How Big Pharma Weaves Its Web
I never set out to be an advocate. I wasn’t a doctor, scientist, or policy expert. I was just a regular person who, like so many, blindly trusted that our healthcare system was designed to protect us.
But life has a way of pulling us into the arena when we least expect it.
After the tragic and unexpected loss of my husband Woody to the antidepressant Zoloft he was prescribed for insomnia, I was thrust into a world I never imagined—one where medicine wasn’t solely about healing, but deeply entangled in a system that prioritizes profit over safety, buries harms, and keeps the public in the dark.
For over two decades, I’ve had a front-row seat to how this system truly operates—not the illusion of rigorous oversight we see in medical journals or glossy pharmaceutical ads, but the reality of how industry influence is woven into every stage.
I’ve met with regulators, testified before the FDA and Congress, filed a wrongful death and failure-to-warn lawsuit against Pfizer, and earned a seat on the FDA’s Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee as a consumer representative.
I’ve also spoken at and participated in global conferences like Selling Sickness, Too Much Medicine, and the Harms in Medicine meeting in Erice, Italy—where some of the world’s leading experts acknowledge what few in mainstream medicine dare to say:
Our healthcare system isn’t about health—it’s about business.
And in this business, harm isn’t an accident. It’s built into the system.
The more I uncovered, the more I realized:
We aren’t just patients. We are customers.
And we are all trapped in Big Pharma’s spiderweb of influence.
The Spiderweb of Influence
The more I learned, the more I saw just how deeply embedded the pharmaceutical industry is—not just in drug development and marketing but in every corner of our healthcare system.
That’s why I created the Big Pharma Spider Web of Influence—to visually map out how the system is designed not to prioritize health but to sell sickness while minimizing, downplaying, or outright hiding harms.
From clinical trial design to regulatory approval, from direct-to-consumer advertising to medical education, from controlling medical journals to silencing dissenting voices, the industry has built an intricate and self-reinforcing web—one that traps doctors, patients, and even regulators in a cycle of pharmaceutical dependence.
How the Web Works
- Clinical trials are often designed, funded, and controlled by the very companies that stand to profit. They manipulate data to exaggerate benefits and obscure risks, ensuring that negative results are buried, spun, or never published at all.
- Regulatory agencies like the FDA are deeply entangled with the industry they’re supposed to oversee. More than 50% of the FDA’s budget comes from industry-paid user fees, and a revolving door ensures that many key decision-makers come from—and later return to—pharmaceutical companies.
- Medical journals depend on pharmaceutical funding through advertising, reprint sales, and industry-sponsored studies—severely limiting independent scrutiny of drug safety. Many studies are ghostwritten or crafted by paid “key opinion leaders” (KOLs) who serve as pharma’s trusted messengers.
- Doctors receive education through industry-funded programs, learning “best practices” based on treatment guidelines crafted by the very system that profits from overprescription.
- Patient advocacy groups, once independent grassroots organizations, have been co-opted by industry money, ensuring that the loudest voices often serve pharma’s interests rather than patients’ needs. I call them “astroturf” patient groups—they look like real grassroots organizations, but they’re anything but.
- Screenings and guidelines continuously expand the definitions of disease, turning more people into lifelong customers.
This isn’t about one bad actor or isolated corruption—it’s a systemic issue. The entire structure is designed to push more drugs onto the market, medicalize normal human experiences, and only acknowledge harm when it becomes too big to ignore.
It’s a brilliant business model—but a catastrophic public health strategy.
“To Sell to Everyone:” The Business Model of Medicine
If this sounds like a conspiracy, consider the bold admission made by Henry Gadsden, former CEO of Merck, in a 1976 interview with Fortune Magazine:
“The problem we have had is limiting the potential of drugs to sick people. We could be more like Wrigley’s Gum…it has long been my dream to make drugs for healthy people. To sell to everyone.”
– Former Merck CEO Henry Gadsden
Let that sink in.
This wasn’t about curing disease—it was about expanding markets. Gadsden’s vision wasn’t just to treat illness, but to medicalize everyday life—creating a cradle-to-grave model where every person, healthy or sick, became a customer for life. Just like selling a variety of gum—something for everyone. Juicy Fruit, Big Red, Doublemint, Spearmint, and so on.
And that’s exactly what happened.
Today, we live in a system where:
- Everyday emotions—sadness, worry, shyness—are rebranded as medical conditions requiring treatment.
- Preventive medicine often means lifelong prescriptions, not lifestyle changes.
- Drugs are marketed to the “worried well”, turning normal human experiences into diagnoses.
