time in the long-term seasonal cycle when there is always a decline in ACM by time. It was followed by an anomalously small mortality for the 85+ years age group, showing that deaths were accelerated in this age group. Likewise, the mortality of young males (0-44 years) has a large increase in the summer-2020, and into the fall, a phenomenon never before seen, which cannot be due to a VRD pathogen.

5. Concluding comments: Missing self-evaluation

We proved that there was no pandemic in the COVID-period in Canada, if the concept of a pandemic means anything. We showed strong evidence that the pandemic response was so aggressive and ill-advised as to have large negative health consequences, identified in ACM by time.

Although there was no pandemic, our analysis of the ACM by time data suggests that the pandemic response in Canada was a reckless and deadly fiasco. Had there been a particularly virulent pathogen, this level of government and institutional negligence, based on the international trend in attitudes and on political motives, would not have been possible.

There is no concrete evidence that the provincial and federal governments have learned any lesson from what was a massive public health blunder. On the contrary, there is every sign that governments continue to have a siloed approach based entirely on vaccine programs and ineffective personal hygiene regulations, while ignoring the science relevant to what actually occurred in Canadian care homes, and while avoiding strategies to start to address what actually occurred, and is occurring.

A first and immediate step should be to trash the pandemic-response methods that were implemented after the WHO’s declaration of a pandemic, and to develop expertise-based national skepticism about such declarations and their accompanying recommendations.

We hope that our analysis will be useful to public health policy reviewers, and that the needed serious in-depth critical review of the government and medical responses will be undertaken, one way or another. We further hope that this will be done with transparency and accountability, and that it will include broad consultations.

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This article was originally published on denisrancourt.ca.

Prof. Denis Rancourt, Ontario Civil Liberties Association (ocla.ca), [email protected]

Marine Baudin and Jeremie Mercier, Mercier Production (jeremie-mercier.com) 

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2021–Chaillot : Chaillot P. « La mortalité en Europe. Comprendre les données de mortalité européenne pour prendre les bonnes décisions. » Mondialisation. Published June 15, 2021. Accessed June 16, 2021. https://www.mondialisation.ca/la-mortalite-en-europe-comprendre-les-donnees-de-mortalite-europeenne-pour-prendre-les-bonnes-decisions/5657446

2021–Clarke : “Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in nursing and residential care facilities in Canada”, by Janine Clarke, StatCan (10 June 2021), Catalogue no. 45-28-0001 —- https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/45-28-0001/2021001/article/00025-eng.htm

2021–StatCan : Statistics Canada (2021). Table 13-10-0768-01  Weekly death counts, by age group and sex https://doi.org/10.25318/1310076801-eng (accessed 2 August 2021)

2020–Campbell : Campbell, A. D. (2020) ‘Practical Implications of Physical Distancing, Social Isolation, and Reduced Physicality for Older Adults in Response to COVID-19’, Journal of Gerontological Social Work, pp. 1–3. doi: 10.1080/01634372.2020.1772933. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32501151/

2020–Comas-Herrera : Comas-Herrera, A., Fernandez, J.-L., et al. (2020) ‘COVID-19: Implications for the Support of People with Social Care Needs in England’, Journal of Aging & Social Policy, 32(4–5), pp. 365–372. doi: 10.1080/08959420.2020.1759759. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32497462/

2020–Comas-Herrera : Comas-Herrera, A., Zalakaín, J., et al. (2020) ‘Mortality associated with COVID-19 outbreaks in care homes: early international evidence’. https://ltccovid.org/2020/04/12/mortality-associated-with-covid-19-outbreaks-in-care-homes-early-international-evidence/

2020–Levin : Levin AT, Hanage WP, Owusu-Boaitey N, Cochran KB, Walsh SP, Meyerowitz-Katz G. Assessing the age specificity of infection fatality rates for COVID-19: systematic review, meta-analysis, and public policy implications. Eur J Epidemiol. 2020 Dec;35(12):1123-1138. doi: 10.1007/s10654-020-00698-1. Epub 2020 Dec 8. PMID: 33289900; PMCID: PMC7721859. —- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7721859/

2020–Morawska : Morawska, L. and Milton, D. K. et al. (239 signatories) (2020) ‘It is Time to Address Airborne Transmission of COVID-19’, Clinical Infectious Diseases. doi: 10.1093/cid/ciaa939. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7454469/

2020–Rancourt : 20 August 2020 article “Evaluation of the virulence of SARS-CoV-2 in France, from all-cause mortality 1946-2020”, by Rancourt, DG, Baudin, M, and Mercier, J, ResearchGate, DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.16836.65920/1 —- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343775235_Evaluation_of_the_virulence_of_SARS-CoV-2_in_France_from_all-cause_mortality_1946-2020

2020–Rancourt : “All-cause mortality during COVID-19: No plague and a likely signature of mass homicide by government response”, by Rancourt, DG (2 June 2020) ResearchGate.    DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.24350.77125  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341832637_All-cause_mortality_during_COVID-19_No_plague_and_a_likely_signature_of_mass_homicide_by_government_response

2020b–Rancourt : “Masks Don’t Work: a Review of Science Relevant to Covid-19 Social Policy”. Rancourt, DG (11 April 2020) ResearchGate, https://vixra.org/abs/2006.0044 –https://denisrancourt.ca/entries.php?id=8&name=2020_04_11_masks_dont_work_a_review_of_science_relevant_to_covid_19_social_policy

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Notes

[1] See: “COVID” section, Denis Rancourt’s website: https://denisrancourt.ca/categories.php?id=1&name=covid(accessed on 5 August 2021).

[2] “Montreal police, coroner investigating owner of seniors’ residence where 31 died in less than 1 month” by Colin Harris · CBC News · Posted: Apr 12, 2020 12:56 PM ET | Last Updated: April 13, 2020 (accessed 6 August 2021). https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/covid-19-private-seniors-home-dorval-chsld-herron-1.5530327

[3] “Military report reveals what sector has long known: Ontario’s nursing homes are in trouble” by Adam Carter · CBC News · Posted: May 27, 2020 4:00 AM ET | Last Updated: May 27, 2020 (accessed 6 August 2021). https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/military-long-term-care-home-report-covid-ontario-1.5585844

[4] Décret N° 2020-293 Du 23 Mars 2020 Prescrivant Les Mesures Générales Nécessaires Pour Faire Face à l’épidémie de Covid-19 Dans Le Cadre de l’état d’urgence Sanitaire.; 2020. https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/loda/id/LEGIARTI000041767762/2020-03-29/

[5] “The Great VIRAL Debate: Dr Rancourt’s Closing Statement” by Denis Rancourt, Off-Guardian (10 November 2020) (Accessed on 6 August 2021). https://off-guardian.org/2020/11/10/the-great-viral-debate-dr-rancourts-closing-statement/

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

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Appendix: ACM/w normalized by population, and comparisons

In this appendix, we show various plots of ACM/w, normalized by population, and various plots comparing ACM/w data, by province, and by age group.

Statistics Canada (StatCan) is the national statistical office of the country. The all-cause mortality (ACM) and the population (pop) data used in this appendix were retrieved from the StatCan database. The following table shows the characteristics of the data:

*At the date of access, data were available from week-1 of 2010 (beginning of January) to week-17 of 2021 (end of April). In the following figures, we show the data until week-12 of 2021 (end of March), because the data are not consolidated in later weeks, which gives a large artifact (anomalous drop in mortality).

Moreover, data can be retrieved by sex (males/females) or by age group. For the population data, the age groups are year by year from 0 to 99 years-old, and the last group is 100 years-old and over. For the ACM data, the age groups are as follows:

• 0-44 years-old
• 45-64 years-old
• 65-84 years-old
• 85 years-old and over

The population is estimated on July 1^st of each year. The ACM/w of one calendar year has been normalized by the population of that calendar year (ACM/pop/w). The only exception is the year 2021, as there are no population estimates for that year, the ACM/w has been normalized by the population estimates for 2020.

Sources

2021–StatCan : Statistics Canada (2021). Table 13-10-0768-01  Weekly death counts, by age group and sex https://doi.org/10.25318/1310076801-eng (accessed 2 August 2021)

2020–StatCan : Statistics Canada (2020). Table 17-10-0005-01  Population estimates on July 1st, by age and sex https://doi.org/10.25318/1710000501-eng (accessed 31 July 2021)

Appendix Figures

Figure A1: All-cause mortality by population by week in Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia and Alberta from 2010 to 2021. Data are displayed from January 2010 to March 2021. Data were retrieved from StatCan (StatCan, 2020 and 2021).

Figure A2: All-cause mortality by population by week in Ontario and British Columbia from 2010 to 2021. Data are displayed from January 2010 to March 2021. Data were retrieved from StatCan (StatCan, 2020 and 2021).

Figure A3: All-cause mortality by population by week in Ontario and Quebec from 2010 to 2021. Data are displayed from January 2010 to March 2021. Data were retrieved from StatCan (StatCan, 2020 and 2021).

Figure A4: All-cause mortality by population by week in Ontario and Quebec from 2018 to 2021. Data are displayed from January 2018 to March 2021. Data were retrieved from StatCan (StatCan, 2020 and 2021).

Figure A5: All-cause mortality by population by week in Ontario and Quebec for the 0-44 age group, both sexes, from 2010 to 2021. Data are displayed from January 2010 to March 2021. Data were retrieved from StatCan (StatCan, 2020 and 2021).

Figure A6: All-cause mortality by population by week in Ontario and Quebec for the 45-64 age group, both sexes, from 2010 to 2021. Data are displayed from January 2010 to March 2021. Data were retrieved from StatCan (StatCan, 2020 and 2021).

Figure A7: All-cause mortality by population by week in Ontario and Quebec for the 65-84 age group, both sexes, from 2010 to 2021. Data are displayed from January 2010 to March 2021. Data were retrieved from StatCan (StatCan, 2020 and 2021).

Figure A8: All-cause mortality by population by week in Ontario and Quebec for the 85+ age group, both sexes, from 2010 to 2021. Data are displayed from January 2010 to March 2021. Data were retrieved from StatCan (StatCan, 2020 and 2021).

Figure A9: All-cause mortality by week in Canada by age group, both sexes, from 2010 to 2021. Data are displayed from January 2010 to March 2021. Data were retrieved from StatCan (StatCan, 2021).

Figure A10: All-cause mortality by week in Canada for the 65-84 and 85+ age groups, both sexes, from 2010 to 2021. Data are displayed from January 2010 to March 2021. Data were retrieved from StatCan (StatCan, 2021).

Figure A11: All-cause mortality by population by week in Canada for the 65-84 and 85+ age groups, both sexes, from 2010 to 2021. Data are displayed from January 2010 to March 2021. Data were retrieved from StatCan (StatCan, 2020 and 2021).

Figure A12: All-cause mortality by population by week in Canada for the 65-84 age group, both sexes, from 2010 to 2021. Data are displayed from January 2010 to March 2021. Data were retrieved from StatCan (StatCan, 2020 and 2021).

Figure A13: All-cause mortality by population by week in Canada for the 45-64 age group, both sexes, from 2010 to 2021. Data are displayed from January 2010 to March 2021. Data were retrieved from StatCan (StatCan, 2020 and 2021).

Figure A14: All-cause mortality by population by week in Canada for the 0-44 age group, both sexes, from 2010 to 2021. Data are displayed from January 2010 to March 2021. Data were retrieved from StatCan (StatCan, 2020 and 2021).

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In 1626, “The New Atlantis: an unfinished work,” written by Sir Francis Bacon, was published posthumously. It described a utopian land of “generosity and enlightenment, dignity and splendor, piety and public spirit” with citizens of  “high moral character and honesty.” It is believed that The New Atlantis planted the seed for transforming a continental wilderness into a democratic republic that became the United States. 

Fast forward four hundred years and that same nation is hardly recognizable today as the American Empire disintegrates under the weight of one unfathomable crisis after another. Once a country whose origins were the result of divine providence, devoted to the concept of self rule and individual liberty, as it grew into the world’s most esteemed system of government and its people, extraordinary and honorable.

There is something surreal about the Afghanistan troop withdrawal scenario that does not fit the facts as they have emerged.   We are asked to believe that the pathetic, doddering Joe Biden should be held solely responsible for the gross failures committed by the US State Department and the military hierarchy including Joint Chief Mark Milley and Afghanistan Commander General Kenneth McKenzie.

Clearly, the Presidency is where the buck stops, but scratching beneath the surface reveals we are being spoon-fed that a massive bungling operation is simply a more than normal bureaucratic snafu not unexpected of the Federal government. It is undeniable that there are administration officials who view American lives as no more valuable than any other nationality as well as the distressing reality that there has been a government infiltration at the professional political class level that is more devoted to Klaus Schwab’s collapse of American society rather than the New Atlantis vision.

There is not one scintilla of humor about State Department bureaucrats being confused with the Apple Dumpling Gang on steroids as they inexplicably held the Taliban’s hand throughout each day, leaving any thinking person to consider the unthinkable: that the unmitigated failure of geopolitical consequences, a disaster of unimaginable negligence can have only been the result of a planned strategy and an intentional series of decisions to further destroy American sovereignty.

This is not to say that Biden, who may have less than half a functioning brain, is responsible enough to be held responsible via Amendment 25 but rather that he is the convenient scapegoat for a dark ops situation, the full awareness of which may lie beyond our comprehension.

The credibility of the entire withdrawal tragedy relies on the US government’s open door communications as well as trading messages with its newest best friends, the Taliban as if they are partners in some otherwise malodorous project that defies definition.

As of January 20^th, the Biden forces made the conscious decision to reject Trump’s ‘conditions based withdrawal‘ plan as incoming Pentagon Chief Lloyd Austin issued a dramatic sixty day ‘stand down’ order to investigate ‘white supremacy’ within the ranks. Declaring it to be the nation’s number one national security risk, Austin told the Senate Armed Services Committee that

“The job of the Department of Defense is to keep America safe from our enemies. But we can’t do that if some of those enemies lie within our own ranks.”

In an embarrassingly inadequate joint press conference, knowing that the Taliban offensive in Kandahar had begun a week earlier, Defense Secretary Austin and Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley announced that the Kabul airport was secured by the US military. Austin added

“There have been no hostile interactions with the Taliban. And our lines of communication with Taliban commanders remain open, as they should be.”

Milley who was Joint Chief during the Trump administration and had attended weekly meetings on Trump’s withdrawal plan, feigned ignorance that “there was nothing that I or anyone else saw that indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days” when he well knew the Trump team assessment was always 2-4 days for a Taliban takeover.

Milley repeated his best reassurance at least twice that the “State Department is currently working with the Taliban to facilitate safe transit to the Airport for American citizens. That’s the primary means; that’s the primary effort.”

It was all one big staged lie; the Biden Administration, Milley and Austin had the assessments at their fingertips and chose to reject it because it came from the Trump Administration.

Hours after the Abbey Gate attack that took the lives of 13 young Marines, General Kenneth McKenzie, Commander of US Central Command in Afghanistan held a press briefing exhibiting a cold-hearted lack of humanity as he announced:

“It was a failure by Taliban operates with varying degrees of competence; some are scrupulously good, some are not. The other thing we do is we share a version of this information with Talibans so they can actually do some searching out their forces and we believe some attacks have been thwarted by them.  We also use Taliban as a tool to protect us as much as possible.  We share a common purpose; as long as we keep that common purpose aligned, they have been useful to work with. They’ve cut some of our security concerns down.” McKenzie added that the intelligence sharing with the Taliban had been in effect since August 14 and included the biometric program.

Almost simultaneously Politico reported that “US officials gave Taliban a list of names of American citizens and allies to grant entry into the outer perimeter of the city’s airport.”

Some of the curiosities that defy explanation include what names were on ‘the list’ that McKenzie referred to as sharing with the Taliban and as reported by Politico? And for what purpose were Taliban recipients other than to enjoy a favored game of torture as their favorite sport? Are we naive enough to believe those names will be given a personal escort by the Taliban out of the country? Were any of the names on that list State Department whistleblowers who have been leaking information about a dark ops biochemical program being run by Dynaport Vaccine Company? How has Eric Prince, founder of Blackwater Services and less known for humanitarian impulses, offered rides out of Kabul to favored individuals?  What exactly were the circumstances of the Abbey Gate bombing and the whereabouts of our martyred thirteen Marines?

A logical question at this point might be why the US committed twenty years of war in Afghanistan since the Taliban was never known to be complicit with the 911 attack? After spending $4T in Afghanistan, with 800K US armed services, 2,448 fatalities, 20,722 wounded and 4,000 contractors, what government would justify a total walk-away from $80 Billion of military hardware including 70,000 vehicles, 600K American made weapons, hundreds of aircraft and some of the most sophisticated weaponry in the world?

Meanwhile, in no less an incomparable political crisis masquerading as a massive health pandemic, the utter chaos in Afghanistan has not stopped Big Pharma’s Covid campaign to wage a concurrent crisis against the no-vaxxers as the southern border continues to explode with thousands of illegals.

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Renee Parsons served on the ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and as president of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter. She has been an elected public official in Colorado, staff in the Office of the Colorado State Public Defender, an environmental lobbyist for Friends of the Earth and a staff member of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC. She can be found at [email protected]

She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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In this new and expanded edition of Michel Chossudovsky’s 2002 best seller, the author blows away the smokescreen put up by the mainstream media, that 9/11 was an attack on America by “Islamic terrorists”.  Through meticulous research, the author uncovers a military-intelligence ploy behind the September 11 attacks, and the cover-up and complicity of key members of the Bush Administration.

The expanded edition, which includes twelve new chapters focuses on the use of 9/11 as a pretext for the invasion and illegal occupation of Iraq, the militarisation of justice and law enforcement and the repeal of democracy.

According to Chossudovsky, the  “war on terrorism” is a complete fabrication based on the illusion that one man, Osama bin Laden, outwitted the $40 billion-a-year American intelligence apparatus. The “war on terrorism” is a war of conquest. Globalisation is the final march to the “New World Order”, dominated by Wall Street and the U.S. military-industrial complex.

September 11, 2001 provides a justification for waging a war without borders. Washington’s agenda consists in extending the frontiers of the American Empire to facilitate complete U.S. corporate control, while installing within America the institutions of the Homeland Security State.

 

People are dying from the mRNA Covid Vaccine.

There is a worldwide upward trend in vaccine deaths and injuries. 

The latest official figures (August 30, 2021) point to approximately: 

38,488 mRNA vaccine reported and registered deaths in the EU, UK and US (combined) and

6.3 million reported “adverse events”.

These are the official figures. Less than 10% of deaths and injuries are reported. For vaccine adverse events approximately one percent of the injuries are registered are reported.

The order of magnitude of vaccine related deaths is AT LEAST 380,000 for a combined population (EU, UK, US) of 830 Million.

In many countries, there was a significant shift in mortality following the introduction of the mRNA vaccine

Source: HeathData.org

 

What are the Causes? 

What is addressed in this article is the process of  “detection” and “estimation” of the so-called Covid-19 positive cases respectively among the vaccinated and unvaccinated as well as the routine  RT-PCR tests undertaken by the health authorities.

Amply documented, confirmed by the WHO, the RT-PCR test is Totally Invalid. It does not identify SARS-CoV-2, nor does it identify the “variants” of  the virus.

The numbers resulting from the PCR test are totally meaningless.

The pandemic is an illusion. These so-called Covid positive cases are nonetheless used by the governments and the media to sustain the 24/7 fear campaign. 

