Vaccine Passports: One Passport to Rule Them All

April 22nd, 2021 by Makia Freeman

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Vaccine passports are a major goal of those orchestrating Operation Coronavirus, though not the ultimate end goal of the COVID agenda. The purpose of vaccine passports is clear, despite whatever flimsy and mealy-mouthed excuses given to justify them: to restrict the movement of the unvaccinated, or in plainer terms, to restrict the movement of those who have seen through the agenda. There are no clever legal arguments that can distract from this basic truth: vaccine passports are inherently discriminatory. In a sane society, no nation that even pays lip service to caring about human rights could claim that vaccine passports are in alignment with their existing laws on individual rights, freedom of choice, freedom of movement, informed consent and medical sovereignty. However, it hardly bares stating that we do not live in a sane world. Below is a brief list of the vaccine passport schemes that are either proposed, about to be rolled out or already in existence. This is a worldwide agenda being rapidly promoted and implemented.

EU Planned for Vaccine Passports in 2018

Long before the word ‘coronavirus’ become a household world, or the term ‘COVID’ even existed, the European Union (EU) was planning for a vaccine passport scenario. The European Commission (the executive arm of the EU) published a proposal for vaccine passports on April 26th 2018 in a document entitled

“Proposal for a Council Recommendation on Strengthened Cooperation against Vaccine Preventable Diseases”.

It lays out the plan for a “vaccine passport” or “vaccine card” and “vaccine portals”:

“HEREBY WELCOMES THE COMMISSION’S INTENTION TO:

17. Examine issues of insufficient vaccine coverage caused by cross-border movement of people within the EU and look into options to address them, including developing a common EU citizens’ vaccination card/passport, compatible with electronic immunisation information systems and recognised for use across borders.

HEREBY WELCOMES THE COMMISSION’S INTENTION TO TAKE THE FOLLOWING ACTIONS, IN CLOSE COOPERATION WITH THE MEMBER STATES:

10. Aim at establishing a European Vaccination Information Sharing (EVIS) system, coordinated by the European Centre for Diseases Prevention and Control (ECDC), in order to:

a. Together with the national public health authorities,

i. examine the options of establishing, by 2020, guidelines for a core EU vaccination schedule, aiming to facilitate the compatibility of national schedules and promote equity in Union citizens’ health protection, and subsequently ensuring broad uptake of the core schedule as well as a common vaccination card;

ii. strengthen the consistency, transparency, and methodologies in the assessment of national and regional vaccination plans, by sharing scientific evidence and tools with the support of National Immunization Technical Advisory Groups (NITAGs);

iii. design EU methodologies and guidance on data requirements for better monitoring of vaccination coverage rates across all age groups, including healthcare workers, in cooperation with the World health Organisation (WHO). Collect such data and share them at EU level;

b. By 2019, establish a European vaccination information portal, with the support of the European Medicines Agency, to provide online objective, transparent and updated evidence on vaccines, their benefit and safety, and the pharmacovigilance process.

c. Monitor online vaccine misinformation and develop evidence-based information tools and guidance to support Member States in countering vaccine hesitancy, in line with the Commission Communication on tackling online disinformation.”

Interestingly, on pg.13, this document also mentions the term vaccine hesitancy as it recommends a “Joint Action on Vaccination, cofunded by the third Programme for the Union’s action in the field of health … to address vaccine hesitancy.”

Vaccine hesitancy has also become a theme in the COVID op because so many people have become aware of just how toxic vaccines can be and how experimental these ones are in particular; in my article from August 2020 I revealed how a Yale study was analyzing how to combat vaccine hesitancy and increase vaccine uptake through a variety of psychological techniques and manipulation.

European Vaccine Passports

Given the above documents, it’s no great surprise that Europe is at the forefront of implementing vaccine passports.

The UK and many European countries are getting close to rolling out their passport scheme; on March 17th 2021, the European Commission proposed the following draft legislation to create a “Digital Green Certificate” as you can see from this document. In a classic example of doublepseak, Commissioner for Justice, Didier Reynders, said:

“With the Digital Green Certificate, we are taking a European approach to ensure EU citizens and their family members can travel safely and with minimum restrictions this summer. The Digital Green Certificate will not be a pre-condition to free movement and it will not discriminate in any way. A common EU-approach will not only help us to gradually restore free movement within the EU and avoid fragmentation.

No pre-condition for movement? Not discriminate in any way? The very essence of the vaccine passport is regulate and restrict movement, as well as to discriminate. Otherwise, what is the point of it? This is a constant theme of the COVID op. Politicians make rules to control your life, and right when they announce these rules, they claim they are not controlling you. Black is white, up is down and tyranny is freedom.

American Vaccine Passports

They’re coming to America too.

The US state of New York was the first state to introduce a pilot program. Authorities have said it’s optional, but that’s how all these schemes of control initially work; first they’re optional to break down resistance and get people accustomed, and then they’re mandatory. New York is calling its vaccine passport the “Excelsior Pass” and the official announcement states:

“Developed in partnership with IBM, the Excelsior Pass will use proven, secure technology to confirm an individual’s vaccination or a recent negative COVID-19 test through a confidential data transfer to help fast-track the reopening of theaters, stadiums and other businesses in accordance with New York State guidelines…The Excelsior Pass will play a critical role in getting information to venues and sites in a secure and streamlined way, allowing us to fast-track the reopening of these businesses and getting us one step closer to reaching a new normal.”

On the upside, there are certain states which have preemptively banned vaccine passports in some form or another, including Florida, Texas, Arizona, Montana and Idaho. As for much of the duration of the COVID op, support or resistance to vaccine passports is mostly following party lines, with the left-wing Democratic states supporting it and the right-wing Republican states resisting it.

Vaccine Passports in Israel, China and India

Israel has earned itself another dubious distinction by leading the world in COVID vaccination rates, and by already implementing its vaccine passport program. Unvaccinated Israelis are being banned from going to so-called non-essential places. Tyrannical Israeli Health Minister Yuli Edelstein warned:

“Whoever doesn’t vaccinate will only go out to supermarkets or pharmacies, while the vaccinated will go to stadiums and gyms.”

The tyranny doesn’t stop there. Israel has also issued “Freedom Bracelets” to be worn by those entering the country from abroad. Israel’s parliament joined action taken previously by the Spanish governmentin approving a law to create a registry of people refusing the COVID vax. Interestingly, UK Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove was recently seen arriving in Israel for what they say was “vaccine passport talks” but in reality, from those who know the backstory of the Zionist New World Order (NWO), was likely his marching orders.

China and India have both joined the vaccine passport game. China called their version the “International Travel Health Certificate” (downloadable from its WeChat mobile app) while India has a QR code certificate version.

One Passport to Rule Them All

No matter what fancy and different names these passports, apps and QR codes have, there are plans afoot to link them all via a common software or framework.

The leading developers of this technology include AOK Pass, Common Pass, the Vaccination Credential Initiative, Good Health Pass Collaborative and the IATA Travel Pass. This is a clear manifestation of the NWO Agenda of a One World Government with detailed information on every single person (except for the ruling elite) on Earth, who are planned to be its subjects or slaves.

This has been a long time coming. It seems like a long time ago now – over a year ago – when Bill Gates started mouthing off about the need for immunity certificates and digital vaccine passports. The plan is not hidden, but rather wide out in the open. Of course, there is a distinct lack of logic about the whole issue. First of all, as I have exhaustively documented, there is no evidence that the virus SARS-CoV-2 exists. But putting that inconvenient truth aside for a moment, why couldn’t natural immunity to the virus qualify you for the vaccine passport? Mainstream brainwashed medical authorities may say it’s because you can still get re-infected. However the same goes for the vaccine … hence all the talks of a 2nd and 3rd shot (actually the plan is to give people countless shots as they upgrade and rewire their DNA operating system). This is the very same group of vaccines which by the way don’t give you proper immunity and are even admitted to only protect against mild symptoms and not to stop transmission.

It’s not about actual real immunity to disease. It’s about finding out who is vaccinated and who is unvaccinated, and subsequently punishing the non-compliant, disobedient, recalcitrant unvaccinated ones.

For those who want their shiny new vaccine passport – think about this. What happens when the authorities say that you have to keep getting vaxxed … and vaxxed … and vaxxed … every year … just to keep your passport and privileges? Are we going to stand in our inherent soveriegn rights or grovel beneath the slavemasters for government-bestowed privileges?

Final Thoughts

The truth is that vaccine passports are a scheme to force people into getting vaxxed so that they become genetically modified humans. The vaccine is the real bioweapon, not an imaginary virus. The vaccine passports will function to make life uncomfortable for the unvaccinated, and also as a registration system to distinguish between the vaccinated and unvaccinated, so the NWO controllers know exactly which citizens have certain nanotechnology embedded inside of them – which you can be sure will be used to further whatever nefarious goals the NWO manipulators have in mind.

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This article was originally published on The Freedom Articles.

Makia Freeman is the editor of alternative media / independent news site The Freedom Articles, author of the book Cancer: The Lies, the Truth and the Solutions and senior researcher at ToolsForFreedom.com. Makia is on Steemit and LBRY.

Sources

https://ec.europa.eu/transparency/regdoc/rep/1/2018/EN/COM-2018-244-F1-EN-MAIN-PART-1.PDF

https://thefreedomarticles.com/toxic-vaccine-adjuvants-the-top-10/

https://thefreedomarticles.com/10-things-to-know-experimental-covid-vaccines/

https://thefreedomarticles.com/same-fake-pandemic-similarities-1976-swine-flu-2020-covid/

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_21_1181

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52021PC0130

https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-cuomo-announces-pilot-program-testing-excelsior-pass-madison-square-garden-and

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/these-states-are-attempting-ban-or-curtail-use-vaccine-passports-n1264665

https://www.timesofisrael.com/government-plans-to-punish-businesses-that-serve-unvaccinated-customers-report/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgd_mVbZBcU

https://www.politico.eu/article/spain-coronavirus-vaccine-refusal-registry-with-eu-countries/

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-vaccine-israel-law-personal-information-privacy/

https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/michael-gove-arrives-in-israel-for-vaccine-passport-talks/

https://thefreedomarticles.com/israel-planned-home-of-new-world-order/

https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Coronavirus/COVID-vaccines/China-rolls-out-vaccine-passport-aiming-to-revive-foreign-travel

https://www.hindustantimes.com/cities/others/got-covid-19-vaccine-you-ll-get-qr-code-certificate-on-phone-101610479579084.html

https://www.aokpass.com/

https://thecommonsproject.org/commonpass

https://vci.org/

https://www.goodhealthpass.org/

https://www.iata.org/en/programs/passenger/travel-pass/

https://thefreedomarticles.com/digital-vaccine-certificates-bill-gates-plan-post-coronavirus/

https://thefreedomarticles.com/10-reasons-sars-cov-2-imaginary-digital-theoretical-virus/

https://truthunmuted.org/vaccine-passports-and-medical-martial-law/

Featured image is from The Freedom Articles

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US-dominated Western governments lie and otherwise mass deceive their people on key domestic and geopolitical issues.

So do their press agent media. On most all things mattering most, nothing they claim can be taken at face value. Secret motives are concealed.

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A new Stanford University study — conducted under the auspices of the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) — concluded that face masks don’t protect against covid (or other) viral droplets and risk serious harm to health if worn longterm.

The NCBI study’s abstract said the following:

“Many countries across the globe utilized medical and non-medical facemasks as non-pharmaceutical intervention for reducing the transmission and infectivity of coronavirus disease-2019 (covid).”

“(S)cientific evidence supporting facemasks’ efficacy is lacking…”

“(A)dverse physiological, psychological and health effects are established.”

It’s “hypothesized that facemasks have compromised safety and efficacy profile and should be avoided from use.”

“The current (assessment) comprehensively summarizes scientific evidence with respect to wearing facemasks in the (covid) era…”

It “provid(es) information for public health and decision making.”

The NCBI study concludes as follows:

“(E)xisting scientific evidences challenge the safety and efficacy of wearing facemask as preventive intervention for (covid).”

“The data suggest that both medical and non-medical facemasks are ineffective to block human-to-human transmission of viral and infectious disease such (as) SARS-CoV-2 and (covid), supporting against the usage of facemasks.”

“Wearing facemasks has been demonstrated to have substantial adverse physiological and psychological effects.”

“These include hypoxia, hypercapnia, shortness of breath, increased acidity and toxicity, activation of fear and stress response, rise in stress hormones, immunosuppression, fatigue, headaches, decline in cognitive performance, predisposition for viral and infectious illnesses, chronic stress, anxiety and depression.”

“Long-term consequences of wearing facemask(s) can cause health deterioration, developing and progression of chronic diseases and premature death.”

“Governments, policy makers and health organizations should utilize (a) scientific evidence-based approach with respect to wearing facemasks, when the latter is considered as preventive intervention for public health.”

Face masks can’t protect. They’re porous to permit breathing. Otherwise, they’d hermetically seal wearers and suffocate them.

Peer-reviewed studies showed no relationship between their use in public and protection from covid.

Aerosolized viral droplets are too minute to be blocked.

If exposed when masked, they penetrate what’s worn and accumulate inside.

Pathogens are then inhaled into lungs in concentrated form.

Nations and local communities with the lowest incidence of mask-wearing had fewer outbreaks.

The NCBI study and considerable other scientific evidence proves beyond a reasonable doubt that virtually everything mandated and recommended by US-dominated Western countries on all things covid risks serious harm to health — not the other way around.

Countless millions of people in the US, West, and elsewhere have been — and continue to be — conned to believe what’s shown up annually for time immemorial with no fear-mongering created mass hysteria became harmful to health and well-being like never before.

So it became necessary to institute draconian policies to address it.

Countless numbers of medical and scientific experts profoundly disagree.

What’s gone on since last year is state-sponsored/media supported madness.

Ignored is that the survival rate for seasonal flu-renamed covid for individuals under age-70 is 99.95% — 95% for people over age-70.

Since last year in the West, countless numbers of reported deaths from causes unrelated to covid were falsely attributed to the renamed viral illness.

Artificially inflating numbers is all about fear-mongering ordinary people to self-inflict harm by going along with draconian/harmful to health policies.

They include multiple inoculations with experimental, high-risk, unapproved, rushed to market, DNA altering mRNA technology and vaccines for covid.

When taken as directed, they risk serious harm to health — including contraction of the illness they’re claimed to protect against.

If ongoing madness continues unchecked — what’s highly likely in the West — the toll on health and well-being may be catastrophic.

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Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

VISIT MY WEBSITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].

My two Wall Street books are timely reading:

“How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion, and Class War”

https://www.claritypress.com/product/how-wall-street-fleeces-america/

“Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity”

https://www.claritypress.com/product/banker-occupation-waging-financial-war-on-humanity/

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An American Professor of Epidemiology at Yale University revealed that the majority of people now coming down with COVID-19 have been vaccinated against the virus. 

“Clinicians have been telling me that more than half of the new COVID cases that they’re treating are people who have been vaccinated,” said Dr. Harvey Risch.

A professor at the Yale School of Public Health, Risch appeared on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” program and contrasted the public’s perception of the vaccines’ efficacy with that of the medical establishment.

Click here to watch the interview.

“I think the American public has been sold on the vaccine by the research that shows that they reduce the infection of mild to moderate symptomatic infection by somewhere between 60-90% depending upon age and vaccine and so on and that is pretty good performance for an individual who wants to take a vaccine to protect himself,” Risch said.

“However, that is not the measure that public health infrastructure, administration, and Dr. Fauci are using to look at the efficacy of the vaccine.”

What the medical establishment is most interested in, Risch believes, is whether or not the vaccines prevent the spread of the infection. As Big Pharma has not provided this information, Risch recommends looking at the data from places where the vaccine has been used.

“For that the best place so far has been the mass rollout in Israel where the Pfizer vaccine was given to more than half the population now,” the epidemiologist said.

“And in Israel, the studies there show that it reduces the spread of the infection by somewhere around 50-60% so that contributes to herd immunity,” he continued.

“But it is not an overnight shutting down of the spread. It is a slow and continuing benefit for society to do that. But it is totally different than each individual’s protection of, say, 90%.”

This should be a wake-up call to people who think the vaccine will “free them up from all restrictions,” he said. This cannot happen because, although they might not get symptoms, the vaccine cuts the actual transmission of the virus only by a half. Risch said clinicians have told him that over half of new coronavirus cases have already had a vaccine.

“They’ve estimated that more than 60% of the new cases that they are treating – COVID cases – have been people who have been vaccinated,” Risch said.

Last summer Dr. Risch caused a stir in medical circles, including his own workplace, when he advocated the use of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the coronavirus. On May 27, he published an article in the American Journal of Epidemiology entitled “Early Outpatient Treatment of Symptomatic, High-Risk COVID-19 Patients that Should be Ramped-Up Immediately as Key to the Pandemic Crisis.” In August, he told Fox News host Mark Levin that the evidence was “overwhelming” that hydroxychloroquine reduces risk of hospitalization or death from COVID-19.

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Afghanistan: US Exit Is with Caveats

April 22nd, 2021 by M. K. Bhadrakumar

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The United States and NATO are yet to begin the withdrawal of their forces from Afghanistan but the eyes are cast over the horizon at what lies after the ‘forever war’ formally ends. The US exit strategy in Afghanistan assumes the look of that random arbitrariness of a lottery that was the case with its Iraq war ending inconclusively in 2011. 

Evidence is piling that the US president Joe Biden’s declaration of April 14  on total troop withdrawal by September 11 may not be the last word on that topic. The Pentagon commanders and the CIA seem to be “tweaking” the decision. 

On the day after Biden spoke, the New York Times reported under the byline of two of the paper’s noted senior correspondents that “the Pentagon, American spy agencies and Western allies are refining plans to deploy a less visible but still potent force in the region to prevent the country (Afghanistan) from again becoming a terrorist base… Pentagon is discussing with allies where to reposition forces.” 

The report mentioned that although NATO forces would formally withdraw, Turkey, a member of the alliance, “is leaving troops behind who could help the C.I.A. collect intelligence.” Besides, some of the Pentagon contractors (mercenaries) who include 6000 American personnel could also be redeployed.  

The Times report also disclosed that “Pentagon actually has about 1000 more troops on the ground there than it has publicly acknowledged. The murky accounting results from some Special Operations forces having been put “off the books” … to include some elite Army Rangers, who work under both the Pentagon and the C.I.A.” Pentagon might even slip these undisclosed troops into Afghanistan after the departure deadline of September 11. 

On the same day as the Times report appeared, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, speaking from Kabul, confirmed to the media after talks with Afghan government officials that “even when our troops come home, our partnership with Afghanistan will continue. Our security partnership will endure. There’s strong bipartisan support (in Washington) for that commitment to the Afghan Security Forces.” 

Blinken sidestepped the scale of future CIA presence in Afghanistan — the tricky part. But Moscow solved the riddle when the Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova alleged on April 17 that “there are persistent reports that the US is itself giving support to terrorist groups, including ISIS, in Afghanistan, and that Washington plans to build up the presence of its intelligence service in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan as it withdraws its troops from that country.” 

Zakharova said, “these circumstances are giving rise to serious concern not only in Russia but in other countries of the region as well. We are looking forward to receiving explanations from the American side.” Indeed, this is not the first time that Russia has alleged a nexus between the US intelligence and ISIS to destabilise the Central Asian region.

In fact, on April 19, Russia conducted a major air strike at a remote region near Palmyra in Syria against camps for terrorists in which 200 terrorists were killed. The Russian statement alleged that terrorists were being trained in the US-controlled al-Tanf zone in the border region in southeast Syria straddling the Baghdad-Damascus highway. 

Earlier, in January, Shanghai Cooperation Organization officials were also quoted as voicing concern over “growing” numbers of ISIS fighters being transferred from Syria and Iraq to Afghanistan. 

Suffice to say, even as the US and NATO are preparing to formally withdraw forces from Afghanistan, Pentagon and CIA are calibrating their future operations in the country, notionally to assist Afghan security forces but in reality, in pursuit of the larger regional interests of Washington, which today narrow down principally to the containment of Russia and China. The Afghan state structure is in meltdown and the US special forces and CIA operatives would have operational freedom to do they want. 

Interestingly, after his return from Kabul, Blinken announced on Tuesday an “additional civilian assistance” of $300 million to the Kabul set-up “as part of our commitment to invest in and support the Afghan people.” This is laughable, coming as it does at a juncture when, as Washington Post reported from Kabul recently, “The scramble for peace in Afghanistan is fracturing Kabul’s political leadership and undermining the U.S.-backed government.” Is Blinken so hopelessly out of touch with the situation in Kabul? In reality, this appears to be Washington’s gift to the power brokers in the Afghan security establishment. 

The bottom line is that the CIA is pushing ahead with its blueprint to use Afghanistan as a staging post to destabilise Russia, Iran and China. On the other hand, the postponement of the high-level conference in Istanbul from 24th April to 4th May means that the peace process has been derailed and the Doha Pact’s May 1 deadline for US troop withdrawal stands erased. Put differently, Washington has shifted the goal post and has also in the bargain granted a fresh lease of life to the Ashraf Ghani regime. 

Perhaps, India is the only friend Washington genuinely has in the region today to lean on. Blinken telephoned External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar on Monday “to reaffirm the importance of the US-India relationship and cooperation on regional security issues.” The White House readout claimed that the two ministers “agreed to close and frequent coordination” over the Afghanistan situation. 

Indeed, at a hearing at the House Armed Services Committee in Washington on Tuesday, the commander of the US Central Command Gen. Kenneth McKenzie Jr. has said that for conducting future operations in Afghanistan, the US will “firstly require heavy intelligence support” and American diplomats are working now “to find new places in the region” to base the intelligence assets. 

Surely, Pakistan cannot be one of those “new places”. Against this complicated backdrop, Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi arrived in Tehran on Wednesday for talks with the Iranian leaders. The press reports from Tehran speak of Iran’s willingness to cooperate with Pakistan (here and here). But it is no secret that the two countries have different outlooks, interests and priorities in Afghanistan.

Having said that, both countries might also sense today a certain congruence of interests in the emergent situation, with the Afghan peace process in suspended animation, the Doha Pact in cold storage and the Taliban resentful, and the US finessing its future options. The extent to which Tehran and Islamabad can reconcile their approaches and coordinate will no doubt impact the future course of events. Conceivably, that is also what Moscow and Beijing would expect.

As things stand, the continuing instability in Afghanistan and the derailment of the peace process can only work to Washington’s advantage to reset the clock and rearrange its pawns and proxies on the chessboard for a fresh game to begin. The prospect for an inclusive interim government in Kabul has receded lately. Certainly, Pakistan has been under pressure to restrain the Taliban.

Can it be mere coincidence that  terrorists chose this moment to stage a well-planned, professionally executed attack in Quetta, shattering the country’s internal situation? Who stands to gain? There are no easy answers. A sense of déjà vu would only be natural.

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Featured image: Raider Brigade Soldiers with 2nd Squadron, 1st Cavalry Regiment, 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division conduct a foot patrol in Afghanistan, Dec. 22, 2018, in support of Operation Resolute Support and Operation Freedom’s Sentinel. (Source: Army/defense.gov)

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To the casual observer, the words “military AI” have a certain dystopic ring to them, one that’s in line with sci-fi movies like “Terminator” that depict artificial intelligence (AI) run amok. And while the “killer robots” cliché does at least provide an entry point into a debate about transformative military technologies, it frames autonomous AI weapons as a challenge for tomorrow, rather than today. But a close look at the history of one common type of weapons package, the air defense systems that militaries employ to defend against missiles and other airborne threats, illuminates how highly automated weaponry is actually a risk the world already faces.

As practical, real-world examples, air defense systems can ground a debate over autonomous weapons that’s often abstract and speculative. Heads of state and defense policymakers have made clear their intentions to integrate greater autonomous functionality into weapons (and many other aspects of military operations). And while many policymakers say they want to ensure humans remain in control over lethal force, the example of air defense systems shows that they face large obstacles.

Weapons like the US Army’s Patriot missile system, designed to shoot down missiles or planes that threaten protected airspace, include autonomous features that support targeting. These systems now come in many different shapes and sizes and can be typically operated in manual or various automatic modes. In automatic modes, the air defense systems can on their own detect targets and fire on them, relegating human operators to the role of supervising the system’s workings and, if necessary, of aborting attacks. The Patriot air defense system, used by 13 countries, is “nearly autonomous, with only the final launch decision requiring human interaction,” according to research by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Air defense systems have been used by militaries for decades. Researchers began developing some of the first so-called “close-in weapons systems” to provide warships a last line of defense against anti-ship missiles and other high-speed threats in the 1970s. Modernized versions of these systems—including the Phalanx, which entered production in 1978—are still in use on US and allied warships. By one estimate, at least 89 countries operate air defense systems; the weapons have shaped the role of human operators.

Our research on the character of human-machine interaction in air defense systems suggests that over time, their use has incrementally reduced the quality of human oversight in specific targeting decisions. More cognitive functions have been “delegated” to machines, and human operators face incredible difficulties in understanding how the complex computer systems make targeting decisions.

Maintaining appropriate human control over specific targeting decisions is particularly important when thinking about the concept of meaningful human control, which plays a prominent role in the international regulatory discussion on autonomous weapons systems. This is because, as previous research suggests, the brunt of a soldier or the military’s obligations under international humanitarian law (such as complying with the principles of distinction, proportionality and precaution enshrined in the Geneva Conventions) apply to specific, battlefield decisions on the use of force, rather than to the development and testing of weapons systems.

A study of air defense systems reveals three real-world challenges to human-machine interaction that automated and autonomous features have already created. These problems are likely to grow worse as militaries incorporate more AI into the high-tech weapons of tomorrow.

Targeting decisions are opaque. 

The people who operate air defense systems already have trouble understanding how the automated and autonomous features on the weapons they control make decisions, including how the systems generate target profiles and assessments. In part, that’s due to the sheer complexity of the systems’ internal workings; how many people understand the algorithms behind the software they use, after all? But high-profile failures of air defense systems also suggest that human operators are not always aware of known system weaknesses.

The history of Patriot systems operated by the US Army, for instance, includes several near-miss so-called “friendly fire” engagements during the First Gulf War in the 1990s and in training exercises. But as John Hawley, an engineering expert working on automation in air defense systems, argued in a 2017 report, the US Army was so convinced of the Patriot system’s successes that they did not want to hear words of caution about using the system in automatic mode. Rather than addressing the root-causes of these deficiencies or communicating them to human operators, the military appears to have framed the issues as software problems that could be fixed through technical solutions.

Another problem that operators of air defense systems encounter is that of automation bias and over-trust. Human operators can be overly confident of the reliability and accuracy of the information they see on their screens. They may not question the algorithmic targeting parameters provided to them by the machine. For example, the Patriot system was involved in two well-documented friendly-fire incidents and one near miss during the 2003 Iraq War. When a Patriot system shot down a Royal Air Force Tornado fighter jet over Kuwait in 2003, the British Ministry of Defense’s accident report said “the operating protocol was largely automatic, and the operators were trained to trust the system’s software.” But human operators need a more balanced approach; they need to know when to trust the system and when to question its outputs.

The combat information center on the Vincennes.

The combat information center on the Vincennes. Credit US Navy.

Operators can lose situational awareness.

As militaries integrate more automated and autonomous features into the critical functions of air defense systems, human operators’ roles have changed. They’ve shifted from actively controlling the weapons systems to monitoring their operations. In real terms, the machines are now performing the bulk of the cognitive skills involved in operating an air defense system, not just the motor and sensory tasks. Human operators are increasingly either overloaded or underloaded with tasks vis-à-vis those delegated to the machine, and they have sometimes lost situational awareness, which the researcher Mica Endsley defines as “the perception of elements in the environment … the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their status in the near future.” Particularly in the context of high-stress combat situations, this can make it nearly impossible for human operators to question system outputs and to make reasoned deliberations about whether certain targets are appropriate.

The tragic 1988 downing of an Iranian Air flight carrying 290 passengers and crew by a US Navy warship, the Vincennes, illustrates how human operators in the midst of combat can misinterpret computer outputs and make fatal mistakes. The Vincennes, a ship so advanced it was jokingly called a “Robocruiser” because of its AEGIS air defense system, was designed to handle the type of threat the Soviet Navy might pose on the high seas. It could track and respond to hundreds of airborne threats at a time. But during a skirmish with a few light Iranian gunboats, the crew of the Vincennes misinterpreted data on their computer screens and identified an Iranian Airlines Airbus as an F-14 fighter plane descending to attack. A 1992 Newsweek investigation found that senior personnel on the Vincennes were unfamiliar or uncomfortable operating the AEGIS’s complex combat computer system.

A plane crash.

The wreckage of a Ukraine International Airlines passenger plane. Fars News Agency. CC BY 4.0.

War is already too fast.

Improvements in the speed and maneuverability of modern weaponry continue to reduce the time human operators have to decide whether to authorize the use of force. Take what happened to an unfortunate Ukraine International Airlines jet as a recent example. The Iranian operators of a Tor-M1 system near Tehran’s airport shot down the civilian plane carrying 176 passengers and crew members in January 2020, only minutes after the plane took off. Iran blamed human error for the incident, saying the missile defense system hadn’t been recalibrated after being repositioned. Operating without a full picture of known traffic in Iranian airspace at the time, they mistook the plane for an incoming American cruise missile. According to Amir Ali Hajizadeh, commander of Aerospace Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the operators of the Tor-M1 had 10 seconds to decide whether to fire or not. The point here is not to excuse this tragedy but to highlight the almost impossible demands that such a timeframe represents for critical deliberation in high stress combat scenarios.

When taken together, these three challenges call into question the level to which humans can exercise meaningful control over specific situations in existing systems that rely on autonomy in targeting. While these tragedies have prompted episodic introspection, they have not necessarily led to a more fundamental reassessment of whether it is appropriate to further integrate automated and autonomous features into air defense systems.

Failures of air defense systems typically arise from the complexities inherent with human-machine interaction. But when things go wrong, it’s frequently the individual human operators at the bottom of the chain of command who bear responsibility for what really are structural failures. Focusing on “human error” shifts attention away from a closer scrutiny of how the use of automated and autonomous technology structures the use of force.

Regulating autonomous weapons.

In our assessment, the decades long process of integrating automated and autonomous features into the critical functions of air defense systems has contributed toward an emerging norm governing the use of air defense systems. The norm is that humans have a reduced role in use of force decisions. Unfortunately, much of the international debate on autonomous weapons systems has yet to acknowledge or scrutinize this norm, which likely will apply to future systems, too.

Countries have been debating possible regulations on lethal autonomous weapons systems at the United Nations since 2014. Many states have agreed in principle that human responsibility for using weapons systems has to be retained to ensure that autonomous weapons systems are used in compliance with international humanitarian law. But this raises two questions. First, how can human control over the use of force be defined; and second, how can such control be measured to ensure that it is people, not machines, who retain ultimate control over the use of force?

Almost a decade after a nonprofit called Article 36 introduced the concept of meaningful human control, there is no agreement on what exactly makes human control meaningful. Not only does this lack of a shared framework complicate efforts to regulate autonomous weapons development; in a more practical sense, it also makes it difficult to assess whether the control humans have over various weapon systems meets the necessary legal and moral standards on a case-by case-basis.

Policymakers should analyze the precedents that the use of highly automated air defense systems and other existing weapons systems with automated or autonomous features in their targeting functions (such as active protection systems, counter-drone systems, and loitering munitions) have set and the ways in which these weapons are altering the relationship between humans and technology. Too often, incrementally integrating more and more autonomous features into weapons systems is presented as either an inevitable trajectory of technological progress or as a reaction to what adversaries are doing. The current crop of more-or-less autonomous weapons has created norms for human control over lethal force, and policymakers need to understand how these may undermine any (potential) international efforts to regulate autonomous weapons systems.

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Dr Ingvild Bode is Associate Professor at the Centre for War Studies, University of Southern Denmark.

Dr Tom Watts is a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Hertfordshire University.

Featured image: Patriot missiles in Israel target an Iraqi Scud missile. Alpert Nathan / Government Press Office. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

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For old-growth forest advocates in British Columbia last year, it sounded like a political turning point. In the race to preserve what’s left of some of the rarest, most ancient tall trees and endangered ecosystems in North America, the provincial government promised action.

“In early September, we moved to protect nearly 353,000 hectares [1,363 square miles] of old-growth forests,” said John Horgan, BC’s premier and head of the New Democratic Party (NDP) majority government, as he spoke last October. “But that’s just the beginning. Many of our old-growth stands are worth more standing up than they ever could be cut down, especially… acknowledge[ing] the broader benefits for communities and the environment.”

Horgan went further. He announced that the NDP had accepted in its entirety the recommendations of a 71-page NDP-commissioned 2020 report, a detailed land-use plan created by foresters Garry Merkel and Al Gorley, explaining why and how to preserve BC’s vanishing coastal and interior primary and old-growth forests.

All 14 report recommendations were agreed to, including an immediate deferral of logging “in old forests where ecosystems are at very high or near-term risk of irreversible biodiversity loss.”

Horgan’s proclamation and the report’s adoption were seen as a bold sea change for BC — a Canadian province that has long favored the economics of forestry over conservation.

Biologically productive old-growth forests are complex ecosystems. From the 2020 report A New Future for Old Forests: “Old forests meld light and dark; their structural complexity can include large old living trees, large standing dead snags, long downed logs, a multi-layered canopy, horizontal patchiness with canopy gaps that allow understory growth, and hummocky micro-topography.” Image by Jakob Dulisse.

From bold pledges to ‘Talk and log’

Barely six months later, once-hopeful forest advocates are calling Horgan’s statements “talk and log.”

Nearly half the area he said had been protected remains open to logging for timber and wood pellet-for-energy manufacture. Much of the rest doesn’t qualify as the intact, biodiverse forests chosen for logging deferrals by the 2020 report. Meanwhile, the timber and forest biomass industries are moving ahead fast to procure and cut new forest tracts.

“I see BC slowly slipping away from this brighter future that was promised,” said Tegan Hansen, a forest campaigner with the environmental group Stand.earth. “Instead, we’re doubling down on a forestry paradigm that is leveling primary forests and further degrading high-risk species and ecosystems.”

Researchers and policymakers worldwide acknowledge that without aggressive regulation at regional and national levels, the environmental protections needed to save forests, curb climate change and protect biodiversity will not likely occur.

But as with the Kyoto Protocol, Paris Climate Agreement, and the 25 past U.N. climate conferences, soaring government rhetoric is rarely transformed into significant action, while business as usual continues to warm the planet.

In interviews with leading BC environmental and political figures, each grapples here with the dire implications for their province and the world if sustainable forest management fails there.

Low productivity forests like this one don’t have anywhere near the same capacity for sequestering carbon as do old-growth forests. Image by TJ Watt for Ancient Forest Alliance.

‘We will run out of old-growth’

A year ago, forest ecologist Karen Price and colleagues Rachel Holt and Dave Daust produced a different, but alarming, report based on BC provincial data. While the government asserted that 23% of the province’s standing forests were old-growth (51,000 square miles), in reality less than 1% (1,544 square miles) existed as the towering, centuries-old red cedar and western hemlock inland rainforests that define biodiverse old-growth.

In the year since, many of those tall trees have been lost to timbering.

“If the NDP doesn’t act, we will run out of old-growth in five to 10 years,” Price told Mongabay. “We need the deferrals [Horgan promised] so that we can have meaningful land-use discussions and planning while there is still old-growth left to make decisions about.”

However, Price says she’s been told repeatedly by the government that saving trees takes time. The 2020 Merkel/Gorley report recommended, for example, that some 200 First Nation tribes in BC be consulted about land they want protected before regulations are written. Such talks are ongoing, says the NDP.

Except that, “Across BC, there are First Nations who have already requested moratoria of harvesting old-growth in their territory,” Price said. “There are some [Indigenous] nations who have areas mapped out ready to share with the government. The forestry industry has taken those maps and it appears [to be] prioritizing logging in those places now.… And the government is doing nothing to protect this old-growth land.”

Conservation North, a forest-protection advocacy group, put together an interactive map called: Seeing Red: BC’s last primary forests. The province-wide, full-color map illustrates the extent of deforestation in British Columbia as well as the smaller areas where primary and old-growth forests remain.

Price and other leading environmentalists say they are exasperated by the government’s lack of action, noting that grim deforestation field reports, letters to provincial forestry ministers, and anguished public statements only receive vague official NDP responses.

“We are frustrated because the stakes are so high,” Price said. “This is a government that purportedly listens to science. There are good people in the NDP [re-elected by historic margins in November]. But as we continue to log in BC — some 200,000 hectares per year (772 square miles) — a lot of that is old-growth.

“If we don’t keep those standing, Canada is not going to meet its carbon-reduction goals under the Paris Agreement. We need to maintain our inland and coastal rainforests. It’s critical for working toward Canada’s and the world’s climate mitigation.”

Forest activists fear that British Columbia’s last old-growth forests could be reduced to wood pellets burned abroad for energy. Image found on Flickr.

Industry versus nature?

Garry Merkel told Mongabay he was not surprised that his, and fellow forester Al Gorley’s, groundbreaking 2020 report, A New Future for Old Forests, was embraced by BC Premier Horgan. Afterall, the pair was hand-selected by the NDP, spent months gathering stakeholder input, and enjoy a reputation for non-partisan environmentalism.

Aside from their immediate old-growth logging deferral recommendation, he and Gorley called for a radical shift in policy in a province whose economy was built on logging and timber exports. Their recommendation: nature must come before industry. As such, they wrote, “conservation of ecosystem health and biodiversity of BC’s forests [becomes] an overarching priority,” with laws enacted to establish protection over timber interests.

In British Columbia, current laws seem to protect forests, wildlife, visual impacts and wilderness recreation. But there’s a catch: none of that can reduce the “Annual Allowable Cut” of timber by more than 10%. According to forest activists, the actions of Horgan and the NDP show that BC’s generations-old mantra still holds: forestry industry first; nature a distant second.

“We need to fundamentally change our paradigm to manage for ecosystem health and health of the land,” Merkel said. “We cannot continue to head down this road of managing for [timber] resources subject to constraints. That model doesn’t work for anybody.

“Our job was to make recommendations on how to take a much more scientific approach to managing old-growth in BC,” he added. “It’s [now] the government’s job to figure out the balance.”

Merkel still believes the NDP is doing just that “as fast as they possibly can.” He agrees however, that logging deferrals haven’t been put in place as promised. He said he believes it will take two to three years to enact the new regulations the NDP adopted, and that imperiled old-growth forests will likely be lost in the meantime.

Others doubt whether the NDP can shift the province’s historical forestry-centric model. They note that while the industry is down to just 3% of provincial GDP, it still holds political clout.

That too needs to change, Merkel said. “We built BC on the back of the forest industry; it’s a part of our core culture.” In a once forested province four times bigger than California, it must have seemed once that trees existed in endless supply. But “They’re not endless. That’s the direction we’re heading — [toward] a more sustainable model for everyone.”

Pinnacle Renewable Energy’s Strathnaver facility which produces wood pellets exported and burned to make electricity. Wood when burned releases more carbon dioxide per unit of electricity produced than coal or gas, and a newly planted sapling replacing a mature tree requires several decades to reabsorb the carbon dioxide emitted by burning — time the world doesn’t have as it rushes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Image by Mary Booth.

BC forestry minister speaks

Mongabay requested an interview with Katrine Conroy, the NDP’s forestry minister. She declined through a spokesperson, but offered a statement which was unresponsive to specific questions.

“We want to make sure people can appreciate old-growth trees for years to come, while supporting a sustainable forest sector for workers and communities,” Conroy wrote. “In September, we worked collaboratively with First Nations on a government-to-government basis and protected old-growth in nine different areas that were at high-risk across BC. This was an important step in acting on the top two recommendations from the [Merkel/Gorley] old-growth report.

“We know there is much more work to do. To get this right, we will follow the advice of the old-growth report and fully engage Indigenous leaders, industry, workers, communities and environmental groups to find the right way forward for old-growth forests in BC.”

Price, the forest ecologist, called Conroy’s statement an example of “talk and log.” Published reports note that logging is now taking place in all of those “nine different areas.” Critically important Merkel/Gorley recommendations have not yet been implemented, said Price.

In an op-ed co-authored for the Victoria Sun in October, Price estimated that the amount of BC’s majestic old-growth newly protected from logging is just 14 square miles scattered from coast to interior.

Pinnacle Renewable Energy operates seven inland pellet mills in BC and is the province’s largest pellet producer. Pictured here is its Burns Lake facility. In February, Drax Group of the United Kingdom announced it was acquiring Pinnacle, helping assure the gigantic power plant its wood supply. Image by Google Earth, CNES-Airbus 2021.

The green of money versus the green of conservation

Forestry expert Kevin Kriese chairs BC’s Forest Practices Board. He’s witnessed decades of BC policy that accelerated logging across the province.

Of the NDP he said:

“I think the government made a political commitment and is not sure what it committed to. You read the Merkel/Gorley report, there’s a lot of room for interpretation. Some think it’s obvious; others see the devil in the details. Regardless, the government needs to commit significant resources to carry out this plan, and right now, the money isn’t there.”

That economic imbalance between forestry and conservation is being partly driven by the wood pellet industry, which experts say accounts for 10% of BC’s wood consumption in either lumber waste, diseased trees and whole trees less valuable as timber, but valuable as standing forests, carbon sinks and biodiversity havens. The BC wood pellet export industry has created several hundred jobs, even as thousands of saw mill jobs have been lost.

And that industry appears to be digging in for the long haul. In February, Drax Group of the United Kingdom announced it was acquiring BC’s largest pellet producer, Pinnacle Renewable Energy and its seven inland pellet mills.

Drax provides up to 12% of the U.K.’s energy at the world’s largest pellet-burning plant — a facility the U.K. claims to be carbon neutral, though science has repeatedly shown that to be false. Drax is also a major manufacturer of pellets in the U.S. Southeast for export. One stated company goal: securing supply for a growing market to Japan for wood pellets for energy.

Canadian caribou thrive in old-growth forests. Image courtesy of the Canadian government / © John A. Nagy.

Kriese sees a political conundrum for the NDP, as it embraces two goals at cross purposes — continued forestry industry support and greater forest protection.

For “Those with a strong agenda on conservation, every stick of old-growth matters,” he said. “But there are those who still think we can harvest some old-growth and still conserve some… This is the challenge [inside the NDP].”

The meteoric growth of the wood pellet industry complicates this conundrum, especially as lumber waste declines and whole trees are harvested more for pellets. But today, pressure on tall, old-growth forests still comes mostly from the timber industry economy as the government seeks to protect a shrinking number of rural community jobs.

“We have committed to something the bureaucracy has never done before — the balance shift between conservation and logging,” Kriese said. “What shade of green will it be? It’s going to take a while.”

One crucial question remains as the clock ticks, a question common to all regions and nations: is there the political will to make decisions that benefit a dangerously warming planet first, while coping later with the economic impact?

Anzac Valley clearcuts in British Columbia’s boreal rainforest. Image by Taylor Roades courtesy of Stand.earth.

Fairy Creek: ‘the litmus test’

Sonia Furstenau has demonstrated since she entered local politics in 2014 that she has the political will. But now as leader of the Green Party, with just two seats in BC’s parliament, she doesn’t have the power.

“I know what they say [in the NDP], but I don’t know what this government’s long-term vision is for forestry,” Furstenau told Mongabay. “They are adhering to the status quo that is giving us the same outcomes we’ve had for decades.

“I was on the finance committee a few years ago. I spent a lot of time in small planes flying over the province. When you fly over British Columbia, it is a landscape of devastation. It’s heart-wrenching to see it from the sky, just how little intact forest there is left.”

A steady parade of BC governments has practiced a policy of deforestation on “crown land,” she said. “It is owned by the public. It is a public asset. And the NDP is allowing for decisions to be made about this public asset while not adhering to the promises it made.”

As such, standing forest and forestry continue to collide. Logging is allowed within a mere 100 meters of the pristine West Coast Trail on Vancouver Island. A proposed wood pellet mill in Fort Nelson threatens the largest remaining tract of primary and old-growth forest in BC’s northern interior.

And at Fairy Creek — only 1,200 hectares (4.6 square miles) — the last intact watershed of old-growth forest on southern Vancouver Island is at risk. Protesters blocked roads there for months to keep a logging company out, but the BC Supreme Court ordered demonstrators removed in early April.

Furstenau likens the massive, centuries-old western red cedars and yellow cedars at Fairy Creek to the world’s endangered megafauna — rhinos, elephants and lions.

This video features a contentious exchange during a session of the British Columbia Parliament on March 25, as Green Party leader Sonia Furstenau asks Forestry Minister Katrine Conroy if the NDP government intends to keep loggers away from Fairy Creek, the last intact watershed of old-growth forest remaining on southern Vancouver Island.

“We recognize the role, the rareness and the value that those large animals have in their African ecosystems,” she said. “It’s the same here in BC. These are the last giants. And to just drop them for timber or wood pellets is heartbreaking and so short-sighted.”

Fairy Creek is on the front line, say activists, of the sort of majestic old-growth forest desperately in need of immediate protection as described by the Merkel/Gorley report. But when asked by Mongabay if the NDP would protect it, Forestry Minister Conroy declined to respond.

“I went down to Fairy Creek a few weeks ago,” Furstenau said. “To get there, you have to drive through clear cuts all around. And then you get to that intact forest, and you are altered by being in a place like that. You are surrounded by an abundance of life. And to get there, you have to drive through this landscape of death.”

British Columbia’s remaining old-growth forests aren’t only valuable for the carbon storage they provide; they are also cherished for their uniqueness, the biodiversity they harbor, and the awe they inspire. Image by Jakob Dulisse.

Furstenau understands economic realities. She realizes logging and conservation in BC must co-exist. But she said,

“If we want to protect jobs, the way to get there is not to cut down as much timber as possible in the shortest amount of time.… If you want jobs and sustainability, short-term profits can’t come before all else.”

The NDP, with its unchallenged provincial parliamentary majority, could intervene at any time in Fairy Creek, Furstenau stressed. It could, if it chose, buy back the logging permits and protect these ancient endangered trees.

“They have the power to do that,” Furstenau said. “They are the government. This is crown land. So this is the litmus test. This will show if they actually mean what they say. If they do not act to protect all of Fairy Creek, then their words are meaningless.”

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Justin Catanoso, a regular contributor to Mongabay, is a professor of journalism at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. Follow him on Twitter @jcatanoso

Featured image: Ancient old-growth forest near Prince George, British Columbia. Image courtesy of Stand.earth.

Agriculture’s Greatest Myth

April 22nd, 2021 by Dr. Jonathan Latham

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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Sustainable, local, organic food grown on small farms has a tremendous amount to offer. Unlike chemical-intensive industrial-scale agriculture, it regenerates rural communities; it doesn’t pollute rivers and groundwater or create dead zones; it can save coral reefs; it doesn’t encroach on rainforests; it preserves soil and it can restore the climate (IAASTD, 2009). Why do all governments not promote it?

For policymakers, the big obstacle to global promotion and restoration of small-scale farming (leaving aside the lobbying power of agribusiness) is allegedly that, “it can’t feed the world”. If that claim were true, local food systems would be bound to leave people hungry and so promoting them becomes selfish, short-termist, and unethical.

Nevertheless, this purported flaw in sustainable and local agriculture represents a curious charge because, no matter where one looks in global agriculture, food prices are low because products are in surplus.

Often, they are in huge surplus, even in the hungriest countries. Farmers will tell you they are going out of business because, as a result of these surpluses, prices are low and continuously falling. Indeed, declining agricultural prices are a broad trend continuing, with the odd blip, for over a century, and applying to every commodity. This downward trend has continued even through a recent biofuel boom designed to consume some of these surpluses (de Gorter et al., 2015). In other words, the available data contradict the likelihood of food shortages. Despite the rising global population, food gluts are everywhere.

Global food models

The standard justification for claiming that these surpluses will one day turn into global food shortages comes from various mathematical models of the food system. These models are based on food production and other figures supplied to the UN by national governments. Whereas anecdotal or local evidence is necessarily suspect, these models claim to be able to definitively assess and predict the enormous, diverse, and highly complex global food system.

The most prominent and most widely cited of these food system models is called GAPS (Global Agriculture Perspectives System). GAPS is a model created by researchers at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome (Alexandratos and Bruinsma, 2012). These models – and most often GAPS – are thus what is being cited in any quantitative discussion of future food needs. GAPS, for example, is the basis for the common ‘60% more food needed by 2050’ prediction, what Britain’s chief scientist John Beddington called “a perfect storm” facing humanity.

How reliable are these food system models?

In 2010 Professor Thomas Hertel of Purdue University gave the annual presidential address of the U.S. Agricultural and Applied Economics Association. He chose to discuss the ability of mathematical models like GAPS to predict future supplies (this work was subsequently published as Hertel, 2011). Hertel told his audience that those models are faulty.

What Hertel highlighted is that economic analysis has plainly shown that food supplies respond to long-term prices. That is, when prices for food items increase, food production also increases. For example, when prices increase, it becomes more worthwhile for farmers to invest in boosting their yields; but when prices are low there is little such incentive. Other actors in the food system behave similarly.

Yet global food models, noted Hertel, have adopted the opposite interpretation: they assume global food supplies are insensitive to prices.

In the firm but diplomatic tone expected of a Presidential Address, Hertel told his audience:

I fear that much of this rich knowledge has not yet worked its way into the global models being used for long run analysis of climate, biofuels and agricultural land use……it is not clear that the resulting models are well-suited for the kind of long run sustainability analysis envisioned here.

This is rather important. Since the whole point of these models is long-term prediction, if global food models underestimate the ability of food systems to adjust to higher demand, they will tend to predict a crisis even when there isn’t one.