This isn’t just theory—it’s well documented. In Selling Sickness: How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All into Patients, Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels expose how pharmaceutical companies create diseases, expand diagnostic criteria, and convince the public that normal life experiences require medical intervention.
The goal?
Make medication the default—not the last resort.
Harms Are Always an Afterthought
Harms from medication are not rare, nor are they unexpected.
But in this system, they are treated as acceptable collateral damage—something to be dealt with only after the damage is done, after lives are lost or forever changed.
I’ve sat in FDA Advisory Committee meetings, reviewing new drug applications, and have seen firsthand how safety concerns are often dismissed in favor of “innovation” or “unmet medical need.”
I’ve heard industry representatives and advisory committee members argue that safety signals can be addressed post-market, meaning after a drug is already in circulation and causing harm or a required REMS (Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies) program upon approval.
But by the time post-market safety issues are acknowledged, it’s often too late.
We’ve seen this play out over and over:
- Opioids—marketed as “non-addictive” and pushed aggressively onto patients, leading to an epidemic of addiction and death.
- SSRIs and antidepressants—long linked to increased risks of suicide and violence, particularly in young people, yet downplayed or dismissed for decades. Other hidden harms include withdrawal syndromes and Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction (PSSD), conditions that many patients were never warned about.
- Antipsychotics—widely prescribed for off-label use, leading to severe metabolic and neurological side effects.
- Covid-19 vaccines—an experimental mRNA platform rushed to market, mandated, and imposed on society despite limited long-term safety data and growing concerns over harms.
Every time, the pattern is the same:
The industry sells the benefits while downplaying the risks—until those risks become too big to ignore.
By then, the drug is a blockbuster, billions have been made, and the system moves on to the next new “breakthrough.”
More Than Degrees: The Truth of Lived Experience
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in this fight is that real-world experience matters just as much as credentials.
Over the years, I’ve been invited to speak at medical schools, PhD programs, and universities, thanks to brave academics willing to challenge the narrative. I share my journey as an accidental advocate—someone who didn’t have a medical degree but discovered America’s broken drug system the hard way.
But let’s be honest—the medical world is driven by credentials. Or, as I like to say, the alphabet soup.
At conferences, attendees wear name tags listing their titles—MD, PhD, JD, MPH. It’s a quick way to size someone up, to assess credibility before even speaking. And I’ve seen it happen: people glance at my name tag, see no impressive letters after my name, and walk right by.
Years ago, I was speaking at the Preventing Overdiagnosis Conference and noticed my badge read: Kim Witczak, BA.
I was horrified. Was that really necessary? Did my name tag need to remind everyone that I only had a BA?
Later, I was telling the story to a doctor friend, and he laughed.
“Next time, tell them BA stands for Bad Ass.”
And he was right.
Because real expertise doesn’t always come from an advanced degree—it comes from lived experience, from asking the right questions, from refusing to accept the status quo.
The Counterargument: But Don’t We Need Experts?
Of course, some will argue that only experts with MDs and PhDs should be trusted to shape healthcare policy.
But that assumes that the system they operate in is free from bias, conflicts of interest, or financial incentives.
The reality is that many of those with the most letters after their names are also the ones benefiting from pharma funding—whether through consulting fees, research grants, or advisory roles.
Meanwhile, patients and their families—the ones living with the consequences—are too often ignored.
That needs to change.
Asking Better Questions: Reclaiming Our Power
If there’s one thing I’ve learned on this journey, it’s this: no one is coming to save us. The institutions meant to protect us are too entangled in the web to act with true independence.
My late husband, Woody, used to say: “Follow the money.” And when you do, the truth becomes impossible to ignore. Pharmaceutical profits—not patient well-being—drive the system. That’s why the only way to create real change is through awareness, transparency, and fundamentally shifting how we think about medicine and health.
That starts with asking better questions:
- Who funded this research?
- Does this person or institution have financial ties, intellectual bias, or self-interest that could impact their recommendations?
- Who benefits from this treatment?
- What aren’t we being told?
- What are the long-term consequences of this drug or intervention?
- Are there safer, non-drug alternatives being ignored because they aren’t profitable?
But asking the right questions isn’t enough.
We have to stop outsourcing our health to a system built on financial incentives and guided by corporate interests.
We must demand full transparency, challenge the status quo, and recognize that sometimes the best medicine isn’t a pill but a deeper understanding of what our bodies truly need.
Because once you see the web, you can’t unsee it.
And once you recognize how deeply medicine has been shaped by profit, you’ll realize the most important question isn’t just “What can I take?”—it’s “Who benefits if I do?”
