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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 Bourlasaid 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.”
“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.
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.
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.
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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)
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.
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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 HybridWar 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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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.
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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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:
“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.
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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”).
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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 Asotold 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 Timesreported 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.
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 toIndependent 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. Newsweekreports 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 Girarduncovered “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 Journalreported 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 Spiegelreported:
“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.”
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 Medicinepublished 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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Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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.
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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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.
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.”
“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.
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Comments Off on Video: Dr. Peter McCullough: “Warp Speed Went at Full Tilt for Vaccine Development and There Was a Silencing of Any Information on Treatment.”
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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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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.
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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.”
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.
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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.
“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.
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]
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.”
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.
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.
“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.
“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
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
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
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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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.
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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.
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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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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 HybridWar 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.
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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 (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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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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“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 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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Protestors once again gathered at Queen’s Park in Toronto to speak out against the ongoing lockdowns, the latest amendment of which gives police increased authority to enforce the provincial stay-at-home order.
In sharp contrast to previous weeks where protestors were arrested and ticketed in accordance with the order, the police were far more relaxed during Saturday’s events.
LIVE in Toronto: A day after Doug Ford announced increased police authority to enforce the provincial stay-at-home order, Toronto police are not ticketing or arresting anti-lockdown protestors. pic.twitter.com/CmkaRljr4N
Officers stood in groups around the event itself, while others walked among the protestors in conversation.
“I understand you have an opinion that you’d like to express,” one officer said to some protestors, adding that “free expression is everything in this country.”
Another officer said
“There are at least two sides to everything,” one said, “and we’re always in the middle. We’re just trying to make it a safe place for everybody.”
LIVE in Toronto: A day after Doug Ford announced increased police authority to enforce the provincial stay-at-home order, Toronto police are not ticketing or arresting anti-lockdown protestors. pic.twitter.com/CmkaRljr4N
Since Doug Ford’s announcement that police would now be stopping vehicles in order, several police districts have said they do not intend to enforce the orders.
I’m starting a thread of Ontario police services that have said they will not make use of the new powers authorized by the panicking Ontario government today. Will update as warranted. Please @ me if your local force has made an announcement I’m not aware of.
Protestors then embarked on their “Essential Exercise March,” referencing the fact that exercise is deemed an acceptable reason to be outside.
LIVE in Toronto: Anti-lockdown protestors embark on their “Essential Exercise March.” No tickets or arrests were issued at Queen’s Park despite increased police authority to enforce the provincial stay-at-home order. pic.twitter.com/jYDokTwdnQ
Travis Dhanraj, Queen’s Park Bureau Chief for Global News, reported that as a result of the police’s refusal to enforce Ford’s harsh measures, Ontario is currently “reconsidering” the playground closures and police stops.
Protestors passed through Trinity Bellwoods Park where they declared “cherry blossoms are essential” and called to “free the cherry blossoms” after the city blocked off access to the trees.
LIVE in Toronto: Anti-lockdown protestors call to “free the cherry blossoms” at Trinity Bellwoods Park after the city barricaded off access to the trees. pic.twitter.com/jDOAFkRhSn
As the group made its way through the city, several passerby expressed their disapproval with the protestors. One threw at least two bottles of water from off a roof.
LIVE in Toronto: Someome threw at least 2 water bottles at anti-lockdown protestors. Police are investigating.
The march wrapped at Queen’s Park, with one participant shouting “Two weeks to flatten the curve became over 1 year!” at the Ontario Legislative Building.
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Comments Off on Plot Twist: Toronto Police Make No Arrests, Allow Anti-lockdown Protest to Proceed One Day after Doug Ford’s Restrictive Lockdown Measures
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1976 Swine Flu vaccine program
This program, in hindsight, was mounted to gain support for the Presidential election of Gerald Ford, who was running against Jimmy Carter. The program was conceived after a soldier died at Fort Dix (after an exhausting march) and then he and several other soldiers were found to harbor swine influenza virus.
The specter of the 1918 swine flu pandemic was invoked, and the public health machinery went into overdrive to create a national vaccine program. Several Pharma companies were enlisted to produce vaccines.
The vaccine companies demanded relief from liability. After all, it is hard to get everything right the first time. They declined to continue the vaccine program, complaining that their insurers refused to take on the liability burden. This became the first time the federal government agreed to serve as Pharma’s insurer. This event became the model for the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act.
You know the rest of the story. One quarter of the US got vaccinated, before it was acknowledged that the vaccine caused paralysis. Guillain-Barre syndrome, at a rate 6 times normal, was occurring in vaccinees. There were about 400 cases and 40 deaths. Vaccinations ended. The virus was gone long before the vaccinations had even started, and has never returned. The federal government paid damages. Pharma and their insurers had been a lot more savvy than the U.S. public health enterprise.
2003 Smallpox vaccination program
This was a program rooted in fear of bioterrorism engendered by the 2001 anthrax letters and the hype provided by the media. Everyone knew the nasty little phrase, “It’s not a question of if, but when” and preparedness was on everyone’s mind. There was no intelligence supporting an imminent threat of smallpox. But the vaccine program was a central part of the campaign of fear that was used to justify the invasion and takeover of Iraq. The idea fed to Americans was that we had to stop Saddam before he sprayed us with smallpox, even though he had nothing to do with either the anthrax letters, or the 9/11 attacks. The fact that the United States’ American Type Culture Collection had provided Iraq’s atomic energy agency with Vollum strain anthrax was kept as quiet as possible.
Smallpox vaccine had been stockpiled by the Clinton administration, and more had been purchased by the Bush administration. Smallpox vaccinations had been halted in the US decades earlier, and the disease smallpox had been wiped out in 1977. Smallpox vaccine was known to be highly reactogenic, and the old medical literature claimed it killed one in a million babies who received it.
When the vaccine was given to healthcare workers and first responders in 2003, episodes of heart failure, heart attacks, myocarditis and death quickly mounted. Doctors and nurses noticed that they could not sue for damages if injured, and at first there was no federal compensation either. They began refusing to be vaccinated. Congress quickly allotted money for a compensation program, but the maximum award was only $250,000 for a permanent disability or death.
Well-paid professionals were not impressed. After about 50,000 inoculations, and a series of 6 negative “Letter Reports” by the Institute of Medicine, the program quickly petered out, at least for civilians. The military continued vaccinating soldiers. Yet no smallpox cases have occurred since 1977.
2009 Swine Flu vaccination program
In the early spring of 2009, another swine flu was discovered in Mexico, and quickly spread to the U.S. People were said to be dying from the illness in droves. Not only the United States, but the entire ‘developed’ world clamored for vaccines. Again, the initial hype was that this was a tremendously dangerous flu bug, probably 1918 all over again.
Not only were multiple new vaccines to be created, but this was also an opportunity to trial new vaccine adjuvants, which by supercharging the immune response, could cut down the amount of antigen needed by an estimated 80%, thus providing much faster production of the large volumes of vaccine needed.
The 2009 “swine flu” pandemic was a dud in terms of virulence–it turned out to be considerably less deadly than a normal flu season virus. It did, however, serve to expose the fact that pre-existing pandemic flu vaccine deals had already been negotiated and signed by the World Health Organization, Big Pharma, and individual countries.
Here is how the deals worked: once a pandemic was declared by the WHO Director-General, the contracts were activated, and countries were committed to buying large stocks of pandemic vaccine, sight unseen. Other agreements and memoranda of understanding guaranteed that the flu vaccines (the original concern was a deadly bird flu or swine flu pandemic) would be grandfathered in, dodging the unpredictable testing and licensure process in which many more vaccine candidates fail than finally cross the finish line.
The phrase “enormous numbers of deaths and illness” had been removed from the W.H.O. webpage listing the phases of a pandemic, and the revised web page simply read as follows: “An influenza pandemic may occur when a new influenza virus appears against which the human population has no immunity.” Surprisingly, a novel virus that only caused a cold would have met the definition.
A declaration of pandemic Phase 6 was the requirement that would trigger the pre-existing vaccine contracts, committing many nations to spend billions of dollars on vaccines yet to be designed.
Why had WHO changed the definition? What was the process that led WHO’s then-Director General Margaret Chan to invoke it? We still don’t know.
The 2009 pandemic was an opportunity that opened the door to powerful vaccine adjuvants. The US bought large quantities of adjuvants from GlaxoSmithKline and Novartis (which has since sold its vaccine businesses) as well as large quantities of rapidly tested vaccines. But in response to widespread fears about these novel adjuvants, and their potential to cause autoimmune illnesses, they were not added to the new swine flu vaccines in the US.
In Europe things were different. The adjuvants were used. The GSK vaccine with adjuvant, Pandemrix,led to over 1300 cases of severe narcolepsy, primarily in adolescents. Whether this was caused by the vaccine antigens or the adjuvant has not been resolved. Glaxo unsurprisingly has denied its vaccine caused the problem.
However, studies of the frequency of new narcolepsy cases in many European countries revealed that adolescents who had received the Pandemrix vaccine were 10-16 times more likely to develop narcolepsy as those who had not.
The 2009 pandemic revealed something else. The vaccine contracts that had been mediated by the WHO between the vaccine manufacturers and individual nations contained a clause absolving the manufacturers of all liability for injuries. In order to access vaccines, countries had to agree that their citizens could not sue the manufacturers for damages if deaths or injuries occurred. Litigation of some of the narcolepsy cases continues, as the UK government has flip-flopped over its responsibility to compensate those injured by the Pandemrix vaccine.
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Those are the prior examples of “warp speed” vaccine development for perceived pandemics. In no case were the vaccine manufacturers willing to take on liability for their products. In each case, governments took on the liability, but grudgingly. Any benefits awarded were considerably less than would be expected from successful litigation with pharmaceutical companies.
Why won’t the manufacturers stand by their products? Because there is no possible way to determine the products’ safety or effectiveness in the short time allotted. The two swine flu programs went from conception to vaccinating citizens in approximately six months, similar to what was achieved with the Covid-19 vaccines. (Claims that the warp speed vaccines were the fastest ever developed is simply wrong.) The smallpox program was a little different, as vaccine had been stockpiled, but not clinically tested, over several years.
Vaccine development is a long, complex process, often lasting 10-15 years and involving a combination of public and private involvement…Vaccines are developed, tested, and regulated in a very similar manner to other drugs. In general, vaccines are even more thoroughly tested than non-vaccine drugs…
CDC says, Vaccine licensing is a lengthy process that can take 10 years or longer.
The Vaccine Life Cycle: Safety at Every Phase
The bottom line is that given current technology, it is impossible to make a safe and effective vaccine in months. Everyone wishes it wasn’t so, and Presidents may think they have the funds and clout to compel the system to produce a great vaccine, or six, at warp speed. They may think they can make it happen, but they can’t.
When you hand billions of dollars to inveterate government bureaucrats with MDs after their names, tragedies are certain to follow. They always have.
Repurposed drugs could have won against this pandemic, and most likely the next, since we know a lot more about how to combat viruses using drugs in 2021 than ever before. Can someone tell the President he can be an even bigger hero using drugs instead of vaccines, since they are more readily available, cheaper and safer? I’m very concerned about the next time, given all these future vaccine contracts. What does the government know that I don’t about the next time?
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Then again, when the public health bureaucracy is working so hard to get us all vaccinated, especially those who are already immune (i.e., at greater risk of serious adverse reaction, with no benefit at all from a vaccine) you just have to ask, what are they really trying to do?
If you want us to have immunity passports, then check our immunity. Why can’t I get an acceptable immunity test?
Why do we need to get vaccine passports instead of immunity passports?
Why has the US government and the EU committed to buying many vaccine doses per person for several years?
What are they putting, or planning to put, into those injections?
Or could the purpose be to put our life onto an app? Is the vaccine passport going to be the social credit score/finances/travel/privileges/ control app? The Financial Times suggests,
“There is an opportunity here to use the Covid-19 pass as a building block for a digital infrastructure that could service public needs well beyond the pandemic — for example in banking, education or public health more generally…”
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US President Joe Biden announced on Wednesday that the American military intervention in Afghanistan will be brought to an end by September 11, 2021, and the last American soldier will leave that country several weeks before the 20th anniversary of the American invasion and conquest of the Central Asian country on October 7, 2001.
Biden is the third American president to promise to end the war in Afghanistan. Even if the last 3,500 or so American soldiers leave the country, there will still remain thousands of CIA operatives, mercenaries and paratroopers propping up the puppet government of President Ashraf Ghani. And the Pentagon will continue to drop bombs and fire missiles more or less at will at whatever the US claims are “terrorist” targets. A renewed deployment of combat troops, as in Iraq, is entirely possible.
But Biden’s announcement provides an occasion for drawing a balance sheet of the longest war in the history of the United States, one which has produced incalculable suffering for the people of Afghanistan, squandered vast resources and brutalized American society.
By official figures, more than 100,000 Afghans have been killed in the war, no doubt a vast underestimation. The US waged this war through the methods of “counterinsurgency,” that is, through terror: bombing wedding parties and hospitals, drone assassination, abductions and torture. In one of the crowning atrocities of the war, in 2015, US aircraft carried out a half-hour long attack on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing 42 people.
Biden’s brief remarks announcing the military withdrawal made no reference to the dire conditions in the country, for which American imperialism bears the principal responsibility.
The war, based on the deliberate misrepresentation of the US’s real aims, was sold to the American population as a response to the events of September 11, 2001, which have never been the subject of a serious investigation. It was, in reality, an illegal war of aggression, aimed at dominating and subjugating a historically oppressed population in pursuit of the predatory interests of US imperialism.
No one has been held accountable for the crimes perpetrated by the US military in Afghanistan, including the officials in the Bush administration, who launched it, and the Obama administration, who perpetuated it. George W. Bush is (lately) praised as a statesman because he is less openly crude and dictatorial than Donald Trump.
Barack Obama is treated by the media as a celebrity although he is the only American president to have waged war every day he was in office. Top aides, from Donald Rumsfeld to Hillary Clinton, enjoy millionaire retirements. Obama’s vice president now occupies the White House. This criminal war was supported by every section of the US political establishment, Republican and Democrat, including Senator Bernie Sanders, who voted for it.
The World Socialist Web Site has an unparalleled record of opposition to the American imperialist intervention in Afghanistan, going back to the initial invasion in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In its first statement on the US invasion, published on October 9, 2001, the WSWS editorial board explained “Why we oppose the war in Afghanistan.” We wrote:
The nature of this or any war, its progressive or reactionary character, is determined not by the immediate events that preceded it, but rather by the class structures, economic foundations and international roles of the states that are involved. From this decisive standpoint, the present action by the United States is an imperialist war.
The US government initiated the war in pursuit of far-reaching international interests of the American ruling elite. What is the main purpose of the war? The collapse of the Soviet Union a decade ago created a political vacuum in Central Asia, which is home to the second largest deposit of proven reserves of petroleum and natural gas in the world.
The Caspian Sea region, to which Afghanistan provides strategic access, harbors approximately 270 billion barrels of oil, some 20 percent of the world’s proven reserves. It also contains 665 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, approximately one-eighth of the planet’s gas reserves.
The American intervention in Afghanistan began, not in 2001, but in July 1979, when the Carter administration decided to aid forces fighting the Soviet-backed government, with the goal, as National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski put it, of “giving the USSR its Vietnam War.” Following the Soviet invasion of December 1979, the CIA worked with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to recruit Islamic fundamentalists to go to Afghanistan and engage in guerrilla warfare, an operation that brought Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan and created Al Qaeda.
The Taliban was likewise the product of Pakistani weaponry and training, Saudi financing and American political backing. Although the fundamentalist group emerged out of the refugee camps in Pakistan as a kind of “clerical fascism,” the byproduct of decades of war and oppression, the Clinton administration endorsed its takeover in 1995-96 as the best prospect for restoring “stability.”
From 1996 to 2001, US relations with Afghanistan revolved around proposed pipelines to bring oil and gas from the Caspian basin on a route that would bypass Russia, Iran and China. Both Zalmay Khalilzad, the perpetual US envoy to the region, and Hamid Karzai, the first US-backed president of Afghanistan, worked for the oil giant Unocal.
The Bush administration threatened military action against the Taliban at several points in 2001. The 9/11 terrorist attacks, far from being events that “changed everything,” set into motion a long-planned attack. And there is considerable evidence that US intelligence agencies permitted the 9/11 attacks to go forward to supply the necessary pretext.
The WSWS analyzed the rapid conquest of Afghanistan and the collapse of the Taliban regime as an event that revealed the criminal ferocity of American imperialism, as thousands were killed in US bombing raids, and thousands more were slaughtered by US-backed militia forces. The regime established in Kabul was an unstable alliance of former Taliban officials like Hamid Karzai, head of a Pashtun tribe, and the Northern Alliance, based in the Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara minorities.
The US invasion had a no less destabilizing effect on geopolitics, as all the neighboring states, including Iran, Russia, China and Pakistan, regarded the huge American expeditionary force, which grew to 100,000 troops at various times under the Bush and Obama administrations, as a permanent threat just across their borders. The Bush administration would go on to carry out an even bloodier act of imperialist barbarism, with the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which created the conditions for the wider destabilization of the whole Middle East, now consumed by civil wars and imperialist interventions in Syria, Libya and Yemen.
The Bush and Obama administrations combined record military budgets with police-state measures at home, the buildup of the surveillance state and economic austerity—budget cuts, wage cuts and worsening living standards for the majority of working people.
The WSWS explained that the war in Afghanistan was part of an eruption of US imperialism, beginning with the Gulf War of 1991, aimed at offsetting the economic decline of the United States through military means. As David North wrote in the preface to A Quarter Century of War in 2016: “The last quarter century of US-instigated wars must be studied as a chain of interconnected events. The strategic logic of the US drive for global hegemony extends beyond the neocolonial operations in the Middle East and Africa. The ongoing regional wars are component elements of the rapidly escalating confrontation of the United States with Russia and China.”
This prognosis has been confirmed. A principal consideration behind Biden’s plans for withdrawing US military forces from Afghanistan is to concentrate the resources of the US military on the escalating conflict with Russia and, above all, China. In recent weeks, Biden has overseen a series of increasingly provocative actions in the East Asia, and the US military has inscribed in its official doctrine the necessity for preparing for “great power conflict.”
A real accounting for two decades of bloody crimes in Afghanistan, and the development of a movement against imperialist barbarism, requires the building of an international socialist movement in the working class. This is the task which the WSWS and the International Committee have taken up.
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In this new and expanded edition of Michel Chossudovsky’s 2002 best seller, the author blows away the smokescreen put up by the mainstream media, that 9/11 was an attack on America by “Islamic terrorists”. Through meticulous research, the author uncovers a military-intelligence ploy behind the September 11 attacks, and the cover-up and complicity of key members of the Bush Administration.
The expanded edition, which includes twelve new chapters focuses on the use of 9/11 as a pretext for the invasion and illegal occupation of Iraq, the militarisation of justice and law enforcement and the repeal of democracy.
According to Chossudovsky, the “war on terrorism” is a complete fabrication based on the illusion that one man, Osama bin Laden, outwitted the $40 billion-a-year American intelligence apparatus. The “war on terrorism” is a war of conquest. Globalisation is the final march to the “New World Order”, dominated by Wall Street and the U.S. military-industrial complex.
September 11, 2001 provides a justification for waging a war without borders. Washington’s agenda consists in extending the frontiers of the American Empire to facilitate complete U.S. corporate control, while installing within America the institutions of the Homeland Security State.
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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. It beats the previous record for an annual increase in this sector by a healthy 50%.
The bad news for Americans is that most of this increase took place in Asia, especially China. In this strategic set of technologies, China is eating America’s lunch.
Given that China beat the pandemic even before the vaccine with masks and social distancing, while the odious Trump left counties on their own and refused to mobilize the federal government, it is no surprise that the Chinese economy saw a growth spurt last fall and grew for the year. In the first quarter of 2021, China’s economy grew an eye-popping 18.3 percent! Along with its rapid march to renewables, China is becoming more and more formidable. Unlike the Biden administration, I don’t see this as a threat, but as a healthy challenge. If we want to compete, we have to swing into action.
In 2020, the global net increase in renewables was 261 gigawatts (GW). That is the nameplate capacity of some 300 nuclear power plants! There are actually only 440 nuclear power plants in the whole world, with a generation capacity of 390 gigwatts.
So let’s just underline this point. The world put in 2/3s as much renewable energy in one year as is produced by all the existing nuclear plants!
Those who argue we absolutely must construct more nuclear plants to beat the climate emergency are clearly just wrong. Renewables can do it all, and they can be installed much more inexpensively and way faster than nuclear plants. Nuclear is a distraction and a diversion of resources at a time when we are racing to get the earth down to producing no net carbon dioxide.
Asia was responsible for the lion’s share of the new renewables capacity, at 61 percent.