Like all mathematical models, GAPS and other food system models incorporate numerous assumptions. These assumptions are typically shared across related models, which is why they tend to give similar answers. The reliability of all such models therefore depends crucially on the validity of shared assumptions like the one Hertel focused on.

Hertel’s analysis therefore prompts two important questions. The first is this: If GAPS contains an assumption that contradicts the collective wisdom of conventional agricultural economics, what other questionable assumptions hide in global food models?

Surprisingly though, given the stakes, scarcely any attention has been devoted to rigorous independent testing of these crucial assumptions (Scrieciu, 2007; Reilly and Willenbockel, 2010; Wise, 2013; Lappé and Collins, 2015).

The second question is this: Is it significant that the error identified by Hertel will tend to generate predictions that are unnecessarily alarmist?

Critiquing the critical assumptions

In a new peer-reviewed paper, The Myth of a Food Crisis, I have critiqued FAO’s GAPS – and by extension all similar food system models – at the level of these, often unstated, assumptions (Latham, 2021).

The Myth of a Food Crisis identifies four assumptions in food system models that are especially problematic since they have major effects on the reliability of modeling predictions. In summary, these are:

1) That biofuels are driven by “demand”.

As the paper shows, biofuels are incorporated into GAPS on the demand side of equations. However, biofuels derive from lobbying efforts. They exist to solve the problem of agricultural oversupply (Baines, 2015). Since biofuels contribute little or nothing to sustainability, land used for them is available to feed populations if needed. This potential availability (e.g. 40% of US corn is used for corn ethanol) makes it plainly wrong for GAPS to treat biofuels as an unavoidable demand on production.

2) That current agricultural production systems are optimized for productivity.

As the paper also shows, agricultural systems are typically not optimised to maximise calories or nutrients. Usually, they optimise profits (or sometimes subsidies), with very different results. For this reason, practically all agricultural systems could produce many more nutrients per acre at no ecological cost if desired.

3) That crop “yield potentials” have been correctly estimated.

Using the example of rice, the paper shows that some farmers, even under sub-optimal conditions, achieve yields far in excess of those considered possible by GAPS. Thus the yield ceilings assumed by GAPS are far too low for rice and probably other crops too. Therefore GAPS grossly underestimates agricultural potential.

4) That annual global food production is approximately equal to global food consumption.

As the paper also shows, a significant proportion of annual global production ends up in storage where it degrades and is disposed of without ever being counted by GAPS. There is thus a very large accounting hole in GAPS.

The specific ways in which these four assumptions are incorporated into GAPS and other models produces one of two effects. Each causes GAPS to either underestimate global food supply (now and in the future), or to overestimate global food demand (now and in the future).

Thus GAPS and other models underestimate supply and exaggerate demand. The cumulative effect is dramatic. Using peer-reviewed data, the discrepancy between food availability estimated by GAPS and the underlying supply is calculated in the paper. Such calculations show that GAPS and other models omit approximately enough food annually to feed 12.5 billion persons. That is a lot of food, but it does perfectly explain why the models are so discrepant with policymakers’ and farmers’ consistent experiences of the food system.

The implications

The consequences of this analysis are very significant on a number of fronts. There is no global shortage of food. Even under any plausible future population scenario or potential increases in wealth, the current global glut will not disappear due to elevated demand. Among the many implications of this glut is, other things being equal, global commodity prices will continue to decline. The potential caveat to this is climate chaos. Climate consequences are not factored into this analysis. However, for people who think that industrial agriculture is the solution to that problem, it is worth recalling that industrialised food systems are the leading emitter of carbon dioxide. Industrialising food production is therefore not the solution to climate change –­ it is the problem.

Another significant implication of this analysis is to remove the justification for the (frequently suggested) adoption of special and sacrificial ‘sustainable intensification’ measures featuring intensive use of pesticides, GMOs, and gene edited organisms to boost food production (Wilson, 2021). What is needed to save rainforests and other habitats from agricultural expansion is instead to reduce the subsidies and incentives that are responsible for overproduction and unsustainable practices (Capellesso et al., 2016). In this way, harmful agricultural policies can be replaced by ones guided by criteria such as ecological sustainability and cultural appropriateness.

A second implication stems from asking: if the models err on such elementary levels, why are critics largely absent? Thomas Hertel’s critique should have rung alarm bells. The short answer is that the philanthropic and academic sectors in agriculture and development are corrupt. The form this corruption takes is not illegality – rather that, with important exceptions, these sectors do not serve the public interest, but their own interests.

A good example is the FAO, which created GAPS. The primary mandate of FAO is to enable food production – its motto is Fiat Panis – but without an actual or imminent food crisis there would hardly be a need for an FAO. Many philanthropic and academic institutions are equally conflicted. It is no accident that all the critics mentioned above are relative or complete outsiders. Too many participants in the food system depend on a crisis narrative.

But the biggest factor of all in promotion of the crisis narrative is agribusiness. Agribusiness is the entity most threatened by its exposure.

From Syngenta's career page April 2021

From Syngenta’s career page (April 2021)

It is agribusiness that perpetuates the myth most actively and makes best use of it by endlessly championing itself as the only valid bulwark against starvation. It is agribusiness that most aggressively alleges that all other forms of agriculture are inadequate (Peekhaus, 2010). This Malthusian spectre is a good story, it’s had a tremendous run, but it’s just not true. By exposing it, we can free up agriculture to work for everyone.

The article on which this post is based appeared in the book: Rethinking Food and Agriculture Edited by L. Kassam and A. Kassam. Woodhead Publishing. 2021.

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Sources

Alexandratos, N., & Bruinsma, J. (2012). World agriculture: Towards 2030/2050. ESA working paper no. 12-03 Rome: FAO.

Baines, J. (2015). Fuel, feed and the corporate restructuring of the food regime. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 42(2), 295–321.

Capellesso, A. J., Cazella, A. A., Schmitt Filho, A. L., Farley, J., & Martins, D. A. (2016). Economic and environmental impacts of production intensification in agriculture: comparing transgenic, conventional, and agroecological maize cropsAgroecology and Sustainable Food Systems40(3), 215-236.

de Gorter, H., Drabik, D., & Just, D. R. (2015). The economics of biofuel policies: Impacts on price volatility in grain and oilseed markets. (Palgrave studies in agricultural economics and food policy). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hertel, T. W. (2011). The global supply and demand for agricultural land in 2050: A perfect storm in the making? American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 93, 259–275.

Lappé, F. M., & Collins, J. (2015). World hunger: Ten myths. Grove Press.

Latham, J. (2021). The myth of a food crisis. In Rethinking Food and Agriculture (pp. 93-111). Woodhead Publishing.

Peekhaus, W. (2010). Monsanto discovers new social media. International Journal of Communication, 4, 955–976.

Reilly, M., & Willenbockel, D. (2010). Managing uncertainty: A review of food system scenario analysis and modelling. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 365, 3049–3063.

Scrieciu, S. (2007). Commentary: The inherent dangers of using computable general equilibrium models as a single integrated modelling framework for sustainability impact assessment. A critical note on Böhringer and Löschel 2006. Ecological Economics, 60, 678–684.

Wilson, A. K. (2021). Will gene-edited and other GM crops fail sustainable food systems? In Rethinking Food and Agriculture (pp. 247-284). Woodhead Publishing.

Wise, T. (2013). Can we feed the world in 2050? A scoping paper to assess the evidence. In Global development and environment institute working paper no. 13-04.

Featured image is from Independent Science News

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Selected Articles: The Lockdown Paradigm Is Collapsing

April 21st, 2021 by Global Research News

Comply or Die: The Only Truly Compliant Person in a Police State Is a Dead One

By John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead, April 21 2021

These warrior cops may get paid by the citizenry, but they don’t work for us and they certainly aren’t operating within the limits of the U.S. Constitution.

Pregnant Women Should Not Get a COVID Vaccine

By Dr. Joseph Mercola, April 21 2021

By injecting pregnant women with novel COVID-19 mRNA gene technologies, the medical establishment has thrown away one of the most fundamental safety edicts of medicine, which is that you do not experiment on pregnant women.

European Drug Regulator Slaps Safety Warning on J&J Jab Due to Blood-Clot Links

By Zero Hedge, April 21 2021

While Europe grapples with its own vaccine safety scandal, the EMA, the same EU pharma regulator that has insisted that the AstraZeneca-Oxford jab’s benefits far outweigh its risk, has just poured cold water on J&J’s vaccine.

Clinical Trial Confirms Breakthrough Treatment for COVID-19

By Business Wire, April 21 2021

Patients with a self-administered nasal spray application found to have reduced SARS-CoV-2 log viral load by more than 95% in infected participants within 24 hours of treatment, and by more than 99% in 72 hours.

Chinese President Highlights the “World Wants Justice” and “Not Hegemony”

By Paul Antonopoulos, April 20 2021

Chinese President Xi Jinping, in speaking on Tuesday at the annual Boao Forum for Asia, declared that “the world wants justice, not hegemony,” in what was an indirect, but obviously scathing message towards Washington.

The Lockdown Paradigm Is Collapsing

By Jeffrey A. Tucker, April 21 2021

It’s taken much longer than it should have but at last it seems to be happening: the lockdown paradigm is collapsing. The signs are all around us.

Ukraine Crises Trace Back to Ongoing NATO Enlargement

By Shane Quinn, April 21 2021

Due to its location on the map between Russia and the EU-NATO states, the Ukraine or Ukraine has significant strategic importance as tensions there rise once more.

“Reimagining” Mice and Men. “Synthetic Embryos”

By Dr. Marilyn M. Singleton, April 21 2021

For 100 years scientists have dreamed of creating and developing life outside of a womb. In March 2021 that dream came true. Scientists grew naturally conceived mouse embryos in tiny beakers for six days—the equivalent of the full first trimester of gestation.

Russia Threatens Ukraine? Biden Has Transformed Russia’s Border with Ukraine into A Dangerous Hot Spot

By Stephen Lendman, April 21 2021

Throughout its 30 year history, the Russian Federation never attacked or threatened another country. In sharp contrast to US-dominated NATO, Moscow prioritizes peace, stability, cooperative relations with other nations and compliance with international law.

US Order Against Russia: Italy at Attention

By Manlio Dinucci, April 21 2021

The Order not only decrees expulsions of diplomats and economic sanctions, as reported by the media. “If Russia continues or intensifies its destabilizing international actions”, the Order established, “the United States will impose such costs as to cause a strategic impact on Russia”.

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***

If you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Don’t argue with me, don’t call me names, don’t tell me that I can’t stop you, don’t say I’m a racist pig, don’t threaten that you’ll sue me and take away my badge. Don’t scream at me that you pay my salary, and don’t even think of aggressively walking towards me.”—Officer with the Los Angeles Police Department

Americans aren’t dying at the hands of police because of racism.

For that matter, George Floyd didn’t die because he was black and the cop who killed him is white.

Floyd, who died after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes, died because America is being overrun with militarized cops—vigilantes with a badge—who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.”

These warrior cops may get paid by the citizenry, but they don’t work for us and they certainly aren’t operating within the limits of the U.S. Constitution. As retired Philadelphia police captain Ray Lewis warns, “The system is corrupt. Police really are oppressing not only the black community, but also the whites. They’re an oppressive organization now controlled by the one percent of corporate America. Corporate America is using police forces as their mercenaries.”

Now, not all cops are guns for hire, trained to act as judge, jury and executioner in their interactions with the populace.

However, the unfortunate reality we must come to terms with is that the good cops—the ones who take seriously their oath of office to serve and protect their fellow citizens, uphold the Constitution, and maintain the peace—are increasingly being outnumbered by those who believe the lives (and rights) of police should be valued more than citizens.

It doesn’t matter where you live—big city or small town—it’s the same scenario being played out over and over again in which government agents, hyped up on their own authority and the power of their uniform, ride roughshod over the rights of the citizenry.

Indeed, if you ask police and their enablers what Americans should do to stay alive during encounters with law enforcement, they will tell you to comply, cooperate, obey, not resist, not argue, not make threatening gestures or statements, avoid sudden movements, and submit to a search of their person and belongings during encounters with the police.

In other words, it doesn’t matter if you’re in the right, it doesn’t matter if a cop is in the wrong, it doesn’t matter if you’re being treated with less than the respect you deserve: if you want to emerge from a police encounter with your life and body intact, then you’d better comply, submit, obey orders, respect authority and generally do whatever a cop tells you to do.

In this way, the old police motto to “protect and serve” has become “comply or die.”

This is the unfortunate, misguided, perverse message that has been beaten, shot, tasered and slammed into our collective consciousness over the past few decades, and it has taken root.

This is how we have gone from a nation of laws—where the least among us had just as much right to be treated with dignity and respect as the next person (in principle, at least)—to a nation of law enforcers (revenue collectors with weapons) who treat “we the people” like suspects and criminals.

As a result, Americans as young as 4 years old are being leg shackled, handcuffed, tasered and held at gun point for not being quiet, not being orderly and just being childlike—i.e., not being compliant enough.

Americans as old as 95 are being beaten, shot and killed for questioning an order, hesitating in the face of a directive, and mistaking a policeman crashing through their door for a criminal breaking into their home—i.e., not being submissive enough.

And Americans of every age and skin color are continuing to die at the hands of a government that sees itself as judge, jury and executioner over a populace that have been pre-judged and found guilty, stripped of their rights, and left to suffer at the hands of government agents trained to respond with the utmost degree of violence.

At a time when growing numbers of unarmed people have been shot and killed for just standing a certain way, or moving a certain way, or holding something—anything—that police could misinterpret to be a gun, or igniting some trigger-centric fear in a police officer’s mind that has nothing to do with an actual threat to their safety, even the most benign encounters with police can have fatal consequences.

The problem, as one reporter rightly concluded, is “not that life has gotten that much more dangerous, it’s that authorities have chosen to respond to even innocent situations as if they were in a warzone.”

Warrior cops—trained in the worst case scenario and thus ready to shoot first and ask questions later—are definitely not making us or themselves any safer.

Worse, militarized police increasingly pose a risk to anyone undergoing a mental health crisis or with special needs whose disabilities may not be immediately apparent or require more finesse than the typical freeze-or-I’ll-shoot tactics employed by America’s police forces. Indeed, disabled individuals make up a third to half of all people killed by law enforcement officers. (People of color are three times more likely to be killed by police than their white counterparts.)

If you’re black and disabled, you’re even more vulnerable.

Specifically, what we’re dealing with today is a skewed shoot-to-kill mindset in which police, trained to view themselves as warriors or soldiers in a war, whether against drugs, or terror, or crime, must “get” the bad guys—i.e., anyone who is a potential target—before the bad guys get them.

This nationwide epidemic of court-sanctioned police violence carried out with impunity against individuals posing little or no real threat has all but guaranteed that unarmed Americans will keep dying at the hands of militarized police.

Consider just some of the scenarios in which unarmed Americans have been shot and killed by police:

Killed for taking public transit. Oscar Grant, traveling home on a train packed with New Year’s Eve revelers, was pulled off the train while police investigated reports of fighting, shoved against a wall, punched in the head, kneed in the face, then shot and killed by police while lying face down on a train platform.

Killed for standing in a “shooting stance.” In California, police opened fire on and killed a mentally challenged—unarmed—black man within minutes of arriving on the scene, allegedly because he removed a vape smoking device from his pocket and took a “shooting stance.”

Killed for holding a cell phone. Police in Arizona shot a man who was running away from U.S. Marshals after he refused to drop an object that turned out to be a cellphone.

Killed for displaying air fresheners from a rearview mirror. Daunte Wright was shot and killed during a traffic stop over an expired registration and a state law prohibiting motorists from hanging air fresheners and other items from their rearview mirrors. Police claimed to have mistakenly used a gun instead of a Taser.

Killed for behaving oddly and holding a baseball bat. Responding to a domestic disturbance call, Chicago police shot and killed 19-year-old college student Quintonio LeGrier who had reportedly been experiencing mental health problems and was carrying a baseball bat around the apartment where he and his father lived.

Killed for opening the front door. Bettie Jones, who lived on the floor below LeGrier, was also fatally shot—this time, accidentally—when she attempted to open the front door for police.

Killed for being a child in a car pursued by police. Jeremy David Mardis, six years old and autistic, died after being shot multiple times by Louisiana police in the head and torso. Police opened fire on the car—driven by Jeremy’s father, Chris Few, who was also shot—and then allegedly lied, claiming that they were attempting to deliver an outstanding warrant, that Few resisted arrest, that he shot at police (no gun was found), and that he tried to ram his car into a police cruiser. Body camera footage refuted the police’s claims.

Killed for approaching police with a metal spoon. In Alabama, police shot and killed a 50-year-old man who reportedly charged a police officer while holding “a large metal spoon in a threatening manner.”

Killed for holding a tree branch. Georgia police shot and killed a 47-year-old man wearing only shorts and tennis shoes who, when first encountered, was sitting in the woods against a tree, only to start running towards police holding a stick in an “aggressive manner.

Killed for crawling around naked. Atlanta police shot and killed an unarmed man who was reported to have been “acting deranged, knocking on doors, crawling around on the ground naked.” Police fired two shots at the man after he reportedly starting running towards them.

Killed for hunching over. Responding to a domestic trouble call, multiple officers with the Baltimore County police forced their way inside a home where they proceeded to open fire on an unarmed 41-year-old man who was hunched over in a defensive posture. The man was killed in front of his two young daughters and their mother.

Killed because a police officer accidentally pulled out his gun instead of his taser. An Oklahoma man suspected of trying to sell an illegal handgun was shot and killed after a 73-year-old reserve deputy inadvertently fired his gun instead of his taser. “Oh! I shot him! I’m sorry!” the deputy cried out.

Killed for wearing dark pants and a basketball jersey. Donnell Thompson, a mentally disabled 27-year-old described as gentle and shy, was shot and killed after police—searching for a carjacking suspect reportedly wearing similar clothing—encountered him lying motionless in a neighborhood yard. Police “only” opened fire with an M4 rifle after Thompson first failed to respond to their flash bang grenades and then started running after being hit by foam bullets.

Killed for telling police you lawfully own a firearm. Philando Castile was shot and killed during a routine traffic stop allegedly over a broken tail light. As he was reaching for his license and registration, Castile explained to police that he had a  conceal-and-carry permit. That’s all it took for police to shoot Castile four times in the presence of his girlfriend and her 4-year-old daughter.

Killed for leaving anywhere at all when a police officer pulls up. Deravis Caine Rogers was killed after starting to drive away from an apartment complex right around the same time as a police officer pulled up. Despite the fact that the police officer had no reason to believe Rogers was a threat or was suspected of any illegal activity, the officer fired into Rogers’ passenger side window.

Killed for driving while deaf. In North Carolina, a state trooper shot and killed 29-year-old Daniel K. Harris—who was deaf—after Harris initially failed to pull over during a traffic stop.

Killed for shopping at Walmart. John Crawford III was shot and killed by police responding to reports of an armed man in an Ohio Walmart. Crawford, shopping and talking on his phone, had been holding an unpackaged pellet gun that had been sitting on a store shelf.

Killed for being homeless. Los Angeles police shot an unarmed homeless man after he failed to stop riding his bicycle and then proceeded to run from police.

Killed for brandishing a shoehorn. John Wrana, a 95-year-old World War II veteran, lived in an assisted living center, used a walker to get around, and was shot and killed by police who mistook the shoehorn in his hand for a 2-foot-long machete and fired multiple beanbag rounds from a shotgun at close range.

Killed for playing in a park. Tamir Rice was shot and killed in an Ohio park when a police officer mistook the 12-year-old’s toy airsoft pistol for a real gun.

Killed for having your car break down on the road. Terence Crutcher, unarmed and black, was shot and killed by Oklahoma police after his car broke down on the side of the road. Crutcher was shot in the back while walking towards his car with his hands up.

Killed for being in your own apartment. Botham Jean was shot and killed when a police officer entered Jean’s unlocked apartment, mistaking it for her own and mistaking Jean for a burglar.

Killed for staying up late. Atatiana Jefferson, up late playing video games with her 8-year-old nephew, was shot and killed after neighbors who were concerned about that the lights were on in the house asked police to do a wellness check.

Killed for holding a garden hose. California police were ordered to pay $6.5 million after they opened fire on a man holding a garden hose, believing it to be a gun. Douglas Zerby was shot 12 times and pronounced dead on the scene.

This is what constitutes “law and order” in the American police state.

Making matters worse, when these officers, who have long since ceased to be peace officers, violate their oaths by bullying, beating, tasering, shooting and killing their employers—the taxpayers to whom they owe their allegiance—they are rarely given more than a slap on the hands before resuming their patrols.

This lawlessness on the part of law enforcement, an unmistakable characteristic of a police state, is made possible in large part by police unions which routinely oppose civilian review boards and resist the placement of names and badge numbers on officer uniforms; police agencies that abide by the Blue Code of Silence, the quiet understanding among police that they should not implicate their colleagues for their crimes and misconduct; prosecutors who treat police offenses with greater leniency than civilian offenses; courts that sanction police wrongdoing in the name of security; and legislatures that enhance the power, reach and arsenal of the police, and a citizenry that fails to hold its government accountable to the rule of law.

Indeed, not only are cops protected from most charges of wrongdoing—whether it’s shooting unarmed citizens (including children and old people), raping and abusing young women, falsifying police reports, trafficking drugs, or soliciting sex with minors—but even on the rare occasions when they are fired for misconduct, it’s only a matter of time before they get re-hired again.

Much of the “credit” for shielding these rogue cops goes to influential police unions and laws providing for qualified immunity, police contracts that “provide a shield of protection to officers accused of misdeeds and erect barriers to residents complaining of abuse,” state and federal laws that allow police to walk away without paying a dime for their wrongdoing, and rampant cronyism among government bureaucrats.

It’s happening all across the country.

This is how perverse justice in America has become.

If you’re starting to feel somewhat overwhelmed, intimidated and fearful for your life and your property, you should be, because as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the only truly compliant, submissive and obedient citizen in a police state is a dead one.

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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: Brutal: A Minnesota police officer sprays protesters with pepper spray at the weekend (Source: Morning Star)

US Order Against Russia: Italy at Attention

April 21st, 2021 by Manlio Dinucci

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).

***

Italian Foreign Minister Di Maio and Defense Minister Guerini were urgently summoned to NATO headquarters in Brussels for an extraordinary meeting of the North Atlantic Council on April 15: the same day on which President Biden signed the “Executive Order Against Harmful Foreign Activities of the Russian Government” in Washington. The Order not only decrees expulsions of diplomats and economic sanctions, as reported by the media. “If Russia continues or intensifies its destabilizing international actions”, the Order established, “the United States will impose such costs as to cause a strategic impact on Russia”.  

Precisely in order to prepare  the “strategic impact”, that is an intensified political-military escalation against Russia, the North Atlantic Council was convened at the level of  Foreign and Defense Ministers of the 30 NATO countries, formally chaired by the Secretary-General Stoltenberg, in reality by US Secretary of State Blinken and US Defense Secretary Austin.

The North Atlantic Council – the Alliance political body  which, according to NATO rules, decides not by majority but always “unanimously and by common agreement”, i.e. in agreement with what was decided in Washington – has immediately approved, unanimously, a «Declaration of solidarity with the United States on actions, announced on April 15, to respond to Russia’s destabilizing activities». The  Council then listed the charges against Russia: “Destabilizing and provocative behavior, violation of the territorial integrity of Ukraine and Georgia, interference in US and Allied elections, vast disinformation campaign, use of nerve gas against Navalny, support for attacks on US / NATO forces in Afghanistan, violation of agreements on non-proliferation and disarmament ” in the same words as the Biden Executive Order. 

On the merit of these accusations, it is enough to consider one for all, the latter:  who accused Russia of having violated the agreements on non-proliferation and disarmament is the United States, which has always violated the Non-proliferation Treaty, deploying nuclear weapons in Italy and other European countries, and  tore up the INF Treaty by reopening the way for new nuclear missiles installation  in Europe.

The escalation is not just verbal. The day before the North Atlantic Council meeting, the US Army in Europe announced that it will retain three bases in Germany that it should have returned to the German government because it will receive two new operational units in the coming months. The day after the North Atlantic Council meeting, the United States announced an agreement with Norway, which allows the US to have four air and naval bases on the border with Russia. 

In the meantime, the US destroyer Arleigh Burke has returned to Europe after undergoing a modernization that has “increased the range and capacity of its armaments”. The Arleigh Burke is one of the four advanced deployment missile-launching units of the Sixth Fleet that operate mainly in the Baltic and Black Sea under the orders of the US Naval Forces Command in Europe (with their headquarters in Naples-Capodichino). 

These ships are equipped with Lockheed Martin Mk 41 vertical launchers, capable of launching (according to official technical specifications) «missiles for all missions: anti-aircraft, anti-ship, and attack against land targets». This latter, including the Tomahawk missile, can be armed with a conventional warhead or a nuclear warhead. Unable to know, Russia takes it of granted that nuclear attack missiles are aboard these ships near its territory. 

While London also announces the forthcoming dispatch of a missile-launching  unit to the Black Sea, Moscow announces that no passage of foreign warships will be allowed through Russian territorial waters in three areas of the Black Sea from  April 24 to  October 31. The situation will become even tenser when, next summer, the US-Ukraine Sea Breeze exercise will take place in the Black Sea with over 30 ships supported by airplanes, helicopters, and drones with the participation of other NATO countries.

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This article was originally published in Italian on Il Manifesto.

Manlio Dinucci is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Pregnant Women Should Not Get a COVID Vaccine

April 21st, 2021 by Dr. Joseph Mercola

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).

***

By injecting pregnant women with novel COVID-19 mRNA gene technologies, the medical establishment has thrown away one of the most fundamental safety edicts of medicine, which is that you do not experiment on pregnant women.

None of the COVID-19 vaccines on the market are licensed. They’ve only received emergency use authorization, as basic efficacy and safety studies are still ongoing. Yet pregnant women are urged to get vaccinated, and are lining up to get the shot — probably while at the same time being careful about avoiding second-hand smoke, alcohol and drugs with known or suspected toxicity.

In my view, giving these vaccines to pregnant women is beyond reprehensible. This experimentation is doubly unforgivable seeing how women of childbearing age have virtually no risk of dying from COVID-19, their fatality risk being a mere 0.01%.1

Contrast this dramatic downside to the potential benefits of the vaccine. You can still contract the virus if immunized and you can still spread it to others.2 All it is designed to do is lessen your symptoms if or when you get infected. Pregnant women simply do not need this vaccine, and therefore any risk is likely excessive.

It seems like the choice is obvious, unless you are an unethical pharmaceutical company that has been previously convicted of criminal felonies that resulted in billions of dollars in judgments and is seeking to create tens of billions of dollars of revenue.

Abnormal Periods and Miscarriage Reported

As reported by The Defender,3 as of April 1, 2021, VAERS had received 56,869 adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination, including 7,971 serious injuries and 2,342 deaths. Of those deaths, 28% occurred within 48 hours of vaccination. The youngest person to die was just 18 years old.

There were also 110 reports of miscarriage or premature birth among pregnant women. In all, 379 pregnant women reported some sort of adverse event. In the U.K., the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) Yellow Card reporting site that collects COVID-19 vaccine side effects had, as of March 28, 2021, 40 miscarriages listed for Pfizer’s vaccine4 and 15 for AstraZeneca’s.5

Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., sent me a 2006 study6 that could explain this, as it showed sperm can take up foreign mRNA, convert it into DNA, and release it as little pellets (plasmids) in the medium around the fertilized egg. The embryo then takes up these plasmids and carries them (sustains and clones them into many of the daughter cells) throughout its life, even passing them on to future generations.

It is possible that the pseudo-exosomes that are the mRNA contents would be perfect for supplying the sperm with mRNA for the spike protein. So, potentially, a vaccinated woman who gets pregnant with an embryo that can (via the sperms’ plasmids) synthesize the spike protein according to the instructions in the vaccine, would have an immune capacity to attack that embryo because of the “foreign” protein it displays on its cells. This then would cause a miscarriage.

If there were, truly, a public health authority in the U.S., the criminals that are recommending this would be put in prison for reprehensible criminal negligence for the unnecessary damages they are causing to pregnant women and the deaths of their unborn children.

Even among non-pregnant women, side effects hinting at reproductive side effects are being reported, such as heavier than normal menstrual flow, uterine bleeding or restarting their period for the first time in years.7,8

While no one knows what might be causing the heavier flow, it may be worth looking into the parallels between the blood clotting disorders reported, both in some COVID-19 cases and post-COVID-19 vaccination, and Von Willebrand disease, a chronic condition that prevents normal blood clotting, thus resulting in excessively heavy periods.

Rare and Lethal Blood Disorder Reported

Several individuals have rapidly developed immune thrombocytopenia9,10 (ITP), a rare autoimmune disease, following COVID-19 vaccination.11 The condition, which is often lethal, causes your immune system to destroy your platelets (cells that help blood clot), resulting in hemorrhaging. Despite the loss of platelets, serious blood clots are also occurring at the same time.

One example is the 58-year-old Florida doctor who got the Pfizer vaccine and died from sudden onset of ITP two weeks later. Dr. Jerry L. Spivak, an expert on blood disorders at Johns Hopkins University, told The New York Times “it is a medical certainty” that Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine caused the man’s death.12,13 Pfizer, of course, denies any connection.

At least two papers have been published on the condition, as scientists search for clues as to how the vaccines might be causing this unusual reaction. As reported by The Defender:14

“Two teams of researchers have published detailed observations of patients who developed thrombotic thrombocytopenia after receiving the AstraZeneca vaccine and have speculated about a possible mechanism.

Both groups suggest that the development of serious blood clots alongside falling levels of platelets is an immune response that resembles a rare reaction to the drug heparin, called heparin-induced thrombocytopenia. The researchers have labelled the syndrome vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia.”15,16

It’s unclear, however, where the platelet-antagonistic antibodies come from. They might form against the spike antigen, or perhaps it’s a response triggered by some other immune response factor. Either way, doctors at Oslo University Hospital recently announced the blood clotting disorders experienced by some recipients of the AstraZeneca vaccine are caused by the vaccine:17

“Our theory that this is a powerful immune response most likely triggered by the vaccine, has been confirmed … In collaboration with experts in the field from the University Hospital of North Norway HF, we have found specific antibodies against blood platelets that can cause these reactions …

We have the reason. Nothing but the vaccine can explain why these individuals had this immune response. There is nothing in the patient history of these individuals that can give such a powerful immune response. I am confident that the antibodies that we have found are the cause, and I see no other explanation than it being the vaccine which triggers it.”

Several European countries have halted use of the AstraZeneca vaccine due to blood clots in the past several weeks, and in the U.S., the FDA and CDC have agreed to temporarily halt use of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine while they review six reports of blood clots in combination with low platelet counts. So far, one has died. Another is in serious condition. The announcement was made April 13, 2021.18

Another Novel Hypothesis

Other potential mechanisms of action also exist. For example, as noted by freelance medical writer and neurobiology postgrad Shin Jie Yong in a March 19, 2021, Medium article,19 Dr. Goh Kiang Hua, a consultant general surgeon and Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, has suggested a novel hypothesis to explain the loss of platelets seen in some COVID-19 vaccine recipients.

He believes the lipid-coated nanoparticles, which transport the mRNA, may be carrying that mRNA into the megakaryocytes in your bone marrow. Megakaryocytes are cells that produce platelets. According to this hypothesis, once the mRNA enters your bone marrow, the megakaryocytes would then begin to express the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which would tag them for destruction by cytotoxic T-cells.

“Platelets then become deficient, causing thrombocytopenia,” Yong writes, adding, “Of course, he emphasized that these are just speculations.” In my view, Hua may well be onto something. If correct, it would be an elegant explanation.

Breast Cancer Symptoms

Many also report developing swollen lymph nodes after their COVID-19 vaccination and, as reported by Fox 8 News Cleveland,20 doctors at Cleveland University Hospital system are seeing swollen lymph nodes in the mammograms of women who have had a COVID vaccine, and typically on the side where the vaccine was given.

Swollen lymph nodes on a mammogram are one sign of breast cancer. University Hospital’s breast imaging department also reported that they are fielding calls from patients who are concerned about finding swollen nodes under their arms.

According to the news report, data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows over 11% of vaccine recipients have swollen lymph nodes after the first dose of COVID-19 vaccine and 16% after the second dose. The swelling typically begins two to four days post-vaccination, and can persist for up to four weeks.

Lymph nodes that remain engorged beyond the four-week mark need to be evaluated by your doctor, Dr. Holly Marshall with University Hospitals told Fox 8 News.

Scarcity of Controlled Trials in Pregnant Women

Getting back to vaccination during pregnancy, it’s important to realize that this is a time during which experimentation can be the most hazardous of all, as you’re not only dealing with potential repercussions for the mother but also for the child. Any number of things can go wrong when you introduce drugs, chemicals or foreign substances during fetal development.

According to the Mayo Clinic,21 30,000 pregnant women have been “successfully” vaccinated against COVID-19 in the U.S. with either Pfizer’s or Moderna’s mRNA vaccines. They don’t mention anything about reported side effects, but as mentioned earlier, 379 VAERS reports had been filed by pregnant women as of April 1, 2021.

A recent BBC article22 sought to make light of post-vaccination miscarriages, saying, “Data showing a miscarriage occurred after a vaccine does not mean that the two events are linked.” Meanwhile, people dying from heart attacks, cancer and other longstanding diseases who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 were counted as COVID-19 deaths, no questions asked. There was no difficulty in linking those data points to drive up COVID-19 fatality statistics.

The BBC also notes that miscarriage is “very common,” with 1 in 8 pregnancies (12.5%) ending in miscarriage. The U.K. MHRA, in an effort to put a lid on concerns about miscarriages, claim they occur in “about 1 in 4 pregnancies,”23 or 25%, which strikes me as an exaggeration.

Other sources24 reviewing statistical data stress that the risk of miscarriage drops from an overall, average risk rate of 21.3% for the duration of the pregnancy as a whole, to 5% between Weeks 6 and 7, all the way down to 1% between Weeks 14 and 20. One way to assess whether miscarriages are in fact increasing after vaccination could be to compare miscarriage rates during the second and third trimester, when spontaneous losses are at their lowest under normal circumstances.

A vaccination safety monitoring program led by the CDC called V-Safe currently has 2,000 pregnant patients enrolled, but fewer than 300 had completed their pregnancies by the end of March 2021.25Their babies will be evaluated for side effects until they’re 3 months old.26

These are not significant numbers. It’s also a very short follow-up for the babies. So, while COVID-19 vaccines are hailed as safe for pregnant women and their babies alike, they seem to be basing such claims on extremely limited data.

On the whole, injecting pregnant women with novel gene therapy technology that can trigger systemic inflammation, cardiac effects and bleeding disorders (among other things), isn’t a good idea in my view, and violates both the Hippocratic Oath that admonishes doctors to “First, do no harm,” and the precautionary principle that, historically, has governed health care for pregnant women.

Report All COVID-19 Vaccine Side Effects

If you or someone you love has received a COVID-19 vaccine and are experiencing side effects, be sure to report it, preferably to all three of these locations:27

  1. If you live in the U.S., file a report on VAERS
  2. Report the injury on VaxxTracker.com, which is a nongovernmental adverse event tracker (you can file anonymously if you like)
  3. Report the injury on the Children’s Health Defense website

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Notes

1 Annals of Internal Medicine September 2, 2020 DOI: 10.7326/M20-5352

2 The Defender April 6, 2021

3 The Defender April 9, 2021

4 UK Gov Yellow Card Report for Pfizer, March 28, 2021 (PDF)

5 UK Gov Yellow Card Report for AstraZeneca, March 28, 2021 (PDF)

6 Molecular Reproduction and Development 73(10):1239-46

7 MSN April 10, 2021

8 UK Gov Yellow Card Report Unspecified Brand March 28, 2021 (PDF)

9 Hopkins Medicine ITP

10, 14 The Defender April 13, 2021

11 The Defender February 9, 2021

12 New York Times January 12, 2021

13 The Defender January 13, 2021

15 NEJM April 9, 2021 DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2104882

16 NEJM April 9, 2021 DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2104840

17 Science Norway March 18, 2021

18 NBC News April 13, 2021

19 Medium March 19, 2021

20 Fox 8 Cleveland February 2021

21, 25, 26 Mayo Clinic March 29, 2021

22 BBC April 11, 2021

23 Reuters March 31, 2021

24 Medical News Today January 12, 2020

27 The Defender January 25, 2021

Featured image is from Health Impact News

Herpes Infection Possibly Linked to COVID Vaccine, Study Says + More

April 21st, 2021 by Children’s Health Defense

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Herpes Infection Possibly Linked to COVID-19 Vaccine, Study Says

New York Post reported:

Herpes infections may be a side effect of a COVID-19 vaccine, experts have revealed.

Scientists in Israel identified six cases in a new study of patients developing a skin rash known as herpes zoster — or shingles — after receiving the Pfizer vaccine, according to a study in the Rheumatology journal.

Herpes zoster starts off as a small, itchy skin rash, but if left untreated, it could cause nerve damage and pain, the Jerusalem Post reported.

33-Year-Old Woman Hospitalized for ‘Mysterious’ Paralysis 12 Hours After Pfizer Vaccine

The Defender reported:

A healthy 33-year-old woman in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, who asked to remain anonymous, experienced paralysis 12 hours after getting her first dose of the Pfizer COVID vaccine and is still hospitalized, WPXI-TV reported.

The Pennsylvania woman said she initially felt fine after being vaccinated, but woke up in the middle of the night with no feeling in her arms or legs.

“It was the scariest thing in the world to go to sleep completely fine (and walking), to wake up 1:30 in the morning and not be able to move at all,” the woman said. “I’m literally counting on my daughter to hand me my phone to call to get help.”

Paramedics rushed her to the hospital where she was later transferred to the Cleveland Clinic where doctors ran tests to figure out how and why she suffered paralysis. An MRI and spinal tap were clear and blood work all came back negative, ruling out any rare diseases or disorders.

EU Regulators Find ‘Possible Link’ Between J&J Vaccine and Blood Clots, U.S. Still Investigating

The Defender reported:

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) said Tuesday it found a “possible link” between the Johnson & Johnson (J&J) COVID vaccine and very rare blood clots, but concluded the vaccine’s benefits still outweigh the risks.

EMA’s safety committee (PRAC) said a warning should be added to the product label,  but the blood clot-related disorders should be listed as “very rare” side effects of the vaccine.

J&J had delayed the vaccine’s rollout in the EU after concerns about blood clots led U.S. regulators to call for a pause. The company said Tuesday it will resume shipment of the vaccine, distributed under its Janssen subsidiary, in the EU, Norway and Iceland.

In reaching its conclusion, the committee said it took into consideration all currently available evidence including eight reports from the U.S. of serious cases — one of which was fatal — of unusual blood clots. All cases occurred in people under 60, and all occurred within three weeks after vaccination. The majority were women.

Young, Healthy Adults Will Be Deliberately Reinfected With COVID-19 to Boost Vaccine Development

Market Watch reported:

Healthy, young volunteers who have previously had COVID-19 will be deliberately exposed to coronavirus for a second time to see how the immune system responds, as part of a new U.K. study.

Researchers at the University of Oxford on Monday launched the “human challenge” trial to investigate what happens when volunteers who have recovered from the coronavirus disease are then reinfected with the virus a second time.

The study, which is funded by the Wellcome Trust, is expected to start in the next few weeks after receiving ethics approval, and could help accelerate the development of new treatments and vaccines against the disease.

Human challenge studies have played a crucial role in the development of treatments for a number of diseases, including malaria, typhoid, cholera and flu.

Mexico President Touts ‘No Risks’ as He Receives AstraZeneca Vaccine

US News reported:

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador received the AstraZeneca shot against COVID-19 on Tuesday, urging trust in vaccines after several countries limited the use of AstraZeneca due to suspected links to rare blood clots.

Lopez Obrador, 67, has said the benefits of getting inoculated outweighed the risks of the low-cost shot, which is a core pillar of Mexico’s vaccination strategy.

The Race to Curb the Spread of COVID Vaccine Disinformation

Scientific American reported:

Researchers are launching projects to track and tag vaccine misinformation and disinformation on social media, as well as collecting massive amounts of data to understand the ways in which misinformation, political rhetoric and public policies all interact to influence vaccine uptake across the United States.

Scientists have identified a wide variety of disinformation surrounding COVID-19 and vaccines, ranging from conspiracy theories that the pandemic was engineered to control society or boost hospital profits, through to claims that the vaccines are risky and unnecessary.

One research consortium, dubbed the Virality Project, is expanding on strategies pioneered during the election to help inform how platforms such as Twitter and Facebook tackle vaccine disinformation. Created by researchers at multiple US institutions — including Stanford University in California, the University of Washington in Seattle and New York University — the team is working with public-health agencies and social-media companies to identify, track and report disinformation that violates their rules.

With the Competition Struggling, Pfizer’s COVID Vaccine Sales Could Hit $24B This Year

Fierce Pharma reported:

Messenger RNA COVID-19 vaccines are sailing along as viral vector shots encounter setback after setback. How will the recent headlines affect vaccine sales in 2021?

In his weekly notes to investors, Bernstein analyst Ronny Gal offered eye-popping revenue estimates for the mRNA shots from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. He sees the Pfizer team picking up $24 billion in revenues this year, compared with $14 billion for Moderna.

Why such a difference? It’s about Pfizer and BioNTech’s more extensive manufacturing network, Gal wrote to clients Monday.

Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 Vaccine Adds $100 Million to Quarterly Sales

The Wall Street Journal reported:

Johnson & Johnson ’s COVID-19 vaccine contributed $100 million to the company’s sales growth in the latest quarter, as U.S. health authorities re-evaluate the vaccine during a pauseamid safety concerns.

As vaccination campaigns help ease the pandemic’s severity, Johnson & Johnson’s results from its other business lines showed a trend toward normality compared with the tumultuous first months of 2020.

No, We Don’t Know If Vaccines Change Your Period

The New York Times reported:

A spate of reports from women stating that their periods changed after they got their coronavirus vaccines has left many women worried that the jab is affecting their cycle.

So far, there’s no data linking the vaccines to changes in menstruation. Even if there is a connection, one unusual period is no cause for alarm. There is a long list of triggers that can cause changes to the menstrual cycle, including stress, illness and changes in diet and physical activity.

But that raises the question: If so many things can affect periods, why don’t we know more about how these vaccines — or any others — affect menstruation? It’s part of a long history of medicine not taking women’s bodies seriously.

Adagio Raises $336 Million to Advance COVID-19 Antibody Treatment

The Boston Globe reported:

Adagio Therapeutics announced on Monday that it has raised $336 million in additional funding to rapidly advance its COVID-19 antibody therapy to treat and prevent the disease, caused by the coronavirus, as well as illness resulting from new variants.

Last week, the Waltham biotech began recruitment for a global clinical trial to test the drug’s efficacy as a treatment for high-risk individuals with mild or moderate COVID-19. The goal: to determine whether a single intramuscular dose could prevent hospitalization and death.

Free Joints for Vaxxed People in DC Today

Washingtonian reported:

A DC group will hand out joints to anyone who can show they’ve been vaccinated on Tuesday, April 20. DC Marijuana Justice isn’t publicizing the locations of “Joints for Jabs” “because we do not want lines or crowding,” the group says in a tweet, adding, “If you were already vaccinated, we suggest going back to that location!”

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U.S. Costs to Date for the War in Afghanistan, 2001-2021

April 21st, 2021 by Prof. Neta C. Crawford

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Estimated Congressional Appropriations and Spending in Current Billions of U.S. Dollars, Excluding Future Interest Payments and Future Costs for Veterans Care

Since invading Afghanistan in 2001, the United States has spent $2.26 trillion on the war, which includes operations in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Note that this total does not include funds that the United States government is obligated to spend on lifetime care for American veterans of this war, nor does it include future interest payments on money borrowed to fund the war.

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Neta C. Crawford is co-director of the Costs of War Project and Professor and Chair of Political Science at Boston University. Crawford is the sole author of the budgetary component of this research.

Catherine Lutz is co-author of the estimate of war deaths. She is co-director of Costs of War Thomas J. Watson, Jr. Family Professor Emerita of Anthropology and International Studies, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University.

Notes

2 This chart tallies estimated direct deaths caused by war violence. It does not include indirect deaths, namely those caused by loss of access to food, water, and/or infrastructure, and war-related disease, etc. The numbers included here are approximations based on the reporting of several original data sources. Most, though not all, original data sources are updated through 2020 or early 2021; dates are noted in the foot notes. Some original data sources are incomplete, inconsistent and/or data is inaccessible. Thus, for the most part, these data are estimated. The totals are rounded to indicate that there is a degree uncertainty in these counts.

3 Department of Defense Casualty Report, https://dod.defense.gov/news/Casualty-Status/. Through April 2021.

4 In Operations Enduring Freedom and Freedom’s Sentinel.

5 Included in Afghanistan figures.

6 Department of Defense Casualty Report https://dod.defense.gov/news/Casualty-Status/.

Figures include deaths in other operational locations.

7 Estimate based on United States Department of Labor (DOL) (2019). Defense Base Act Case Summary by Nation. Retrieved from: https://www.dol.gov/owcp/dlhwc/dbaallnation.htm (data through March 31, 2020).

The figure given here is an estimate of total contractor deaths based on DOL numbers, namely the additional number of unreported contractor deaths by comparing the percentage of foreign contractors working for the US military in the warzone with the much lower percentage of foreign contractors among the reported contractor dead. The multiplier reflecting this disparity is 2.15 times the DOL number. DOL data for contractor deaths: Afghanistan, 1,789; Pakistan, 42.

8 Includes National Military Forces and National and Local Police Forces.

9 There is uncertainty about the number of Afghan National Police and military deaths. This estimate is based on several source s. In September 2013, US General Joseph Dunford said that more than 100 Afghan Security Forces were being killed a week. Harrison, Emma Graham (2013, Sept. 2), “Afghan Forces Suffering Too Many Casualties Says Top NATO Commander,” The Guardian, retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/02/afghan-forces.

In March 2014, The New York Times reported 13,729 Afghan National Security and Police deaths from 2001 to 2014. Nordland, Rod (2014, March 3), “War Deaths Top 13,000 in Afghan Security Forces,” The New York Times, retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/04/world/asia/afghan-cabinet-releases-data-on-deaths-of-security-personnel.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0.

In January 2017, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) reported 6,785 Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) killed from January 1, 2016 to November 12, 2016, a rate of about 147 per week.: https://www.sigar.mil/pdf/quarterlyreports/2017-01-30qr.pdf.

In September 2018, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said 28,529 Afghan security forceshad been killed since 2015. Fahim Abed and Rod Nordland, “Afghan War Casualty Report: Nov. 9-15” The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/magazine/afghan-war-casualty-report.html?module=inline.

In January 2019, President Ashraf Ghani said that there have been 45,000 security personnel killed since he took office in September 2014. See BBC (2019, January 25), “Afghanistan’s Ghani says 45,000 Security Personnel Killed Since 2014,” BBC News, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-47005558.

Assuming that 100 Afghan ANSDF were killed each week from April through August 2014, this adds an additional 2,000 deaths. The New York Times reported 3,395 Afghan security force deaths for the period January 1, 2019 to October 31, 2019. Fahim Abed, “Afghan War Casualty Report,” The New York Times for each week from January 1 to October 31, 2019. US Forces in Afghanistan began to classify these numbers in 2017 after previously releasing them. See Thomas Gibbons-Neff (2017, October 30), “Afghan War Data, Once Public, is Censored in U.S. Military Report,” The New York Times, retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/30/world/asia/afghanistan-war-redacted-report.html, and

Rod Nordland (2018, September 21), “The Death Toll for Afghan Forces is Secret. Here’s Why,” The New York Times, retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/world/asia/afghanistan-security-casualties-taliban.html.

In December 2017, the DOD reported that the “number of ANDSF casualties suffered while conducting local patrols and checkpoint operations was similar to that of 2016,” while “the number of casualties in planned operations has decreased over the same period.” See Department of Defense, “Enhancing Security and Stability in Afghanistan”: https://www.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/1225-Report-Dec- 2017.pdf.

See Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), “Quarterly Report April 30, 2018”: https://www.sigar.mil/quarterlyreports/index.aspx?SSR=6.

Also for trends see, Livingston, I.S., and M. O’Hanlon (2017), Afghanistan Index, Figure 1.15, p. 12. Brookings, retrieved from https://www.brookings.edu/afghanistan-index/.

See also Crawford, Neta C (2015, May 22), “War Related Death, Injury and Displacement in Afghanistan and Pakistan 2001-2014”, Costs of War, retrieved from https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2015/War%20Related%20Casualties %20Afghanistan%20and%20Pakistan%202001- 2014%20FIN.pdf

10 Through June 2019. From Pak Institute for Peace Studies (PIPS) Annual Pakistan Security Reports. Retrieved from http://pakpips.com/ through 2020.

Also see the South Asia Terrorism Portal, https://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/pakistan/database/casualties.htm.

11 Retrieved from iCasualties, http://icasualties.org/. Data through April 2021.

12 For 2001-2007, see Crawford, Neta C. (2015, May 22). “War Related Death, Injury and Displacement in Afghanistan and Pakistan 2001-2014,” Costs of War, retrieved from https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2015/War%20Related%20Casualties%20Afghanistan%20and%20Pakistan%202001- 2014%20FIN.pdf;

for 2008-2020, see the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) annual Reports on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict, retrieved from https://unama.unmissions.org/protection-of-civilians-reports.

These civilian death numbers include the recorded direct violent deaths. Additional direct violent deaths may not have been recorded and significant numbers of indirect deaths due to displacement or destruction of infrastructure have not been included.