Vaccine Related Mortality and Morbidity

What the data indicates is that since the onset of the vaccination program, there has been an  increasing trend (Worldwide) in vaccine related deaths and adverse events, which is also accompanied by an increase in the number of vaccinated people who have sought medical attention in  hospitals  and clinics.

Vaccinated Spreading the Virus? 

First an introductory note: There are reports (yet to be fully corroborated) suggesting that the vaccinated “are spreading the virus”.  According to Nobel Prize Laureate Professor Luc Montagnier it is the vaccinated and not the unvaccinated who “are spreading the virus.”

“Viral loads of breakthrough Delta variant infection cases were 251 times higher than those of cases infected with old strains detected between March-April 2020. Time from diagnosis to PCR negative was 8–33 days (median: 21). …

… Breakthrough Delta variant infections are associated with high viral loads, prolonged PCR positivity, and low levels of vaccine-induced neutralizing antibodies, explaining the transmission between the vaccinated [and unvaccinated] people.

The viral transmission from the vaccinated to the unvaccinated raised by Montagnier, Et al and the Lancet report quoted above, remains to be firmly corroborated by medical doctors and scientists. No reliable empirical data has been put forth.

Moreover, it should be understood that the detection of  “viral loads breakthrough of Delta variants infection cases” cannot be confirmed by the RT-PCR test, which has been declared totally invalid by the WHO.

More generally, all the estimates conducted using the PCR test since January 2020 are invalid and cannot be used as a basis for evaluating the spread of the alleged epidemic.

Hospitalizations and Medical Attention to the Vaccinated

What should be addressed at this juncture of the crisis is the following. Since the onset of the vaccination program, there has been:

•  an  increasing trend in vaccine related deaths and adverse events, 
• an increase in the number of vaccinated people who have been hospitalized and/or have received medical attention in  hospitals /clinics.  

In turn this tendency has led to an increase in the recorded number Covid positive cases among vaccinated persons.

About the Author

Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal, Editor of Global Research.

He has undertaken field research in Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and the Pacific and has written extensively on the economies of developing countries with a focus on poverty and social inequality. He has also undertaken research in Health Economics (UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC),  UNFPA, CIDA, WHO, Government of Venezuela, John Hopkins International Journal of Health Services (1979, 1983)

He is the author of eleven books including The Globalization of Poverty and The New World Order (2003), America’s “War on Terrorism” (2005),  The Globalization of War, America’s Long War against Humanity (2015).

He is a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.  His writings have been published in more than twenty languages. In 2014, he was awarded the Gold Medal for Merit of the Republic of Serbia for his writings on NATO’s war of aggression against Yugoslavia. He can be reached at [email protected]

See Michel Chossudovsky, Biographical Note

Michel Chossudovsky’s Articles on Global Research

These estimates are used to promote the fear campaign. They are routinely reported 24/7 by the governments, the media and the medical professionals are TOTALLY invalid.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

FAIR (10/6/20, 6/28/21) has previously critiqued Western news media’s credulous coverage of evidence-free “lab leak” speculations. One key factor in spreading suspicion that the coronavirus might have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) is media’s early and ongoing politicization of the World Health Organization’s investigation into the pandemic’s origins. Much of this politicization weaponizes Orientalist tropes about China being especially, perhaps genetically, untrustworthy—the sort of people who would unleash Covid-19 on the world.

While no new evidence has emerged suggesting that the virus emerged from the WIV, many more Americans now believe it did. A Politico/Harvard poll in July, following an increase of uncritical Western media coverage on the lab leak theory, found that 52% of US adults now believe Covid-19 leaked from a lab, up from 29% in March 2020. This is contrary to the assessment of most scientists, who believe, based on available evidence, that a natural origin for the virus is more likely.

At the center of the search for the virus’s origins is the WHO. Its initial investigation, which ended in February 2021, concluded that the lab leak hypothesis was “extremely unlikely.” Shortly afterwards, however, WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stated that although the lab leak theory is the least likely cause of the pandemic, it nevertheless “requires further investigation,” and that “all hypotheses remain on the table” (BBC, 3/31/21). The WHO is now calling for WIV laboratory audits and access to raw data from China, with Tedros claiming that attempts to rule out the lab leak theory were “premature” (France24, 7/16/21, 7/16/21).

In a rejection of WHO requests for greater “transparency” and “access” in its proposed plan for the second phase of the origins investigation, the Chinese government reemphasized its preference that the second phase of the WHO investigation focus on further research around possible pre-Wuhan Covid cases globally.

Was China ‘stalling’ investigation?

Early news reports about potential WHO investigations into pandemic origins portrayed China as “stalling” an international probe, and failed to give context for Beijing’s initial rejection of requests for an investigation.

Under the headline “On the Ground in Wuhan, Signs of China Stalling Probe of Coronavirus Origins” (5/12/20), the Wall Street Journal reported that Beijing was “stalling international efforts to find the source of the virus.” It mentioned that this was occurring “amid an escalating US push to blame China for the pandemic”—”amid” rather than “because of,” as though this might be mere coincidence.

The Journal claimed that the “lack of transparency and international involvement in the search has left room for speculation and blame,” even though Chinese officials have repeatedly explained that the blame game and politicized speculation were why it resisted further transparency and international involvement. The Journal did note:

China isn’t the first country to resist an international investigation of a health crisis on its territory, and its early focus on controlling the virus is understandable, health experts said.

Bloomberg’s report “China Is Making It Harder to Solve the Mystery of How Covid Began” (12/30/20) presented China as a selfish country uninterested in tracing pandemic origins, attempting to silence and punish countries like Australia for merely calling for an independent investigation:

Where the pathogen first emerged and how it transmitted to humans is a stubborn mystery, one that’s becoming more elusive with each passing month. Before the initial cluster among stall-holders at a produce market in central China, the trail largely goes cold, and the country the novel coronavirus hit first — the place many blame for unleashing the disease on an under-prepared world — now has little incentive to help find the true origin of the greatest public health emergency in a century….

China has ignored appeals for an independent investigation into the virus’s origin, hammering Australia with trade restrictions after it called for one. It’s also stalled efforts by the World Health Organization to get top infectious diseases experts into Wuhan this year.

A Washington Post editorial, “We’re Still Missing the Origin Story of This Pandemic. China Is Sitting on the Answers” (2/5/21), laid out many of the frequent suspicions, questions and demands the US government, and much of US media, have towards China:

What is China trying to hide about the origins of the pandemic—and why?

If the WIV had no role in sparking the outbreak, it should be relatively straightforward for Dr. Shi [Zhengli] to safely open up the databases to scientists so they can properly understand the evolutionary origins of SARS-CoV-2. The institute should provide all records regarding bat samples, viruses and sequences, with verified information provenance, and eventually, it should be disclosed to all.

‘Weapons inspector’ powers

However, the innocent-sounding Australian request for an independent investigation was actually a startling call for giving the WHO, or another international body, “powers equivalent to those of a weapons inspector” to investigate the outbreak (Australia Broadcasting Corporation, 4/22/20, 5/20/20). By invoking such inflammatory rhetoric, Prime Minister Scott Morrison unavoidably brought to mind familiar stories like the invasion of Iraq, launched on the basis of false US/UK accusations that it possessed weapons of mass destruction, even after weapons inspectors found no evidence of any (Los Angeles Times, 10/23/02; FAIR.org, 3/19/07; Extra!, 4/06).

This was occurring as the Trump administration was hyping up its propaganda campaign to blame and punish China for the pandemic, in efforts to sue Beijing for damages and reparations (New York Times, 5/3/20). It’s no wonder the Chinese government viewed Morrison’s statements as a political accusation, rather than a good-faith scientific effort to trace the pandemic’s origins.

Australia’s ABC (5/20/20) noted that China declared that it was always willing to agree to a “scientific investigation.” This seems to be corroborated by China’s agreement on May 18, 2021, to an investigation at the World Health Assembly (WHA) in Geneva, as soon as the hostile rhetoric was toned down, and when certain compromises (such as not granting the WHO new “weapons inspector” powers) were made on the WHA’s motion. Some compromises included assurances that China won’t be expected to take blame for the pandemic, along with the investigation not operating under a presumption of guilt, and occurring after the pandemic is brought under control (Business Insider, 5/19/20).

WHO manipulation conspiracy theories

The WHO’s credibility has also been subject to both US government and media politicization. As part of its China-blaming propaganda, the Trump administration pushed a baseless conspiracy theory that the WHO was under the corrupting influence of Chinese money, simply because the organization delivered conclusions Trump disliked. Some US media outlets helped lend legitimacy to Trump’s claims, as he used them to justify suspending US support for the organization (FAIR.org, 6/21/20).

The New York Times report, “In Hunt for Virus Source, WHO Let China Take Charge” (11/2/20), continued that media habit even months later. As evidence, the paper pointed to the WHO praising China’s undeniably excellent pandemic response—as judged by multipleindependent science journals—while refusing to applaud the Trump administration’s objectively horrible performance:

The WHO’s staunchest defenders note that, by the nature of its constitution, it is beholden to the countries that finance it. And it is hardly the only international body bending to China’s might. But even many of its supporters have been frustrated by the organization’s secrecy, its public praise for China and its quiet concessions.

The Times insinuated that the WHO was being manipulated by Chinese money, even though the US is the organization’s largest donor, contributing more than 10 times ($893 million) as much as China ($86 million) before the Trump administration vindictively suspended funding last April. In fact, some scientists argue that WHO Director General Tedros has “capitulated” to the “enormous pressure” of the “barrage of political and media commentary,” and is unduly influenced by the US (Science, 7/17/21). Yet questions about the WHO’s credibility only seem to travel in one direction in US media, with suspicions being raised only when the organization distances itself from the lab leak theory.

The Times attributed China’s delay to some innate or exceptional Chinese preference for secrecy and authoritarianism, claiming China’s “authoritarian leaders want to constrain” the WHO, and have “impeded” the effort for an independent investigation because they’re “notoriously allergic to outside scrutiny.” The Times resorted to these thought-terminating stereotypes as explanations for the months-long delay—omitting any mention of Australia’s provocative call for new “weapons inspector” powers to investigate China, or of other countries who also sensibly prioritized containing the pandemic within their borders before investigating pandemic origins. The Times‘ insinuations survived the paper’s admission that the probe was delayed due to the Trump administration’s illegal withdrawal from the WHO:

No date has been set for a visit, though diplomats say China and the health organization appear eager to pause until after the American election. Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee, has said he will keep the US in the organization if he wins.

Sham investigation or sound science?

It’s true that the first phase of investigation into Covid’s origins wasn’t conducted with maximum possible transparency. The Wall Street Journal (2/12/21, 5/23/21) has reported that WHO investigators were denied raw data, or original safety logs and lab records, on the WIV’s extensive work with bat coronaviruses, or to a Wuhan blood bank to test samples from before December 2019 for Covid-19 antibodies. They were, however, provided extensive summaries and analyses of that data by Chinese scientists and officials.

But corporate media coverage of the investigation implied that the results were suspect, simply because its parameters were set by the Chinese government in cooperation with the WHO, or because WHO investigators didn’t receive unfettered access to all information they wanted in Wuhan.

A New York Post op-ed (2/10/21) by Miranda Devine argued:

WHO conducted a fake investigation from the start, with a team of experts vetted by Beijing and a pre-planned conclusion designed to take the heat off China.

Any report produced by them is a waste of time. It is Chinese Communist Party propaganda that only exposes how fatally compromised by China WHO has become.

A Wall Street Journal op-ed, “The World Needs a Real Investigation Into the Origins of Covid-19” (1/15/21), implied that the probe was a sham because it was not investigating the lab leak scenario seriously enough, instead focusing on a natural origin—as though not treating both with equal gravity was ridiculous rather than based on scientific rationale:

The world needs an inquiry that considers not just natural origins but the possibility that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, escaped from a laboratory. The WHO team, however, plans to build on reports by Chinese scientists rather than mount an independent investigation….

The WHO team includes experts who traced the origins of Ebola and MERS outbreaks, but critics are concerned that it doesn’t have the expertise for an investigation that would examine possible lab origins.

A peer-reviewed pre-proof by over 20 of the world’s eminent virologists noted that “all previous human coronaviruses have zoonotic origins, as have the vast majority of human viruses,” and that aside from the 1977 A/H1N1 influenza pandemic that likely originated from a large-scale vaccine trial, “No epidemic has been caused by the escape of a novel virus and there is no data to suggest that the WIV—or any other laboratory—was working on SARS-CoV-2, or any virus close enough to be the progenitor, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.” It also noted:

Known laboratory outbreaks have been traced to both workplace and family contacts of index cases and to the laboratory of origin. Despite extensive contact tracing of early cases during the Covid-19 pandemic, there have been no reported cases related to any laboratory staff at the WIV and all staff in the laboratory of Dr. Shi Zhengli were reported to be seronegative for SARS-CoV-2 when tested in March 2020.

Whose burden of proof?

The New York Times’ “A Top Virologist in China, at Center of a Pandemic Storm, Speaks Out” (6/14/21) made it clear that a major component of the lab leak speculations depends on rejecting the credibility of Chinese scientists at the WIV. They described Shi Zhengli as “the key to whether the world will ever learn if the virus behind the devastating Covid-19 pandemic escaped from a Chinese lab.” She finds herself, according to the Times, in the predicament of having to defend the “reputation of her lab and, by extension, that of her country.”

The Times blamed “China’s refusal to allow an independent investigation into her lab, or to share data on its research,” for making it “difficult to validate Dr. Shi’s claims,” which “has only fueled nagging suspicions about how the pandemic could have taken hold in the same city that hosts an institute known for its work on bat coronaviruses.” But the Times did not question whether lab leak proponents had provided enough evidence to justify such “nagging suspicions.”

The Times noted Shi’s frustration at the burden of proof being placed on her to prove a negative, rather than on WIV accusers to provide evidence of a lab leak:

“How on earth can I offer up evidence for something where there is no evidence?” she said, her voice rising in anger during the brief, unscheduled conversation. “I don’t know how the world has come to this, constantly pouring filth on an innocent scientist,” she wrote in a text message.

Yet when media outlets omit plausible rationales for China resisting further cooperation with an international investigation, it becomes easier for their audiences to leap to the conclusion that China must be hiding evidence of a lab leak.

Typical national security concerns

In fact, it’s doubtful that any country would grant unrestricted access to the data from one of its top biolabs on the basis of the coincidence that the lab was located near where a pathogen was first detected. Such proximity is actually not strong evidence at all, considering that virology labs tend to specialize in the viruses found naturally around them. It seems especially unlikely other nations would grant unfettered access to a facility with a BSL-4 laboratory, since such facilities operate with heightened secrecy due to the national security risks of the dangerous pathogens they research, as the Washington Post (6/22/21) reported:

The events have shined a light on a research niche that—in China, the United States and elsewhere — operates with heightened secrecy because of the national security risks of handling deadly pathogens….

The precautions don’t mean the lab has anything to do with the virus’s origin, or that there’s anything nefarious about its classified projects. The United States also conducts classified pathogen research, and requires employees of high-containment labs to pass background checks.

The Post‘s Eva Dou cited virologist Angela Rasmussen explaining:

If the pandemic had started in the DC area, you can count on the fact that the US government would not allow an unfettered “independent” investigation to occur for the exact same reasons: It is a major longer-term security risk that can’t be fully mitigated…. It does not indicate the need to cover anything up, beyond not letting potential adversarial powers have carte blanche access to secure government facilities.

The US is not alone in politicizing the pandemic; China is also guilty of irresponsibly spreadingconspiracy theories regarding the Fort Detrick laboratory in Maryland researching dangerous pathogens being the origin of the pandemic. Chinese media often cite the Maryland lab’s shutdown over safety concerns in the summer of 2019, and the coincidence of reports of a mysterious respiratory illness circulating in northern Virginia around the same time—before the coronavirus was first detected in Wuhan—as well as the US military’s presence in Wuhan during October 2019 for its military games (Global Times, 6/28/21).

The US response has been to reject any international investigation for the exact same reasonsChina gives for denying further WIV inspection. But when they come from the US, they are reported without any objections from outlets like the Journal:

Most scientists say they have seen nothing to corroborate the idea that the virus came from a US military lab, and the White House has said there are no credible reasons to investigate it.

Lack of incentive for access

This is why epidemiologists like Dr. David Heymann (Nature, 4/1/21) have said that the fact China would allow an investigation at all is unusual, and possibly a sign of greater transparency from China than other developed countries, since he is “not sure” whether “other highly industrialized countries” would do the same. Frank Hamill (Nature, 6/5/20)—who previously managed a BSL-4 lab in the US—stated that it would be a “bit hypocritical” to “ask the Wuhan institute to open up its files and let people starting poking around,” given that (as Nature put it) “US biosecurity laboratories are far from fully transparent about their own research.”

Dr. David Gorski, managing editor of Science-Based Medicine (5/31/21), asked:

What country would welcome investigators with open arms into one of their major research institutions to look for evidence that its scientists had screwed up and caused a major disaster? Even if a government were confident that no such error had occurred, it might not be too thrilled with such an investigation, particularly when it’s coupled with what can only be called accusations of wrongdoing and being instigated by people hostile to you. That the Chinese are testy and unenthusiastic about cooperating is not a strong argument in favor of a lab leak. Sure, it could be a sign of a coverup, but it could also just be a normal reaction to accusations.

Foreign Policy’s deputy editor James Palmer (6/9/21) offered yet another plausible reason:

Nor is there any domestic public demand to cooperate on an investigation. Consider how the accusations over a supposed lab leak look from the perspective of ordinary Chinese people. Doctors and scientists who worked on coronaviruses are being painted as co-conspirators in the outbreak. And a country that utterly botched its pandemic response and that often refuses to participate in international accountability itself is making accusations against one that succeeded—driven in part by the politicians involved in that failure.

Yet another reason why China wouldn’t agree to further investigation—even if they’re confident no lab leak occurred—is that an investigation is only politically worthwhile when exoneration is a realistic possibility, but many virologists admit that a lab leak “may be near impossible to falsify” anyway, due to the inherent difficulties of proving a negative.

Australian journalist Caitlin Johnstone (6/8/21) also argued that China has no incentive to open itself up to more opportunities for bad press when Western media would follow the US’s lead in taking every opening to produce their desired anti-China narrative:

Beijing would be absolutely insane to open its doors to such an investigation, because it would have no way of preventing the US and its lackeys from manipulating the results and producing a narrative which fully incriminates the Chinese government while leaving Washington innocent.

Are her remarks hyperbolic?

Distorting China’s cooperation

While it’s true China hasn’t shown maximal transparency in the way the US demands (and would itself never grant to others), it’s also true that Orientalist narratives of Chinese secrecy and duplicity seem to be predetermined and unfalsifiable narratives for Western media, as is typical of coverage on countries Washington declares to be its Official Enemies.

For instance, the New York Times’ report “On WHO Trip, China Refused to Hand Over Important Data” (2/12/21) was called out for distorting and misrepresenting quotes given by the WHO team members, like Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance and Danish epidemiologist Thea Kølsen Fischer (MintPress News, 2/15/21). The Times claimed that the scientists said that “China’s continued resistance to revealing information about the early days of the coronavirus outbreak” made it “difficult for them to uncover important clues that could help stop future outbreaks of such dangerous diseases.”

Daszak tweeted in response to the article:

This was NOT my experience on @WHO mission. As lead of animal/environment working group I found trust & openness w/ my China counterparts. We DID get access to critical new data throughout. We DID increase our understanding of likely spillover pathways.

Fischer also tweeted:

This was NOT my experience either on the epidemiological side. We DID build up a good relationship in the Chinese/international epidemiology team! Allowing for heated arguments reflects a deep level of engagement in the room. Our quotes are intendedly twisted, casting shadows over important scientific work.