In other words, the United States was lying down on the job. President Biden wants to turn this lackluster performance around and put the US back into the vanguard of this crucial emerging technology.
Almost all (91 percent) of the new renewables capacity consisted in wind and solar farms.
Asia has 1,286 gigawatts of renewables, and they put in 167.6 GWs just in 2020! North America, despite being industrially and technologically advanced, only has 422 gigawatts. For shame, America. Even Europe has 609 gigawatts.
Since I cover the Middle East a lot at this site, it is worth noting that this region only has a minor renewables capacity, of about 24 gigawatts, only 1 percent of the global production. It only put in 1.2 gigawatts last year. This result is because the region has so much natural gas. But note that renewables are nevertheless cheaper and more reliable in their pricing. In the region, only Morocco has made real strides toward renewables, though there are some big projects planned in Egypt.
The rate of new wind energy installation almost doubled in 2020 year on year, with an increase of of 111 gigawatts in 2020 against only 58 new gigawatts in 2019.
China was the world leader here, putting in 72.4 gigawatts of new wind all by itself. The US only put in 14.2 gigawatts of wind.
This kind of statistic has made President Biden worried about American competitiveness in the new world that is taking shape. China is leaving us in the dust.
Offshore wind reached 5% of total wind capacity in 2020. It is still a small part of the sector but it is growing rapidly and has enormous potential.
In what is perhaps a sign of the future, solar energy, which was a poor cousin to wind a few years ago, has now caught up with it and its responsible for just about as much electricity production.
Asia was the leader here too, putting in 78 gigawatts of new solar in 2020 (up from 55 GW in 2019). China alone put in nearly 50 gigawatts of new solar. Vietnam put in 11.6 GW of new solar. Japan, despite being an advanced industrial country, only put in 5 GW of new solar.
India only put in 4 GW of solar in 2020, despite its big ambitions, about the same as South Korea.
The United States was down around the Vietnam level, with only 14.9 gigawatts of new solar.
I’ve been in places like Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas and Arizona in the summer, and I cannot understand why every single house doesn’t have solar panels. In some Republican-ruled such states, the legislature has even put in fees to discourage solar and promote dirty fossil fuels, which are wrecking the planet with global heating.
As a result, China is making the breakthroughs in solar panel technology and is a major exporter of panels. The US? Desperately breaking up underground rocks and polluting the environment chasing the last wisps of natural gas under there so as to add to the climate emergency.
I grew up in the age of the moon shot and I am not used to America being so backward.
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In his landmark foreign policy speech delivered from the US state department on February 4, President Joe Biden had proclaimed that “America is back. Diplomacy is back at the centre of our foreign policy.” That maxim was put to test last week. And it failed to make the grade.
A confusing picture emerges as the US diplomacy toward Russia in recent weeks, especially in the past week since April 13, runs a zigzag course. To recap, Washington has been quietly encouraging Kiev to be belligerent along the contact line with Ukraine’s breakaway region of Donbas.
Repeatedly affirming the US’ “unwavering commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity” and concerns over “the sudden Russian military build-up in occupied Crimea and on Ukraine’s borders,” the Biden Administration has been steadily boosting Ukraine’s military capability to provoke Russia.
Moscow estimated that a precipitate situation might be engineered as in 2008 when Washington encouraged the regime in Georgia to pick up a fight with its breakaway regions that inevitably led to a conflict with Russia. Thus, on April 7, the Kremlin warned that Russia would keep military forces near the border with Ukraine and could take “measures” if a precipitate situation arose threatening Donbas or Crimea.
In a reversal of the policy of President Obama not to provoke Russia, Biden Administration has begun supplying lethal weapons to Ukraine, which has fired up revanchist neo-Nazi Ukrainian nationalists. Indeed, the US is fully aware that the Ukraine issue concerns Russia’s core interests, and Moscow will never give in. Simply put, if Ukraine joins NATO, the reach of the alliance gets extended to Russia’s doorsteps.
Thus, the announcement in Kiev in early April of large-scale military exercises planned between Ukraine and NATO armies disregarded the Kremlin’s repeated warnings that any deployment of NATO troops to Ukraine would threaten stability near Russia’s borders. On top of it, Turkey informed Russia on April 9 that two US warships were due to cross the Bosphorus and enter the Black Sea to remain there until May 4.
Amidst these rising tensions — with Washington drawing the EU and NATO into its containment strategy against Russia — President Joe Biden telephoned Russian President Vladimir Putin on April 13. According to the Kremlin readout, Biden expressed interest in interaction with Russia on pressing matters such as “ensuring strategic stability and arms control, Iran’s nuclear programme, the situation in Afghanistan, and global climate change.” The White House readout said Biden proposed a summit meeting in a third country in the coming months to discuss the “full range of issues” facing the US and Russia.
Biden’s motivation remained a mystery, since only two days later, on April 15, the State Department disclosed that he had also signed an Executive Order imposing more sanctions against Russia and that the US Treasury had already issued a directive that prohibits American financial institutions from participation in the primary market for ruble or non-ruble denominated Russian bonds, the intention being to weaken and destroy the Russian currency. Besides, the US also expelled 10 Russian diplomats.
Either Biden had a memory lapse and forgot he was to sign the Executive Order when he called Putin and played nice, or he was plain insincere. (Curiously, the Executive Order also delegated the executive power to the state dept to use the discretion to impose even more sanctions if needed in future!) This strange behaviour has triggered speculation. Some say Biden may not be in control of the Russia policies that are being driven by the “Deep State”.
But Moscow reacted strongly. The Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharovawarned that Washington’s “hostile moves are dangerously raising the level of confrontation” and that the only plausible explanation for such strange behaviour is that the US “is not ready to accept the objective reality of a multipolar world in which American hegemony is not possible. It is placing its bets on sanctions pressure and interference in our domestic affairs.”
But then came yet another surprise when within hours, on April 15 itself, Biden appeared personally before the media to make what appeared to be a conciliatory statement about Putin and Russia. He insisted,
“The United States is not looking to kick off a cycle of ecs- — of escalation and conflict with Russia. We want a stable, predictable relationship… When I spoke to President Putin, I expressed my belief that communication between the two of us, personally and directly, was to be essential in moving forward to a more effective relationship…
“Now is the time to de-escalate. The way forward is through thoughtful dialogue and diplomatic process. The U.S. is prepared to continue constructively to move forward that process. My bottom line is this: Where it is in the interest of the United States to work with Russia, we should and we will. Where Russia seeks to violate the interests of the United States, we will respond.”
However, as it turned out, these sugar-coated words hid a bitter pill to swallow — that Russia should gracefully accept the sanctions and simply reconcile with the idea of a selective engagement with Washington whenever it suited US interests.
Amidst such contradictions, a thaw the US-Russia tensions cannot be a realistic possibility. Moscow is unlikely to compromise on core interests. On the other hand, Biden also knows that Russia’s participation is vital for solving many major global issues and to that extent, Biden may want to ease tensions.Indeed, a pragmatic working relationship also cannot be ruled out, as the US is well aware that Russia is interested in easing tensions with the West, given the challenges it is facing over its domestic economy, production lines and stability in the Middle East.
Simply put, the current tensions would have unpredictable consequences. There is room for the two sides to interact over issues such as strategic stability and arms control, the Iran nuclear issue, Afghanistan or climate change. Above all, Russia is also keen to be a participant on the global stage. But a summit cannot produce substantive results unless it is backed up with adequate preparations and in-depth exchanges regarding each side’s interests and concerns. Whereas, the current state of play does not allow space for constructive diplomacy.
Russia has since blacklisted eight current and former American officials and sent ten diplomats packing in retaliation for US sanctions. Evidently, as the Russian statement put it, these were “just a fraction of the capabilities at our disposal.” Nonetheless, the State Department has promptly lamented this “escalatory” response and warned that it might respond. In effect, the US insists on its prerogative to impose sanctions, but Russia should not retaliate.
How far this pantomime will continue under therubric of “diplomacy” remains to be seen. Expectations must be kept low. Evidently, the Biden administration has no interest to use diplomacy to wean Russia away from an alliance with China, as Kissinger once advised, so as to isolate and encircle China, the US’ main archetypal rival on the world stage. Biden instead expects Russia to submit to American writ and thereby deny strategic depth to China.
But will Russia submit to the US hegemony — a nation that held its ground against Napoleon and Hitler? No, it will never. The Ukraine issue will, therefore, remain a tinder box, which can blow up anytime and become a laceration wound on Russia’s body polity and contaminate and weaken it — which, of course, is also the ultimate logic of the regime change in Kiev in the 2014 colour revolution masterminded by the US state department officials including Victoria Nuland, who has resurfaced as Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs in the Biden Administration currently.
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Featured image: US President Joe Biden departs after delivering remarks on Russia in the East Room at White House, Washington, DC, April 15, 2021 (Source: Indian Punchline)
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A woman’s exposure to the pesticide DDT during pregnancy can increase her granddaughter’s risk for breast cancer decades later, according to a new study.
Published today in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, the study found a significant association between DDT in grandmothers’ blood during pregnancy, and obesity and early first menstrual periods in their granddaughters—factors known to increase the risk for breast cancer, high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease.
“This is the first three-generation study that [shows] it’s plausible that an environmental chemical in a grandparent can impact obesity and timing of menarche in the grandchild,” Barbara Cohn, a study author and director and senior research scientist at the Public Health Institute’s Child Health and Development Studies (CHDS), told EHN.
Transgenerational impacts of DDT
Researchers have established health effects from transgenerational exposure to chemicals in laboratory animals, but never before in humans. Grandchildren’s exposure can occur when their mothers are in utero and their mother’s egg cells are in development.
DDT compounds are known endocrine-disrupting chemicals that can alter and interfere with natural hormones that are essential for development. DDT exposure has been linked to breast cancer, birth defects, reduced fertility, and an increased risk of diabetes. It was banned in the United States in 1972 but is still used in other countries to kill mosquitoes that carry malaria.
Conducted by researchers at CHDS and the University of California at Davis, the study relied on blood samples collected from pregnant women between 1959 and 1967 as part of the CHDS study that has followed 20,000 pregnant women in California’s Bay Area, and their families, for more than 60 years. CHDS investigates how health and disease are passed on between generations. The original cohort of women, the grandmothers, gave blood samples at each trimester during pregnancy and one sample shortly after they gave birth.
The current study is based on a subset of 365 adult granddaughters. The risk of obesity (Body Mass Index greater than 30 kg/m2) in young adult granddaughters was found to be 2 to 3 times greater when their grandmothers had higher levels of o,p’-DDT, a minor compound of DDT, in their blood during or just after pregnancy. Similarly, granddaughters were twice as likely to have earlier first menstrual periods (before age 11) when their grandmothers had higher o,p’-DDT blood levels.
Previous CHDS studies have shown that mothers’ DDT exposure during pregnancy or immediately after birth correlates with increased risk of breast cancer and the prevalence of breast cancer risk factors, including obesity, in their adult daughters. While the granddaughters were too young (median age of 26) to measure breast cancer risk, the researchers state that “the impact can’t be ruled out.”
Timing of toxic exposures
DDT was banned in the U.S. in 1972 but is still used in other countries to kill mosquitoes that carry malaria.(Credit: Tim Lang/flickr)
The study breaks other important ground, according to Julia Brody, executive director at the Silent Spring Institute, who was not involved in the study. First, it shows consistency that o,p’-DDT is the best marker for recent exposure. Most previous studies, conducted after DDT was banned in the U.S., have measured DDT’s main breakdown compound (DDE) in women’s blood and they largely failed to find a connection to breast cancer.
CHDS researchers focused on o,p’-DDT, a contaminant comprising roughly 15 percent of commercial grade DDT, as a marker for active exposure—that is, exposure during pregnancy many decades ago—because it is more quickly metabolized than DDT’s main ingredient (p,p’-DDT) which breaks down to DDE.
Second, Brody told EHN, the study shows, “You can’t assume that exposure later in life is the same as exposure early in life.” Exposures to DDT at pregnancy appear more impactful than at mid-life, the age that other researchers have focused their investigations into DDT and breast cancer risk.
Cohn agrees. Her research shows that DDT exposure during pregnancy and at puberty is particularly harmful. “The issue of the vulnerability of a pregnant woman should be a major part of the story,” she said.
Policies aimed at endocrine disruptors
Researchers further conclude that their results suggest that ancestral DDT exposures may be a contributing factor to the global trend in today’s rising obesity rates, and the falling age at first menstrual period.
Though they were not able to account for diet or exposure to other so-called obesogens (chemicals associated with obesity), Cohn pointed to the strong association they found between grandmothers’ DDT levels and granddaughters’ obesity and said that for other factors to explain granddaughters’ obesity, “only the daughters whose grandmothers were exposed to DDT would have to be exposed to current obesogens today,” and that’s unlikely.
Kelle Moley, deputy director at Reproductive Health Technologies, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, thinks the theory has “biological plausibility.” She’s studied factors in transgenerational obesity in laboratory animals and finds it interesting to see a similar effect in humans. “The study, of course doesn’t explain all of it, but it could be some contributing factor to the rise in obesity,” she said.
Moving forward, both Cohn and Brody would like policymakers to view the study as proof of concept that exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals can impact generations, and to begin looking to animal studies that have documented the impact of endocrine disruptors on future generations to devise policies that reduce human exposure.
“We don’t want to wait the next three generations to find out the chemicals that are in use now cause breast cancer,” said Brody.
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Featured image: “We’re all kind of connected…what you do today has an effect on generations going forward,” says Akilah Shahid, pictured here with her mother Dr. Terri Jett and grandmother Beatrice Jett. All three generations participated in the Child Health and Development Studies research program. (Credit: Akilah Shahid)
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When veteran Minnesota police officer Kimberly Potter, who is white, stopped Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, for an expired registration tag, she committed an act of racial profiling. As a result, Wright’s blood is on the hands not only of Potter but also of the U.S. Supreme Court, which has legally sanctioned this type of racial profiling.
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. When Potter shot and killed Wright, her act — whether intentional or accidental — was also grounded in the same sort of racism manifested by officers throughout the United States.
Potter killed Wright quickly, unlike Chauvin, who tortured Floyd to death over a period of nine minutes and 29 seconds. After she stopped Wright, Potter found he had a warrant out for his arrest for a misdemeanor. When the officers tried to arrest him, Wright pulled away to get back in the car. Potter pointed her gun at Wright, threatened to taser him and then shot him. The overreaction of both Potter and Chauvin to relatively minor offenses led to the murders of two unarmed Black men. “Why, when you stop people of color, [do] you automatically draw a weapon?” asked Pastor Ezra Fagge’Tt, an eyewitness to Wright’s death.
Pretext Traffic Stops Enable Racial Profiling
Although Potter may have had probable cause to believe that Wright committed a minor traffic infraction, her decision to stop him was also the result of racial profiling.
In 1996, Antonin Scalia wrote an opinion for a unanimous Supreme Court that legalized racial profiling during traffic stops. The Court authorized pretext stops in Whren v. United States. That means officers can stop cars and temporarily detain motorists on the pretext of enforcing traffic laws, even if a reasonable officer would not have stopped the driver absent some additional law enforcement objective.
Even if they are subjectively motivated by racism, officers can stop a car as long as they have probable cause to believe the driver committed a traffic infraction. Whren permits “reasonable”law enforcement objectives to serve as a pretextual justification for subjective suspicion on the basis of race. Pretext stops foster racial profiling, and ultimately, the use of violence against Black people.
Living in a society steeped in white supremacy, non-Black people in the U.S. often associate Blackness with criminality and violence. The participants in a 2017 study conducted by the American Psychological Association “believed that the black men were more capable of causing harm in a hypothetical altercation and, troublingly, that police would be more justified in using force to subdue them, even if the men were unarmed,” lead author John Paul Wilson said. Non-Black participants were more likely to view the Black men as more harmful.
More than a quarter of police killings in 2018 occurred during traffic stops, according to a study conducted by National Public Radio. Officers’ use of force is not proportionate to the level of risk they’re faced with during these traffic stops.
Legal scholar Jordan Blair Woods found that “the rate for a felonious killing of an officer during a routine traffic stop was only 1 in every 6.5 million stops.” Likewise, the rate for an assault resulting in serious injury to an officer was just 1 in every 361,111 stops. Yet Black men were killed at a rate of 31.17 per every 1 million stops, a report by ProPublica concluded.
Tasers Can Also Kill People
Potter is claiming that she intended to reach for her Taser but accidentally grabbed her gun instead. Before shooting Wright, Potter screamed, “Taser!” Even if Potter did intend to taser Wright, that still would have amounted to the use of excessive force.
Tasers are electrical weapons that “deliver pulses of electrical charge that cause the subject’s muscles to contract in an uncoordinated way, thereby preventing purposeful movement. This effect has been termed ‘neuromuscular incapacitation,’” according to the 2020 UN Guidance on Less-Lethal Weapons in Law Enforcement. “The charge is delivered through metal probes that are fired towards the subject but which remain electrically connected to the device by fine wires.”
Officers regularly use Tasers despite their lethal nature. While police ostensibly seek compliance from victims by utilizing Tasers, they render victims unable to respond to commands due to neuromuscular incapacitation. There is a pattern of disproportionate use of deadly force by tasering Black people. A Reuters survey on Taser-related deaths through 2018 concluded that of the 1,081 people who have died in the U.S. from the use of Tasers, at least 32 percent were Black, even though Black people comprise only 14 percent of the population. But although 29 percent of people killed by Tasers were white, 60 percent of the U.S. population is white.
Officers Are Rarely Convicted of Killing Black People
Officers are rarely held accountable for killing Black people. Mapping Police Violence reported in 2020, “Officers were charged with a crime in only one percent of all killings by police.” Most officers who are charged are not convicted. And in the few cases they are convicted, it is frequently for lesser charges, not murder.
The timing of her killing of Wright made Potter’s prosecution more likely. Tensions in Minneapolis and indeed, throughout the nation, are high as video clips of Chauvin crushing the life out of Floyd are broadcast repeatedly throughout Chauvin’s trial. The justifiable public outrage at Potter’s shooting of Wright led to quick resignations of Potter and the Brooklyn Center police chief. Prosecutors charged Potter with second-degree manslaughter, which carries a maximum of 10 years in prison.
In Minnesota, second-degree manslaughter is defined as causing the death of another by “culpable negligence whereby the person creates an unreasonable risk, and consciously takes chances of causing death or great bodily harm to another.”
But Ben Crump, attorney for the Wright family, stated “This was no accident. This was an intentional, deliberate and unlawful use of force.” He said, “You would think that you know what side your gun is on and what side your Taser is on. There was no need to even Tase him.”
Crump cited “implicit bias” that “goes beyond policy.”
Wright’s aunt, Nyesha Wright, wants Potter charged with murder. “Prosecute them, like they would prosecute us,” she said at a news conference. “We want the highest justice.”
Prosecutors are likely doubtful they could get a jury to convict Potter of murder. Second-degree murder, which can result in a 40-year prison sentence, is defined as causing the death of another, without intent to kill, but while committing a felony. Third-degree murder carries a maximum sentence of 25 years. In order to be convicted, the perpetrator must have caused the death of another by “an act eminently dangerous to others and evincing a depraved mind, without regard for human life.”
Potter is a former president of her police union. These unions often assist members in covering up their misconduct. Police union representatives frequently provide officers with false narratives to conceal their culpability. Officers routinely meet with union representatives and lawyers before they officially submit a statement.
On April 27, the International Commission of Inquiry on Systemic Racist Police Violence Against People of African Descent in the United States, for which I am serving as a rapporteur, will release its report with findings of fact and recommendations addressed to national and international policy makers. The commission is examining whether police violence against Black people in the U.S. constitutes a gross violation of international human rights and fundamental freedoms. Testimony was presented to the commission by family members and attorneys about police killings of 43 Black people and the paralyzing of another, all of whom were unarmed or were not threatening the officers or others.
Racism drove each of the steps that led to Wright’s murder — from Potter’s stop of Wright, to her pulling out her gun, to her threatening to fire a Taser at him, to finally shooting Wright dead. Systemic racism is the fuel that drives police violence against Black people, and we must cast aside any talk of “accidents” when it comes to matters of racially motivated violence.
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Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and a member of the advisory board of Veterans for Peace. Her most recent book is Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues.
She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: Daunte Wright Protest at GAP (By Andrew Ratto/Wikimedia Commons)
April 19th, 2021 by Center For Biological Diversity
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Popular herbicide products widely available at hardware and garden stores contain undisclosed “inert” ingredients that can kill bumblebees, according to a new study published in the Journal of Applied Ecology.
The study compared several products, most of which contained the herbicide glyphosate, which is best known as the active ingredient in Roundup products. They found highly variable toxicity to bumblebees, including one formulation that killed 96% of the bees within 24 hours. Yet another herbicide formulation was found to cause no harm to bumblebees.