13 Through 2020. Pak Institute for Peace Studies (PIPS) annual Pakistan Security Reports. Retrieved from http://pakpips.com/.

This data is mostly consistent with South Asia Terrorism Portal, “Fatalities in Terrorist Violence in Pakistan 2003-2018,” retrieved from www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/pakistan/database/casualties.htm.

The counts of the dead (and wounded) are complicated not only by the difficulty of access to war zones for investigators, but also because some actors have incentives to either exaggerate or to minimize the number of civilians killed, or to identify civilians as militants.

14 Neither the US or NATO have released figures on the exact number of anti-government insurgents killed. From July 1 through November 5, 2019, Afghan National Defense Forces reported killing 10,259 militants/insurgents/terrorists and reported killing 10,091 from 6 November to 13 April 2021. They did not report any data for the period of May through August 2020. https://mod.gov.af/en/press-release.

See also Crawford, Neta C. (2015, May 22). “War Related Death, Injury and Displacement in Afghanistan and Pakistan 2001-2014,” Costs of War, retrieved from https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2015/War%20Related%20Casualties%20Afghanistan%20and%20Pakistan%2020 01- 2014%20FIN.pdf.

15 Through 2020. See Pak Institute for Peace Studies (PIPS) annual Pakistan Security Reports. Retrieved from http://pakpips.com/.

Also see South Asia Terrorism Portal, https://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/pakistan/database/casualties.htm.

16 Journalist and media worker deaths for war years through 2020. See Committee to Protect Journalists, retrieved from https://cpj.org/data/killed/?status=Killed&motiveConfirmed%5B%5D=Confirmed&type%5B%5D=Journalist&start_year=1992&end_year=2018&grou p_by=year (Journalist Motive Confirmed and Media Workers Motive Confirmed and Unconfirmed).

17 Afghan national and international aid workers killed through March 2021 https://aidworkersecurity.org/incidents/search?start=2001&detail=1&country=AF

Featured image: Members of the U.S. Air Force Honor Guard transfer Capt. David A. Wisniewski’s casket to a caisson while HH-60G Pave Hawk helicopters fly overhead during his funeral at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Va., Aug. 23, 2010. Wisniewski died July 2, 2010, from injuries suffered during a helicopter crash in Afghanistan. (Credit: SSgt Gina Chiaverotti-Paige/Public Domain)

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That we live on a hugely degraded, biologically impoverished planet, in which natural ecosystems are battered, abused, barely clinging on, is now emerging into public consciousness. But the corresponding rise of the superweed, and increasing vulnerability of our crop species, has yet to so register.

Here in the UK, the #StateofNature petition, backed by major campaign groups and calling for a 2030 nature target in the Environment Bill, has raced well over the 100,000 signature mark. The tumbling numbers of iconic and charismatic species, from the sparrow to the starling, have attracted considerable attention, and there’s much joy at each new small advance for nature, from beaver releases to butterfly reintroductions.

Around the world, the US is starting to recognise that it doesn’t have an endless frontier to move on to, and that much of its vast territories have been poisoned by fossil fuel industries, ground down by exploitation,including for agri-chemicals.

Wildflowers

China is about to chair the crucial COP15 on biodiversity. Yet even here we see the crisis. The Yangtze was once as rich and verdant as the Amazon. It has lost the baiji, a beautiful graceful dolphin once worshipped as a beautiful maiden turned into a goddess. And now it is about to lose the Yangtze paddlefish, once the world’s largest freshwater fish and the softshell turtle.

Yet there’s another huge area of biological loss and damage of great importance to human existence that’s just starting to be uncovered and understood. That’s the damage done by decades of industrial agriculture to the fabric and being of the plants on which we directly depend – crops – and the environments that they live in. It is supposed to be included in the work of the Biodiversity COP, but gets little attention.

The damage to soils is moderately well-known, the figure that with current practices there are only 60 years of crops left in them is often quoted, as is the 30-40 years of fertility estimate in the UK, as quoted by Michael Gove back in those days when he was interested in the environment.

Yet what’s been anecdotally often discussed, but little documented, is the damage to the genetic basis of our current crops, and the strengthening of their rivals for water, nutrients and light, the wildflowers that we often call “weeds”. 

In trials running continuously since the 1960s, the amount of crop lost to weeds has grown from a third in the 1960s up to more than a half now.

Calories

In what in the age of the Covid-19 pandemic has become a sadly familiar tale, a focus in plant breeding on “efficiency” and “productivity” – selecting plants that put more energy into the seed and less into growing a good long stalk to reach up to the sunlight – has left crops struggling to compete with their wild, naturally selected fieldmates, winnowed by nature for resilience.

The nitrogen fertilisers pumped on to fields have boosted those “weeds”, designed by nature to be brilliant at grabbing what resources they can, as much, and probably more, than the crops they’re designed for.

Those “weeds”, tough beings as they are, have been doing better in the warming climate. Crops, meanwhile, are literally wilting, with the impact of heatwaves and droughts tripling across Europe in the past five decades.

Weeds too are developing growing resistance to herbicides through widespread use. Another recent study talks of an “epidemic of resistance”, with attempts to mix the type of herbicides used risks producing a general form of resistance to any herbicide, old or new, calling, as the researchers say, “into question the ubiquity of resistance management based on mixtures and combination therapies”.

This, while we’ve concentrated the gene pool of crops, and the number of crops, down to a scant few, with more than 50 percent of human calories coming from just four crops. And even outside those other significant crops, from bananas to peanuts, are incredibly, dangerously undiverse, open to sweeping destruction by disease, ill-equipped to deal with the fast-changing climate.

Landraces

The diversity of cultivated crops declined by 75 percent in the 20th century, and is set to fall a further third by 2050. This is speeding up of one more great, under-recognised impact of centuries of globalisation. Cassava only arrived in sub-Saharan Africa with Portuguese sailors in the 16th century, yet has now displaced many traditional crops.

The oil palm found a comfortable place in West Africa for millennia as a important rich local foodsource, yet transplanted a few decades ago to Malaysia and Indonesia is responsible for vast destruction of valuable rainforest, of little benefit to the locals, or indeed those who consume its products as fuel, cosmetics and ultraprocessed pap foods.

A further threat comes from a trend to increase the percentage of crops that rely on pollinators, particularly bees, to set seed or fruit. That’s generally accompanied by a huge reduction in the diversity of species on the land, which is a threat to the survival of those crucial pollinators.

When I studied agricultural science in Australia three decades ago, the term landraces – not identikit plants selected for uniformity but suites of diversity fit for a range of conditions and challenges – wasn’t even mentioned. Yet now, the concept is rising up fast in farming discussions, and the Food and Agriculture Organisation stresses its importance.

Yet a search of the record of the UK parliament, Hansard, however, finds not one mention of it this century.

Nutrition

Industrial agriculture is clearly a dangerously failed system, the “Green Revolution” looking increasingly like a modern version of Roman salt-strewing on the once rich farmlands of Carthage.

Slowly, however, the principles of its reverse, agroecology, a system of production that seeks to develop systems where soils, crops, other plants, wildlife and nutrient flows work in harmony together, focusing on resilience and diversity – the very characteristics that we’ve so damaged.

That’s one reason why an inquiry now being run by the All Party Parliamentary Group of Agroecology, seeking to establish the practice as, in the formal terminology of the Agriculture Act, a “nature-based solution” to human and natural problems, is particularly important.

Back in Michael Gove’s agricultural days, I heard him admit that agroecological approaches received only a tiny fraction of research funding, and little’s changed – the global agri-giants have no interest in it, with no money to be made for them.

But progress is being made: innovative farmers, independent researchers, small-scale retailers are bringing back crop diversity, seeking out tough, resilient crops that grow well under agroecological conditions, and provide good nutrition for people, not just empty calories.

The government tells us, endlessly, that it wants to be world-leading. There are few more important areas of innovation than this for it to target. There can be fewer higher priorities for a government than ensuring its people can continue to get the nutrition they need for health in a flourishing environment.

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Natalie Bennet is a member of the Green Party and a Peer.

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While Europe grapples with its own vaccine safety scandal, the EMA, the same EU pharma regulator that has insisted that the AstraZeneca-Oxford jab’s benefits far outweigh its risk, has just poured cold water on J&J’s vaccine.

Although the EMA said the reported combination of blood clots and low blood platelets is very rare, and the overall benefits of J&J’s COVID-19 Vaccine Janssen in preventing COVID-19 outweighs the risks of side effects, the EMA has decided to affix a safety warning to the J&J jab – a warning that EMA neglected to impose on the AstraZeneca jab that is so critical to the Continent’s vaccination program.

The EMA’s safety committee, known as PRAC, determined that blood clots caused by the vaccine occurred mostly at unusual sites such as in veins in the brain (cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, CVST) and the abdomen (splanchnic vein thrombosis) as well as in the arteries. They’re often accompanied with low levels of blood platelets and sometimes bleeding. The cases reviewed were very similar to the cases that occurred with the COVID-19 vaccine developed by AstraZeneca, Vaxzevria, the committee said.

Healthcare professionals and people who will receive the vaccine “should be aware of the possibility of very rare cases of blood clots combined with low levels of blood platelets occurring within three weeks of vaccination,” the committee added.

Mirroring comments from a top CDC doctor delivered at a press conference in the US last week which was called to discuss the blood clots tied to J&J, the PRAC said the blood clots were likely an autoimumune response to the jab. The response mirrors the reaction sometimes seen in patients treated with heparin, a blood-thinning agent, which is called heparin induced thrombocytopenia. Questions about the AstraZeneca jabs’ link to these dangerous blood clots let US authorities to halt its Phase 3 trial for more than a month.

It’s believed that the roots of the problem lie in the adenovirus platform upon which both J&J and AstraZeneca jabs were built.

The PRAC said it would make “further recommendations” about the J&J jab’s safety once it finally finishes its accelerated safety review. Meanwhile, J&J jabs remain on hold in the US.

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Interesting how the military “defends” this country by sending ships 7,000 kilometres from Canadian soil.

Canada’s navy is running provocative maneuvers in the South China Sea. While they claim to be upholding the “international rules based order” in these missions, their main partner refuses to recognize the Law of the Sea.

At the end of last month HMCS Calgary passed near the Spratly Islands claimed by both China and the Philippines. In response Chinese vessels shadowed Calgary through the South China Sea.

In recent years Canadian vessels have repeatedly been involved in belligerent Freedom of Navigation (FON) exercises through international waters — claimed by Beijing — in the South China Sea, Strait of Taiwan, and East China Sea. To counter China’s growing influence in Asia, Washington has stuck its oar into long-standing territorial and maritime boundary disputes between China and the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam and other nations. As part of these efforts to rally regional opposition to China, the US Navy has engaged in regular FON operations, which see warships travel through or near disputed waters.

Last year the Canadian Press obtained documents showing that FON efforts in the South China Sea were approved at the highest levels of government. When HMCS Ottawa traveled through the South China Sea’s Taiwan Strait the government said it “demonstrated Canadian support for our closest partners and allies, regional security and the rules-based international order.”

But Canadian FON missions are principally designed to demonstrate support for the US, which is one of only a handful of countries that has refused to sign the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). The US has failed to ratify UNCLOS even after gaining broad changes to the convention in 1994. Failing to ratify UNCLOS is but one of many examples of Washington’s hostility to the “international rules based order” the Trudeau government claims to uphold.

US Naval patrols in the region regularly violate UNCLOS. In “Do US Actions in the South China Sea Violate International Law?”, scholar Mark J. Valencia points out that their employment of sonobuoys (radar) to search for submarines is prohibited by UNCLOS. Valencia also questions whether FON exercises to pressure China violate the UN Charter. Irrespective of legal interpretations, Washington’s expressed concern over China’s failure to adhere to international norms in maritime disputes shouldn’t be taken too seriously given its own flagrant refusal to accept the Law of the Sea.

Ottawa is under pressure to increase its military contribution in a region with a significant US presence. (Le Monde Diplomatique pointed out that despite China’s 14,000 kilometers of coastline, it collides with the US military, which has bases sprinkled all around region, as soon as it goes out to sea.) Recently the Globe and Mail published “Canada urged to play bigger role with allies to counter China in the Indo-Pacific”. The story called on Ottawa to join the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, which includes the US, India, Japan and Australia.

Incredibly, Canada may join an alliance focused on an area some 7,000 kilometers from Canada’s coast. Earlier this year, the Canadian Air Force participated in an anti-submarine warfare exercise in Guam known as Sea Dragon with the Quad nations for the first time.

While increasing, the Canadian navy’s presence in the region is nothing new. In 2012 it came to light the military sought a small base with a port facility in Singapore to keep an eye on China. For two decades the Canadian navy has made regular port visits to Asia and since its 1971 inception Canada has participated in every Rim of the Pacific Exercise, which is a massive US-led maritime warfare training action every two years.

During the early 1950s Korean War Canadian ships bombed North Korean and Chinese troops. They hurled 130,000 rounds at Korean targets. According to a Canadian War Museum exhibit, “during the war, Canadians became especially good at ‘train busting.’ This meant running in close to shore, usually at night, and risking damage from Chinese and North Korean artillery in order to destroy trains or tunnels on Korea’s coastal railway. Of the 28 trains destroyed by United Nations warships in Korea, Canadian vessels claimed eight.” Canadian Naval Operations in Korean Waters 1950-1955 details a slew of RCN attacks that would have likely killed civilians.

Before the outbreak of the Korean War the Canadian Navy sought to exert itself in the region. In a bizarre move, Ottawa sent a naval vessel to China in 1949 as the Communists were on the verge of victory. According to Canadian Gunboat Diplomacy, the boat was sent too late to stop the Kuomintang’s defeat by Mao’s forces and was not needed to evacuate Canadians since British boats could remove them. The objective, it seems, was to demonstrate to the US and UK “that Canada was a willing partner”, particularly in light of the emerging north Atlantic alliance.

A Canadian naval presence off China’s coast isn’t new. But running provocative maneuvers to support a nation that refuses to recognize the Law of the Sea is a bizarre way to uphold the “international rules based order”.

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The European Union had to correct a claim made by its foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, concerning Russian troops near the Ukrainian border. Borrell told reporters on Monday that there were “over 150,000” Russian troops near the border. The number was corrected in a transcript of his briefing on the EU’s website to “over 100,000.”

Despite the change, it’s still unclear how the EU determined that there are over 100,000 Russian troops near the border. Russia has announced the deployment of additional forces near Ukraine in recent weeks, but nothing has indicated it sent over 100,000 troops to the region. Last week, a spokesperson for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed there were 80,000 troops stationed along the border of Ukraine, with 40,000 of them in Crimea.

The fact that Russia has troops in Crimea is no surprise. Moscow had a military base in the peninsula even before Crimea joined the Russian Federation in 2014. An alarmist report from the Daily Mail published satellite images that it claims show a Russian military build-up at a base in Crimea. But the base is located in southern Crimea, nowhere near the conflict zone in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. Demonstrating that the Daily Mail report lacks any credibility, it repeats Borrell’s original claim that 150,000 Russian troops have amassed as fact.

When asked about Borrel’s comments, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said the situation is “concerning” to the US. “What I can tell you is, in general, we have continued to see this build-up increase. And again, that is concerning to us,” He said. While Kirby didn’t offer any numbers, he claimed the Russian troop deployment is “certainly bigger” than the 2014 deployment Kirby said resulted in a “violation of Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

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Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave.

Featured image: Borrell during the 2005 Ibero-American Summit in Salamanca. (CC BY 2.0)

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Patients with a self-administered nasal spray application found to have reduced SARS-CoV-2 log viral load by more than 95% in infected participants within 24 hours of treatment, and by more than 99% in 72 hours

Trial concluded that treatment accelerated clearance of SARS-CoV-2 by a factor of 16-fold versus a placebo

Randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial evaluated 79 confirmed cases of COVID-19, the majority heavily-infected with the UK variant

No adverse events were recorded in the group

Submission for Emergency Use in the UK and Canada for the treatment and prevention of COVID-19 is planned immediately

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Biotech company SaNOtize Research & Development Corp., (SaNOtize), Ashford and St Peter’s Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in Surrey, UK, and Berkshire and Surrey Pathology Services, UK, on Thursday announced results of clinical trials indicating that SaNOtize’s Nitric Oxide Nasal Spray (NONS) represents a safe and effective antiviral treatment that could prevent the transmission of COVID-19, shorten its course, and reduce the severity of symptoms and damage in those already infected.

In a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled Phase 2 trial that evaluated 79 confirmed cases of COVID-19, SaNOtize’s early treatment for COVID-19 significantly reduced the level of SARS-CoV-2, including in patients with high viral loads. The average viral log reduction in the first 24 hours was 1.362, which corresponds to a decline of about 95%. Within 72 hours, the viral load dropped by more than 99%. The majority of these patients had been infected with the UK variant, which is considered a variant of concern. There were no adverse health events recorded in the UK trial, or in over 7,000 self-administered treatments given in earlier Canadian clinical trials.

NONS is the only novel therapeutic treatment so far proven to reduce viral load in humans that is not a monoclonal antibody treatment. Monoclonal antibodies are highly specific, expensive and must be administered intravenously in a clinical setting.

“I expect this to be a major advance in the global battle against the devastating human impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Dr. Stephen Winchester, Consultant Medical Virologist and Chief Investigator of this NHS Clinical Trial. “This simple portable nasal spray could be highly effective in the treatment of COVID-19 and reducing onward transmission. Our trial included patients with a variant of concern and high viral loads yet still demonstrated significant reductions in the levels of SARS-CoV-2, which could be critical in supporting vaccines, preventing future outbreaks and safely reopening economies. Simply stated, I think this could be revolutionary.”

The SaNOtize treatment is designed to kill the virus in the upper airways, preventing it from incubating and spreading to the lungs. It is based on nitric oxide (NO), a natural nanomolecule produced by the human body with proven anti-microbial properties shown to have a direct effect on SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The pharmacology, toxicity, and safety data for NO use in humans has been well-established for decades. The NO molecule released from NONS is identical to the one delivered in its gaseous form to treat persistent pulmonary hypertension, or Blue Baby Syndrome, in newborn babies.

SaNOtize Seeking Emergency Use Authorization in UK and Canada

SaNOtize is applying to regulatory authorities in the UK and Canada for Emergency Use authorization. Swift approval and ramp-up of manufacturing could facilitate an almost immediate safe return to work, school and society, and spur an economic recovery that is months – if not years – ahead of full global vaccination.

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“Reimagining” Mice and Men. “Synthetic Embryos”

April 21st, 2021 by Dr. Marilyn M. Singleton

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While everyone is preoccupied with mask-shaming and vaccine-cheerleading, scientists are engaged in critical research with a more lasting effect on our lives. For 100 years scientists have dreamed of creating and developing life outside of a womb. In March 2021 that dream came true. Scientists grew naturally conceived mouse embryos in tiny beakers for six days—the equivalent of the full first trimester of gestation. At this point the embryos had an identifiable body shape and organs. This miracle of modern science, posted in a YouTube video, garnered a mere 9,400 views.

In 2016, scientists developed the “right cocktail of growth factors and nourishment” and were able to incubate human embryos in a dish. The embryos attached to the dish “as if it were a uterus, sprouting a few placental cells.” The researchers halted the experiment due to the 4,000-member International Society for Stem Cell Research’s (ISSCR) 14-day rule. The ISSCR arrived at this limit based on the point in time at which the nervous system begins to develop.

Two separate research groups have now created their versions of synthetic embryos, called “human blastoids” from embryonic stem cells and “iblastoids” using reprogrammed adult skin stem cells. A real blastocyst is a human embryo around five or six days after fertilization that is growing. Normally, a blastocyst would implant in the wall of the uterus at around 7 or 8 days and the placenta would start to form. These advances prompted the ISSCR to rewrite its own yet to be revealed new guidelines allowing synthetic embryos to develop beyond the current 14-day limit.

As Dr. Frankensteinian as this sounds, researchers explain that the stem cell-produced embryos can be used to study congenital conditions, and the effects of drugs, toxins, and viruses on early development without using human embryos and perhaps create organs for transplants. Kind of like the good that would come from Dr. Fauci’s unethical “gain of function” research on coronaviruses (making them more deadly and transmissible). Look where that got us.

We have truly entered the brave new world, grappling with the morality of life and death in the age of medical technology. Devaluing life is now commonplace. Abortion on demand is available on the day of birth. Freshly obtained aborted fetal tissue is being used to create “humanized mice” (on the taxpayers’ dime, no less). Not surprisingly, COVID-19 is the justification. Moreover, there is evidence that upstanding organizations and suppliers are making profits from the illegal sale of human fetuses.

In the United States, thousands of children are trafficked every year for sex or labor. This doesn’t make front page news or leave a lasting imprint on our consciousness—unlike the ever present COVID-19 statistics.

On the other end of life’s spectrum, government COVID-19 policies regarding nursing home residents cemented what victims already knew: our society treats elders like jetsam—the debris that is thrown overboard to lighten a ship’s load. Former Obama advisor and member of Biden’s COVID-19 team, Ezekiel Emanuel, is on board. His “Complete Lives System” posits that medical care should be rationed based on one’s “instrumental value” to society. Babies, those over 60 years of age, and the disabled are out of luck. “When the worst-off can benefit only slightly while the better-off people could benefit greatly, allocating to the better-off is often justifiable.” One more nail in the coffin of our humanity. With doctors like this who needs the Grim Reaper.

However, the unwanted cast-offs may be more difficult to replace with better models. Our reproductive abilities appear to be on the decline. The global fertility rate, sperm counts, and the quality of sperm are declining and reported miscarriages increased at about 1 percent per year from 1970 to 2000.

Enter the robobabies. We could eliminate the need for mothers. We could ensure that only the right kind of embryos develop. Newspeak paves the way. The United Nations’ European Union and U.S. delegations have neutered mother and father to “parents” and declared that “various forms of family exist.”

Crazy? Social Justice Warriors are “reimagining” the evolution of our society. Why not reimagine humans?

Who would have imagined a pediatrician governor supporting infanticide? Who would have imagined that social media in America, the bastion of free speech, would crush politically unpopular speech and diversity of thought? Who would have imagined that physicians who offered early treatment of COVID-19 would be treated like drug dealers? Who would have imagined that the media-government complex would silence the reasoned opinions of renowned epidemiologists, virologists, and clinicians who raised questions about the response to COVID-19? Who would have imagined that 1984 would cease being fiction?

COVID-19 watchdogs have showcased their faux humanity, incessantly preaching that it is our moral duty to wear a mask and submit our bodies to an experimental drug. As science is catching up to longstanding utopian political agendas, our real moral duty is to reflect on playing God with life and death.

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Dr. Singleton is a board-certified anesthesiologist. She is past President of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS). She graduated from Stanford and earned her MD at UCSF Medical School. Dr. Singleton completed 2 years of Surgery residency at UCSF, then her Anesthesia residency at Harvard’s Beth Israel Hospital. While still working in the operating room, she attended UC Berkeley Law School, focusing on constitutional law and administrative law. She interned at the National Health Law Project and practiced insurance and health law. She teaches classes in the recognition of elder abuse and constitutional law for non-lawyers. She lives in Oakland, Ca. Website: marilynsingletonmdjd.com; Twitter: @MSingletonMDJD.

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

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***

Throughout its 30 year history, the Russian Federation never attacked or threatened another country.

In sharp contrast to US-dominated NATO, Moscow prioritizes peace, stability, cooperative relations with other nations and compliance with international law — a reality I’ve stressed many times before.

The same is true about China, Iran, and other nations free from the scourge of US imperial control.

What establishment media should explain, they suppress — instead featuring fabricated official narrative talking points.

Examples appear daily.

Citing and quoting EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell’s reinvention of reality, AP News reported the following:

On Monday, Borrell claimed that  Russian forces in their own territory — conducting regularly scheduled military exercises and protecting the nation’s borders, their UN Charter right — risk confrontation with Ukraine, a falsified assessment.

Borrell also defied reality by claiming that imprisoned political nobody/Western darling/embezzler Navalny’s condition is “critical (sic).”

Along with unacceptably meddling in Russia’s internal affairs together with the US and UK, his remark turned truth on its head.

On Monday, a statement by Russia’s Penitentiary Service said the following:

“A medical commission…transfer(ed) A. Navalny to the inpatient department of the regional hospital for prisoners, located on the territory of the 3rd correctional facility in the Vladimir Region, which specializes in the dynamic examination of such patients,” adding:

His health is stable and “satisfactory.”

Medically examined daily, he’s being treated with vitamin therapy.

Earlier in April, he was treated in Penal Colony Number 2’s medical unit — then returned to his cell when his condition improved.

Tests showed he had not contracted seasonal flu-renamed covid or any other disease.

Claims by Western officials like Borrell and their press agent media falsely claimed otherwise.

The Biden regime and EU block said they’ll hold Moscow accountable for his condition and safety.

Navalny is a US/Western political tool, used in waging war on Russia by other means.

His health and well-being only matter as long as he’s politically useful. Otherwise he’d be ignored.

The US, UK and Brussels falsely accused Russia of Pentagon/CIA orchestrated aggression by Ukrainian proxy forces against Donbass.

On Monday, the People’s Republic of Donetsk News Agency reported the following:

“Ukrainian armed formations shelled Yakovlevka on the outskirts of Donetsk on Monday evening” — citing the DPR mission to the Joint Center for Control and Coordination (JCCC).

“The shelling was reported at 5.55 p.m. originating from Ukraine-controlled Avdeyevka; the total of 12 rounds of 120 mm caliber were fired.”

“All the attempts to reinstall the ceasefire through the coordination mechanism failed as Ukrainian ignored the requests.”

“A shelling from Ukrainian positions has left eight transformer substations in north-western Gorlovka without power.”

“A residential house at 40 Ermolovoi street, Komarova township was damaged.”

“Additional Measures to Strengthen the Ceasefire were signed at the Contact Group meeting on July 22 (2020) to reinforce and control the indefinite ceasefire in effect since July 21, 2019, the latest in the series of more than 20 reconfirmation and announcements of the ‘silence regime.’ ”

Kiev rejected repeated attempts to restore peace and stability since its forces preemptively attacked Donbass in 2014.

Following orders from Washington, they’re perpetuating a permanent state of war along Russia’s borders.

Last Saturday, DPR People’s Militia deputy chief-of-staff Eduard Basurin explained that Kiev forces near the contact line with Donbass “violated the ceasefire 36 times over the past week” alone — using Western supplied heavy weapons.

On Monday, Southfront reported that Ukrainian forces continue near-daily preemptive attacks on Donbass.

None of the above is reported by Western media. Instead, reports like the following are featured.

According to Axios on Monday, Russian military exercises “near commercial shipping lanes in the Black Sea…threaten to strangle Ukraine’s economy (sic)” — citing a falsified Kiev war ministry “internal document,” conveniently leaked to to Western media, part of anti-Russia propaganda.

Separately on April 14, Russia’s Defense Ministry said passage of foreign warships and other vessels through the country’s Black Sea territorial waters will not be permitted from April 24 through October 31, adding:

Closed areas will not prevent free navigation by Ukraine ships or those of other countries from or to the Black Sea through the Kerch Strait between Russia’s mainland and its Crimean Republic.

Kiev and Biden regime State Department unacceptably objected — ignoring that regular shipping by Ukrainian vessels and others are unaffected by the move.

Continuing Washington’s war of words on Russia, Blinken spokesman Price “reaffirm(ed) (US) unwavering support for” colonized Ukraine, adding:

“We commend…its…restraint (sic) in the face of Russian provocations (sic), and call on Russia to cease its harassment of vessels in the region (sic) and reverse its build-up of forces along Ukraine’s border and in occupied Crimea (sic).”

Explaining Russia’s action, its Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev said the above explained order came in response to “increased military activity of NATO, the US in particular, in the immediate vicinity of the Russian borders in the Black Sea region” adding:

“The question is, what (does) the US ha(ve) to do with the Black Sea?”

“What kind of national interests are they pursuing here…”

He noted that most “Americans have no idea where this sea is located” or perhaps even exists?

Hostile US-led NATO actions “forced (Moscow) to take measures to ensure the security of its territory,” adding:

Russia is willing to hold “talks (for) a political settlement.”

Patrushev and other Russian officials know that whatever the US-dominated West may agree to in talks with Moscow is virtually certain to be breached in the near-or-longer-term.

Since replacing Trump in January by brazen election fraud, Biden regime hardliners transformed Russia’s borders with Ukraine into the world’s top hot spot.

Their provocations risk confrontation with a nation able to hit back hard in self-defense if attacked.

If Washington’s drive for hegemony results in war with Russia, it’ll be made-in-the-USA with possible catastrophic consequences.

The same risk applies to South and East China Sea waters — especially the Taiwan Strait — because of the menacing US Indo/Pacific military footprint in a part of the world where it doesn’t belong.

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Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

VISIT MY WEBSITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].

My two Wall Street books are timely reading:

“How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion, and Class War”

https://www.claritypress.com/product/how-wall-street-fleeces-america/

“Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity”

https://www.claritypress.com/product/banker-occupation-waging-financial-war-on-humanity/

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***

Due to its location on the map between Russia and the EU-NATO states, the Ukraine or Ukraine has significant strategic importance as tensions there rise once more. The country is most commonly called “Ukraine” but, out of preference, the author will retain its less frequently used title of “the Ukraine”. 

Zbigniew Brzezinski, former US National Security Advisor (1977-1981) for president Jimmy Carter, wrote that Russian power would be diminished without control over the Ukraine, its western neighbour.

Brzezinski outlined of the Ukraine being “a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard” and “a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire”. (1)

One of the Kremlin’s principal gateways into Europe would be cut off, if the Ukraine became hostile to Russia, coupled with a grave threat to Russian access of the nearby Black Sea. Brzezinski noted that, with the wresting of the Ukraine from Russia’s sphere of influence, Moscow would be forced to direct much of its focus instead to the south and east, such as towards the Central Asian states. Russia would lose not only a pivotal ally, but could be deprived of investing in the Ukraine’s rich industrial and agricultural base.

The background to ongoing crises in the Ukraine can be traced to the Soviet Union’s disintegration – from 1989 culminating in the complete collapse in late 1991. During the summer of 1990, there were crucial negotiations between US president George H. W. Bush, his Secretary of State James Baker and Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader.

Gorbachev consented to a most unwise move: Germany would be allowed to align with the West, on the basis that NATO thereafter should not advance “one inch eastward” (2). Bush and Baker verbally agreed to this generous concession with “iron-clad guarantees”. Gorbachev had been naive to think that such an arrangement would hold. In violation of their pledge, the Americans instantly expanded NATO to the eastern half of Germany, as the country was formally reunified in October 1990. Gorbachev was irate at this but, when he complained, he was informed by Washington that their previous understanding was merely a gentleman’s agreement. It was not “iron-clad” after all.

NATO had been founded in 1949 under the guise of defending western Europe from the Soviets. NATO was established in fact to bolster US hegemony, and to prevent Europe from pursuing an independent path. The US strategic analyst George Friedman said, “For all of the last 100 years Americans have pursued a very consistent foreign policy. Its main goal: to not allow any state to amass too much power in Europe”. (3)

When the perceived Russian threat disappeared in the early 1990s, the pretext for NATO’s existence vanished. Yet this organisation did anything but disappear; quite the opposite, it has enlarged on a continual basis.

In March 1999 president Bill Clinton absorbed into NATO the central European countries of Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland. Less than a decade before, Hungary and Poland had still belonged to the Russian-led Warsaw Pact alliance, along with the defunct Czechoslovakia. By undertaking these reckless moves Clinton ignored the warnings of US diplomats like George Kennan, who wrote two years before, “Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the post cold-war era”. (4)

Kennan’s opinion was shared by dozens of US political, military and academic leaders, including former president Dwight Eisenhower’s granddaughter, Susan Eisenhower, an expert on international security. Together they signed an open letter to Clinton on 26 June 1997, in which they expressed that his plan to enlarge NATO was “a policy error of historic proportions”. (5)

General Eisenhower had written in the early 1950s that NATO “will have failed” if by 1961 all American soldiers present in Europe “have not been returned to the United States” (6). He would be somewhat shocked to learn, two generations later, that US troops are still stationed on European soil.

Clinton’s successor George W. Bush continued with NATO expansionism in March 2004, by advancing to various parts of Russia’s borders. That year, acceding to NATO were the Baltic states in the Kremlin’s backyard – Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Likewise joining NATO in 2004 were the former Warsaw Pact countries of Romania and Bulgaria, along with Slovenia and Slovakia.

The encirclement of Russia by US-led military forces has led to an enhanced risk of nuclear war. This scenario has been sadly predictable as one nuclear superpower (America) has encroached deep into the domains of another (Russia). For example, NATO and Russian aircraft have been involved in skirmishes and near collisions in recent times, which could eventually result in disaster. (7) (8)

Due to the Ukraine’s strategic value, Clinton, on winning the presidency in January 1993, gave specific priority to that nation. Clinton feared that if the Ukraine was left to its own devices, it would again fall firmly under the sway of Russia (9). When Clinton met the Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk in Kiev during January 1994, the US president proposed the Ukraine’s integration under NATO’s umbrella, by joining the new Partnership for Peace (PfP) program.

Clinton described the PfP as a “track that will lead to NATO membership”, and president Kravchuk signed up to it in February 1994. Clinton’s proposition, to link the Ukraine to the US Armed Forces through NATO, was heavily favoured in Kiev by nationalist and far-right groups, and in other areas of western Ukraine such as Galicia.

Following the Soviet Union’s demise, the American historian and linguist Noam Chomsky wrote,

“The general mission of NATO was officially changed to a mandate to protect ‘crucial infrastructure’ of the global energy system, sea lanes and pipelines, giving it a global area of operations. Furthermore, under a crucial Western revision of the now widely heralded doctrine of ‘responsibility to protect’, sharply different from the official UN version, NATO may now also serve as an intervention force under U.S. command”. (10)

The Ukraine itself is a complex country, containing entrenched ethnic, political and cultural differences. Other segments of its population would not accept NATO or EU membership, particularly those living in eastern Ukraine.

The so-called colour revolutions (in Georgia, 2003 and the Ukraine, 2004) received encouragement from the CIA, NED and USAid, along with other US organisations like Freedom House and the American Enterprise Institute. (11)

The 2004 Orange Revolution in the Ukraine sought to invalidate the election of Viktor Yanukovych, the slightly pro-Russian ex-governor of Donetsk Oblast. In 2003 and 2004, the Bush administration funnelled over $65 million into US-linked associations and NGOs in the Ukraine, with the ultimate aim of helping pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko to claim the presidency, which he did in January 2005. President Bush even paid for Yushchenko’s trips to America, where the latter met with the US authorities.

Near the end of Bush’s presidency in April 2008, it was stated explicitly at the NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania: “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO”. This announcement was a serious aggravation to the Russians.

Chomsky, whose father William was born in what is today western Ukraine, said in early March 2015,

“No Russian leader, no matter who it is, could tolerate Ukraine, right at the geostrategic center of Russian concerns, joining a hostile military alliance”. (12)

By interfering in Ukrainian affairs, Washington wanted to negate Russia’s re-emergence as a major power. Since the Americans could not defeat Russia in war, short of a certain nuclear conflict, the US has sought to surround and contain Russia, as it had done with the Soviet Union.

The former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (1973-1977), hardly a dove, pointed out how “the West must understand that, to Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country”. Kissinger noted that separate parts of the Ukraine consisted of Russian territory for generations. Much of western Russia had first been called Kievan Rus’, between the 9th and 13th centuries. The Ukraine was historically called “Little Russia”.

Western efforts to institute a client outfit in the Ukraine was concerned, moreover, in dislodging Russia from the Crimea, a 10,000 square mile peninsula which juts out into the Black Sea. The Crimea contains an old Russian naval base in the port of Sevastopol, a critical installation from Moscow’s viewpoint.

The Crimea has strong ties to the Kremlin; it was part of the Russian Empire from 1783 to 1917, and subsequently consisted of Soviet territory until 1991. According to a 2014 Russian census, the Crimea’s 2.2 million populace comprises of two-thirds who say they are Russians, compared to 15% who believe they belong to the Ukraine, and about 10% being Crimean Tatars (13). The latter are an indigenous group of Turkic origin.

A 2001 Ukrainian census on the Crimea stated that 60% of its people were ethnic Russians, and 24% were Ukrainian. Both censuses highlighted that over 75% of Crimeans identify Russian as their native language, whereas around one in ten of its inhabitants speak Ukrainian as a first language. (14)

The Crimea’s largest city, Sevastopol, had long been considered a Russian metropolis. More than nine-tenths of its people spoke the mother tongue. The Crimea is a popular holidaying destination for tourists from Russia. Considerable numbers of Sevastopol’s male residents were ex-Soviet sailors, with anchors tattooed on their hands and arms. They were favourable to Russia and strongly opposed NATO, which they regarded as a foe. In 1994, over 90% of Sevastopol locals expressed support for the Russian naval base remaining in the area, which hosts the Kremlin’s Black Sea Fleet, as it has done since 1783.

The Ukraine’s exit from Russian control would compromise Moscow’s natural gas exports to various European countries. By 2013, around three trillion cubic feet of Russian gas passed through Ukrainian territory, to supply such EU states as Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia and Poland. The Ukraine was dependent on at least 40% of its gas imports from the Russian state-owned energy firm Gazprom, headquartered in St. Petersburg.

The American economist Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under president Ronald Reagan, wrote in February 2014, “Ukraine, or the western part of the country, is full of NGOs maintained by Washington”. Their goal as Roberts outlined was “to make Ukraine available for looting by US banks and corporations and to bring Ukraine into NATO, so that Washington can gain more military bases on Russia’s frontier”. (15)

In December 2013, the IMF approved a $15.2 billion bailout to the Ukraine, over a two and a half year period. The IMF’s conditions were harsh and included a substantial cut to energy subsidies, social projects and pensions, the sacking of state workers, strengthening of banks and privatisation of state-owned enterprises, along with their selling off at reduced prices to Western corporations. These were the same terms that the IMF had proposed to Kiev in 2010, which the new president Yanukovych was unable or unwilling to meet.

Yanukovych suspended negotiations on 21 November 2013 on potentially joining the EU, often a precursor to NATO accession (or the other way around). Out of the EU’s 27 states, 21 are NATO members. Had the Ukraine moved towards the European bloc, they would have suffered a loss of around $500 billion due to a severance of business ties with Russia (16). The previous month, October 2013, president Vladimir Putin had levied customs controls, duties and quotas on Ukrainian products entering Russia, as a warning to Yanukovych regarding his flirtations with the West.

Furthermore, the EU was hardly in a position to fix the Ukraine’s economic woes. Brussels was reeling from its own self-inflicted financial turmoil plaguing member states like Spain, Portugal and Greece, while threatening France and the very survival of the Eurozone.

On 17 December 2013, Yanukovych travelled to Moscow where Putin offered him a securities investment worth $15 billion. It included a natural gas deal whereby Kiev would pay at a 33% lower cost. This would allow the Ukraine to save $3.5 billion per year. The contract was less expensive and more advantageous to Kiev, in comparison to the terms proposed by the EU and IMF. (17)

The Ukraine’s then prime minister, Mykola Azarov, said it was a “historic deal”, enough to enable Kiev to balance its payments for two years and to allow the country to re-establish economic growth. It involved co-operation with Russia on industrial matters, including collaboration in such fields as aeronautics, satellite production, arms and ship building.

However, Yanukovych would not be allowed to follow through with these plans. His decision to snub Western overtures led Washington to conclude that he would have to go. From 21 November 2013, revolts sprang up in the western half of the Ukraine, perhaps some of a spontaneous nature but which was quickly exploited for geopolitical purposes.

Roberts observed,

“The protests in western Ukraine are organized by the CIA, the US State Department, and by Washington and EU-financed Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) that work in conjunction with the CIA and State Department. The purpose of the protests is to overturn the decision by the independent government of Ukraine not to join the EU”. (18)

Already in mid-December 2013, US senators John McCain and Christopher Murphy were ensconced in the protests in Kiev, stirring up the marchers. This was flagrant interference by foreign officials in the internal affairs of another country. Victoria Nuland, the US Assistant Secretary of State, was also in Kiev at this time encouraging the protesters, handing out sandwiches to them and to police officers. Nuland was involved to such an extent she later participated in choosing Yanukovych’s possible successor, and she stated that since 1991 Washington had spent $5 billion to support “the aspirations of the Ukrainian people to have a strong, democratic government that represents their interests”.

In early February 2014, Nuland spoke of her preference for the economist and lawyer Arseniy Yatsenyuk. She said he has “got the economic experience, the governing experience” to replace Yanukovych as president. Yatsenyuk, who is pro-EU and pro-NATO, would instead become the Ukraine’s prime minister on 27 February 2014. Billionaire businessman Petro Poroshenko took over from the ousted Yanukovych, in what Friedman called “the most blatant coup in history”.

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Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree. He is interested in writing primarily on foreign affairs, having been inspired by authors like Noam Chomsky. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Notes

1 Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (Basic Books; 1st edition, 9 Oct. 1997) pp. 46-47

2 Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson, “Op-Ed, Russia’s got a point: The US broke a NATO promise”, Los Angeles Times, 30 May 2016

3 Elena Chernenko, Alexander Gabuev, “In Ukraine, U.S interests are incompatible with the interests of the Russian Federation, Stratfor chief George Friedman on the roots of the Ukraine crisis”, US-Russia.org, 17 January 2015

4 Jacob Heilbrunn, “Will Trump destroy America’s alliance with Europe?”, The National Interest, 11 October 2019

5 Eugene J. Carroll Jr, “NATO Expansion Would Be an Epic ‘Fateful Error’”, Los Angeles Times, 7 July 1997

6 Ibid.

7 Deutsche Welle, “NATO jet approaches Russian defense minister’s plane”, 21 June 2017

8 Thomas Nilsen, “Russian bombers met by NATO fighter jets over the Barents Sea”, The Barents Observer, 9 February 2021

9 Luiz Alberto Moniz Bandeira, The World Disorder: US Hegemony, Proxy Wars, Terrorism and Humanitarian Catastrophes (Springer; 1st ed. 2019 edition, 4 Feb. 2019) p. 176

10 Noam Chomsky, Who Rules The World? (Metropolitan Books, Penguin Books Ltd, Hamish Hamilton, 5 May 2016) p. 247

11 Bandeira, The World Disorder, p. 182

12 Democracy Now!, “Noam Chomsky: After Dangerous Proxy War, Keeping Ukraine Neutral Offers Path to Peace with Russia”, 2 March 2015

13 Ayşe Betül Bal, “Crimean crisis: Hope for peace amid differing views”, Daily Sabah, 4 March 2021

14 Ukrainian Community of Crimea Regional Public Organization, The Slavs, Ukrainians of the Crimean Peninsula, published by CERD – UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination

15 Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, “Washington orchestrated protests are destabilizing Ukraine”, Global Research, 13 February 2014

16 Bandeira, The World Disorder, p. 185

17 Ibid., p. 190

18 Roberts, Global Research, 13 February 2014

The Lockdown Paradigm Is Collapsing

April 21st, 2021 by Jeffrey A. Tucker

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).

***

It’s taken much longer than it should have but at last it seems to be happening: the lockdown paradigm is collapsing. The signs are all around us. 

The one-time hero of the lockdown, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, has seen his support tank from 71% to 38%, along with ever more demands that he resign. Meanwhile, polls have started to favor Florida governor and lockdown opponent Ron DeSantis for influence over the GOP in the future. This remarkable flip in fortunes is due to the dawning realization that the lockdowns were a disastrous policy. DeSantis and fellow anti-lockdown governor Kristi Noem are the first to state the truth bluntly. Their honesty has won them both credibility.

Meanwhile, in Congressional hearings, Representative James Jordan (R-OH) demanded that Dr. Fauci account for why closed Michigan has worse disease prevalence than neighboring Wisconsin which has long been entirely open. Fauci pretended he couldn’t hear the question, couldn’t see the chart, and then didn’t understand. Finally he just sat there silent after having uttered a few banalities about enforcement differentials.

The lockdowners are now dealing with the huge problem of Texas. It has been fully open with no restrictions for 6 weeks. Cases and deaths fell dramatically in the same period. Fauci has no answer. Or compare closed California with open Florida: similar death rates. We have a full range of experiences in the US that allow comparisons between open and closed and disease outcomes. There is no relationship.

Or you could look to Taiwan, which had no stringencies governing its 23.5 million people. Deaths from Covid-19 thus far: 11. Sweden, which stayed open, performed better than most of Europe.The problem is that the presence or absence of lockdowns in the face of the virus seem completely uncorrelated with any disease trajectory. AIER has assembled 33 case studies from all over the world showing this to be true.

Why should any of this matter? Because the “scientists” who recommended lockdowns had posited very precisely and pointedly that they had found the way to control the virus and minimized negative outcomes. We know for sure that the lockdowns imposed astonishing collateral damage. What we do not see is any relationship between lockdowns and disease outcomes.

This is devastating because the scientists who pushed lockdowns had made specific and falsifiable predictions. This was probably their biggest mistake. In doing so, they set up a test of their theory. Their theory failed. This is the sort of moment that causes a collapse of a scientific paradigm, as explained by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).

A good example of a similar situation might be the Soviet economy under Nikita Khrushchev. He came to power with a promise that he would make the Russia economy under communism perform better than the United States. That was the essence of his famous promise “We will bury you.” He meant that Russia would outproduce America.

It did not happen. He failed and the theory he pushed failed alongside. And thus began the slow coming apart of communist theory and practice. Khrushchev had already repudiated the Stalinist terror state but never had any intention of presiding over the slow demise of the entire Soviet experiment in central planning. By setting up a test that could falsify his promise, he doomed an entire system to intellectual repudiation and eventual collapse.

The theory and practice of lockdownism could be going the same way.

In Kuhn’s reconstruction of the history of science, he argued that progress in science occurs not in a linear fashion but rather episodically as new orthodoxies emerge, get codified, and then collapse under the weight of too many anomalies.

The pattern goes like this. There is normal science driven by puzzle solving and experimentation. When a theory seems to capture most known information, a new orthodoxy emerges – a paradigm. Over time, too much new information seems to contradict what the theory would predict or explain. Thus emerges the crisis and collapse of the paradigm. We enter into a pre-paradigmatic era as the cycle starts all over again.

As best anyone can tell, the idea of locking down when faced with a new virus emerged in the US and the UK around 2005-2006. It started with a small group of fanatics who dissented from traditional public health. They posited that they could manage a virus by dictating people’s behavior: how closely they stood next to each other, where they travelled, what events they attended, where they sat and for how long. They pushed the idea of closures and restrictions, which they branded “nonpharmaceutical interventions” through “targeted layered containment.” What they proposed was medieval in practice but with a veneer of computer science and epidemiology.

When the idea was first floated, it was greeted with ferocious opposition. Over time, the lockdown paradigm made progress, with funding from the Gates Foundation and more recruits from within academia and public health bureaucracies. There were journals and conferences. Guidelines at the national level started to warm to the idea of school and business closures and a more broad invocation of the quarantine power. It took 10 years but eventually the heresy became a quasi-orthodoxy. They occupied enough positions of power that they were able to try out their theory on a new pathogen that emerged 15 years after the idea of lockdown had been first floated, while traditional epidemiology came to be marginalized, gradually at first and then all at once.

Kuhn explains how a new orthodoxy gradually replaces the old one:

When, in the development of a natural science, an individual or group first produces a synthesis able to attract most of the next generation’s practitioners, the older schools gradually disappear. In part their disappearance is caused by their members’ conversion to the new paradigm. But there are always some men who cling to one or another of the older views, and they are simply read out of the profession, which thereafter ignores their work. The new paradigm implies a new and more rigid definition of the field. Those unwilling or unable accommodate their work to it must proceed in isolation or attach themselves to some other group.

That’s a good description of how lockdown ideology triumphed. There are plenty of conspiracy theories out there concerning why the lockdowns happened. Many of them contain grains of truth. But we don’t need to take recourse to them to understand why it happened. It happened because the people who believed in them became dominant in the world of ideas, or at least prominent enough to override and banish traditional principles of public health. The lockdowns were driven primarily by lockdown ideology. The adherents to this strange new ideology grew to the point where they were able to push their agenda ahead of time-tested principles.

It is a blessing of this ideology that it came with a built-in promise. They would achieve better disease outcomes than traditional public health practices, so they said. This promise will eventually be their undoing, for one simple reason: they have not worked. Kuhn writes that in the history of science, this is prelude to crisis due to “the persistent failure of the puzzles of normal science to come out as they should. Failure of existing rules is the prelude to a search for new ones.” Further: “The significance of crises is the indication they provide that an occasion for retooling has arrived.”

The silence of Fauci in Congressional hearings is telling. His willingness only to be interviewed by fawning mainstream media TV anchors is as well. Many of the other lockdowners that were public and preening one year ago have fallen silent, sending ever fewer tweets and content that is ever more surreptitious rather than certain. The crisis for the fake science of lockdownism may not be upon us now but it is coming.

Kuhn speaks of the post-crisis period of science as a time for a new paradigm to emerge, first nascently and then becoming canonical over time. What will replace lockdown ideology? We can hope it will be the realization that the old principles of public health served us well, as did the legal and moral principles of human rights and restrictions on the powers of government.

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Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research. He is the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and nine books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown. He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

Jeffrey is available for speaking and interviews via his emailTw | FB | LinkedIn

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Denying the Demonic

By Edward Curtin, April 18 2021

RNA inoculations, misnamed vaccines. People are lined up for them now as they are being told incessantly to “get your shot.” The RNA inoculations are not vaccines. To call them vaccines is linguistic mind control.

In Our Hurry to Conquer Nature and Death, We Have Made a New Religion of Science

By Jonathan Cook, April 20 2021

Foolishly, we have made a religion of science. We have forgotten that in a world of unknowables, the application of science is necessarily tentative and ideological. It is a tool, one of many that we can use to understand our place in the universe, and one that is easily appropriated by the corrupt.