The Times report is especially suspect for insisting on the narrative of Chinese uncooperativeness, as it came less than a week after an Associated Press (2/7/21) interview with Daszak in which he testified that the Chinese side “granted full access to all sites and personnel they requested—a level of openness that even he hadn’t expected.”

Rejecting Sinophobic premises

FAIR has documented how US media have politicized the pandemic from the beginning, prioritizing condemnation of China’s political system, scapegoating China for the US’s disastrous handling of the pandemic (3/24/20) and alleging Chinese dishonesty without evidence (4/2/20)—all of which has stoked a surge in anti-Asian racism (3/6/20).

Media constantly repeat the repeatedly debunked myth of China punishing “whistleblower doctors” like Dr. Li Wenliang, and other falsehoods like the Chinese government denying that there was any human-to-human transmission of SARS-CoV-2 before January 20, 2020, or needlessly delaying the release of the SARS-CoV-2 genome (FAIR.org, 10/14/20; CGTN, 4/23/20, 8/22/20).

I also pointed out (FAIR.org, 1/20/21) that Dr. Zhang Jixian, the first doctor to report SARS-CoV-2 to health authorities, was rewarded for coming forward. US corporate  media outlets, however, generally omit her contribution to the world’s discovery of the virus, which would greatly complicate the narrative of a Chinese “coverup.”

This China-vilifying pandemic coverage unsurprisingly extends to the search for the virus’s origins. Although the lab leak hypothesis is often presented by its proponents as a solely scientific inquiry that has been unfairly dismissed for political reasons, in a seemingly innocuous “just-asking-questions” fashion (Salon, 4/24/20; New York, 1/4/21, 6/3/21), this couldn’t be farther from the truth. The lab leak hypothesis is, in fact, a literal conspiracy theory that is gaining traction due to constant media innuendo.

WIV’s Shi Zhengli has testified that her laboratory never had SARS-CoV-2 prior to first receiving patient samples on December 30, 2019, after the virus was first reported by Dr. Zhang Jixian to health authorities on December 27, 2019 (Scientific American, 6/1/20). Early speculations led Shi to declare, “I swear with my life, [the virus] has nothing to do with the lab.”

Shi also affirmed that the WIV has only isolated and grown in culture three bat coronaviruses related to any that infect humans, and these are related to SARS-CoV, not SARS-CoV-2. She says she was never ordered to destroy any viruses after the outbreak surfaced, and that there had been “no pathogen leaks or personnel infection accidents” at the WIV to date (Science, 7/24/20). Shi insists that she would welcome “any kind of visit” to rule out the lab leak theory, claiming she has “nothing to fear,” because she’s confident that she “did nothing wrong.”

If Shi’s testimony is true, the Wuhan lab leak theory cannot be correct, since possessing SARS-CoV-2 in the laboratory prior to the outbreak is a necessary precondition for a lab leak. This is also why any version of the lab leak theory is literally alleging a conspiracy of Chinese scientists lying about their work—along with foreign scientists and officials familiar with their research—in concert with the Chinese government.

Of course, rejecting Sinophobic premises that Chinese people are exceptionally deceptive doesn’t imply the opposite conclusion that Chinese people are incredibly trustworthy; it simply means that the burden of proof is on those alleging Chinese deceit, as it should be for anyone else. Presuming without evidence that WIV scientists are guilty of lying is based on centuries-old Yellow Peril propaganda portraying China as inherently dishonest, coming from a country with a long history of hatred towards Chinese people.

Evidence of actual coverup

But perhaps the biggest irony is that there is evidence of lying by Chinese officials. It’s just that the lying points in the opposite direction of a laboratory origin for SARS-CoV-2.

Since the pandemic began, the Chinese government claimed that the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market vendors, once suspected to be at the origin of the outbreak, never sold any illegal wildlife. Yet it’s been proven that vendors at the markets linked to some of the earliest Covid-19 cases were illegally selling a range of wildlife in unsanitary conditions, from which the coronavirus may have spread (Bloomberg, 6/7/21). Perhaps the most interesting part of these revelations is that the evidence came from Chinese researchers, from the China West Normal University in Nanchong, who exposed their government’s lies (Nature, 6/7/21).

US corporate media initially used the Huanan Market origin theory to propagate misleading conflations between wildlife markets and “wet markets,” and perpetuated racist stereotypes of Chinese people’s eating habits being especially unsanitary, but the theory was abandonedbecause the earliest known cases weren’t linked to the market (FAIR.org, 5/7/20). However, recent evidence that illegal wildlife was being sold at the Huanan Market has caused some scientists to believe a zoonotic origin is even more likely than before, and to give the possibility of a Huanan Market origin a second look.

Evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey—who signed the open letter calling for a more serious investigation of the WIV—stated “transmission by another species, without a lab escape, is the most likely scenario by a long shot” (NPR, 7/19/21). Worobey even suspects the spillover began at the Huanan Market, though the WHO team concluded it was “more of an amplifying event, rather than necessarily a true ground zero.”

Scientists who mapped out the locations of the earliest Covid cases in Wuhan showed why believing the WIV to be the source of SARS-CoV-2, simply because the virus was first detected in Wuhan, is simplistic. They found that most of the earliest documented cases and excess pneumonia deaths were clustered around the Huanan Market—with “no epidemiological link to any other locality in Wuhan”—with SARS-CoV-2 detected in environmental samples “primarily in the western section that traded in wildlife and domestic animal products.”

Despite concerns about Daszak’s presence on the WHO team, due to his own organizationhaving worked closely with the WIV, he stated, “Don’t think for a minute” the Chinese government “is happy when we repeatedly state that this likely came out of industrial-scale wildlife farming employing 14 million people” (NPR, 3/15/21). Rasmussen, who was not on the WHO team, concurred with Daszak:

The Chinese government has a big incentive to keep this quiet. This is exactly how SARS spilled over. It looks very bad and draws a lot of negative attention to the wildlife trade that the same thing could have happened again.

Resisting bad faith investigations

Despite all the available scientific evidence pointing in favor of a zoonotic origin—and none for a laboratory origin—the Biden administration directed intelligence agencies (not public health experts) to hunt for incriminating documentary evidence showing that Chinese officials were aware of and lied about the virus leaking from the WIV. On August 24, the director of national intelligence presented what the New York Times (8/24/21) described as an “inconclusive initial report” to Biden. But employing the tools of intelligence rather than epidemiology to the questions indicates that the US is promoting lab leak speculations and demanding a political investigation in bad faith. This is especially troubling, considering that 83% of Americans support taking action against China if US intelligence agencies (not the WHO, or scientists capable of conducting a scientific investigation) “reveal” evidence SARS-CoV-2 leaked from the WIV.

It’s true that an apolitical scientific investigation independently checking Chinese claims about the WIV would be ideal, but we should focus on the available evidence, instead of letting the Biden administration falsely present the possibility of SARS-CoV-2 originating in the Wuhan Institute of Virology being “at least as credible as the possibility that it emerged naturally in the wild” (CNN, 7/16/21). A conspiracy to hide a lab leak is a logical possibility, but it’s a near certainty that an Orientalist media would use tropes of an untrustworthy China to turn lack of evidence for a lab leak into evidence of a coverup, with potential results somewhere between distracting and disastrous.

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Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, lockdown champions have perennially invoked “science and data” to sanctify any mandate politicians impose. Hard facts have recently shown that neither vaccines nor face masks provide surefire protection against the virus. But no amount of evidence has yet shaken faith in the magic of absolute power.

Covid policies are increasingly degenerating to the equivalent of sacrificing virgins to appease angry viral gods. New Zealand on Tuesday imposed a nationwide lockdown in response to a single Covid case in the capital city. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern ordered her captive citizenry: “Do not congregate, don’t talk to your neighbors. Please keep to your bubble.” Arden asserted that “complying with these rules, making sure we do all we can to stamp it out, still remains the best strategy in the world right now.” Ardern did not deign to explain why almost no place else in the world, including places with vastly more Covid cases, sought to outlaw everyday conversations.

In Australia, the military is patrolling city streets to enforce the latest lockdown. Daniel Andrews, the Premier of the state of Victoria, recently decreed: “There will be no removal of masks to consume alcohol outdoors.” One Aussie lamented, “My business has been forcibly closed. Everyone has been sent home without pay. We are banned from leaving our homes except for the 5 reasons given by the Government.”

There is no “science” to justify prohibiting Australians from going more than 2 miles from their home. But New Zealand and Australia presume that no one will be safe unless government officials have jurisdiction over every breath that citizens take.

In the United States, many of the same pundits and activists who howled about the evils of “microaggressions” are now cheering for the government to forcibly inject everyone with a Covid vaccine. Biden publicly declared that he is checking to see if he has the power to force everyone to get injected.

Biden endorsed the vaccination passports that some cities have already imposed. Radio host Grant Stinchfield commented, in Los Angeles “you can [defecate] on the street, shoot drugs in crack tent on the sidewalk and even steal anything less then (sic) 900 bucks but now you have to show papers to get in a restaurant or gym!?!?” New York City’s passport regime effectively bans the majority of blacks from many activities of daily life, since they have a much lower vaccination rate than other groups.

Far greater restrictions may be on the horizon. The Associated Press reported that the Biden administration is considering “mandating vaccines for interstate travel” but is delaying any such decree until “Americans were ready for the strong-arming from the federal government.” A top former Homeland Security official has called for placing anyone who is not fully vaccinated on the No Fly list, thereby expanding the list to scores of millions of people and creating new havoc for air travel. Biden administration officials have offered no evidence that such restrictions would end the pandemic but it would permit the president to demonstrate the same machismo that President Nixon showed with his illegal invasion of Cambodia in 1970.

Politicians’ anti-Covid recommendations increasingly resemble frightened soldiers shooting at any noise they hear in the dark. NIH Director Francis Collins recently condemned the “epidemic of misinformation, disinformation, distrust that is tearing us apart.” But much of the misinformation has stemmed directly from the Biden administration’s flip-flops and fearmongering. On August 3, Collins announced during a CNN interview that “parents of unvaccinated kids should… wear masks” in their own homes. He conceded: “I know that’s uncomfortable, I know it seems weird, but it is the best way to protect your kids.” A few hours later, Collins recanted on Twitter, perhaps after other political appointees persuaded him to stop sounding like a blithering idiot.

Covid misinformation started at the top. In a CNN Town Hall last month, Biden declared, “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”

Biden administration officials kept reciting the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” refrain long after it became clear that vaccines were rapidly failing to prevent the spread of Covid. On August 8, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky finally admitted: “What [COVID vaccines] can’t do any more is prevent transmission.” Helluva asterisk. Prior to that, the Biden administration even refused to disclose the number of “breakthrough” infections that had occurred among White House staff. Prof. Eric Topol complained that the CDC’s false statements on Covid risks was a “blatant failure putting millions of vaccinated Americans at unnecessary risk for breakthrough infections.”

On Thursday, a front page Washington Post article castigated the CDC for withholding Covid information from the public, noting that its “overly rosy assessments of the vaccines’ effectiveness against delta may have lulled Americans into a false sense of security.” Tom Frieden, former CDC director under Obama, suggested that the long delays in disclosure led some people to “wonder if the CDC is hiding results.” CDC Director Walensky responded to the debacle by promising “to develop a new forecasting and outbreak analytics center to analyze data in real time,” the Post reported. The CDC apparently did not previously consider it worthwhile to spend any of its $8 billion annual budget on such a project.

The Biden administration has sought to blame the resurgence of Covid on scofflaws who did not submit to every revised command. The Official Enemies List has expanded from those not wearing a mask to those resisting getting vaccinated, and it will soon include those who balk at getting a third (and fourth? fifth?) injection.

The biggest expansion of the Enemies List occurred on August 13, when the Department of Homeland Security issued a terrorist alert, warning law enforcement agencies that “anti-government/anti-authority violent extremists could exploit… potential re-establishment of public health restrictions across the United States as a rationale to conduct attacks.”

Anyone who loudly objects to being locked back under house arrest will be the moral equivalent of the Taliban, or maybe Hezbollah. Previous federal driftnets for potential troublemakers expanded far beyond individuals who threatened violence. The feds may already be compiling vast lists of Covid critics that could come in handy at some future point.

But at least government officials now recognize the real enemy. Covid Czar Tony Fauci recently declared, “I know people must like to have their individual freedom… but I think that we’re in such a serious situation now, that… mandates should be done.” Fauci predicts that once the FDA rushes its formal approval of the Covid vaccines, there will be far more mandates imposed on Americans.  The fact that the efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine has fallen to 42% is irrelevant. A vaccine isn’t a failure as long as the government can force everyone to get additional injections.

The primary “evidence” for most Covid policies is the job title of the government official issuing the decree. As University of California San Francisco professor of medicine Vinay Prasad wrote last month, “When it comes to non-pharmacologic interventions such as mandatory business closures, mask mandates, and countless other interventions, the shocking conclusion of the last 18 months is this: We have learned next to nothing.” Prasad slammed his colleagues for failing to do reliable research on key issues of the pandemic: “Anyone who considers themselves a scientist should be embarrassed by our collective failure to generate knowledge, and this failure is once again looming large.”

For bureaucrats and politicians, gaining power and compelling submission are victory enough, even when their policies fail to vanquish a virus. Citizens are obliged to assume “government knows best, even when it knows little or nothing.” People won’t get infected as long as they are groveling to federal commands, right? Unfortunately, the government has no liability for the injections it approves or the freedoms it destroys.

Faith in absolute power is not “science” – regardless of how many scientists pledge allegiance to Washington in return for federal funding. As historian John M. Barry, author of The Great Influenza, observed, “When you mix politics and science, you get politics.” There is no safety in submission to damn fools, regardless of their pompous titles.

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James Bovard is the author of ten books, including Public Policy Hooligan, Attention Deficit Democracy, The Bush Betrayal, and Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, New Republic, Reader’s Digest, and many other publications. He is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors, a frequent contributor to The Hill, and a contributing editor for American Conservative.

Featured image is from Mercola

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About 1.6 million doses of Moderna’s coronavirus vaccine have been taken out of use in Japan because of contamination reported in some vials, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare said early Thursday.

Several vaccination centers have reported that vaccine vials contained foreign matter, according to an announcement from the ministry, which added it will seek to minimize the impact of the withdrawal on the country’s inoculation program.

The ministry said later in the day that the substance that had been mixed in may have been metal. “It’s a substance that reacts to magnets,” a ministry official said. “It could be metal.”

Takeda Pharmaceutical handles distribution of the U.S.-developed Moderna vaccine in Japan.

Nasdaq-listed Moderna confirmed receiving “several complaints of particulate matter” in vaccine vials distributed in Japan but said it had found “no safety or efficacy issues” related to these reports.

“The company is investigating the reports and remains committed to working transparently and expeditiously with its partner, Takeda, and regulators to address any potential concerns,” a Moderna spokesperson told Nikkei, saying the drugmaker believed a “manufacturing issue” at a plant in Spain was the cause.

The vaccine lot in question and two adjacent lots have been put on hold “out of an abundance of caution,” the spokesperson said.

The Japanese ministry has not halted the use of Moderna vaccines in other batches, deeming them safe.

Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga told reporters on Thursday afternoon that he had instructed the ministry to look into the case with safety as the top priority, adding he had received reports that the withdrawal “won’t have a significant impact on the country’s vaccination campaign.”

The Moderna vaccine was granted emergency-use authorization in Japan in May.

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Natural immunity from previous COVID-19 infection may offer stronger protection against the Indian ‘Delta’ variant than immunity from full vaccination, a new study suggests.

Researchers compared people who had received two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine to unvaccinated individuals who had recovered from the virus.

They found that participants with natural immunity were up to 13 times less likely to contract Covid than those who were given two jabs.

The team, from Maccabi Healthcare and Tel Aviv University note that their study – which has not yet been peer-reviewed –  has many limitations including the more highly transmissible Delta variant being dominant at the time and participants not being required to be tested.

The study looks at breakthrough infections and does not discourage vaccination with a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) finding unvaccinated people still have five times as many COVID-19 infections and 29 times as many hospitalizations as those who’ve had their shots.

Participants who were double jabbed were 5.96 times more likely to be infected and 7.13 times more likely to experience symptoms, a new study found

After three months, risk of infection was 13.06 times higher among immunized individuals and they were 27 times more likely to experience symptoms

For the study, published on pre-print server medRxiv.org, the team looked at more than 800,000 people split into three groups.

This included people who received both doses of the Pfizer vaccine and never had Covid, unvaccinated people who previously been infected, and people had the virus and has also received a single dose of the vaccine.

The study was conducted after the Delta variant became dominant in Israel, which has been shown to more easily evade vaccines than older strains.

Researchers found that fully vaccinated but people were much more likely to have a ‘breakthrough’ Covid infection than people with natural immunity for the disease.

Overall participants who were double jabbed were 5.96 times more likely to be infected and 7.13 times more likely to experience symptoms including cough, fever and shortness of breath.

They also looked at the likelihood of vaccination after three months.

Researchers found, in this instance, likelihood of infections at 13.06 times higher among immunized individuals and they were 27 times more likely to experience symptoms.

People who had recovered from the virus and had been vaccinated were even less likely to have a breakthrough infection.

The team notes that there are several limitations. Firstly, the study only examines protection offered by the Pfizer vaccines and does not address other approved vaccines or extra protection that a third dose provides.

Secondly, while the study controlled for factors such as age, sex, and region of residence, there might be differences in behaviors of the groups – such as social distancing and mask wearing – that weren’t accounted.

Dr Andrew Croxford, an immunologist from the UK, also points out that someone who previously tested positive for COVID-19 is not likely to get re-tested for reinfection.

‘If you’ve tested positive and isolated for weeks with significant disruption, how likely are you to get tested again as opposed to thinking “I’ve already had it so it’s surely something else”?’ he tweeted.

‘Are people who decline vaccination, or people with previous infection, less likely to get tested?’

However, if the findings are confirmed by peer review, it could have implications for

‘This study demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, ‘ the authors wrote.

‘Individuals who were both previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 and given a single dose of the vaccine gained additional protection against the Delta variant.’

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We have sound and clear signals from Latin America that its people want progressive anti-imperialist governments that promote real democracy, sovereignty and well-being for all, and not only for a small minority of privileged oligarchs. They have realised that the US imposed capitalist-centred neoliberal model does not work. Peruvians have also joined recently in this left-wing movement, together with Mexicans, Argentinians, Cubans, Venezuelans, Bolivians, Nicaraguans, with the election of working class Pedro Castillo as president. If Washington was hoping to see a coup by the Keiko Fujimori faction taking place in Lima, like it happened in Bolivia in 2019 by the opponents of Evo Morales, the wait was in vain and likely disappointing.

At the end of July, Antony Blinken, Secretary of the US State Department, finally spoke to president-elect Pedro Castillo, not to congratulate him; instead he “expressed his hope that Peru would continue to play a constructive role in addressing the deteriorating situation in Cuba and Nicaragua”. This was a not so veiled threatening warning to Mr. Castillo to continue Lima’s alignment with US foreign policy in the region as his predecessor, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski had done before. The warning was followed by a promise of “continued U.S. support for pandemic recovery and … our donation of two million vaccine doses, as well as hospitals, ventilators, cold storage units, and protective equipment.” The US has typically used the global tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic on other countries as leverage in exchange for their submission.

From the beginning the Castillo government, on the contrary, has taken a clear independent position in a series of statements in opposition to blockades and sanctions, in defense of the rights of marginalised people, for participation in the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) and the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), and even for withdrawing from the infamous Lima Group.