Unlike the active ingredients in pesticide products, such as glyphosate, these so-called inert ingredients are not subjected to a mandatory set of tests by the Environmental Protection Agency. But the study shows these inert substances can be toxic and harmful in their own right, including some that appear to block the bees’ breathing holes and gas-exchange systems, essentially drowning them.
“This important new study exposes a fatal flaw in how pesticide products are regulated here in the U.S.,” said Jess Tyler, a staff scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Now the question is, will the Biden administration fix this problem, or will it allow the EPA to continue its past practice of ignoring the real-world harms of pesticides?”
Pesticides are manufactured and sold as formulations that contain a mixture of compounds, including one or more active ingredients and, potentially, many inert ingredients. The inert ingredients are added to pesticides to aid in mixing and to enhance the products’ ability to stick to plant leaves, among other purposes.
The researchers’ finding that the various inert ingredients added to each formulation played a significant role in mortality rates suggests that the EPA’s current practice of just looking at the impacts of active ingredients fails to provide adequate protections.
Currently the agency requires hardly any toxicity data on a pesticide formulation. In 2017 the Center for Food Safety filed a legal petition calling for the agency to require pesticide companies to provide safety data on the whole pesticide formulations that farmers and homeowners actually use, including inert ingredients. The EPA held a comment period on the petition but has not yet acted to grant or deny it.
“EPA must begin requiring tests of every pesticide formulation for bee toxicity, divulge the identity of ‘secret’ formulation additives so scientists can study them, and prohibit application of Roundup herbicides to flowering plants when bees might be present and killed,” said Bill Freese, science director at the Center for Food Safety. “Our legal petition gave the EPA a blueprint for acting on this issue of whole formulations. Now they need to take that blueprint and turn it in to action, before it’s too late for pollinators.”
There are currently 1,102 registered formulations that contain the active ingredient glyphosate, each with a proprietary mixture of inert ingredients. The secrecy of these undisclosed, inert ingredients leaves researchers and the general public in the dark about the exact chemical makeup and actual toxicity of pesticide products.
Glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide in the United States and worldwide, with about 280 million pounds a year used across 285 million acres in U.S. agriculture alone. Its total volume of application increased by a factor of 12 from 1995 to 2014. This is largely driven by the adoption of genetically engineered crops like corn and soy that are engineered to withstand what would normally be a fatal dousing of glyphosate.
The EPA recently determined that glyphosate’s labeled uses are likely to “adversely affect” 93% of all threatened and endangered species and 96% of critical habitats that sustain them.
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Featured image: Roundup’s active ingredient, glyphosate, is the most heavily-used agricultural chemical in history. (Photo: Mike Mozart/Flickr/cc)
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VAERS data released today showed 795 reports related to blood clotting disorders with 400 attributed to Pfizer, 337 to Moderna and 56 to Johnson & Johnson between Dec. 14, 2020 and April 8, 2021.
Data released today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on the number of injuries and deaths reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) following COVID vaccines revealed reports of blood clots and other related blood disorders associated with all three vaccines approved for Emergency Use Authorization in the U.S. — Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson (J&J). So far, only the J&J vaccine has been paused because of blood clot concerns.
VAERS is the primary mechanism for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S. Reports submitted to VAERS require further investigation before a causal relationship can be confirmed.
Every Friday, VAERS makes public all vaccine injury reports received through a specified date, usually about a week prior to the release date. Today’s data show that between Dec. 14, 2020 and April 8, a total of 68,347 total adverse events were reported to VAERS, including 2,602 deaths — an increase of 260 over the previous week — and 8,285 serious injuries, up 314 since last week.
Of the 2,602 deaths reported as of April 8, 27% occurred within 48 hours of vaccination, 19% occurred within 24 hours and 41% occurred in people who became ill within 48 hours of being vaccinated.
In the U.S., 174.9 million COVID vaccine doses had been administered as of April 8. This includes79.6 million doses of Moderna’s vaccine, 90.3 million doses of Pfizer and 4.9 million doses of the J&J COVID vaccine.
This week’s VAERS data show:
19% of deaths were related to cardiac disorders.
55% of those who died were male, 43% were female and the remaining death reports did not include gender of the deceased.
The average age of those who died was 77 and the youngest death was an 18-year-old. There are a few reported deaths in children under 18, but these reports contained errors.
Of the 678 cases of Bell’s Palsy reported, 59% of cases were reported after Pfizer-BioNTechvaccinations, 38% following vaccination with the Moderna vaccine and 24 cases (4%) of Bell’s Palsy were reported with J&J.
Children’s Health Defense queried the VAERS data for a series of adverse events associated with the formation of clotting disorders and other related conditions. VAERS yielded a total of 795 reports for all three vaccines from Dec. 14, 2020, through April 8.
As The Defender reported today, although the J&J and AstraZeneca COVID vaccines have been under the microscope for their potential to cause blood clots, mounting evidence suggests the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines also cause clots and related blood disorders. U.S. regulatory officials were alerted to the problem as far back as December 2020.
CDC ignores The Defender, no response after 39 days
According to the CDC’s website, “the CDC follows up on any report of death to request additional information and learn more about what occurred and to determine whether the death was a result of the vaccine or unrelated.”
On March 8, The Defender contacted the CDC with a written list of questions about reported deaths and injuries related to COVID vaccines. We requested information about how the CDC conducts investigations into reported deaths, the status of ongoing investigations reported in the media, if autopsies are being done, the standard for determining whether an injury is causally connected to a vaccine, and education initiatives to encourage and facilitate proper and accurate reporting.
After many attempts to get a response from the CDC, 22 days after our initial outreach a representative from the CDC’s Vaccine Task Force responded, 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 set a new deadline of April 7. We’ve reached out multiple times since, but the representative has not answered our emails or returned our calls.
On April 15 we called the CDC’s general media line again and were told they had our list of questions and were unsure why the representative told us she never received them. We were told the COVID response team would be informed and that we should follow up in a few days.
It has been 39 days since we first reached out and have yet to receive answers to our questions.
Johnson & Johnson paused over reports of blood clot
On April 15, The Defender reported that a healthy 43-year old man in Mississippi suffered a stroke hours after being vaccinated with J&J’s COVID vaccine. Brad Malagarie, father of seven, had received the vaccine a little after Noon and was found unresponsive by co-workers at his desk.
Also on April 15, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported that the Ohio Department of Health is monitoring the investigation into what may have caused a 21-year-old University of Cincinnati student to die suddenly last Sunday, about a day after he received the J&J vaccine.
Alicia Shoults, a spokeswoman for the state health department, said the agency is waiting for the completion of a Hamilton County coroner’s report, and “if necessary,” further guidance from the CDC.
The two news stories came just days after federal health officials paused the J&J vaccine.
As The Defender reported April 13, the CDC and U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) called for a temporary but immediate halt to the use of J&J’s COVID vaccine while the agencies investigated the vaccine’s possible link to potentially dangerous blood clots.
In a joint statement, the agencies said the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) was reviewing clinical data gathered on six women, one who died, between the ages of 18 and 48 years who developed blood clots after receiving the single-dose J&J vaccine.
On April 14, the ACIP held an emergency meeting to vote on whether to lift the pause on J&J’s vaccine or change recommendations for its use. As The Defender reported, the ACIP postponed the vote, extending the pause pending further analysis of data relating to blood clots. The ACIP said it would reconvene for a vote in one week to 10 days.
That same day, J&J revealed two more cases of blood clots — one that occurred in a 25-year-old man who suffered a cerebral hemorrhage during a clinical trial and another case of deep-vein-thrombosis in a 59-year-old woman.
In its review of J&J’s submission for Emergency Use Authorization in February, the FDA initially urged further surveillance of a slight “numerical imbalance” in blood clotting events after receiving the shot. At the time, it was concluded there was “insufficient” data to determine “a causal relationship” with the vaccine and the drugmaker resumed the trial.
As The Defender reported April 12, the rollout of J&J’s COVID vaccine has not been smooth. At the beginning of the month the vaccine maker had to throw out 15 million doses of its vaccine after they were contaminated with AstraZeneca vaccine ingredients at an unapproved manufacturing plant in Baltimore.
The vaccine maker also has been plagued with shutdowns of its vaccine sites prior to the vaccine being paused, multiple reports of COVID breakthrough cases and criticism over its CEO’s $30 million pay package while the company pays out billions for its role in the opioid epidemic.
CDC, multiple states report ‘breakthrough’ COVID cases among fully vaccinated
Cases of fully vaccinated people getting COVID, referred to as “breakthrough” cases, continue to make news.
Calling it a “really good scenario,” the CDC yesterday reported 5,800 cases of COVID in fully vaccinated people. Of the 5,800 cases, 396 required hospitalization and 74 people died, the CDC said.
The CDC said it was “keeping a close eye” on the cases, but that breakthrough cases are to be expected. Tara Smith, a professor of epidemiology at the Kent State University College of Public Health in Ohio, told NBC News:
“This is a really good scenario, even with almost 6,000 breakthrough infections. Most of those have been mildly symptomatic or asymptomatic. That’s exactly what we were hoping for.”
On April 12, the Houston Health Department reported 142 breakthrough cases of COVID that occurred in fully vaccinated people since January, according to ABC 13 News. Vaccine recipients received either two doses of Moderna or Pfizer, or one dose of J&J. The report ruled out those who were said to have contracted the virus 45 days before their second scheduled shot date.
Houston Health Department said there were 2.46 positive cases out of every 10,000 fully-vaccinated people and it was unclear if those who tested positive contracted the original strand of COVID or a newer variant.
Last month, The Defender reported on breakthrough cases in Washington, Florida, South Carolina, Texas, New York, California and Minnesota. On April 6, The Defender reported on 246 breakthrough cases in Michigan, which included three people who died.
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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.
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When the United States government’s Food and Drug Administration earlier this week called for temporarily halting the giving of Johnson & Johnson’s experimental coronavirus vaccine shots because of the developing of blood clots in people who have received the shots, I asked if we were seeing an example of regulatory favoritism for the new mRNA technology shots over more traditional vaccine shots such as the Johnson & Johnson shots. The question arises because the US government is still encouraging everyone to take experimental mRNA “vaccines” from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech regarding which there are also many reports of injury and death.
While a variety or injuries and deaths have been reported after people have taken experimental coronavirus vaccine shots developed respectively by the three companies, if you focus in on just blood clot problems, those problems appear to arise after Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech experimental coronavirus shots as well as after Johnson & Johnson shots.
Megan Redshaw wrote Friday at the Children’s Health Defense website regarding adverse events reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) related to the blood clots in people who had taken any one of the three companies’ experimental vaccines:
Children’s Health Defense queried the VAERS data for a series of adverse events associated with the formation of clotting disorders and other related conditions. VAERS yielded a total of 795 reports for all three vaccines from Dec. 14, 2020, through April 8.Of the 795 cases reported, there were 400 reports attributed to Pfizer, 337 reports with Moderna and 56 reports with J&J — far more than the eight J&J cases under investigation, including the two additional cases added Wednesday.
As The Defender reported today, although the J&J and AstraZeneca COVID vaccines have been under the microscope for their potential to cause blood clots, mounting evidence suggests the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines also cause clots and related blood disorders. U.S. regulatory officials were alerted to the problem as far back as December 2020.
So why the different treatment for the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech shots?
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Comments Off on If Johnson & Johnson Coronavirus Vaccine Shots Are Halted Because of Blood Clots, Why Have Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech Shots Not Also Been Halted?
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Is Canada breaking international law when it applies unilateral coercive economic measures that are commonly referred to as sanctions?
Most countries and international law experts believe sanctions are only legitimate when approved by the World Trade Organization or United Nations Security Council. Economic sanctions outside the framework of the UN charter are generally considered “unilateral” and unlawful. According to the Asian-African Legal Consultative Organization report “Unilateral and Secondary Sanctions: An International Law Perspective”, “the imposition of unilateral and secondary sanctions on countries through application of national legislation is not-permissible under international law.”
So US sanctions on Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, Syria and elsewhere clearly violate the UN charter. Rather than a nonviolent measure, they are akin to a medieval siege designed to starve a city or fortress into submission.
Unilateral sanctions run afoul of the principle of self-determination and people’s right to development. In The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights a trio of authors note: “Unilateral economic sanctions (as opposed to multilateral UN measures under Chapter VII of the Charter) imposed by one State or group of States on another, to compel the latter to change a particular political or economic policy, could amount to a prohibited intervention and a denial of self-determination.” Similarly, the UN Human Rights Council recently reaffirmed that “unilateral coercive measures are major obstacles to the implementation of the Declaration on the Right to Development.” Last month the Human Rights Council approved a resolution 30 to 15 (with two abstentions) urging all states to stop adopting unilateral sanctions as they impede “the right of individuals and peoples to development.”
In recent years the Canadian government has adopted unilateral sanctions against a host of countries including Venezuela, China, Russia, Nicaragua and others. In a sign of Ottawa’s growing employment of sanctions as a tool of coercive statecraft, Canada adopted legislation modeled after the US Magnitsky Act and Global Affairs created a Sanctions Policy and Operations Coordination Division in 2018. At the time they put up $22 million over five years to enforce their sanctions regime.
Alongside the US, UK and EU, Canada sanctioned a Chinese state agency and four officials recently. Individuals assets in Canada were frozen and they are prohibited from travelling here or doing business with Canadian firms.
Two years ago Canada sanctioned nine Nicaraguan government officials, including ministers and the president of the National Assembly, in coordination with Washington. A June 2019 media note released by the US State Department declared “Canada’s sanctions actions today illustrate the international commitment to Nicaraguans’ cause, signaling clearly that President Ortega’s insufficient and self-serving measures are not nearly enough to address Nicaraguans’ demands for democracy, basic rights, and freedom from repression.”
Canada has adopted four rounds of sanctions against Venezuela since 2017. These moves reinforced and legitimated US sanctions that have contributed to tens of thousands of deaths. According to the preliminary report by the UN Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures, Alena Douhan, “the [Venezuelan] government’s revenue was reported to shrink by 99%, with the country currently living on 1% of its pre-sanctions income,” which has impeded “the ability of Venezuela to respond to the Covid-19 emergency.”
Not only a possible violation of international law, Canada’s first round of sanctions on Venezuela may have actually contravened domestic law. According to lawyer Andrew Dekany the August 2017 sanctions weren’t in accordance with Canadian legislation stating that international sanctions be adopted only as part of international alliances. As such, the Trump administration aided the Trudeau government by creating the US-Canada “Association Concerning the Situation in Venezuela” to conform to the existing sanctions legislation. In a Venezuela Analysis article titled “Do Canadian Sanctions Against Venezuela Violate Canadian Law?”, Dekany wrote, “there is no reason for Canada to ‘create’ this association but for its desire to help the U.S. out [by sanctioning Venezuela], having failed to persuade the one obvious organization (Organization of American States) which it had democratically joined to, among other things, act in such a way.”
Partly to sidestep the requirement to sanction in accordance with international institutions the federal government adopted the Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act (or Magnitsky law), empowering it to freeze individuals’ assets/visas and prohibit Canadian companies from dealing with sanctioned individuals. These sanctions are presented as simply targeting corrupt officials, but they have broader impacts. They dissuade broader commercial relations with a country and often legitimate harsher US measures. Whether they are in compliance with the UN charter is unclear. In her September report “Negative impact of unilateral coercive measures: priorities and road map: Report of the Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights”, Douhan questions “the legality of sanctions imposed on individuals and non-State entities, especially due to the proliferation of Magnitsky-like acts.”
Trudeau and his ministers regularly claim to promote an “international rules based order” with the No. 1 priority on Global Affairs’ website “revitalizing the rules-based international order.” As such, it’s remarkable how little discussion there is of whether unilateral Canadian sanctions violate international law.
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In a remote corner of Brazil’s Roraima state, a makeshift mining raft, made of empty gasoline barrels bound together with rope, floats in the Cotinga River. Under the surface of the murky water, its pump noisily scrapes up gravel and gold from the riverbed. On the horizon, chalk-colored pools of water polluted with heavy metals dot the savanna landscape of the Raposa Serra do Sol Indigenous territory.
Gold miners are technically barred from the vast territory, which is protected under federal law and reserved for the exclusive use of the 26,705 Indigenous people who call it home. Yet scenes like these — captured on video by Indigenous leaders last year — are becoming increasingly common in the Raposa Serra do Sol Indigenous Reserve as illegal wildcat miners, known as garimpeiros, descend on the territory in search of gold.
Illicit mining in the territory — which sprawls for 1.75 million hectares (4.32 million acres) along Brazil’s border with Venezuela and Guyana — has exploded over the last two years. Indigenous leaders in the territory now estimate there are between 2,000 and 5,000 garimpeiros in the area. The Indigenous Council of Roraima (CIR) says the number has doubled in the last year.
The Indigenous community has put up a barrier to stop outsiders — including illegal gold miners — from entering Raposa Serra do Sol Indigenous Territory and infecting those who live there with Covid-19. But residents say the garimpeiros are still pouring in. Image courtesy of the Indigenous Council of Roraima.
“The invasions are intensifying,” said Edinho Batista, CIR coordinator and part of the Macuxi ethnic group. “We have a huge challenge on our hands in Raposa Serra do Sol. And it’s thanks to the discourse of the government.”
Jair Bolsonaro has repeatedly supported miners and agribusiness over Indigenous groups — before and since becoming Brazil’s president — often using incendiary language. In 2016, while still in Congress, he declared: “We’re going to reverse Raposa Serra do Sol’s demarcation. We’re going to give rifles and weapons to all the ranchers!” As president, he has said of the reserve that “it is the richest area in the world. There are ways to exploit it rationally. And for the Indians, to give them royalties and integrate them into society.”
Possibly emboldened by such language, miners invading the territory have done far-reaching environmental and social damage. Swaths of the territory are burning, as garimpeiros set ablaze vegetation to clear the riverbanks, where most gold deposits can be found. In the last four months, satellites from U.S. space agency NASA have recorded 1,303 fire alerts in Raposa Serra do Sol, 80% of which lies in Brazil’s Cerrado savanna biome.
Environmentalists also warn that toxins like mercury — frequently used in mining to separate gold from grit — are seeping into the soil and flowing into water supplies. And with Covid-19 still ravaging Brazil, many fear illegal miners will infect Indigenous people, whose relative isolation makes them especially vulnerable to disease.
“The social and environmental impact is enormous,” said Alisson Marugal, federal public prosecutor for Roraima. “It’s devastating for the Indigenous community that lives there.”
An IBAMA agent investigates an illegal gold mine inside the Raposa Serra do Sol Indigenous Reserve during a past raid. Illicit invasions have increased in the territory since Jair Bolsonaro took office, but with IBAMA’s sharply reduced budget and personnel, law enforcement has been lax. Image courtesy of IBAMA.
Emboldened to invade
In Raposa Serra do Sol, the battle against invaders can be traced back more than half a century. The push to demarcate the territory began in the 1970s, but was stymied by local politicians and powerful agricultural interests, who argued that preservation would deal an economic blow to Roraima.
While Reposa Serra do Sol was formally demarcated in 2005, its protected status has been disputed for years. Rice producers, soy farmers and cattle ranchers illegally occupying the land refused to abandon it. Finally, Brazil’s Supreme Court recognized the demarcation in 2009 and ordered the removal of non-Indigenous occupants.
“We’re talking about Indigenous land that is iconic,” said Martha Fellows, a researcher at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM). “There was a battle to demarcate it, which was very complex. And now it finds itself under attack again.”
Observers blame the fresh incursions into the territory on Bolsonaro’s rhetoric, a populist who took office in January 2019. Since taking office, he has greatly weakened environmental enforcement, opposed the demarcation of Indigenous lands and supported a bill that would allow wildcat miners to freely explore them. He has also repeatedly criticized Raposa Serra do Sol’s protected status and vowed to review it.
“The Bolsonaro government is giving a green light with these plans to legalize economic activities inside Indigenous territories,” said Carol Marçal, a campaigner at Greenpeace Brazil. “And clearly this has an automatic impact on the ground, in the form of more invasions of Indigenous lands.”
The president’s rhetoric has been echoed by Roraima’s state government, which earlier this year passed a law legalizing wildcat mining. While the law did not permit mining on Indigenous lands or environmentally protected areas, it allowed garimpeiros to explore public lands without prior environmental studies.
And even though the law was revoked by the Supreme Court after just two weeks, it left a profound mark on the state, according to Marugal.
“This law, above all, had a symbolic impact for the wildcat miners,” Marugal said in an interview with Mongabay. “They understood this to be a signal that their activities within Indigenous lands could also be legalized in the future.”
Indigenous community members in the Raposa Serra do Sol Reserve being vaccinated against Covid-19 in March 2021. The community worries that illegal gold miners, who are invading their territory, may be bringing Covid-19 with them. Image courtesy of the Indigenous Council of Roraima.