The Legitimacy of the WHO as a Gold Standard of Health is Dubious. Analysis and Review

By Dr. Gary Null and Richard Gale, April 20 2021

The WHO is the front line command post for medical prevention (i.e., vaccination) and treatment. Consequently its rulings are often regarded as the gold standard. On matters of global health, the WHO holds dominance.

Pentagon Adds Africa to Global Battleground with China and Russia

By Rick Rozoff, April 20 2021

Referred to as “malign actors,” China and Russia were accused of “coercive and exploitative activities” which “undermine and threaten” the stability of African nations. Anyone familiar with the history of Africa over the past five hundred years would have to be astonished by that claim.

The War of Global Corporate Wealth against Life and Humanity

By Emanuel Pastreich, April 20 2021

Certain traumatic events are engineered that shock the population, disorient the population and create a deep mental trauma that makes it impossible for the individual, or the group as a whole, to comprehend what is taking place.

Understanding Brazil’s Crisis

By Prof. Mauricio Metri, April 20 2021

Domestically, contrary to the world tendency, the after-coup administrations have implemented an ultra-liberal economic agenda characterized by privatization, flexibilization of labor and environmental laws, cutting government spending in education, health, research & development, etc.

AK-47. Kalashnikov: The Amateur Inventor Who Shot to Global Fame

By Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin, April 19 2021

AK-47: Kalashnikov (2020) is a biographical film about Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov (1919–2013), the inventor and designer of the AK-47 automatic rifle.

Big Pharma Conglomerate with a Criminal Record: Pfizer “Takes Over” the EU Vaccine Market. 1.8 Billion Doses

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, April 18 2021

On April 14, 2021, the President of the European Commission confirmed that Brussels is negotiating a contract with Pfizer for the production of 1.8 billion mRNA vaccine doses. This astronomical figure represents 23 percent of the World’s population.

Vaccine Makers Destroy COVID Vaccine Safety Studies

By Dr. Joseph Mercola, April 20 2021

Makers of COVID-19 vaccines are now destroying long-term safety studies by unblinding their trials and giving the control groups the active vaccine, claiming it is “unethical” to withhold an effective vaccine.

Gates Unhinged: Dystopian Vision for Agrifood Must Not Succeed

By Colin Todhunter, April 18 2021

The high-tech/data conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, have joined traditional agribusiness giants, such as Corteva, Bayer, Cargill and Syngenta, in a quest to impose a certain type of agriculture and food production on the world.

New Wind and Solar Up 50% Globally in 2020, as China Beats US by Over 4 to 1

By Prof. Juan Cole, April 19 2021

The new report on 2020 by the International Renewable Energy Agency reveals that the world’s renewable energy generation capacity increased by an astonishing 10.3% in 2020 despite the global economic slowdown during the coronavirus pandemic.

The Supreme Court Is Also to Blame for Daunte Wright’s Death

By Prof. Marjorie Cohn, April 19 2021

Like Derek Chauvin, who is on trial for killing George Floyd, Potter is not an exception to the rule. Both are typical representatives of a system of racist, violent law enforcement against Black people.

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Ordine Usa contro la Russia: Italia sull’attenti

April 20th, 2021 by Manlio Dinucci

Il ministro degli Esteri Di Maio e il ministro della Difesa Guerini sono stati convocati d’urgenza al quartier generale della Nato a Bruxelles, per una riunione straordinaria del Consiglio Nord Atlantico il 15 aprile: il giorno stesso in cui, a Washington, il presidente Biden firmava l’«Ordine esecutivo contro le dannose attività estere del governo russo».

L’Ordine non decreta solo espulsioni di diplomatici e sanzioni economiche, come hanno riportato i media. «Se la Russia prosegue o intensifica le sue destabilizzanti azioni internazionali», stabilisce l’Ordine, «gli Stati uniti imporranno costi tali da provocare un impatto strategico sulla Russia». Proprio per preparare l’«impatto strategico», ossia una intensificata escalation politico-militare contro la Russia, è stato convocato il Consiglio Nord Atlantico a livello dei ministri degli Esteri e della Difesa dei 30 paesi della Nato, presieduto formalmente dal segretario generale Stoltenberg, di fatto dal segretario di Stato Usa Blinken e dal segretario Usa alla Difesa Austin.

Il Consiglio Nord Atlantico – l’organo politico dell’Alleanza che, secondo le norme Nato, decide non a maggioranza ma sempre «all’unanimità e di comune accordo», ossia d’accordo con quanto deciso a Washington – ha approvato immediatamente, all’unanimità, una «Dichiarazione di solidarietà con gli Stati uniti sulle azioni, annunciate il 15 aprile, per rispondere alle attività destabilizzanti della Russia». Elenca quindi, con le stesse parole dell’Ordine esecutivo di Biden, i capi di accusa alla Russia: «Comportamento destabilizzante e provocatorio, violazione della integrità territoriale di Ucraina e Georgia, interferenza nelle elezioni degli Usa e degli Alleati, vasta campagna di disinformazione, uso di gas nervino contro Navalny, sostegno agli attacchi contro le forze Usa/Nato in Afghanistan, violazione degli accordi sulla non-proliferazione e il disarmo».

Sulla fondatezza di tali accuse basti considerare, una per tutte, quest’ultima: ad accusare la Russia di aver violato gli accordi sulla non-proliferazione e il disarmo sono gli Stati uniti, che hanno sempre violato il Trattato di non-proliferazione, schierando armi nucleari in Italia e altri paesi europei, e che hanno stracciato il Trattato Inf riaprendo la via all’installazione di nuovi missili nucleari in Europa.

L’escalation non è solo verbale. Il giorno prima del Consiglio Nord Atlantico, l’Esercito Usa in Europa ha comunicato che, dovendo ricevere nei prossimi mesi due nuove unità operative, conserverà in Germania tre basi che avrebbe dovuto restituire al governo tedesco. Il giorno dopo il Consiglio Nord Atlantico, gli Stati uniti hanno annunciato un accordo con la Norvegia, che permette loro di disporre di 4 basi aeree e navali ai confini con la Russia. Nel frattempo è rientrato in Europa il cacciatorpediniere Usa Arleigh Burke, sottoposto a un ammodernamento che ha «accresciuto il raggio e la capacità dei suoi armamenti». L’Arleigh Burke è una delle 4 unità lanciamissili a spiegamento avanzato della Sesta Flotta che, agli ordini del Comando delle forze navali Usa in Europa (con quartier generale a Napoli-Capodichino), operano soprattutto nel Baltico e nel Mar Nero.

Queste navi sono dotate di lanciatori verticali Mk 41 della Lockheed Martin, in grado di lanciare (secondo le specifiche tecniche ufficiali) «missili per tutte le missioni: anti-aeree, anti-nave, e di attacco contro obiettivi terrestri». Questi ultimi, tra cui il missile Tomahawk, possono essere armati di testata convenzionale o di testata nucleare. Non potendolo sapere, la Russia dà per scontato che, a bordo di queste navi in prossimità del suo territorio, vi siano missili da attacco nucleare. Mentre anche Londra annuncia il prossimo invio di una unità lanciamissili nel Mar Nero, Mosca comunica che, dal 24 aprile al 31 ottobre, non sarà concesso alcun passaggio di navi da guerra straniere attraverso le acque territoriali russe in tre aree del Mar Nero.

La situazione diverrà ancora più tesa quando, l’estate prossima, si svolgerà nel Mar Nero l’esercitazione Usa-Ucraina Sea Breeze, cui parteciperanno anche altri paesi Nato, con oltre 30 navi, appoggiate da aerei, elicotteri e droni.

Manlio Dinucci

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Global Research: Honest Journalism in Uncertain Times

April 20th, 2021 by Global Research News

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***

Beijing’s foreign policy has traditionally been one of friendly rhetoric, avoidance of controversy, and focussing on cooperation rather than differences. However, with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, Chinese diplomatic practices have certainly changed to what has been described by the West as “wolf warrior diplomacy.”

Of course, this is a Western attempt to portray China’s responses to endless allegations and provocations as being aggressive. Long gone are the days of Westerners stereotyping Asians as docile, meek and subservient. For this reason, any response by Beijing to challenges and provocations against it are labelled by Western politicians and media as “wolf warrior diplomacy.”

Chinese President Xi Jinping, in speaking on Tuesday at the annual Boao Forum for Asia, declared that “the world wants justice, not hegemony,” in what was an indirect, but obviously scathing message towards Washington.

Reuters in its report about Xi’s comments wrote that “China has long called for reforms of the global governance system to better reflect a more diverse range of perspectives and values from the international community, including its own, instead of those of a few major nations.”

In effect, what they are describing is Beijing’s efforts to create a Multipolar World Order where the U.S. is no longer the preeminent global power as there is a more equitable distribution of it confined to scopes of influence.

“A big country should look like a big country by showing that it is shouldering more responsibility,” Xi said at the Forum. He also criticised efforts by some countries to “build barriers” and “decouple,” which he said would harm others and benefit no one.

This was once again an indirect reference to the U.S., raising the question on whether Xi’s comments on Tuesday will result in fresh allegations of Chinese “aggression” through its “wolf warrior diplomacy.”

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and President Joe Biden endlessly accuse Beijing of human rights violations against the Uighur minority in China’s Xinjiang region, cracking down on so-called democracy activists in Hong Kong, threats against Taiwan, and cyberattacks against the U.S. and its allies. Blinken emphasized in March that these supposed actions by China “threaten the rules-based order that maintains global stability. That’s why they’re not merely internal matters, and why we feel an obligation to raise these issues.”

But it is this very emphasis on a “rules-based order” that highlights the U.S.’ contradictory behavior considering its military invasions and interventions outside of international law, as well as endless sanctions and embargoes against Russia, Syria and Venezuela to name but a very few countries. Rather, the so-called “rules-based-order” is a U.S.-led liberal order – the very thing that China is beginning to resist by engaging in so-called “wolf warrior diplomacy” and promoting the idea that the world wants justice and not hegemony, as Xi said.

Although Westerners are still positively reactive to the ideals of “freedom,” “rules” and “liberalism” as mantras that cannot be debated or challenged, these very ideals are endlessly violated by the U.S.’ pursuit to maintain global dominance. As the U.S. was founded on liberalism, it believes it has the moral high ground to patronize and demonize other systems of governance and/or dominant ideologies irrespective of historical, geographical and demographic realities.

Liberalism espouses pragmatism and cooperation, especially through the utilization of international institutes and multilateral formats. This is supposedly in the hope of creating a balanced, peaceful and prosperous world. However, as liberalism drives to shape the world in its own image, it certainly does not shy away from using military power to achieve its goals when necessary, just as the invasion of Iraq demonstrates. It is in this context that Xi highlights that “the world wants justice, not hegemony.”

Despite China pursuing a path of peaceful economic development, it has not prevented endless accusations of human rights violations and challenges against a so-called “rules-based-order.” Rather, China is a major threat to the liberal order as it achieves economic growth and global cooperation despite operating under one party rule. While the U.S. violently destroys countries through pretexts of human rights violations, like it has done in Venezuela and Syria, China demonstrates that such global hegemony is a remnant of the past.

Although “wolf warrior diplomacy” is decried by the West today, it is just a cheap effort to deflect its own provocative diplomacy as an inherently Chinese aggression. Although Chinese diplomatic rhetoric might be crude at times, it is not China militarily engaged across the globe in a desperate attempt to maintain an old hegemonic international system that no longer exists.

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

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***

Back in the 1880s, the mathematician and theologian Edwin Abbott tried to help us better understand our world by describing a very different one he called Flatland. 

Imagine a world that is not a sphere moving through space like our own planet, but more like a vast sheet of paper inhabited by conscious, flat geometric shapes. These shape-people can move forwards and backwards, and they can turn left and right. But they have no sense of up or down. The very idea of a tree, or a well, or a mountain makes no sense to them because they lack the concepts and experiences of height and depth. They cannot imagine, let alone describe, objects familiar to us.

In this two-dimensional world, the closest scientists can come to comprehending a third dimension are the baffling gaps in measurements that register on their most sophisticated equipment. They sense the shadows cast by a larger universe outside Flatland. The best brains infer that there must be more to the universe than can be observed but they have no way of knowing what it is they don’t know.

This sense of the the unknowable, the ineffable has been with humans since our earliest ancestors became self-conscious. They inhabited a world of immediate, cataclysmic events – storms, droughts, volcanoes and earthquakes – caused by forces they could not explain. But they also lived with a larger, permanent wonder at the mysteries of nature itself: the change from day to night, and the cycle of the seasons; the pin-pricks of light in the night sky, and their continual movement; the rising and falling of the seas; and the inevitability of life and death.

Perhaps not surprisingly, our ancestors tended to attribute common cause to these mysterious events, whether of the catastrophic or the cyclical variety, whether of chaos or order. They ascribed them to another world or dimension – to the spiritual realm, to the divine.

Paradox and mystery 

Science has sought to shrink the realm of the inexplicable. We now understand – at least approximately – the laws of nature that govern the weather and catastrophic events like an earthquake. Telescopes and rocket-ships have also allowed us to probe deeper into the heavens to make a little more sense of the universe outside our tiny corner of it.

But the more we investigate the universe the more rigid appear the limits to our knowledge. Like the shape-people of Flatland, our ability to understand is constrained by the dimensions we can observe and experience: in our case, the three dimensions of space and the additional one of time. Influential “string theory” posits another six dimensions, though we would be unlikely to ever sense them in any more detail than the shadows almost-detected by the scientists of Flatland.

The deeper we peer into the big universe of the night sky and our cosmic past, and the deeper we peer into the small universe inside the atom and our personal past, the greater the sense of mystery and wonder.

At the sub-atomic level, the normal laws of physics break down. Quantum mechanics is a best-guess attempt to explain the mysteries of movement of the tiniest particles we can observe, which appear to be operating, at least in part, in a dimension we cannot observe directly.

And most cosmologists, looking outwards rather inwards, have long known that there are questions we are unlikely ever to answer: not least what exists outside our universe – or expressed another way, what existed before the Big Bang. For some time, dark matter and black holes have baffled the best minds. This month scientists conceded to the New York Times that there are forms of matter and energy unknown to science but which can be inferred because they disrupt the known laws of physics.

Inside and outside the atom, our world is full of paradox and mystery.

Conceit and humility

Despite our science-venerating culture, we have arrived at a similar moment to our forebears, who gazed at the night sky in awe. We have been forced to acknowledge the boundaries of knowledge.

There is a difference, however. Our ancestors feared the unknowable, and therefore preferred to show caution and humility in the face of what could not be understood. They treated the ineffable with respect and reverence. Our culture encourages precisely the opposite approach. We show only conceit and arrogance. We seek to defeat, ignore or trivialise that which we cannot explain or understand.

The greatest scientists do not make this mistake. As an avid viewer of science programmes like the BBC’s Horizon, I am always struck by the number of cosmologists who openly speak of their religious belief. Carl Sagan, the most famous cosmologist, never lost his sense of awestruck wonder as he examined the universe. Outside the lab, his was not the language of hard, cold, calculating science. He described the universe in the language of poetry. He understood the necessary limits of science. Rather than being threatened by the universe’s mysteries and paradoxes, he celebrated them.

When in 1990, for example, space probe Voyager 1 showed us for the first time our planet from 6 billion km away, Sagan did not mistake himself or his fellow NASA scientists for gods. He saw “a pale blue dot” and marvelled at a planet reduced to a “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam”. Humility was his response to the vast scale of the universe, our fleeting place within it, and our struggle to grapple with “the great enveloping cosmic dark”.

Mind and matter 

Sadly, Sagan’s approach is not the one that dominates the western tradition. All too often, we behave as if we are gods. Foolishly, we have made a religion of science. We have forgotten that in a world of unknowables, the application of science is necessarily tentative and ideological. It is a tool, one of many that we can use to understand our place in the universe, and one that is easily appropriated by the corrupt, by the vain, by those who seek power over others, by those who worship money.

Until relatively recently, science, philosophy and theology sought to investigate the same mysteries and answer the same existential questions. Through much of history, they were seen as complementary, not in competition. Abbott, remember, was a mathematician and theologian, and Flatland was his attempt to explain the nature of faith. Similarly, the man who has perhaps most shaped the paradigm within which much western science still operates was a French philosopher using the scientific methods of the time to prove the existence of God.

Today, Rene Descartes is best remembered for his famous – if rarely understood – dictum: “I think, therefore I am.” Four hundred years ago, he believed he could prove God’s existence through his argument that mind and matter are separate. Just as human bodies were distinct from souls, so God was separate and distinct from humans. Descartes believed knowledge was innate, and therefore our idea of a perfect being, of God, could only derive from something that was perfect and objectively real outside us.

Weak and self-serving as many of his arguments sound today, Descartes’ lasting ideological influence on western science was profound. Not least so-called Cartesian dualism – the treatment of mind and matter as separate realms – has encouraged and perpetuated a mechanistic view of the world around us.

We can briefly grasp how strong the continuing grip of his thinking is on us when we are confronted with more ancient cultures that have resisted the west’s extreme rationalist discourse – in part, we should note, because they were exposed to it in hostile, oppressive ways that served only to alienate them from the western canon.

Hearing a Native American or an Australian Aboriginal speak of the sacred significance of a river or a rock – or about their ancestors – is to become suddenly aware of how alien their thinking sounds to our “modern” ears. It is the moment when we are likely to respond in one of two ways: either to smirk internally at their childish ignorance, or to gulp at a wisdom that seems to fill a yawning emptiness in our own lives.

Science and power 

Descartes’ legacy – a dualism that assumes separation between soul and body, mind and matter – has in many ways proved a poisonous one for western societies. An impoverished, mechanistic worldview treats both the planet and our bodies primarily as material objects: one a plaything for our greed, the other a canvas for our insecurities.

The British scientist James Lovelock who helped model conditions on Mars for NASA so it would have a better idea how to build the first probes to land there, is still ridiculed for the Gaia hypothesis he developed in the 1970s. He understood that our planet was best not viewed as a very large lump of rock with life-forms living on it, though distinct from it. Rather Earth was as a complete, endlessly complex, delicately balanced living entity. Over billions of years, life had grown more sophisticated, but each species, from the most primitive to the most advanced, was vital to the whole, maintaining a harmony that sustained the diversity.

Few listened to Lovelock. Our god-complex got the better of us. And now, as the bees and other insects disappear, everything he warned of decades ago seems far more urgent. Through our arrogance, we are destroying the conditions for advanced life. If we don’t stop soon, the planet will dispose of us and return to an earlier stage of its evolution. It will begin again, without us, as simple flora and microbes once again begin recreating gradually – measured in aeons – the conditions favourable to higher life forms.

But the abusive, mechanistic relationship we have with our planet is mirrored by the one we have with our bodies and our health. Dualism has encouraged us to think of our bodies as fleshy vehicles, which like the metal ones need regular outside intervention, from a service to a respray or an upgrade. The pandemic has only served to underscore these unwholesome tendencies.

In part, the medical establishment, like all establishments, has been corrupted by the desire for power and enrichment. Science is not some pristine discipline, free from real-world pressures. Scientists need funding for research, they have mortgages to pay, and they crave status and career advancement like everyone else.

Kamran Abbasi, executive editor of the British Medical Journal, wrote an editorial last November warning of British state corruption that had been unleashed on a grand scale by covid-19. But it was not just politicians responsible. Scientists and health experts had been implicated too: “The pandemic has revealed how the medical-political complex can be manipulated in an emergency.”  

He added: “The UK’s pandemic response relies too heavily on scientists and other government appointees with worrying competing interests, including shareholdings in companies that manufacture covid-19 diagnostic tests, treatments, and vaccines.”

Doctors and clerics

But in some ways Abbasi is too generous. Scientists haven’t only corrupted science by prioritising their personal, political and commercial interests. Science itself is shaped and swayed by the ideological assumptions of scientists and the wider societies to which they belong. For centuries, Descartes’ dualism has provided the lens through which scientists have often developed and justified medical treatments and procedures. Medicine has its fashions too, even if they tend to be longer-lived – and more dangerous – than the ones of the clothing industry.

In fact, there were self-interested reasons why Descartes’s dualism was so appealing to the scientific and medical community four centuries ago. His mind-matter division carved out a space for science free from clerical interference. Doctors could now claim an authority over our bodies separate from that claimed by the Church over our souls.

But the mechanistic view of health has been hard to shake off, even as scientific understanding – and exposure to non-western medical traditions – should have made it seem ever less credible. Cartesian dualism reigns to this day, seen in the supposedly strict separation of physical and mental health. To treat the mind and body as indivisible, as two sides of the same coin, is to risk being accused of quackery. “Holistic” medicine still struggles to be taken seriously.

Faced with a fear-inducing pandemic, the medical establishment has inevitably reverted even more strongly to type. The virus has been viewed through a single lens: as an invader seeking to overwhelm our defences, while we are seen as vulnerable patients in desperate need of an extra battalion of soldiers who can help us to fight it off. With this as the dominant framework, it has fallen to Big Pharma – the medical corporations with the greatest firepower – to ride to our rescue.

Vaccines are part of an emergency solution, of course. They will help save lives among the most vulnerable. But the reliance on vaccines, to the exclusion of everything else, is a sign that once again we are being lured back to viewing our bodies as machines. We are being told by the medical establishment we can ride out this war with some armour-plating from Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca. We can all be Robocop in the battle against Covid-19.

But there are others ways to view health than as an expensive, resource-depleting technological battle against virus-warriors. Where is the focus on improving the ever-more nutrient-deficient, processed, pesticide-laden, and sugar and chemical-rich diets most of us consume? How do we address the plague of stress and anxiety we all endure in a competitive, digitally connected, no-rest world stripped of all spiritual meaning? What do we do about the cosseted lifestyles we prefer, where exertion is a lifestyle choice renamed as exercise rather than integral to our working day, and where regular exposure to sunshine, outside of a beach vacation, is all but impossible in our office-bound schedules?

Fear and quick-fixes 

For much of human history, our chief concern was the fight for survival – against animals and other humans, against the elements, against natural disasters. Technological developments proved invaluable in making our lives safer and easier, whether it was flint axes and domesticated animals, wheels and combustion engines, medicines and mass communications. Our brains now seem hardwired to look to technological innovation to address even the smallest inconvenience, to allay even our wildest fears.

So, of course, we have invested our hopes, and sacrificed our economies, in finding a technological fix to the pandemic. But does this exclusive fixation on technology to solve the current health crisis not have a parallel with the similar, quick-fix technological remedies we keep seeking for the many ecological crises we have created?

Global warming? We can create an even whiter paint to reflect back the sun’s heat. Plastics in every corner of our oceans? We can build giant vacuum-cleaners that will suck it all out. Vanishing bee populations? We can invent pollinator drones to take their place. A dying planet? Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk will fly millions of us to space colonies. 

Were we not so technology obsessed, were we not so greedy, were we not so terrified of insecurity and death, if we did not see our bodies and minds as separate, and humans as separate from everything else, we might pause to ponder whether our approach is not a little misguided.

Science and technology can be wonderful things. They can advance our knowledge of ourselves and the world we inhabit. But they need to be conducted with a sense of humility we increasingly seem incapable of. We are not conquerors of our bodies, or the planet, or the universe – and if we imagine we are, we will soon find out that the battle we are waging is one we can never hope to win.

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This essay first appeared on Jonathan Cook’s blog: https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: People hold signs during the March for Science in Melbourne, Australia on April 22, 2017. (Photo: Takver/flickr/ccc)

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The War of Global Corporate Wealth against Life and Humanity

April 20th, 2021 by Emanuel Pastreich

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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We find ourselves in the midst of a global war on a scale even greater than that of the Second World War. But the nature of war has changed, and as a result many cannot conceive of what is happening. They think that it is a struggle between nations over power, when in fact it is an effort of the superrich to destroy most of humanity.

Moreover, it is part of the strategy in this war to make the most dangerous moment, now, seem to most people as if nothing is happening, as if things are slowly returning to normal.

The front line in this war is the promotion of the COVID-19 scare and the push for mandatory vaccines. That push, which comes at us from every direction, has nothing to do with medicine or with health. The problem is not one of misdiagnosis, or of a misunderstanding of science. Rather multinational corporations have set out to destroy all reliable sources of information, including governments, universities and research institutes, to get experts to say whatever they are told to by corporations and to set up a system in which humans are forced to let corporations inject into their bodies whatever drugs they want to without any science—only the use of fear and authority.

COVID-19 is but one part of a larger plan to take over every single aspect of human life. It is the front line in the battle because it is a means to take over our bodies (by allowing corporations to introduce gene-altering RNA, or Nano-sensors, into our blood).

But there are other weapons in the arsenal of these corporations.

The corporations wish us to depend on them for food. They destroy every opportunity for us to raise our own food and they force us to consume processed, unhealthy foods with high sugar produced by them. They force farmers to use GMO plants with one-use seeds, force them to use petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides that destroy the soil and make farmers more dependent on corporate products (all financed by government programs paid from our taxes). They also try to make all of us dependent on the import of food from abroad controlled by them. They want to make food a product that must be bought. They stop us from using the sun and the water and the soil that belongs to all people to create our own food. They even promote a cool urban culture and make farming seem backward by forcing people to move to cities as a way of destroying food independence.

These corporations are buying up farmland around the world as part of this project with money that they make out of nothing through their corrupt relations with national and international banks. They are preparing for a day when they can starve to death all opposition.

They want to control water, to privatize its supply, to force us to buy water that should be free in bottles, to make us think bottled water is more healthy when it is less healthy, and they force us to waste dangerous amounts of water in agriculture and industry that damages the environment and harms citizen. They claim, falsely, that this process is “growth.”

They use the concept of “real estate” to artificially inflate the cost of land and to force us to pay for housing at a rate that is crippling. The relationship between investment banks and real estate costs is a taboo topic in the media.

They make fortunes for themselves by compelling us to take out loans to buy houses and apartments, and they create films, commercials and billboards to convince us that we must waste money on expensive housing in order to be happy.

They make it impossible for us to create our own energy through water, or wind, or solar power, or even through our own muscles, forcing dependency on electricity, or petroleum, that only they supply through imported fossil fuels. They make fortunes on heating and cooling as well, and they design buildings in ways that are wasteful—even as they advertise them as being “energy efficient.”

They bribe experts and politicians to create cities designed for automobiles to force us to buy these dangerous and expensive products and to depend on imported petroleum. For the price of all those freeways, all those car accidents, all cancer from polluted air, we could easily install solar panels on every home for free—and more. We could easily become energy independent and stop spending all that money on weapons to protect the import of energy.

Corporations have pushed to make medicine private and they force us to pay more for healthcare and health insurance while bribing politicians to reduce funding for public medicine so that we have no choice but to use private medical facilities. The health of people is a low priority; the profits of corporations are the main goal.

Highly paid medical experts ignore, or attack, natural herbs, acupuncture, nutrition, exercise and other traditional approaches to health, that are most appropriate for most illnesses. Nothing that the citizen can do on his own, for free, is permitted. We must buy pharmaceutical products that are unhealthy, addictive, or even deadly pushed on us through advertising. They bribe doctors to promote these medicines.

They want to force us to spend enormous amounts of money on education so that we can find jobs, jobs that they define for us. They commercialize education so that it is overpriced, and unrelated to the real task of education: helping people to think for themselves, to understand the world, to be able to express their ideas, to engage in moral action. Education has been made just a means to get a qualification for a job, and not an opportunity to learn to think for yourself.

Journalism in newspapers and TV news is about protecting and defending corporations and the rich, and confusing people. Media is about seducing people with sex, food and glamour so that they are unable to focus on the destruction of the environment or the theft of their money by the rich and powerful.

The government has been turned into a device for controlling us used by corporations, rather than a method for controlling those corporations. Corporations spend billions of dollars to bribe the media to tell citizens that government is the problem, that the personalities of politicians is the problem. They hide the truth that the government could be run as a means to control, and to defeat, the machinations of the rich.

Perhaps the most damaging aspect of the corporate assault on us is the attack on science. We are misled into thinking that the technology that is rapidly transforming our society into a nightmare, without humans, a fully automated inhuman desert, is necessary, even inevitable. Meanwhile, our ability to think scientifically is being destroyed by smartphones and games, pornography and images of people eating food. This is an intentional strategy to take away our ability to think for ourselves, and to analyze the world objectively.

The human need for security is exploited by corporations so as to make vast fortunes, selling us weapons for imagined, or hyped up, enemies, weapons that are vastly overpriced and in most cases do not even work properly. Much of that spending on “defense” is transferred to banks and disappears without a trace behind the veil of “classified” budgets.

Corporations are destroying our financial independence. Not only has COVID-19 been used as a way to destroy independent small businesses, and to allow massive corporations to buy them up for cheap, but it is also a way to make us dependent on “basic income” supplied by a government run by those very same corporations. They want to force us to conduct all purchases online, via credit, or cryptocurrencies, and therefore give banks and corporations the power to decide to freeze our money, or to stop our monthly “relief” payments, if we do something that they disapprove of.

The final frontier for the corporations is the conquest of our minds and our spirits, to make our very consciousness a product that they can control, that we must pay for.

First, all interactions are being forced online, by social media and email controlled by multinational corporations. COVID19 is a way to stop all meetings with friends and family, to make sending a letter expensive, or even impossible if overseas.

We are fed commercial music and art, movies and television from infancy, so much that we do not even know that we could create our own art, our own music, much more appropriate to our experiences, and much healthier and inspiring, on our own, for free, with our own hands.

We are rendered dependent on Apple or Google for our creativity. We are forced to purchase at the store furniture or tools that we made for ourselves 70 years ago. If we made these things ourselves, we would have jobs and we would control our own economy. We are forced to buy clothing, and other products, that wear out quickly so as to assure corporate profits and to impoverish us further.

Corporations have created an industry of “experts” advertised on television who want to tell us how to run our families, how to make friends, how to be successful. They tell us what our priorities should be. They play the role that our family and friends should play, undermining our independence and suggesting that getting buying more, living glamorously, should be our highest priority.

Sadly, older people say that youth are uninspired, that they lack the discipline or the focus of the previous generation. It does not even occur to them that youth are being targeted by corporations who set out to create a superficial consumption culture that renders youth dependent, to create a banal society in which everything has a price.

What should we do?

The takeover of our world is almost complete. Fortunately, there are those who have awoken to this attack and who are struggling to find solutions.

First, we must be independent in our thinking in order to respond to the takeover of our communities, our governments and our minds by multinational corporations.

That means that we must have time away from commercial media to discuss seriously with our friends and neighbors what needs to done at the local level. That is the first step. We cannot depend on sources of information, on institutions, linked in any way to corporations and banks. They may say things we want to hear, but they are not there to help us.

Secondly, we must create our own sources of information, our own journalism, even if we write it by hand, and we must train ourselves, and our children, to think deeply, to pull themselves away from this superficial culture and write about, read about, what is really going on.

That means that we must start our own schools, must launch our own hospitals, create our own art and furniture and produce our own entertainment.

It means that we must form alliances with farmers to obtain access to organic food that is grown with real seeds, not GMO one-use seeds, and that does not use pesticides or herbicides, or petroleum-based fertilizer. Once we have food that supplied independently of corporate suppliers, we will start to regain independence.

We must establish cooperatives in which provide housing for all members, in which we pledge to support each other for a lifetime and combine our resources for our common future. We must make up our own barter systems, and currencies independent of the financial systems that have been taken over by multinational corporations.

The current plan to force everyone to have a dangerous “vaccination,” or otherwise be deprived of the right to see a doctor, to go to school, to buy food at a store or to have access to money from the bank is well underway.

The implementation of that plan will start this summer. We will be given a stark choice of either creating our own totally independent cooperatives or being turned into GMOs through injections of modified RNA, while being completely controlled by technology that both watches us 24 hours a day, sells that information to corporations and then degrades our thinking through garbage broadcasts and advertising in the so-called “smart cities.”

We do not have long to act.

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Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.

Biden’s Afghan Withdrawal Isn’t a Blow to China

April 20th, 2021 by Andrew Korybko

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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Bloomberg published an op-ed last week provocatively claiming that “Biden’s Afghanistan Withdrawal Is A Blow To China”. Opinion columnist Bobby Ghosh argues that the country might soon slip back into an all-out civil war that would not only disrupt China’s connectivity interests in the country, but also spill over to threaten the Belt & Road Initiative’s (BRI) flagship project of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). In addition, he predicts that Afghanistan will become “a sanctuary for jihadists of every stripe — some of whom will undoubtedly direct their attention to that very short, mountainous and porous border with China.”

This line of thinking is typical of what many in the Western mainstream media are saying. They were against former US President Donald Trump’s deal with the Taliban last year and subsequent promise to complete his country’s military withdrawal by the beginning of next month. His successor, US President Joe Biden, will instead initiate the full withdrawal by that date and complete it before the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Some establishment voices fear that this will create strategic opportunities for China and the US’ other so-called peer competitors like Russia to exploit for zero-sum ends against American interests.

In reality, however, it’s in everyone’s interests that the US completes its promised withdrawal from Afghanistan as soon as possible. America has spent trillions of dollars there without much of anything to show for it. It’s true that Afghanistan now has a governing system comparatively closer (key word) to Western democracy than before and that woman now enjoy greater rights, but the Taliban still controls large swathes of the country and ISIS’ entry to the battlefield in 2014 immensely complicated the anti-terrorist situation there. Indefinitely continuing the US’ occupation of Afghanistan would only make matters much worse without solving anything.

By boldly agreeing to withdraw from the country and clearly articulating the strategic reasons behind this decision in his national speech on Wednesday, President Biden concluded that it’s better to cut America’s losses and simply move on even though the victimized Afghan people won’t be able to move past this twenty-year dark chapter of their national history so easily. In any case, their future is arguably brighter than before, not dimmer. The completion of the US’ withdrawal will unlock promising socio-economic opportunities for Afghanistan provided that their leadership and local stakeholders have the political will to support them.

To explain, it’s precisely because of China that this is possible. Afghanistan’s geostrategic location in the center of the tri-regional Central-South-West Asian space affords it enormous potential for connecting these three massive markets through BRI. In particular, CPEC’s de facto expansion into Afghanistan via the recently agreed Pakistan-Afghanistan-Uzbekistan (PAKAFUZ) railway will complement existing rail connectivity with China via the Central Asian nations of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. The Chinese-Iranian Strategic Partnership deal also creates the chance of further expanding this connectivity network to West Asia with time via W-CPEC+.

Domestically, the Afghan economy would require extensive reconstruction, but its reported $3 trillion worth of minerals – including some rare earth ones – could ideally be extracted in the most responsible way possible to ensure the equitable distribution of this wealth to every citizen. Coupled with grants and low-interest no-strings-attached loans from partner states like China and others, the Afghan people actually stand a very credible chance of succeeding in the future so long as their country can avert the all-out civil war that Ghosh fears might soon erupt.

That worst-case scenario is plausible, but nevertheless not inevitable. The Taliban, despite being designated as terrorists, have recently proven themselves to be shrewd diplomats on the international stage during multiple rounds of peace talks over the past few years. They seem to have understand the pragmatism of facilitating such connectivity and extractive projects for the purpose of improving their citizens’ living standards. Should they enter into the planned inclusive transitional government that’s been proposed, then they’ll probably not do anything to threaten those projects since they’ll too have a stake in their success.

Considering all of this, it was hyperbole for Ghosh to claim that “Biden’s Afghanistan Withdrawal Is A Blow To China”. It might only be so in the worst-case scenario, which is far from certain. What’s much more likely is that the existing low-intensity conflict continues but doesn’t reach catastrophic proportions. Instead, with the Taliban possibly becoming part of the Afghan government, the international community might remove their terrorist designation and accept them as equal stakeholders in Afghanistan’s future socio-economic success, a large part of which will be due to mutually beneficial cooperation with China.

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This article was originally published on OneWorld.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Biden Regime Behind Czech Expulsion of Russian Diplomats

April 20th, 2021 by Stephen Lendman

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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The Czech Republic is virtual US occupied territory, its pro-Western puppet regime following orders from Washington.

The same is true about most European countries.

Pentagon forces occupy them. CIA and other US dark forces infest them.

In response to Biden regime orders, Prague expelled 18 Russian diplomats, falsely calling them spies involved in a 2014 munitions depot explosion.

Pro-Western Czech prime minister Andrej Babis falsely claimed there’s “well-grounded suspicion about the involvement of officers of the Russian intelligence service GRU… in the explosion of an ammunitions depot in the Vrbetice area.”

No evidence was cited because there is none.

The Biden regime’s embassy in Prague said the US “stands with its steadfast ally, the Czech Republic (sic).”

“We appreciate their significant action to impose costs on Russia for its dangerous actions on Czech soil (sic).”

On Monday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova slammed Prague for its unacceptable action, saying:

Its hostile act “means that not 18 but 62 Russians have to leave the Czech Republic, because there are family members. This includes 28 children.”

“As for the Czech Republic, one should understand that plenty of problems have accumulated in the EU’s member states and in the West in general…”

It’s “necessary to (invent fake accusations) and political measures to hide these problems.”

“Russia is a time-tested instrument, a thesis that has been long put into circulation, and which is used in such cases,” adding:

“Of course, (Biden regime hardliners are) behind” Prague’s action — wrecking relations with Moscow at the same time.

Separately, Zakharova explained that Prague’s hostile to Russia act is connected to a Biden regime assassination plot against Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko — jointly foiled by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) and Minsk, a joint statement saying the following:

“In a special operation conducted by the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation alongside the State Security Committee of the Republic of Belarus (KGB), the illegal activities of Yuri Leonidovich Zyankovich, a dual citizen of the United States and the Republic of Belarus, and Belarusian citizen Alexander Feduta were prevented, as those had been scheming to stage a military coup in Belarus in accordance with the tried and tested ‘color revolution’ scenario with the involvement of local and Ukrainian nationalists, as well as the physical removal of President Alexander Lukashenko.”

Both individuals were involved in a US planned “armed uprising in Belarus.”

After taken into custody, they said for the plan to succeed, “it was necessary to physically remove nearly all the top figures of the republic.”

“They described in detail the plan of a military coup, including the seizure of radio and television centers to broadcast their address to the nation and the blocking of internal troops and OMON (riot police) loyal to the authorities in the capital.”

“They were preparing a blackout of the Belarusian power grid to hamper the actions of the army and law enforcement agencies.”

Some armed groups located at hidden bases were supposed to launch an active phase.”

“(T)he conspirators were apprehended by the Russian security services and handed over to the Belarusian counterparts.”

The above scenario has US plotted color revolution fingerprints all over it — a failed attempt to gain another client state along Russia’s border.

On Saturday, Czech police falsely accused two Russian citizens of involvement in the depot explosion, once again no evidence cited to suggest guilt.

Britain wrongfully charged the same individuals for the false flag incident involving Sergey and Yulia Skripal.

Staged by the Theresa May regime in March 2018, Russia was wrongfully blamed for what it had nothing to do with.

Nor were the Skripals harmed by a deadly novichok nerve agent — able to kill anyone exposed to a minute amount in minutes, no recovery possible.

According to Russian lower house State Duma Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Leonid Slutsky, Czech authorities were following “Washington’s Russophobic” agenda by expelling its diplomats.

In response, the Kremlin declared 20 Czech officials persona non-grata — ordering out of Russia by Monday evening.

Biden regime hardliners achieved a virtual break in Czech relations with Russia.

Acting as a US political pawn, Czech leadership drove a stake into the heart of relations with Moscow not easily repaired soon or longer-term — shooting itself in the foot at the same time.

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Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

VISIT MY WEBSITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].

My two Wall Street books are timely reading:

“How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion, and Class War”

https://www.claritypress.com/product/how-wall-street-fleeces-america/

“Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity”

https://www.claritypress.com/product/banker-occupation-waging-financial-war-on-humanity/

Featured image: Babiš and U.S. President Donald Trump shake hands in the White House in March 2019 (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Vaccine Makers Destroy COVID Vaccine Safety Studies

April 20th, 2021 by Dr. Joseph Mercola

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Makers of COVID-19 vaccines are now destroying long-term safety studies by unblinding their trials and giving the control groups the active vaccine, claiming it is “unethical” to withhold an effective vaccine.

In so doing, they make it virtually impossible to assess any long-term safety and effectiveness, and the true benefit versus cost.

It’s ironic, because vaccine mandates are being justified on the premise that the benefit to the community is more important than an individual’s risk of harm. Yet vaccine manufacturers are saying that participants in the control groups are harmed by not getting the vaccine, and saving the individual is more important than securing the data needed to make public health decisions.

Getting the active vaccine comes with risk, not merely benefit. This is particularly true for the novel mRNA technology used in COVID-19 vaccines.

As of April 1, 2021, VAERS had received 56,869 adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination, including 7,971 serious injuries and 2,342 deaths. Of those deaths, 28% occurred within 48 hours of vaccination. The youngest person to die was 18 years old.

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While reports of side effects from COVID-19 gene therapies, including life-threatening effects and deaths, continue to climb at breakneck speed,1 a one-sided narrative of safety and effectiveness permeates mainstream media and medical news.

These “vaccines” are so safe and so effective, according to this narrative, that keeping control groups intact for long-term study and comparison of outcomes is now being derided as “unethical,” despite the fact that there is absolutely no non-fraudulent data to support their perverse assertions. Truly, what we’re watching is the active destruction of basic medical science in a surreal dystopian nightmare.

Vaccine Makers to Ditch Control Groups

Consider this report in JAMA by Rita Rubin, senior writer for JAMA medical news and perspectives, for example.2 According to Rubin, the launch of “two highly efficacious” COVID-19 vaccines has “spurred debate about the ethics, let alone the feasibility, of continuing or launching blinded, placebo-controlled trials …”

Rubin recounts how Moderna representatives told a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel that rather than letting thousands of vaccine doses to go to waste, they planned to offer them to trial participants who had received placebo.

Pfizer representatives made a similar announcement to the advisory panel. According to a news analysis published in The BMJ,3 the FDA and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are both onboard with this plan, as is the World Health Organization.4

In the JAMA report by Rubin, Moncref Slaoui, Ph.D., chief scientific adviser for Operation Warp Speed, is quoted saying he thinks “it’s very important that we unblind the trial at once and offer the placebo group vaccines” because trial participants “should be rewarded” for their participation.

All of these statements violate the very basics of what a safety trial needs, which is a control group against which you can compare the effects of the drug or vaccine in question over the long term. I find it inconceivable that unblinding is even a consideration at this point, seeing how the core studies have not even concluded yet. The only purpose of this unblinding is to conceal the fraud that these vaccines are safe.

None of the COVID-19 vaccines currently on the market are actually licensed. They only have emergency use authorization — which, incidentally, also forbids them from being mandated, although this is being widely and conveniently ignored — as trials are still ongoing.

At the earliest, they may be licensed two years from now, at the completion of the follow-up studies.5 This is why those in the military are allowed to refuse it, and refuse they have. Among Marines, the refusal rate is nearly 40%.6

So, before the initial studies are even completed, vaccine makers and regulatory agencies are now deciding to forgo long-term safety evaluations altogether by giving placebo recipients the real McCoy, and so-called bioethicists are actually supporting this madness. As reported in The BMJ:7

“Although the FDA has granted the vaccines emergency use authorization, to get full license approval two years of follow-up data are needed. The data are now likely to be scanty and less reliable given that the trials are effectively being unblinded.”

Hypocrisy Abounds

It’s ironic in the extreme, because vaccine mandates are being justified on the premise that the benefit to the community supersedes the risk of individual harm. In other words, it’s OK if some people are harmed by the vaccine because the overall benefit to society is more important.

Yet here they’re saying that participants in the control groups are being harmed by not getting the vaccine, so therefore vaccine makers have an obligation to give it to them before the long-term studies are completed. This is the complete opposite argument used for mandatory vaccination.

If we are to accept the “greater good” justification for vaccination, then people who agree to participate in a study, and end up getting a placebo, need to roll the dice and potentially sacrifice their health “for the greater good.” Here, the greater good is the study itself, the results of which are of crucial importance for public health decisions.

Without this data, we will never know whether the vaccines work in the long term and/or what their side effects are. If an individual in the control group gets COVID-19, then that’s the price of scientific participation for the greater good of society, just as when a vaccinated person gets harmed, that’s considered an acceptable price for creating vaccine-induced herd immunity.

Put another way, when it comes to mandating vaccines, harm to the individual is acceptable, but when it comes to doing proper safety studies, all of a sudden, harm to the individual is not acceptable, and protecting the controls is more important than protecting the integrity of the research. The fact that they’re this inconsistent in their “ethics” could be viewed as proof positive that public health isn’t even a remote concern.

Scientific Ethics Are Eroding

Apparently, concern about risk to the individual only matters when vaccine makers have everything to gain. By eliminating control groups, we’ll have no way of really proving the harm that these “vaccines” might impart over time, as all participants will be in the same proverbial boat.

I remain confident that we’ll continue to see many more health problems and deaths develop in time, but without control groups, these trends can more easily be written off as “normal” and/or blamed on something else. As noted by Dr. Steven Goodman, associate dean of clinical and translational research at Stanford University, who is quoted in Rubin’s JAMA article:8

“By unblinding trial participants, ‘you lose a valid comparison group,’ Goodman said. ‘There will be this sense, and it will be sort of true, that the study is over.’ Unlike, say, a highly effective cancer drug, ‘the vaccine is not literally a life-and-death issue today and tomorrow’ for most trial participants, Goodman said.

So, he noted, those running COVID-19 vaccine trials shouldn’t feel obligated to unblind participants and vaccinate placebo recipients right away. Doing so implies ‘you can just blow up the trial’ on the basis of promising preliminary results, establishing ‘an ethical model for future trials that we maybe don’t want to set,’ Goodman said.”

Indeed, this strategy will set a dangerous precedent that will probably lead to vaccine and drug studies being conducted without control groups in the future, which could spell the end of medical science as we know it. At bare minimum, future variations of the current COVID-19 vaccine trials are likely to be conducted without control groups.

Trial Participants Told Not to Unblind Themselves

Goodman is also quoted in another article,9 this one in MedPage Today, discussing the problems with trial participants unblinding themselves by taking an antibody test:

“‘There is no good scientific reason for someone to do this,’ he told MedPage Today. ‘I can understand why they want that information, but it can only serve to diminish the value of the trial. Getting tested is not right unless there is a pressing need for unblinding for health reasons.'”

Here, yet another hypocritical irony arises, as the reason they don’t want trial participants to unblind themselves is because if they know they got the vaccine, they’re statistically more likely to take more risks that might expose them to the virus.

This, then, will skew the results and “could make the vaccine look less effective than it is,” Dr. Elizabeth McNally of Northwestern University explained to MedPage Today.10 So, whether vaccine scientists agree with unblinding or not, unblinding really only has to do with whether it will skew results in their favor.

Trial participants unblinding themselves might make the vaccine appear less effective if they alter their behavior as a consequence, whereas vaccine makers unblinding the entire control group will allow them to hide side effects, even if participants alter their behavior.

Justification for Elimination of Controls Is Flimsy at Best

While pro-vaccine advocates insist the elimination of control groups is justified on the “moral grounds” that it’s unethical to not provide volunteers with something of value, this argument completely ignores the undeniable fact that no vaccine is 100% safe.

Getting the active vaccine comes with risk, not merely benefit. This is particularly true for the novel mRNA technology used in COVID-19 vaccines. Historical data are troubling to say the least, and the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is rapidly filling up with COVID-19 vaccine-related injury reports and deaths.

Reports of Side Effects and Deaths Are Piling Up

As reported by The Defender,11 as of April 1, 2021, VAERS had received 56,869 adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination, including 7,971 serious injuries and 2,342 deaths. Of those deaths, 28% occurred within 48 hours of vaccination! The youngest person to die was 18 years old. There were also 110 reports of miscarriage or premature birth among pregnant women.

As reported in “COVID-19 Vaccine To Be Tested on 6-Year-Olds,” between January 2020 and January 2021, COVID-19 vaccines accounted for 70% of the annual vaccine deaths, even though these vaccines had only been available for less than two months!

In my view, it’s unconscionable and morally reprehensible to not take these data into account. Clearly, these “vaccines” have risks. Pretending like they don’t, and that all placebo recipients in vaccine trials are at a distinct disadvantage simply isn’t true.

Keep in mind that we still do not know the percentage of adverse effects being reported. Is it between 1%12 and 10%13 as past inquiries into VAERS reporting have shown, or is it higher?

If only 10% are reported, we may be looking at 23,420 deaths, but if it is as low as 1%, it jumps to more than 230,000 deaths. We will never know because there are major attempts to suppress this information, as we have already witnessed with the deaths of sport celebrities Hank Aaron and Marvin Hagler, both of whom died shortly after COVID vaccinations.

Regardless, it’s hard to justify even a single death of an otherwise healthy individual, seeing how the survival rate for COVID-19 across all age groups is 99.74%. If you’re younger than 40, your survival rate is 99.99%.14

There’s every reason to suspect that these reports account for just a small percentage of actual side effects. Just think of all those who get the vaccine at grocery stores or temporary vaccination sites, for example. First of all, are all Americans even aware that VAERS exists and that they need to file a report if they suffer an adverse reaction post-COVID vaccination?

Who is going to file the adverse report if you get vaccinated in a grocery or convenience store? Will they return to the pharmacist and report their side effects? Will the pharmacist file the report? Who’s responsible for filing the report if you go to a temporary vaccination site?