Washington must be on alert watching the loss of another chunk of its “backyard” and wondering how to cause a regime change in Peru, perhaps taking advantage of the small margin of votes by which Pedro Castillo was democratically elected over his contender, rightwing Keiko Fujimori.

Coincidentally (or maybe not), signs of social tensions with demonstrations by supporters of Fujimorismo are already showing in Peru. Some observers are alerting to a coup brewing in the country. The protesters claim to oppose Castillo’s leftist party Peru Libre, communism and terrorism. This is a broad net of typically rightwing “issues” taken from the regime change playbook of the US government.

In fact, the pressure on the Castillo government for a less progressive stand is playing out on the domestic and international fronts.

Domestically, the first casualty has being former foreign minister Hector Bejar who was forced to resign based on a statement that implicated elements of the Peruvian Navy in the 1970s, in collusion with the CIA, involved in terrorist actions allegedly leading to the formation of the guerrilla movement Shining Path in the 1980s. Bejar resigned only a few weeks after his appointment, under pressure from the military establishment. Perhaps the more compelling reason to force him out of government has been his conciliatory position (from the left) towards Venezuela in favor of a dialogue between the government and the opposition in that country and the elimination of sanctions.

Hector Bejar’s resignation is considered a great loss given his political experience and ability, even more so when he was replaced by the career diplomat Oscar Maurtua who has been less than clear about Peru’s position in Latin America simply suggesting “consultations” about the future of CELAC, UNASUR and the Lima Group.

The Peruvian rightwing continues digging in the past of other ministers of the Castillo administration, like Labor Minister Iber Maravi and prime minister Bellido, searching for leftist connections that might lead to other possible dismissals.

As we write, the Peruvian Congress, with majority opposition members, is reviewing the proposed list of ministers. If Congress does not give them a vote of confidence, president Castillo will have to appoint a new set of ministers for a second congressional review. If the second review fails then Castillo will call for the election of a new Congress. All accordingly to the Peruvian constitution.

All of this can only create insecurity in the country giving a dangerous advantage to those intent in a regime change.

Internationally, we have to consider the US involvement and the role of the large solidarity movement supporters.

The United States has shown a very low tolerance for any progressive government in Latin America and as of this century has increased its interventionist efforts. Peru will not be an exception if Washington perceives that president Castillo will move his social policies to the left.

If that is the case, we can be certain to see signs of increased actions by the opposition with the tacit assistance of the United States. We might see signs of a hybrid warfare against Peru that might include infowar in order to demonise the government or any of its members, increased violence, financial downturn aided by US sanctions to blame the poor economic administration, inciting the military to a revolt in support of the rightwing forces, or any other means from the hybrid warfare toolbox

The escalation of the US intervention will be in direct proportion to the resistance and determination of the government of Lima to pursue an independent and sovereign social project.

Many questions remain unanswered about the future of Peru. But the international community will respond and will not remain indifferent. A large solidarity movement is building up in Latin America that is increasingly becoming more vocal in support of Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua among others. We must now all be on alert to defend Peru and denounce any imperial intervention in that country.

No one is more prepared to answer questions about current events in Peru than former minister Hector Bejar given his recent experience and his long involvement in the political life of the country. He will be the main speaker at a webinar organized by several US and Canadian organizations on August 31, 2021. [Register here]

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Nino Pagliccia is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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Truth, facts, and individual freedom don’t seem very important these days. As the COVID-19 scamdemic rages on our little blue planet is drowning in a sea of lies, oppression, and propaganda. Day after day, night after night, hour after hour adnauseam our weary brains are being saturated with case numbers, death totals, and supposedly overcrowded hospitals while governments and private businesses are coercing and bullying us into taking so called vaccines that are killing and permanently disabling who knows how many tens of thousands. We are told that we must bow to the voice of authority and give up our freedom lest we be accused of being selfish and murdering our fellow earthlings.

But are we being told the truth? Does truth even matter? Even more important, how do we know the difference between the truth and a lie?

Matthew 7: 13-14 issues this warning:

“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”

That passage applies to how we live and think.

The human mind is a complex and wonderful instrument. With it, we have soared to the heights of technical advancement, plumbed the psychic depths, and probed the mysteries of the universe. In fact, our journey has only just begun in those areas. There is so much more to know and do. But the mind can also be our tower of Babel and technology our prison. This is because the human brain is also a deeply flawed, imperfect instrument that is filled with biases and destructive thought patterns and impulses. It’s part of how we evolved, but it is also what we need to understand and overcome. In other words, we can often be our own worst enemy.

So, let’s clear out the mental cobwebs and understand a few things.

What you need to know.

First, let’s address what you don’t need to know which can be summed up in one word: everything. You don’t need to know everything. It’s impossible to know everything anyway.

In 1980 Astronomer Carl Sagan (1934-1996) did a 13 part PBS miniseries, Cosmos. In episode 11 Sagan entered the New York Public Library. I had been there many times and I can tell you, the place is  breathtakingly awesome. Sagan went to one of the upper levels and walked passed about 30 feet of six shelves of books. He explained that reading that amount of books would take an entire lifetime which is only a mere tenth of the some ten million books that are in there.

Sagan explained: “The trick is to know which books to read.” Or, to put it another way, what is essential knowledge? What do you really need to know?

Since we are all unique individuals, the answer to that question will greatly vary in a lot of ways. But just as we all have to eat and go to the bathroom, there are some areas of knowledge that apply to all of us.

In my humble opinion, the most important thing to know is yourself closely followed by those things that have the greatest impact on your life. COVID-19 certainly falls into the latter category as does  politics and history.

What is truth? 

There are two kinds of truth: inner truth and outer truth.

Inner truth is what is true for you as in what gives your life pleasure and meaning. For some that means being an artist, actor, or poet; for others it means being a physician or a scientist; for others it can mean owning a business like a restaurant or a construction company; for others it can mean being a teacher or a social reformer; for others it means being a laborer or a homemaker. It also has to do with whether it’s better to be married or remain single, to have or not have children, to be sexually monogamous or to have multiple lovers; it’s about what you like to do for fun and relaxation along with so much more.

In my experience addictions along with other forms of self-destructive behavior occur when you aren’t living truthfully. They are ways to numb and distract yourself from a life of quiet desperation. Unfortunately, too many people are living lives of quite desperation. They have acquired a conditioned self, a persona, an image. They are living the way their parents, or their spouse, or how society thinks they should live rather than how they ought to live. Such individuals are lonely, angry, and confused. They loathe themselves because they have lost their way. They have forgotten how to live truthfully.

Outer truth is the truth we all share. It is reality. For example, two people in an art gallery looking at a painting. One person thinks it’s a beautiful painting while the other person thinks it’s the stupidest looking thing they ever saw. Both are right because each has different taste. It’s a matter of opinion or inner truth. But if someone asserts that the Earth is flat that is not a matter of opinion because the Earth isn’t flat. The ancient Greeks figured that out 2,700 years ago without flight or space travel. It doesn’t matter that people thought the earth was flat at one time. It doesn’t matter that a small  percentage of the world’s population still think it’s flat mainly due to the influence of Samuel Rowbotham (1816-1884). It isn’t flat.

Simply stated: Inner truth is about being real and outer truth is about what is objectively real.

Sadly, a lot of people can’t tell the difference between inner and outer truth. For example, way back in 1985 I had a 22 year old girlfriend who believed in Santa Claus. I was 31. When I tried to explain to her why there couldn’t possibly be a Santa Claus she would just keep saying “It’s true for me.” She actually  believed that if she went to the North Pole she would find Santa in his workshop because he exists for her, but that I wouldn’t find Santa in his workshop if I went to the North Pole because he doesn’t exist for me. I tried to explain to her that reality is reality and that something either exists or it doesn’t regardless of what we choose to believe, but to no avail. Obviously, one of the dimmer bulbs on the Christmas Tree, but I was in love so what can I say.

Understand science 

The word scientist was invented in 1833 by William Whewell (1794-1866). Prior to that and even long after, into the 1890s, scientists were usually called natural philosophers. Whewell was a philosopher. Galileo (1564-1642), Copernicus (1473-1543), Newton (1642-1727), etc. never were called scientists because the word didn’t exist in their time. Even Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and other great scientists of the 19^th Century continued to call  themselves natural philosophers. Rarely were they referred to as scientists. Most of today’s scientists are PhDs. A PhD is a doctor of philosophy. The world’s oldest scientific journal after over 350 years still calls itself “Philosophical Transactions.”

As Historian Dr. Richard Carrier, PhD  puts it:

“Science is just philosophy with better data.”

Philosophy was invented by the ancient Greeks. It comes from the Greek words Philo + Sophia which means the love of wisdom. But as Dr. Carrier explains in his 2016  lecture “Is Philosophy Stupid,” there is a lot more to this branch of knowledge than science.

Though it existed prior to his time, the father of modern philosophy is Aristotle (384 BC-322 BC). He also gave us the laws of thought or basic logic: The Law of Identity, The Law of Non-Contradiction, and The Law of the Excluded Middle. Inductive and deductive reasoning also comes from Aristotle. But not Abductive Reasoning. That was invented by Charles Sanders Pierce (1839-1914).

Aristotle, as Dr. Carrier explains in his lecture, formalized and structured philosophy into six areas that are essential to a sound epistemology.  Meaning, the way we gather knowledge and process information which results in the conclusions and judgments that we make. The six areas are: Epistemology, Physics, (meaning all science, not just one area as it does today), Metaphysics (means after the physics, or  science, the  conclusions you make from scientific data), Aesthetics, Ethics, and Politics.

Most modern philosophers only want to be concerned with the analysis of concepts and not facts  which Dr, Carrier points out is false. Philosophy is a conclusion about facts and data provided by science, relationships, and personal experience. It deals with factual questions that science and religion alone can’t answer. It teaches you to see the whole picture.

So, when pondering life’s big questions: Why am I here? What am I supposed to be? Should I marry this or that person? Is there life on other worlds? How did this universe come to be? Is Elvis still alive? Whether you call it religion, meditation, deep thought, or mental masturbation, you are doing philosophy. Learn to do it well.

Know history 

Most people are abysmally ignorant when it comes to history. I cringe when I hear them support wearing masks, mandatory vaccinations, and other oppressive measures.  They refuse to resist the hand that’s choking them to death, but will gladly wear the mask that’s suffocating them.

Most of the public doesn’t realize how utterly corrupt and dishonest government and medical science have become because they don’t know history. If you doubt me, read what the scientific literature has to say about it here, here, and here. And that’s only a small sample.

Former U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill (1874-1965) in a 1948 speech declared:

“Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”

Also heed the words of Richard Carrier in his book “Proving History,”  Page 115: “…our bias against the supernatural is warranted, just as our bias against the honesty of politicians is warranted: we’ve caught them being dishonest so many times it would be foolish to implicitly trust anyone in politics.”

And that includes so-called public health officials like Anthony Fauci and CDC director Rochelle Walensky because they are also politicians.

It is important to understand that all history is probabilistic. We don’t have a time machine. We weren’t there. All historians can do is determine what happened in the past based on surviving archaeological and documentary evidence, and on how the world works through science. And on establishing prior probability—what normally happens in the case of what you are looking at. This also applies to modern times. History is history and the past is the past whether it happened ten minutes ago or ten thousand years ago.

In the case of COVID-19, the prior probability, that governments lie, makes it highly unlikely that we are being told the truth. Only strong solid evidence would reverse that prior probability. Instead, the evidence shows that what usually happens is happening–we are being lied to.

The word radical is defined as going to the root of the matter. So, let’s ignore all the rhetoric and the fear mongering and  look at two basic facts when it comes to testing and deaths.

The con job with the COVID-19 PCR test works like this: the test is run in cycles. The more cycles that are run the greater the chance of someone testing positive.

Page 35 of the PCR diagnostic panel on the FDA website instructs labs to run the test at 40 cycles. Yale New Haven Hospital on page 4 of their report also states that PCR tests are usually run at 40 cycles and that the cycle threshold used “is never included in the results sent to clinicians.” This fact was also reported in the New York Times. Yet, on a July 2020 program, “This Week In Virology,” Fauci explained that if you run the PCR test at 35 or more cycles it’s pretty much worthless because the chances of any active infectious virus being present are “miniscule.” He said that all you will get are “dead nucleotides.” POW! SOCK! WHAM! There you have it. Nothing more needs to be said. The PCR test isn’t accurate.

As for the number of COVID-19 deaths in this country, to get an accurate unbiased picture of what’s going on you have to look at all deaths from all causes in ratio to the population by the year. As the population goes up the number of deaths go up. But does the percentage of the population that dies in a given year go up? The figures below came from the 2021 World Almanac and from the CDC’s provisional deaths web page.

As you can see, while more people died in 2020 than in previous years, there was no statistically significant excess mortality. Other studies have shown that there was excess mortality in some states, the ones with the strictest lockdown measures—especially states like New York that transferred hospital patients into nursing homes. But not for the country as a whole.

Bottom line: Ignore the shock and awe tactics. It’s all empty rhetoric. Don’t let it distract you. The tests are worthless and there is no excess mortality. That’s the root of the matter. And that is all that matters.

Faith Isn’t a fact

If someone asserts to me that COVID-19 is a real pandemic I ask them the following: what scientific papers have you read that convinced you that COVID-19 and the virus that supposedly causes it are real? How do you know what you know about COVID-19? Did you look at the actual science as in  read the studies in the scientific literature–would you even know how to interpret them? Or are you just believing what some authority figure or media personality is telling you?

I then further explain to them that if they’re getting their information from the TV and other various  mainstream sources, their position on COVID-19 is a religious one. It is a faith-based opinion that naively assumes that government and medical science are honest and have their best interests at heart.

They are assuming on faith that the COVID narrative is true.

There is a wise old saying:

“never assume because when you assume you make an ass of you and me.”

Naturally, many people can’t handle being confronted with reality. They will either call me a conspiracy theorist or question my credibility because I’m not an M.D. or a PhD even though what I’m doing is reporting on what M.D.s and PhDs who haven’t been corrupted by globalists and corporations are saying. Or they will say it’s my opinion.

Nothing rubs my rhubarb the wrong way more than when someone tries to invalidate facts by calling them opinions. I understand why people do this: to shut down the conversation and avoid having to think. They don’t want to know that they have been lied to. They don’t want to know how irresponsible, stupid, and selfish they are being by allowing their freedom, their health, and their country to be destroyed. They don’t want to see the cruel totalitarian world they will be leaving to their children. They need to believe that they are virtuous and patriotic by following the rules.

Hebrews 11:1 declares:

“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

But facts are the substance of what we already have and the evidence of things that are seen. Blind faith, on the other hand, has never been a path to knowledge—it has often been a path to destruction.

A strong moral lesson about misplaced faith can be found in I Kings chapter 18. It doesn’t matter if the story is a myth because that’s one of the purposes of myths: to teach you something. The prophet Elijah challenges 450 false prophets of Baal to prove that their god is God because the people of Israel have turned to worshiping Baal. So, Elijah challenges all 450 of them to meet him on Mt. Carmel where each will build a sacrificial alter. Each kills a bullock, or steer, and places it on the alter. Whichever side can cause fire to come down from heaven to burn the dead animal wins. The prophets of Baal accepted the challenge and they got to go first. For hours they cry out to Baal to nuke the alter. Finally, they get desperate and  even cut themselves so that their blood gushes onto the alter. But no response from Baal. Then, it’s Elijah’s turn. Naturally, God sends down the fire for his altar and Elijah gets to kill the false prophets of Baal.

The point here is that the prophets of Baal were sincere in their beliefs. They really thought Baal was god and freaked-out when they found out that he wasn’t. There were 450 of them and only one Elijah. They were the majority. But the majority was wrong. Their false belief cost them their lives.

So, if you feel strongly and passionately about something ask yourself if it’s faith based or fact based.

Recognize that no matter how strongly you feel about something, if you don’t know the facts, if you haven’t looked at the evidence, if there is no evidence at all, then you really don’t know what you think you know. Your position is weak, superficial, and could very well be blatantly wrong.

The mark of the beast 

A lot of conservative religious people believe that the COVID vaccination program is the fulfillment of Bible prophecy. Chapter 13 in the Book of Revelation describes two beasts that serve the dragon  (Satan, the Devil, Rev. 12:9). Verses 16 and 17 talk about the second beast forcing everyone to get a mark in their right hand or forehead or they wouldn’t be allowed to buy or sell anything.

A big problem with this way of thinking is that it can make a lot of people complacent. They think that they don’t have to do anything because Jesus is coming back to rescue them. It’s the same with people who think that Donald Trump is going to get back in office and rescue them from the evil Democrats when both parties are in on the COVID scam.

But things aren’t always what they seem.

Example: for over 20 years I resided in Elizabeth, N.J. It’s a city and the county seat of Union  County. It had more furniture stores than you could shake a stick at. If you wanted good quality  furniture cheap Elizabeth was the place to go. One furniture store in particular made a lasting impression on me. It was on the city’s main road. The letters of its name were on large individual sheets of painted plywood. Those letters were P- I -T- U -S -A. My mind read that as Pit U.S.A. Nearly every day on my way to work for years I would pass that store and think Pit U.S.A.

Then, one day, I was driving by the store with a former girlfriend in the car. We weren’t getting along so to break the ice and make conversation I said, “Look, Pit U.S.A. Isn’t that an odd name for a store?” She looks at the sign and then she glares at me and shouts: “THAT’S PITUSA.” A noise went off in my head: BOING! And I thought “Oh yeah, wow, It is Pitusa.” And this in spite of the fact that they had another store in the neighboring city of Newark where the name was written out on a smaller sign. I still wasn’t able to see the obvious: Pit U.S.A. was really Pitusa until my ex snapped me out of it.

As what happened with me, some people get so caught up in a belief or a concept that their mind becomes locked. They can’t see things any other way but the way they see it. They don’t take into account that there could be another explanation and that their way of looking at things could be wrong.

In the case of Bible prophecy, 81% of the world’s population have access to a Bible in their language.  It’s the world’s best selling and most popular book.  Is it not possible that someone could read the prophecies and try to fulfill them in some way? Is it equally possible that someone out there has already done this? The answer is yes.

Example: Herbert W. Armstrong (1892-1986) head and founder of the Worldwide Church of God  claimed to have fulfilled a prophecy that Jesus made on the Mt. of Olives (Mat. 24:14). Jesus predicted that the end wouldn’t come until his gospel of the kingdom would “be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations.”

The gospel isn’t the stories about Jesus’ life that appear in the New Testament. The gospel is the message about the government of God replacing the governments of the world on Earth.

Mr. Armstrong traveled all over the world in his private jet, and met with various world leaders to give them the gospel message as well as through his radio and later television show The World Tomorrow. It was reported that he gave various world leaders expensive gifts in order to meet with them. Obviously, the supernatural isn’t required to do something like this. All you need is motivation, your own private jet, and lots of money.

Incidentally, it was Mr. Armstrong who inspired me to intensely study the Bible starting in 1980 when I came across his television show. This also led me to study theology and comparative religion. What I liked about Mr. Armstrong was that he never asked for money on the air like all of the other TV evangelists. His sermons were educational lectures and any church literature as well as a subscription to their magazine, “The Plain Truth,” was free. But if you joined his church you would get tithed up the wazoo. But I never joined his church so I never had to give them any money and was never asked to.

Another example of not jumping to conclusions and taking the time to look at things more deeply was something that happened to me a long time ago. I was always fascinated by UFOs and the high probability of life on other planets. I was envious of people who claimed to have had close encounters with extraterrestrials. I hoped that someday I would have such an experience.