From conflict to Covid
The invasions into Raposa Serra do Sol have posed a series of fresh threats to the Macuxi, Wapichana, Taurepang, Sapará and Ingaricó Indigenous peoples who live within the territory. Batista says these communities are seeing their health impacted, which he blames on the toxins miners often use to extract gold — especially mercury.
“We are suffering from the environmental impact: the water contamination, the air pollution, the destruction of the soil,” Batista said.
Scientific studies have found mercury to be dangerous to human health and have linked exposure to skin diseases, infertility and birth defects. In Brazil, some 221 metric tons of mercury seep into the environment each year as a result of illegal mining, preliminary studies showed in 2018.
In Roraima, a 2016 government-backed study discovered alarming levels of mercury in hair samples collected in Indigenous villages. One community was found to have mercury levels that were more than double what is considered a serious health risk.
Indigenous groups say miners are also bringing with them a host of social problems, including alcohol abuse and prostitution. Violence is on the rise too: in 2019, authorities registered 26 murders of Indigenous people in Roraima, the second highest rate in Brazil.
The advance of illegal mining is also spurring internal conflicts within Indigenous communities, according to Batista. “It ends up pitting people within the community against each other,” he said, noting that some reject the mines while others welcome the economic prospects they promise to Indigenous residents. “It’s fragmenting our communities.”
Many also fear that, as Covid-19 continues to batter Brazil, illegal miners may be bringing the virus into the territory and infecting Indigenous people, who have a history of being decimated by disease brought in from the outside. Batista says communities in Raposa Serra do Sol have put restrictions in place to keep Covid-19 out, but the surge in illegal miners is undermining their efforts.
“We created various sanitary barriers for containing the virus,” Batista said. “But the reality is that the garimpo continues operating, beyond these barriers.”
This week, Indigenous leaders in the neighboring Yanomami Indigenous Territory accused Ministry of Health workers of immunizing garimpos in exchange for gold, using vaccines meant for Indigenous people. Indigenous communities in Brazil have registered 46,509 known cases of Covid-19, with the eastern Roraima region accounting for 3,890 of these.
Members of the Indigenous community in Raposa Serra do Sol keep watch for outsiders invading their territory. Image courtesy of the Indigenous Council of Roraima.
Déjà vu
Authorities have struggled to contain the surge in invasions into Raposa Serra do Sol. Under Bolsonaro’s leadership, environmental agencies like IBAMA and ICMBio have seen their budgets and staff slashed repeatedly, leaving them with fewer enforcement resources.
Last year, three high-ranking IBAMA officials were also fired, after their teams burned equipment confiscated during a mass crackdown on illegal miners in an Indigenous territory — a practice long used legally by IBAMA, but condemned by the president.
“There is a whole series of measures that were taken [by the Bolsonaro administration] with the intention of weakening the structures that are in place to protect Indigenous territories,” Fellows said. “And that makes it difficult to enforce the rules.”
Federal police forces carried out two operations in Raposa Serra do Sol in early 2020 with the aim of investigating the criminal structure behind the mining operations, according to Marugal. He said authorities are now planning another operation in hopes of expelling the outsiders, amid worries about the surge in invasions this year.
But broader enforcement efforts in the region may have also backfired. With a renewed crackdown on miners in the Yanomami Reserve located in the Amazon rainforest biome, Batista says that mining pressure seems to have shifted to Raposa Serra do Sol, most of which lies in the Cerrado savanna biome.
“The operations are expelling some of the miners from Yanomami,” he said. “And so they’re just migrating here.” For many in Raposa Serra do Sor, this harks back to the 1990s, when the Yanomami reserve’s demarcation set off a similar wave of expelled garimpeiros who poured into the territory.
Across Brazil today, illegal miners are opening up new areas for mineral exploration as existing ones become oversaturated or mineral deposits dwindle. About 90% of new mining sites in 2020 were in Indigenous territories or protected parks, data from Brazilian space agency INPE shows. It is known that this surge in wildcat mining is well supported by criminal networks and elites, who pump money into gold mining, paying the miners, providing heavy equipment and supplies, as well as planes and airstrips to fly out gold.
As a new frontier of illicit gold mining emerges in Raposa Serra do Sol, authorities worry the territory may be on the same path as the Yanomami reserve, where illegal mining has become so entrenched that garimpeiros have built whole towns to back their efforts. Indigenous groups say about 20,000 wildcat miners have invaded Yanomami so far — a figure the federal government disputes.
“Today, normal police actions are not enough in Yanomami,” Marugal said. “We need a huge operation to expel the miners from there. It’s almost like fighting a war.
“And in Raposa Serra do Sol, the biggest concern right now is that the mining activity could spiral out of control in the same way that it has in Yanomami. This is our greatest fear.”
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It’s now universally acknowledged that public support for the Iraq war was based on an ignominious lie, a fallacy deliberately constructed within the public imagination by the imperial command system that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction. The mythos was the consequence of a multi deep-state ops supposed to swindle the masses into believing Saddam Hussein represented an immediate existential threat to the West that could only be contained by military action, military action conspicuously consisting in the presence of more corporate contractors than actual fighting soldiers for the first time in the history of war.
Today we are seeing the same strategies of disinformation being deployed to isolate and destroy an ascendant socialist China and leftists in the imperial core are once again being influenced by propaganda, uncritically, unthinkingly regurgitating Orientalist tropes about the barbarity of the Chinese regime. To defend the life of the mind against its debasement at the hands of imperialist propaganda those on the left must put in the hard work of methodically, sceptically examining the articles of faith the establishment manipulates us into swallowing about China.
The lynchpin of the Western propaganda effort against China is the myth of the Uyghur genocide, a lie serving as justification for a long planned war against China, which, as the biggest threat to US geostrategic hegemony, is a target for neutralization, and the propaganda is deeply, darkly manipulative, weaponising people’s innate sense of humanism against them.
A dispassionate study of the data, statistics and eye witness testimonies from Western dissidents who have studied the Uyghur culture suggest there is no genocide to speak of. Nevertheless, a moral panic has taken over Western politicians and media following a high profile Washington funded propaganda campaign. Claims of “millions detained” came from a Washington backed NGO, the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, who interviewed only eight people before jumping to rash conclusions about what was happening to a population of twenty million. CHRD boasts significant donations from the National Endowment for Democracy, a Washington regime change outfit which has its claws deep in the far-right discourse on the “need” to turn China into a Westernized client state.
Claims of “millions detained” were given more oxygen by Adrian Zenz, a far-right evangelist who serves as a China specialist at an anti-communist institute established by the US government, a religious zealot who once claimed that God had ordered him to fight against China.
Perhaps unsurprisingly given the abhorrent standards of western media, he is being treated as a serious authority on Chinese politics rather than the deluded, apoplectic liar he is, testifying to congress and becoming the go to pundit on Xianjing. The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation that Zenz works for is a descendent of the National Captive Nations Committee, a far-right nationalist organisation in the Ukraine which sought to stop detente with the Soviet Union. Yaroslav Stetsko, its co-chairman, boasted rank in a fascist militia that collaborated with the Nazis during their occupation of the Ukraine and went on to set up the World Anti-Communist League, a festering void of anti-semitism and neo-nazi sympathies that is attempting to whitewash history by rewriting it to put the legacy of Communism on a par with Hitler.
In the run up to Iraq, Blair, suzerain of the UK Parliament, relied on a “dodgy dossier” concocted by his principal spin doctor Alistair Cambpell which plagiarised parts of a PhD thesis and selectively presented the facts to suit the narrative that Saddam harbored weapons of mass destruction posing an immediate existential threat to the West.
Zenz has his own “dodgy dossier”: Sterilizations, IUDs, and Mandatory Birth Control: The CCP’s Campaign to Suppress Uyghur Birthrates in Xinjiang, in which he argues that the CCP are systematically suppressing Uyghur birthrates. Far from being isolated and attacked by a CCP policy steeped deep in repressive biopolitics the Uyghurs benefit from access to a wealth of family planning clinics and family planning resources supplied by the Chinese state for all citizens.
That the Western politico-media establishment gives an indomitable platform to such ethically dubious figures as Zenz shows that the verities of “liberalism” today, of which the myth of the Uyghur genocide is one, lack academic integrity. Zenz is merely an avatar of a fascistic US empire, a 2-dimensional cardboard cutout villain who makes an industry out of lying. One of the main aims of the massive psyops against China is to repress knowledge that the regime is making historic progress in bringing millions of people in and beyond China out of absolute poverty, therein distracting people from the fact neoliberal capitalism isn’t working. Another aim is to inculcate a revisionist history that wrongfully attributes genocidal intent to communist regimes.
Beyond the fact that the “millions detained” lie stems from agencies of the empire state, it’s also true that the “concentration camps” emotively referred to by western politicians are really educational institutes aiming to rehabilitate extremists so they can learn the skills to peacefully coexist within Chinese society. Uyghur separatists have joined forces with violent, murderous terrorist groups in the middle east and pose a severe threat to the safety, coherence and stability of Chinese society. The “concentration camps” are really a humane attempt to re-educate those mis-led by extremist philosophies.
If we were looking for examples of repression of Muslims, we might want to start with France, where illiberal policies are impinging on religious freedoms the West once prided itself on. If we were looking for examples of colonialism in Africa we might focus on the French military executing 12 innocent civilians. If we were looking for examples of colonialism as a danger worldwide, we might want to start looking at the transatlantic capitalist monolith.
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Hopes and expectations for a partial normalization between Moscow, Washington and Kiev stepping off the warpath were brief and flickered only for a moment before being entirely extinguished.
On April 13, U.S. President Joe Biden held a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The White House statement on the matter was positive, optimistic even, saying that the two discussed a number of regional and global issues.
They agreed to pursue a strategic stability dialogue on a range of arms control and emerging security issues.
They spoke about Ukraine, and how Russia needs to put forward effort to de-escalate the situation.
In response, Putin outlined approaches to a political settlement based on the Minsk Package of Measures.
The counterparts agreed to meet for talks a month after the diplomatic crisis sparked by Biden’s claims that Putin was a “killer.”
The situation seemed to be largely defused, proven by the fact that the United States decided not to deploy two of its warships to the Black Sea and, in fact, recalled them.
Immediately after that, the Biden Administration turned around, with the US President signing an executive order sanctioning Russia, and recalling 10 ambassadors.
He declared a national emergency over Russia’s alleged threat and all aspirations of normalization quickly evaporated.
The US Secretary of State immediately said that he was “pleasantly surprised” by the position of all 30 NATO states against Russia’s presumed aggression against Ukraine.
In addition, Russian ambassadors were summoned to the Foreign Ministers of the UK and Poland.
It was a united front, two complete shifts in rhetoric within a single day.
The same day, Biden had a short speech, expressing hope of establishing a rapport with Russia.
It was a very cliché text, and he quickly bolted afterwards.
He answered two questions, including one regarding Nord Stream 2.
He simply ran out of text and left, solidifying any “conspiracies” regarding whether he’s actually in control of his own ship.
As a result of the instability in US politics, Russia said that it was considering to ditch the US dollar.
No other Biden Putin meetings are likely to take place, mostly due to the incredible hypocrisy shown within a single day.
Meanwhile, the situation in Ukraine appears to be heading towards deterioration.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that the “Army is ready” and that the situation was under control, albeit there were “certain issues.”
While Moscow’s attention was focused on Washington, Turkey reportedly sent its troops to Ukraine.
According to Turkish media, Ankara’s specialists arrived to train Ukrainian soldiers in operating the Bayraktar TB2 drones.
April 15th may come down in modern history as the day a new war began, be it hot or cold.
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The recently intensified “sanctions war” between the US and Russia has made many observers wonder whether this escalation is symbolic, substantive, or strategic.
The US’ imposition last week of its most intense sanctions against Russia in several years prompted Moscow to respond in kind. Reuters published a handy factbox about the US’ initial moves while Sputnik released one about Russia’s, both of which should be reviewed by readers who aren’t fully familiar with what just happened.
The US reacted real negatively to Russia’s response by viewing it as a so-called “escalation” despite it mostly being tit-for-tat. Moscow also hinted that it has a few more sanctions tricks up its sleeve if Washington decides to take matters further. It therefore remains to be seen what might come next, but now’s the perfect moment to reflect on last week’s events in order to determine whether they’re symbolic, substantive, or strategic.
In a nutshell, the US sanctioned Russian currency and debt, tech companies, information outlets, and officials alongside expelling ten Russian diplomats. Russia responded by expelling an equal number of American diplomats, publishing a list of several American officials who are banned from the country, imposing restrictions on the hiring practices of US diplomatic missions and the movement of its diplomats, and promising to thwart all US-backed meddling efforts inside of Russia. The American moves were made on the unsubstantiated pretext of Russian hacking and meddling accusations while Russia’s were promulgated purely in self-defense. The US aims to create a stigma around Russian companies, its economy, and friendly media outlets while Russia intends to expose actual American meddling within the country.
It can be argued that both sets of moves are symbolic, substantive, and strategic. The American ones were in reaction to a weaponized information warfare narrative (symbolic), target elements of the Russian economy (substantive), and increase the campaign of so-called “maximum pressure” against Moscow (strategic). Russia’s, meanwhile, responded in kind by expelling US diplomats and publishing the list of officials who’ve been banned (symbolic), restricting US diplomatic activities (substantive), and thereby making it more difficult for America to meddle in Russia’s internal affairs (strategic). Basically, the US’ actions are offensive while Russia’s are defensive, and both endeavor to gain strategic advantages over the other in terms of the respective dynamics of their competition (the US pushing against Russia to destabilize it while Russia pushes back to protect itself).
Unlike the US-Chinese trade war, neither side can really inflict all that much damage on the other since their countries never “coupled” in the first place to “decouple” in the present in a way that might be mutually detrimental. This observation has pros and cons for each side. The “positive” side of things is that each party’s moves carry very little chance of provoking the other to significantly damage their interests, while the “negative” one is that this means that each party can at least in theory continue with their moves unabated depending on their political will to do so since it’s unlikely that their counterpart’s response will adversely affect them all that much. Obviously, the “positive” and “negative” determinations are relative and in the eyes of the bolder, dependent also on their intentions, ideologies, and other such factors that differ between them.
With that in mind, it’s appropriate to assess the chances of each respective strategy succeeding. The US’ will only be consequential if Washington has the political will to impose so-called “secondary sanctions” against those who purchase Russian currency and debt, which remains to be seen. Even in that scenario, however, the Russian response might predictably be to move much closer to China on those fronts, thus accelerating their grand strategic convergence and strengthening the newly formed “Justice League” between those two multipolar Great Powers. As for the odds of Russia’s defensive strategy succeeding, it has much brighter prospects since Moscow’s moves will greatly restrict Washington’s ability to meddle in its domestic affairs. For this reason, it’s predicted that US will lose its “sanctions war” with Russia even if it spins its failure as a success.
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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.
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In March of last year as the coronavirus panic was starting, I wrote a somewhat flippant article saying that the obsession with buying and hoarding toilet paper was the people’s vaccine.
My point was simple: excrement and death have long been associated in cultural history and in the Western imagination with the evil devil, Satan, the Lord of the underworld, the Trickster, the Grand Master who rules the pit of smelly death, the place below where bodies go.
The psychoanalytic literature is full of examples of death anxiety revealed in dreams of “shit-filled overflowing toilets” and “people pissing in their pants”. Ernest Becker put it simply in The Denial of Death:
No mistake – the turd is mankind’s real threat because it reminds people of death.
The theological literature is also full of warnings about the devil’s wiles. So too the Western classics from Aeschylus to Melville. The demonic has an ancient pedigree and has various names. Rational people tend to dismiss all this as superstitious nonsense. This is hubris. The Furies always exact their revenge when their existence is denied. For they are part of ourselves, not alien beings, as the tragedy of human history has shown us time and again.
Since “excremental visions” and the fear of death haunt humans – the skull at the banquet as William James put it – the perfect symbol of protection is toilet paper that will keep you safe and clean and free of any reminder of the fear of death running through a panicked world. It’s a magic trick of course, an unconscious way of thinking you are protecting yourself; a form of self-hypnosis.
One year later, magical thinking has taken a different form and my earlier flippancy has turned darker. You can’t hoard today’s toilet paper but you can get them: RNA inoculations, misnamed vaccines.
People are lined up for them now as they are being told incessantly to “get your shot.” They are worse than toilet paper. At least toilet paper serves a practical function. Real vaccines, as the word’s etymology – Latin, vaccinus, from cows, the cowpox virus vaccine first used by British physician Edward Jenner in 1800 to prevent smallpox – involve the use of a small amount of a virus. The RNA inoculations are not vaccines. To say they are is bullshit and has nothing to do with cows. To call them vaccines is linguistic mind control.
These experimental inoculations do not prevent the vaccinated from getting infected with the “virus” nor do they prevent transmission of the alleged virus. When they were approved recently by the FDA that was made clear. The FDA issued Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) for these inoculations only under the proviso that they may make an infection less severe. Yet millions have obediently taken a shot that doesn’t do what they think it does. What does that tell us?
Hundreds of millions of people have taken an injection that allows a bio-reactive “gene-therapy” molecule to be injected into their bodies because of fear, ignorance, and a refusal to consider that the people who are promoting this are “evil” and have ulterior motives. Not that they mean well, but that they are evil and have evil intentions. Does this sound too extreme? Radically evil? Come on!
So what drives the refusal to consider that demonic forces are at work with the corona crisis?
Why do the same people who get vaccinated believe that a PCR test that can’t, according to its inventor Kary Mullis, test for this so-called virus, believe in the fake numbers of positive “cases”? Do these people even know if the virus has ever been isolated?
Such credulity is an act of faith, not science or confirmed fact.
Is it just the fear of death that drives such thinking?
Or is it something deeper than ignorance and propaganda that drives this incredulous belief?
If you want facts, I will not provide them here. Despite the good intentions of people who still think facts matter, I don’t think most people are persuaded by facts anymore. But such facts are readily available from excellent alternative media publications.
Global Research’s Michel Chossudovsky has released, free of charge, his comprehensive E-Book:
Perhaps you think these sites are right-wing propaganda because many articles they publish can also be read or heard at some conservative media. If so, you need to start thinking rather than reacting. The entire mainstream political/media spectrum is right-wing, if you wish to use useless terms such as Left/Right.
I have spent my entire life being accused of being a left-wing nut, but now I am being told I am a right-wing nut even though my writing appears in many leftist publications. Perhaps my accusers don’t know which way the screw turns or the nut loosens. Being uptight and frightened doesn’t help.
I am interested in asking why so many people can’t accept that radical evil is real. Is that a right-wing question? Of course not. It’s a human question that has been asked down through the ages.
I do think we are today in the grip of “radical evil”, “demonic forces”. The refusal to see and accept this is not new.
As the eminent theologian, David Ray Griffin, has argued, the American Empire, with its quest for world domination and its long and ongoing slaughters at home and abroad, is clearly demonic; it is driven by the forces of death symbolized by Satan.
I have spent many years trying to understand why so many good people have refused to see and accept this and have needed to ply a middle course over many decades. The safe path. Believing in the benevolence of their rulers. When I say radical evil, I mean it in the deepest spiritual sense. A religious sense, if you prefer. But by religious I don’t mean institutional religions since so many of the institutional religions are complicit in the evil.
It has long been easy for Americans to accept the demonic nature of foreign leaders such as Hitler, Stalin, or Mao. Easy, also, to accept the government’s attribution of such names as the “new Hitler” to any foreign leader it wishes to kill and overthrow. But to consider their own political leaders as demonic is near impossible.
So let me begin with a few reminders.
The U.S. destruction of Iraq and the mass killings of Iraqis under George W. Bush beginning in 2003. Many will say it was illegal, unjust, carried out under false pretenses, etc. But who will say it was pure evil?
Who will say that Barack Obama’s annihilation of Libya was radical evil?
Who will say the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the firebombing of Tokyo and so many Japanese cities that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians was radical evil?
Who will say the U.S. war against Syria is demonic evil?
Who will say the killing of millions of Vietnamese was radical evil?
Who will say the insider attacks of September 11, 2001 were demonic evil?
Who will say slavery, the genocide of native people, the secret medical experiments on the vulnerable, the CIA mind control experiments, the coups engineered throughout the world resulting in the mass murder of millions – who will say these are evil in the deepest sense?
Who will say the U.S. security state’s assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, Jr., Robert Kennedy, Fred Hampton, et al. were radical evil?
Who will say the trillions spent on nuclear weapons and the willingness to use them to annihilate the human race is not the ultimate in radical evil?
This list could extend down the page endlessly. Only someone devoid of all historical sense could conclude that the U.S. has not been in the grip of demonic forces for a long time.