CDC Stays Mum on How It’s Ensuring Reporting Compliance

According to the CDC, deaths from COVID-19 vaccines are required to be reported to VAERS.15 It’s not supposed to be voluntary, as with other vaccines. However, it is not being transparent about how it is ensuring this “requirement” is being followed, so it’s impossible to confirm that all related deaths are in fact being reported. As reported by The Defender:16

“We … inquired about whether healthcare providers are reporting all injuries and deaths that might be connected to the COVID vaccine, and what education initiatives are in place to encourage and facilitate proper and accurate reporting.

Twenty-two days later a representative from the CDC’s Vaccine Task Force responded by saying the agency had never received our questions — even though the employees we talked to several times said their press officers were working through the questions we sent. We provided the questions again and requested a response by April 7. To date, the CDC has not responded despite our repeated follow-up attempts.”

Absolute Versus Relative Risk Reduction

Vaccine makers are also very careful about only referencing relative risk, not absolute risk. By doing so, the vaccines appear far more protective than they actually are. It’s a commonly used statistical trick that I encourage you to familiarize yourself with.

For example, in his November 26, 2020, BMJ article,17 Peter Doshi, associate editor of The BMJ, pointed out that while Pfizer claims its vaccine is 95% effective, this is the relative risk reduction. The absolute risk reduction — which is far more relevant for public health measures — is actually less than 1%!

I recommend listening to the interview with Dr. Ron Brown above, in which he explains the ins and outs of relative and absolute risks, and the differences between them. He’s also written two papers detailing the problems with this kind of reporting bias: “Outcome Reporting Bias in COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine Clinical Trials”18 and “Public Health Lessons Learned From Biases in Coronavirus Mortality Overestimation.”19

You Likely Don’t Need a Vaccine

If you’re concerned about vaccine side effects, please understand there are several prevention strategies and treatments readily available that have been shown to be highly effective, which means the need for a vaccine in the first place is nearly moot.

For example, nebulized hydrogen peroxide with iodine, which I’ve written about in previous articles, works very well. For a refresher, see “How Nebulized Peroxide Helps Against Respiratory Infections.” Other treatments include hydroxychloroquine with zinc, ivermectin and the iMASK and MATH+ protocols, which you can learn more about in the linked articles.

What to Do if You Got the Vaccine and Are Having Problems

In closing, if you got the vaccine and now regret it, you may be able to address your symptoms using the same strategies you’d use to treat actual SARS-CoV-2 infection.

I’ve written many articles over the past year detailing simple strategies to improve your immune system, and with a healthy immune system, you’ll get through COVID-19 without incident. Below, I’ll summarize some of the strategies you can use both to prevent COVID-19 and address any side effects you may encounter from the vaccine.

  • Eat a “clean,” ideally organic diet. Avoid processed foods of all kinds, especially vegetable oils, as they are loaded with damaging omega-6 linoleic acid that wrecks your mitochondrial function. Linoleic acid has been shown to increase mortality from COVID-19.
  • Consider nutritional ketosis and a time-restricted eating window of six to eight hours with no food at least three hours before bed. These strategies will help you optimize your metabolic machinery and mitochondrial function.
  • Implement a detoxification program to get rid of heavy metals and glyphosate. This is important as these toxins contribute to inflammation. To improve detoxification, I recommend activating your natural glutathione production with molecular hydrogen tablets.

A simple way to block glyphosate uptake is to take glycine. Approximately 3 grams, about half a teaspoon, a few times a day should be sufficient, along with an organic diet, so that you’re not adding more glyphosate with each meal.

  • Maintain a neutral pH to improve the resiliency of your immune system. You want your pH to be right around 7, which you can measure with an inexpensive urine strip. The lower your pH, the more acidic you are. A simple way to raise your pH if it’s too acidic (and most people are) is to take one-fourth teaspoon of sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) or potassium bicarbonate in water a few times a day.

Nutritional supplementation can also be helpful. Among the most important are:

  • Vitamin D — Vitamin D supplements are readily available and one of the least expensive supplements on the market. All things considered, vitamin D optimization is likely the easiest and most beneficial strategy that anyone can do to minimize their risk of COVID-19 and other infections, and can strengthen your immune system in a matter of a few weeks.
  • N-acetylcysteine (NAC) — NAC is a precursor to reduced glutathione, which appears to play a crucial role in COVID-19. According to one literature analysis,20 glutathione deficiency may actually be associated with COVID-19 severity, leading the author to conclude that NAC may be useful both for its prevention and treatment.
  • Zinc — Zinc plays a very important role in your immune system’s ability to ward off viral infections. Like vitamin D, zinc helps regulate your immune function21 — and a combination of zinc with a zinc ionophore, like hydroxychloroquine or quercetin, was in 2010 shown to inhibit SARS coronavirus in vitro. In cell culture, it also blocked viral replication within minutes.22Importantly, zinc deficiency has been shown to impair immune function.23
  • Melatonin — This boosts immune function in a variety of ways and helps quell inflammation. Melatonin may also prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection by recharging glutathione24 and enhancing vitamin D synthesis, among other things.
  • Vitamin C — A number of studies have shown vitamin C can be very helpful in the treatment of viral illnesses, sepsis and ARDS,25 all of which are applicable to COVID-19. Its basic properties include anti-inflammatory, immunomodulatory, antioxidant, antithrombotic and antiviral activities. At high doses, it actually acts as an antiviral drug, actively inactivating viruses. Vitamin C also works synergistically with quercetin.26
  • Quercetin — A powerful immune booster and broad-spectrum antiviral, quercetin was initially found to provide broad-spectrum protection against SARS coronavirus in the aftermath of the 2003 SARS epidemic,27,28,29 and evidence suggests it may be useful for the prevention and treatment of SARS-CoV-2 as well.
  • B vitamins — B vitamins can also influence several COVID-19-specific disease processes, including30 viral replication and invasion, cytokine storm induction, adaptive immunity and hypercoagulability.
  • Type 1 interferon — Type 1 interferon prevents viral replication and helps degrade the RNA. It’s available in spray form that you can spray directly into your throat or nose. You can try taking a couple of sprays per day prophylactically, and more if you have a cough, fever or headache.

Report All COVID-19 Vaccine Side Effects

Last but not least, if you or someone you love have received a COVID-19 vaccine and are experiencing side effects, report it. The Children’s Health Defense is calling on all who have suffered a side effect from a COVID-19 vaccine to do three things:31

  1. If you live in the U.S., file a report on VAERS
  2. Report the injury on VaxxTracker.com, which is a nongovernmental adverse event tracker (you can file anonymously if you like)
  3. Report the injury on the CHD website

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1, 11, 16 The Defender April 9, 2021

2, 8 JAMA 2021;325(10):918-921

3, 5, 7 The BMJ 2020;371:m495

4 Nature Medicine March 16, 2021

6 MSN April 11, 2021

9, 10 MedPage Today March 11, 2021 (Archived)

12 The Vaccine Reaction January 9, 2020

13 BMJ 2005;330:433

14 Annals of Internal Medicine September 2, 2020 DOI: 10.7326/M20-5352

15 The Vaccine Reaction March 13, 2021

17 The BMJ Opinion November 26, 2020

18 Medicina 2021; 57(3): 199

19 Concepts in Disaster Medicine, Public Health Lessons Learned From Biases in Coronavirus Mortality Overestimation (PDF)

20 Endogenous Deficiency of Glutathione as the Most Likely Cause of Serious Manifestations and Death in Patients with the Novel Coronavirus Infection

21 “COVID-19: Poor Outcomes in Patients with Zinc Deficiency,” International Journal of Infectious Disease 100 (November 2020): 343-49

22 te Velthuis AJ, van den Worm SH, Sims AC, et. al . PLoS Pathog. 2010 Nov 4;6(11):e1001176. doi: 10.1371/journal.ppat.1001176

23 “Zinc Fact Sheet for Health Professionals,” U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, National Institutes of Health, updated July 15, 2020

24 Grazyna Swiderska-Kołacz, Jolanta Klusek, and Adam Kołataj, Neuro Endocrinology Letters 27, no. 3 (June 2006): 365-8

25 JAMA 2019 Oct 1; 322(13): 1261–1270

26 Frontiers in Immunology June 19, 2020 DOI: 10.3389/fimmu.2020.01451

27 Journal of Virology Sep 2004, 78 (20) 11334-11339, Antiviral activity of an analog of luteolin

28 Bioorg Med Chem. 2006 Dec 15;14(24):8295-306

29 Maclean’s February 24, 2020

30 Maturitas August 15, 2020 DOI: 10.1016/j.maturitas.2020.08.007 [Epub ahead of print]

31 The Defender January 25, 2021

Featured image is from Mercola

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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Vaccine makers are telling investors and the media that COVID booster shots are already in the works. In some cases, companies say the boosters may be needed because the vaccine’s effectiveness may run out. In other instances, they suggest booster shots will be needed to combat new COVID variants.

Annual COVID booster shots are music to the ears of investors. But some independent scientists warn that trying to outsmart the virus with booster shots designed to address the next variant could backfire, creating an endless wave of new variants, each more virulent and transmissible than the one before.

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said Thursday a third dose of the company’s COVID vaccine was “likely” to be needed within a year of the initial two-dose inoculation — followed by annual vaccinations.

Bourla said that “a likely scenario” is “a third dose somewhere between six and 12 months, and from there it would be an annual re-vaccination.”

In a conversation hosted by CVS Health, Bourla explained how some vaccines are given only once, while others need annual boosters like flu shots.

“It is extremely important to suppress the pool of people that can be susceptible to the virus,” Bourla said during an interview with CNBC. Booster shots will be an important tool in battling more contagious variants, he added.

Moderna’s chief commercial officer, Corinne M. Le Goff, said during a call with investors last week that Americans could start getting booster shots of its vaccine later this year to protect against COVID variants.

“It is likely that the countries that have already achieved high vaccine coverage are going to be ready to shift their focus to boosters in 2022, and possibly even starting at the end of this year,” Le Goff said.

Johnson & Johnson (J&J) has said its single-shot vaccine will probably need to be given annually.

The U.S. is also preparing for the possibility that a booster shot will be needed between nine to 12 months after people are initially vaccinated against COVID, a White House official said Thursday.

While the duration of immunity after vaccination is being studied, booster vaccines could be needed, David Kessler, chief science officer for President Biden’s COVID-19 response task force told a congressional committee meeting.

According to initial data, Moderna and Pfizer vaccines retain most of their effectiveness for at least six months, though for how much longer has not been determined.

Even if that protection lasts longer than six months, experts have said rapidly spreading COVID variants may emerge and could lead to the need for regular booster shots similar to annual flu shots.

Boosters could enable new, more infectious variants — and a never-ending market for vaccines

According to Rob Verkerk Ph.D., founder, scientific and executive director of Alliance for Natural Health International, variants can become more virulent and transmissible, while also including immune (or vaccine) escape mutations if we continue on the vaccine treadmill — trying to develop new vaccines that outsmart the virus.

Verkerk said “if we put all our eggs” in the basket of vaccines that target the very part of the virus that is most subject to mutation, we place a selection pressure on the virus that favors the development of immune escape variants.

Scientists and vaccine developers are trying to work their way around these viral variants, but there’s no guarantee of the outcomes. It’s an experiment in which vast numbers of citizens have become unwitting participants, Verkerk explained.

In early March, Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche, a vaccinologist who worked with GSK Biologicals, Novartis Vaccines, Solvay Biologicals, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Health Discovery team in Seattle and Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization in Geneva, put out a call to the World Health Organization, supported by a 12-page document that discussed the “uncontrollable monster” that global mass vaccination will create.

In his letter, Vanden Bossche broke down the dangers of mass vaccination for COVID compared to natural infection and concluded:

“There can be no doubt that continued mass vaccination campaigns will enable new, more infectious viral variants to become increasingly dominant and ultimately result in a dramatic incline in new cases despite enhanced vaccine coverage rates. There can be no doubt either that this situation will soon lead to complete resistance of circulating variants to the current vaccines.”

As The Defender reported March 26, a combination of lockdowns and extreme selection pressure on the virus induced by the intense global mass vaccination program might diminish the number of cases, hospitalizations and deaths in the short-term, but ultimately, will induce the creation of more mutants of concern.

This is the result of what Vanden Bossche calls “immune escape” (i.e. incomplete sterilization of the virus by the human immune system, even following vaccine administration).

This will in turn trigger vaccine companies to further refine vaccines that will add to, not reduce, the selection pressure, producing ever more transmissible and potentially deadly variants.

The selection pressure will cause greater convergence in mutations that affect the critical spike protein of the virus that is responsible for breaking through the mucosal surfaces of our airways, the route used by the virus to enter the human body, Vanden Bossche argues. The virus will effectively outsmart the highly specific antigen-based vaccines that are being used and tweaked, dependent on the circulating variants.

All of this could lead to a hockey stick-like increase in serious and potentially lethal cases — in effect, an out-of-control pandemic.

Even before boosters, Pharma was cashing in big on COVID vaccines

Pfizer made headlines last month when its chief financial officer, Frank D’Amelio, said the company would look to raise prices on its COVID vaccine — the second-highest revenue-generating drug in the world — after the pandemic waned and they are no longer in a pandemic pricing environment.

The company has since doubled down on that stance as it now believes annual vaccinations are “increasingly likely.”

During a recent virtual investor conference hosted by Barclays, Pfizer’s D’Amelio said the company sees “significant opportunity” for its COVID vaccine once the market shifts from a “pandemic situation to an endemic situation.”

At that point “factors like efficacy, booster ability, clinical utility will basically become very important, and we view that as, quite frankly, a significant opportunity for our vaccine from a demand perspective, from a pricing perspective, given the clinical profile of our vaccine,” D’Amelio told the analyst.

Pfizer has said it expects at least $15-$30 billion in revenue from its mRNA vaccine this year with cost and profit margins split equally with BioNTech. At the Barclays event, D’Amelio said his company expects “return after taxes” of around 25% on the $15 billion figure, or around $3.75 billion.

The CFO previously said he expects margins for the vaccine to grow over time, Fierce Pharma reported.

Moderna said it expects 2021 sales of $18.4 billion. Barclays analyst Gena Wang forecasts sales of $19.6 billion in 2021, $12.2 billion in 2022, and $11.4 billion in 2023, assuming recurring vaccinations.

According to The Guardian, a group of investors that backed Moderna when it was founded in 2010 will make substantial returns, with CEO Stéphane Bancelnow worth nearly $5 billion.

J&J expected sales of $10 billion in 2021 prior to the U.S. pause on its vaccine, with CEO Alex Gorsky poised to receive a $30 million pay package.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and chief medical advisor to President Biden, said Sunday the decision about whether a COVID vaccine booster shot would be needed would be made by public health officials and not by pharmaceutical companies.

“It is going to be a public health decision,” Fauci told NBC’s Meet the Press. “It is not going to be a decision that is made by a pharmaceutical company. We’re partners with them because they’re supplying it. It’ll be an FDA/CDC decision. The CDC will use their advisory committee and immunization practices the way they always do.”

But as the Washington Post reported last month, Moderna has strong ties to the NIAID, which operates under the National Institutes of Health. NIAID, which partnered with Moderna on its mRNA COVID vaccine, owns half the patent for the Moderna vaccine and under an agreement with Moderna, its director, Fauci, will personally collect royalties on the vaccine.

Fauci, during an appearance on ABC’s “This Week” with Martha Raddatz, was asked about the Pfizer CEO’s comments suggesting vaccine recipients would “likely” need a third dose of its vaccine within six to 12 months after being fully vaccinated, with Moderna, and J&J suggesting the same.

When asked when Americans would know for sure if they would need a third booster shot, Fauci said it would depend on when immunity would wane, which would likely be determined by summer or fall.

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Megan Redshaw is a freelance reporter for The Defender. She has a background in political science, a law degree and extensive training in natural health.

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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On March 23, 2021, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson told a group of Conservative Party backbenchers: ‘The reason we have the vaccine success is because of capitalism, because of greed, my friends.’ Johnson was articulating the dogma that the pursuit of private profit through capitalist free markets leads to efficient outcomes. In reality, however, Britain’s accomplishments in developing the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine and in the national vaccination rollout have more to do with state investments than the market mechanism. Government money subsidised the vaccine development at the University of Oxford, and it is the state-funded National Health Service that has carried out the vaccination programme. Johnson did not admit that it is due to capitalism and greed that Britain now has the fifth worst COVID-19 mortality rate in the world with over 126,500 deaths (almost 1,857 per million people in the population) and counting.

The British government, like most neoliberal regimes, refused to take the measures necessary to slow and halt community transmission, it failed early on to provide health care and social care workers with adequate PPE and other resources which could have saved the lives of hundreds of frontline staff who died as a result. It contracted private businesses to carry out essential activities, most with little or no relevant experience, for example, instead of equipping the community-based GP system of the National Health Service to take charge of ‘track and trace,’ the government dished out £37 billion to Serco to manage part of the system. In public health terms it has been disastrous; but measured by Boris Johnson’s celebrated standards of capitalism and greed it is has indeed excelled. The greatest beneficiaries of Britain’s response to the pandemic have been the private corporations making huge profits. Around 2,500 Accenture, Deloitte and McKinsey consultants are on an average daily rate of £1,000, with some paid £6,624 a day.

Johnson has now laid out a road map for reopening the economy. As a result, even the most optimistic scenario predicts a third wave between September 2021 and January 2022 resulting in at least 30,000 additional deaths in Britain. These deaths are preventable. But it precisely because the British government is driven by the capitalism and greed that it insists that we have to learn to ‘live with the virus’ so that the business of business can continue.

Contrary to Johnson’s claims, this pandemic has affirmed that public healthcare needs cannot be adequately met under a profit-based system. Indeed, it is the absence of the capitalist profit motive which underlies the outstanding domestic and international response to COVID-19 by socialist Cuba, which now has five vaccines in clinical trials and is set to be among the first nations to vaccinate its entire population.

By reacting quickly and decisively, by mobilising its public healthcare system and world-leading biotech sector, Cuba has kept contagion and fatalities low. In 2020 Cuba confirmed a total of 12,225 coronavirus cases and 146 deaths in a population of 11.2 million, among the lowest rates in the Western Hemisphere. In November 2020, the airports were opened, leading to a surge with more infections in January 2021 than the whole of the previous year. By March 24, 2021, Cuba had registered fewer than 70,000 cases and 408 deaths. The death rate was 35 per million and the fatality rate was just 0.59 percent (2.2 percent worldwide; 2.9 percent in Britain). Within one year, 57 brigades of medical specialists from Cuba’s Henry Reeve International Contingent had treated 1.26 million COVID-19 patients in 40 countries; they joined 28,000 Cuban healthcare professionals already working in 66 countries. Cuba’s accomplishments are more extraordinary given that from 2017 onwards, the Trump administration punitively unleashed 240 new sanctions, actions and measures to tighten the 60-year blockade of Cuba, including nearly 50 additional measures during the pandemic which cost the health sector alone over $200 million.

Cuba has gone on the offensive against COVID-19, mobilising the prevention-focussed, community based public healthcare system to carry out daily house visits to actively detect and treat cases and channelling the medical science sector to adapt and produce new treatments for patients and COVID-19 specific vaccines. These advances bring hope not just for Cuba, but for the world.

What is special about Cuba’s vaccines?

Some 200 COVID vaccines are being developed worldwide; by March 25, 2021, 23 candidates had advanced to phase III clinical trials. Two of those were Cuban (Soberana 2 and Abdala). No other Latin American country has developed its own vaccine at this stage. Cuba has three more vaccine candidates in earlier stage trials (Soberana 1, Soberana Plus and an intranasal, needle-free vaccine called Mambisa). How do we explain this accomplishment? Cuba’s biotech sector is unique; entirely state-funded and owned, free from private interests, profits are not sought domestically, and innovation is channelled to meet public health needs. Dozens of research and development institutions collaborate, sharing resources and knowledge, instead of competing, which facilitates a fast track from research and innovation to trials and application. Cuba has the capacity to produce 60-70 percent of the medicines it consumes domestically, an imperative due to the US blockade and the cost of medicines in the international market. There is also fluidity between universities, research centres, and the public health system. These elements have proven vital in the development of Cuba’s COVID-19 vaccines.

There are five types of COVID-19 vaccines being developed globally:

  • Viral vector vaccines, which inject an unrelated harmless virus modified to deliver SARS-CoV-2 genetic material (Oxford AstraZeneca, Gamaleya and SputnikV)
  • Genetic vaccines containing a segment of SARS-CoV-2 virus genetic material (Pfizer, Moderna)
  • Inactivated vaccines containing disactivated SARS-CoV-2 virus (Sinovac,/Butantan, SinoPharm, Bharat Biotec)
  • Attenuated vaccines containing weakened SARS-CoV-2 virus (Codagenix)
  • Protein vaccines containing proteins from the virus which trigger an immune response (Novavax, Sanofi/GSK)

The five Cuban vaccines under clinical trials are all protein vaccines; they carry the portion of the virus spike protein which binds to human cells; it generates neutralising antibodies to block the binding process. Dr Marlene Ramirez Gonzalez explains that they are, ‘subunit vaccines, one of the most economical approaches and the type for which Cuba has the greatest know-how and infrastructure. From protein S—the antigen or part of the SARS-CoV2 virus that all COVID vaccines target because it induces the strongest immune response in humans—Cuban candidates are based only on the part that is involved in contact with the cell’s receptor: the RBD (receptor-binding domain) which is also the one that induces the greatest amount of neutralizing antibodies. This strategy is not exclusive to Cuban vaccines. But Soberana 2 does distinguish itself from the rest of the world’s candidates as the only “conjugate vaccine.” Currently in phase III clinical trials, it combines RBD with tetanus toxoid, which enhances the immune response…Cuba had already developed another vaccine with this principle. It is Quimi-Hib, “the first of its kind to be approved in Latin America and the second in the world,” against Haemophilus influenzae type b, coccobacilli responsible for diseases such as meningitis, pneumonia and epiglottitis.’

Idania Caballero, a pharmaceutical scientist at BioCubaFarma points out that the vaccines build on decades of medical science and work on infectious diseases. “The mortality rate in Cuba due to infectious diseases, even in times of COVID, is less than one percent. Cuba today vaccinates against 13 diseases with 11 vaccines, eight of which are produced in Cuba. Six diseases have been eliminated as a result of vaccination schedules. The vaccines produced with these technologies have been administered even to children in the first months of life.”

The Soberana vaccines are produced by the Finlay Institute in partnership with the Centre for Molecular Immunology (CIM) and the Centre of Biopreparados. Soberana means ‘sovereign,’ reflecting its economic and political importance; without a domestic product, Cuba would struggle to access foreign vaccines either due to the US blockade or to the cost. Soberana vaccines insert genetic information into superior mammalian cells. Soberana Plus is a the world’s first vaccine for COVID-19 convalescent patients to reach clinical trials.

The other vaccines, Abdala and Mambisa, names which also pay tribute to Cuba’s struggle for independence, are produced by the Centre of Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB). These vaccines insert genetic information in a less evolved organism, a unicellular microorganism (the yeast Pichia Pastoris). They build on the CIGB’s extraordinary record, including its Hepatitis B vaccines, used in Cuba for 25 years.

By developing different vaccine platforms, those institutions avoid competing for resources. Caballero explains that, “Cuba has the capacity to produce two independent vaccine chains, with over 90 million vaccines annually, while maintaining the required production of other products for the domestic market and for export.” The Cuban vaccines require three doses and, because they are stable at temperatures of between two and eight degrees, do not require costly special refrigeration equipment.

Phase III trials and ‘interventional studies’

By late March, phase III trials were underway for Soberana 2 and Abdala, each incorporating over 44,000 volunteers over 19 years old in regions with high incidence of COVID-19. Soberana 2 is being administered in Havana and Abdala in Santiago de Cuba and Guantanamo. Analysis and follow-up for phase III trial patients will continue until January 2022 to investigate whether they prevent transmission, how long immunity lasts, and other questions that no vaccine producers can yet answer. However, an additional 150,000 healthcare workers in Havana are receiving Soberana 2 shots, as part of an ‘interventional study,’ a form of clinical trial that can be authorised after drug safety has been demonstrated in phase II. Intervention studies do not involve double blind testing or placebos. Another 120,000 healthcare workers in western Cuba will receive Abdala in the next few weeks. Other interventional studies in the capital will see 1.7 million people in Havana, most of the adult population, vaccinated by the end of May 2021, meaning that two million Cubans will have been fully vaccinated.

Assuming satisfactory results, in June the real national vaccination campaign will begin, prioritising groups according to risk factors and starting with over 60-year-olds. By the end of August 2021, six million Cubans, over half the population, will have been covered and by the end of the year, Cuba will be among the world’s first countries to fully vaccinate its entire population.

Cuban medical scientists are confident that they have the capacity and experience to adapt their vaccine formulations, technologies and action protocols to tackle new variants. The next steps are for Soberana 1 and Soberana Plus to enter phase II trials and a new study involving five to 18-year-olds will be launched.

Cuba and China team up on Pan-Corona

Cuba’s CIGB have teamed up with colleagues in China to work on a new vaccine called Pan-Corona, designed to be effective on different strains of the coronavirus. It will use parts of the virus that are conserved, not exposed to variation, to generate antibodies, combined with parts directed at cellular responses. The Cubans contribute the experience and personnel, while the Chinese provide equipment and resources. The research will take place at the Yongzhou Joint Biotechnology Innovation Center, in China’s Hunan Province, which was established last year with equipment and laboratories designed by Cuban specialists. Gerardo Guillen, director of biomedical science at CIGB said the approach “could protect against epidemiological emergencies of new strains of coronavirus that may exist in the future.” The project builds on nearly two decades of medical science collaboration between Cuba and China, including five joint ventures in the biotech sector.

A vaccine for the Global South

Cuban professionals have received ten gold medals from the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) over 26 years; their biotech products were exported to 49 countries prior to the pandemic, including vaccines used in childhood immunisation programmes in Latin America. Cuba has stated that its COVID-19 vaccines will be exported to other countries. This brings hope to low- and middle-income nations that simply cannot afford to vaccinate their populations at high prices (between $10 and $30 per dose) demanded by big pharma. In February 2021, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported that US company Pfizer has been ‘bullying’ Latin American countries into putting up sovereign assets, such as embassy buildings and military bases, as guarantees against the cost of any future legal cases in relation to their COVID-19 vaccines.

Through an agreement with Iran’s Pasteur Institute, 100,000 Iranians will take part in the phase III clinical trials for Soberana 2 and another 60,000 people will participate in Venezuela. Other countries including Mexico, Jamaica, Vietnam, Pakistan, and India, have stated their interest in receiving the Cuban vaccines, as has the African Union, which represents all 55 nations in Africa. It is likely that Cuba will apply a sliding scale to its COVID-19 vaccine exports, as it does with the export of medical professionals, so what it charges reflects the countries’ ability to pay.

What Cuba has achieved is remarkable, but as Caballero states, “without the unjust US blockade, Cuba could have more and better results.” Cuba has become a world leader in biotechnology because it has a socialist state with a centrally planned economy, that has invested in science and technology and puts human welfare before profit; that is, with the absence of capitalism and greed that British Prime Minister Johnson celebrates.

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A version of this essay was originally published in Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No. 280, April/May 2021.

Helen Yaffe is a lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow, specialising in Cuban and Latin American development. Her new book We Are Cuba! How a Revolutionary People have survived in a Post-Soviet World has just been published by Yale University Press. She is also the author of Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution and co-author with Gavin Brown of Youth Activism and Solidarity: the Non-Stop Picket against Apartheid, Rouledge, 2017.

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Strategic Context

All of Europe is discussing Czechia’s surprise decision to expel a whopping 18 Russian diplomats on alleged espionage pretexts as well as their curious claims that Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov of Skripal saga infamy were behind an accidental 2014 munitions depot explosion in the country. This follows hot on the heels of the US imposing its most intense sanctions against Russia since 2018, which itself occurred within the context of Ukraine’s unprovoked US-backed military escalation in Donbass. I posited that the purpose of the latter is actually to manufacture the political conditions whereby Europe’s possibly impending large-scale purchase of Sputnik V might become impossible, thereby indefinitely prolonging America’s fading hegemony over the continent seeing as how close epidemiological cooperation between Russia and the EU could in theory create the opportunity for an incipient rapprochement between them. I elaborated on this in my relevant analysis asking, “Are Vaccines The Real Driving Force Behind The Latest Donbass Destabilization?

The British-Russian “Deep State” Struggle In Europe

While a secret American hand obviously can’t be ruled out when it comes to Czechia’s surprise decision this weekend, it’s also worthwhile to explore the possibility that the British were meddling behind the scenes as well. The most obvious hint in this direction was the revival of the Skripal saga through Prague’s unsubstantiated allegations against Petrov and Boshirov. There’s more to it than just that, however, since I’ve been closely following British intelligence’s activities in Europe over the past year, as proven by the following analyses that I’ve published during that time which should be reviewed by interested readers:

To sum it all up for those who might not have the time to peruse those analytical pieces, the intelligence faction of the UK’s permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (“deep state”) is engaged in an active struggle against Russia all across Europe. The British are acting at America’s behest as its preferred “Lead From Behind” partner in this theater to facilitate their big brother’s divide-and-rule plans like they’ve traditionally done throughout the centuries (albeit before without doing so as anyone’s junior partner). In practice, this takes the form of information warfare and especially associated “spy” scandals such as the Skripal saga.

The Ukrainian-Belarusian Connection

The latest developments aren’t just tied to the US’ desire to obstruct Russian-EU epidemiological cooperation, but also to Ukraine and Belarus. Although Donbass remains a tinderbox, the prospects of all-out war there have seemingly somewhat diminished over the past week as Russia proved how resolute it is in defending both its border and fellow citizens in Eastern Ukraine in line with international law. For this reason, the US and its British partner might have thought to execute their back-up plan for dividing and ruling Russia and the EU via the latest “spy” scandal that their joint junior partner in Czechia just manufactured. Not only that, but Head of the Duma’s Committee on Foreign Affairs Leonid Slutsky publicly claimed that this latest provocation was timed to distract from Saturday night’s revelations that Russia detained two terrorists who were plotting to carry out a military coup in Belarus after assassinating President Lukashenko and his family. In other words, the Czech “spy” scandal is intended to kill several birds with one stone, thus making it a major Hybrid War provocation.

Concluding Thoughts

There’s little doubt that the US encouraged its junior partner in Czechia to manufacture the latest Russian “spy” scandal that erupted over the weekend, but observers should arguably investigate the supportive role that British intelligence might have also played in recent events. They, just like their American big brothers, have the desire to divide and rule Russia and the EU in order to expand their own influence in order to secure their economic intersts and especially those in strategic spheres such as the epidemiological one. Since Donbass has yet to explode like many predicted might have already happened by now (though such a worst-case scenario might still transpire in the coming future), it makes sense that the US and UK would initiate their back-up plan of manufacturing a major “spy” scandal just in case so as to continue advancing their interests despite the latest strategic setback (however temporary the latter might prove to be). Observers shouldn’t ever forget that wherever there’s an American intelligence footprint in Europe, there’s likely a British one not too far behind.

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Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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Unser Dank geht an Dr. Rudolf Hänsel

Deutsche Übersetzung des Originalartikels in englischer Sprache durch Dr. Rudolf Hänsel

Our thanks to Dr. Rudolf Hänsel

German translation by Dr. Rudolf Hänsel f the original article in English at:

Big Pharma Conglomerate with a Criminal Record: Pfizer “Takes Over” the EU Vaccine Market. 1.8 Billion Doses

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, April 18, 2021

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“Hunderte von Millionen von Menschen haben eine Injektion erhalten, die es erlaubt, ein bio-reaktives “Gen-Therapie”-Molekül in ihren Körper zu injizieren – aufgrund von Angst, Unwissenheit und der Weigerung, in Betracht zu ziehen, dass die Leute, die dies fördern … Hintergedanken haben.” (Edward Curtin, April 2021)

Einleitung

Am 14. April 2021 bestätigte der Präsident der Europäischen Kommission, dass Brüssel einen Vertrag mit Pfizer über die Produktion von 1,8 Milliarden mRNA-Impfstoffdosen aushandelt.

Diese astronomische Zahl entspricht 23 Prozent der Weltbevölkerung. Es ist genau das Vierfache der Bevölkerung der 27 Mitgliedsstaaten der Europäischen Union (448 Millionen, Daten für 2020).

Dies ist das größte Impfstoffprojekt der Weltgeschichte, das von der Auferlegung einer teuflischen “Timeline” auf die Menschen der Europäischen Union begleitet wird, die aus wiederkehrenden mRNA-Impfungen über “die nächsten zwei Jahre und darüber hinaus” besteht.

Der gesamte Prozess wird mit einer unerbittlichen Angstkampagne und dem eingebetteten ID-Impfpass gekoppelt, der vom Europäischen Parlament nur wenige Wochen vor der Ankündigung der EU verabschiedet wurde.

Der digitale EU-Impfpass, der von Pfizer BioNTech implementiert werden soll, ist Teil des berüchtigten ID2020-Projekts, das von Bill Gates’ Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) gesponsert wird, “und das die allgemeine Impfung als Plattform für die digitale Identität nutzt”.

Sollte dieser EU-Vertrag mit Pfizer, der bis ins Jahr 2023 reicht, wie geplant durchgeführt werden, würde jeder einzelne Mensch in der Europäischen Union innerhalb von zwei Jahren (2021-2023) viermal geimpft werden.

Und bedenken Sie, dass zum Zeitpunkt des Verfassens dieses Artikels die mRNA von Pfizer (wie auch die seiner Konkurrenten, einschließlich Astrazeneka, Moderna und J & J) rechtlich (in den USA) als “nicht zugelassene” und “experimentelle Produkte” eingestuft sind. Sie sind illegale Medikamente.

In den USA hat die FDA in einer zweideutigen Stellungnahme dem Impfstoff von Pfizer-BioNTech eine sogenannte Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) erteilt, nämlich “um die Notfallverwendung des nicht zugelassenen Produkts zu erlauben, … für die aktive Immunisierung…” (siehe unten)

Ich habe diese Aussage mit einem prominenten Anwalt überprüft. Es ist eklatant illegal, ein “nicht zugelassenes Produkt” zu vermarkten (unabhängig von den diesbezüglichen behördlichen Genehmigungen).

Eine Multi-Milliarden-Dollar-Bonanza für Pfizer BioNTech

Zeitgleich mit der historischen Entscheidung der EU vom 14. April 2021 hat Pfizer bekannt gegeben, dass der Preis für seinen Impfstoff auf 23 Dollar pro Dosis angehoben wurde.

Großes Geld für Big Pharma. Das Impfstoffprojekt mit 1,8 Milliarden Dosen wird 41 Milliarden Dollar kosten, die größtenteils durch Fremdkapital finanziert werden sollen. Damit trägt das Impfstoffprojekt zu der sich zuspitzenden Staatsschuldenkrise bei, von der die meisten europäischen Länder betroffen sind und die im Laufe der letzten 14 Monate durch die Abschottung entstanden ist.

Unterdessen hat Pfizer seinen Weltmarkt weitgehend zum Nachteil der Konkurrenz ausgebaut.

Ein Vertrag zur Belieferung der USA mit bis zu 600 Millionen Dosen,

  • Brasilien, ungefähr 100 Millionen,
  • Südafrika, 20 Millionen Dosen,
  • Philippinen, 40 Millionen,
  • usw.

Mittelfristig: 2021-2023 und “darüber hinaus”. Keine Rückkehr zum “New Normal” nach der Impfung

Was in der EU vorgesehen ist, ist ein sogenannter “mittelfristiger” Plan, der bis 2022/23 reicht. Bedeutet dieser “mittelfristige” Zeitplan eine vierte und eine fünfte Welle?

Das “mittelfristige” Projekt wird in Verbindung mit dem vom Weltwirtschaftsforum vorgeschlagenen “Great Reset” durchgeführt werden. Er wird höchstwahrscheinlich von Abriegelungen und anderen restriktiven Maßnahmen begleitet sein. Eine Rückkehr zur “Neuen Normalität” ist nicht absehbar:

“Aber lassen Sie mich [EU-Kommissionspräsidentin Ursula von der Leyen] auch den Blick auf die mittlere Frist richten. … Es ist klar, dass wir, um das Virus entscheidend zu besiegen, auf Folgendes vorbereitet sein müssen: … wir werden Auffrischungsimpfungen benötigen, um die Immunität zu verstärken und zu verlängern; … wir werden Impfstoffe entwickeln müssen, die an neue Varianten angepasst sind; und wir werden sie frühzeitig und in ausreichender Menge benötigen. Vor diesem Hintergrund müssen wir uns auf Technologien konzentrieren, die sich bewährt haben. mRNA-Impfstoffe sind ein klares Beispiel dafür.“

Auf dieser Grundlage verhandeln wir jetzt mit BioNTech-Pfizer über einen dritten Vertrag. Dieser Vertrag sieht die Lieferung von 1,8 Milliarden Impfstoffdosen über den Zeitraum von 2021 bis 2023 vor. Und es wird bedeuten, dass nicht nur die Produktion der Impfstoffe, sondern auch alle wesentlichen Komponenten in der EU angesiedelt sein werden.

Die Verhandlungen, die wir heute [14. April 2021] beginnen – und hoffentlich sehr schnell abschließen werden – sind ein weiterer wichtiger Schritt in Europas Reaktion auf die Pandemie.

Ich möchte BioNTech-Pfizer danken. Es hat sich als zuverlässiger Partner erwiesen. Es hat seine Zusagen eingehalten und ist auf unsere Bedürfnisse eingegangen. Dies kommt den EU-Bürgern unmittelbar zugute.” (President of EU Commission)

Verlässlicher Partner? Das Strafregister von Pfizer

Es gibt noch eine weitere Dimension, eine “Büchse der Pandora”, die die EU nicht öffnen will. Das größte Impfstoffprojekt eines “nicht zugelassenen Medikaments” soll von einem Big-Pharma-Unternehmen durchgeführt werden, das seit langem für die Bestechung von Ärzten und Gesundheitsbehörden bekannt ist.

Pfizer ist ein “Gewohnheitstäter”, der sich beharrlich an illegalen und korrupten Marketingpraktiken beteiligt, Ärzte besticht und unerwünschte Studienergebnisse unterdrückt. Seit 2002 wurden das Unternehmen und seine Tochtergesellschaften mit 3 Milliarden Dollar an strafrechtlichen Verurteilungen, Zivilstrafen und Geschworenenurteilen belegt. (Dr. Robert G. Evans, National Institutes of Medicine)

Darüber hinaus ist Pfizer in den USA vorbestraft und wurde 2009 vom US-Justizministerium wegen “betrügerischen Marketings” angeklagt.

“Pfizer, der weltgrößte Pharmakonzern, wurde im Rahmen eines 2,3-Milliarden-Dollar-Vergleichs mit der Bundesstaatsanwaltschaft mit der höchsten Strafe in der US-Geschichte belegt, weil er Medikamente falsch vermarktet und Schmiergelder an willfährige Ärzte gezahlt hat.” (Guardian)

In einer historischen Entscheidung des US-Justizministeriums bekannte sich Pfizer Inc. im September 2009 zu den strafrechtlichen Vorwürfen schuldig. Es handelte sich um den “größten Vergleich zum Betrug im Gesundheitswesen” in der Geschichte des US-Justizministeriums.

Wie um alles in der Welt können Sie einem Big-Pharma-Impfstoffkonglomerat vertrauen, das sich zu strafrechtlichen Vorwürfen des US-Justizministeriums (DoJ) schuldig bekannte, darunter “betrügerisches Marketing” und “schwerwiegende Verletzung des Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act”?

In diesem DOJ-Urteil aus dem Jahr 2009 wurde Pfizer sozusagen für einen Zeitraum von vier Jahren “auf Bewährung” gesetzt. Pfizer wurde angewiesen, mit dem Generalinspektor des Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), der de facto als “Bewährungshelfer” fungierte, “eine Vereinbarung zur Unternehmensintegrität” abzuschließen. ” Diese Vereinbarung sah “Verfahren und Überprüfungen vor, um … (zukünftiges) Fehlverhalten seitens Pfizer, Inc. zu vermeiden und umgehend aufzudecken”.

Der Killer-“Impfstoff”

Unternehmensintegrität? Das “Betrügerische Marketing”-Verhalten von Pfizer BioNTech herrscht in Bezug auf die prognostizierten 1,8 Milliarden Dosen seines “nicht zugelassenen” “experimentellen” mRNA COVID-19 Tozinameran-“Impfstoffs” vor, der unter dem Markennamen Comirnaty verkauft wird.

Wir haben es hier mit der “betrügerischen Vermarktung” eines “Impfstoffs” zu tun, der am besten als Killer-“Impfstoff” beschrieben wird.

Aber in Wirklichkeit ist der mRNA-“Impfstoff”, der das menschliche Genom verändert, “KEIN” Impfstoff. Er basiert auf Gentherapie, kombiniert mit einem eingebetteten ID-Impfpass.

Todesfälle und Verletzungen durch den “Experimentalimpfstoff” MRNA

Will die Europäische Kommission Astrazeneka und J & J (im Auftrag von Pfizer??) verdrängen. Offizielle Verlautbarungen deuten darauf hin, dass Pfizer BioNTech letztendlich den gesamten EU-Impfstoffmarkt übernehmen wird.

Anfang März 2021 beschlossen 18 europäische Länder, darunter Frankreich, Italien, Deutschland und Spanien, den mRNA-Impfstoff von AstraZeneka auszusetzen. Astrazeneka war das Ziel der nationalen EU-Regierungen, der Europäischen Arzneimittelagentur (EMA) sowie der EU-Kommission.

Die EU hat nun bestätigt, dass sie die Verträge mit J und J und AstraZeneka nicht verlängern wird, obwohl (laut EU- und UK-Daten) die Todesfälle und Verletzungen durch den Pfizer BioNTech-„Impfstoff” viel höher sind als die von AstraZeneka.

Offizielle EU-Daten zu Todesfällen und Verletzungen durch Impfstoffe für Pfizer, Moderna und AstraZenecaweisen auf: 3.964 Tote und 162.610 Verletzte (27. Dezember 2020 – 13. März 2021)

Die Aufschlüsselung (Astrazeneka, Pfizer, Moderna)

Gesamtreaktionen für den experimentellen Impfstoff AZD1222 (CHADOX1 NCOV-19) von Oxford/ AstraZeneca: 451 Todesfälle und 54.571 Verletzungen bis 13.03.2021

Gesamtzahl der Reaktionen für den experimentellen mRNA-Impfstoff Tozinameran (Code BNT162b2, Comirnaty) von BioNTech/ Pfizer: 2.540 Todesfälle und 102.100 Verletzungen bis zum 13.03.2021

Gesamtzahl der Reaktionen für den experimentellen mRNA-Impfstoff mRNA-1273 (CX-024414) von Moderna: 973 Todesfälle und 5.939 Verletzte bis zum 13.03.2021

Auch britische Daten bestätigen, dass die so genannten Nebenwirkungen der mRNA für den “Impfstoff” von Pfizer BioNTech deutlich höher sind (im Vergleich zu AstraZeneka).

Siehe Britische Regierung Schockierender Bericht über Nebenwirkungen der Corona-Impfstoffe: Schlaganfälle, Blindheit, Fehlgeburten

Abschließende Bemerkungen

Ausreichend dokumentiert, der Impfstoff ist nicht erforderlich. Es gibt keine Pandemie.

Und warum sollte die EU-Kommission, die 450 Millionen Menschen in 27 Ländern vertritt, sich verpflichten, 1,8 Milliarden Dosen von Pfizers mRNA-“Impfstoff” zu kaufen, von dem von vornherein bekannt ist, dass er zu Todesfällen und Verletzungen geführt hat, einschließlich Autoimmunreaktionen. Blutgerinnungsanomalien, Schlaganfall und inneren Blutungen.

Siehe die an die Europäische Arzneimittel-Agentur (EMA) gerichtete Widerlegung von Ärzten für Covid-Ethik.

Sagen Sie NEIN zu dem Killer-Virus. Der von der EU gesponserte Pfizer-“Impfstoff” muss Gegenstand einer koordinierten Graswurzelbewegung in allen 27 Mitgliedsstaaten der Europäischen Union sowie weltweit sein.

Die wissenschaftlichen Beweise bestätigen hinreichend, dass ein Covid-19-Impfstoff NICHT erforderlich ist. Ganz im Gegenteil.

Die Schätzungen der sogenannten Covid-19-positiven Fälle basieren auf dem RT-PCR-Test, der nach der neuesten Erklärung der WHO (20. Januar 2021) völlig unzuverlässig ist und der dazu dient, die Zahlen in die Höhe zu treiben und gleichzeitig die Notwendigkeit eines mRNA-Impfstoffs zu rechtfertigen, der in Wirklichkeit kein Impfstoff ist.

Siehe: Die WHO bestätigt, dass der Covid-19 PCR-Test fehlerhaft ist: Schätzungen von “positiven Fällen” sind bedeutungslos. Der Lockdown hat keine wissenschaftliche Grundlage

Während die Medien das “Killer-Virus” mit dürftigen und widersprüchlichen “Beweisen” hervorheben, wird das, was auf dem Spiel steht, am besten als “Killer-Impfstoff” beschrieben.

Irreführende Covid-Todesschätzungen

Darüber hinaus sind die Schätzungen der Covid-Todesfälle, die verwendet werden, um die Notwendigkeit eines Impfstoffs zu rechtfertigen, gefälscht. In den USA wurden die Zertifizierer angewiesen, die “zugrundeliegende Todesursache” „meisten“ als Covid-19 anzugeben (“more often than not”).

Siehe Covid-19 und die Fälschung von Totenscheinen: Die “More Often Than Not”-Klausel der CDC.

Für eine umfassendere Betrachtung siehe Michel Chossudovskys zehn Kapitel umfassendes E-Book mit dem Titel:

The 2020-21 Worldwide Corona Crisis: Zerstörung der Zivilgesellschaft, künstliche Wirtschaftsdepression, globaler Staatsstreich und der “Große Reset”

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The ultimate international authority for infectious diseases is the World Health Organization (WHO). Due to its widespread acceptance by the world’s national governments, it has been extremely successful in assuming the helm to monitor regional and global infectious diseases and dictate medical intervention policies to international health agencies. The organization has become the final word to rule whether the spread of a serious pathogen is a pandemic or not. For the majority of the medical community, the media and the average person, the WHO is the front line command post for medical prevention (i.e., vaccination) and treatment.  Consequently its rulings are often regarded as the gold standard.  On matters of global health, the WHO holds dominance.

For approximately a year the WHO has propagated the belief that the first line of defense for curtailing the COVID-19 pandemic is self-isolation, distancing, masks and, ultimately, vaccination. Although it approved Ivermectin as a cost-effective treatment against SARS-CoV-2 infections, it disapproved hydroxychloroquine in favor of Gilead Bioscience’s and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease’s (NIAID) Anthony Fauci’s novel and costly drug Remdesivir.  Much of it’s funding efforts have been reserved for mass-vaccination with the new generation of experimental vaccines. Throughout these efforts, the WHO has allied itself with the US’s and UK’s national health systems, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and his Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) initiative.

Most people wrongly assume the WHO acts independently from private commercial and national government interests for the welfare of the world’s population. The legitimacy of the WHO as a gold standard of health is dubious. The organization has frequently been accused of conflicts of interests with private pharmaceutical companies and mega-philanthropic organizations such as the Gates’ Foundation, as well as being riddled with political alliances, ideologies, and profiteering motives. Despite it’s mega-pharmaceutical interests and consultants representing private vaccine interests, in the past the WHO has had the audacity to ridicule the pharmaceutical industry of corruption.

“Corruption in the pharmaceutical sector occurs throughout all stages of the medicine chain, from research and development to dispensing and promotion…. A lack of transparency and accountability within the medicines chain can also contribute to unethical practices and corruption.”

These are similar charges that have been leveled against the WHO. An article in the National Review called the WHO “scandal plagued” with “wasteful spending, utter disregard for transparency, pervasive incompetence, and failure to adhere to even basic democratic standards.” In his book, Immunization: How Vaccines Became Controversial, University of Amsterdam professor emeritus Dr. Stuart Blume raises the serious problem of the WHO’s most influential advisors on emergency health conditions, such as the current Covid-19 pandemic and earlier the 2009 H1N1 swine flu scare that never was, serve as consultants for the vaccine industry. During times of global emergencies and crises, the WHO confers with a separate group of advisors outside its formal sitting Strategic Advisory Group of Experts or SAGE; the names of this group’s members are not made public.

We would add that the WHO’s level of incompetence has resulted in serious misinformation about pandemics, medical risks of vaccines and other health-threatening chemicals.  For example, during the early stage of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, the organization reported it could not find any evidence of human transmission. However, the WHO has repeatedly kowtowed to China’s demands and unscrupulously accepts whatever statistics and statements the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) provides. Responding to a petition signed by over 700,000 signatories demanding the resignation of the current WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom, Japan’s Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso told the Japanese parliament that the organization “should be renamed the Chinese Health Organization” for favoring China’s policy to stall and obstruct international investigations and for lauding unsubstantiated praise on the country’s transparency and handling of the pandemic. Back on December 31, 2019, Taiwan – which has been barred from WHO membership due to China’s political maneuvering – had been warning of a possible human-to-human transmission contrary to the wet-market narrative, but this was largely ignored in order to avoid upsetting the CCP.