In 1975 I got my wish.

It was the wee hours of the morning in Rutherford, N.J. and I was on my way home from a friend’s  house. The roads were deserted. I was all alone. I got on the exit ramp to the highway when I saw  strange colored lights in the sky. I stopped my car to look at them. As they got closer I got scared. Now I didn’t want to encounter a UFO. I thought to duck down in my car and hide. But I said to myself “No! I’m going to see what this is even if I get abducted or killed. I have to know.” So, I got out of my car stood tall and watched as the lights approached. It was flying low and suddenly I could see that the lights were attached to a huge black shape. But it wasn’t saucer shaped–it was cigar shaped. No matter, some UFOS were described as cigar shaped. The object wasn’t making a sound either. Then, letters started to run across the side of it and I thought, “It’s trying to communicate with me and in my language.” Soon, the entire message appeared before me:

GOODYEAR.

Yep, it was the Goodyear Blimp. But if I had chickened out and hid in my car cowering in fear to this day I would have been convinced that I saw an honest-to-goodness genuine UFO.

So, consider the fact that just maybe the billionaire globalists that created the COVID death cult read the Book of Revelation and decided that they liked the devil’s style and are attempting to fulfill the prophecies on their own. There are some people out there who like being bad. And since they like to play God why not play Devil too?

Don’t worship science

When it comes to COVID-19 I’m especially disappointed in atheists. These are people who claim to place a high value on science. Yet they have fallen for the phony COVID narrative hook, line, and sinker. I’m not talking about all atheists only the ones that I call the mechanistic atheists who dominate the organizations.

I consider myself spiritual, but not religious. In spite of this, atheists consider me atheist because I don’t believe in God as a man in the sky with a personality who worries about what’s going on down here. I see God as the life force energy that flows within us and outside of us. All things come from that life energy and all things return to it. The essence of this life energy is love. I John 4:16 says that “God is love.” The Chinese call it Chi, the Japanese call it Ki, the Hindus call it prana, Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) called it orgone, and Semyon Kirlian (1898-1978) made it visible via  Kirlian Photography. As I see it, you’re spiritual to the degree that you can love yourself and others unconditionally.

Mechanistic atheists don’t follow science they worship it. Science has become their false god, their graven image. They wave science around like an evangelical waves a Bible around. It’s their badge of righteousness and superiority. They fail to understand that Fauci and his ilk are not following science—they are following the dictates of billionaire globalists and Big Pharma. Just as religious snake oil salesmen like Peter Popoff who has been exposed faking healings and Jimmy Swaggert who has been caught with prostitutes, claim to represent God, today’s public health officials are corporate shills who claim to represent science.

Scientists and the scientific method are meant to  serve humanity—not be worshiped by it. Science is not a cult—it is a tool by which we can learn about ourselves and the world. The scientific method works and was invented to counteract the cognitive bias inherent in our flawed thinking processes. But cults can be formed around the word science and can be used by governments and corporations to exploit people.

A blogger I recently came across said it best:

“Science is the word used to convince stupid people that something made up is fact.”

Don’t go quietly into the night 

Whether we choose to call someone president, king, fuhrer, emperor, high priest, reverend, grand high imperial mystic ruler, or just an average Joe schmoe,  in the unlimited vastness and eternity of the space time continuum, we’re all just mere blips on the radar screen of life. Mere hangnails on the fickle finger of fate. Mere specks of consciousness afloat in a universe without end or purpose. But just as a stone  thrown into a pond causes ripples to radiate out in all directions, what we do hear and now will ripple across time for generations to come.

How will future history judge us I wonder. More important, how will we judge ourselves? Global economies a shambles, billions of lives shattered, human liberty trampled into the dirt, and people walking around in face diapers in fear of the sniffles.

Face reality people, we can’t encase the world in a plastic bubble to accommodate the frail and the  immunocompromised any more than we can turn the planet into one big safe space to accommodate the easily offended.

Our liberties are not mere trinkets to be doled out or withheld at the pleasure of some bureaucrat,  employer, or pompous quack in a white lab coat. They are inalienable rights that cannot be taken from us. Ask yourselves this: is life without liberty better than no life at all? In my opinion neither are worth very much without the other. Guard your liberties jealously. Cherish them, Value them. For without them it is you and not the proverbial emperor who will be naked.

So, rise up, take a load off those knees. Lift your head up out of the muck, stop cowering in fear. and say enough is enough. Stop listening to these simpering bureaucratic jackasses. Peacefully resist, open your business. Coordinate with other businesses and defy them as a group. If you’re an employee organize a strike if they demand that you wear a mask or get vaccinated. If you’re a medical professional refuse to participate in any COVID vaccination programs. If you’re a parent take your kids out of school if they want to put masks on them. Show up at school board meetings and raise hell. If you’re a college student protest like they did in the 1960s. Support mass protests and demand that the architects of this COVID nightmare be brought to justice.

The politicians didn’t shut the economy down, put a mask on your face, or a needle in your arm—you did because you obeyed them. Stop Obeying them. Stop believing them. And stop believing in them.

Take back your country and your world.

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Michael J. Talmo has been a professional writer for over 40 years and is strongly committed to the protetion of civil liberties. He also did three music videos on COVID-19. The Masker Mash, COVID Vaccine Man, and The Corona Globalists. He can be reached at [email protected]

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***

A major study conducted by Israeli researchers into natural immunity has found that immunity acquired via infection from Covid-19 is superior to immunity from the Pfizer vaccine.

Researchers at Maccabi Healthcare and Tel Aviv University compared the outcomes of over 76,000 Israelis in three groups: the doubly vaccinated (with the Pfizer vaccine), the previously infected but unvaccinated, and the previously infected with only a single vaccine dose.

They found that fully vaccinated but uninfected people were significantly more likely to have a “breakthrough” Covid infection than people who had previously been infected and recovered from the disease.

“This study demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalisation caused by the Delta variant,” the authors conclude.

The study is only published as a preprint at this stage and has not been peer reviewed. Critics including British immunologist Andrew Croxford have pointed out potential limitations, but it has been described by infectious diseases expert Professor Francois Balloux as a “bombshell” development.

If the findings are confirmed, the implications for global Covid policy will be profound.

It would not undermine the importance of vaccination for more vulnerable groups in society. However it would weaken the case for vaccinating children, despite the programme being confirmed in the UK today, as they (and the people around them) would get superior future protection from contracting the disease. And it would pose a fundamental challenge to the singular emphasis on vaccine passports for travel and large events, if unvaccinated people who have already had Covid actually pose less of a risk.

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Featured image is from National File

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Iraq is back, and stands center stage in the Middle Eastern drama of blood and sand. In a regional summit, which is being called a turning point, Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi co-hosts the Baghdad Conference on Cooperation and Partnership. Kadhimi’s co-host is French President Emmanuel Macron, who remained in Iraq two days for meetings with French Special Forces fighting ISIS, as well as a trip to Erbil in the North.  The meeting, dubbed the Iraq Neighborhood Summit, has not included Iraq’s neighbor to the west, Syria, but has brought key regional officials and leaders together, to discuss pressing issues.  The Syrian conflict next door, lasting 10 years, did not make the agenda, signaling a continuation of the stalemate in Idlib, and the Kurdish separatist’s region in the north east.

Egyptian President Fattah al-Sisi told Kuwaiti Prime Minister Sabah Al-Khalid Al-Sabah on the sidelines of the meeting, that “the security of the Gulf region is one of the main pillars of the Arab national security, and is closely linked to the Egyptian national security.”

Kadhimi wants to promote Iraq as a neutral mediator in the region’s crises and establish confidence in Iraq internationally after decades of conflict.  The past years of Al Qaeda, ISIS and the US military occupation have tarnished the image of Iraq.  In recent years, Iraq suffered from Turkish airstrikes in the north. Baghdad wants to build an image of a place where neighbors can peacefully discuss issues together.

Additionally, the conference seeks to promote economic development and capital investment to Iraq from among its neighbors and allies.

Iraq’s neighbor to the east, the Islamic Republic of Iran, announced its support for Iraq, and the need for the withdrawal of the US military occupation.  The Iraqi parliament voted to request the US military withdrawal after the defeat of ISIS.  However, the US has not complied with the democratic process of the Iraqi government.

France’s Macron has expressed his support for Iraq and the political process and democracy.

Iran’s new President Ebrahim Raisi signaled his support for Iraq through statements saying Iran considers foreign intervention in security arrangements in the region not constructive, and emphasized the importance of the regional people to be included in dialogues.  Iran’s statement included, “What we need now, and more than ever before, is sustainable regional security with the participation of countries of the region.”

Iraq and Iran are tied historically, geographically, and have been close partners in fighting terrorism.

Iraq had suffered from an image of unrest and danger amid the US invasion of Iraq, and later from the war on ISIS.  The international airport was frequently attacked by terrorists.

Issues on the meeting’s agenda are the regional water crisis, the war in Yemen and the severe economic and political crisis in Lebanon that has brought the country to the point of collapse.  The meeting could prove to be a step towards Saudi-Iranian rapprochement.

Invitations were sent to the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, as well as Iraq’s neighboring and regional countries, including some European countries, according to Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein.

No official mention was made as to why Iraq’s direct neighbor to the west, Syria, was not invited.

The participating countries are Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, Jordan, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and France, in addition to the Arab League, the Gulf Cooperation Council and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation,” said the head of the committee, spokesman for the Baghdad conference, Nizar Al-Khairallah.

Attendees were: Kuwaiti Prime Minister Sheikh Sabah Khalid Al-Hamad Al-Sabah, Secretary General of the Gulf Cooperation Council Nayef Al Hajraf, Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian, Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Ferhan al-Saud, Turkish foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, King Abdullah II of Jordan, and French President Emmanuel Macron.

President al-Sisi met with the Emir of Qatar Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani on Saturday morning on the sidelines of the conference, in a process of repairing relationships after the 2017 blockade on Qatar.

Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Bahrain have decided to end the blockade on Qatar, in the first important political development to have resulted from the Baghdad conference.

In June, on the first official visit by an Egyptian president to Iraq in 30 years, al-Sisi attended the trilateral summit with Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi and Jordanian King Abdullah II to strengthen economic cooperation between the three countries, which marked the fourth between the three leaders since March 2019.

During their summits, the three countries hammered out the details of a long list of cooperation agreements in the fields of energy, health, construction, reconstruction, agriculture, pharmaceuticals, and food.

Saudi Arabia and Iran resumed direct talks in Iraq in April this year. Iranian officials have said they are focused on the outcome of talks in Vienna with Western powers over Iran’s nuclear program and international sanctions.

The US-Iran rivalry brought the Middle East to the brink of war after the United States under former US President Donald Trump killed Qassem Soleimani, in a drone strike at Baghdad airport in 2020.

Iraqi militias tied to the government have launched increasingly sophisticated drone and rocket attacks against US military bases. The Houthis in Yemen have also targeted Saudi oil installations through drone and missile attacks, especially the 2019 assault on Saudi oil plants that briefly knocked out half of Saudi oil production.

Gulf Arabs, which have long leaned on the United States for their security, are concerned about the chaotic end to Washington’s two-decade war in Afghanistan, with the hardline Islamist Taliban having regained power this month as foreign forces aim to complete their withdrawal by Aug. 31.

“The prospect of regional conflict, coupled with their perception of Washington as unreliable, have…prompted the Saudis and Emiratis to pursue a limited, tactical, bilateral de-escalation with Tehran,” the International Crisis Group think tank said in a report.

Saudi Arabia and Iran are aligned with rival forces fighting a war in Yemen and severed their relations in 2016.

Earlier this month, the Saudi foreign minister said an “emboldened” Iran was acting in a negative manner around the Middle East including in Yemen and Lebanon and in regional waters.

“We have always welcomed improving ties with regional countries such as Saudi Arabia”, and it is a priority of our President Raisi’s foreign policy according to an Iranian official.

The Arabs could not discuss bringing Syria in from the cold, because Macron was present, who would have scoffed at the idea, since former French President Nikolas Sarkozy was one of the chief architects of the 2011 attack on Syria for ‘regime change’.  The US and their allies, NATO and EU member states, refuse to admit they lost the war in Syria, and need to establish a new relationship with Damascus, for the sake of the suffering citizens.

The meeting demonstrated how US leadership in the region has diminished. America is leaving Afghanistan and many see the US as withdrawing from the region. Washington has left many facilities in Iraq in recent years as Iraqi militias target US forces. Turkey has been bombing US-backed Kurdish SDF fighters in Syria and the Kurds are concerned the US-led anti-ISIS coalition no longer cares about them. Gulf states fear they can no longer rely on Washington, while relationships within the region are strained chiefly by hostility between Iran on one side and the US and its Persian Gulf allies on the other. The US and Syria were both absent from the Baghdad meeting, but negotiations under the table among the attendees may be discussing how to bring Syria back into the brotherhood of Arabs and neighbors.

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

Steven Sahiounie is an award-winning journalist. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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On August 12, the military contractor CACI International Inc. told its investors that the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is hurting its profits. The same contractor is also funding a think tank that is concurrently arguing against the withdrawal. This case is worth examining both because it is routine, and because it highlights the venality of our ​“expert”-military contractor feedback loop, in which private companies use think tanks to rally support for wars they’ll profit from.

The contractor is notorious to those who have followed the scandal of U.S.-led torture in Iraq. CACI International was sued by three Iraqis formerly detained in Abu Ghraib prison who charge that the company’s employees are responsible for directing their torture, including sexual assault and electric shocks. (The suit was brought in 2008 and the case is still ongoing.)

In 2019, CACI International was awarded a nearly $907 million, five-year contract to provide ​“intelligence operations and analytic support” for the U.S. Army in Afghanistan.

During an August 12 earnings call, CACI International noted repeatedly that President Biden’s withdrawal from the 20-year Afghanistan War harmed the company’s profits. John Mengucci, president and CEO of CACI International, said, ​“we have about a 2 percent headwind coming into FY 2022 because of Afghanistan.” A ​“headwind” refers to negative impacts on profits.

Afghanistan was mentioned 16 times throughout the call — either in reference to the dent in profits, or to assure investors that other areas of growth were offsetting the losses. For example, Mengucci said, ​“We’re seeing positive growth in technology and expect it to continue to outpace expertise growth, collectively offsetting the impact of the Afghanistan drawdown.”

Similar themes were repeated in an April 22 earnings call, where the company lamented the ​“headwinds” posed by the Afghanistan withdrawal. (Industry and defense publications have picked up on this them, but framed it in the company’s terms, by emphasizing the offsets to its losses.)

Despite CACI International’s clear economic interest in continuing the war, on the August 12 call, company officials were careful not to editorialize about the Biden administration’s decision. The closest they came was a cautious statement from Mengucci: ​“At least as of today we’ve watched the administration make the decision to completely exit Afghanistan by 9 – 11 and all I can say is they’re executing on that decision.”

But CACI International does not have to broadcast its positions on the war: Instead, it is funding a think tank that has been actively urging the Biden administration not to leave Afghanistan.

CACI International is listed as a ​“corporate sponsor” of the Institute for Study of War, which describes itself as a ​“non-partisan, non-profit, public policy research organization.” Dr. Warren Phillips, lead director of CACI International, is on the board of the think tank. (Other funders include General Dynamics and Microsoft.)

When it comes to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, however, the think tank is extremely partisan. In an August 20 paper, the think tank argued that ​“Russia, China, Iran, and Turkey are weighing how to take advantage of the United States’ hurried withdrawal.”

Jack Keane, a retired four star general and board member of the Institute for Study of War, meanwhile, has been on a cable news blitz arguing against the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, as reported by Ryan Grim, Sara Sirota, Lee Fang and Rose Adams for The Intercept. (The Intercept noted CACI’s International’s backing of the think tank.)

Kimberly Kagan, founder and president of the Institute for the Study of War, told Fox News on August 17 that the U.S. withdrawal could cause Afghanistan to become the ​“second school of jihadism.” She warned, ​“It is not clear that the Taliban, which seeks international recognition and legitimacy, is going to want to tolerate or encourage direct attacks on the U.S. from al Qaeda or other extremist groups based in Afghanistan.”

The think tank’s backing from a military contractor was not discussed in these media appearances.

The case of CACI International is not unique. The Intercept notes,

​“Among the other talking heads who took to cable news segments or op-ed pages without disclosing their defense industry ties were retired Gen. David Petraeus; Rebecca Grant, a former staffer for the Air Force secretary; Richard Haass, who worked as an adviser to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell; and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.”

This cacophony of voices matters because Biden is facing a media uproar over the withdrawal. Pundits and mainstream press outlets that have been ignoring civilian deaths for years are suddenly expressing moral outrage at their hardships now that the war is ending. While there are legitimate concerns about the fate of Afghans as the Taliban seizes control, the vast majority of the firestorm stems from a reflexively pro-war perspective, in favor of the indefinite extension of an occupation that has proven brutal and lethal for civilians. The overwhelming effect is to send the message to Biden, and any future presidents, that they should think twice before withdrawing from a war, lest they have a media revolt on their hands.

But this outcry didn’t materialize out of nowhere. Think tank ​“experts,” whose organizations are financed by the very companies profiting from the war, play a key part. They are trotted out in front of cameras and quoted in major media outlets, presented as above-the-fray observers. They are well-financed, polished and groomed precisely for moments like these. And the companies financing them get to launder their own objectives through institutions that are seen as respectable, academic and rigorous. It’s a grotesque system that is functioning as it was designed.

In its August 12 call, CACI International simply acknowledged the company’s economic interests out loud.

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Sarah Lazare is web editor and reporter for In These Times. She tweets at @sarahlazare.

Featured image: U.S. jets bombing Afghanistan. These attacks will not end despite the formal U.S. withdrawal by September 11th. [Source: wired.com]

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When President Biden leaves billions of US military hardware in the hands of America-hating terrorists – after having seven months to “plan a withdrawal” – he doesn’t mess around.

According to a now-viral infographic from The Sunday Times, ongoing terror operations will benefit from the luxury of more than 22,000 Humvees, 42,000 pick-up trucks and SUVs, 16,000 night visions goggles and devices, 64,000 machine guns, and 358,000 assault rifles.

Indeed, while Biden wants to strip law-abiding Americans of their constitutional right to bear arms, he’s put over 400,000 of them in the hands of terrorists.

Biden gave the Taliban 350,000 assault rifles but wants to take yours away https://t.co/o55Oozyp7o

— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) August 29, 2021

Needless to say, the vast trove of US military hardware handed to America’s enemies on a silver platter should, at minimum, make Raytheon – whose board Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin sat on until he joined the Biden admin – very happy.

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Featured image: Taliban fighters stand on a military vehicle in Kabul, capital of Afghanistan, August 16, 2021. /Xinhua

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Americans finally recognize the military lies that pervaded the success claims of the 20-year war in Afghanistan.  But democracy promotion was an even bigger sham. Afghanistan was Exhibit A for the triumphal crusade to spread freedom and democracy.

After the U.S. invasion in 2001, the U.S. government spent more than $600 million to support elections and democratic procedures in Afghanistan (part of the $143 billion the U.S. spent there for relief and reconstruction). Washington bragging points were always more important than Afghan preferences. “In 2002 and 2003, when Afghan tribal councils gathered to write a new constitution, the U.S. government gave [bribes] to delegates who supported Washington’s preferred stance on human rights and women’s rights,” the Washington Post reported in 2019. President George W. Bush boasted in 2004: “Afghanistan has now got a constitution which talks about freedom of religion and talks about women’s rights…Democracy is flourishing.” Though Bush’s reelection campaign speeches were larded with such lines, women in many parts of Afghanistan continued to be oppressed even worse than characters in American country music songs. One international aid worker commented that during the Taliban era “if a woman went to market and showed an inch of flesh she would have been flogged—now she’s raped.”