If you can do addition, you will find the totals staggering. They are overwhelming in their implications.
But to accept this history as radically evil in intent and not just in its consequences are two different things. I think so many find it so hard to admit that their leaders have intentionally done and do demonic deeds for two reasons. First, to do so implicates those who have supported these people or have not opposed them. It means they have accepted such radical evil and bear responsibility. It elicits feelings of guilt.
Secondly, to believe that one’s own leaders are evil is next to impossible for many to accept because it suggests that the rational façade of society is a cover for sinister forces and that they live in a society of lies so vast they the best option is to make believe it just isn’t so. Even when one can accept that evil deeds were committed in the past, even some perhaps intentionally, the tendency is to say “that was then, but things are different now.” Grasping the present when you are in it is not only difficult but often disturbing for it involves us.
So if I am correct and most Americans cannot accept that their leaders have intentionally done radically evil things, then it follows that to even consider questioning the intentions of the authorities regarding the current corona crisis needs to be self-censored. Additionally, as we all know, the authorities have undertaken a vast censorship operation so people cannot hear dissenting voices of those who have now been officially branded as domestic terrorists. The self-censorship and the official work in tandem.
There is so much information available that shows that the authorities at the World Health Organization, the CDC, The World Economic Forum, Big Pharma, governments throughout the world, etc. have gamed this crisis beforehand, have manipulated the numbers, lied, have conducted a massive fear propaganda campaign via their media mouthpieces, have imposed cruel lockdowns that have further enriched the wealthiest and economically and psychologically devastated vast numbers, etc.
Little research is needed to see this, to understand that Big Pharma is, as Dr. Peter Gøtzsche documented eight years ago in Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare, a world-wide criminal enterprise. It takes but a few minutes to see that the pharmaceutical companies who have been given emergency authorization for these untested experimental non-vaccine “vaccines” have paid out billions of dollars to settle criminal and civil allegations.
It is an open secret that the WHO, the Gates Foundation, the WEF led by Klaus Schwab, and an interlocking international group of “conspirators” have plans for what they call The Great Reset, a strategy to use the COVID-19 crisis to push their agenda to create a world of cyborgs living in cyberspace where artificial intelligence replaces people and human biology is wedded to technology under the control of the elites. They have made it very clear that there are too many people on this planet and billions must die. Details are readily available of this open conspiracy to create a transhuman world.
Is this not radical evil? Demonic?
Let me end with an analogy. There is another organized crime outfit that can only be called demonic – The Central Intelligence Agency. One of its legendary officers was James Jesus Angleton, chief of Counterintelligence from 1954 until 1975. He was a close associate of Allen Dulles, the longest serving director of the CIA.
Both men were deeply involved in many evil deeds, including bringing Nazi doctors and scientists into the U.S. to do the CIA’s dirty work, including mind control, bioweapons research, etc. The stuff they did for Hitler.
As reported by David Talbot in The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, when the staunch Catholic Angleton was on his deathbed, he gave an interviews to visiting journalists, including Joseph Trento. He confessed:
He had not been serving God, after all, when he followed Allen Dulles. He had been on a satanic quest….’Fundamentally, the founding fathers of U.S. intelligence were liars,’ he told Trento in an emotionless voice. ‘The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted…. Outside this duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power. I did things that, looking back on my life, I regret. But I was part of it and loved being in it.’ He invoked the names of the high eminences who had run the CIA in his day – Dulles, Helms, Wisner. These men were ‘the grand masters,’ he said. ‘If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell.’ Angleton took another slow sip from his steaming cup. ‘I guess I will see them there soon.’
Until we recognize the demonic nature of the hell we are now in, we too will be lost. We are fighting for our lives and the spiritual salvation of the world. Do not succumb to the siren songs of these fathers of lies.
Resist.
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Distinguished author and sociologist Edward Curtin is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
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We are currently seeing an acceleration of the corporate consolidation of the entire global agrifood chain. 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.
Of course, those involved in this portray what they are doing as some kind of humanitarian endeavour – saving the planet with ‘climate-friendly solutions’, helping farmers or feeding the world. This is how many of them probably do genuinely regard their role inside their corporate echo chamber. But what they are really doing is repackaging the dispossessive strategies of imperialism as ‘feeding the world’.
Failed Green Revolution
Since the Green Revolution, US agribusiness and financial institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have sought to hook farmers and nation states on corporate seeds and proprietary inputs as well as loans to construct the type of agri infrastructure that chemical-intensive farming requires.
Monsanto-Bayer and other agribusiness concerns have since the 1990s been attempting to further consolidate their grip on global agriculture and farmers’ corporate dependency with the rollout of genetically engineered seeds, commonly known as GMOs (genetically modified organisms).
“In the 1980s, the chemical corporations started to look at genetic engineering and patenting of seed as new sources of super profits. They took farmers varieties from the public gene banks, tinkered with the seed through conventional breeding or genetic engineering, and took patents.”
Shiva talks about the Green Revolution and seed colonialism and the pirating of farmers seeds and knowledge. She says that 768,576 accessions of seeds were taken from farmers in Mexico alone:
“… taking the farmers seeds that embodies their creativity and knowledge of breeding. The ‘civilising mission’ of Seed Colonisation is the declaration that farmers are ‘primitive’ and the varieties they have bred are ‘primitive’, ‘inferior’, ‘low yielding’ and have to be ‘substituted’ and ‘replaced’ with superior seeds from a superior race of breeders, so called ‘modern varieties’ and ‘improved varieties’ bred for chemicals.”
It is now clear that the Green Revolution has been a failure in terms of its devastating environmental impacts, the undermining of highly productive traditional low-input agriculture and its sound ecological footing, the displacement of rural populations and the adverse impacts on village communities, nutrition, health and regional food security.
Aside from various studies that have reported on the health impacts of chemical-dependent crops (Dr Rosemary Mason’s many reports on this can be accessed on the academia.edu website), ‘New Histories of the Green Revolution’ (2019) debunks the claim that the Green Revolution boosted productivity; ‘The Violence of the Green Revolution’ (1991) details (among other things) the impact on rural communities; Bhaskar Save’s open letter to Indian officials in 2006 discusses the ecological devastation of the Green Revolution and in a 2019 paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology and Agricultural Sciences, Parvez et al note that native wheat varieties in India have higher nutrition content than the Green Revolution varieties (many such crop varieties were side-lined in favour of corporate seeds that were of lower nutritional value).
These are just a brief selection of peer reviewed and ‘grey’ literature which detail the adverse impacts of the Green Revolution.
GMO value capture
As for GM crops, often described as Green Revolution 2.0, these too have failed to deliver on the promises made and, like the 1.0 version, have often had devastating consequences.
The arguments for and against GMOs are well documented, but one paper worth noting appeared in the journal Current Science in 2018. Along with PC Kesavan, MS Swaminathan – regarded as the father of the Green Revolution in India – argued against introducing GM crops to India and cited various studies about the failings of the GMO project.
Regardless, the industry and its well-funded lobbyists and bought career scientists continue to spin the line that GM crops are a marvellous success and that the world needs even more of them to avoid a global food shortage. GM crops are required to feed the world is a well-worn industry slogan trotted out at every available opportunity. Just like the claim of GM crops being a tremendous success, this too is based on a myth.
There is no global shortage of food. Even under any plausible future population scenario, there will be no shortage as evidenced by scientist Dr Jonathan Latham in his recent paper ‘The Myth of a Food Crisis’.
However, new gene drive and gene editing techniques have now been developed and the industry is seeking the unregulated commercial release of products that are based on these methods.
It does not want plants, animals and micro-organisms created with gene-editing to be subject to safety checks, monitoring or consumer labelling. This is concerning given the real dangers that these techniques pose.
Many peer-reviewed research papers now call into question industry claims about the ‘precision’, safety and benefits of gene-edited organisms and can be accessed on the GMWatch.org website.
It really is a case of old wine in new bottles.
And this is not lost on a coalition of 162 civil society, farmers and business organisations which has called on Vice-President of the European Commission Frans Timmermans to ensure that new genetic engineering techniques continue to be regulated in accordance with existing EU GMO standards.
The coalition argues that these new techniques can cause a range of unwanted genetic modifications that can result in the production of novel toxins or allergens or in the transfer of antibiotic resistance genes. The open letter adds that even intended modifications can result in traits which could raise food safety, environmental or animal welfare concerns.
The European Court of Justice ruled in 2018 that organisms obtained with new genetic modification techniques must be regulated under the EU’s existing GMO laws. However, there has been intense lobbying from the agriculture biotech industry to weaken the legislation, aided by the Gates Foundation.
The coalition states that various scientific publications show that new techniques of genetic modification allow developers to make significant genetic changes, which can be very different from those that happen in nature.
In addition to these concerns, a new paper from Chinese scientists, ‘Herbicide Resistance: Another Hot Agronomic Trait for Plant Genome Editing’, says that, in spite of claims from GMO promoters that gene editing will be climate-friendly and reduce pesticide use, what we can expect is just more of the same – GM herbicide-tolerant crops and increased herbicide use.
The industry wants its new techniques to be unregulated, thereby making gene-edited GMOs faster to develop, more profitable and hidden from consumers when purchasing items in stores. At the same time, the costly herbicide treadmill will be reinforced for farmers.
None of this is meant to imply that new technology is bad in itself. The issue is who owns and controls the technology and what are the underlying intentions. By dodging regulation as well as avoiding economic, social, environmental and health impact assessments, it is clear that the industry is first and foremost motivated by value capture and profit and contempt for democratic accountability.
This is patently clear if we look at the rollout of Bt cotton in India which served the bottom line of Monsanto but brought dependency, distress and no durable agronomic benefits for many of India’s small and marginal farmers. Prof A P Gutierrez argues that Bt cotton has effectively placed these farmers in a corporate noose.
Monsanto sucked hundreds of millions of dollars in profit from these cotton farmers, while industry-funded scientists are always keen to push the mantra that rolling out Bt cotton in India uplifted their conditions.
Those who promote this narrative remain wilfully ignorant of the challenges (documented in the 2019 book by Andrew Flachs – ‘Cultivating Knowledge: Biotechnology, Sustainability and the Human Cost of Cotton Capitalism in India‘) these farmers face in terms of financial distress, increasing pest resistance, dependency on unregulated seed markets, the eradication of environmental learning, the loss of control over their productive means and the biotech-chemical treadmill they are trapped on (this last point is precisely what the industry intended).
When assessing the possible impacts of GMO agriculture, it was with good reason that, in their 2018 paper, Swaminathan and Kesavan called for:
“able economists who are familiar with and will prioritise rural livelihoods and the interests of resource-poor small and marginal farmers rather than serve corporate interests and their profits”.
What can be done?
Whether through all aspects of data control (soil quality, consumer preferences, weather, etc), e-commerce monopolies, corporate land ownership, seed biopiracy and patenting, synthetic food or the eradication of the public sector’s role in ensuring food security and national food sovereignty (as we could see in India with new farm legislation), Bill Gates and his corporate cronies seek to gain full control over the global food system.
Smallholder peasant farming is to be eradicated as the big-tech giants and agribusiness impose lab-grown food, GM seeds, genetically engineered soil microbes, data harvesting tools and drones and other ‘disruptive’ technologies.
We could see farmerless industrial-scale farms being manned by driverless machines, monitored by drones and doused with chemicals to produce commodity crops from patented GM seeds for industrial ‘biomatter’ to be processed and constituted into something resembling food.
The displacement of a food-producing peasantry (and the subsequent destruction of rural communities and local food security) was something the Gates Foundation once called for and cynically termed “land mobility”.
Technocratic meddling has already destroyed or undermined agrarian ecosystems that draw on centuries of traditional knowledge and are increasingly recognised as valid approaches to secure food security, as outlined in Food Security and Traditional Knowledge in India in the Journal of South Asian Studies, for instance.
The report outlines two different futures. If Gates and the global mega-corporations have their way, we will see the entire food system being controlled by data platforms, private equity firms and e-commerce giants, putting the food security (and livelihoods) of billions at the mercy of AI-controlled farming systems.
The other scenario involves civil society and social movements – grassroots organisations, international NGOs, farmers’ and fishers’ groups, cooperatives and unions – collaborating more closely to transform financial flows, governance structures and food systems from the ground up.
The report’s lead author, Pat Mooney, says that agribusiness has a very simple message: the cascading environmental crisis can be resolved by powerful new genomic and information technologies that can only be developed if governments unleash the entrepreneurial genius, deep pockets and risk-taking spirit of the most powerful corporations.
Mooney notes that we have had similar messages based on emerging technology for decades but the technologies either did not show up or fell flat and the only thing that grew were the corporations.
He says:
“In return for trillions of dollars in direct and indirect subsidies, the agribusiness model would centralise food production around a handful of untested technologies that would lead to the forced exodus of at least a billion people from hundreds of millions of farms. Agribusiness is gambling on other people’s food security.”
Although Mooney argues that new genuinely successful alternatives like agroecology are frequently suppressed by the industries they imperil, he states that civil society has a remarkable track record in fighting back, not least in developing healthy and equitable agroecological production systems, building short (community-based) supply chains and restructuring and democratising governance systems.
As stated in the report, the thrust of any ’Long Food Movement’ strategy is that short-termism is not an option: civil society groups need to place multiple objectives and actions on a 25-year roadmap and not make trade-offs along the way – especially when faced with the neoliberal-totalitarianism of Gates et al who will seek to derail anything or anyone regarded as a threat to their aims.
The report ‘A Long Food Movement: Transforming Food Systems by 2045’ can be accessed here.
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Colin Todhunter is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research.
Featured image is from American Institute for Economic Research
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The US will soon review its nuclear weapons programme.
Should it spend $1.2 Trillion extending & updating it?
“The world’s largest nuclear weapon would vaporize everything within 5km and kill nearly everyone within 9km. At 20km, most buildings would collapse and many would catch fire. Everyone would be injured and many would die.”
Watch the video below by Double Down News.
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ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102 Print Edition: $10.25 (+ shipping and handling) PDF Edition: $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)
Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.
Reviews
“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.” –John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University
“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.” -Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations
Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction. –Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute
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Early on the morning of November 16, 2010 in front of the U.S. Federal District Courthouse in Tacoma, Washington, a large throng had gathered to vigil before the motions hearing for five Plowshares activists known as the Disarm Now Plowshares. Up the sidewalk I saw one of the defendants, Sr. Anne Montgomery walking toward us with Former US Attorney General William Ramsey Clark.
Clark had come to testify on behalf of the defendants who had been charged with a variety of offenses, while their only intention was to prevent the most ghastly crime possible – a full scale nuclear war.
The former attorney general appeared on behalf of Bill “Bix” Bichsel, SJ, Susan Crane, Lynne Greenwald, Steve Kelly, SJ, and Anne Montgomery, RSCJ, who all faced charges of Conspiracy, Trespass, Destruction of Property on a Naval Installation and Depredation of Government Property for their November 2, 2009 Plowshares action. They had entered the U.S. Navy’s nuclear weapons storage depot at Bangor, Washington to symbolically disarm the nuclear weapons stored there, and expose the illegality of the government’s continuing preparations for nuclear war.
Later, in the courtroom, Judge Benjamin Settle allowed testimony from Clark, who responded to questions from Disarm Now Plowshares co-defendants. When asked by Anne Montgomery if the plowshares activists were justified to enter the restricted area of the U.S. Naval Base, Clark said that they “had a duty to prevent harm, they were justified, and even required to prevent harm.” Clark was speaking in the context of the Plowshares activists entering the base, in which nuclear weapons are stored, to expose the illegality of the government’s actions in preparing for nuclear war.
When asked by Susan Crane if Trident nuclear warheads are legal, Clark said “No,” and explained that the Supreme Court has ruled that international law is binding under the U.S. Constitution. Nuclear weapons are unlawful under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) because of the agreement of the nuclear powers to eliminate them. Clark was in the Justice Department when the NPT was drafted. “Had we abided by the NPT, we would be a nuclear free world. It’s hard to believe we’ve come to this stage,” Clark said. The U.S. has ignored its obligations under the NPT, and now has enough warheads to destroy the planet.
Clark quoted Hugo Grotius, who wrote in his book “Of The Law of War And Peace” in the 17th century that, “The care to preserve society that is the source of all law.” Essentially, the law is designed to preserve society, and this theme continued to grow over centuries through international treaties (such as the NPT).
“Possession of the bomb is a crime. Just like it’s illegal to have a switchblade or concealed weapon, the nuclear weapons are illegal,” Clark said. He explained that 99 percent of the deaths in the Hiroshima bombing were non-military, and therefore extraordinarily disproportional. Possessing thousands of nuclear weapons, each one many times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, and which do not discriminate between combatants and civilians, is definitely a crime.
Clark concluded that Plowshares activists are opposed to all violence, and particularly nuclear weapons, which are “the ultimate human degradation.”
Among the documents considered by the Judge in the Disarm Now Plowshares case was a motion for dismissal in which the co-defendants concluded that, “Because this case involves unjust and illegal weapons of mass destruction, the use of which is a war crime under US and international law, and defendants actions were taken to protect a greater good and much higher law than the laws they are accused of violating, this case should be dismissed immediately.” Clark spoke to the heart of this issue and elucidated the duty of citizens to act when their government fails to follow the rule of law. The five Disarm Now co-defendants firmly believed that there was sufficient legal doctrine substantiating their invocation of the necessity defense, and that the “Defendants’ actions are just and not at all illegal,” and therefore the case should be immediately dismissed.
As with most other Federal Plowshares trials, the judge dismissed both motions by the defendants to dismiss charges, and the trial went forward. Ultimately, the jury found the defendants “guilty” of trespass, felony damage to federal property, felony injury to property, and felony conspiracy to damage property after a trial in which the defendants were not allowed to mount anything resembling a reasonable defense.
Clark testified on behalf of the Transform Now Plowshares in 2013, and led the defense team for Fr. Philip Berrigan and the Harrisburg Seven in 1971.
As for Clark’s participation in the Disarm Now Plowshares trial, it was a fine example of speaking one’s truth to power, and representing those with little or no voice or power. Clark’s life is an example of an individual who evolved over a full lifetime; an imperfect human being who strived to follow the rule and intent of the law, and to criticize his country when necessary, saying that a citizen’s “highest obligation” was to speak up when his government had violated its own principles and “not point the finger at someone else.”
The New York Times has published a detailed obituary that chronicles Clark’s many legal exploits on behalf of the victims of abuse of power by the US government. Wikipedia also lists a large number of people Clark defended in the years after he left government service.
Thank you, Ramsey, for representing those our nation has abused, neglected and usurped in its quest for power and hegemony.
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Featured image: Ramsey Clark and Sr. Anne Montgomery in front of the Tacoma Federal Courthouse on November 16, 2010 (by Leonard Eiger)
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Last week’s cyberattack on an Iranian nuclear facility, reportedly by Israeli intelligence, is the latest gambit from the coalition of Israeli leaders, Christian fundamentalists, and hawkish Washington neocons who want to block a US return to the Iran nuclear agreement. If they’re successful, millions of ordinary Iranians suffering under draconian sanctions will pay the price.
Just as talks between the United States and Iran were taking place last week in Vienna, a cyberattack was carried out on Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility. Reports are that the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, was behind the attack that blacked out the facility just one day after Tehran launched new advanced uranium enrichment centrifuges, and as US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was in Israel speaking about the United States’ “enduring and ironclad” commitment to the Jewish state.
This is the latest in a series of Israeli attacks on Iran designed to scuttle negotiations. Last summer, a number of explosions attributed to Israel broke out across Iran, including a fire at the Natanz site. These took place while US elections were in full swing and Biden was promising that if elected, he would return the United States to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA) that Trump withdrew from in 2018. In November 2020, Israeli operatives assassinatedMohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran’s top nuclear scientist in the city of Absard outside Tehran. Had Iran responded, the United States might have been dragged into an all-out war.
Israeli officials have also directly lobbied the US Congress to quash the deal. In 2015, Netanyahu traveled to Washington, DC in 2015 to address a joint session of Congress in an attempt to uncut Obama’s original negotiations. This time, Mossad chief Yossi Cohen will be traveling to Washington to meet with top White House and US intelligence officials, and he hopes with Biden directly, to convince the administration that Iran has been concealing details about its nuclear program and therefore can’t be trusted. This is indeed ironic coming from a country that, unlike Iran, actually has nuclear weapons and refuses to disclose any information about its program.
Like Israel, the powerful US lobby American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is trying to convince Biden not to go back into the JCPOA. Last month, they organized bipartisan letters in the House and Senate, urging the Biden administration to insist on an expanded deal that included missiles, human rights, and Iran’s activities in the region. Since Tehran has been clear that an expanded or amended deal is a nonstarter, such “advice” was an attempt to quash talks.