The UK’s Sunday Times reported that Chinese scientists were forced to destroy their proof of the virus shortly after its discovery. In the province of Hubei, authorities ordered the cessation of further testing and the destruction of existing samples. Other researchers who made efforts to warn the public were punished.  Writing for The Hill, University of Texas at San Antonio professor Bradley Thayer wrote, “Tedros apparently turned a blind eye to what happened in Wuhan and the rest of China and… has helped play down the severity, prevalence and scope of the Covid-19 outbreak.” Thayer concludes, “Tedros is not fit to lead the WHO.” He has no formal medical training as a physician or any international management experience in global health. Many others have voiced similar criticisms pointing out Tedro’s unsuitable background.  Moreover, the Director General’s conflicts of interest with China abound. Immediately before and after his tenure as the Health Minister for Ethiopia’s ruling Communist party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, China had donated an estimated $60 million to the terrorist government and its social programs. Now heading the WHO, Tedros appears to continue lobbying on China’s behalf. In 2017, the Washington Post noted the fundamental problem:

“[China] worked tirelessly behind the scenes to help Tedros defeat the United Kingdom candidate for the WHO job, David Nabarro. Tedros’s victory was also a victory for Beijing, whose leader Xi Jinping has made public his goal of flexing China’s muscle in the world.”

Upon assuming his new position at the WHO, Tedros had left Ethiopia’s healthcare system in ruin.  As one young healthcare worker reported, there was no “bare necessities of a health care office…. Sterile gloves, paper exam gowns and covers, cotton swabs, gauze, tongue depressors, alcohol prep pads, chemical test strips, suturing equipment, syringes, stethoscopes… were non-existent. This is a fact in most health care centers in Ethiopia.”

During the more recent re-investigation of SARS-CoV-2 origins, the Chinese authorities refused to provide raw case data and created repressive conditions to curtail reliable analysis and disclosure. The WHO’s final report concluded that the virus had an animal origin and did not escape Wuhan’s high security pathogen laboratory. But there are viable reasons to discredit the report as untrustworthy at best and perhaps intentionally deceptive.

First, the entire agenda of the investigation was staged theater rather than a deep investigation to uncover empirical evidence. The team simply inspected seafood and open-air markets. Consequently, the WHO team returned empty handed and without laboratory records for a proper forensic examination. To call the entire WHO effort gross incompetence would be an understatement. Based upon all the evidence that has emerged, a large number of professional medical voices are calling the entire investigation a farce.

EcoHealth Alliance President Dr. Peter Daszak

Most problematic is the appointment of Peter Daszak on the WHO’s group to carry out the investigation. Daszak, the founding president of the shadowy non-profit organization EcoHealth Alliance, has headed many hunting adventures worldwide to identify the emergence of potential pathogens that could become pandemics. With the intention to divert attention away from an escaped laboratory virus, Daszak stated on a Going Viral podcast there was no evidential reason to visit and inspect the Wuhan laboratory. According to Independent Science News, despite Daszak’s denial of a lab origin, “EcoHealth Alliance funded bat coronavirus research, including virus collection, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and thus could themselves be directly implicated in the outbreak.” The research at the Wuhan lab included ‘gain of function” efforts on coronaviruses, and received funds directly approved by Anthony Fauci. Newsweek reports the NIH had given a total of $7.4 million to the Chinese lab for the research. The organization has received over $100 million from a variety of sources, including the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, the NIH and undisclosed amounts from the Chinese government. Daszak himself has authored 25 studies funded by the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, think tanks, universities, military institutions, and ministries directly connected with the Chinese Communist Party.

Given the halls of power within the WHO, we are outlining some of the more salient reasons why the organization’s declarations about infectious diseases, pandemics and vaccination should not be trusted.

Vaccine Promotional Misconduct

For many years the WHO’s recommendations for certain vaccines were kept secret. Writing in a 2006 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Dr. Marc Girard uncovered “scientific incompetence, misconduct or even criminal malfeasance” over the intentional inflation of vaccines’ benefits while undermining toxicity and adverse effects. Dr. Girard testified as a medical expert for a French court in a criminal trial against the WHO after French health officials obliged the organization to launch its universal Hepatitis B vaccine campaign. The campaign resulted in the deaths of French children. Girard gained access to confidential WHO documents. He noted that the WHO’s “French figures about chronic liver diseases were simply extrapolated from the U.S. reports.” He further accused the WHO serving “merely as a screen for commercial promotion, in particular via the Viral Hepatitis Prevention Board (VHPB), which was created, sponsored, and infiltrated by the manufacturers.”

Now during the Covid-19 pandemic, as early as last July, the WHO approved of China’s first vaccine for emergency use, long before it had undergone proper clinical trials and much earlier than Moderna’s and Pfizer’s mRNA vaccines’ approval.

Orchestration of Pandemic Panics

Before the current COVID-19 pandemic, there was the H1N1 swine flu scare in 2009. However, at the very start the WHO’s fear mongering of a global contagion that could exceed the death counts of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic was solely based on false rhetoric rather than empirical evidence.  The fabrications are believed to have originated from the WHO’s senior consultant on viral outbreaks who happens to carry the reputation of being one of the world’s leading pandemic alarmists: Dr. Albert Osterhaus, nicknamed “Dr. Flu.” At the time, Osterhaus was head of the Department of Virology at Erasmus University in the Netherlands. When the swine flu scare appeared, he was also the president of the European Scientific Working Group on Influenza (ESWI), an organization funded by the major vaccine manufacturers including Baxter, MedImmune, Glaxo, Sanofi Pasteur and others. It was also Osterhaus who transformed an otherwise potentially bad flu season into a global pandemic. The WHO has been criticized harshly in the media for changing the definition of a “pandemic” and in doing so has been charged with benefitting the pharmaceutical industry. The British Medical Journal reported that the WHO failed to report conflicts of interest in its H1N1 advisory group. The journal’s Editor-in-Chief Fiona Godlee wrote, “WHO must act now to restore its credibility, and Europe should legislate.” The former head of the prestigious Cochrane Database Collaboration’s vaccine studies, Dr. Tom Jefferson, told a Der Spiegel interviewer, “the WHO and public health officials, virologists and the pharmaceutical companies… built this machine around the impending [H1N1] pandemic. And there’s a lot of money involved, and influence and careers, and entire institutions.”

When the 2009 H1N1 influenza strain appeared, the WHO rushed forward to mangle its earlier criteria that would realistically define a pandemic. The organization intentionally removed reference to a pathogen’s “severity” as a necessary requirement. “Don’t you think there’s something noteworthy,” Dr. Jefferson continues, “about the fact that the WHO has changed its definition of a pandemic?…. that’s how swine flu has been categorized as a pandemic.” Moreover, the WHO’s decision to label the outbreak as a pandemic was not based upon its own permanent vaccine experts but on the recommendations of a non-disclosed group of outside consultants.

According to a financial forecast published by JP Morgan, the collaboration between the WHO and Osterhaus’s ESWI to orchestrate the pandemic would have profited the pharmaceutical industry up to $10 billion. Der Spiegel reported:

“The WHO and those in charge of public health, the virologists and the pharmaceutical laboratories….  created a whole system around the imminence of a pandemic. There is a lot of money at stake, as well as networks of influence, careers and whole institutions! And the minute one of the flu viruses mutates we’d see the whole machine roll into action.”

In 2010, the EU’s Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe launched an investigation into the evidence that the WHO had created “a fake pandemic” in order to financially benefit the pharmaceutical giants’ vaccine market and to strengthen the influence private drug interests have over the health organization. The Assembly’s chairperson Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg charged the WHO’s fake pandemic as “one of the greatest medical scandals of the century that resulted in “millions being needlessly vaccinated.”

Epidemic of Conflict of Interests

According to former World Bank geopolitical analyst Peter Koenig, about half of the WHO’s budget is derived from private sources — primarily pharmaceutical companies but also other corporate sectors including the telecommunication and agro-chemical industries. It also receives large donations from large philanthropic organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and GAVI. Eleven years ago, Gates had committed $10 billion to the WHO; after the US, his Foundation is its second largest donor providing 10 percent of its funding.  His financial commitment aligned with his global ambition to “make this the decade of vaccines.” Koenig also believes that Tedros’s appointment was due to Gates’ influence. This may carry some truth because Tedros is a former Chair of GAVI’s Vaccine Alliance. Barbara Loe Fisher at the National Vaccine Information Center estimates that “only about 10 percent of total funding provided by GAVI ($862M) was used to strengthen health systems in developing countries, such as improving sanitation and nutrition, while nearly 80 percent was used to purchase, deliver and promote vaccines.”

There is also the deep personal and financial relationship between Gates and the Chinese Communist government that demands further investigation. Gates is a member of the Chinese Academy of Science. For the moment, the WHO has been advising against Covid-19 vaccine passports as a mandate to travel. Nevertheless, China has already launched encrypted digital certificates as proof of vaccination. Given Gates’ close relationship with Chinese officials, perhaps he is awaiting on China to establish a precedent for other nations to agree on a global mandate that will eventually be propagated by the Gate’s network and the World Economic Forum and its Great Reset.  During a 2020 TED talk, Gates had already revealed that digital vaccine passports may be necessary; that part of his speech was edited from the original video, however, Robert Kennedy Jr. tracked down the original footage.  Gates has also 1) commissioned MIT to develop injectable a quantum dot dye system for children, 2) funded MicroChips, a company developing implantable chip-based devices, and 3) purchased 3.7 million shares in Serco who is developing tracing technology to track pandemic infections and vaccine compliance.

Finally, Gates shares the Chinese Communist Party’s interests in collecting and ‘mining” citizens’ DNA. A 60 Minutes expose presented the covert activities of BGI Genomics, a CCP-linked firm that has exported Covid-19 tests to “collect, store and exploit biometric information” on American citizens. Independent investigations reveal that the Gates Foundation has collaborated with BGI and it was through Gates’ influence over Obama that the Chinese company entered the US market.

BGI’s RT-PCR kit was promoted by the WHO back in May 2020 for first line emergency diagnostic use. The rationale was that the test was highly sensitive, specific and user-friendly. Subsequently the EU, FDA, and the Australian, Canadian and Japanese health ministries rapidly purchased and deployed it. On its website, the Gates Foundation acknowledges its role in having the PCR tests supplied to the WHO.

“Nine Chinese PCR tests were approved by WHO during 2020 under its Emergency Use Listing (EUL) mechanism, with one of the foundation’s partners supplying tests to WHO”

Three months later, Sweden filed complaints after reports of a high percentage of false positives from the Chinese tests.

There is in our opinion little doubt that the WHO is another one of Gates’ bought off entities for furthering his personal agenda to promote vaccines, genetically modified seeds and chemical agriculture in the developing world.

Vaccine Adverse Effects Monitoring System Needs Overhaul

The WHO’s Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety is the group responsible for administering vaccine programs in poorer, developing countries. It is also responsible for gathering data on incidents of vaccine injuries. Any deaths following vaccination campaigns are ignored and ruled as coincidental. This policy is based on the erroneous assumption that if no one died during a vaccine’s clinical trials, then the vaccine should be regarded as automatically safe and unrelated to any deaths that might occur later. Consequently, the WHO’s monitoring system is seriously flawed and requires a major overhaul.

One of the more controversial incidences was the WHO’s collaboration with the Bill Gates’ GAVI campaign to launch the Pentavalent vaccine (diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, HIP and Hepatitis B) in Africa and later in South and Southeast Asia. In India, health officials recorded upwards to 8,190 additional infant deaths annually following Pentavalent campaign.  The WHO’s response was to reclassify its adverse event reporting system to disregard “infant” deaths altogether. Dr. Jacob Puliyel, a member of the Indian government’s National Technical Advisory Group on Immunization concluded,

“deaths and other serious adverse events following vaccination in the third world, that use WHO-AEFI classification are not recorded in any database for pharmaco-vigilance. It is as if the deaths of children in low (and middle) income countries are of no consequence.”

WHO’s Double Standards of Vaccine Safety

A more recent scandal erupted during the WHO’s Global Vaccine Safety Summit convened in December 2019.  Days before the summit, one of the WHO’s medical directors for vaccination, Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, appeared in a public advertisement touting the unquestionable safety of vaccines and ridiculing parents who speak out against vaccination. She assured viewers that the WHO was in control of matters and monitored any potential adverse risks carefully. However, during the Summit, the same Dr. Swaminathan acknowledged vaccine health risks and stated, “We really don’t have very good safety monitoring systems.” Another Summit participant, Dr. Heidi Larson stated,

“We have a very wobbly ‘health professional frontline’ that is starting to question vaccines and the safety of vaccines. When the frontline professionals are starting to question or they don’t feel like they have enough confidence about the safety to stand up to the person asking the questions. I mean most medical school curriculums, even nursing curriculums, I mean in medical school you are lucky if you have half a day on vaccines.”

And more noteworthy were the statements by Dr. Martin Howell Friede, Coordinator of the WHO’s Initiative for Vaccine Research,

“… I give courses every year on how do you develop vaccines, how do you make vaccines. And the first lesson is while you’re making your vaccine if you can avoid using an adjuvant please do so. Lesson two is if you’re going to use an adjuvant use one that has a history of safety. And lesson three is if you’re not going to do that, think very carefully.”

Click here to watch the video.

In other words, what the WHO presents to the public contradicts what is discussed behind closed doors, another example of the veil of secrecy the organization operates within.

Now we are witnessing more countries halting further administration of AstraZeneca’s Covid vaccine, a vaccine Trump had committed $1.2 billion towards its development. Subsequently the CDC paused Johnson & Johnson’s similar engineered adenovirus vaccine in order to investigate its association with an otherwise rare condition of fatal blood clotting. The WHO on the other hand has ignored these nations’ ethical responsibility to adhere to the precautionary principle. Its own review claimed there were no blood clot links to AstraZeneca’s vaccine; later the WHO changed its tune to “plausible” after EU regulators found a causal link and the New England Journal of Medicine published two studies providing specific details confirming these adverse reactions.  Although acknowledging these risks, the WHO has continued to recommend that mass vaccination proceed as if there were no red alarms.

WHO’s Depopulation Efforts with Vaccines

Without doubt, the most nefarious activity conducted by the WHO is its alleged support and distribution of vaccines to poorer developing countries that may have been intentionally designed to decrease population rates.  Back in 1989, the WHO sponsored a symposium at its Geneva headquarters on “Antifertility Vaccines and Contraceptive Vaccines.” The symposium presented proposals for vaccines that were later discovered to have been laced with the sterilizing hormones HCG and estradiol; the former prevents pregnancy and triggers spontaneous abortions and miscarriages, and the latter can turn men infertile.

In 2015, the Kenyan Conference of Catholic Bishops reported its discovery of a polio vaccine laced with estradiol that was manufactured in India and distributed by the WHO. A year earlier, Dr. Wahome Ngare from the Kenyan Catholic Doctors Association uncovered a tetanus vaccine specifically being administered to women, also distributed by the WHO, that contained the HCG hormone. All of the polio vaccine samples tested contained HCG, estrogen-related compounds, follicle stimulating and luteinizing hormones, which will damage sperm formation in the testes. Even more disturbing, this vaccine was going to be administered to children under five years of age.

However, this is not the first time the WHO appears to have made efforts to use vaccination campaigns for depopulation.  A decade earlier, in 2004, the WHO, UNICIF and CDC launched a vaccination campaign to immunize 74 million African children during a polio outbreak. The initiative encountered a serious obstacle. In Nigeria, laboratory tests on the WHO’s vaccine samples resulted in the presence of estrogen and other female hormones. And in the mid-1990s, a tetanus vaccine being administered to Nicaraguan and Filipino girls and women in their child-bearing years was discovered to contain HCG, which accounted for a large number of spontaneous abortions that were reported by Catholic health workers.

Illegal Vaccine Experiments

In 2014, The Economic Times of India published a report that provided details of a joint venture between the WHO and the Gates Foundation to test an experimental HPV vaccine on approximately 16,000 tribal girls between the ages of 9 and 15 unwittingly. The experiment was conducted in 2008, and the vaccine is now what we commonly know as Gardasil. Many of the girls, the report states, became ill and some died.

The following year the WHO and Gates Foundation conducted a similar experiment on 14,000 girls with the HPV vaccine Cervarix. Again “scores of teenage girls were hospitalized.”  Investigations led by Indian health officials uncovered gross violations in India’s laws regarding medical safety. In numerous cases there was no consent and the children had no idea what they were being vaccinated for. The Indian Supreme Court has taken up a case against the duo for criminal charges.

There are many other questionable activities that the WHO has been involved with over the years. However, the above provide sufficient evidence to argue the case that, at least within the upper echelons of the WHO, global health does not stand in high priority.  The organization employs over 7,000 people around the world and most of these have deep concern for improving the lives of populations in poor and developing nations. On the other hand, the WHO’s leaders are there largely because the powers of Washington, London and the pharmaceutical industry benefit by the organization advancing its agendas.

Of course, the WHO is not the only health entity with a legacy of corruption.  Corruption appears to be systemic throughout global health and national health agencies.  This topic was featured last year in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet. Author Dr. Patricia Garcia writes,

“Corruption is embedded in health systems. Throughout my life—as a researcher, public health worker, and a Minister of Health—I have been able to see entrenched dishonesty and fraud. But despite being one of the most important barriers to implementing universal health coverage around the world, corruption is rarely openly discussed.”

Bear in mind, the WHO, along with Bill Gates and his Foundation, and Anthony Fauci at the National Institutes for Allergy and Infectious Disease, are leading the efforts to get the COVID-19 vaccine administered as quickly as possible. Already the Gates Foundation has given $1.75 billion for developing and distributing these vaccines. Do you believe we can trust their judgment and the intense public relations effort that will immediately follow after such a vaccine reaches the market?

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Richard Gale is the Executive Producer of the Progressive Radio Network and a former Senior Research Analyst in the biotechnology and genomic industries.

Dr. Gary Null is the host of the nation’s longest running public radio program on alternative and nutritional health and a multi-award-winning documentary film director, including The War on Health, Poverty Inc and Plant Codes.

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One of the great things about America is that it has 50 states that can set their own policy across a broad range of areas, including on public health and lockdowns. This has allowed some to resist the stampede to impose swingeing restrictions on normal life in the hope of limiting transmission of SARS-CoV-2, and this provides us with a valuable control group in the great lockdown experiment that can give us an idea what might have happened if we hadn’t made some intervention or other.

During the autumn and winter a new surge in Covid infections prompted most US states, like most Western countries, to reimpose restrictions. But a few resisted. Eleven states did not impose a stay-at-home order and left people at liberty to leave their homes whenever they wished. Of these, four – Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and South Dakota – did not impose any restrictions at all and treated it pretty much like any other winter.

Although there are various differences between states that might have affected Covid outcomes, because they all form part of one country there are enough similarities to make comparisons useful. In particular, if lockdowns are effective and necessary to prevent hundreds of thousands of extra deaths (or the equivalent for the size of the population), then those states which didn’t lock down should have a far worse death toll. If the death tolls are not much worse, but about the same (or better), then lockdowns cannot be having a large impact on preventing Covid deaths.

In the chart above I have used data from Worldometer to plot the current total Covid deaths per million for each state. I have coloured the 11 states which did not lock down (i.e., impose a stay-at-home order) this winter in red. I have also calculated the average for the two groups of states, those which did not lock down over the winter and those which did, and coloured them in yellow.

As you can see, states which did not lock down over the winter, far from having many times more Covid deaths, have actually had fewer – 1,671 vs 1,736 deaths per million. There may be demographic or other reasons that some states have a higher or lower number of deaths than others so we shouldn’t read too much into the precise differences. But even so, if lockdowns are supposed to suppress the virus to low levels and thus prevent ‘hundreds of thousands’ of deaths (or the population equivalent), then how is this possible? The only conclusion is that lockdowns do not work as intended and do not suppress the virus.

This conclusion is reinforced by looking at the death tolls in the four states which imposed no restrictions at all over the winter, the average of which is 1,716 deaths per million, which is still below that of those which imposed lockdowns (1,736). Florida reopened in the autumn, Georgia and South Carolina in the spring of 2020, and South Dakota never closed. Yet overall they have suffered fewer Covid deaths per million than the states which imposed stay-at-home lockdowns this winter.

Those academic teams which produce models predicting doom for places which don’t impose the measures they recommend should be challenged to apply their models to these states and hindcast the last winter. Any model which cannot accurately reproduce the known outcomes for these states should be calibrated until it can. Otherwise, if it can’t get the answer right for the past, why should we trust it for the future?

The modelling teams at Warwick, Imperial and LSHTM can be found on Twitter (as can LSHTM’s Adam Kucharski) if anyone feels like putting these questions to them.

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Fifteen million doses of the Johnson & Johnson Wuhan coronavirus vaccine were ruined as a result of the wrong ingredient being added during production. The incident occurred in a factory in west Baltimore which federal authorities flagged for multiple violations. Because of the mishap, delays have been anticipated in the federal government’s vaccine rollout.

A government official said the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) discovered that Emergent BioSolutions ruined the 15 million doses by adding the wrong ingredient. The company’s Bayview facility in Baltimore is also producing AstraZeneca vaccines. Unfortunately, workers at Emergent accidentally included an ingredient meant for the AstraZeneca jabs in a batch of J&J vaccines.

The HHS official told POLITICO: “It was no secret that Emergent did not have a deep bench of pharmaceutical manufacturing experts.”

J&J acknowledged the gaffe on March 31, saying that the affected batch is unusable and needs to be discarded.

J&J’s vaccine has been viewed as a milestone for COVID-19 immunization programs worldwide. The one-dose jab can be shipped and stored at standard refrigeration temperatures. On the other hand, the two-dose mRNA vaccines by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna require sub-zero temperatures for storage and shipping. The 15 million ruined doses would have been enough to fully vaccinate 15 million citizens.

The pharmaceutical giant attributed the incident to human error and added that an earlier batch was not affected by the mishap. The last shipment consisting of 11 million doses came from a facility in the Netherlands. The latest delivery of vaccine doses fulfilled J&J’s goal of providing the U.S. government with 20 million shots by the end of March 2021.

White House officials told the New York Times that the J&J vaccine mishap will not prevent the U.S. from meeting its COVID-19 vaccination goals. President Joe Biden has pledged to have sufficient vaccine doses for all American adults by the end of May 2021.

He previously committed to having 100 million Americans immunized against the Wuhan coronavirus in his first 100 days in office, which was achieved with six weeks to spare. (Related: Yearly COVID-19 shots might be needed by everyone, Johnson & Johnson CEO now conveniently claims.)

Emergent repeatedly flagged by FDA for failing to meet manufacturing standards

Emergent and J&J first joined forces in April 2020 to produce the one-dose COVID-19 jab. The drug manufacturer even lauded the lesser-known firm in a statement as an important partner for its goal of supplying more than one billion doses by the end of 2021.

However, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) described Emergent’s Bayview plant as a testing laboratory that “did not manufacture products.” The facility needed technology and personnel upgrades before it could be allowed to churn out vaccines.

An FDA inspection at the Bayview plant around the time J&J announced its partnership with Emergent revealed more skeletons in the closet. The agency’s lead investigator, Marcellinus Dordunoo, said the company failed to train employees for their respective roles “as part of their function and current good manufacturing practices.” He also flagged the Bayview plant’s failure to protect “electronically held-data generated during analytical testing” from possible deletion or manipulation. Dordunoo noted in his report that Emergent did not address “data integrity concerns.”

Prior to this inspection, the FDA had already pointed out a number of issues with Emergent. A December 2017 inspection of the firm’s Canton, Massachusetts plant found that it had not rectified the presence of “low-level mold and yeast isolates” there. FDA agents also questioned Emergent’s “unwritten policy of not conducting routine audits” at the separate Camden facility, also located in Baltimore. (Related: FDA slaps vaccine manufacturer for ongoing bacterial contamination.)

Anthrax vaccines are filled into vials at Emergent’s Camden plant while the vaccine serum for the J&J shots is produced at the Bayview plant. A plant located in Indiana and owned by the New Jersey-based Catalent handles the “fill and finish” process of putting the vaccine serum into vials.

J&J said it would add more manufacturing and quality experts to supervise vaccine production at the Bayview facility. The move is in compliance with the instruction from the Biden administration to directly oversee Emergent’s vaccine production process moving forward. Emergent declined to comment on the matter.

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Chances are, you are unaware that Palestinian elections are in the offing. But if you are following them, there is a lot to ponder.

If you are like me, you followed the US elections with disbelief, and now, things are “back to normal.” You followed the Israeli elections with disgust, and now, “safely past another election, Israel turns attention back to de-Arabization of the Zionist state.”

As Miko Peled writes:

“The Zionists openly say that they will allow Palestinians to choose whether they remain in “Israel” as residents without rights, leave, or fight and be killed by the Israeli forces — these same forces that have been killing them for more than seventy years.”

In March, The New York Times’ Patrick Kingsley and Adam Rasgon reported on the “stark differences” in electoral politics between Israel and the Palestinian Authority: “While many Israelis feel numbed by their fourth election in two years, Palestinians are excited about the chance to vote for the first time in more than a decade.”

Dig more deeply and you will find a chasm of difference … and not just in “the mood” of the electors.

Zionism is an ideologically exclusionary social and political policy toward non-Jews based on an ancient tribal identity, and a Zionist regime has had an iron grip on Palestine for decades, as many people know. The upcoming Palestinian elections may be an opportunity for change within the Palestinian Authority, an empowering change that officially sheds the Oslo agreement to focus on the de-Zionization of Palestine, one way or another.

To understand what’s really going on re the Palestinian elections, try to find sources other than The New York Times (NYT). In the article I reference above, for example, you will find this seemingly banal declaration:

The Palestinian election, scheduled for May 22, will be the first since a violent rift in 2007 between the Palestinian faction that controls the Gaza Strip, the Islamist militant group Hamas, and its rival that exerts limited autonomy over parts of the West Bank, the mainstream Fatah.

Missing from the NYT report is any contextualization regarding the role the US played in the vicious division between Hamas and Fatah in derailing the democratic process in Palestine after the 2006 elections when Hamas won. Consider this passage from The Making of Hamas’s Foreign Policy by Daud Abdullah (2020):

Ten years after the Roadmap was announced, one of its key drafters, Elliott Abrams, conceded that further disengagement from the West Bank ‘might not produce a Palestinian state in accordance with the Roadmap’. Nevertheless, he advised that the USA and its allies should ‘continue to support Abbas against Hamas’, because he was all they had. With regard to Hamas, Abrams added that, while efforts to create internal splits in Hamas were a ‘no-lose proposition’, the USA would play ‘no part in this’ and leave the task to other governments, including Russia and the Arab nations.

The “violent rift” between Hamas and Fatah, a rift that was unnecessary and futile according to Daud Abdullah, caused the deaths of 350 Palestinians, including 20 children and 18 women.

Furthermore, there is no mention in the NYT article that the Gaza strip since then has been subjected to an unconscionable economic land, air and sea blockade, imposed by Egypt and Israel in the hope of provoking a popular uprising against Hamas. It speaks a lot to Palestinian resilience and steadfastness (sumoud) that, to date, and despite the horrendous bombing (mainstream outlets have largely ignored Israel’s latest round of near-daily attacks, which began in early August, 2020), the US strategy has failed.

Instead, you read in the NYT report dewy-eyed language about young Palestinians who “dream of a new and more competent Palestinian leadership with a clearer idea of how to achieve statehood,” that appears to lay the blame for the Palestinian predicament (nakba, rather) entirely on “Palestinian leadership,” rather than on US and Israeli strategies meant to keep Palestinians in check, their leaders in prison, and Israel dominant.

If Patrick Kingsley and Adam Rasgon were to go beyond the framework of the status quo and the mirage of “democracy” in Israel or the OPT; if they were to step outside the defunct “peace process” framework they continue to polish for their readers, they would find plenty more going on with young Palestinians in and out of Palestine that is worthy of Israel’s attention and theirs. Nearly a third of Palestinian party logos, for example, including those for Fatah and Hamas, erase Israel from the map of Palestine.

It would help if these reporters could read Arabic and would take a look, for example, at the leadership and other training workshops offered continuously in Ramallah by Masarat, the Palestinian Center for Policy Research & Strategic Studies, whose director, writer and political analyst Hani al Masri, recently stepped down from his post at the Center in order to run in the elections. Here is a rough translation of the conclusion of an article he published on April 14:

If the fate of the elections is placed in the hands of the occupation, then this means that no elections will take place unless they achieve the interests of the occupation — i.e., obligating the Palestinian Authority to follow the Oslo Agreement unilaterally, even though successive Israeli governments have long abandoned their obligations per Oslo.

We should make the elections part of the battle against the occupation (as we did by joining the International Criminal Court and obtaining the observer membership for the State of Palestine in the United Nations). This also requires preparing a plan to end Oslo and its commitments as a prelude to ending the occupation and achieving freedom, sovereignty and independence, which will not come through diplomacy and negotiations, but rather through combining political action and negotiations in a timely manner after changing the balance of power, and committing to a liberation struggle and popular resistance.

Our struggle includes boycott and organizing uprisings that grow and continue until the occupation is defeated. In addition, we are holding elections in order to give popular legitimacy to the Palestinian Authority, to strengthen it, to open the doors for possible change and necessary reform, through the establishment of effective and good governance; elections give Jerusalem the status, importance and priority it deserves to thwart the Israeli plans. Elections promise change and could rid us of a Palestinian Authority with a decaying legitimacy, operating without a legislative council that could strengthen it, challenge it, hold it accountable, give it confidence, and prevent corruption.

And if Patrick Kingsley and Adam Rasgon are interested in further investigative reporting, I suggest they look into what young Palestinians in exile are planning and thinking. One place to begin is Masar Badil’s “The Alternative Palestinian Path Conference (Towards a new revolutionary commitment)”, Madrid, Spain, October-November 2021.

In the end, neither Israeli elections nor Palestinian elections are about “democracy.” In Israel, they are all about entrenching the Zionist regime in Palestine from the river to the sea; in the occupied territories, they are all about liberation and de-Zionization.

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Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank.

She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: At a 2018 rally in Washington DC [Rima Najjar]

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Dr. Peter McCullough is an internist, cardiologist, and professor of Medicine at Texas A&M University. He is an academic doctor who sees patients but is also very involved in research. He is editor of two major journals and the most published person in the field of heart and kidney research.

In the video below, Dr. McCullough appeared before the Senate Committee on Health and Human Services talking about the dropping and silencing of any information on COVID-19 treatment while Operation Warp Speed went at full tilt for vaccine development.

Source

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In his last book “War with Russia?” my friend and colleague Steve Cohen wrote about the flagrant censorship of news being carried on by The New York Times in support of its Russia-bashing editorial policies. Said Cohen, the newspaper’s century old slogan of “All the News That’s Fit to Print” has been turned into “All the News that Fits” when it comes to coverage of Russia.

But the problem goes far deeper than the professional malpractice of one leading newspaper in America. The censorship of news carried by mainstream media by U.S. authorities covers not only the domestic press but also the mainstream of Allied countries.  News blackouts are imposed when something ugly arises implicating the United States in violation of international norms of state behavior for which the State Department has no ready explanation or white wash.

This very situation seems to have arisen over the weekend, when news broke in Moscow over the arrest of two conspirators plotting a coup d’état in Minsk, to be carried out by the Belarus armed forces tentatively during the 9 May parade celebrating victory over fascist Germany in the Second World War.

Other leading English-speaking papers such as The Guardian and The Financial Times have front page reports on Alexei Navalny’s near death condition in a prison camp but not a word about Belarus. Ditto the Frankfurter Allgemeine and Le Figaro.  Curious, n’est-ce pas? Warum?  Let’s look into the story in its full dimension.

Last night’s News of the Week program hosted by Dimitry Kiselyov, Russia’s top manager of state news programming,  began with a 20 minute report on the extraordinary arrest of two conspirators plotting armed rebellion entailing the murder of Lukashenko and his family, abolition of the post of President, installation of a Committee of Concord such as previously had been headed by the opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya.

But these were not empty allegations. The arrests followed on a meeting by the two conspirators with Belarus military officers held in a downtown Moscow restaurant which was filmed from start to finish by the Russian state security agency, the FSB.  Lengthy segments of recordings from their meeting and discussion of their treasonous plans were aired on the Kiselyov program. Moreover, the accused are not some unknown pawns such as the British presented to the world press when they released their accusations against Russia over the Skripal poisoning.  No, one of the two arrested was the former press secretary of Lukashenko, a person who would have had all the contacts necessary to organize such a rebellion. The other plotter has dual US-Belarus citizenship and was well known as a fighter against Lukashenko’s rule.

The two were turned over to the Belarus KGB for interrogation in Minsk.  Surely further information about the links of the plotters to Ukraine, to Poland and to the United States will come out in the next few days.

What we have here is “very likely” (to use current Anglo-American political jargon) involvement of the United States in yet another regime change operation.  The revolution from below in Belarus led by Tikhanovskaya with support from Poland and Lithuania failed. The anti-Lukashenko street demonstrations led to nothing. And now Plan B, a putsch from above, was being organized to achieve the objective of removing Lukashenko both politically and physically. We have not seen such openly murderous plans with “likely” U.S. backing since John Kennedy’s days when the assassination of Fidel Castro was the hot game in D.C.

On the same “very likely” logic, I permit myself to take this all back to the door of the U.S. Under Secretary of State for Policy designate Victoria Nuland.  The links to Warsaw and Kiev that appear present are all in line with what she was doing to precipitate the Maidan in 2013 and violent overthrow of the sitting President in Kiev amidst attempts to murder him as he made his escape to Russian territory in February 2014.

From all of the foregoing, it looks as though U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s pledge several weeks ago that the US would no longer pursue “orange revolutions” was either an out and out lie or made without his knowing that control of foreign policy no longer is in his hands, but is being carried out by his nominal subordinate, Mme Nuland.  No wonder that the U.S. has ordered “stop the presses” on this story until it can put together some plausible response.

In the meantime, the same news program delivered the Kremlin’s response to the Czech action over the weekend to expel 18 diplomats from the Russian embassy in Prague over allegations that Russia was involved in blowing up an arms depot near the capital back in 2014, an event which previously the Czech authorities had blamed on the owners-managers of the depot.  Per the Kremlin, these new and absurd Czech charges of Russia’s nefarious activities were agreed with Washington to direct attention away from the pending story about U.S. involvement in plans to murder the Belarus head of state.

Are we headed to World War III?  If the war machinery today were like what existed in August 1914, the answer would be unquestionably yes.  It is our good fortune that until someone on either side of the East-West divide pushes the Red Button, there are ways back from the abyss. However, we are still heading in the wrong direction, towards the abyss, and the United States is the prime mover.

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Understanding Brazil’s Crisis

April 20th, 2021 by Prof. Mauricio Metri

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The current Brazilian crisis gave its first signs with “spontaneous” demonstrations in 2013 on account of the bus fare rising in São Paulo. It was the spark for an escalation of the struggles faced by President Rousseff of the Workers Party, whose responses avoided clashes and repression. In the following year, although the Brazilian economy was at its lowest level of unemployment in its history and achieved positive social outcomes, leaving, for example, the UN hunger map, the protests in opposition to the then-administration increased on behalf of fighting against corruption.

The struggles soon spread throughout society due to the intensification of the 2014 electoral dispute for the presidency. Despite the good social outcomes, the tight victory in the elections ended up pushing Rousseff to carry out a change in the economic policy. She had to deal with some shocks and macroeconomic imbalances, whose final result was to add a new component to the context, exploited by opposers. Since 2015, Brazilian society has faced a prolonged economic crisis, alternating recession, and stagnation.

The gravest component has happened a year later with the beginning of an institutional crisis related to the fundamental principles and guarantees of the Democratic State of the Law in Brazil, established by the 1988 Constitution. In 2016, the coup against President Dilma Rousseff carried out for silly reasons and without a crime of responsibility was the first act. The arrest of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2018, by a controversial legal process, was the second. According to the polls, he was the most popular politician in the country and the favorite to win the elections that year. Nowadays, it is proved that the prosecutors worked together with the judge aiming to convict the former president. Both acts have set the country on the road to a deep, political, economic, and institutional crisis. It was the opportunity for the emergence of a right-wing extremist through spreading fake news and post-truth.

How come part of the Brazilian society has become supporters of this process is a good question. There are at least three social dynamics behind it.

The first and more evident dynamic is the capital-work confrontation. During the Workers’ Party’s administrations (2003-2015), there were expressive increases in the salary mass, especially in the minimum wage, which improved 74% in real terms. The government has established a valuation mechanism, which has restored inflationary losses as well as granted real salary increases. Furthermore, there was significant growth in social investments especially in public education and health which favored the poorest layers of society. The combination of the strength of minimum wages and expressive growth in job opportunities, achieving full employment in 2014, compelled the middle class to change their lifestyle to a modern pattern more similar to other western countries, whose domestic services are expensive. In Brazil, up to now, the middle class is used to counting on a large group of cheap domestic workers, like maids, cooks, cleaners, doormen, babysitters, janitors, etc.

From a historical point of view, labor in Brazil is structurally so low-cost that even the family’s framework in the middle classes bases on the widespread use of domestic services by inexpensive value. It is another social dynamic of confrontation in the country whose origins go back to the slavery aspect of colonial brazil, which has left deep marks up to the present. In this context, one of the most symbolic government acts was the constitutional amendment carried out by Rousseff in 2012 regularizing domestic labor. The bill matched the labor rights of domestic servants to those of workers in general. Somehow, Dilma’s administration tried to put an end to semi-slave labor present in Brazilian middle-class homes, which mainly has affected black and poor women. Quota policy for black and poor young people to access public universities, the best qualified in the country, is another important example. It is not difficult to understand the aversion of the upper and middle classes towards Rousseff and Lula. These Brazilian layers effectively ended up acting in defense of their class privileges, which have roots in the colonial era.

Despite all these clashes, the Brazillian conservative forces were unable to accomplish a coup, as the one had happened against president Rousseff and the later arrest of former president Lula. There was another actor very disappointed and worried about the way that the country was moving forward.

Throughout Lula and Dilma administrations, geostrategic antagonisms of hard overcoming have arisen with the United States, the most powerful country in the world. The first one related to Brazil’s National Defense Policy (2005) and the National Defense Strategy (2008), as well as the Union of South American Nations (2008), coordinated by Brazil in the Region. All of them structurally changed the emphasis on the security agenda. Instead of stressing internal threats, as guided by the U.S. Doctrines for the South American countries since the Second World War, priority was given to external threats, especially foreign powers. The main objective was to improve the Region’s international insertion and achieve more autonomy for the countries in the system. It also searched to strengthen the control on strategic natural resources like oil reserves. It implemented policies for cooperation among the South American countries without the presence of the United States. On the economic side, there has been the reformulation of Mercosul, not by liberal bias anymore. On the political one, it has established a regional security agenda through the Union of South American Nations (USAN), undermining the Organization of American States (OAS) controlled by the United States.

A second international antagonism arose with the discovery in 2007 of large reserves of high-quality oil in the pre-salt layer deep under the South Atlantic Ocean. Three years later, the Brazilian government approved specific legislation to this new frontier, placing Petrobras (a Brazillian state oil company) at the center of pre-salt exploration. In the first auction of the pre-salt reserves in 2013, Petrobras won the bid in partnership with Chinese companies to the detriment of the American ones, which had abandoned the process a month earlier due to diplomatic problems between Brazil and the United States, accentuating the contradictions. Those diplomatic problems were related to the espionage of president Rousseff and Petrobras by the National Security Agency.

There was yet a third antagonism regarding the international financial field. The strengthening of the BRICS as well as Brazil’s commitment to improving its partnership with Russia and China were not well seen by the United States. The Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) and the New Development Bank (NDB) will have allowed countries with difficulties in their Balances of Payments to be financed in convertible currency by the end of their full implementation. If these multilateral financial institutions are successful, they will act outside the influence of North Atlantic great powers, competing with the international institutions enshrined in the Bretton Woods Agreements (IMF and World Bank), controlled by the United States. As an effect, the Bretton Woods institutions will lose their framing capacity due to the end of the stabilization loan monopoly.

Considering all those facts, national and foreign conservative groups have converged forces against the Worker Party’s administrations and its leaders. As a result, there was a coup against President Rousseff, not to mention the prison of the most popular politician in Brazil, former president Lula, based on “lawfare”. The strategy of condemning and interfering in the democratic political process has led to the rise of extreme right-wing in Brazil, connected to the militias, criminal paramilitary groups.

Therefore, after 2016, Brazilian foreign policy has changed abruptly, returning to an old tradition of automatic alignment with Washington. It was for no other reason that the post-coup administrations have opened the oil and gas sector to foreign companies (especially to the western ones), including the pre-salt reserves, while Petrobras has been criminalized within and outside the country. Furthermore, general principles and some important initiatives have been emptied or even abandoned, like multilateralism, south-south cooperation, BRICS, the Union of South American Nations, etc.

Domestically, contrary to the world tendency, the after-coup administrations have implemented an ultra-liberal economic agenda characterized by privatization, flexibilization of labor and environmental laws, cutting government spending in education, health, research & development, etc. Those initiatives have only exacerbated the social and economic crisis, such as favoring social inequalities which are already so huge in the country.

Since 2018, the scenario has become even worse. The current administration’s attitude has been quite problematic due to different sorts of racist, homophobic, misogynistic actions, such as positions against human rights, indigenous people, and environmental preservation. Amid this crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic exploded in the world, exacerbated in Brazil due to the government’s inaction and the president’s denialist and anti-scientific behavior. Now, the country has become the world center of pandemic.

Lately, two events have impacted the national context. First, it was the defeat of Trump in the American election, removing the most important international supporter of the current Brazillian President and isolating him on the world stage. Second, the Brazilian supreme court has decided that the process against former President Lula had been defrauded, and consequently the court annulled it. This decision meant the first step toward the normalization of political life in the country. The drama in Brazil is the considerable difference between the time of politics and that of the virus.

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Mauricio Metri is Associate Professor at the Institute of International Relations and Defense of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Brazil, and the Graduate Program in International Political Economy (UFRJ). PhD, Master and Graduate in Economics.

UK About to Send Ships to the Black Sea

April 20th, 2021 by Lucas Leiroz de Almeida

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New tensions are emerging in Ukraine as more countries decide to intervene in the region. This time, the United Kingdom, defending Kiev’s interests and showing support to the US and NATO, decided to participate in the crisis in Eastern Europe by sending military ships from its Royal Navy to occupy the Black Sea. The act sounds truly irresponsible, considering that it involves another major military power in a regional crisis, unnecessarily increasing tensions that would be resolved peacefully without the involvement of foreign powers.

According to British media, a Type 45 destroyer, armed with anti-aircraft missiles, and a Type 23 anti-submarine frigate will leave the Royal Navy’s HMS Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier group, which is in the Mediterranean, and will head across the Bosporus Strait to the Black Sea. The strong potential for destruction of these vessels highlights British plans for the Black Sea region. The Royal Navy is prepared to act with a military force that is absolutely huge for the current dimension of tensions, which shows that the West really expects an open conflict to arise in the region.

In parallel, sources at the Turkish Foreign Ministry confirmed to the media that London recently sent a notification to Ankara about the passage of British ships through the Bosporus Strait, which gives access to the Black Sea. This is expected to take place in the first week of May. The details of the operation are not yet known as well as whether the vessels assigned to the mission will cross the route to the Black Sea simultaneously or at different times, however, it is clear that there will be a significant escalation in military activities in the area in the coming weeks.

It is important to emphasize that, according to the data obtained so far, it appears that the British plans will violate the rules established in the Montreux Convention, which regulates naval activities in the region, limiting the number of ships from countries not bathed by the Black Sea, and the simultaneous displacement of vessels in those waters. If British ships cross the region simultaneously, there will be a violation of international law and, even if the passage is operated in a non-simultaneous way, there may be as abuse of the rules, depending on the number of ships – which is still uncertain, considering that NATO forces will also send more vessels to the site. Taking into account that several American ships have already been sent to the Black Sea recently and that more vessels are expected to arrive in the region soon, the flow of ships is likely to exceed the limits imposed by the Convention.

This is not the first time – and it certainly will not be the last time – that the UK sends its military forces to Ukraine in support of Kiev. In 2018, British troops and ships were sent to the region in order to support Kiev against “Russian hostilities”. At the time, London claimed to defend Ukrainian “democratic freedom” and invested heavily in bilateral military partnerships. This alignment remains today and tends to continue as the UK shares the American interest in implementing a policy of encircling Russia – interest that has declined significantly in Europe, for example, but which remains strong in London.

In fact, all tensions involving disputes in maritime territory have a common symbolic character: in tactics of naval warfare, demonstrating strength is more important than having real military force. When the West tries to allocate as many military vessels as possible with high destructive power in the Black Sea, its intention is simply to show strength in order to impose fear on Russia, trying to pressure Moscow to assume a position of obedience.

In the specific case, the West wants to prevent Russia from exercising its sovereignty over Crimea and, for that, it is essential to obstruct the flow of navigations in the Black Sea and maintain a permanent encirclement policy. This orientation by the West has intensified in recent weeks due to a number of factors that are growing tensions in the region, however, most of these factors are just unfounded accusations by Kiev and NATO to justify coercive measures against Russia – such as the accusation that Moscow was allocating nuclear weapons in Crimea. In imposing a naval siege on Russia, the West also acts provocatively as it makes it more difficult to maintain Russian activities in its own territory, demanding a reaction from the country. The West’s main objective is precisely to receive a Russian reaction that justifies more measures and more violence – and that is why Moscow presents a patient, strategic posture and slowly builds an adequate response, by non-violent means.

A symbolic war with its spectacles of constant displays of strength is absolutely unnecessary for a tense and complicated region like the Black Sea. The Western stance is dangerous and, above all, unsustainable. Biden, apparently, remains willing to meet with Putin and negotiate a solution for Ukraine. But how does he expect a positive response from Moscow when the US and its main allies continue to increase violence day after day?

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Lucas Leiroz is a research fellow in international law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

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General Stephen Townsend, commander of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), and General Kenneth McKenzie, commander of U.S. Central Command, are scheduled to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 22. The testimony, both open and closed, will address the proposed 2022 National Defense Authorization Act which is reported to include a total of $753 billion for the Pentagon’s operations around the world.

The last time AFRICOM’s Townsend addressed that committee was in January of last year, when he spoke in depth of his command’s, and more broadly the U.S.’s overall, strategy toward Africa.

Commanders of the six geographical unified combatant commands the Pentagon employs to divide up the world – Africa Command, Central Command, European Command, Indo-Pacific Command, Northern Command and Southern Command – are duty-bound to appear before the Senate Armed Services Committee and its equivalent in the House of Representatives to solicit funding and so must give an account of themselves and their commands. (General Townsend also appeared before the House Armed Services Committee in March of 2020 with Central Command’s General McKenzie in a hearing on National Security Challenges and U.S. Military Activities in the Greater Middle East and Africa.)

In his testimony last year Townsend’s comments not only laid out AFRICOM’s perspective and plans for the world’s second-most populous continent but prefigured what has become the U.S.’s central global strategy, which is now coming fully into its own with the Biden-Harris administration: that the U.S. is in competition with – in fact is in conflict with – China and Russia, individually and jointly, in every part of the world. From Africa to the Arctic, from Europe to South America, from the Middle East to the Asia-Pacific region. And in most every category, military and civilian. Trade and finance, ownership of foreign debt, mineral and other resources, energy and energy transit, port and rail and road construction projects, foreign investments in the private and public sectors, diplomatic relations with the other nations of the world, control of shipping lanes and maritime choke points, international arms sales, military training of other nations’ armed forces, communications and cyber security, democracy and human rights and their alleged subversion, information (ours) and disinformation (theirs), almost ad infinitum.

Townsend identified three security threats in Africa, to Africa itself and to the U.S. and its allies and, grandiosely, the world: in his order, China, Russia and violent extremist organizations (VEOs) of the al-Shabaab and other varieties the U.S. has been waging war and counterinsurgency war against in Somalia, Mali, the Central African Republic, Congo (Kinshasa), South Sudan, Uganda and elsewhere over the past twenty years. However, now the emphasis has been shifted away from those wars as, in the commander’s words, AFRICOM “must orient the bulk of our efforts against China and Russia even as we counter VEOs that threaten America.”

His comments, excerpts of which appear below, have recently been echoed by European Command commander General Tod Wolters (who is also NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe), Secretary of State Antony Blinken and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg inter alia in regard to what Washington and its military and political allies in Europe and elsewhere have collectively identified as the global challenge of China and Russia.

Townsend’s presentation last year, in a section called Africa and National Security, contained unadulterated geopolitics that evoke the writings of Halford Mackinder in defining Africa as a global crossroads where “Africa watches over strategic choke points and sea lines of communication, including the Mediterranean Sea and the Strait of Gibraltar on NATO’s southern flank, the Red Sea and the Bab al Mandeb strait, and the Mozambique Channel.”

The reference to NATO’s southern flank is neither fortuitous nor peripheral. As every country in Europe except Russia (and the tiny island nation of Cyprus) is a NATO member or partner, and as every North African country except Libya (for the moment) is a member of NATO’s Mediterranean Dialogue military partnership, Africa is now NATO’s southern flank as Russia is its eastern one; by NATO’s expansion toward both locations.

The waterways mentioned above, he added, are essential to the functioning of not only AFRICOM but all U.S. unified combabant commands throughout the world and are vital to “African, U.S., and global prosperity.”

He immediately moved on to a discussion of Global Power Competition, which begins with this paragraph:

“China and Russia have long recognized the strategic and economic importance of Africa, and continue to seize opportunities to expand their influence across the continent. The National Defense Strategy directs us to prioritize great power competition with China and Russia due to the ‘magnitude of the threats they post to U.S. security and prosperity today and the potential for those threats to increase in the future.’”

Again, the threats supposedly presented by China and Russia – inevitably coupled – to Africa (and to the world in Africa) are inseparable from the alleged threat the duo poses to the U.S. and its allies and partners in every other part of the world. Referred to as “malign actors,” China and Russia were accused of “coercive and exploitative activities” which “undermine and threaten” the stability of African nations.

Anyone familiar with the history of Africa over the past five hundred years would have to be astonished by that claim. That Washington, which has not only coerced and exploited most of Africa since the end of World War II and played a hand in several violent coups and wars, direct (as that against Libya a decade ago) and proxy, would accuse China and Russia in the above regard is beyond presumption. Beyond reason. Perhaps beyond sanity.