Hamid Karzai, the slick operator who the Bush administration installed to rule Afghanistan after 9/11, won a rigged 2004 presidential election. Karzai approved a law that entitled a husband to starve his wife if she refused his sexual demands.

During his 2008 presidential campaign, Obama labeled the conflict in Afghanistan the “right war.” By the time Obama took office, the Taliban were vigorously reviving and Afghans were shunning the corrupt puppet regime the U.S. installed in 2002.

President Obama justified his 2009 troop surge in Afghanistan to bolster its democracy. When Obama spoke to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in August 2009, he boasted that “our troops are helping to secure polling places for this week’s election so that Afghans can choose the future that they want.” In reality, Obama effectively sent American soldiers to serve as bodyguards for Karzai’s minions to steal the election. At first glance, Karzai won a narrow victory. But two weeks after the election, the New York Times reported that Karzai’s operatives set up as many as 800 fictitious polling sites “where no one voted but where hundreds of thousands of ballots were still recorded toward the president’s re-election.” In some Afghan provinces, pro-Karzai ballots outnumbered actual voters by tenfold. Peter Galbraith, a senior United Nations official in Afghanistan, was fired after he estimated that a third of Karzai’s votes were bogus. Galbraith wrote, “No amount of spin can obscure the fact that we spent upwards of $200 million on an election that has been a total fiasco” which “handed the Taliban its greatest strategic victory.”

Despite the shenanigans, the Obama administration praised Karzai as if he had won fair and square. The Obama administration told Congress that the decision to send far more U.S. troops to Afghanistan depended on the Afghan government’s “ability to hold credible elections,” among other tests. After the 2009 Afghan election turned into a sham, Obama decided it was “close enough for government work” to democracy. Thanks to Obama’s surge, 1,400 American soldiers died in part to propagate the mirage of Afghan democracy.

Afghan officials conspired for more than 15 years to both multiply and ignore election fraud. As early as 2009, U.S. Admiral Mike Mullen, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned that the result was that the Afghan government’s legitimacy “is, at best, in question right now and, at worst, doesn’t exist.” An analysis by the U.S. Agency for International Development of the 2014 Afghan election noted that “several prominent election officials associated with fraud during past elections were promoted or given ministerial appointments.”

Behind closed door, D.C. poohbahs admitted their Afghan charade. At a confidential 2015 National Security Council meeting, President Obama admitted that the U.S. would never “transform Afghanistan into a semblance of a democracy able to defend itself,” the New York Times reported. But that didn’t deter Obama from publicly bragging the following year that U.S. troops and diplomats had helped Afghanistan “establish a democratic government.”

To buttress the new democracy, the U.S. government spent a billion dollars to promote the “rule of law” and justice reform in Afghanistan. But such programs were as wasteful as the rest of the U.S. dollar deluge on that nation. As the Christian Science Monitor noted in mid-2010, the Obama administration’s Agency for International Development “created an atmosphere of frantic urgency about the ‘burn rate’—a measure of how quickly money is spent. Emphasis gets put on spending fast to make room for the next batch from Congress.”

One American contractor received $35 million to promote the rule of law in Afghanistan in part by distributing kites and comic books to kids. The New York Times reported that the contractor “arranged an event to hand out kites and comic books to children. The kites were festooned with slogans about gender equality and rule of law that most of the attendees could not read. Police officers guarding the event stole many of the kites, beating some of the children, while fathers snatched kites from their girls to give to the boys.” A 2015 report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) report found that the Afghan “rule of law” spending had been a dismal failure.

Afghan democracy was a bigger fraud than almost anyone wanted in D.C. would admit. One of the best demolitions can be found in a February 2021 report, “Elections: Lessons from the U.S. Experience in Afghanistan,” produced by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). After more than 15 years of pro-democracy “assistance,” Afghanistan’s 2019 presidential election was “the most corrupt the country had ever held,” according to expert consulted by SIGAR.

U.S. tax dollars poured into the coffers of Afghanistan’s Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) to safeguard voting. Alas—that agency was a prime source of the most brazen vote stealing. ECC bosses were careful not to hire almost anyone with electoral experience since such folks might raise troubling questions. A former top ECC official told SIGAR that “one criterion for chief electoral officer applicants in 2018 was how well the candidates were dressed. He said this category was used as a pretext to reduce the scores of less pliable candidates.” It is unknown whether this villainy character test was inspired by Washington’s K Street lobbyists.

Afghan elections were institutionalized racketeering because the rules were always in flux. SIGAR noted, “Only one of the country’s election laws has ever been passed by parliament; the rest were presidential decrees that were never referred to the parliament for consideration.” The SIGAR report quoted election experts: “The likelihood of a credible election is inversely proportional to the degree to which the ruling regime directly controls the election management body.” Afghan voting records were a total mess, making it easy for politicians to fabricate claims about the “will of the people.” SIGAR concluded, “Afghanistan’s national voter registry and the voter registration process are exceptionally vulnerable to manipulation and mismanagement.”

It is tricky to build a viable democracy when elected officials receive a license to steal. After noting the hefty bribes that politicians pay to election officials, SIGAR explained: “One reason candidates may be willing to pay such high prices for seats in parliament is to protect ill-gotten fortunes…By becoming members of parliament, they can gain access to new sources of illicit revenue and immunity from prosecution.” That parliament was the last place on earth to seek support for honest elections.

Afghan experiences also offer lessons for Americans confounded by disputes regarding the 2020 U.S. election, including the controversies surrounding computer voting. As one election expert told SIGAR, “There is no difference between stuffing 100 ballots and pressing a button on an electronic voting machine 100 times.” Afghan President Ashraf Ghani decreed that the 2019 election must rely on electronic voting. But SIGAR noted that electronic voting “did not reduce fraud overall; it just displaced it to other parts of the electoral cycle.” Confidence in Afghan electronic voting was not assisted by the secrecy surrounding the software and equipment. After the 2019 presidential election, Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission declared that it could not “share information” about how votes were being reconciled because “the contractor, Dermalog, controlled that process.” SIGAR quoted experts who warned that “because governments often control electoral commissions and the procurement of election technology, they are well placed to use it to commit fraud.” SIGAR ruefully noted, “The true purpose of adopting election technologies may not be to actually reduce fraud, but to create the illusion of doing so.”

Afghan debacles are a reminder that there is no “guardian angel of democracy.” Politicians permitting citizens to vote does not assure that election results will receive even a whiff of legitimacy. Once fraud or suspicions of fraud reach a certain level, any election winners will be suspected scoundrels. A U.S. Army colonel who deployed several times to Afghanistan told SIGAR that as early as 2006, the Afghan government had “self-organized into a kleptocracy.” Officials who were stealing everything else never hesitated to steal votes.

Biden, like Obama and George W. Bush, is seeking to make “democracy promotion” a redeeming theme for his presidency. But no Washington pundit, politician, or “expert” who vouched for Afghan democracy should ever be trusted again. The U.S. government will continue meddling in foreign elections as long as American politicians think they can gain influence—or perhaps contracts for their friends or family members. There is no reason to expect Biden’s “democracy promotion” to be any cleaner than his Ukraine policy during the Obama administration.

The collapse of the Afghan government settled any doubts about whether intellectuals are some of Washington’s biggest con artists. They profited mightily by pirouetting as experts with lavish government contracts that produced nothing except windfall profits for overpriced D.C. restaurants. Any think tank or research institute or Beltway Bandit that was honest about Afghanistan being a quagmire for democracy would have been banned from future contracting.

Americans also need to take lessons from the endless lies that Washington told about Afghan democracy. Are U.S. government officials more honest when they talk about American democracy than when they praise sham democracies abroad? Unfortunately, no one is talking of the peril of the “Afghanization” of American democracy.

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Military Doctor: “The COVID Vaccine Program Has Killed More Young Active Duty People than COVID Did”

By Brian Shilhavy, August 30, 2021

This is the not the first time the military has been implicated in killing active duty military with experimental vaccines. It happened also during the Gulf War with the experimental anthrax vaccine, which some estimates claim killed 35,000 military people with what was originally termed “Gulf War Syndrome.”

“Who Is Our Friend, Syria . . . or al-Qaeda?”, Retired Virginia State Senator Richard Black Asks

By Richard H. Black and Basma Qaddour, August 30, 2021

America would be wise to continue cutting its losses across the Middle East. It could start by normalizing relations with Syria, ending sanctions, and withdrawing U.S. troops from their sovereign territory.

Sen. Ron Johnson: 5 Questions for FDA About Pfizer Vaccine Approval

By Children’s Health Defense, August 30, 2021

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) on Thursday sent a letter to Dr. Janet Woodruff, acting commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), demanding answers to five questions pertaining to the FDA’s approval of the Pfizer Comirnaty COVID vaccine.

Chicago Judge Strips Mother of Parental Rights for Being Unvaccinated

By The Jewish Voice, August 30, 2021

A judge in Cook County Illinois (which includes Chicago and some of the surrounding area) has taken away the parental rights of a woman due to her refusal to get vaccinated, according to Fox in Illinois.

A Political Windfall for the Taliban. Supported by the US

By M. K. Bhadrakumar, August 30, 2021

The commander of CENTCOM Gen. Kenneth McKenzie disclosed to journalists on Thursday that  the US was already sharing information on terror threats in Afghanistan with Taliban. As he put it, “We share versions of this information with the Taliban so that they actually make searches… We think they’ve thwarted some.”

The Corruption of Science. The Hydroxychloroquine Lancet Study Scandal. Who Was Behind It? Anthony Fauci’s Intent To Block HCQ on Behalf of Big Pharma

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, August 29, 2021

The Guardian has revealed the scandal behind the hydroxychloroquine study which was intent on blocking HCQ as a cure for COVID-19. “Dozens of scientific papers co-authored by the chief executive of the US tech company behind the Lancet hydroxychloroquine study scandal are now being audited, including one that a scientific integrity expert claims contains images that appear to have been digitally manipulated.

Most Vaccinated Countries Have Most COVID Cases

By Rodney Atkinson, August 29, 2021

The most vaccinated countries have the most cases and deaths per million population and the least vaccinated countries have the fewest cases and deaths per million population.

If California Governor Is Replaced with Republican, Senate Could Swing to GOP

By Prof. Marjorie Cohn, August 29, 2021

If Gov. Gavin Newsom is recalled, the health, civil rights and future of Californians — and people across the country — will be profoundly threatened.

Legal Action in British Columbia Supreme Court, To Hold Multiple Parties Accountable for their Actions with respect to COVID-19 Measures

By Action4Canada, August 29, 2021

On August 16th, 2021, Action4Canada formally filed legal action in the BC Supreme Court, to hold multiple parties accountable for their actions with respect to COVID-19 measures.

Why Vaccine Passports Must be Rejected

By Dr. Joseph Mercola, August 29, 2021

Identity authentication on the Vax Verify portal is done using a one-time verification process through the financial credit score company Experian — a decision that suggests your medical history and finances might become interconnected in the future.

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In this group interview facilitated by Dr. Sam Dubé, M.D., Ph.D., four physicians from across Canada – emergency physician Dr. Chris Milburn, rural family physician Dr. Charles Hoffe, general surgeon Dr. Francis Christian, and pathologist Dr. Roger Hodkinson – tell their stories of persecution at the hands of their governing bodies. Their only crime: practicing evidence-based medicine by questioning the safety of their patients and the public during the pandemic.

A legal representative for their cases, John Carpay, Esq., provides insights and legal commentary, invoking the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. These physicians, and others like them, are the living embodiment of the medical mantras of “do no harm” and “informed consent”.

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This is a DO NOT MISS video!

We are extremely excited to debut this video for you all.

We interviewed pioneer and ground-breaking researcher Dr. Hector Carvallo. He is the investigator and author of the IDEA Trial and IVERCAR Trial, two ground-breaking studies on Ivermectin for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19. He has done substantial work on Ivermectin, Iota Carrageenan, Bromhexine, and more for both prophylaxis and treatment of COVID-19!

He was one of the first researchers to do significant work on treating and preventing COVID-19 with Ivermectin. He not only will help us in understanding the science and evidence behind these therapies, but will also give us a glimpse into the challenges they have faced in getting this cheap, broadly available therapeutic approved on a larger scale!

Do not miss this tremendously interesting discussion!

• IDEA Trial – Ivermectin, Dexamethasone, Enoxaparin, Aspirin for COVID-19
• IVERCAR Trial – Ivermectin and Iota Carrageenan Prophylaxis for COVID-19

The list of questions Dr. Carvallo will be answering/discussing:

• Tell us a little bit about yourself.
• What first peaked your interest in Ivermectin as a possible therapeutic for COVID-19?
• Did you meet resistance when you first started using Ivermectin to treat COVID-19?
• What has been your clinical experience using Ivermectin for COVID-19? What types of things have you observed that may not be easy to grasp by reading your research?
• What do you think is preventing Ivermectin from becoming more heavily considered by the world as a therapeutic for COVID-19?
• After the ICON Trial was published in Chest, more physicians seem to be publicly supporting the use of Ivermectin for COVID-19. What do you think it will take for the larger medical industry to start to pay attention to this potential therapeutic?
• What do you want our viewers to know about COVID-19, your research, or your ground-breaking work on Ivermectin?
• What is Iota Carrageenan and how did you first get interested in this compound?
• What has been your clinical experience using this medication for COVID-19?
• There seems to be mixed literature on whether Bromhexine is efficacious. What are your thoughts on it’s efficacy?
• Do you think that we will find a single agent to treat COVID-19, or do you believe it will be a combination of different medications? What might that combination look like?
• What are you looking at right now? Any interesting or impressive data that has yet to be published that you would like to share with our viewers?
• Any other things you would like to discuss with our viewers?

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Member of America’s Frontline Doctors Dr. Ryan Cole provides a scientific clarification of what these injections do in the head and other organs of the vaccinated people.

Watch the video below.

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Dr. Lee Merritt completed an Orthopaedic Surgery Residency in the United States Navy and served 9 years as a Navy physician and surgeon where she also studied bioweapons before returning to Rochester, where she was the only woman to be appointed as the Louis A. Goldstein Fellow of Spinal Surgery.

Dr. Merritt has been in the private practice of Orthopaedic and Spinal Surgery since 1995, has served on the Board of the Arizona Medical Association, and is past president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.

Dr. Merritt recently addressed the American Frontline Doctors and discussed how all through 2020 there were only 20 deaths among all active duty military personnel related to COVID. However, there are now many reports of tumors and over 80 cases of myocarditis (inflammation of the heart), which has a 5-year mortality rate of around 66%, following the COVID-19 shots given to the military.

With the vaccine program we’ve ostensibly killed more of our young active duty people than COVID did.

This is the not the first time the military has been implicated in killing active duty military with experimental vaccines. It happened also during the Gulf War with the experimental anthrax vaccine, which some estimates claim killed 35,000 military people with what was originally termed “Gulf War Syndrome.”

I have produced a video that includes an Army wife of an active duty soldier in South Korea explain how her previously healthy husband now has major heart problems after taking the COVID-19 vaccines, followed by a medic whistleblower who explains what lengths the military will go to to cover up deaths related to experimental vaccines.

Please watch this and share with everyone you know in the military, so we don’t see a repeat in history of what happened with the anthrax vaccine.

It is better to risk court martial and losing your military career than to give up your life for a vaccine, or become permanently disabled for what is now the largest public vaccine trial ever conducted upon humanity.

This is from our Rumble channel, and it should also be on our Bitchute channel shortly.

Also, here is the documentary: “Vaccine Syndrome: How the Experimental Anthrax Vaccine Killed 35,000 Military Men and Women” from our Bitchute channel.

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***

Canada will be, arguably already is, totalitarian, and most won’t notice.

The jab will kill and injure multitudes more and most won’t notice.

The Truth will continue to be rejected.

People will be plugged into cell phones and info streams and reality will continue to be disappeared.

Anti-social distancing and communication distruptors will continue and accelerate.

Screen-time will be increasingly normalized, digital education, digital health care, digital everything will prevail.

The human genome itself will be changed (transhumanism).

People will be increasingly controlled and programmed.

It will happen as it is happening, all in the name of combating an ever-changing “outside enemy”.

Previous freedoms, and inalienable rights will end “not with a bang but a whimper.”

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Mark Taliano is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and the author of Voices from Syria, Global Research Publishers, 2017. Visit the author’s website at https://www.marktaliano.net where this article was originally published.

Featured image is from the author

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Order Mark Taliano’s Book “Voices from Syria” directly from Global Research.

Mark Taliano combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes  the mainstream media narratives on Syria. 

Voices from Syria 

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-1-6

Author: Mark Taliano

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America would be wise to continue cutting its losses across the Middle East. It could start by normalizing relations with Syria, ending sanctions, and withdrawing U.S. troops from their sovereign territory. 

This is what the Retired Virginia state senator Richard Black has said in an interview with the Syria Times e-newspaper.

“Syria is helping us by battling the greatest army of al Qaeda terrorists on earth in Idlib Province. And since “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” it’s time we asked, just who is our friend, Syria . . . or al Qaeda?”, the retired senator added.

He asserted that the Obama-Biden administration bears heavy responsibility for institutionalizing never-ending wars and extending them into Libya, Syria, and Yemen.

Asked about the reperucussions of the Taliban’s capture of Afghanistan, the retired senator replied:

“The fall of Afghanistan is a damaging blow to the American deep state, which thrives on a continuous state of warfare. Before he ordered the withdrawal from Afghanistan, President Biden could do no wrong; the press suppressed negative news about him. But now, the media are lashing out with a vengeance, causing his popularity to plummet.”

He went on to say:

“War hawks have warned that al Qaeda may reemerge in Afghanistan. Their claim rings hollow, since the U.S. has been an unwavering supporter of al Qaeda in Syria throughout the Syrian War. Under CIA Project Timber Sycamore, the U.S. channeled vast quantities of anti-tank and anti-air missiles to al Qaeda affiliates there. To this day, the U.S. actively supports the largest concentration of al Qaeda fighters on earth in Syria’s Idlib Province. It is outrageous to suggest that the U.S. is genuinely concerned that al Qaeda might reconstitute in Afghanistan, when we are their principal sponsors in Syria.”

Read the full interview here.

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Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) on Thursday sent a letter to Dr. Janet Woodruff, acting commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), demanding answers to five questions pertaining to the FDA’s approval of the Pfizer Comirnaty COVID vaccine.

The FDA on Aug. 23 granted full approval to Pfizer’s vaccine, over the objections of some scientists who pointed out that full approval was based on only six months’ worth of data — despite clinical trials designed for two years — and that there was no public discussion of the data.

In his Aug. 26 letter, Johnson asked questions similar to those raised earlier this week by Children’s Health Defense Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Dr. Meryl Nass about the legal distinction between the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine being administered under Emergency Use Authorization, and Pfizer’s Comirnaty vaccine, which was granted full licensure.

In his letter, Johnson asks these five questions:

1. Why didn’t the FDA grant full licensure for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine that is in use and available in the U.S.?

2. How are the Comirnaty and Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines “legally distinct” and what are the “certain differences”?

3. There is no doubt that the FDA’s action will lead to more vaccine mandates and increased pressure on those currently choosing not to get vaccinated. Your letter to Pfizer suggests that “there is not sufficient approved vaccine available for distribution.” Is there sufficient supply in the U.S. of the Comirnaty vaccine to ensure that those being vaccinated under mandates will be receiving the FDA-approved version? Or is it more likely (or certain) that they will be vaccinated using the vaccine administered under the reissued EUA?