The neoconservative think tank Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), which worked inside the Trump administration during and after Trump pulled out of the JCPOA, has been relentlessly pushing for war with Iran. After the United States recklessly assassinated Iran’s top general, Qassem Soleimani, FDD CEO Mark Dubowitz gloated, tweeting that the death of Soleimani was “more consequential than the killing of [Osama] #BinLaden”; and on April 11, the same day as the Natanz blackout, former CIA officer and FDD fellow Reuel Marc Gerecht, speaking on CNN, voiced disappointment that Trump hadn’t taken the United States and Iran into an all-out war.
Another group against a deal with Iran is Christians United for Israel (CUFI), one of the most powerful pro-Israel voices in the United States. In March 2021, CUFI urged the Senate not to confirm Colin Kahl for a top policy position at the Pentagon, claiming, “Kahl is a serial Iran appeaser” who “helped advance the disastrous Iran nuclear accord.” In response to the blackout at Natanz, they cheered Netanyahu, tweeting “‘Battling Iran is a colossal mission,’ Netanyahu says following blackout at Iranian nuclear plant.”
The People’s Mujahedin of Iran, or MEK, which the United States had previously designated as a terrorist organization and is known for assassinations and bombings it has carried out, is virulently opposed to US-Iran diplomacy. In March 2021, a number of US Senators attended a virtual event organized by the MEK-aligned Organization of Iranian American Communities (OIAC) calling for continued US sanctions and “bringing down the regime.” Senator Bob Menendez, the powerful chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was among several Democrats in attendance.
The opponents of the Iran deal are trying to keep in place the draconian wall of sanctions that the Trump administration imposed precisely to make it more difficult for a future US administration to rejoin the JCPOA. But these sanctions are causing immense suffering for ordinary Iranians, including runaway inflation and skyrocketing food and medicine prices. According to the UN, they contributed to the government’s “inadequate and opaque” response to the COVID-19 pandemic that has hit Iran particularly hard.
While “successful” in inflicting harm on the Iranian people, the sanctions have failed to broaden the terms of the talks, led the nation to increase its uranium enrichment, negatively impacted the human rights situation, and put the United States and Iran on the brink of an all-out war on multiple occasions.
That’s why so many people in Iran, and those who care about them, have been encouraged by this new round of diplomatic engagement. But Israel, AIPAC, CUFI, FDD, MEK, Menendez, and the like are probably instead hoping that Iran carries out the revenge that Iranian officials have called for in response to the Natanz blackout. But as the saboteurs of diplomacy hope for a violent escalation, let’s keep in mind — and hope Iran agrees — that the best revenge would be a revived JCPOA.
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The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.
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If an identifiable group were being destroyed, especially a group that in 2018 constituted 12.7184 million people, that would surely be impossible to hide — even in a region as large as the autonomous province of Xinjiang. Furthermore, if one is going to allege such a horrific crime, one should not do so without irrefutable evidence.
One French journalist based in China, writing under the byline of Laurene Beaumond, criticized western media for alleging genocide1 against Uyghurs in Xinjiang province.2
She asks,
So what is this parody of a process against China from a distance, without any concrete proof, without any valid testimony, by individuals who have never set foot in this region of the world?3
Concrete evidence should be demanded of all accusers.
This genocide is alleged to have occurred although the population of Uyghurs is vastly increasing in Xinjiang. Global Times, an English-language Chinese newspaper under the People’s Daily, cites statistical data from 2010 to 2018 that show:
the Uygur population increased from 10.1715 million to 12.7184 million, an increase of 2.5469 million, or 25.04%; the population of Han ethnic group increased from 8.8299 million to 9.0068 million, an increase of 176,900 people, or 2.0%.
If factually accurate (and I have seen no refutation of the statistics), then this is an utter refutation of a genocide taking place! The only other conclusion is that the modern Chinese are absolutely incompetent genocidaires.
Western media accusations are relying, for the greatest part, on a thoroughly discredited German “academic”: Adrian Zenz.
Le Monde does not seek to buttress the allegations of genocide in Xinjiang. Instead it questions the bona fides of Laurene Beaumond. Le Monde says this person does not exist.
Global Times says she exists, but the name is a pseudonym.
This is problematic. It can be taken for granted that if one wants to work in western media then previous writings highly critical of the western Establishment and its media would shut the door quite tightly for any writing gigs in the West. But writing under a pseudonym poses ethical considerations. The monopoly media is often criticized by independent media and free thinking readers for trotting out anonymous sources. When a source is anonymous, when substantiation is lacking for what is said or written, then that source and its claims deserve to be met with skepticism.
In my mind, CGTN or any scrupulous media, should only allow persons to write under a pseudonym under stringent conditions, for example, if the writer’s life would be endangered. Also, the media would have to vouch, up front, for the bona fides of the writer or story source. This is especially so given the seriousness of a genocide allegation.
There is a solution, and it will require a bold step by “Laurene Beaumond.” She must come forward, declare her genuine identity, and present her credentials to clear all this up. CGTN needs to develop a transparent policy on the use of pseudonyms, and I’d suggest an apology might be in order for publishing this under a pseudonym.4
The heinous allegation of genocide demands a forthrightness to dispel it as disinformation. The insidiousness of disinformation is such that it has been held to be a crime against humanity and a crime against peace. Professor Anthony J. Hall made this clear:
Disinformation originates in the deliberate and systemic effort to break down social cohesion and to deprive humanity of perceptive consciousness of our conditions. Disinformation seeks to isolate and divide human beings; to alienate us from our ability to use our senses, our intellect, and our communicative powers in order to identity truth and act on this knowledge. Disinformation is deeply implicated in the history of imperialism, Eurocentric racism, American Manifest Destiny, Nazi propaganda, the psychological warfare of the Cold War, and capitalist globalization. Disinformation seeks to erode and destroy the basis of individual and collective memory, the basis of those inheritances from history which give humanity our richness of diverse languages, cultures, nationalities, peoplehoods, and means of self-determination. The reach and intensity of disinformation tends to increase with the concentration of ownership and control of the media of mass communications.
Practice open-minded skepticism; demand evidence; demand to know who the people involved are; scrutinize the history and backgrounds of the people, media, and places. In other words don’t allow yourself to easily be lied to.
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Kim Petersen is a former co-editor of the Dissident Voice newsletter. He can be emailed at: kimohp@gmail. Twitter: @kimpetersen.
Notes
Several media speak of “allegations” or “accusations” of genocide in Xinjiang. E.g., CNN, BBC, Frankfurter Allegemeine, Al Jazeera, Berlinske, CTV, CBC, Forbes, etc. Japan is more cautious. It is highly recommended for those seeking insight to read the report compiled by the Qiao Collective, an all-volunteer group comprised of ethnic Chinese people living abroad, on Xinjiang that warned of “politically motivated” western disinformation.
The linked article carries an editor’s note: “Freelance journalist based in France, with a double degree in art history and archeology at the University of Sorbonne-IV and holder of a master’s degree in journalism, Laurène Beaumond has worked in various editorial offices Parisians before settling down in Beijing where she lived for almost 7 years. The article reflects the views of the author, and not necessarily those of CGTN Français.”
“Qu’est-ce donc cette parodie de procès que l’on fait à la Chine à distance, sans aucune preuve concrète, sans aucun témoignage valable, par des individus qui n’ont jamais mis le pied dans cette région du monde…?”
After all, Global Timesdemanded an apology from Le Monde for doubting the existence of “Laurene Beaumond.” No writer genuinely exists under this birth name, so, in fact, Le Monde was accurate on this account.
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It had to be symbolic, and was represented as such. Forces of the United States will be leaving Afghanistan on September 11 after two decades of violent occupation, though for a good deal of this stretch, US forces were, at best, failed democracy builders, at worst, violent tenants.
In his April 14 speech, President Joe Biden made the point that should have long been evident: that Washington could not “continue the cycle of extending or expanding our military presence in Afghanistan hoping to create the ideal conditions for our withdrawal, expecting a different result.” As if to concede to the broader failure of the exercise, “the terror threat” had flourished, being now present “in many places”. To keep “thousands of troops grounded and concentrated in just one country at a cost of billions each year makes little sense to me and to our leaders.”
For such a long stay, the objectives have been far from convincing. The US presence in Afghanistan should focus “on the reason we went there in the first place: to ensure Afghanistan would not be used as a base from which to attack our homeland again. We did that. We accomplished that objective.” A debacle is dressed up in the robes of necessity, the original purpose being to “root out al Qaeda” in 2001 and “to prevent future terrorist attacks against the United States planned from Afghanistan.”
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is marshalling European leaders to aid in the withdrawal effort. “I am here,” he stated at NATO’s Belgium headquarters, “to work closely with our allies, with the secretary general, on the principle that we have established from the start, ‘In together, adapt together and out together’.” There have been few times in history, perhaps with the exception of the Vietnam War, where defeat has been given such an unremarkable cover.
Little improvement on this impression was made at a meeting between Blinken and Abdullah Abdullah, chair of the Afghanistan High Commission for National Reconciliation. According to State Department spokesperson Ned Price, the secretary “reiterated the US commitment to the peace process and that we will use our full diplomatic, economic, and humanitarian toolkit to support the future the Afghan people want, including the gains made by Afghan women.”
At the US embassy in Kabul, Blinken made an assortment of weak assurances about “America’s commitment to an enduring partnership with Afghanistan and the Afghan people.” Despite the troops leaving the country, the “security partnership will endure.” There was “strong bipartisan support for that commitment to the Afghan Security Forces.” There would be oodles of diplomacy, economic investment and development assistance. And, as for the Taliban, joyfully lurking in the wings to assume power, Blinken had this assessment: “It’s very important that the Taliban recognize that it will never be legitimate and it will never be durable if it rejects a political process and tries to take the country by force.”
A better, and more accurate sense of attitudes to Kabul could be gathered in the remarks of a senior Biden official, as reported in the Washington Post. “The reality is that the United States has big strategic interests in the world…. Afghanistan just does not rise to the level of those other threats at this point.” Afghanistan, in time, will be discarded like strategic refuse.
Critics invariably assume various aspects of the imperial pose: to leave the country is to surrender a policing function, to encourage enemies, to reverse any gains (shallow as they are), to lay the grounds for the need for potential re-engagement. An erroneous link is thereby encouraged linking US national security interests with the desperate ruination that has afflicted a State that has not seen peace in decades. For its part, the US contribution to that ruination has been, along with its coalition allies, far from negligible.
Senate minority leader Mitch McConnellpreached that the withdrawal was “a grave mistake,” a reminder that such foolish decisions had been made before. “Ten years ago, when President Obama let politics dictate the terms of our involvement in Iraq, those failed decisions invited the rise of ISIS.” For McConnell, battling terrorism remained a central purpose for keeping boots on the much trodden ground of Afghanistan. “A reckless pullback like this would abandon our Afghan, regional, and NATO partners in a shared fight against terrorists we have not yet won.”
In March, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, told a National Security Council Principal Committee meeting that withdrawing would see women’s rights return “to the Stone Age”. Leaving was also not advisable, given “all the blood and treasure spent”. (Others at the meeting felt that Milley’s arguments had the soft stuffing of emotion rather than firm logic.)
The Washington Post, in a vein similar to that of McConnell and Milley, resorted to the conventional betrayal thesis: leaving was “an abandonment of those Afghans who believed in building a democracy that guaranteed basic human rights”. It would also mean nullifying “the sacrifices of the American servicemen who were killed or wounded in that mission.” Little thought is given to the shallow, corruption saturated regime in Kabul that can barely claim any semblance of legitimacy beyond the sponsorship of external powers.
The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William Burns, takes a more prosaic, utilitarian line. Leaving Afghanistan will, he explained at a hearing of a Senate Intelligence Committee on global threats, drain the intelligence pool. “When the time comes for the US military to withdraw, the US government’s ability to collect and act on threats will diminish. That’s simply a fact.”
The pessimists from the National Review are also full of warning. Jim Geraghty is almost shrill in worrying what the media headline, “Taliban Rule Afghanistan Again” will do in spurring on “global Islamist jihadism,” claiming that, “[a] bad withdrawal only sets up the need for more combat in the future.” Kevin Williamson is at least accurate on one point: Afghanistan, for the US, is a clear picture of “what failure looks like. What success is going to look like, we still don’t know.” Nor, it would seem, ever will.
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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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That the United States likes to use expressions like “shock and awe” or “maximum pressure” would rather suggest that there is a psychopath working in the White House basement whose full-time job is to come up with pithy one-liners to somehow euphemize government bad behavior. The expressions hardly mean anything in and of themselves apart from “tough talk” but they do serve as an alternative to having to admit in plain language to the killing of millions of people since the Global War on Terror began in 2001. “Millions?” one might skeptically ask. Yes, millions if one includes all those killed directly or indirectly as a result of the wars. Direct victims of the violence number at least 157,000 in Afghanistan, 182,000 in Iraq, 400,000 in Syria and 25,000 in Libya. And if you want to go back a few years three million Vietnamese died in 1964-1975 while 2.5 million civilians were killed in Korea. And even in the “Good War” World War 2 there were unnecessary incidents to include the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that killed 105,000, the firebombing of Tokyo adding another 97,000, and the firebombing of Hamburg and Dresden that together killed 45,000.
An estimated ten million more civilians have been displaced from their homes since 2001, creating refugee crises in both Europe and the Americas, while trillions of dollars have also been wasted or “misplaced” by the geniuses at the Pentagon and in Congress. And some might reasonably argue that the violence taking place all around the world has also been internalized in the U.S., with mass murders surfacing in the news media every few days. Some argue that the United States has nearly always been at war since its founding, which would be true, but it is also correct to note that the nature of America’s lethal engagement with the rest of the world has changed in the past twenty years. Old wars were fought to expand territory and trade or to acquire colonies for the same purpose, meaning they were intended to increase one’s power and wealth. Since 9/11, however, the wars are being fought seemingly without any real identifiable objective while also inflicting significant losses in relative wealth and power on the United States.
The fundamental problem is that the United States is being led by a political and financial elite that has completely bought into a radical view that Americans have a “manifest destiny” to create an international order that is both plausibly democratic and rules-based that would as the theory goes benefit everyone. This is, of course, nonsense as the United States itself is becoming increasingly totalitarian while it also nurtures in its bosom anti-democratic states like Saudi Arabia and Israel.
The elite that might be blamed for many of the missteps of the past twenty years includes both liberals and conservatives, all of whom for one reason or another embrace America’s mission. There is, for example, little to differentiate the world views of Donald Trump appointees Mike Pompeo and John Bolton from those of the current foreign policy incumbent Tony Blinken, as all three men believe that the use of force is the completely acceptable ultimate response to recalcitrant nations and leaders.
Blinken shares the very same trait visible in Pompeo and Bolton, that they actually radiate a sense of moral superiority while implementing policies that result in the pointless deaths of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands and even millions of innocents. They occupy the bully pulpit as they sanctimoniously call for action regarding their “noble cause” of making the rest of the world both look like America while also deferring to Washington for direction and guidance.
Tony Blinken is not surprisingly a protégé of Bill Clinton’s former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who famously cackled that “it was worth it” when asked about the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children due to U.S. enforced sanctions on food and medicine. Somehow it seems that whenever one turns over a rock in the Democratic Party up pops someone connected with the Clintons. Blinken recently produced and tweeted out a bizarre video that attempts to explain the real “humanity” behind the current Syrian policy, which he helped to define and initiate working closely with Joe Biden while serving under President Barack Obama. It is a sanctions-plus military intervention construct that has, inevitably, resulted in the deaths and the displacements into Europe and the Middle East. The policy was from the beginning clearly intended to bring about “regime change” in Damascus even though the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad in no way threatened the United States.
Blinken tweeted: “When I think of the suffering of the Syrian people, including Syrian children, I think of my own two children. How could we not take action to help them? Our common humanity demands it. Shame on us if we don’t. We have to find a way to do something to take action to help people.” Blinken fails to mention that the blood of the Syrian children is largely on his hands, particularly as the U.S. and Israel effectively turned loose and otherwise supported the terrorist and separatist groups that killed so many Syrian civilians while also destroying entire towns, religious centers and many irreplaceable relics of the country’s history.
So Blinken is really a good guy, thinking about his own kids while mourning the deaths of so many Syrian boys and girls? No. If he really wanted to help those children, he would have announced that U.S. troops will be withdrawn from Syria immediately. He would have lifted sanctions on the country so that it can begin serious reconstruction, together with restoring access to food and needed medicines. He did nothing of the sort and clearly is fully on board with the agenda set over the past ten years by the neocons and their Israeli masters plus the “democracy promotion” at all costs wing in his own party.
And the real problem is that Syria is not alone. Blinken and his cohorts are also encouraging Ukraine’s irredentism which is close to bringing on a war with Russia while also poking China over Taiwan. And then there is also Venezuela which appears to need a regime change and the perennial problem with Iran. And Afghanistan? Blinken should realize that all the deaths of the children that so concern him could be avoided if he and those pulling his strings would adopt a more modest agenda and stay at home. We have enough problems in the United States, but then again, the hubris which has created a pointless foreign policy would likely be channeled to drive still more of the destructive impulses that are turning the country into a collective of hostile enclaves.
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Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]
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Objectives
The goal of this study is not to impress academics with complex statistics or seek favourable peer reviews, but to demonstrate to the ordinary decent citizen of Ireland, in the simplest possible terms, how the 2020 COVID-19 deaths claimed by NPHET every night on RTE1 and published on the data.gov.ie website cannot possibly be true. To that end I will present basic arithmetic and graphs as it is my belief that every Irish citizen should be fully informed of the fraud which has been carried out by the Irish Government, its agents and the media for the benefit of vested interests to terrorise the population into submitting to their draconian COVID measures by grossly overstating the deaths due to COVID-19 in 2020.
This study will conclude that Ireland had the lowest death rate in 2020 since 2012
Introduction
It is a legal requirement in Ireland that every death that takes place in the State must be recorded and registered. Records of deaths in Ireland are held in the General Register Office (GRO), which is the central civil repository for records relating to Births, Marriages and Deaths in Ireland. Deaths must be registered as soon as possible after the death and no later than 3 months.
The GRO estimate that approximately 80% of deaths are registered in this timeframe, however many deaths take longer than 3 months especially if a death is referred to the Coroner’s Service, such deaths include suicides, violent deaths and more recently all COVID-19 deaths, these deaths may not be registered for months or years after the occurrence. The GRO provide regular updates on the total deaths registered by the month they occurred in, but because of the lag in registrations they do not come close to being accurate until approximately six months after the month of occurrence. Generally, this lag would not cause a major problem as the death data is mainly used for medical research, however in natural disasters and health emergency situations such as the ongoing alleged COVID-19 pandemic, accurate and up-to-date death data is critical for planning and implementing measured responses to emerging situations. Without this current data on deaths, vested interests can use misinformation to understate or exaggerate deaths to pacify or terrorise the general population into certain actions or inactions, i.e., mass manipulation or hysteria.
Methodology
During the early stages of the alleged COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 a number of publicly funded Irish academics began fearmongering through the media, including state sponsored media, that they estimated thousands of additional deaths would occur due to COVID-19. These deaths are called “excess” as they are above the normally expected deaths based on the previous 5-year average. These academics were estimating deaths compared to deaths notices published on the RIP.ie website.
Antidotally the evidence I was receiving from family, friends, work colleagues and my own observations in the major Dublin hospital where I work made me sceptical that the large numbers of COVID-19 deaths being reported were not actually excess deaths and were not above normal for previous flu seasons. In fact, January 2020 had a very low occurrence of flu cases. I began to look at the RIP.ie death notices and could not see how the academics could predict such high numbers of deaths. I contacted the academics and debated with them by email but they claimed the RIP.ie database they were using was privileged and would not share it with me, I was led to believe that they had obtained a proprietary database of the death notices from RIP.ie.
Later in November 2020 I became aware of an experiment being carried out by John Flanagan of the Central Statistics Office (CSO) also using RIP.ie death notices to estimate the total number of deaths occurring in recent months. The last CSO press statement on 2nd November 2020 regarding John’s experiment which ended in the September encouraged me to look closer at the possibility of obtaining more up-to-date figures on deaths using the RIP.ie death notices. I developed an automated system to obtain the data required from the death notices published on the RIP.ie website, plus, a method to remove or “clean” notices for deaths which occurred outside of Ireland and duplicate notices. I benchmarked my estimates against previous monthly GRO/CSO death data back to 2014 and found that it was as accurate as John Flanagan found during his experiment.
Results
The comparison in tabular format between the death notes that I obtained from the RIP.ie website and cleaned to remove deaths which had occurred outside Ireland and duplicate notices, and the published GRO/CSO data from 2014 to 2021 is shown in Table 1 & 2 below.
Table 1
Table 2
While it can be seen that there are variations between the monthly and yearly data, the totals for the years 2014 to 2019 is 185,741 for RIP.ie and 185,500 for GRO/CSO, a difference of only 0.13%.