The commander went on to accuse China of disguising military penetration of Africa behind the construction of ports (“These Chinese seaports are not genuine commercial ports”) and other infrastructure projects, specifically in Djibouti where China established a naval base four years ago. Elsewhere Townsend spoke of there being 6,000 U.S. in Africa at any given time, half of those at the Pentagon’s Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti where the U.S. has been for twenty years. He evidently saw no contradiction in his statements.

That the commander of AFRICOM, whose area of responsibility includes all of Africa’s 54 nations except for Egypt (which remains in that of U.S. Central Command), would accuse China of posing a military threat to Africa and the world by opening a small naval base in minuscule Djibouti (population: 973,000) is beyond any sensible person’s ability to comprehend.

He also castigated China and Russia for selling arms to African nations, with Russia reportedly being the largest arms dealer, not mentioning that Russia, as successor state to the Soviet Union, inherited military relations with nations from Egypt to Angola and Ethiopia among dozens of others on the continent. One of the purposes of inaugurating AFRICOM in 2008 was to dominate – monopolize – the arms trade there with the sales of “NATO interoperable” weaponry.

In general, in an exercise that goes beyond mere irony, Townsend declared “it is clear that China prioritizes Africa and Russia sees an opportunity to gain a strong position on NATO’s southern flank.”

As Russia is encroaching on NATO’s eastern flank simply by remaining where it is.

Regarding NATO and Africa, before the beginning of its post-Cold War expansion into Central and Eastern Europe NATO’s members included every European colonial, imperial and settler nation in Africa over the last half-millennium: Britain, France, Portugal, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Turkey.

Townsend didn’t neglect any part of the contingent in conjuring up the China-Russia threat. North Africa, where Russia “continues to harvest benefits from the instability in Libya,” the Horn of Africa with China in Djibouti and the rest of Africa as well: “China and Russia are in a position of advantage in central and southern Africa. Russia is testing its playbook for malign activity in the Central African Republic.” In Mozambique, Russia is doubly villainous in “provid[ing] second-rate counterterrorism assistance in the hopes of buying oil and gas concessions.”

The AFRICOM chief summed up Pentagon concerns over Africa – and by implication every other part of the globe – in declaring that “longterm global power competition with China and Russia and the need to limit the harmful influence of malign actors in the region is of utmost importance.”

Because “if the U.S. steps back from Africa” – and Europe and the Middle East and Central Asia and Southern Asia and East Asia and the South Pacific and the rest of Oceania and South and Central America and the Arctic and the Antarctic, but these areas aren’t in AFRICOM’s area of responsibility – “too far, China and Russia will fill the void to our detriment.”

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We all owe Farah Nabulsi an enormous debt of gratitude. In a short 24-minute film, “The Present”, she has exposed the oppressive indecency of the Israeli occupation while telling the deeply moving story of a Palestinian family. What is especially exciting is that after winning awards at a number of international film festivals, Ms Nabulsi has been nominated for an Academy Award for this remarkable work of art.     

It’s a simple story about a complex reality: Yusef, a Palestinian man on his day off from work, takes Yasmine, his little daughter, into the city to buy his wife, Noor, an anniversary present. It ought to be simple, but it’s not , because to get to the shops they must pass through an Israeli-controlled checkpoint. And the ordeal they must endure becomes the crux of the story.

Ever since I first witnessed the dehumanising and humiliating treatment meted out to Palestinians at Israeli checkpoints, I’ve tried to explain the situation to American audiences. I don’t have to try any longer. I can just ask them to see “The Present”.

After that first experience with the checkpoints, I wrote a piece , “Anger and Fear”. It was horrifying to witness. Young Israeli boys and girls holding weapons, shouting commands, demeaning the older Palestinians, lined up in what looked like cattle shoots, trying to get to work, go to school, shop for necessities, or visit family. “Don’t look at me.” “Keep your heads down.” “Hold up your ID’s.” The Palestinians, with the heads down obeyed these commands because they had no other choice if they wanted to pass.

It was the “master/slave dialectic” playing out in front of me. The young Israelis demonstrating anger to assert their control. But without their weapons and their angry commands, they were frightened little people. Meanwhile, the Palestinians were feigning fear. Because they had no control over their lives, they suffered the indignity in silence. But inside they were seething in anger at the humiliation they were forced to endure.

We’ve seen this play out in other settings. It’s the way occupation armies always behave. It’s also the way police forces behave in America’s inner cities. And the consequences, in all cases, are devastating.

What’s so remarkable about ‘The Present’ is how much it accomplishes in such a short time. Palestinians in this film aren’t one-dimensional stick figures. Just five minutes into the story and you’ve fallen in love with Yusef, Noor, and Yasmine. Little gestures and telling glances bring home the obvious affection they feel for one another. Because the portraits of this little Palestinian family are so real, you care about them and want them to find happiness. Aside from the powerful story that unfolds, this is one of the film’s most important contributions.

Because Palestinians have long been reduced in the West to objects or “a problem to be solved” so that Israeli humanity can live with security and peace, elevating Palestinian humanity becomes a revolutionary act. It upends the equation that Israeli hasbarists have created and reinforced to justify their behaviours.

As powerful as the story is, it’s dramatic ending is equally rich in meaning and the message it conveys. I won’t ruin it for you because I want you to experience it for yourself. But when you do, just remember a lesson I learned from one of my mentors, Dan Berrigan, the activist Jesuit priest. He told me that in the insanity of our Kafkaesque world, just being able to affirm a simple truth like “Two plus two equals four” becomes a revolutionary act. In “The Present”, it’s Yasmine who affirms simple truth — the revolutionary act — and leaves the oppressors powerless.

Farah Nabulsi has truly given us a present. While watching “The Present”, viewers will experience a gamut of emotions: affection, anger, fear, sadness and then exhilaration. Please watch it, and cheer her to victory on April 25th.  Then, on May 5th, please join me for my “Coffee and a Column” at 2:00 pm ET and thank her for this remarkable gift.

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The writer is president of the Washington-based Arab American Institute.

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

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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This spring, the biotechnology company Oxitec plans to release genetically modified (GM) mosquitoes in the Florida Keys. Oxitec says its technology will combat dengue fever, a potentially life-threatening disease, and other mosquito-borne viruses — such as Zika — mainly transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito.

While there have been more than 7,300 dengue cases reported in the United States between 2010 and 2020, a majority are contracted in Asia and the Caribbean, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In Florida, however, there were 41 travel-related cases in 2020, compared with 71 cases that were transmitted locally.

Native mosquitoes in Florida are increasingly resistant to the most common form of control — insecticide — and scientists say they need new and better techniques to control the insects and the diseases they carry. “There aren’t any other tools that we have. Mosquito nets don’t work. Vaccines are under development but need to be fully efficacious,” says Michael Bonsall, a mathematical biologist at the University of Oxford, who is not affiliated with Oxitec but has collaborated with the company in the past, and who worked with the World Health Organization to produce a GM mosquito-testing framework.

Bonsall and other scientists think a combination of approaches is essential to reducing the burden of diseases — and that, maybe, newer ideas like GM mosquitoes should be added to the mix. Oxitec’s mosquitoes, for instance, are genetically altered to pass what the company calls “self-limiting” genes to their offspring; when released GM males breed with wild female mosquitoes, the resulting generation does not survive into adulthood, reducing the overall population.

But Oxitec has been proposing to experimentally release GM mosquitos in the Keys since 2011, and the plan has long been met with suspicion among locals and debate among scientists. Some locals say they fear being guinea pigs. Critics say they are concerned about the possible effects GM mosquitoes could have on human health and the environment. In 2012, the Key West City Commission objected to Oxitec’s plan; in a non-binding referendum four years later, residents of Key Haven — where the mosquitoes would have been released — rejected it, while residents in the surrounding county voted in support of the release. With the decision left up to the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District, officials approved the trial to be conducted elsewhere in the Keys.

According to Oxitec, the release was delayed due to a transfer of jurisdiction over the project from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to the Environmental Protection Agency.

The company reapplied for approval to release a new version of the mosquitoes, called OX5034, in the Keys. In May, the EPA granted a two-year experimental use permit, which the agency can cancel at any time. State and local sign-off soon followed — finally giving the project the greenlight.

Oxitec’s OX5034 mosquitoes are the first GM mosquitoes approved for release in the U.S. The company has already conducted a trial with the OX5034 mosquitoes in Brazil and released more than a billion of a previous version, called OX513A, there and in other locations over the years — including the Cayman Islands. The company says it is confident in the effectiveness and safety of the technology.

But some scientists want to hit pause on Oxitec’s Florida trial, to find what they say is a fairer process in deciding to release the mosquitoes. Others want to see clearer proof that this technology is even necessary, claiming that the company has only released its most positive data with the public and has kept other key data, including whether the mosquitoes curb disease transmission, private. And if the release actually launches as planned, some Keys residents say they aim to interfere.

Critics also say that Oxitec failed to engage with local communities in Florida and get their consent to release the mosquitoes. “What’s the most upsetting is that the very people that are going to be most impacted, both by the benefits or the risks of such a decision, have like the smallest voice in how these choices are made. I think that’s a really big issue,” says Natalie Kofler, a molecular biologist and bioethicist who founded Editing Nature, a platform that advocates “for inclusive decision-making processes to steer” the use of genetic technology. “If Oxitec doesn’t do this right,” she adds, “we could have huge impact on delaying the use of other beneficial technologies like that in the future.”

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Oxitec’s OX5034 mosquitoes are programmed to combat the transmission of mosquito-borne illnesses by suppressing local Aedes aegypti populations. Oxitec — which is U.S.-owned and based in the United Kingdom — describes their mosquitoes as “friendly” because they will only release males, which, unlike females, do not bite humans or transmit disease.

At Oxitec’s laboratory in the U.K., the company genetically engineers the mosquitoes, giving the insects the “self-limiting” gene that makes the females dependent on the antibiotic tetracycline. Without the drug, they will die. Eggs from these genetically-altered mosquitoes — which will hatch both male and female insects — will be shipped to the Keys. Mosquitoes require water to mature from an egg to an adult; when Oxitec’s team adds water to the boxes the mosquitoes will be deployed in, both GM males and GM females will hatch. With no tetracycline present in the box, the GM females are expected to die in early larval stages.

The male mosquitoes will survive and carry the gene. When they leave the boxes, the insects will, hypothetically, fly away to mate with wild females to pass the gene to the next wild generation, according to Nathan Rose, head of regulatory affairs at Oxitec. Kevin Gorman, the company’s chief development officer, says the local female mosquito population will be increasingly reduced — which will also reduce the number of wild male mosquitoes in the treatment areas.

Gorman emphasized to Undark that the EPA and other regulators found no risk in using tetracycline in breeding their genetically-altered mosquitoes. But some scientists think the presence of this antibiotic in the environment does pose a risk. According to Jennifer Kuzma, co-founder and co-director of the Genetic Engineering and Society Center at North Carolina State University, tetracyline is commonly used in Florida to prevent bacterial diseases in agriculture — particularly in citrus groves — and to treat bacteria in sewage plants. The use of the antibiotic for these purposes may mean that it will remain in the environment, especially in water where the mosquitoes breed, which could allow Oxitec’s female mosquitoes to survive. While the company does not plan to release the mosquitos near areas where the antibiotic is used, Kuzma says the EPA’s risk assessment did not include testing of any standing water for tetracycline — something, she adds, “would have been easy enough to do for good due diligence.”

Skeptics of Oxitec’s GM mosquitoes include local residents, physicians, scientists, and environmental activists. Many of these opponents say they aren’t anti-GMO, but disagree with how the approval process has been handled. One group has even kept a running list of what it sees as Oxitec’s wrongdoings since it first began experimental releases. The list includes Oxitec’s lack of disease monitoring in the countries where it has released mosquitoes; the unknown price of its technology; and complaints that the company has overstated the success of some of it its trials.

“I cannot trust this company. I cannot trust this technology,” says Mara Daly, a resident of Key Largo who says she’s been following Oxitec’s plans for nine years.

“This is not a traditional pesticide,” she adds. “ This is not a chemical that you can trace. This is something completely different, new emerging technology and we need better regulation.”

Phil Goodman, chairman of the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District (FKMCD), an independently-elected commission carrying out mosquito control within Monroe County, says that many of those who discredit Oxitec’s evidence do not understand the technology. “They’re fearmongering,” he says.

“They have very little credibility here in the Florida Keys as far as I’m concerned,” he adds.

But people like Daly and Barry Wray, executive director of the Florida Keys Environmental Coalition, disagree.

“We want to know it’s safe,” says Wray, who notes that his group more generally supports GM technology. “We don’t have another Florida Keys ecosystem. We don’t have another Florida Keys community. We have this one.”

Daly, Wray, and others point to what they perceive as the FKMCD’s disrespect for public opinion. They argue that the community wasn’t given a chance to consent before the EPA approval. There was a 30-day public forum in September 2019 about Oxitec’s technology application, with 31,174 comments opposing release and 56 in support. A statement emailed to Undark by Melissa Sullivan, an EPA spokesperson, noted that the agency considered these comments during the review, but critics think it happened too quickly to be of real use.

In June, Kofler and Kuzma wrote an opinion piece in The Boston Globe about the EPA approval, critiquing the agency’s regulatory system and calling for a better process for evaluating new biotechnologies. The researchers expressed concern that “the EPA did not convene an independent, external scientific advisory panel to review” Oxitec’s claims about its mosquito strategy and that the agency only publicly released its risk assessment after approving the technology. The “American public,” Kofler and Kuzma wrote, “needs to be assured that these decisions are made free of conflicts of interest.” The statement from the EPA’s Sullivan noted that the agency “conducted an extensive risk assessment based on the best available science.”

Some critics also wanted there to be more public engagement. Kofler and Kuzma say they offered to provide their expertise, along with other outside experts, to the mosquito control district to allow more discussion about the GM mosquitoes with the Keys community. But Kofler says the district wasn’t responsive. Oxitec itself launched webinars about their new product, but not until after the EPA approval. “Here we are, like in the final hour, having these conversations that needed to be happening a year ago,” says Kofler.

Without public trust and enthusiasm, it doesn’t matter whether Oxitec’s mosquito technique works, says Guy Reeves, a genetic researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Germany, who stresses that he doesn’t think the company’s approach is unsafe. “If the population in Florida Keys becomes so sensitized to this issue — that they can no longer cooperate with each other — that’s good for the mosquitoes, not good for the people,” he adds.

Based on their first generation mosquito OX513A, Oxitec says it has shown that the approach reduces a targeted mosquito population in trials in both Brazil and the Cayman Islands. But there’s no evidence that this new OX5034 mosquito release will actually be worth it for mosquito suppression, says Reeves. Oxitec also hasn’t explained how their new mosquito will directly curb human diseases, such as dengue. Reducing disease transmission and burden should be measures of efficacy for this technology, says Kofler.

According to Gorman, independent disease suppression data has only been collected by municipalities in Brazil because that’s where most of the company’s trials have been released in larger scales. These municipalities have shown that Oxitec mosquitoes have reduced dengue cases in areas of release, Gorman says. In order for Oxitec to collect additional data, he adds, the company needs to release and test large areas over sustained periods of time. Gorman maintains that the company is not required to report formal health impact studies.

Reeves adds that Oxitec also hasn’t explained what resources are needed to sustain this product, how long it could take to be effective, or the cost. When asked about the cost of the Florida Keys project, Oxitec responded to Undark by email: “Oxitec is a pre-commercial, pre-profit company. We will not profit from this pilot project in Florida. We are paying for it ourselves.”

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Oxitec has released more than a billion of their OX513A mosquitoes over the past 10 years. According to independent scientists, some of those experiments did not go well.

For example, researchers at Yale University and collaborators from Brazil analyzed Oxitec’s 2015 release of OX513A in Brazil. The scientists confirmed that some offspring of the genetically modified mosquitoes — which were supposed to die and not pass new genes to the wild population — survived to adulthood and mated with their native counterparts. Between 10 and 60 percent of the native mosquitoes contained genes from Oxitec, according to the Yale study, which published in Nature in 2019. The paper’s authors concluded they do not know what impacts these mixed mosquitoes have on disease control or transmission, but added that their findings underscore the importance of monitoring the genetics of the insects.

Oxitec disagreed with the findings and responded on the journal’s website. Oxitec told Gizmodo that Yale’s study includes “numerous false, speculative, and unsubstantiated claims and statements about Oxitec’s mosquito technology.” And when Kofler and three other scientists wrote about Oxitec’s Brazil trial in The Conversation, Oxitec pushed to have the article retracted, says Kofler.

“Here we are, like in the final hour, having these conversations that needed to be happening a year ago,” says Kofler.

For this coming release, some Key Largo locals are willing to act on their anger. Daly, for instance, says that if the mosquitoes are deployed in her neighborhood, she’ll try to put insecticide in any box she finds or send it to an expert to test — even if it means getting in trouble with the federal authorities. “I already have my arresting officer and she said she’s gonna clean her handcuffs for me,” she says. “I don’t care.”

Ideally, Daly says, it won’t have to come to that. She and other locals hope to stop Oxitec before the latest mosquitos are delivered. Daly says she has been busy organizing protests — like one that happened recently in Key Largo — and giving out yard signs to residents who don’t want their property used in the trial. “Locals are pissed off. So I have been busy getting the press to cover the local opposition,” Daly wrote in an email to Undark.

“The first flying insect or animal that can actually use our human blood for a friggin trial for a product to come to market without my consent,” Daly says.

“That’s my blood,” she adds. “That’s my son’s blood. That’s my dog’s blood.”

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Taylor White is a freelance journalist based in Cape Cod, MA and a graduate of the Science, Health & Environmental Reporting Program at the NYU school of journalism. Her work has appeared in NOVA GBH, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, GenomeWeb, Spectrum, and Science Vs.

Greed and the European Super League

April 20th, 2021 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

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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Suffocating the grassroots.  Mocking the working class origins of the game.  World football, and primarily European club football, has long done away with loyalties in favour of cash and contract.  The professionalization of the game has seen a difficult relationship between fan, spectator and sporting management, none better exemplified than the price of tickets, the role of branding and sponsorship. 

The apotheosis of this has arrived in the form of a proposed breakaway European Super League.  Like a mafia-styled cartel, twelve of Europe’s elite football clubs have banded together to create their own, sealed competition.  The English contribution will be Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, Tottenham, Chelsea and Arsenal.  Juventus, AC Milan and Inter provide the Italian contingent; Barcelona, Real Madrid and Athletico Bilbao supply the Spanish element.  To these will be added three as yet unconfirmed founding members and five annual qualification spots. The competition itself will feature two small leagues of ten clubs each, with the highest finishers facing each other in an elimination phase to eventually reach a deciding final in May.

The decision reeks of smoky, backroom secrecy, and promises to supplant the UEFA Champions League.  Initial infrastructure payments between the clubs will be 3.5 billion euros, followed by 10 billion euros for an initial period of commitment.  As with any such decisions made in the stratosphere of corrupt, gold crazed management, the foot soldiers, front line workers and fans are merely incidental.  In some cases, not even coaches were consulted.  Liverpool’s Jürgen Klopp was left dumbfounded. “I heard for the first time about it yesterday,” he told Sky Sports.  “We are not involved in any process, not me or the players.”

For Klopp, accepting the proposal was tantamount to rigging the competition, creating a closed shop where the relegation and admission of clubs would be impossible.  “I like the fact that West Ham might play Champions League next year.  I don’t want them to, because I want us to be there, but I like that they have the chance.”  For Klopp, “the Champions League is the Super League, in which you do not always end up playing against the same teams.”  His nightmare: a perennial bout of competition between the same football clubs, a franchise model, in other words, commonly accepted in US sports.  (Consider Major League Soccer, NBA basketball and NFL gridiron football.)  “Why should we create a system where Liverpool faces Real Madrid for 10 straight years?”  Klopp’s observations impressed former Manchester United footballer turned commentator Gary Neville.  “He’s destroyed his owners on national television.”

Traditional football officialdom is also furious at the move.  UEFA president Aleksander Čeferin cast a withering eye over the idea, focusing his ire on Juventus chairman Andrea Agnelli and Manchester United executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward.  Woodward, the furious president claimed, had expressed his satisfaction with the existing stable of UEFA reforms in a phone call.  But it was obvious that “he had already signed something else.”  Agnelli, however, took the crown, being “the biggest disappointment of all.  I have never seen a person that would lie so many times, so persistently as he did – it is unbelievable.” 

On April 18, UEFA, the English Football Association and the Premier League, the Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) and LaLiga, and the Italian Football Federation (FIGC) and Lega Serie A issued a joint statement of condemnation.  Were the Super League to be established, the various bodies, including FIFA, would “remain united in our efforts to stop this cynical project,” one “founded on the self-interest of a few clubs at a time when society needs solidarity more than ever.”  Judicial and sporting measures were promised.  Bans on the clubs will be implemented, affecting playing at all levels: domestic, European or global.  Participating players will not be able to represent their country.

With some of these governing bodies, virtue has been a difficult thing.  FIFA has a lengthy record of diddling finances, resorting to bribery and greasing backdoor deals.  Over the years, multinational investigations have been conducted into various executive members of the organisation and associated bodies, including former chief Sepp Blatter.  But on the matter of the Super League, the righteous were proving noisy, with the organisation keen to “clarify that it stands firm in favour of solidarity in football and an equitable redistribution model which can help football as a sport, particularly at the global level”.

Attempts to punish the renegades may not be as fruitful as detractors of the Super League think.  Memories seem to have been rinsed on that score, but the English Premier League itself broke away from the English Football League in 1992.  Officialdom, as it was bound to be, was enraged, as were the fans.

The Super League proposal is drawing attention to an already decaying structure, one that sees little by way of revenue returning to the lower leagues and clubs that were already struggling prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.  With that in mind, it is hard to take the views of Prince William, who is president of England’s Football Association, too seriously.  Well it is that “we must protect the entire football community – from the top level to the grassroots – and the values of competition and fairness,” but that project is hardly flourishing as things stand. 

Astronomical transfer fees already keep the top clubs in the clouds, meaning that the Champions League already resembles, on some level, Klopp’s nightmare of repetitive competition.  What the franchise Super League model proposes to do is take it that one step further, creating a closed shop.

Commentary abounds on whether this play is part of a negotiating tactic to better improve the financial standing of the twelve clubs.  With so much football already being played, a mid-week Super League fixture seems like exhausting surfeit.  But for those keeping an eye on football politics, the idea of a reformed European league has been on the table for some years.  In October 2020, the notion of a European Premier League, sponsored by JP Morgan and comprising 18 clubs, was already being mooted.  Alarm was sounded by the words of Barcelona president Josep Maria Bartomeu, who claimed in his resignation statement that the club had “accepted a proposal to participate in a future European Super League”.

Were this league’s establishment culminate in savage retributions – bans, relegations, prohibitions – as promised by the authorities, a standalone creation, hoovering up sponsorships and broadcasting revenues, may well be the default outcome.  Little wonder that the finance wonks suggest keeping the selfish twelve within the tent rather than letting them scamper off.

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

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CDC Violated Law to Inflate COVID Cases and Fatalities

April 19th, 2021 by Dr. Joseph Mercola

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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In this interview, Dr. Henry Ealy, ND, BCHN, better known as Dr. Henele, a certified holistic nutritionist and founder/executive community director of the Energetic Health Institute,1 reviews how U.S. federal regulatory agencies have manipulated COVID-19 statistics to control the pandemic narrative.

He earned his doctorate in naturopathic medicine from SCNM. After graduating from UCLA with a bachelor of science in mechanical engineering, he worked for a major aerospace company as a primary database developer for the International Space Station program. He holds over 20 years of teaching and clinical experience and was the first naturopathic doctor to regularly teach at a major university in the U.S., when he headed up a program at Arizona State University on bioanxiety management.

As he points out, he’s an avid data collector. In October 2020, Henele and a team of other investigators published a paper2 in Science, Public Health Policy and the Law, titled, “COVID-19 Data Collection, Comorbidity & Federal Law: A Historical Retrospective,” which details how the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has enabled the corruption of case- and fatality-reporting data in violation of federal law.

Accuracy of Data Is Paramount for Public Health Policies

The team started looking at CDC data on COVID-19 cases and fatalities in mid-March 2020. He explains:

“What I started doing on March 12 was going through all the data we could find from the Italian Ministry of Health and South Korea. We couldn’t validate any of the data coming out of China. There was just no independent way to do it. What we were seeing out of Italy and South Korea was that we were going to be concerned about people who are over 60, over 70 years of age with preexisting conditions.

That was the main thing coming out of that data. So, we were expecting the same kind of trends here … I started tracking the data on a daily basis from each state health department, and then making sure that what the CDC was reporting was matching up.

What we started to see, very early on, were some significant anomalies between what the states were reporting and what the CDC was saying. It was concerning, because the variance was growing with each day. We have an old saying: ‘Garbage in equals garbage out.’ And that was the concern, because we knew public health policies are going to be based upon the data, so accuracy is of paramount importance.

Then we started delving in a little deeper into how the CDC was supposedly collecting their data. That’s where we saw the National Vital Statistics Systems (NVSS) March 24 guidelines, which were very concerning, and we saw the CDC adopt the Council for State and Territorial Epidemiologists paper on April 14.

What was incredibly concerning about this was that it was all done without any federal oversight, and it was all done without any public comment, especially scientific comment. That became increasingly problematic. We started to see discrepancies in the state of New York alone, in the thousands of fatalities.”

Click here to watch the video.

Special Rules for COVID-19 Fatalities Were Implemented

Importantly, in March 2020, there was a significant change made to the definition of what a COVID-19 fatality was. As explained by Henele, there’s a handbook on death reporting, which has been in use since 2003. There are two key sections on a death certificate. In the first part, the cause of death is detailed. In the second part, contributing factors are listed.

Contributing factors are not necessarily statistically recorded. It’s the first part, the actual cause of death, that is most important for statistical accounting. March 24, 2020, the NVSS updated its guidelines on how to report and track COVID-19-related deaths.

“They were saying that COVID-19 should be listed in Part 1 for statistical tracking, but [only] in cases where it is proven to have caused death, or was assumed to have caused death,” Henele explains.

“What was really concerning about this document was that it specifically stated that any preexisting conditions should be moved from Part 1, where it has been put for 17 years, into Part 2.

So, it was basically taking this and saying, ‘We’re going to create exclusive rules for COVID-19 and we’re going to do a 180 for this single disease …’ The big problem with that is that now you remove the ability for a medical examiner, a coroner, a physician, to interpret [the cause of death] based upon the collective health history of that patient …

You remove their expertise, and you say, ‘You have to count this as COVID-19.’ That takes on an added measure when you incentivize it financially, and that’s what we saw with some of the Medicare and Medicaid payouts …”

Who’s Responsible?

Who has the authority to do this? The answer is “no one.” A federal agency has the ability to propose a data change, at which time it would be registered in the Federal Register. At that point, federal oversight by the Office of Management and Budget kicks in, and the proposed change is opened up for public comment.

Since they did not register the proposed change, there was no oversight and no possibility for the public to comment on the change. Basically, what happened is that these changes were simply implemented without following any of the prescribed rules. “They acted unilaterally, and that’s not how [it] is supposed to work,” Henele says.

As to who took it upon themselves to alter the reporting rules, we don’t know. To identify the culprits, Henele and his team have sent out formal grand jury investigation petitions to every U.S. attorney and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), requesting a thorough, independent and transparent investigation.

“We did it at both state and federal levels. We have sent physical copies to every U.S. attorney and their aides. We sent out over 247 mailings in October [2020],” Henele explains. “We sent out an additional 20 to 30 to various people at the Department of Justice …

They would have the ability to call a grand jury, and that grand jury would have the ability to subpoena all those records to determine who were at fault … All we need is one U.S. attorney. All we need is one person at the Department of Justice to take up the cause.”

Dramatic Implications

The consequences of that change in the definition of the cause of death where COVID-19 is involved have been dramatic. For the full implications, I recommend reading through Henele’s peer-reviewed paper, “COVID-19: CDC Violates Federal Law to Enable Corruption of Fatality-Reporting Data.”3

“We’ve accumulated about 10,000 hours of collective team research into this [paper]. It’s been reviewed by nine attorneys and a judge for accuracy. It’s gone through the peer-review process before being published. We feel it’s tight.

On page 20 of the paper, we have a big graphic showing what the estimated actual fatality count should have been as of August 23, 2020. What was reported on August 23 was 161,392 fatalities caused by COVID-19 …

Had we used the 2003 guidelines, our estimates are that we would have roughly 9,684 total fatalities due to COVID-19. That’s a significant difference. That’s a difference on the scale of as much as 96%. The range that we calculated was 88.9% to 96% inflation.”

Indeed, this matches up with an admission by the CDC in late August 2020, at which time they admitted that only 6% of the total death count had COVID-19 listed as the sole cause of death. The remaining 94% had had an average of 2.6 comorbidities or preexisting health conditions that contributed to their deaths.4

“For absolute 100% accuracy, we’d have to do something like what we were just alerted to by a whistleblower in Florida, where they’ve actually gone in and reexamined every single death certificate and the medical records with them. What they found was that roughly 80% of the fatalities were wrongfully classified as COVID-19 fatalities,” Henele says.

Science Foundations Have Been Violated

Mainstream media have justified pandemic measures “based on the science,” yet the very foundation of science has been violated. The ramifications are enormous, from the destruction of local economies and skyrocketing suicide rates to people being forced to die alone, their family members being barred from being at their bedside during their last moments.

“I lost my mother in in 2002,” Henele says. “The grace of it all was that we were able to get her out of the hospital and fulfill her last request, which was to pass away in her bed with family around her. I grieve for every single person who’s lost someone [during this pandemic] who was not able to be there.

Americans should not have to die alone because we’re worried about some virus that they’re telling us is a problem, when the data, even the data that we know to be inflated and fraudulent, still doesn’t suggest the virility that they want us to believe.”

COVID-19 Timeline

In their paper, Henele and his team detail a timeline of the COVID-19 pandemic and federal laws that impact data handling. Here’s a summary:

In 1946, certain administrative procedures were implemented. The Administrative Procedures Act requires federal agents and agencies to follow certain rules to get things done. These rules are to ensure transparency in government.

“If you’re a federal agency, you have an obligation to the people of this country to make sure that the data you’re publishing is not only accurate, but that it is transparent,”Henele explains.

In 1980, the Paperwork Reduction Act was written into law. In 1995, the Act was amended, designating the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) as the oversight body for all federal agencies’ data.

In October 2002, the Information Quality Act was implemented, which doubles down even further on the accuracy and integrity and data gathering. This act requires federal agencies to meet explicit criteria in order for their data to be published and analyzed.

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In 2005, the Virology Journal published research demonstrating that hydroxychloroquine has strong antiviral effects against SARS-CoV (the virus responsible for SARS) primate cells. This finding was hailed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, Henele notes. In other words, 15 years ago, Fauci admitted that hydroxychloroquine works against coronaviruses. This is public record.

As reported in “The Lancet Gets Lanced With Hydroxychloroquine Fraud” and “How a False Hydroxychloroquine Narrative Was Created,” the myth that this drug was useless at best and dangerous at worst was purposely created using falsified research and trials in which the drug was given in toxic doses.

This fraudulent research was then used to discourage and in some cases block the use of hydroxychloroquine worldwide. As noted by Henele, “It’s not science. We’re in this very weird faith-based model of science, which isn’t science at that point.”

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In 2014, Fauci authorized $3.7 million to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). In 2019, WIV received another $3.7 million. In both instances, this funding was for gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses.

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October 18, 2019, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security hosted Event 201, in conjunction with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum and a few other financial partners. November 17, 2019, China recorded the first known case of COVID-19.

“Now, they could be completely unrelated,” Henele says, “but for us, it’s a very incredible coincidence that you run a simulation a month before a pandemic breaks out. It’s a little tough for me to digest as just a coincidence.”

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January 29, 2020, the White House installed a coronavirus task force, which included Fauci and then-CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield, as well as Derek Kan, then-deputy director of the OMB.

I found this to be a little interesting,” Henele says. “Why would you need an OMB person on a coronavirus task force?”

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March 9, 2020, the CDC alerted Americans over 60 with preexisting conditions that they might be in for a long lockdown out of safety concerns.

March 24, the CDC changed how COVID-19 is recorded on death certificates, de-emphasizing preexisting conditions and comorbidities, and basically calling all deaths in which the patient had a positive SARS-CoV-2 test a COVID-19 death.

“We have, legitimately on record, people who’ve died in a motorcycle accident listed as a COVID-19 death. These are not fictitious things that we’ve made up. Rhode Island had over 80% of their fatalities at one point in either assisted living centers or hospice care. Why are we testing people in hospice care and life care? That’s another interesting question,” Henele says.

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April 14, 2020, the CDC adopted a position paper from a nonprofit, the Council for State and Territorial Epidemiologists, which identifies every single methodology for how to report a probable COVID-19 case, a confirmed COVID-19 case, an epidemiologically-linked or contact-traced COVID case.

“What’s so incredible about this is the standard of proof for a probable case is literally one cough. That’s all a physician needs, [according to] this document, to validate that that person is a probable COVID case,” Henele says.

“And it gets worse. On Page 6 of that document, Section 7B, it explicitly states that they are not going to define a methodology to ensure that the same person cannot be counted multiple times. So, what we end up with is a revolving door.

Now, in terms of new cases, the same person can be counted over and over and over again, without being tested, without having any symptoms. All they need to do is be within 6 feet of someone [who has been deemed positive for SARS-CoV-2] and then a contact tracer can say, ‘OK, well, that person is [also] positive.’

When we looked at data from last week, roughly 27% of the people who were said to be positive actually had a positive test. That means 73% were just told ‘Yeah, we think you got it.’ And that’s good enough, because we’re in this faith-based model of science, instead of a verifiable framework for science, which we’re supposed to be based on.

That person then cannot go back to work until they show a negative test. Well, let’s say they get tested 13 times. Guess what happens? That’s 13 new cases, when it really should only be one.

So, there are major flaws, and the issue that I think a lot of scientists like myself … have with this document and its adoption is that there was no oversight, and there was no public comment period to question some of the obvious flaws in what they were defining as data collection — let alone to ask a very simple question: ‘You’re the CDC, you’re supposed to be the pinnacle of this.

Why do you need to outsource rules and criteria for data collection to a nonprofit entity?’ That doesn’t make much sense to me.”

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Transparency Rules Have Been Grossly Violated

So, what exactly is the connection between the Paperwork Reduction Act and the COVID-19 fatality data? Why is it so important?

“Well, the Paperwork Reduction Act is really about establishing oversight,” Henele explains. “It established the Office of Management and Budget, the OMB, which is under the executive branch. It established them as the key agency for oversight of all data in the entire federal government.

So, when you start seeing IHME [Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation] out of the University of Washington — which is heavily funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to the tune of $384 million in two installments — when you see their data being used at federal levels, you go and look at the Federal Register and you say, ‘OK, where is the 30 to 60 days that we were supposed to have to comment on the use of that data?’

Public comment is part of the Paperwork Reduction Act. That’s what it’s all about. What we saw instead was just, ‘Hey, this is what the IHME is putting out there. We’re going to go with it.’ Well, you can’t do that if you’re a federal agency … IHME is … technically an independent organization, but they don’t have any governmental designation.

They’re not a 501(c)(3), they’re not a 501(c)(4), they’re not a 501(c)(6). They’re just this amorphous nongovernmental organization within our country, and it’s kind of concerning. We’re doing more research on that, but it’s very, very concerning because they don’t have anybody to account to.”

Test-Based Strategy Has Been an Egregious Fraud

In addition to the manipulation of fatality statistics, the statistics of “cases” were also manipulated. Traditionally, a “case” is a patient who is symptomatic; someone who is actually ill. When it comes to COVID-19, however, a “case” suddenly became anyone who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 using a PCR test, or worse, assumed positive based on proximity to someone who tested positive.

I’ve detailed this fraud in many previous articles over the past year, including “Coronavirus Fraud Scandal — The Biggest Fight Has Just Begun” and “The Insanity of the PCR Testing Saga.” “Cases” were also counted multiple times, as explained above. Henele expounds on this issue, noting:

“The CDC specifically enacted what’s called a test-based strategy, which we’ve never done before in medicine for anything. What that test-based strategy means is if you test positive, you got [COVID-19]. But what they didn’t do for the PCR testing was they didn’t identify the agreed upon number of cycles across all states across all labs that are testing.

What most people don’t know is that the closer you get to zero in terms of cycle times, the more likely that the result is going to be negative. The closer you get to 60, the more likely that it’s going to be positive.

Well, we’ve never seen a document coming out of the FDA, coming out of the CDC, coming out of any of the state health departments, that says, ‘We need all labs to be at this specific cycle [threshold]. And if a person is not deemed positive with that number of cycles, then they are not positive.’ So, there’s just flaw after flaw after flaw.”

Data Manipulation Created COVID-19 Pandemic

Most labs used cycle thresholds above 40 — as recommended by the CDC and the World Health Organization — which exponentially increased the likelihood of a positive test, even among completely healthy and noninfectious individuals. The only justification for all of this is that it was done to perpetuate the narrative that we were in a raging pandemic, which was then used to justify the unprecedented destruction of personal freedom and the economy.

“The thing I have to give the folks that have been involved in this credit for is the incredible number of sleights of hands,” Henele says. “It’s a little bit here, a little bit here, a little bit here, a little bit here.

And when that happens, it leads to something that is very dangerous scientifically, and very dangerous for public health policy, which is control of data — the ability to manipulate data … and if you can control the data, you get to control the narrative …

If we’re not going to have an absolute, transparent and verifiable data collection process that is based upon accuracy and integrity of that data, then you can turn that [pandemic emergency] dial up and down at your whim. My hope is that the objective scientist within all of us understands that this is bigger than politics. This is beyond it. This is a severely broken system that we have to fix, and we better do it.”

As discussed in many other articles, it appears the COVID-19 pandemic has in fact been a preplanned justification for the implementation of a global technocrat-led control system, which includes a brand-new financial system to replace the central bank-manufactured fiat economy that is now at the end of its functional life. Fiat currency is manufactured through the creation of debt with interest attached, and the whole world is now so laden with debt it can never be repaid.

If people understood how the central banks of the world have pulled the wool over our eyes, we would simply demand an end to the central banks. Currency ought to be created and managed nationally.

The central banks, of course, do not want this reality to become common knowledge, because then they will no longer be able to manipulate all the countries of the world, so they need the economic breakdown to appear natural. For that, they need a global catastrophe, such as a major war, or a fearsome pandemic necessitating the shutdown of economies.

Through this willful manipulation of case- and fatality statistics, the CDC has been complicit in willful misconduct by generating needless fear that has then been used against you to rob you of your personal freedoms and liberties and help usher in this massive transfer of wealth and global tyranny. As noted by Henele, “People are going to be complicit in their own slavery. People are complicit in putting digital shackles around themselves and really restricting their civil liberties.”

Hopefully, people will begin to understand how pandemic statistics have been, and still are, manipulated to control the narrative and generate unjustified fear for no other reason than to get you to comply with tyrannical measures designed to enslave you, not just temporarily but permanently.

More Information

To understand how we got to this point, please consider reading Henele’s paper, “COVID-19: CDC Violates Federal Law to Enable Corruption of Fatality-Reporting Data.” As noted by Henele:

“I’m looking forward to the day when we look back on this, and go, ‘Oh, we almost fell for one, but we woke up in time and we figured this out. And now we have a good balance of technology, but technology that doesn’t have the right to censor us, technology that doesn’t have the right to control us; we have figured out that having too much control in the hands of too few is not a good recipe for us as a species on this planet.’

We know it doesn’t pass the smell test, so it’s important to get informed and educated and it’s papers like this — and this isn’t the only one out there — that have done the homework. If we’re going to trust someone, it’s important to me that we trust people who’ve done the homework and have no vested interest in the outcome.

My team is a team of volunteers. We all do this in our spare time. We’re not making any money. We’re not going to seek to make any money off of this. We’re doing this because we believe in this country. We love this country and we love the people of this country. When I see people suffering, I have to help. I got to get in and help.

So, if you are an American that wants to help, we are setting up resources for you to be able to get engaged and help us push this forward, maybe grease some of these wheels of justice, so we can get an independent grand jury investigation.”

For additional information, or if you want to help, you can email Henele and his team at [email protected]. You can also use your voice and actions to support an investigation into the CDC’s actions.

Two Easy Ways You Can Take Action

  1. Add your signature to this petition to help mount public pressure to convene a formal grand jury to investigate allegations of willful misconduct by federal agencies during COVID-19 through Stand For Health Freedom, a nonprofit advocacy organization that Henele and his team have collaborated with
  2. Send a predrafted, customizable letter through Stand For Health Freedom urging key members of Congress to thoroughly investigate alleged violations of federal law by the CDC that compromised COVID-19 data

Click here to watch the video.

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Notes

1 Energetic Health Institute Dr. Henele

2 Science, Public Health Policy and the Law October 12, 2020; 2: 4-22

3 Metabolic Healing October 12, 2020

4 CDC.gov August 26, 2020, Comorbidities Table 3, updated October 14, 2020

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The current deterioration of any hopes of a lasting “ceasefire” in the eastern Ukraine, have brought not only the long smoldering conflict back into the forefront of global media attention, but have also presented an opportunity for several geopolitical rivals to take advantage of the situation for their own perceived benefit. Russia responded rapidly to immediate signals from the Kiev government that it fully intended to explore yet another military campaign to resolve the long-standing stalemate in the Donbass and a possible invasion of the Crimean Peninsula.

On March 29th, the Ukrainian Parliament (Verkhovna Rada) officially adopted Resolution No. 5312, which is a clear departure from the Minsk Agreement and labels Russia as the unequivocal aggressor and responsible party for the conflict. Within days, the Ukrainian Armed Forces began moving large amounts of heavy equipment and materiel up to the line of contact and advanced some units within the demilitarized zone. The Zelensky government made very public calls for support from NATO, the United Kingdom and the United States, which were reciprocated in short order. Russia responded with warnings to Kiev to deescalate, coupled with deployments of military units along the south-eastern border with Ukraine, and reinforcement of units tasked with safeguarding the Crimea.

Within a week of the provocative parliamentary vote, over 100 former Turkish Navy officers committed their signatures to an open letter criticizing the Erdogan government’s decisions related to maritime matters and demanded that he maintain Turkey’s commitment to the Montreux Convention. Ten former admirals that signed the letter were swiftly arrested and painted as traitors planning a governmental coup. This story was briefly covered by corporate media, but quickly dropped off the radar. Was this incident aimed at undermining the Erdogan government, or a diplomatic ploy created by the Erdogan government? There are ample reasons to support either assertion. The timing of the incident, in close relation to developments vis-à-vis Russian and Ukraine, are far from coincidental.

Erdogan himself has made a number of statements regarding his administration’s willingness to re-evaluate whether the Montreux Doctrine should be revised or abandoned. Most of these comments were linked to media questions regarding the proposed Istanbul Canal, a $10 billion project that would construct a canal parallel to the busy Bosporus Strait. The Istanbul Canal project has been proposed off and on since 2011, with referrals for proposals from likely contractors solicited since 2013. But why the sudden reinjection of the topic of the Montreux Doctrine in such a dramatic fashion now? The timing seems far from a coincidence.

Is Turkey signaling a possible departure from the international compact, signed in 1936, as an attempt to put pressure on Russian efforts to defend Crimea and respond to NATO assurances of support for Ukraine? What benefits would be achieved by Turkey pulling out of the treaty? Ukrainian president Zelensky made an official visit to Turkey and met with Erdogan on April 10th to discuss defense cooperation amongst numerous other topics. Erdogan reiterated his administrations commitment to Ukraine’s national sovereignty yet saw the Minsk Agreement as the vehicle to achieve a solution to the current impasse. He also voiced support for the official inclusion of Ukraine as a full member of the NATO alliance in the future. More than a few mixed messages to say the least.

Montreux Convention: A Brief Overview

The Regime of the Straits as first adopted by signatories in 1936 in Montreux, Switzerland attempted to govern the movement of commercial and military traffic through the Bosporus and Dardanelles Straits. This treaty once adopted, replaced the previous Lausanne Treaty of 1923. Clearly a major diplomatic victory for Turkey, the nation maintained sovereignty over the maritime territory of the Bosporus Strait, Strait of Dardanelles, and the Sea of Marmora and gave it the ability to close this major maritime traffic lane to any belligerent of Turkey in time of war. More importantly, it has minimized the ability of any nation whose territory does not border the Black Sea to transit significant amounts of naval warships into the Black Sea. This was a major concern of many of the signatories at the time of its adoption at the onset of the Second World War, chief amongst them the Soviet Union.

Balance Of Power In The Black Sea: Will The Montreux Convention Prevail?

The strategically important maritime bottleneck that is controlled by Turkey and governed by the Montreux Convention. Approximately 50,000 vessels a year move through this waterway, along with 3 million barrels of oil every day.

On one hand, aggregate tonnage limitations imposed on non-Black Sea powers severely limits the size and total number of surface warfare vessels that can transit the straits and enter the Black Sea, and these vessels can only remain in the Black Sea for a period of 21 days. On the other hand, the limitation on movements of vessels through the straits does affect the naval movements of the Black Sea nations. The movement of submarines is significantly hampered by Article 12 as follows:

Black Sea Powers shall have the right to send through the Straits, for the purpose of rejoining their base, submarines constructed or purchased outside the Black Sea, provided that adequate notice of the laying down or purchase of such submarines shall have been given to Turkey.

Submarines belonging to the said Powers shall also be entitled to pass through the Straits to be repaired in dockyards outside the Black Sea on condition that detailed information on the matter is given to Turkey.

In either case, the said submarines must travel by day and on the surface, and must pass through the Straits singly.

Understanding how the limitations imposed by the Montreux Convention effect Russian submarine movements illustrate a major challenge for Russian submarine deployments in the Mediterranean. A Russian naval base capable of major repair, supply and retrofitting is required outside of the Dardanelles (such as Tartus, Syria) is required to facilitate a sustained Russian submarine presence in the Mediterranean.

An additional limitation of significance is the agreement’s prohibition of the transit of aircraft carriers. The Montreux Convention describes an aircraft carrier under Annex II:

Aircraft Carriers are surface vessels of war, whatever their displacement, designed or adapted primarily for the purpose of carrying and operating aircraft at sea. The fitting of a landing-on or flying-off deck on any vessel of war, provided such vessel has not been designed or adapted primarily for the purpose of carrying and operating aircraft at sea, shall not cause any vessel so fitted to be classified in the category of aircraft carrier.

One of the reasons why the Soviet Union classified the Kiev class and Kuznetsov class vessels as “heavy aircraft carrying cruiser” was to circumvent this restriction. Their primary armament comprised of ant-aircraft missiles and anti-ship missiles, with the small complement of Yak-38 VTOL meant for fleet defense. The acceptance of the heavy aircraft carrying cruiser moniker under the Montreux Convention arguably required the acquiescence of friendly Turkey, especially one that was a NATO member.

Throughout the 85-year history of the convention, the Black Sea has remained largely demilitarized and stable, with the Black Sea states keeping modest fleets in this maritime area. Even during World War II, Turkey’s neutrality and administration of the convention greatly limited the injection of large naval fleets into the Black Sea. Coupled with the impediment of Gibraltar, Nazi Germany only introduced small numbers of patrol boats and submarines to the region, with these having to make most of the transit overland, requiring them to be assembled and launched from Axis controlled territory along the coast.

2021: Ukraine Conflict Reignition?

As the situation along the conflict line in eastern Ukraine continues to further deteriorate, and the statements coming out of Ukraine, NATO and the U.S. become exceedingly provocative, the likelihood of a significant armed conflict reigniting on an even larger scale increase with each passing day. Russia has voiced its concerns and made its “red lines” know to all, has mobilized a large amount of personnel and military hardware, and positioned it close to the border with eastern Ukraine. It has reinforced the defense of Crimea significantly. Russia has conducted its movements of troops and materiel quite overtly, with no attempts to conceal them. This clearly communicates the Russian movements are in fact a reaction to developments in the region and a are designed as a deterrent, not the signs of a premeditated offensive as the corporate media would have the world believe.

By contrast, the United States has sent numerous military transport aircraft loaded with unknown payloads to Ukraine in the past few days. Although the flights were not hidden per se, questions regarding their purpose were not answered by various Biden Administration press secretaries. This can hardly be seen as an attempt to achieve strategic ambiguity, as the U.S. has been supplying Ukraine with billions of dollars in military aid since the conflict began in 2014. The United States requested transit approval from Turkey of the Straits for two U.S. Navy warships 15 days ahead of the proposed transit as required by the Montreux Convention. Turkey granted the request. Although the U.S. Navy’s 6th Fleet routinely sends warships into the Black Sea and had three vessels in the area during the previous month, the official reasons given for this deployment were that the U.S. was providing a show of support for Ukraine and attempting to provide “stability” in the region. After a call between presidents Biden and Putin on April 15th, the U.S. Navy rescinded its transit request. This was a welcome step toward de-escalation.

Balance Of Power In The Black Sea: Will The Montreux Convention Prevail?

USS Carney DDG 64 during a previous naval deployment that took her into the Black Sea and an official visit to the port of Odessa, Ukraine in 2017. She is currently in drydock undergoing a full modernization overhaul in Jacksonville, FL.