4. If there is insufficient supply of Comirnaty vaccines for those succumbing to the coercion of mandates, isn’t the FDA de facto endorsing vaccine mandates utilizing EUA vaccines?

5. Will individuals who receive either vaccine be afforded the same legal protections if they are injured by the vaccine? If not, why not?

This isn’t the first time Johnson has written the FDA about COVID vaccines. On Aug. 22, he sent a letter to Woodcock; Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH); and Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, director of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, criticizing the FDA’s decision not to hold a formal advisory committee meeting to discuss Pfizer’s application for full approval of its vaccine.

In July, Johnson held a news conference with families injured by the vaccines, during which he said the medical community was “repeatedly ignoring” the vaccine-injured.

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A judge in Cook County Illinois (which includes Chicago and some of the surrounding area) has taken away the parental rights of a woman due to her refusal to get vaccinated, according to Fox in Illinois.

In what all parties agree is a very unusual and perhaps unprecedented step, a judge at Chicago’s Daley Center has stripped Rebecca Firlit of custody due to her refusal to get vaccinated.

That’s the day Firlit appeared in court via Zoom, accompanied by her ex-husband, for a child support hearing involving her 11-year-old son. The two have been divorced for seven years and share custody and parenting time. Out of the blue, Cook County Judge James Shapiro asked her whether she had been vaccinated. Firlit told Shapiro she didn’t get vaccinated because she has had bad reactions to vaccines in the past.

Watch the video here.

Shapiro then ordered that Firlit be prevented from spending parenting time with her son until she gets vaccinated. Over the past two weeks, Firlit has been able to talk to her son on the phone and through video calls, but has been unable to see him in person.

“I think that it’s wrong. I think that it’s dividing families. And I think it’s not in my son’s best interest to be away from his mother,” Firlit said.

Firlit is now appealing the court order, saying the judge has no authority to take away her parenting rights over her vaccination status.

“It had nothing to do with what we were talking about. He was placing his views on me. And taking my son away from me,” Firlit said.

Her attorney, Annette Fernholz, claimed the judge has overstepped his authority.

“In this case you have a judge, without any matter before him regarding the parenting time with the child deciding ‘Oh, you’re not vaccinated. You don’t get to see your child until you are vaccinated.’That kind of exceeds his jurisdiction,” Fernholz said.

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Three neonicotinoid insecticides likely harm all of the country’s 38 protected amphibians and roughly three fourths of all other endangered plants and animals, according to long-anticipated studies released today by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Neonicotinoids are the most popular insecticides used in the United States. Hundreds of studies have shown they play a major role in population-level declines of bees, birds, butterflies and freshwater invertebrates. Today’s draft biological evaluations represent the first time the EPA has evaluated the chemicals’ potential to harm the nation’s most imperiled plants and animals.

“Now the EPA can’t ignore the fact that these popular insecticides are wiping out our country’s most endangered plants and animals,” said Lori Ann Burd, environmental health director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Neonicotinoids are used so widely, and in such large quantities, that even the EPA’s industry-friendly pesticide office had to conclude that few endangered species can escape their toxic effects.”

The EPA’s draft biological evaluations analyzed three neonicotinoids: clothianidin, imidacloprid and thiamethoxam.

Nearly 80% of all endangered species — 1,445 different kinds of plants and animals — are likely to be “adversely affected” by imidacloprid, and the pesticide will adversely modify the designated critical habitats of 658 species. For thiamethoxam, 1,396 (77% of all) endangered species are likely to be adversely affected, and the pesticide will adversely modify the designated critical habitats of 644 species. About two thirds of all endangered species, 1,225, are likely to be adversely affected by clothianidin, and the pesticide will adversely modify the designated critical habitats of 644 species.

“The EPA doesn’t need any more proof. It should ban neonicotinoids right now,” said Burd. “We’re in a heartbreaking extinction crisis, and neonicotinoids are playing an outsized role in driving it. Pollinator populations are declining nationwide. The American bumblebee, once the most common bumblebee in the country, has declined by an estimated 89% in just the past 20 years. There are more Starbucks stores than monarch butterflies in California. What will it take for the EPA to act on this information and ban these deadly chemicals?”

Neonicotinoids are used on hundreds of millions of acres of U.S. agricultural land. They can be directly sprayed or injected and are very commonly used as coatings on seeds planted on hundreds of millions of acres each year. As systemic insecticides, they’re absorbed by plants, making the entire plant deadly, including its nectar, pollen and fruit. They can persist in soil for years.

Species found to be harmed by all three of the neonicotinoids include rusty patched bumblebees, whooping cranes, Chinook salmon, northern long-eared bats and orcas.

Imidacloprid is also one of the two active ingredients in Seresto flea collars, implicated in the deaths of more than 1,700 family pets and under consideration for cancelation following a petition from the Center.

Authors of a major scientific review of the catastrophic decline of insects have said that a “serious reduction in pesticide usage” is key to preventing the extinction of up to 41% of the world’s insects in the next few decades.

For decades the EPA has steadfastly refused to comply with its obligations under the Endangered Species Act. It was finally forced to do this evaluation under the terms of legal settlements with the Center for Food Safety and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

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The horrific terrorist strikes in Kabul on Thursday which killed at least 12 US servicemen and dozens of civilians will lead to a higher level of cooperation between the US and the Taliban. 

The commander of CENTCOM Gen. Kenneth McKenzie disclosed to journalists on Thursday that  the US was already sharing information on terror threats in Afghanistan with Taliban. As he put it, “We share versions of this information with the Taliban so that they actually make searches… We think they’ve thwarted some.”

The US is finally coming round to the Russian view that the real terrorist threat in Afghanistan stems from the Islamic State and not the Taliban — and, more importantly, Taliban can be a useful partner in the fight against the ISIS. 

The Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday that a communications mechanism between Russia and the US on Afghanistan has been established, and contacts are likely to continue. This follows a phone conversation earlier this week between Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev and the US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan to discuss the situation in Afghanistan.

The Taliban’s victory march into Kabul stunned the Biden administration. The immediate task at hand was to launch the evacuation of American citizens and thousands of Afghan nationals out of Kabul airport. The daunting security operation necessitated a working relationship with the Taliban — even as, on a parallel track, the Biden Administration began turning the screws to punish the victorious insurgents by cutting off their access to funds. 

On its part, the Taliban has remained largely cooperative. With the comfort level rising, President Biden deputed the CIA director William Burns to travel to Kabul on Monday to meet the Taliban’s political chief Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. In retrospect, Burns’ mission would have been partly at least to sensitise Baradar about intelligence reports regarding an imminent terrorist threat to Kabul.

Indeed, President Biden himself said more than once in the recent days that the Taliban is an inveterate enemy of the ISIS — and vice versa. Biden probably signalled to the Taliban about a limited convergence of interests in working together. 

Already, in remarks to the press in Washington on August 25, Secretary of State Antony Blinken admitted that when it came to dealing with the Taliban government, America’s self-interests came first. In Blinken’s words,

“Going forward, we will judge our engagement with any Taliban-led government in Afghanistan based on one simple proposition: our interests, and does it help us advance them or not.” 

Blinken added,

“As a practical matter, it advances our interests” to engage with the Taliban, saying that an Afghan government that keeps its commitments to renouncing terrorism, protecting human rights, and allowing people to leave is “a government we can work with.”

Thus, it is to be expected that the terrorist attacks in Kabul will prompt a major rethink in Washington’s approach to the Taliban. What direction it will take remains to be seen. But at any rate, a deeper engagement with the Taliban has become a necessity for Washington for the simple reason that they are the compelling reality in Kabul and they control almost the entire Afghanistan — and happen to be implacably opposed to the ISIS and sundry other terrorist groups. 

Biden’s message was loud and clear when he threatened the ISIS from the White House yesterday:

“We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay.”

It means that ostracisation of the Taliban government in Kabul is no longer a viable option for the Biden Administration. 

At issue will be the terms of engagement. To be sure, the US will need a strong intelligence presence in Kabul. Thus, the reopening of the US embassy in Kabul may become unavoidable sooner rather than later. 

The Taliban are pragmatic. They’ll be positive toward the US overtures for engagement, as it can open the pathway for recognition of their government, enhanced international legitimacy, and, most important, access to blocked funds, and resumption of assistance by the international financial institutions such as World Bank and IMF as well as the UN agencies. 

An enhanced level of relationship with the US will go a long way to help the Taliban to consolidate its government and focus on governance. Clearly, there isn’t going to be space for any anti-Taliban resistance movement within Afghanistan. The Panjshiris will be smart enough to sense this.  

Suffice to say, the paradox is that the horrific events in Kabul on Thursday may turn out to be a political windfall for the Taliban. Afghanistan will remain a frontline state for Washington for a foreseeable future in terms of the potential threats to the US national security from terrorist groups. 

And counterterrorism will be the leitmotif of the new relationship between the US and Taliban. Of course, the quality of that relationship will depend increasingly on how far the Taliban government is receptive to the US expectations and demands on the security front. 

The human rights issues will inevitably get relegated to the back burner. Already, there is grudging acceptance in the West that a democratic transformation of Afghanistan is not to be expected and that prescriptive western values have few takers in that country. 

The question henceforth will be not whether Taliban has changed from the 1990s but rather how much it is willing to change. Taliban’s strategic autonomy as a manifestation of political Islam will be bolstered. The best hope would be that as time passes, and Taliban gathers experience in statecraft, it may assume some characteristics of the Muslim Brotherhood with whose ideologues based in Doha it would have had chance encounters in the recent years.  

However, for Biden himself, the Afghan debacle has seen a dramatic decrease in his approval rating from voters. As of now, polls show that a majority of Americans would prefer Biden to sit out the 2024 White House run. Meanwhile, any serious reverse in the mid-term elections next year would mean loss of control over Congress, which could cripple the presidency.  

There is a serious political crisis at home that Biden has to grapple with. To be sure, the recent events in Afghanistan will seriously affect the Biden administration’s attention span and capability to counter the challenge from China and Russia on the global stage. In fact, the Iran nuclear issue looms large as a huge challenge in immediate terms.

America’s credentials to lead its transatlantic allies are already under questioning. The G7 Leaders meeting on Tuesday exposed the fault lines. Two days later, the limits to US power were on full display in Kabul. 

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Important study first published on June 2020.

The Guardian has revealed the scandal behind the hydroxychloroquine study which was intent on blocking HCQ as a cure for COVID-19. “Dozens of scientific papers co-authored by the chief executive of the US tech company behind the Lancet hydroxychloroquine study scandal are now being audited, including one that a scientific integrity expert claims contains images that appear to have been digitally manipulated. 

The audit follows a Guardian investigation that found the company, Surgisphere, used suspect data in major scientific studies that were published and then retracted by world-leading medical journals, including the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine.  ….

According to The Lancet:

… several concerns were raised with respect to the veracity of the data and analyses conducted by Surgisphere Corporation and its founder and our co-author, Sapan Desai, in our publication. We launched an independent third-party peer review of Surgisphere …  As such, our reviewers were not able to conduct an independent and private peer review and therefore notified us of their withdrawal from the peer-review process

The study was allegedly based on data analysis of 96,032 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 between Dec 20, 2019, and April 14, 2020 from 671 hospitals Worldwide. The database, according to the Guardian could not be verified. It was false.

“I am truly Sorry”

Surgishpere CEO Dr. Sapan Desai was not in charge of the study. The lead author was Harvard Medical School professor Mandeep Mehra:

“I did not do enough to ensure that the data source was appropriate for this use. For that, and for all the disruptions – both directly and indirectly – I am truly sorry.”

CEO Dr. Sapan Desai took the blame. Who was behind him?

The Surgisphere Scientific Scam. Who was behind it?  Who “commissioned” this Report? 

Was the pharmaceutical industry and vaccine lobby group behind this initiative?  The Lancet acknowledges that the study received funding from the William Harvey Distinguished Chair in Advanced Cardiovascular Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital which is held by Dr. Mandeep Mehra. In this regard, it is worth noting that Brigham Health has a major contract with Big Pharma’s Gilead Sciences Inc, related to the development of the Remdesivir drug for the treatment of COVID-19. The Gilead-Brigham Health project was initiated in March 2020.

Was the Surgisphere study intended to provide a justification to block the use of HCQ, as recommended by Dr. Anthony Fauci, advisor to president Trump? Upon reading the study (prior to its retraction),  “Dr Fauci, … grinned as he told CNN that “the data shows hydroxychloroquine is not an effective treatment …”Referring to the Surgisphere report: “The scientific data is really quite evident now about the lack of efficacy for it [HCQ],” said Dr. Fauci. (quoted by CNN).

Here is the CNN’s authoritative assessment of Surgisphere’s  report (prior to The Lancet’s Retraction):

“Seriously ill Covid-19 patients who were treated with hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine were more likely to die or develop dangerous irregular heart rhythms, according to a large observational study [by Surgisphere] published Friday [May 22, 2020] in the medical journal The Lancet.

And Did CNN “retract” its earlier endorsement of  this “fake scientific study”? 

Dr. Anthony Fauci who is the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), has from the very outset led the campaign against hydroxychloroquine (largely on behalf of Big Pharma) invoking similar “scientific arguments” against HCQ, saying categorically there was no cure to COVID-19, and the only solution was the vaccine.

According to the Spectator:

The campaign to destroy hydroxychloroquine has been waged relentlessly, both by competitor pharmaceutical companies and those who want to destroy the US economy to advance their political agenda. It is shocking that it has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and billions of taxpayer dollars. But although the corruption of science for political and/ or financial gain has become a defining characteristic of our age, it is not a new story.

The publication of the Surgisphere study had an immediate impact: According to the Guardian, “Surgisphere data led to global trials of hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19 being halted in May, because it appeared to show the drug increased deaths in Covid-19 patients”.

“Higher Risks of Death” if you take HCQ, according to the study. In the days following the fake Surgisphere Lancet report on May 22, several countries including Belgium, France, Italy, acted to halt the use of hydroxychloroquine. The study had concluded patients taking the anti-malaria drug had a higher risk of death than those who were not taking the medication

It is worth noting that prior to the conduct of the Surgisphere study, Dr. Fauci stated categorically that the use of HCQ had not been studied in relation to the coronavirus. “No proven drug”: “Not Enough Known”. Nonsensical and false statements.

What Fauci failed to mention is that Chloroquine had been “studied” and tested fifteen years ago by the CDC as a drug to be used against coronavirus infections.  Chloroquine was used in 2002 and tested against SARS-1 coronavirus in a study under the auspices of the CDC published in 2005 in the peer reviewed Virology Journal. The main conclusion of the article was that:  Chloroquine is a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection and spread. It was used in the SARS-1 outbreak in 2002. It had the endorsement of the CDC.

The main author Dr. Martin J. Vincent together with several of his colleagues were affiliated with the Special Pathogens Branch of the Atlanta based CDC together with co-authors from a Montreal based partner research institution.  The main conclusions of this study are that Chloroquine is a tested drug and can be used for SARS-corona virus infections.

Dr. Anthony Fauci has not put forth a treatment which could be applied against COVID-19. What he is saying is that there is no treatment. And then he endorses the fake scientific study by Surgisphere which was subsequently retracted by The Lancet.

Lancet: the article was retracted

Dr. Anthony Fauci has been deliberately blocking a drug which was endorsed by the CDC 15 years ago for treatment of SARS-1 Coronavirus. More recently, it has been used extensively in a number of countries in relation to the Coronavirus or SARS-COV-2 (COVID-19) outbreak. Whose interests is he serving?

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Global Research Editor’s Note

Important and carefully research article by Rodney Atkinson revealing the data.

The causality remains to be fully ascertained.  There is another important factor which must be investigated.

Vaccinated persons suffering from injuries will seek medical attention at a health clinic or at the hospital where he/she was vaccinated. These  individuals will immediately be subjected to a medical diagnosis as well as to a routine RT-PCR test, which will contribute to pushing up the number of Covid positive cases.

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The most vaccinated countries have the most cases and deaths per million population and the least vaccinated countries have the fewest cases and deaths per million population.

Devastating Israel figures show 80-90% of cases are vaccinated and an Oxford University study shows the vaccinated could be super spreaders. This was all predicted by leading authorities in the field but on both sides of the Atlantic Government vaccine lies continue.

As Dr Janci Lindsay, MD Toxicology & Molecular Biology, Technology Support Services LLC asserts:

“It is the vaccinated not the unvaccinated spreading the mutant variants” (thus confirming Nobel Prize Winner Professor Luc Montagnier’s theory – RA) This is what has happened with numerous other “leaky” (non neutralising) vaccines. The classic example is Marek’s Disease in chickens. I warned the CDC (the USA Centre for Disease Control) of this in April this year. Other scientists warned the CDC  as well“

I have compiled these tables below which set out the cases per million population and the deaths per million population of, firstly, the most vaccinated countries and secondly the least vaccinated countries. The final column in the first table is the date at which the country started vaccinations and after which the majority of all their cases and deaths occurred.Only in Saudi Arabia did the majority of cases occur before the vaccination start date but the cases did start to rise again after that.

I took the stats on the 12th August 2021. Average cases for the most vaccinated countries stood at 77,491 per million compared to only 19,672 in the least vaccinated. Average deaths in the most vaccinated countries were 1,647 per million compared to only 427 deaths in the least vaccinated.

To those who would counter that “naturally the worst affected countries would ensure the most vaccinations which is not the same as the vaccinations causing the cases” I would point to the majority of ALL their cases occurring AFTER they started vaccinating – the start date is in the third column.

Most Vaccinated Countries (More than 50%)

Least Vaccinated Countries (less than 23%)

After 8 months of frenetic vaccination activity there was a total for the EU/UK/USA of  34,052 Covid-19 injection related deaths and over 5.46 million injuries reported as at 1 August 2021. The above country figures are backed up by detailed evidence from Israel and the UK of vaccine induced deaths and/or the failure of vaccines to protect the vaccinated.

In the UK between 1st Feb 2021 and 2 Aug 2021 deaths within 28 days of positive specimen were 402 for the (double) vaccinated but only 253 for the unvaccinated. See this.

Vaccinated More Infectious

A groundbreaking preprint paper by the prestigious Oxford University Clinical Research Group, published Aug. 10 in The Lancet makes a complete mockery of the dangerous and ignorant corporations and governments who are seeking to punish the unvaccinated and promote the vaccinated. DELTA AIRLINES in the USA for instance is charging their unvaccinated employees a $200 a month “health insurance”.

But this study found vaccinated individuals carry 251 times the load of COVID-19 viruses in their nostrils compared to the unvaccinated. Vaccinated individuals therefore carry unusually high viral loads without becoming ill making them into presymptomatic superspreaders. 

So DELTA should be charging the vaccinated – or indeed stopping them from coming to work as a danger to everyone else.

Israel’s Vaccine Disaster

Israel is one of the most highly vaccinated countries in the world and yet by far the greatest number of cases are in the vaccinated. If the vaccine had been effective of course the vast majority of the cases would be in the unvaccinated. But in the period 27th June to July 3rd 79% of the cases in the 20-29 age group were in vaccinated people ranging up to 100% in the 90+ age group.