I then calculated the previous 5-year average for each month 2018-2012 from the data in Table 1 & Table 2, the excess deaths were calculated as the difference between the previous 5-year average for each month and the total for that month as shown in Table 3 below. The COVID-19 deaths claimed by NPHET and sourced from data.gove.ie is also included in Table 2 for each month from March 2020 to March 2020, there are no COVID-19 deaths provided for Jan and Feb 2020 and are assumed to be zero.
Table 3
Discussion
As can be seen from the Table 3, the excess deaths based on RIP.ie data for a full year from Jan to Dec 2020 (in red) total up to -103 whereas the total deaths claimed by NPHET / data.gov.ie from Mar to Dec 2020 (in blue) total up to 2,167, an alarming difference of 2,270 deaths. It must be noted that NPHET / data.gov.ie do not provide data on COVID-19 deaths in Jan and Feb 2020 and therefore assumed to be zero. If COVID-19 deaths claimed by NPHET/data.gov.ie were caused by a novel virus, and there were no other factors causing excess deaths (such as another novel disease, war, famine, natural disaster, etc.), then the NPHET/data.gov.ie claimed COVID-19 deaths (solid red line) should closely match the RIP.ie excess deaths (dashed green line) in Graph 1.
In order to analyse the results further I prepared Graph 1 from the 5-year average and excess deaths calculated in Table 3.
The expected influenza season can be easily identified from the 5-year average shown in the data in Table 3 and the peak in Graph 1 in Jan 2020 –
3,223 deaths GRO/CSO (solid blue line)
3,224 deaths RIP.ie (dashed purple line)
The drop in excess deaths for Jan 2020 in the data in Table 3 and the dip in Graph 1 –
266 deaths GRO/CSO (solid black line) and
339 deaths RIP.ie (dashed green line)
indicate that the deaths which would historically occur in Jan, often referred to “flu season”, will occur later in the as they have occurred occasionally in previous years. These deaths which always occur at some time during the year are delayed due to some undetermined factors in 2020.
As can be seen by the total deaths in the data in Table 3 and the spike in Graph 1 –
3,216 deaths GRO/CSO (solid orange line)
3,235 deaths RIP.ie (dashed yellow line)
The “flu season” moved from Jan to Apr in 2020.
The number of excess deaths in April 2020 is highlighted in yellow in the data in Table 3 and as shown as the spike in Graph 3 indicates where the influenza or COVID-19 season moved –
992 deaths GRO/CSO (solid black line)
923 deaths RIP.ie (dashed green line)
981 deaths NPHET/data.gov.ie claimed COVID-19 deaths (solid red line).
Oddly, this is the only point at which the claimed COVID-19 deaths match the GRO/CSO and RIP.ie excess deaths.
Graph 1
The next expected influenza season is again indicated in the 5-year average data in Table 3 and the peak in Graph 1 Jan 2021 –
3,216 deaths GRO/CSO (solid blue line)
3,224 deaths RIP.ie (dashed purple line)
However, the total deaths in the data in Table 3 and the spike in Graph 1 in Jan 2021 is –
3,722 deaths RIP.ie (dashed yellow line), also higher than the April 2020 spike indicating that a serious unexplained event took place and increased the excess deaths by –
487 deaths RIP.ie (dashed green line) in Jan 2021, which is the same month that the COVID-19 vaccination was rolled out in the Irish nursing homes. Death data from RIP.ie also indicates the deaths which occurred in nursing homes directly after the rollout of vaccinations are approximately 500 higher than normal for this time.
The number of claimed COVID-19 deaths shown in the data in Table 3 and as the two high points in Graph 3 in Jan and Feb 2021 indicates a very large exaggeration of COVID deaths –
1, 082 and 1,045 deaths NPHET/data.gov.ie (solid red line)
In comparison to the to –
487 and 301 RIP.ie excess deaths (dashed green line) in Jan and Feb 2021
I obtained 50 records for deaths which occurred in the nursing homes after the scheduled date of COVID-19 vaccinations and when I examined them, I found that the majority of the deaths were recorded as COVID-19 even though they occurred very shortly after the scheduled vaccination dates. If those patients who died were ill with COVID-19 then they should not have been vaccinated, otherwise if they did not have a positive COVID-19 PCR test then it is very likely that they died from an adverse reaction to the experimental COVID-19 vaccination and not COVID-19 disease.
The total GRO/CSO deaths (solid orange line) and excess deaths (solid black line) are ignored from Oct to Mar because they are falling away indicating the lag / delay in the registration of deaths is greatest closer to the present time causing a deficit in the GRO/CSO death data.
The claimed COVID-19 deaths NPHET/data.gov.ie (solid red line) also look suspiciously higher compared to the excess deaths indicated in Graph 1 by RIP.ie (dashed green line) and GRO/CSO (solid black line) between June and Dec 2020. For this reason, I produced a more detailed Graph 2 for Dec 2020 to Mar 2021 using the same RIP.ie data, but plotted the figures weekly to analysis this more closely.
If the large number of COVID-19 deaths claimed by NPHET/data.gov.ie were caused by a novel virus, and there were no other factors causing excess deaths (such as another novel disease, war, famine, natural disaster, etc.), then the COVID-19 deaths claimed by NPHET/data.gov.ie deaths (solid red line) should closely match the RIP.ie excess deaths (solid green line) in Graph 2, however as can be seen the COVID-19 deaths are consistently higher than the RIP.ie excess deaths. It can also be seen at this level of detail that the peak of the claimed COVID-19 deaths in mid Apr 2020 were approximately 200 deaths higher and 2 weeks later that the actual peak excess deaths indicated by the RIP.ie death notices.
The NPHET/data.gov.ie claimed COVID-19 deaths (solid red line) in Graph 2 is also a very smooth line compares to the fluctuating RIP.ie excess deaths (dashed green line) which would be expected for weekly data, this makes the red line appear to be unnatural and false or fabricated.
Graph 2
An argument which has been raised by various vested interests is the possibility that healthcare deprivation during the alleged pandemic may have increased other causes of deaths in in 2020. While there is a possibility of this occurring later in 2020, I feel that it would be very doubtful that it had any effect in the early part of 2020, and if that were the case, then it would further prove that the COVID-19 death figures were exaggerated as they would have been concealing healthcare deprivation deaths in order for the excess deaths to remain low.
Other vested interests claim that the lockdowns have reduced influenzas deaths and accidental deaths which compensate for the extra COVID-19 deaths and that this explains why the total or excess deaths are not higher in 2020. I find this a difficult proposition to accept as the CSO 2019 Vital Statistics Yearly Summary states that accidents accounted for only 909 deaths and even if there were no accidental deaths in 2020, it would not make up the 2,270 difference between claimed COVID-19 deaths and excess deaths. Influenza deaths were not identified in previous CSO reports, as tests such as PCR, were not used to confirm diagnosis of influenza and those deaths were recorded as respiratory deaths. Suicides accounted for 421 deaths in 2019 and it is expected that there may be a substantial increase in those deaths due to the socioeconomic impact of the lockdowns plus healthcare deprivation will also most likely increase deaths in related causes. To give an overview of the relative numbers of deaths in the main IDC-10 causes, and to demonstrate how little they vary from year to year, thus having little effect on the 5-year average and on excess deaths, I have complied Graph 3 below from the CSO’s 2014-2019 Vital Statistics Annual Reports.
Graph 3
Conclusion
By now the, mis-match that I have outlined between the NEPHET/data.gov.ie claimed COVID-19 deaths and the official GRO registered deaths up to Jun 2020 together with the RIP.ie cleaned death notices from then up to Mar 2021 can only bring you to the same conclusion that I have arrived at. That is, that the NEPHET/data.gov.ie claimed COVID-19 deaths are deaths of older people and people with underlying conditions who died as per normal but were fraudulently classified as COVID-19 by vested interests using PCR tests which have found to produce a high percentage of false positive results.
Furthermore, I conclude that the approximately 500 excess deaths in Jan-Feb 2021 must be related to the rollout of the vaccinations in those nursing homes during that period, and that the excessively high COVID-19 deaths claimed by NPHET/data.gov.ie in Jan-Feb 2021 are contrived for the sole purpose of allowing those deaths to be explained as COVID-19 as per the death records rather than adverse reactions to the vaccines.
And finally, the health of a nation can be quickly assessed by looking at its trend death rates as quoted in deaths per 1,000 of population. I have prepared Table 4 below from CSO annual reports, recent GRO updated data and RIP.ie death notices for 2020.The table shows that the 2020 death rate will be the lowest since 2012, a clear indication that there was no need for the mass hysteria created by vested interests which could not be challenged due to the lack of up-to-date date and transparent death data from the Central Statistics Office.
Table 4
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Kieran Morrissey is a US born Engineer who has worked in healthcare for most of his career and has been educated and spent most of his life in Ireland. He is married with 4 adult children.
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President and Co-Founder of Your Ontario Doctors and frontline physicianDr. Kulvinder Kaurrecently sat down with Dr. Richard Schabas, MD, Former Chief Medical Officer of Health for Ontario, Canada, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD Professor of Medicine at Stanford University, Epidemiologist, Dr. Sunetra Gupta, PhD Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford andDr. Martin Kulldorff, PhD, Professor of Medicine at Harvard, Infectious Disease Epidemiologist. Bhattacharya, Gupta and Kulldorff were the initiators behind The Great Barrington Declaration.
In the video below they discuss the harms of lockdown and the dangerous of censorship, as well as a path forward. Throughout this pandemic, numerous studies have found that lockdowns have been quite ineffective at stopping the spread of covid. You can access some of those studies and read more about it here for more examples and an in depth discussion. I also recently published an article about two renowned Swedish scientists/epidemiologists who have gone through the data from UNICEF and UNAIDS, and came to the conclusion that least as many people have died as a result of the restrictions to fight covid as have died of covid. You can read more about that here.
Obviously, as you probably already know, there is information on both sides of the coin when it comes to all things covid. What doesn’t bode well, however, is the fact that one side is being completely unacknowledged, ignored, and censored within the mainstream.
Some experts have not been given a voice, and discussion has been completely shut down. When certain information, data/evidence or opinion goes “against the grain” and gains some sort of “virality” it then seems to be heavily ridiculed within the mainstream and labelled a “conspiracy theory.” It seems mainstream media along with government health authorities don’t even want to entertain the idea of having a discussion with experts who oppose their narrative. They simply continue to push forth their viewpoints and perspective as the ultimate truth.
This type of censorship, and the entire pandemic has truly served as a catalyst for ‘ordinary’ citizens, doctors and scientists to really question what type of world we are currently living in as well as the intentions of government and ‘big health.’ This is a very encouraging thing to see, but what’s more important is that everyday people who disagree with each other really need to start empathizing with each other.
I decided to share the video below because, whether you agree or disagree is not important.
What’s important is that everybody in the field gets to share their perspective, openly and freely without being subjected to censorship. What’s happening during this pandemic is quite unfair, immoral, unethical and harmful, which is why it’s so important to share discussions like this.
The Takeaway
Society must have controversial conversations in a meaningful way. We are not getting anywhere by taking authoritarian actions that harm the well being of general society and our ability to stay connected as communities. Mainstream culture is expecting everyone to side with the idea that fringe ‘conspiracy theories’ are undermining truth in society, yet mainstream culture does not want to take responsibility for its role in this phenomenon via censorship and corporate favoritism.
At the end of the day, it’s quite clear that things with regards to the pandemic are not as clear as mainstream media is making them out to be. Lockdowns and other “authoritarian” measures taken by governments, although supported by many people are also heavily opposed by many people. When this is the case and things aren’t as black and white has they are being made out to be, should the government simply not make recommendations and let the people decide for themselves? Should we really give them the authority to put into place such mandates that they have when there are such enormous consequences as a result and when it’s not even clear if they (the mandates) are effective?
People want to thrive, they are tired of being constantly handed the short end of the stick as the rich get richer. It does not take long to look with open eyes and see that government is not working to serve people as much as we’d like to think.
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First published by Global Research on November 22, 2020
Author’s Note and Update
On 13 April 2021, the government of the Federal Republic of Germany amended or tightened the Infection Protection Act (§ 28b IfSG). It is the draft of a Fourth Law for the Protection of the Population in the Event of an Epidemic Situation of National Significance.
In reality, this so-called “Federal Emergency Brake” slows down the legally guaranteed basic rights of citizens.
The renowned legal scholar Volker Boehme-Neßler adds: The planned coercive measures such as de curfews are “unconstitutional, dictatorial and against human nature” (2).
The German Bundestag will decide next week on this legislative path to open dictatorship.
The German national anthem, as a state symbol, was protected from denigration in a special way. But for months it has been dragged deeper and deeper into the mud by a corrupt clique of politicians on behalf of a billionaire and power “elite” and is now only valid for them, no longer for the common people.
A minority of people, who exploit, enslave, sow discord, injustice and lack of freedom, has taken over the scepter worldwide. And whoever believes that he can speak and negotiate with this other side, these ruling beneficiaries, who have the whole thing in their hands, is mistaken.
No! They are so sick that no negotiation is possible with them. It was still like that in the story: When the working people went on strike for their right to freedom, justice, security, peace and a life worthy of a human being and took to the streets for their children, the governments first used the police and then the military – and finally let them shoot.
The text of the German national anthem is the third verse of the poem “Das Lied der Deutschen” and was written by August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben in 1841 on Helgoland and set to music by Joseph Haydn:
“Unity and Justice and Freedom / for the German Fatherland!
Let us all strive for this / Brotherly with Heart and Hand!
Unity and Justice and Freedom / are the Promise of Happiness:
Flourish in this Blessing’s Glory, / Florish, German Fatherland!”
What has remained of all this in Germany?
The passing of the new so-called infection protection law last week is only one example of many for the omnipotence fantasies of politicians and the increasing compulsion, the permanent rule changes and threats, the sickening isolation detention of adults and their children, the restricted freedom of movement, the psychological programming and finally the systematic destruction of the human psyche (David Icke). The formerly “silent” dictatorship of democracy was secretly transformed into an open dictatorship.
Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian lawyer, moral teacher and pacifist, showed the world in the last century what strength a person with an unbending will can develop and what he can achieve through it. His motto was:
“Strength does not come from physical abilities. It comes from an unbending will.”
The Indian independence movement, of which he was the intellectual and political leader, took up his idea of non-violent action and “Civil Disobedience” and in August 1947 reached the end of British colonial rule over India. Why should we not develop this unbending will?
“When I think of Germany at night, / Then I am deprived of sleep,
I can no longer close my eyes, / And my hot tears flow.”
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Dr. Rudolf Hänsel is a certified psychologist and educationalist.
The thirty-member North Atlantic Council, the political decision-making body of NATO consisting of the ambassadors of all member states, posted a statement supporting the Joe Biden administration’s declaration of a national emergency attributed to Russian actions, real or fancied.
The validity of the PCR test has been questioned for months, if not from the very beginning of the declared covid-19 plandemic, including lately also by WHO. However, this test is still and ever more so being forced upon us.
The CDC today apparently sent out emails to the major corporate media outlets allegedly explaining that about 5,800 fully vaccinated people have still come down with COVID-19 after being fully vaccinated, and 74 people fully vaccinated against COVID-19 have allegedly died from COVID-19.
The US decision to leave Afghanistan without any conditions represents a political victory for those in the US government who sought an end to the nearly two-decade conflict in that nation.
After President Biden formally announced his plan to withdraw from Afghanistan by September 11th, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was asked if special operations soldiers would remain in the country under the plan, which she declined to answer.
A group of Labour activists fighting through the courts to discover why they and others were investigated or expelled from the UK’s Labour Party for antisemitism say they have flushed out proof of bad faith from their accusers.
A senior official in the Indian government recently revealed to Reuters that the government would soon propose a law banning the trade and possession of cryptocurrencies.
The country of Yemen, once renowned for its architectural gems and theatre shaping the minds and memory of its population, is now scraping itself out from under the wreckage of homes, schools, mosques and hospitals downed by Saudi-led coalition airstrikes.
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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An Afghan taxi-driver in Vancouver told one of us a decade ago that this day would come. “We defeated the Persian Empire in the eighteenth century, the British in the nineteenth, the Soviets in the twentieth. Now, with NATO, we’re fighting twenty-eight countries, but we’ll defeat them, too,” said the taxi-driver, surely not a member of the Taliban, but quietly proud of his country’s empire-killing credentials.
Now, after nearly twenty years of a war that has been as bloody and futile as all those previous invasions and occupations, the last 3,500 U.S. troops and their NATO brothers-in-arms will be coming home from Afghanistan.
President Joe Biden tried to spin this as the United States leaving because it has achieved its objectives, bringing the terrorists responsible for 9/11 to justice and ensuring that Afghanistan would not be used as a base for a future attack on the United States. “We achieved those objectives,” Biden said. “Bin Laden is dead and Al Qaeda is degraded. It’s time to end the forever war.”
What Biden did not admit is that the United States and its allies, with all their money and firepower, were unable to vanquish the Taliban, who currently control about half of Afghanistan and are positioned to control even more in the coming months without a ceasefire. Nor did Biden admit that, in two decades, the United States and its allies have been unable to build up a stable, democratic, popular government or a competent military in the country.
Like the U.S.S.R., the U.S. is leaving in defeat, having squandered the lives of countless Afghans, 2,488 U.S. troops and personnel, and trillions of dollars.
A U.S. withdrawal—especially one not based on conditions on the ground—is, nevertheless, a bold move for Biden. He is going against the advice of the U.S. intelligence community and top Pentagon officials, including the head of the U.S.-Afghan Forces and the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Biden is also coming under attack from Republicans and Democrats in Congress. Senator Mitch McConnell artfully slammed Biden’s decision, accusing him of helping U.S. enemies “ring in the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks by gift-wrapping the country and handing it right back to them.” Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, said the withdrawal “undermines our commitment to the Afghan people, particularly Afghan women.”
But while Biden is being pilloried by some for pulling out too soon, the truth is that he is violating a May 1 deadline for U.S. troop withdrawal that was painstakingly negotiated under the Trump Administration.
Ironically, Biden acknowledged in his speech on Wednesday that the withdrawal agreement the United States signed with the Taliban in February 2020 was a solemn commitment, but then he said U.S. forces would begin their withdrawal on May 1 and complete it by September 11, which is not what was agreed to.
After it was clear that the United States was going to break the May 1 withdrawal agreement, Mohammad Naeem, the Taliban spokesperson in Qatar, issued a statement that the Taliban would now not take part in the ten days of U.N.-led peace talks scheduled to begin in Istanbul on April 24, nor would it take part in any further peace negotiations until the last foreign soldiers leave Afghanistan.
This is a reversion to the Taliban’s long-standing position that it would not negotiate with a government backed by foreign occupation forces.
U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad spent years of his life negotiating with the Taliban to arrive at the 2020 withdrawal agreement. Secretary Blinken took a potentially historic step back from U.S. unilateralism when he invited the United Nations to lead a new Afghan peace process. And Russian Foreign Secretary Sergei Lavrov set the stage for a ceasefire and a peaceful transition of power by bringing the two Afghan warring parties together in Moscow in March, where they agreed to keep talking.
By reneging on the May 1 deadline, President Biden has squandered much of the hard-won goodwill and trust that was painstakingly built up through these diplomatic efforts. It was not impossible to meet the May 1 deadline. The Trump Administration was steadily withdrawing troops, Biden’s transition began in November, and he’s been President since late January.
It is also unclear whether the United States will continue the war by providing airpower for the Afghan military and carrying out covert operations. Throughout these two decades, the United States has dropped more than 80,000 bombs on Afghanistan and waged a secret war with special forces, CIA operatives, mercenaries, and paramilitary units. Ending U.S. airstrikes and covert operations is as vital to peace as withdrawing U.S. troops.
It’s true that a U.S. withdrawal may lead to setbacks in the gains made by Afghan women and girls. But those gains have been mainly in the capital city of Kabul. Two thirds of girls in Afghanistan still receive no primary education, and Afghan women will never achieve significant advances while their country remains at war.
The United States and NATO military presence has made an end to violence impossible for twenty years, as the Taliban have long made clear that they will keep fighting as long as their country is under foreign occupation. And as long as the U.S. continues to prop up a weak, corrupt government in Kabul, instability and political fragmentation is inevitable.
Ending the fighting and investing a small fraction of U.S. war spending in education and health care would do far more to improve the lives of Afghan women and girls.
The United Nations, even with the full support and cooperation of the United States, will have its work cut out to convince the Taliban to rejoin talks. If the U.N. fails to negotiate a lasting ceasefire before the occupation forces withdraw, the U.S. and its NATO allies will be leaving a country still at war with the Taliban, the Afghan government, and various warlords vying for power.