All the above developments are happening with the backdrop of the commencement of NATO operation Defender Europe 2021 back on March 15th. As the training exercise ramps up in May it will engage approximately 28,000 personnel from 27 participating countries. Approximately 20,000 of these troops will be deployed from the U.S., along with heavy equipment shipped to the continent for the U.S. Army’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team and 3rd Infantry Division. The majority of armored vehicles and war materiel will be mobilized from pre-position depots in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. Exercises will simulate and test the response to a Russian invasion of NATO members and friendly nations, i.e., Ukraine. Exercises will take place in Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, and Ukraine.

Quite ironically, Air Force Gen. Tod Wolters, NATO’s supreme allied commander stated after last year’s Defender Europe 2020 that,

“We’ve seen a fair amount of response from Russia. They’re not overly pleased with Defender Europe 20. We’re concerned mostly about the readiness of our forces and we’re doing all that in accordance with international law.”

Somehow it is acceptable for the U.S. to move tens of thousands of troops and equipment thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean to conduct military exercises on foreign soil, yet it is unacceptable for Russia to conduct similar exercises on its own soil, yet both are clearly in accordance with international law. Could General Wolters grasp that Russia’s displeasure might be influenced by the long list of broken promises related to NATO expansion into previous Warsaw Pact nations over the past thirty years? How about Operation Barbarossa of 1941, which saw a massive invasion of the nation by Nazi Germany, Bulgaria, and Romania, with Hungary and Italy also participating to a greater degree after the initial operation? Russia learned a tragic lesson in this case and one that it will never allow to happen again. Perhaps it would help for General Wolters to crack the binding of a history book or two about Russia in the near future.

What Role will Turkey Decide to Play?

Turkey has a multitude of options open to it in case the current conflict in Ukraine develops into open warfare between Ukraine and Russia. President Erdogan is a very shrewd and calculated politician, who would undoubtedly hedge his bets and alter Turkey’s strategic position as the situation developed. Turkey’s strategic calculus would depend largely on the level of response exhibited by Russia in its reaction to any move by Kiev to break the stalemate in the Donbass region, or any direct military threat on Crimea. A direct move on Crimea is highly unlikely, as Russia was totally unambiguous as to its stance in 2014. It will fight to maintain Crimea even if it means nuclear war.

Balance Of Power In The Black Sea: Will The Montreux Convention Prevail?

Russia has been slowly modernizing the Black Sea Fleet. The Admiral Makarov pictured above is one of three Project 11356 FFGs commissioned and stationed there in the past few years.

Turkey would wait and gauge the NATO response to any Russian reaction to Kiev’s escalation. If NATO moved forcefully and resolutely, Turkey would likely maintain the status quo and honor its responsibilities under the Montreux Convention up until such point that either NATO or Russia gains a clear advantage. Turkey is a NATO member and is bound by the treaty; however, Ukraine is not a member, and thus Turkey has no obligation under Article 5 to defend it, especially if Ukraine initiates hostilities. A propaganda war facilitated by western corporate media would be used to frame any conflict as a case of a Russian invasion to allow for NATO to initiate a conflict to defend a non-member state. If NATO gained a clear advantage, Turkey would align itself unequivocally with the military bloc, declare Russia a belligerent party to Turkey and bar all Russian naval and maritime traffic in the Straits as per the mechanisms available in the Montreux Convention. Turkey would cut off the major supply route from Russia to its forces stationed in Syria and would likely escalate the military situation in Syria in conjunction with NATO. This would only lead to a much wider conflict.

If Russia were to gain an early and clear advantage, Turkey would most likely remain “neutral” and maintain the status quo regarding the Montreux Convention; however, it would likely engage in covert warfare against Russia in both the Crimea and Syria via its proxies in both regions to take advantage of Russia’s immediate focus on Ukraine. It could also reignite the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict. Its commitment to proxy warfare would be gauged by the pace and level of any Russian military success. Even in the case of an overwhelming victory on the part of Russia, I see little likelihood of Turkey abandoning the Montreux Convention and the adoption of a more favorable transit agreement with Russia. In regard to controlling this strategically important maritime bottleneck, Turkey holds all the cards. Russia has been keenly aware of this reality since the agreement was ratified in 1936. Alongside its desire to maintain an advantage in the natural gas trade to Europe, it is also for this reason that Russia has invested so much in stabilizing Syria and defeating Western/Saudi/Gulf Emirate efforts to eliminate Russia’s most viable naval base of operations in the Mediterranean Sea in Tartus, Syria.

The Future of the Montreux Convention

There is very little chance of a major change in the status of the Montreux Convention in the immediate future. The greater possibility is that an open conflict between Russia and Ukraine would be the catalyst for Turkey and NATO to use the agreement to weaken Russia’s position in Syria, where it would be of greatest effect. Erdogan has been very measured in his public statements regarding possible hostilities in Ukraine. While hosting an official state visit with President Zelensky and voicing support for Ukraine’s sovereignty (including Crimea), he has also voiced his support for the Minsk Agreement as the mechanism to resolve the issue; however, public statements are often quite different than the discussions that take place behind closed doors.

The Montreux Convention was perhaps the greatest political victory for Turkey in the past century, and President Erdogan undoubtedly grasps this reality. If the Istanbul Canal project ever actually breaks ground, it is a winning proposition for Turkey economically, although there are several ecological and civic planning concerns that pose a major challenge to the project. Such a project, if successful will bring all the economic benefits that both the Panama and Suez Canals have provided for Panama and Egypt. Although there is a natural, navigable waterway connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, this waterway is constricted and limited in the traffic volume that it can handle.  If a man-made canal can significantly reduce voyage transit time, shippers stand to save significant amounts of money by utilizing it. The time saved equates to fuel savings, possible reduction of overtime labor costs in the next port of call or may determine if a vessel operator meets the contractual terms of a charter party. Russia aims to leverage the same advantages in promoting its own Northern Sea Route.

Balance Of Power In The Black Sea: Will The Montreux Convention Prevail?

If Turkey ever completes the proposed Istanbul Canal it would alleviate some of the maritime traffic congestion in the Bosporus Strait and provide a large amount of revenue for the state.

With or without the proposition of the Istanbul Canal, the Montreux Convention is a major strategic advantage for Turkey and the NATO Alliance, as long as Turkey remains a member state. For Russia it is a double-edged sword. Assuming Turkey remains an ally or a neutral party, it severely limits the ability of any foreign power to introduce a viable naval threat to the Black Sea and Russia’s vital national interests in the region. In any scenario where Turkey becomes an active belligerent in any hypothetical conflict, Russia is forced to take decisive and overwhelming action to rest control of these navigable waterways from Turkey or else surrender its access to the Mediterranean. Turkey, Russia and NATO all clearly understand this strategic reality, and have been rational and logical enough to accept it. By so limiting the available options for naval escalation, the Montreux Convention continues to provide stability and ensure a naval balance of power in the region.

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Excerpts from an article by Bill Sardi on Lew Rockwell

Click link to access complete article

The World Economic Forum, which was a co-sponsor to EVENT 201 at Johns Hopkins Center For Health Security along with Bill Gates in October of 2019, just prior to the onset of COVID-19 in January of 2020 and announcement of a mutated coronavirus pandemic in March of 2020, is now announcing CYBER POLYGON, a war cyber warfare game that will be blamed on overseas “enemies.”  CYBER POLYGON is a drill scheduled for July of 2021.

Should such an event occur, it would paralyze every business, church, hospital, even security and police forces.  It appears prudent to make plans for a major online cyber business disruption given public authorities appear to be clueless or even complicit in this event as they have been in COVID-19.  Consumer-related businesses would be wise to advise their customers to stock up on necessities, particularly food, toiletries, vitamins, medicines and alternate sources of power if possible.  Doctors should schedule patients accordingly.

 

Click through to the links below to validate this warning.  This is not a sensationalist report.

Cyber Polygon is a war game being held by the World Economic Forum (WEF) this July/2021 which is meant to simulate a major cyber attack on the global supply chain and the economic system. There has been endless discussion int the media the past year building up fears of cyber attacks by Russia, China, Iran and even North Korea.

See this.

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From April 2 (Good Friday) to April 10, there were nonstop violent demonstrations in Northern Ireland, everyday with Irish Catholic nationalists (who want to reunify with the Republic of Ireland) and British-Irish loyalists  or unionists (who want to remain part of the UK) confronting the police – molotov cocktails and barricades were everywhere. Tensions still remain. Most of the violence is taking place in Belfast, but it has spread to other towns as well, especially in mostly Protestant loyalist places, such as Carrickfergus and Newtonabbey.

Part of it started over the funeral of former Irish Republic Army (IRA) leader Bobby Storey last year. 24 (mostly catholic) Sinn Fein politicians attended the republican funeral in a huge event in defiance of pandemic-related lockdown measures – Sinn Fein is historically associated with the provisional Irish Republican Army. Many loyalists called for an investigation. Two weeks ago, prosecutors announced no action would be taken against them. Loyalists then interpreted this as evidence that the state gives a kind of preferential treatment to republicans.

This event was a catalyst that brought to surface many grievances and complaints against the police forces in the country. Organized crime gangs such as the South East Antrim UDA and paramilitary groups (that control many working class loyalist neighborhoods) took advantage of the situation to retaliate against police raids and operations targeting their criminal activities.

A lot of it has to do with the post-Brexit situation of Northern Ireland as well (most people there voted against it). The island of Ireland is of course divided into two countries: the – since 1921 – independent Republic of Ireland (a European Union member) that comprises most of the island, and Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom. Although Northern Ireland is part of the UK, the Brexit deal actually left it inside the European Union (EU) customs unions and single market. This, in a way, “pushes” Northern Ireland away from Britain and pushes the Irish island towards reunification, a scenario feared by loyalists who feel their Britishness is thereby diminished – one has to keep in mind that Northern Ireland was pretty much created to be a kind of “haven” for UK unionists within the island of Ireland otherwise they would become a minority in the Republic of Ireland. To this day, Northern Ireland remains a very polarised society – about 90 per cent of its youth grew up attending religious segregated schools.

The problem is the UK government had promised Brexit would not create barriers to trade between Northern Ireland and Britain. However, since Brexit, there are checks on food, agricultural and other goods that are moving between Britain and Northern Ireland (to comply with EU requirements) – and that has been causing many inconveniences. It slows the movement of goods and as a result of that the population has been facing product shortages amid the pandemic. This is being caused by the arrangement made with the European Union, called the Northern Ireland Protocol. Such new regulatory “border” between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK has in fact created a kind of border in the Irish Sea, thereby eroding the very place of Northern Ireland in the UK, loyalists claim.

This complicated situation arose out of the so-called Brexit Trilemma involving the goals of 1) no hard border on the Irish island; 2) no customs border in the Irish Sea; and 3) no British participation in either the European Union Customs Union or the European Single Market. It is impossible to have all three at the same time. The third item was the whole point of Brexit and returning a hard border within the Irish island would bring back the memories of those years of conflict when the UK-Republic of Ireland border were militarized. So Britain sacrificed the second item. Thus, while the rest of the UK (that is, Great Britain) left the EU Single Market, Northern Ireland still adopts its regulations on electricity and goods.

When, in 1998, the Good Friday Belfast Agreement brought an end to the conflict, the border issue did not arise because both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland were EU members within a Common Travel Area. And so was Britain. The Brexit referendum changed it.

The general feeling amongst loyalists is one of betrayal and abandonment. Northern Ireland Justice Minister, Naomi Long, explicitly accused Boris Johnson of “dishonesty” over this border issue. Brussels has sued Britain over this, claiming it constitutes a breach of the Brexit agreement.

This is happening at a time when the cause of Irish union is gaining more support throughout the island of Ireland – Sinn Fein has been calling for it – and so the loyalists are reacting. The violence is worrying many leaders in Europe, who have condemned it – including Boris Johnson. On Thursday, the Biden administration also voiced its concern regarding the escalation of tensions.

The 1998 Good Friday Agreement was supported by former Democrat President Bill Clinton and so Biden would be following Clinton in taking a conciliatory role. After Brexit, UK is seeking new free trade deals and the special relationship with the US will tend to grow stronger. An example of it is Johnson’s keenness on having the UK join the QUAD. Apparently, Britain compromised too much for Brexit, and Northern Ireland unionists now feel abandoned.

The so-called “Irish question” dominated the political life of Britain for two centuries at least and had become a thing of the past – or so many thought. It has come back, apparently.

While much is talked about the rise of nationalism and “tribal” and ethnic conflicts in Eastern Europe, the violence in Ireland is a reminder that nationalist, ethnic and religious conflicts and separatism are a reality in Western Europe too – be it Catalan and Basque separatism in Spain, France’s recent “anti-separatism” bill (widely seen as an Islamophobic measure) or the violence in the UK, the West has no higher moral ground.

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Uriel Araujo is a researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts.

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Xinjiang Must Unite, Not Divide, China and Turkey

April 19th, 2021 by Andrew Korybko

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A controversy occurred earlier this month after two Turkish opposition politicians expressed support for separatism in Xinjiang. The Chinese Foreign Ministry condemned their counterproductive remarks, which in turn prompted Ankara to summon the Chinese Ambassador. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian then said that “We hope that people in Turkey from all walks of life can correctly, rationally and objectively view the firm position of China to protect its national sovereignty and territorial integrity.” Because of how sensitive the issue is both in general and for bilateral relations, it deserves to be discussed more thoroughly.

Turkey is presently rising as a regional power in accordance with its rich civilizational and historical influence. This has recently seen the country promote a hybrid model of secular and religious influence in order to broaden its appeal to traditional and prospective partners alike in North Africa, West Asia, and Central Asia. The last-mentioned region is comprised of former Soviet republics, many of whom are populated by Turkic people who feel a close kinship with their Turkish brethren. This ethnic outreach to what Ankara regards as the Turkic world is natural and should be encouraged by all so long as it doesn’t take any threatening form.

The problem is that there are some in Turkey who flirt with radical interpretations of their country’s newfound soft power strategy. Instead of respecting every country’s sovereign interests to govern themselves however their legitimate leaders believe is best, they arrogantly think that they know better those states or their own people do. Therein lies the issue with the latest Xinjiang controversy whereby two opposition politicians made counterproductive remarks in favor of separatist forces there. Considering the growing closeness of Chinese-Turkish relations, these statements were unwelcome and could have caused trouble between those two.

Thankfully, bilateral ties have matured enough to the point where such comments won’t affect those countries’ expanding partnership, but they still deserved to be condemned in order to remind everyone of how unacceptable they were. The individuals that made them were clearly misled by the US-led global information warfare campaign against the People’s Republic alleging that China is carrying out a so-called “genocide” against the Uyghurs, who are mostly fellow Muslims related to the Turkish people. In fact, one can argue that Turkey is one of the prime target audiences of this American Hybrid War narrative.

The US hopes to mislead the world, and especially Muslim countries, about the situation in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). The intended result is to pressure those states into distancing themselves from cooperating more closely with China, which could in turn provide a comparative competitive advantage to the US. In the Turkish context, American strategists want to manipulate influential Turkish figures into provoking more international controversies between their country and China over this manufactured fake news-driven issue. In reality, however, Xinjiang must unite, not divide, China and Turkey.

Upon learning more about the socio-economic renaissance of the Uyghur people and other minorities in the XUAR, more Turks will realize how badly they were misled by the US’ information warfare campaign. China isn’t “oppressing” the Uyghurs, not to mention committing “genocide” against them, but has unprecedentedly improved their living standards to the point where its efforts can objectively be described as the most successful minority empowerment campaignanywhere in the planet’s history. Life expectancy and overall population numbers have soared, household income is at its highest-ever levels, and security is guaranteed.

In fact, Turkey could even learn from China’s experiences with the Uyghurs to similarly improve the situation for its own minorities. This could in turn reduce separatist and terrorist threats in the same way as has recently happened in the XUAR. With this vision in mind, Turks should resist the US’ external pressure to exploit this situation for the purpose of dividing their country from China. If anything, they should learn more about the reality of what’s happening there in order to motivate them to take ties with China to the next level, including through more people-to-people interactions such as touring the XUAR once the pandemic finally ends.

It’s sad that some Turkish individuals were misled by American propaganda about Xinjiang, but their own government nowadays knows that these narratives aren’t true. That’s why ties remain strong between China and Turkey despite the latest controversy. Both countries are in a mutually beneficial partnership with potential strategic implications, which no single issue – let alone an artificially manufactured one – can sabotage. As time goes on, it’s hoped that more Turks will learn the truth about the XUAR, appreciate China’s historic efforts in improving the Uyghurs’ lives, and see Xinjiang as a natural bridge between their two countries.

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This article was originally published on OneWorld.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from OneWorld

The $2.3 Quadrillion Global Timebomb

April 19th, 2021 by Egon von Greyerz

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Credit Suisse is hours from collapse and the consequences could be a systemic failure of the financial system.

Disappointingly, my dream last night stopped there. So unfortunately I didn’t experience what actually happened.

As I warned in last week’s article on Archegos and Credit Suisse, investment banks have created a timebomb with the $1.5 quadrillion derivatives monster.

A few years ago, the BIS (Bank of International Settlement) in Basel reduced the $1.5 quadrillion to $600 trillion with a pen stroke. But the real gross figure was still $1.5q at the time. According to my sources, the real figure today is probably over $2 quadrillion.

A major part of the outstanding derivatives are OTC (over the counter) and hidden in off balance sheet special purpose vehicles.

Leveraged Assets Just Go Up in Smoke

The $30 billion in Archegos derivatives that went up in smoke over a weekend is just the tip of the iceberg. The hedge fund Archegos lost everything and the normal uber-leveraged players Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, Nomura etc lost at least $30 billion.

These investment banks are making casino bets that they can’t afford to lose. What their boards and top management don’t realise or understand is that the traders, supported by easily manipulated risk managers, are betting the bank on a daily basis.

Most of these ludicrously high bets are in the derivatives market. The management doesn’t understand how they work or what the risks are and the account managers and traders can bet billions on a daily basis with no skin in the game but massive potential upside if nothing goes wrong.

Deutsche Bank — Derivates 600x Equity

But we are now entering an era when things will go wrong. The leverage is just too high and the bets totally out of proportion to the equity.

Just take the notorious Deutsche Bank (DB) that has outstanding derivatives of €37 trillion against total equity of €62 billion. Thus the derivatives position is 600X the equity.

Or to put it in a different way, the equity is 0.17% of the outstanding derivatives. So a loss of 0.2% on the derivatives will wipe the share capital and the bank out!

Now the DB risk managers will argue that the net derivatives position is just a fraction of the €37 trillion at €20 billion. That is of course nonsense as we saw with Archegos when a few banks let $30 billion over a weekend.

Derivatives can only be netted down on the basis that counterparties pay up. But in a real systemic crisis, counterparties will disappear and gross exposure will remain gross.

So all that netting doesn’t stand up to real scrutiny. But it is typical for today’s casino banking world when depositors, shareholders and governments take all the downside risk and the management all the upside.

So let us look at the global risk picture in the financial system:

The $2.3 quadrillion above is what the world is exposed to when this timebomb explodes.

That is the total sum of global debt, derivatives and unfunded liabilities. When all the dominos start falling, and no one can meet their obligations, this is what governments are left to finance.

Yes, they will print this money and much more as deficits mount exponentially due to collapsing currencies. But the MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) clowns will then find out that printed money rightfully has ZERO value.

If these clowns studied history they would learn that MMT has never worked. Just check the Roman Empire 180-280 AD, France in the early 18th century, or the Weimar Republic, Zimbabwe, Argentina and Venezuela in the 19th and 20th centuries.

So when Fiat money dies, how much gold is required to repair the damage?

If we look at the cube below with all the gold ever produced in history, we see that it is 198,000 tonnes valued at $11 trillion.

Below the cube the total central bank and investment gold is shown. This amounts to 77,000 tonnes or $4.3 trillion. That sum represents 0.2% of the total debt and liabilities of $2.3 quadrillion as shown in the Timebomb.

The $4.3 trillion gold value is at a gold price of $1,750 per ounce. This minuscule 0.2% of liabilities obviously is far too small to support global debt. A 20% gold backing of total liabilities would be a minimum.

That would be 100X the current 0.2% or a gold price of $175,000.

I am not forecasting this level or saying that it is likely to happen. All I am doing is looking at the total risk that the world is facing and relating it to the only money that will survive.

Also, measuring the gold price in dollars serves no purpose because when/if this scenario happens, the dollar will be worthless and the gold price measured in worthless dollars at infinity.

Focus on Wealth Preservation

Rather than focusing on a potential gold price measured in dollars, investors should worry about preserving their wealth in real assets held outside a bankrupt financial system.

Regardless of what price gold and silver reach, history proves that it is the ultimate form of wealth preservation.

It will not be different this time. Therefore, in the coming crisis, precious metals will be the best insurance to hold as protection against unprecedented global risk.

Gold’s rise since 2000 in no way reflects the massive money printing we have seen in this century.

Still as the graph below shows, gold is at the beginning of a very strong uptrend that has very far to go in both time and price.

Investors have the following choice:

Either they follow the coming crash in bubble assets like stocks, property and bonds all the way to the bottom which is likely to be 75-95% lower in real terms (measured in gold).

Or they protect their wealth in physical precious metals, stored outside a fractured financial system.

As always, history gives the answer as to which path to take.

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AK-47. Kalashnikov: The Amateur Inventor Who Shot to Global Fame

April 19th, 2021 by Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin

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AK-47: Kalashnikov (2020) is a biographical film about Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov (1919–2013), the inventor and designer of the AK-47 automatic rifle. This Russian film, released in February of last year, follows the young Kalashnikov as he is bombarded by Germans during WWII and interspersed with flashbacks of his childhood. Disturbed by the failure of a newly designed gun that nearly gets a comrade killed when it jams, he examines the parts and lists out various problems with the new design. An amatuer inventor who had been playing around various types of primitive gun designs since he was child, Kalashnikov goes back to work in a steam engine workshop after being injured in battle. There he is assigned a desk and tools, and struggles to assemble a new design he had been drawing up. Help is at hand when the other workers in the workshop offer their after-hours services to help him tool the parts necessary for his new design. After this, his life takes many twists and turns as he struggles to perfect his design and gain acceptance through inventor competitions, testing ranges and the military hierarchy.

The story focuses on his drive and sincerity in producing a safer gun that would help the Soviets win the war. Although the gun he is famous for was not produced until 1947 (“Avtomát Kaláshnikova” (Russian: Автома́т Кала́шникова, lit. ‘Kalashnikov’s Automatic Gun’), its reliability and design ensured its wide use in many armies around the world in subsequent decades. The film also strives to show Kalashnikov as a role model for how someone with a basic education (Kalashnikov left school after seventh grade) can achieve so much in the way of plaudits and global fame.

Image on the right: Kalashnikov’s first submachine gun

In AK-47: Kalashnikov, the testing processes of the gun were not complete successes but Kalashnikov is given more promotions and more help in developing his ideas. With the development of new technologies, a simplified, lighter version of the automatic rifle was developed which soon became the most ubiquitous variant of the AK-47. In the real world, the popularity of the design meant that “approximately 100 million AK-47 assault rifles had been produced by 2009, and about half of them are counterfeit, manufactured at a rate of about a million per year. Izhmash, the official manufacturer of AK-47 in Russia, did not patent the weapon until 1997, and in 2006 accounted for only 10% of the world’s production.”

The film is beautifully shot with realistic battle scenes and panoramic landscape settings. The relations between the soldiers, and between the soldiers and their superiors are developed without the stereotyped or charicatured portrayals seen in films like Enemy at the Gates (2001), as Kalashnikov gets help and encouragement all around him, even at his lowest points when he feels like giving up. Moreover, in these days of instant-everything and easy consumption access to any product, it is refreshing to see male and female workers with so many skills (including his drafting technician who becomes his wife) bringing an idea from drawings through precision tooling to the finished gleaming weapon.

Kalashnikov himself did suffer “spiritual pain” about whether he was responsible for the deaths caused by his weapons, but also believed that their use was defensive rather than offensive. The AK-47 has been used in many anti-colonial wars and received the ultimate praise when appearing on some national flags and coats of arms. Of course like any weapon his guns have been used in terrorist organisations but one could argue that overall its reliability and simplicity evened up the stakes in many an asymmetrical war.

Watch the trailer below.

Kalashnikov was hospitalized on 17 November 2013, in Izhevsk, the capital of Udmurtia and where he lived and died on 23 December 2013, at age 94 from gastric hemorrhage. A statue dedicated to Kalashnikov was commissioned by the Russian Military Historical Society and unveiled in Moscow in 2017. It is a 7.5m (25ft) monument, which shows Kalashnikov holding an AK-47 in his arms. However, it was soon spotted that the technical drawing of the gun etched onto a metallic plate at the base of the monument was actually of an StG 44 rifle used by the Nazis during WWII.

The symbolism of this mistake was not lost on the public, a country that lost millions of its people at the hands of the Nazi invasion which started on Sunday, 22 June 1941. The section of the metallic plate with the gun design was soon removed with an angle grinder.

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Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin is an Irish artist, lecturer and writer. His artwork consists of paintings based on contemporary geopolitical themes as well as Irish history and cityscapes of Dublin. His blog of critical writing based on cinema, art and politics along with research on a database of Realist and Social Realist art from around the world can be viewed country by country here. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. 

Featured image: Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov (1919–2013)  Kalashnikov at the Kremlin, December 2009

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Will Vaccinated People be More Vulnerable to Variants?

April 19th, 2021 by Dr. Joseph Mercola

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As soon as vaccine companies announced they were developing a COVID-19 vaccine, doctors, scientists, researchers and other experts raised warnings1,2 about the problematic history of coronavirus vaccines and their propensity to produce antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), which could make vaccinated individuals more susceptible to infection by SARS-CoV-2 or its variants.

It is also called paradoxical immune enhancement (PIE), which I believe is a more accurate description of what is happening.

Among those issuing early warnings were Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who in my interview with him — featured in “Well-Known Hazards of Coronavirus Vaccines” — recounted previous failed coronavirus vaccine trials in which he said the vaccinated animals died when exposed to the wild virus.

Considering all previous coronavirus vaccine efforts have failed for this reason, it seemed reasonable to suspect that a COVID-19 vaccine might have similar problems, and that such effects might remain hidden for some time since animal testing was bypassed. Recent research suggests such fears might still be warranted, although conclusive evidence that ADE is in fact occurring has not been produced.

Trial Subjects Have Not Been Informed of ADE Risk

The October 28, 2020, paper,3 “Informed Consent Disclosure to Vaccine Trial Subjects of Risk of COVID-19 Vaccine Worsening Clinical Disease,” stressed that “COVID-19 vaccines designed to elicit neutralizing antibodies may sensitize vaccine recipients to more severe disease than if they were not vaccinated,” and criticized vaccine makers for not clearly informing participants in current vaccine trials of this risk.

“Vaccines for SARS, MERS and RSV have never been approved, and the data generated in the development and testing of these vaccines suggest a serious mechanistic concern:

That vaccines designed empirically using the traditional approach (consisting of the unmodified or minimally modified coronavirus viral spike to elicit neutralizing antibodies), be they composed of protein, viral vector, DNA or RNA and irrespective of delivery method, may worsen COVID-19 disease via antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE),” the paper stated.4

“This risk is sufficiently obscured in clinical trial protocols and consent forms for ongoing COVID-19 vaccine trials that adequate patient comprehension of this risk is unlikely to occur, obviating truly informed consent by subjects in these trials.

The specific and significant COVID-19 risk of ADE should have been and should be prominently and independently disclosed to research subjects currently in vaccine trials, as well as those being recruited for the trials and future patients after vaccine approval, in order to meet the medical ethics standard of patient comprehension for informed consent.”

What Is ADE?

What exactly is ADE, and what does it mean? In a nutshell, it means that rather than enhance your immunity against the infection, the vaccine actually enhances the virus’ ability to enter and infect your cells, resulting in more severe disease than had you not been vaccinated.5

Needless to say, this is the exact opposite of what a vaccine is supposed to do. The 2003 review paper “Antibody-Dependent Enhancement of Virus Infection and Disease” explains it this way:6

“In general, virus-specific antibodies are considered antiviral and play an important role in the control of virus infections in a number of ways. However, in some instances, the presence of specific antibodies can be beneficial to the virus. This activity is known as antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) of virus infection.

The ADE of virus infection is a phenomenon in which virus-specific antibodies enhance the entry of virus, and in some cases the replication of virus, into monocytes/macrophages and granulocytic cells through interaction with Fc and/or complement receptors.

This phenomenon has been reported in vitro and in vivo for viruses representing numerous families and genera of public health and veterinary importance … For some viruses, ADE of infection has become a great concern to disease control by vaccination.”

Vaccinated People More Susceptible to South African Variant

As feared from the beginning, vaccinated individuals do appear to be more susceptible to infection by certain variants of SARS-CoV-2, although it remains to be seen whether they are more prone to serious illness.

A study by researchers at Tel Aviv University and Clalit Health Services in Israel found the South African variant of SARS-CoV-2, dubbed B.1. 351 — which presently accounts for about 1% of COVID-19 cases in Israel — affects people vaccinated with Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine to a greater extent than unvaccinated people.7,8,9,10

The researchers compared 400 individuals who had tested positive for the B.1.351 variant two weeks or more after receiving at least one dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine against 400 unvaccinated individuals who had been infected.

Among the 150 people who were fully vaccinated, having received both shots of the vaccine, the variant was eight times more prevalent than in unvaccinated individuals (5.4% compared to 0.7%).

An estimated 53% of Israel’s 9.3 million inhabitants have received the Pfizer vaccine.11 While Moderna’s vaccine is also available in Israel, it was not included in this investigation. According to professor Adi Stern, Ph.D.,12 at Tel Aviv University, who said the findings took her by surprise:13

“We found a disproportionately higher rate of the South African variant among people vaccinated with a second dose, compared to the unvaccinated group. This means that the South African variant is able, to some extent, to break through the vaccine’s protection.”

For clarity, while the risk of infection appears significantly greater, it is still unknown whether the variant might generate more serious illness in vaccinated individuals. The study did not report disease outcomes, stating it would be “statistically meaningless” to do so since the number of vaccinees infected was too low.

That said, professor Ran Balicer, director of research at Clalit Health Services, which provided assistance for the study, noted this is the first study “to be based on real-world data, showing that the vaccine is less effective against the South Africa variant, compared to both the original virus and the British variant.”14

Other Research Suggests B.1.351 May Evade First-Gen Vaccines

Another recent study,15 reported by Times of Israel,16 was done by researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Here, they analyzed blood samples to assess vaccine response to the South African variant. As reported by Times of Israel:17

“The researchers collected blood samples from 10 people who recovered from COVID-19, five people who received the first dose of the vaccine, and 10 people who also received the second. Samples were drawn from participants 21 days after the first dose, or 10 days after the second. They then measured the antibodies’ ability to protect against infection.”

The study18 found that while the Pfizer vaccine produced high levels of neutralizing antibodies against the generic strain of SARS-CoV-2 and the British variant, it fared worse against the South African variant.

Overall, the neutralization potency of the Pfizer vaccine was 6.8 times lower for the B.1.351 variant compared to the generic strains. It was also less effective against strains that have attributes of both the British and the South African variants. According to the authors:19

“Our study validates the importance of the Pfizer vaccine, but raises concerns regarding its efficacy against specific SARS-CoV-2 circulating variants … Our data also indicate that the Pfizer vaccine is moderately compromised against SA-N501Y/K417N/E484K pseudo-variants.

Average decrease in mean neutralization potential of the vaccinated sera against this pseudovirus was 6.8-fold, relative to wild-type SARS-CoV-2 pseudovirus. This result is only partly aligned with recent conclusions from Pfizer,20 reporting that its vaccine is almost similarly efficient against the SA [South African] variant as wild-type SARS-CoV-2.

A Moderna report21 also documented that its vaccine is 6.4-fold less efficient in neutralizing SA-B.1.351 variant, relative to neutralization of the wild-type SARS-CoV-2. However, their conclusion indicated that such a reduction is not clinically significant.

In our mind, the clinical significance of a 6.8-fold-reduced neutralization potency of convalescent or post-vaccination sera against the SA strain remains to be determined and raises concerns about vaccine efficiency against current or future SARS-CoV-2 variants.

Overall, these results call for close attention to variant spread. Moreover, development of new vaccines with improved neutralizing potency against specific SARS-CoV-2 variants may be required.”

As you’d expect, vaccine makers are already hard at work tweaking their formulas to target various mutations of the virus, so don’t be surprised if all of a sudden vaccinated individuals start getting called back for additional shots. As reported by STAT News:22

“Vaccine makers are working on booster shots specifically targeting B.1.351 or that could defend against multiple strains of the coronavirus, and regulators are considering how the updated shots could be authorized without needing to go through the full gamut of clinical trials.”

Pfizer Study Reports Drop in Effectiveness Against B.1.351

Last but not least, Pfizer’s own investigation, published in The New England Journal of Medicine23March 8, 2021, found its vaccine was about two-thirds less effective, in terms of neutralizing potency, against the South African variant, B.1.351, compared to other forms of the virus.

“It can be difficult to extrapolate what such lab experiments mean for what happens if someone who received the vaccine is exposed to the variant. For one, these experiments only look at how one arm of the immune system, called neutralizing antibodies, responds to the modified virus,” STAT News reports.24

“The vaccines generate a range of immune fighters, including other types of antibodies and T cells, so it’s possible that overall people retain more of their defenses in fending off the virus. It’s also possible that even though neutralizing antibodies don’t work as well against the variant, they can still mount enough activity to have an impact.”

What STAT News does not mention is that the vaccines may also generate nonneutralizing (aka binding) antibodies25 which, instead of preventing infection, can trigger ADE, a paradoxical immune enhancement that increases your susceptibility to infection and more severe illness.

Aside from the studies already mentioned at the beginning of this article, many others have raised concerns about coronavirus vaccines and ADE in particular. Among them is the May 2020 mini review26 “Impact of Immune Enhancement on COVID-19 Polyclonal Hyperimmune Globulin Therapy and Vaccine Development.” As in many other papers, the authors point out that:27

“While development of both hyperimmune globulin therapy and vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 are promising, they both pose a common theoretical safety concern. Experimental studies have suggested the possibility of immune-enhanced disease of SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV infections, which may thus similarly occur with SARS-CoV-2 infection …

Immune enhancement of disease can theoretically occur in two ways. Firstly, non-neutralizing or sub-neutralizing levels of antibodies can enhance SARS-CoV-2 infection into target cells. Secondly, antibodies could enhance inflammation and hence severity of pulmonary disease …

Animal studies … have shown that the spike (S) protein-based vaccines (specifically the receptor binding domain, RBD) are highly immunogenic and protective against wild-type CoV challenge … However, immunization with some S protein based CoV vaccines have also displayed signs of enhanced lung pathology following challenge.

Hence, besides the choice of antigen target, vaccine efficacy and risk of immunopathology may be dependent on other ancillary factors, including adjuvant formulation, age at vaccination … and route of immunization.”

Th2 Immunopathology Is Another Potential Risk

Another potential risk is that of Th2 immunopathology, especially among the elderly. As reported in a PNAS news feature:28

“Since the 1960s, tests of vaccine candidates for diseases such as dengue, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) have shown a paradoxical phenomenon: Some animals or people who received the vaccine and were later exposed to the virus developed more severe disease than those who had not been vaccinated.

The vaccine-primed immune system, in certain cases, seemed to launch a shoddy response to the natural infection …

This immune backfiring, or so-called immune enhancement, may manifest in different ways such as antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), a process in which a virus leverages antibodies to aid infection; or cell-based enhancement, a category that includes allergic inflammation caused by Th2 immunopathology. In some cases, the enhancement processes might overlap …

Some researchers argue that although ADE has received the most attention to date, it is less likely than the other immune enhancement pathways to cause a dysregulated response to COVID-19, given what is known about the epidemiology of the virus and its behavior in the human body.

‘There is the potential for ADE, but the bigger problem is probably Th2 immunopathology,’ says Ralph Baric, an epidemiologist and expert in coronaviruses … at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In previous studies of SARS, aged mice were found to have particularly high risks of life-threatening Th2 immunopathology … in which a faulty T cell response triggers allergic inflammation, and poorly functional antibodies that form immune complexes, activating the complement system and potentially damaging the airways.”

Full Extent of Risks Remain To Be Seen

Whether or not COVID-19 vaccines can trigger ADE or Th2 immunopathology remains to be seen. As or right now, studies suggest vaccinated individuals are at increased risk of contracting lab-confirmed infection with variants such as the South African B.1.351 strain, but there’s no telling whether they actually get sicker than unvaccinated individuals.

Similarly, while there are now hundreds of cases of fully vaccinated individuals having being diagnosed with COVID-19, some of whom have died as a result,29 it’s too early to tell whether ADE is at play. We’re currently moving into summer in the Western hemisphere, a time when respiratory viruses tend to be less prevalent in general, so I suspect the real test will come this fall and winter.

So, while some argue that ADE is a “non-issue” with COVID-19 vaccines simply because we haven’t seen any signs of it yet,30 even with new variants, I have my doubts. I suspect we might still see it once flu season sets in. Besides, ADE is far from the only potential problem. There are many other potential side effects, some of which may take months or years to develop, while others may be lethal within days or even hours.

The vaccines may also be problematic for already immunosuppressed patients. The reason for this is because they don’t develop a robust neutralizing antibody response from the vaccines, and there’s research31 warning that developing a poor neutralizing antibody response after an initial exposure to certain coronaviruses might result in more severe illness upon re-exposure. Might the same apply if you fail to develop robust neutralizing antibodies in response to mRNA gene therapy?

A recent JAMA study32,33 found only 17% of organ transplant recipients mounted detectable antibodies after their first dose of Pfizer or Moderna mRNA vaccine. Among patients taking antimetabolites, only 8.75% had detectable antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 following vaccination. As noted by the authors:

“Given this observation, the CDC should update their new guidelines for vaccinated individuals to warn immunosuppressed people that they still may be susceptible to COVID-19 after vaccination. As the CDC guidelines are currently written, they assume that vaccination means immunity.

Our study shows that this is unlikely for most transplant recipients, and one could guess that our findings (especially those concerning anti-metabolites) could also apply to other immunosuppressed patients, such as those with autoimmune conditions.”

In my view, there are still so many potential avenues of harm and so many uncertainties, I would encourage everyone to do your homework, keep reading and learning, weigh the potential pros and cons, and take your time when deciding whether to get any of these COVID-19 gene therapies.

The National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) recently posted more than 50 video presentations from the pay-for-view Fifth International Public Conference on Vaccination held online October 16 to 18, 2020, and made them available to everyone for free.

The conference’s theme was “Protecting Health and Autonomy in the 21st Century” and it featured physicians, scientists and other health professionals, human rights activists, faith community leaders, constitutional and civil rights attorneys, authors and parents of vaccine injured children talking about vaccine science, policy, law and ethics and infectious diseases, including coronavirus and COVID-19 vaccines.

In December 2020, a U.K. company published false and misleading information about NVIC and its conference, which prompted NVIC to open up the whole conference for free viewing. The conference has everything you need to educate yourself and protect your personal freedoms and liberties with respect to your health.

Don’t miss out on this incredible opportunity. I was a speaker at this empowering conference and urge you to watch these video presentations before they’re censored and taken away by the technocratic elite.

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Notes

1 Nature Microbiology September 9, 2020; 5: 1185-1191

2 Hum Vaccin Immunother. December 1, 2020; 16(12): 3055-3060

3, 4 International Journal of Clinical Practice, October 28, 2020 DOI: 10.111/ijcp.13795

5 PNAS.org April 14, 2020 117 (15) 8218-8221

6 Viral Immunology 2003;16(1):69-86

7, 14 Epoch Times April 11, 2021

8, 13 Reuters April 10, 2021

9, 11 Washington Examiner April 11, 2021

10 Medical Xpress April 11, 2021

12 Tel Aviv University Adi Stern

15, 18, 19 Cell Host & Microbe March 20, 2021

16, 17 The Times of Israel March 22, 2021

20 Nature Medicine February 8, 2021

21 BioRxiv January 25, 2021 DOI: 10.1101/2021.01.25.427948

22, 24 STAT News February 17, 2021

23 New England Journal of Medicine March 8, 2021: DOI: 10.1056/NEJMc2102017

25 Science Direct Binding Antibody

26, 27 EBioMedicine 2020 May; 55: 102768

28 PNAS April 14, 2020 117 (15) 8218-8221

29 The Defender April 6, 2021

30 Medpage Today March 16, 2021

31 PLOS Pathogens 2017 Aug; 13(8): e1006565

32 JAMA March 15, 2021 (Epub ahead of print)

33 Medpage Today March 15, 2021 (Archived)

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

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“Afghanistan is the source of more than 90% of world’s opium supply and more than 95% of the European opium supply since 2001.” (Rubenstein 2019, Pg. 235). Why?

The planned events of September 11, 2001 set in motion a series of United States military occupation of Muslim countries that had nothing to do with exacting justice.

Invading other nations is a planned event. By December 2001, 2,500 United States Armed Forces had invaded Afghanistan, climbing to +100,000 soldiers by 2011. By March 2003, 43 NATO countries (51 countries by 2006) had joined in the occupation of Afghanistan. In March 2003, United States Armed Forces invading Iraq totaled 177,194.

Two separate countries, two different military missions. In Iraq, the United States goal was to immediately collapse the Iraqi government and replace it with one more easily managed. In Afghanistan, the long-term United States goal was to seize the countries areas of opium production and prevent Taliban forces from destroying opium crops.

In 2007, the Pentagon changed the designation  “War on Terror” for occupation of Middle East countries identified as hostile, to the “Long War” designation, signaling a restart for a global Cold War.

NATO Occupation and Opium Production

Since United States military occupation of Afghanistan in 2001, followed by NATO occupation in 2003, opium production has increased exponentially. Areas under Taliban control had zero production in 2001 (Global Research, October 17, 2018).

Source: Afghanistan Opium Survey 2017 report

Afghanistan is divided into six regions comprised of administrative provinces: North-eastern (Kundaz, Takhar, Badakhshan), Eastern (Nuristan, Kunar, Kapisa, Laghman, Nangarhar), Central (Panjshin, Parwan, Wardak, Ghazni, Paktika, Khost, Paktya, Logar, Kabul), Northern (Balkh, Jawzjan, Faryab, Samangan, Sari Pul, Bamyan, Baghlan), Western (Ghor, Hirat, Farah, Nimroz, Badghis), and Southern (Hilmand, Kandahar, Zabul, Uruzgan, Day Kundi). The capital-city, Kabul, is located in the province of Kabul in the Eastern region.

The highest percentage of opium poppy cultivation harvested are located in the Western provinces of Ghor, Hirat, Farah, Nimroz, and Badghis. Also, high opium poppy cultivation occurred in the Southern provinces of Hilmand, Kandahar, Zabul, Uruzgan, and Day Kundi. The increase in production is mainly a result of an increase in area under opium poppy cultivation. These areas under opium poppy cultivation are controlled by United States and NATO military forces.

Afghani provinces with zero production between 2016-2017: North-eastern provinces of Kundaz, Takhar. The Central provinces of Panjshin, Parwan, Wardak, Logar, Paktika, Paktya, and Khost. And the Northern province of Bamyan.

Geographically, Afghanistan is divided between climates, with the best climate for opium poppy production found in the Western and Southern provinces. The Western provinces (Ghor, Hirat, Farah, Nimroz, and Badghis) has Warm Mediterranean climate (Csa), Warm semi-arid climate (BSh), and Warm desert climate (BWh), and the Southern provinces climate (Hilmand, Kandahar, Zabul, Uruzgan, and Day Kundi) is separated between Warm desert climate (BWh), Warm Mediterranean climate (Csa), and Cold desert climate (BWk).

The increase in production is mainly a result of an increase in area under opium poppy cultivation. “In 2002, farmers took advantage of the power vacuum following the U.S. invasion and returned to planting poppy as a cash crop. According to the U.N.’s opium production report from 2002, poppy cultivation was down to approximately 8,000 hectares in 2001, then surged to roughly 74,000 hectares after the fall of the Taliban” (Rawlings, 2013).

The difference between increased production of opium poppy and zero production of opium poppy between provinces has to do with the presence of NATO forces verses the presence of Taliban forces. Islam prohibits drug use and the Taliban are strict prohibitionists of poppy production, destroying crops where Taliban are located, resulting in zero opium production. NATO forces work to keep the Taliban from destroying opium crops, resulting in high opium crop production:

“The United States invaded Afghanistan largely to restore the heroin industry and it is now making about $1.5 trillion every year from this business” (Press TV,  2017).

“The heroin business is not “filling the coffers of the Taliban” as claimed by US government and the international community: quite the opposite! The proceeds of this illegal trade are the source of wealth formation, largely reaped by powerful business/criminal interests within the Western countries. …Decision-making in the US State Department, the CIA and the Pentagon is instrumental in supporting this highly profitable multibillion dollar trade, third in commodity value after oil and the arms trade” (Chossudovsky, 2005).

NATO Base map. Source: NATO

NATO forces located in areas of zero opium production do not engage with Taliban forces (Global Research, 2018). Italy, for example, is known to pay Taliban forces to not attack Italian NATO patrols (Ingram, 2009). Also, several NATO countries rotate between provinces, so one year a province may have some opium production under the flag of one NATO country, then the next year opium production falls to zero under the flag of the next NATO nation that rotates in (Press TV, 2017). The process is called “Push down pop up”; as one NATO nation along with provincial government forces attempt to suppress opium poppy production in one area, weak border security in other provinces create opportunity for opium poppy production to increase in areas with less NATO oversight (Redmond, November 2011).

Decrease and zero production of opium poppy also appear in areas where Afghanistan government has confidence of the local population, where government provides incentives to farmers to eradicate their opium crop or not produce one at all (Asia Foundation, 2017).

To rebuild Afghanistan, sixty percent of aid for “projects” is funded through private Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). These organizations consist of private contractors working towards the donors agenda.  (Source: The USAID/Afghanistan Plan for Transition, 2015-2018).  The economy of Afghanistan is based on several key industries: NGOs, Drugs, and Agriculture (FAO, 2012-2015). Also, “Since 2001, the US has spent about $8.6 billion on counter-narcotics efforts in Afghanistan” (The Guardian, 2018).

Source: UNODC, 2016

Areas of increased opium poppy production appear to be in the Northern, Western, and Southern provinces of Afghanistan where the climate is Warm Mediterranean (Csa), Warm semi-arid (BSh), and Warm desert (BWh). The Eastern region has seen a slight increase in opium production do to the Taliban having turned away from opium poppy eradication toward mineral smuggling of Talc, Chromite, and Marble across the border into Pakistan to fund their operations. Border security surrounding Afghanistan is porous, providing opportunity to smuggle stuff in and out of the country (Ghosh, 2018).

Who Profits from Opium Drug Trade?

Answer: Everyone who invests in Afghanistan Opium trade.

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s World Drug Report (2017) lists street value in USofA for heroin at $200 per gram: 189,000 grams X $200 = $37,800,000 per 50 gallon drum.

Value of Opium production in 2017 was worth between US$ 4.1 to 6.6 billion, or 20 and 32 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and provided up to 354,000 full time jobs to rural areas for opium poppy weeding and harvesting. Other countries benefit from the drug trade as well (UNODC, 2017).

Afghanistan Opium Cultivation, 2011. Source United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2011

Areas of decreased opium poppy production appear in the Central (Central Highlands) and North-eastern (Hindu-Kush) regions of Afghanistan where elevation exceeds 10,000 feet above sea-level. The North-eastern and Northern regions appear to have the worst agricultural land due to high mountain regions while the rest of the country appears to be suitable for agriculture:

“Winter can get very harsh, particularly in the mountain regions. Some areas are isolated from autumn’s first snow fall until the spring thaw has melted the snow again. In the most severe cases, this can mean up to and beyond six months a year” (Norwegian Afghanistan Committee, 2018).

The UNODC reports several reasons why Islamic farmers in Afghanistan produce opium poppies. One reason is lack of “Governor-led eradication” (UNODC, 2017, pg. 27). Other reasons are Islamic politics and economic opportunity:

“Opium is permissible because it is consumed by kafirs (infidels) in the West and not by Afghans.” Exhibiting the Taliban leaders’ understanding of the politics of the drug economy, Rashid added, “We cannot push the people to grow wheat as there would be an uprising against the Taliban if we forced them to stop poppy cultivation. So we grow opium and get our wheat from Pakistan” (Redmond, 2011).

Where does the Opium go?

Border security surrounding Afghanistan is porous, providing opportunity to smuggle opium out of the country.

The Taliban allow the sale of Afghanistan opium poppy to Pakistan, collecting a 20 percent tax where:

“The value of Opium production in 2017 was worth between US$ 4.1 to 6.6 billion, or 20 and 32 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and provided up to 354,000 full time jobs to rural areas for opium poppy weeding and harvesting” (UNODC, 2017). Add to that the $8.6 billion the United States spends on counter-narcotic efforts in Afghanistan (The Guardian, 2018).

Opium flow out of Afghanistan. Source UNODC, 2008

Opium and heroin are ingested and transported inside paid refugees (men, women, and children) called Packers. The Balkan route is the main trafficking route for world opiate trafficking.

Balkans Opium route. Source: UNODC, 2008

Another route is the Oppistan route.

“Oppistan” route. Source: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2016

While another is Diplomatic flights. These flights, into and out of war zones, have Diplomatic immunity and can not be searched for contraband: drugs, weapons, or people.

The United States government occupies Afghanistan because it believes opium poppy production there “significantly threatens the United States” (Thomas, 2009).

Results of the Long War

Increase in drug overdose deaths in USA.

Source: National Center for Health Statistics 

With heroin and synthetic opioids impacting states…

Source: The Kaiser Foundation, 2016

and communities closer to home.

Source: CDC, University of Chicago (NORC), USDA, 2017. The Staggering Numbers Behind America’s Opioid Epidemic, ZeroHedge.com, 10/17/2018.

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