This is the Israeli data for infection breakthrough among vaccinated with 2 shots of Pfizer. Seems that efficacy is close to zero.. pic.twitter.com/F7nkrNVdp0

— rafael zioni (@rzioni) July 14, 2021

This was a process over the period of vaccinations whereby between January 2021 and July 2021 the number of monthly cases in the unvaccinated fell by 99% (65,252 to 257)  while the cases in the vaccinated fell by only 58% (3,057 to 1271). and it was the vaccinated who happen to develop symptoms by a ratio of 5:1. It is the vaccinated who are more likely to be hospitalised and develop critical illness.

Takes a few months for vaccine dangers to show: see this.

What Is the Real Deaths from Vaccine Figure?

Public Health Scotland have revealed that 5,522 people have died within twenty-eight days of having a Covid-19 vaccine within the 6 months Dec 2020 to June 21) in Scotland alone. 

This equates to an average of 920 deaths occurring every month due to the Covid-19 vaccines in Scotland alone. A freedom of information request made on the 30th January asked the Scottish Government to reveal the total number of people who had died of Covid-19 since March 2020. To which the Scottish Government responded on the 11th March 2021 with –

“The answer to your question is 596 deaths involving COVID-19 has been registered where there was no pre-existing medical condition between March 2020 and January 2021” . That is 85 per month and less than one tenth of the vaccine deaths reported.

Considering that up to August 2021 there are supposed to be only 1550 deaths in the whole of the UK (Scotland, England, Wales and  Northern Ireland, this makes the UK Government reporting system look fraudulent in the extreme. Allowing for the far greater population in England suggests 57,000 deaths in the UK as a whole.

This should be no surprise since a 2009 Harvard study showed that only 1% of adverse reactions were being officially registered in the USA and a statistician whistleblower in the US (with access to Medicare and Medicaid reports) is on record as claiming that the deaths from the vaccine are probably 5 times the reported figure. Many in the UK have reported that deaths of which they knew were not registered on the system.

Vaccine Lies from the NHS and the USA’s FDA

The official NHS statement of side effects from the COVID vaccines is:

“Most side effects are mild and should not last longer than a week, such as:

• a sore arm from the injection
• feeling tired
• a headache
• feeling achy
• feeling or being sick

You may also get a high temperature or feel hot or shivery 1 or 2 days after your vaccination” See this.

In the USA the FDA also lies about vaccine effects:

“The most commonly reported side effects by those clinical trial participants who received Comirnaty were pain, redness and swelling at the injection site, fatigue, headache, muscle or joint pain, chills, and fever.”

We know from the over 34,000 deaths and over a million serious side effects on both sides of the Atlantic that these statements are criminally negligent outright lies.

Does the British NHS not talk to Public Health England?

In the UK according to PHE the report between the 1st February 2021 and the 15th August 2021 there have been 390 deaths among the unvaccinated population and the fully vaccinated population has suffered a total of 679 deaths.

To be aware of these deaths, never mind the serious thrombosis and heart inflammation effects especially on young peopleand still consider vaccinating 12-15 years olds is criminal behaviour by any standards.

The sooner the “Nuremberg 2” trials begin the better. http://freenations.net/illegality-of-vax-passports-nuremberg-trial-for-politicians-and-a-blast-from-the-nazi-past/ These State and medical elitists must be made accountable.

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There is abundant evidence of direct foreign influence on the July 11 demonstrations. Yet a month later there is still a healthy debate going on, including opposing views among Cuban revolutionaries and Communist Party of Cuba members about its significance and how to interpret these unprecedented demonstrators.  The controversy to be found in an online discussion in Cuban pro-government media has been building up since July 11 to now.

Anti-Cuban Government Cyber Warfare Originating in Spain, Argentina and the US

Expert cyber analyst in Spain Julián Macías Tovar points out that the operation made intensive use of bots and new accounts recently created for the occasion, intending to make a chorus for #SOSCuba. The bot is a software application that runs automated scripts over the Internet. Typically, bot tasks are simple and repetitive, much faster than a person could type text.  More than 1,500 of the accounts that participated in the operation with the hashtag #SOSCuba were created between July 10 and 11. The first account that used the hashtag #SOSCuba was one located in Spain. It posted more than a thousand tweets on July 10 and 11, with an automation of five retweets per second.

Tovar analyzed the more than two million tweets using the hashtag #SOSCuba that started asking for “humanitarian aid” given the increasing COVID-19 deaths. This campaign was spurred on by the participation of artists and thousands of newly created accounts and bots that produced mobilizations in the streets. Tovar points out that the campaign was carried out for artists to participate with the HT #SOSCuba.

There is a history of some artists in Cuba falling prey to hostile foreign appeals. Just in recent history last year, the San Isidro Movement (SIM) arose composed of “artists” and caught the attention of a foreign audience just as the July 11 events. It took place during the [US] election period era. The SIM used pro-Trump slogans such as Vote Trump! Invade Cuba!  It was not only financed by US democracy promotion programs, but it enjoyed the logistical support of the American Embassy in Havana who ferried some leaders to their encampment.

During the presidential elections last year, no one can forget Biden opposition to Trump’s foreign policy. However, Biden only stressed that Trump acted indecently, while Biden would bring decency back to the White House. Did this stop Biden from changing course on Cuba policy? We now know that the US Cuba policy is bipartisan. Thus, it should come as no surprise that on March 12, 2021, under Biden, Julie Chung, Acting Assistant Secretary of State, met with the SIM through an internet conference. She concluded: “We enjoyed an open exchange of views on free expression, assembly, media and culture.  [I] heard about the San Isidro Movement. We salute Cuba’s brave champions of democracy and human rights.”

On July 11, the first demonstration in San Antonio de Los Baños, a small town west of Havana was publicized in the United States by the account of one named Yusnaby with thousands of retweets, As Tovar points out:

“Curiously Yusnaby (Latin American pronunciation of Navy which pronounces the “V” as a “B”) is the account that comes out by far the most in my threads because it is one of the patterns of automated fake accounts that spread hoaxes and hate campaigns.”

So, I investigated him on my own. His real name is Eduardo “Yusnaby” Perez. He was born in Cuba and emigrated to the US. Not long after arriving there, he procured a job as a journalist with Cuba Net (financed by the CIA through the National Endowment for Democracy), Univision as the most important outlet in Spanish based in Miami and broadcast for Latin American residents in Miami and the population in Latin America and others.

The Argentinean Agustín Antonetti is a leading member of the right-wing Fundación Libertad. He is very active in the current #SOSCuba campaign. He has #SOS Cuba as his Twitter banner. Antonetti has been an active participant in the campaigns of hoaxes and bots in social networks against left-wing governments in Latin America such as the very moderate Mexican President Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). To indicate how extremist Antonetti is, on July 24, 2021, he attacked AMLO for his public position in defence of Cuba. AMLO said:

“”We can agree or not with the Cuban Revolution and its government but having resisted 62 years without subjugation is quite a feat. … For their struggle in defence of the sovereignty of the country, I believe that the Cuban people deserve the prize of dignity. And the island should be considered the new Numantia [an ancient Iberian Peninsula city that clashed with Ancient Rome] for its example of resistance. And I think that it should be declared a World Heritage site for the same reason.”

So, we have sources in the US, Spain and Argentina pushing #SOSCuba. Thus, on July 11, protests broke out with hundreds of thousands of tweets and the participation of many artists’ accounts. #SOSCuba became a global trend in several countries including the US.

The international corporate media then stepped in to amplify and make visible the #SOSCuba in print and television.

The Debate in Cuba: But Where are the so-called “Critical Communist” Groups?

In a recent telephone conversation with a colleague in Cuba who specializes in cyber warfare, he reports that in Cuba, 54.3% of the population use smartphones, 54,3% use social media 55.5 % and 68,0% have internet access. In response to a devil’s advocate question on the possibility that the important increase in internet usage in Cuba acts as a double-edged sword. He responded: “It can be said that although internet access has increased, that this is very positive, it also has the negative effect of providing, for the counterrevolution, access to the population, especially to the young people.”

To shed more light on the participation of ordinary Cubans on July 11, that is those that support the government but are exasperated, it was imperative to consult the pro-government website Cuba Debate. It carries articles that are not necessarily published in the official outlets such as the Communist Party of Cuba’s Granma. An article by the very well respected and famous Communist Party of Cuba (CPC) member Fabián Escalante was just what we needed. He is a Major General (retired) and former head of the Cuban Intelligence services. He is the author of several books on the US intelligence services against Cuba and has investigated the assassination of John F. Kennedy from the Cuban prism. Cuba is facing not only the open onslaught of the Biden administration but also the so-called “left” in Cuba. Speaking in the name of “critical communist” groups, they spread false rumours that these groups are repressed by Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel. The principal message however is that within the CPC there is no debate, that opposing views are not tolerated. Based on experience since 1997 in Cuba, this author can state without any hesitation, that if there is a country that not only allows debate, but fosters it, it is Cuba, and this includes within the CPC. Thus, the “critical communists” are most harmful because they give credibility to the US narrative that Cuba is a dictatorship, but from the “left!” What a godsend for the US.

In Escalante’s article entitled “Reflections on Cuba’s Reality,” his very first sentence initiates with a controversial statement. “The social outburst of the past July 11 of this year was, without doubt, a shock to all of us and not precisely for the lack of evidence and signs.” The mainstream Cuban media do not refer to July 11 as a ‘social outburst,” as this appellation indicates that many Cubans who are not against the Cuban government did participate.

The author then goes on to indicate the difficult situation caused by the spike in Covid-19 and the blockade. Another critical comment: “We should also add the difficulties in the necessary food and medicine supplies that cause long lines to get products, a new kind of mob that operates a black market born as a direct result, and the mistakes caused by the delayed implementation of economic measures approved long-ago, including food production.” Thus, in this last phrase, he highlights the reality of avoidable delays in reforms.

This follows another startling sentence by Escalante, which coincides with this author’s own experience in Cuba. He writes:

“Due to our insufficient political and patriotic efforts, there is a depoliticized young group of the population that cannot understand the need to resist imperial policies. They long to have a better life and cannot find a quick way to achieve their goals.”

While saying that “the United States and its fascist government are the first culprits,” he also asserts that 

“It is essential to acknowledge that we are also responsible for the mistakes we made that demand a critical analysis, not only superficial allusion. We must deepen our knowledge of their reasons, their root causes, and how to solve them.”

How come the “critical communists” can not participate in this debate within the CPC and its own “critical communists” such as Escalante? After all, the “critical communists” also demand a “critical analysis”.  The only explanation is that the main grudge that they hold is not with the US, but rather with the CPC and its First Secretary Díaz-Canel. The “critical communist” appellation is just for window dressing.

Nonetheless, Escalante goes further in his critical analysis that “in November 2005, Fidel showed and warned us in a speech at the University of Havana that the Revolution itself could only destroy the Revolution.” He is referring to the speech whereby Fidel pointed out that the US on its own cannot defeat the revolution, it can only come to end by self-destruction from within as a result of Cuba’s own mistakes.

Thus, he continues:

“The call to the revolutionaries and communists must be to move into action, to the front line of combat: to fight the counterrevolutionaries inside and outside the country, to fight bureaucracy and apathy. To fight what is wrong, to fight disappointment and distrust.”

A lot is being said about “eyewitness” reports from Cuba. However, does this eyewitness report and analysis by Escalante not qualify? He writes:

“The combat and confrontation of ideas are taking place today at the base of society, in the block [street blocks of several streets organized by the Committees in Defense of the Revolution], in the neighbourhood in the community. It is there where the Party and the social and mass organizations must and have to battle, not to oppress, but to convince, to explain, and if necessary, to inform the leadership of the Communist Party and the government about the difficulties, misunderstandings, and shortages.”

The debate is ongoing and merits the attention of the supporters of the Cuban Revolution all over the world.

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Published on The Internationalist 11th Issue (India) (Paywall), August 2021

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There’s a good chance that California — a solidly blue state — will get a right-wing Republican governor as a result of the September 14 recall election. If Gov. Gavin Newsom is recalled, the health, civil rights and future of Californians — and people across the country — will be profoundly threatened. It is also possible that Newsom’s defeat could change the balance of power in the U.S. Senate, since the next California governor may be in a position to appoint a senator.

In defending his governorship, Newsom emphasizes that a GOP leader would likely roll back progressive reforms.

“The recall is an attempt by national Republican and Trump supporters to force an election and grab power in California,” Newsom’s ballot statement in the Official Voter Information Guide says. “The leaders of the Republican recall seek to repeal California’s clean air protections, roll back gun safety laws and take away health care from those who need it.”

Newsom cited his efforts to fight racism and police violence in an interview with the San Diego Union-Tribune:

California has fought systemic racism and fought to infuse our justice system with more safety and equality…. I’ve signed into law the nation’s strongest police use-of-force standard; outlawed private, for-profit prisons and immigration detention centers; banned all chokeholds in California; passed the nation’s first bill requiring independent investigations by the attorney general of all police shootings of unarmed individuals; and passed legislation to reform California’s juvenile justice system, break the school to prison pipeline, and phase out state-operated youth prisons.

Right-wing forces behind the recall were aided by the pandemic, gaining more time than usual to collect signatures to place the recall election, estimated to cost taxpayers $276 million, on the ballot. Newsom is also suffering from a self-inflicted wound stemming from the pandemic. Although he was the first governor to issue a mask mandate, which was popular with most Californians, he attended a dinner in November at the upscale French Laundry restaurant with no masks or social distancing, giving rise to charges of hypocrisy.

Even though Republicans make up just 24 percent of registered California voters, a CBS News poll released on August 15 indicated that Newsom has only a slim lead, within the margin of error, among likely voters. Republicans will probably vote at a greater rate than Democrats because California Democratic Party leaders didn’t initially take the recall seriously and dragged their feet while Republicans were mobilizing.

Right-Wing Republican Larry Elder Leads the GOP Pack to Replace Newsom

Trumpster radio talk-show host Republican Larry Elder is the front-runner among the 46 candidates vying to replace Newsom if the latter is recalled. Elder — who mentored Trump’s anti-immigrant adviser Stephen Miller — denies the existence of systemic racism, inaccurately describes Black people as crime-prone, and opposes sanctuary laws and citizenship for Dreamers. He is against vaccine and mask mandates and doesn’t take the climate crisis seriously. Elder opposes gun control, any minimum wage, paid family leave and has called Roe v. Wade “one of the worst decisions that the Supreme Court ever handed down.”

California is a national leader in moving away from fossil fuels, which drive global warming and exacerbate wildfires. But Elder said he would end the “war on oil and gas,” reduce regulation of fracking, and de-emphasize solar and wind power.

Meanwhile, if Elder is elected, “[t]he threat to immigrants in this state and racial justice for all would be catastrophic,” Jean Guerrero wrote in the Los Angeles Times.

Little-known Democrat Kevin Paffrath is running neck-in-neck with Elder. His “grab bag of ideas includes a few that appeal to Democrats (like marriage equality, higher teacher pay and promotion of solar and wind farms),” according to Norman Solomon. But Paffrath “features a lot of pseudo-populist notions that would do tremendous damage if implemented.” Indeed, Brooke Staggs writes that Paffrath wants “to make all coronavirus safety measures optional, to ditch income tax for anyone making less than $250,000, to use the National Guard to get all unhoused Californians off the streets and to give trained gun owners more rights.”

A GOP Governor Could Replace Senator Feinstein With a Republican

The Democrats have a razor-thin majority in the U.S. Senate. There are 50 Republicans, 48 Democrats and two Independents who caucus with the Democrats. If they are split 50-50 on a vote, Vice President Kamala Harris breaks the tie. A simple majority can confirm judicial nominations and enact funding legislation.

In the event that 88-year-old Sen. Dianne Feinstein dies or cannot continue to serve, the governor of California could replace her with an appointee of their choice for at least 14 months following the certification of the recall election. A new GOP governor could appoint a new senator from California, resulting in a Republican majority in the Senate. Solomon suggests that Feinstein resign to enable Governor Newsom to replace her with a Democrat, but admits that is “highly unlikely.”

California’s Recall System Is Unfair and Unconstitutional

California’s recall system is unfair and unconstitutional, as Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Berkeley law and economics professor Aaron S. Edlin explain in a New York Times op-ed on August 11. “Mr. Newsom can receive far more votes than any other candidate but still be removed from office,” they wrote. “Many focus on how unfair this structure is to the governor, but consider instead how unfair it is to the voters who support him.”

If Newsom doesn’t defeat the recall by a majority, he can be replaced by a candidate who receives only a plurality. For example, if 49 percent of voters vote against the recall, Newsom is out and a candidate such as Elder could win the governorship with just 20 percent of the vote or even less.

That’s because Article II, Section 15(c) of the California Constitution reads: “If the majority vote on the question is to recall, the officer is removed and, if there is a candidate, the candidate who receives a plurality is the successor. The officer may not be a candidate.”

“Based on virtually every opinion poll, Mr. Newsom seems likely to have more votes to keep him in office than any other candidate will receive to replace him,” Chemerinsky and Edlin noted. “But he may well lose the first question on the recall, effectively disenfranchising his supporters on the second question.”

They wrote, “Every voter should have an equal ability to influence the outcome of the election.” Chemerinsky and Edlin advocate the filing of a state or federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of California’s recall election. They propose, “The court could declare the recall election procedure unconstitutional and leave it to California to devise a constitutional alternative. Or it could simply add Mr. Newsom’s name on the ballot to the list of those running to replace him.”

Three days after the op-ed was published, on August 14, two California voters filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court, Central District of California challenging the constitutionality of the recall process. Plaintiffs R.J. Beaber and A.W. Clark are claiming that Article II, Section 15(c) violates the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the U.S. Constitution because it does not comply with the federal legal principle of “one person, one vote.”

The plaintiffs are asking the court to declare that Section 15(c) is unconstitutional. They also request a preliminary injunction to either stop the election entirely or suspend it until Newsom’s name is added to the list of candidates who seek to replace him.

“Undoing an unconstitutional election after the fact would be considerably messier than fixing the process beforehand,” according to Chemerinsky and Edlin.

In order to obtain a preliminary injunction, the plaintiffs must demonstrate that they are likely to succeed on the merits, that they will likely suffer irreparable harm without preliminary relief, and that the injunction would be in the public interest.

All three conditions are met in this case. The plaintiffs will likely prevail on the constitutional issues they raise; they would be deprived of their rights to have their votes count and be given equal weight with all of the votes that favor the recall and a candidate other than Newsom; and it is always in the public interest to have constitutional elections.

The federal court should declare California’s recall system unconstitutional and/or issue a preliminary injunction to stop the election unless and until Newsom is listed as a candidate in part two of the ballot.

On August 20, the Los Angeles Times published a separate op-ed by Chemerinsky and Edlin, in which they note that it would be better to file a case directly in the California Supreme Court than in federal court. They cite three reasons to bring the case in state court: 1.) California law makes it easier for plaintiffs to show they have standing, which is the right to bring a lawsuit in court; 2.) As recently as last year, the U.S. Supreme Court held that federal courts should not involve themselves in election processes shortly before the vote; and 3.) California needs a fast and definitive resolution, which is more likely to occur in the California Supreme Court than in a federal court.

In their new op-ed, Chemerinsky and Edlin write that “the easiest solution is for the California Supreme Court to allow the recall election to go forward but hold that if Newsom is recalled, the lieutenant governor will then become governor until the expiration of Newsom’s term in January 2023.”

Meanwhile, we must recognize what is at stake if a right-wing minority succeeds in recalling Newsom. He would likely be replaced by someone who would make Californians more vulnerable to the deadly pandemic, violate the rights of immigrants and people of color, and imperil the future of the planet by refusing to take action to combat climate change.

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Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, and a member of the bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and the advisory board of Veterans for Peace. Her books include Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues.  

She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Zero Hedge