We must hope that, in the coming months, the U.N. will find a way to bring the warring parties in Afghanistan together and craft a ceasefire and a workable peace process based on power sharing. After so many decades of war and intense suffering, much of it perpetrated by the United States and its allies, the Afghan people desperately need—and deserve—an end to this war.
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Medea Benjamin is co-director of the peace group CODEPINK. Her latest book is Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic.
Nicolas J S Davies is the author of “Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.” He is a researcher for CODEPINK: Women for Peace, and a freelance writer.
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 a clear example showing how the CDC and Big Pharma control the corporate media, the CDC today apparently sent out emails to the major corporate media outlets allegedly explaining that about 5,800 fully vaccinated people have still come down with COVID-19 after being fully vaccinated, and 74 people fully vaccinated against COVID-19 have allegedly died from COVID-19.
In typical fashion of how the CDC operates, they attempted to spin these numbers as something positive, by stating how many people have now been “vaccinated” against COVID, and that one’s chance of getting COVID is significantly reduced if you receive the injection.
As I saw this statement start appearing everywhere in social media, I tried to find the source for this alleged CDC information, but all I could find were various corporate media outlets stating that the CDC had told them this directly. Apparently this is not on the CDC website anywhere.
Some examples:
CNN:
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that about 5,800 people who have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 have become infected anyway.
Out of those people, 74 died and 396 [7%] required hospitalization. Many were seriously ill, the CDC reported.
It’s the first indication from CDC of how effective the vaccine is in real life — and the first indication the vaccines do not protect completely against severe disease and death.
“So far, about 5,800 breakthrough cases have been reported to CDC. To date, no unexpected patterns have been identified in case demographics or vaccine characteristics,” the CDC told CNN via email.
The HILL:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said the agency has documented about 5,800 “breakthrough” COVID-19 cases among the millions of Americans who are fully vaccinated, totaling far less than 1 percent of fully vaccinated people.
“Vaccine breakthrough infections make up a small percentage of people who are fully vaccinated,” the CDC told The Hill in a statement. “CDC recommends that all eligible people get a COVID-19 vaccine as soon as one is available to them.”
Yahoo:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found about 5,800 cases of COVID-19 infections among people who have been fully vaccinated in the U.S., according to a new report.
CDC officials tell Yahoo Life that as of April 13, about 5,800 breakthrough COVID-19 infections — meaning someone who was fully vaccinated against the virus still contracts COVID-19 — have been reported to the CDC among the more than 66 million Americans who have been fully vaccinated. Of those, 396 (or 7 percent) required hospitalization and 74 people (0.0001 percent) died.
And as is usual with the Pharma-funded corporate media, there was no investigative reporting done to challenge or even question the data that the CDC was providing.
So let me do that. (The CDC did not send me a copy of the letter for some reason.)
For example, how do we know that there are only “5,800 breakthrough COVID-19 infections” among 66 million fully vaccinated Americans? How did the CDC arrive at that figure, and where are they getting their data?
These experimental COVID injections have only been out in the public for about 4 months now, and the vast majority of the injections have occurred within the past few weeks.
These are experimental pharmaceutical products with very little testing done, and the CDC has changed the amount of time they claim it takes for full immunity to start after “vaccination” several times already. They originally said two weeks after the first injection, and full immunity after the second one. Then it was changed to 4 weeks. Now, they are saying it can take up to 6 weeks.
So there really is no way the CDC can make any definitive statements at this point as to just what the percentage of fully vaccinated people will be who still get COVID and still die from it.
Earlier this week, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky actually stated that the COVID “vaccines” are “too slow” to stop an alleged surge of COVID cases in Michigan, because it takes “weeks” for them to start working.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Rochelle Walensky said Michigan should put coronavirus restrictions back in place to stop the spread of COVID-19.
“Really what we need to do in those situations is shut things down,” Walensky said during a press briefing on Monday. “I think if we tried to vaccinate our way out of what is happening in Michigan, we will be disappointed that it took so long for the vaccine to work – to actually have the impact.” (Source.)
“We know that if vaccines go in arms today, we will not see an effect of those vaccines, depending on the vaccine, for somewhere between two to six weeks,” Walensky said. (Source.)
Anybody with any kind of critical thinking skills can clearly see that this is pure PR the CDC is spinning to their corporate media lap dogs.
They want to try and convince the U.S. public that even though people are still getting sick and dying from COVID after being fully vaccinated, that they still should get vaccinated anyway, and then agree to new lockdowns as cases start going up again because the vaccines “work too slowly.”
Of course they want you to ignore the fact that in states that have opened back up and stopped mandating face masks, that cases and deaths, even by their own corrupted statistics, are now going down.
How long is the American public going to put up with this insanity?
People are DYING from these COVID “vaccines” and the CDC is now forced to admit that these vaccines don’t even work in many people.
And whatever small businesses that are still left and have survived the first round of lockdowns last year will surely die if lockdowns are required again, unless enough people wake up finally and say “enough is enough – we will NOT comply!”
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U.S. President Joe Biden officially announced the withdrawal of American troops and NATO allies from Afghanistan in a televised speech on Wednesday. Accordingly, the withdrawal of these forces will begin on May 1 and symbolically end on September 11.
American troops and their allies invaded Taliban-held Afghanistan after the September 11 terrorist attacks. The guise used to invade Afghanistan was to prevent the country from ever becoming a launch pad to attack the U.S. again. In his speech, Biden stressed that this goal has already been achieved and that the U.S. “cannot continue the cycle of extending or expanding our military presence in Afghanistan, hoping to create ideal conditions for withdrawal and expecting a different result.”
“I’m now the fourth United States president to preside over American troop presence in Afghanistan,” he said, adding “Two Republicans, two Democrats. I will not pass this responsibility on to a fifth.”
The withdrawal of U.S. and allied forces has alarmed Afghanis who are terrified of what is about to happen. Although the Afghan government said the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country would not affect the security situation, officials and experts have repeatedly expressed concern about the withdrawal.
This is an unsurprising expectation considering that the Taliban are already boasting about their victory over the U.S. following Biden’s announcement. In speaking with the BBC, Haji Hekmat, the Taliban’s shadow mayor in Balkh district, said “we have won the war and America has lost.” He also confirms that “the Taliban before and the Taliban now are the same” and they do not “fight for power but for Allah and His Law” and “whoever stands against us, we will fight against them.”
There is clear concern in Kabul as the Afghan Army has very little control over the rural areas of the country and are mostly reduced to controlling the main cities and towns.
Rahman Rahmani, Speaker of the House of Representatives of Afghanistan, said:
“The withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan is a long-standing demand of the Afghan people, but given the security situation in the country, the conditions for the withdrawal of these forces have not yet been provided. The withdrawal of foreign troops in the current situation could lead to a worsening of the situation and a civil war.”
Contrary to the belief of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Fawad Aman, Deputy Spokesman of the Ministry of National Defense of Afghanistan, said:
“Our security and defense forces, which come from different ethnic groups in the country, are a legitimate force that works to defend the lands and protect the lives and property of the people, and after the withdrawal of NATO forces, they will not allow any terrorist group to disrupt the country’s security. Since our defense forces are made up of all the compassionate tribes of this land, we believe we are not heading for a civil war.”
Although Aman expresses confidence that the Afghan Army will be able to establish a peace and defeat the Taliban and other terrorist organizations, regional player India does not share this sentiment. Indian Chief of Defense Staff, General Bipin Rawat, said on Thursday that a “space for other disruptors” who are “looking at the opportunity to exploit the vacuum […] is being created. Afghanistan is a nation which is rich in resources.”
Despite the confidence that many in the Afghan government are portraying, the reality is that the U.S.-NATO withdrawal will lead to a rapid escalation in Taliban insurgency that the national army will struggle against. This will inevitably lead to a proxy struggle as China, India, Pakistan, Russia and Iran will all vie for influence in a post-U.S. Afghanistan in the hope of being able to exploit the $3 trillion worth of mineral wealth in the country.
It is likely that India and Iran will vehemently back the Afghan government’s preservation to prevent a radical Sunni Islamic Emirate from being established as it can pose a major security threat. In turn, to weaken Indian influence in Afghanistan, Pakistan will likely continue its ardent support for the Taliban.
As U.S. Chairman of Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Jack Reed, said on the Senate floor on Thursday, the “crucial factor contributing to the Taliban’s success” has been the U.S.’ inability to “eliminate the sanctuary the Taliban was granted in Pakistan.”
By using the Taliban, Pakistan hopes to eliminate any Indian economic and diplomatic influence in Afghanistan. In this way, Afghanistan will undoubtedly become a field for competing rivalries.
Russia and China will also try and assert their influence over Afghanistan, but will likely deal with any government that emerges in a post-U.S. Afghanistan. But they will certainly not want the country to become a proxy battleground between India (and perhaps Iran too) and Pakistan. Sun Qi, an international relations specialist at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, believes that Beijing will not station troops in Afghanistan, but might instead work with other countries in the region to promote political stability and reduce the security risk to China that a post-U.S. Afghanistan will pose.
It took the U.S. 20 years to finally withdraw from Afghanistan, having achieved nothing but the utter destruction of the country and leaving behind it a vacuum that will undoubtedly not only lead to a civil war between the Taliban, other terrorist organizations and the national army, but a proxy battle between key regional states.
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A group of Labour activists fighting through the courts to discover why they and others were investigated or expelled from the UK’s Labour Party for antisemitism say they have flushed out proof of bad faith from their accusers.
The group, who call themselves Labour Activists for Justice (LA4J), say the new disclosure confirms their claim that leading Jewish organisations intentionally politicised the meaning of antisemitism to entrap left-wing critics of Israel and undermine Labour’s former leader, Jeremy Corbyn.
As a result, the number of cases of antisemitism in Labour was inflated, falsely feeding the public impression that the political party under Corbyn had attracted Jew haters, say the Labour activists.
The suggestion that groups like the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Labour Movement “weaponised” antisemitism against Corbyn is currently seen as grounds by Labour to suspend or expel members.
But according to LA4J, evidence revealed in their legal case has now vindicated that claim.
The activists note that Jewish groups that waged a campaign of attacks on Corbyn over an antisemitism code of conduct drafted by the party in 2018 are now “deafeningly silent” on discovering that Keir Starmer, Labour’s new leader, has been secretly using exactly the same code.
When it was first published, the Board of Deputies and other Jewish organisations erupted in outrage, alleging that the 16-point code was proof of “institutional antisemitism” in the Labour party – and even that Corbyn posed a threat to Jewish life in Britain.
But the admission by Starmer’s officials that they are using the same code of conduct to investigate members has gone entirely unremarked three years later.
That is despite a submission to the courts from Labour’s own lawyers that the code had been kept secret because its publication might prove “politically incendiary”.
LA4J point out that back in 2018 the Board of Deputies, the Jewish Labour Movement and other groups insisted that Corbyn replace the code with an alternative, controversial definition of antisemitism produced by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).
According to the activists, the current silence of these Jewish groups, after Starmer’s officials have conceded that they are using Corbyn’s code rather than the IHRA definition, further indicates bad faith.
Despite public statements to the contrary, the organisations knew that the IHRA definition was unworkable for Labour’s disciplinary procedures back in 2018, LA4J say.
“If Labour believes that the code issued by Corbyn was ‘incendiary’, the question is where is the bushfire now, when Starmer’s team admit they are using the very same code,” Chris Wallis, a spokesman for LA4J, told Middle East Eye.
“One of the things this case suggests is that groups like the Board of Deputies hoped to weaponise antisemitism as a way to attack Corbyn.”
Disciplinary process ‘back to front’
The group’s legal action is due to reach the High Court in June. It will be the first wide-ranging legal examination of Labour’s disciplinary procedures relating to antisemitism. In October 2019, the High Court ruled that the suspension of then-Labour MP Chris Williamson for “bringing the party into disrepute” over antisemitism allegations was illegal, though the judge did not overturn a second suspension that ousted him from the party.
Eight party members, including three Jews, are pursuing the case after they were investigated for alleged antisemitism. LA4J estimates that at least 30 Jewish members of the party have been accused of antisemitism, some repeatedly.
Late last year the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), the UK’s equalities watchdog, issued a report critical of Labour’s handling of antisemitism cases, especially over what it termed “political interference” by Corbyn’s office, which it said had resulted in “a lack of transparency and consistency in the complaints process”.
However, the EHRC found that in practice such interference chiefly harmed the interests of those accused of antisemitism rather than their accusers. Corbyn’s officials often tried to speed up investigations in the hope of ending the barrage of criticism from Jewish organisations.
LA4J argue that hundreds of members have been drummed out of the party in a process that has lacked the transparency and fairness demanded by the EHRC. The procedure, they say, has failed to provide those under investigation with an opportunity to challenge the allegations.
Most members receive a “notice of investigation” that typically cites social media posts as evidence of antisemitism. In some cases, members have been accused of sharing articles from prominent websites, such as Electronic Intifada and Mondoweiss, known to be harshly critical of Israel for its repeated violations of Palestinian rights.
No explanation is made in the notice of why party officials believe the posts to be antisemitic. Instead, it is required of those under investigation to demonstrate why their posts should not be considered antisemitic.
The notices also demand that members under investigation not publicise their case or the information that is being used against them. It is unclear whether they are even allowed to seek legal advice. Instead, they are encouraged to get help from a GP or the Samaritans to aid their “wellbeing”.
Wallis, a former BBC radio drama producer who has been under investigation since last year, is one of the eight members taking the party to court.
“The disciplinary process has been entirely back to front,” he said. “We were never told about the secret code being used to judge our cases and it was never explained how what we did was antisemitic. The assumption was that we were guilty unless we could prove otherwise, and we were expected to incriminate ourselves.”
‘Sickness’ in Labour
At a preliminary hearing in February, the Labour Party argued that the courts had no place adjudicating on its handling of antisemitism cases. However, the judge approved the High Court hearing for June and awarded costs against Labour.
In what appears to be an attempt to avoid a second adverse ruling, Labour officials made the disciplinary process more transparent last month by divulging how it assessed antisemitism cases.
Starmer’s officials published on the party’s website the same antisemitism code of conduct that had been drafted during Corbyn’s time as leader. They did so despite a submission from one of Labour’s senior lawyers during February’s court hearing that such an admission could prove “politically incendiary”.
That was because a wide range of Jewish leadership groups rounded on Corbyn and Labour over the code when it was first published in July 2018.
Dave Rich, head of policy at the Community Security Trust, set up to protect Jewish communities from antisemitic attacks, lambasted Corbyn in an article in the Guardian headlined “Labour’s antisemitism code exposes a sickness in Jeremy Corbyn’s party”.
A blog on the Trust’s website added that the code “brazenly contravenes basic anti-racist principles”.
The Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council, both claiming to represent Britain’s Jewish community, stated that the adoption by Corbyn’s officials of the code would “further erode the existing lack of confidence that British Jews have in their sincerity to tackle antisemitism within the Labour movement”.
The Jewish Labour Movement, a Labour party affiliate connected to the Israeli Labor party, argued that the code was “a get out of jail free card” for antisemites, and claimed it breached equalities legislation.
Ephraim Mirvis, the UK’s chief rabbi, called the code “a watershed moment” for Labour and warned that it sent “an unprecedented message of contempt to the Jewish community”.
Dozens of rabbis backed him, accusing the Labour leadership of having “chosen to ignore the Jewish community”.
And the Campaign Against Antisemitism, a pro-Israel lobby group, argued that “the code seems to be designed to give free rein to certain forms of antisemitic discourse”.
‘It was about who was in charge’
But despite the outpouring of concern back in 2018, note LA4J, Jewish organisations have remained silent since Labour revealed that the same antisemitism code of conduct introduced under Corbyn is being used by Starmer’s officials in disciplinary cases.
“This was never about what was going on inside Labour, as was claimed,” said Wallis. “It was about who was in charge. The aim was to remove Corbyn at all costs.”
Labour’s stated goal in drafting the code in 2018 was to assist with ironing out problems in the IHRA definition, which was being aggressively lobbied for by leading Jewish groups.
In particular, Corbyn’s code provided additional context to help judge aspects of the IHRA’s 11 potential examples of antisemitism, seven of which relate to Israel.
The code warns that the IHRA text “is not a legal definition, and on its own does not provide clear guidance about the circumstances in which particular conduct should or should not be regarded as antisemitic”.
The Labour antisemitism code also emphasises a need for “respectful debate” between party members when talking about contentious political matters around Israel and warns that the party “will not tolerate name-calling and abuse”.
The concern among Corbyn’s team was that the definition would shift the focus of antisemitism away from hatred of Jews to criticism of Israel, and expose activists supportive of Palestinian rights to investigation.
The imprecision of the IHRA definition, and its politicisation of antisemitism, had already been widely criticised, including by a former Court of Appeal judge and the British parliament’s home affairs select committee.
Kenneth Stern, the chief architect of the IHRA definition, had also weighed in to note that it was unsuitable for use in disciplinary procedures and was being “weaponised” by elements of the Jewish community to stifle criticism of Israel.
Jewish organisations, on the other hand, argued that Corbyn was using the Labour code to avoid adopting the IHRA definition in full with all its examples, and implied that his motivation was to make Labour hostile to British Jews.
Facing the backlash, and concerted criticism in the media, Corbyn’s officials appeared to discard the code and instead adopted the IHRA definition in full a few weeks later, in September 2018.
Definition ‘not fit for purpose’
It is unclear whether Corbyn’s officials ever used the 2018 code to adjudicate in disciplinary cases. But LA4J say its adoption by Starmer’s officials – and their efforts to hide the fact that they were using the code – confirm that the IHRA’s definition was indeed unworkable.
Jenny Manson, a co-chair of Jewish Voice for Labour, which was set up in 2017 to show support for Corbyn among Jewish party members and is now supporting LA4J, said that the weaknesses of the IHRA definition must have been clear to organisations like the Jewish Labour Movement and Board of Deputies.
“Their current silence shows that they must have known the IHRA definition wasn’t fit for purpose as it was,” she said. “The additional code of conduct was needed. They opposed it in 2018, it seems clear, only because they were looking to damage Jeremy [Corbyn].”
Although LA4J argue that the code is fairer than the IHRA definition, they also say it has been widely misused against members as officials have sought to placate Jewish groups accusing Labour of being institutionally antisemitic.
Diana Neslen, an 82-year-old Orthodox Jew who has been investigated for antisemitism and sanctioned by the party, said:
“Even a quick look at [the code] suggests that all of us have been wrongfully accused. Indeed, we should never have been investigated in the first place.”
LA4J hopes that, with the code no longer secret, Labour members will have a better chance to challenge current and future investigations conducted against them by party officials.
Neslen warned, however, that existing injustices needed to be addressed too: “What are they going to do about the hundreds of people already judged under the secret code, including me?”
She and LA4J have called for those suspended or expelled to have their cases reopened and the evidence reassessed in a transparent manner.
The Board of Deputies, the Jewish Labour Movement, the Community Security Trust and the Jewish Leadership Council were all approached by Middle East Eye for comment. None had responded by the time of publication.
According to LA4J, their court case highlights how little evidence there was for the claim that antisemitism within the Labour party had been an especial problem under Corbyn’s leadership.
Levels of antisemitism in Labour appear to be lower than in the wider British public, within which about five percent of people could “justifiably be described as antisemites”, according to research published by the Community Security Trust in 2017.
Corbyn’s general secretary, Jennie Formby, issued figures in April 2019 that showed disciplinary action had been taken against just 0.08 percent of Labour’s 540,000 members, even after the strict application of the antisemitism code and “political interference” by Corbyn’s officials in speeding up disciplinary proceedings.
During the latest legal proceedings, Labour has revealed equivalent figures for Starmer, relating to the period between May last year and last month. Although details about the investigations are not precise, in the worst-case scenario an even smaller percentage of Labour members were found to be antisemitic.
These figures, the LA4J argue, suggest that Labour has not had an “antisemitism problem” under either Corbyn or Starmer.
That impression is shared by most Labour members. According to a YouGov poll commissioned last month by the Jewish Chronicle newspaper, a significant majority – 70 percent – believe that Labour does not have a serious problem with antisemitism.
Most appear to agree with Corbyn’s reaction to the Equalities Commission report that the claims against Labour were “dramatically overstated for political reasons”. That statement led to Starmer expelling Corbyn from the Labour parliamentary party.
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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.
One year later, magical thinking has taken a different form and my earlier flippancy has turned darker. You can’t hoard today’s toilet paper but you can get them: RNA inoculations, misnamed vaccines.
Hundreds of millions of people have taken an injection that allows a bio-reactive “gene-therapy” molecule to be injected into their bodies because of fear, ignorance, and a refusal to consider that the people who are promoting this are “evil” and have ulterior motives. Not that they mean well, but that they are evil and have evil intentions. Does this sound too extreme? Radically evil? Come on!
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