Final Thoughts: Tearing Down the Web
I never wanted to be in this fight, but once you see the web, you can’t unsee it. That’s why I continue to speak out, to challenge the system, and to push for real accountability.
Because the stakes aren’t theoretical. They’re deeply personal.
For me, this fight began over two decades ago with Woody. But for countless others, it begins the moment they or someone they love is caught in the web—trusting a system that was never truly designed to protect them.
It’s time to tear down the web.
And it starts with seeing it for what it really is.
Republished from the author’s Substack
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Author
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Leading global drug safety advocate, Consumer Rep on FDA Advisory Committee, and speaker with over 25 years professional experience in advertising and marketing communications.
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Two key points the discussion has mostly missed:
1) It has been a bipartisan Justice Department policy for years to attempt to establish that the First Amendment does not apply to non-US citizens
2) Why has the Trump administration chosen Mahmoud Khalil out of thousands of potential victims; about as problematic a test case as can be imagined?
First Amendment Protection
The outrageous arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil by Immigration Control Enforcement is a new front in the widespread attack on free speech on Palestine in the USA. Indeed free speech on Palestine is under severe attack throughout almost the entire western world.
There is no shortage of excellent commentary and analysis on the Khalil case and its multiple ramifications. The characterisation of criticism of Israel as anti-semitism, the fake narrative of a threat to Jewish students, the denial of the right to protest, the attack on academic freedom, these are all aspects of the case which shed a horrifying light on the devastating effect on civil liberties of explicit Zionist control of the political system.
The same can be said of the arbitrary detention, the lack of access to lawyers and the characterisation of dissent as “terrorism”.
But it has not been much discussed that the central legal issue in the case – whether non-US citizens have First Amendment rights or whether free speech only applies to US citizens – is not an innovation by the Trump administration.
That non-US citizens are not protected by the First Amendment was the key issue pursued by Biden’s Justice Department in the extradition hearings of Julian Assange.
Indeed it was the insistence of English Court of Appeal judge Dame Victoria Sharp that the US must confirm that Assange did have First Amendment protection, that led directly to the Biden administration dropping the case and agreeing a plea deal, rather than give the assurance which Sharp requested.
Key paragraphs of the relevant judgment are here
…
…
The British judges took the view that not to apply the First Amendment to non-citizens would breach the principle of non-discrimination (as guaranteed in the European Convention of Human Rights), and I am sure they were right.
This is a very worrying doctrine which the US Executive is attempting to enforce. But Trump did not initiate it – Biden tried it too, on Assange.
Why Mahmoud Khalil?
Thousands of foreign students in the USA have spoken out and demonstrated against the genocide in Gaza. I am sure that amongst them there will be one or two individuals who can plausibly be depicted as jihadist, who may indeed have actual anti-semitic tendencies and who are only in the US on a student visa.
So why pick on Mahmoud Khalil, who is none of these things?
He has a pregnant American wife and is in possession of a Green Card residency. Those factors may conceivably play into the First Amendment argument in his favour, if judges are looking to fudge the issue.
In addition to which, while he undoubtedly was in the leadership group of protestors at Columbia University, he appears to have played a responsible role in liaising with authorities. The cherry on the cake is that he is a former British Government employee, having worked in the British Embassy in Lebanon, on Syrian affairs.
This is where the story starts to become very murky. I was told by Resistance-linked contacts in Lebanon that not only was Khalil not viewed as pro-Resistance to Israel while there, he was believed to be involved in UK government attempts to undermine the Assad regime by promotion of jihadist groups.
Free Palestine TV, which is Lebanon-based, has the same information.
It is important to understand how deeply the UK has been involved in anti-Syrian activity in Lebanon. Training and equipping of al-Nusra/ISIS/HTS units was carried out by British special forces based at Rayak airbase in the Bekaa Valley, who were certainly still there in January after HTS conquered Damascus.
Contrary to some reports, Mahmoud Khalil would not have worked for MI6 in the Embassy. MI6 stations do not employ foreign nationals. He would have worked for the Political and Information Sections, under diplomats who cooperated closely with MI6 or in some instances were active “undeclared” members of MI6.
Middle East Eye describes Khalil’s role in the Embassy as a “programme manager” running Chevening scholarships. I know this programme extremely well. While I have no reason to doubt Khalil did this, it would amount to no more than 10% of anybody’s time and would not require the UK security clearance which the article states that Khalil received.
The simple truth is that anybody working in good faith in the British Embassy in Lebanon can be no friend of the resistance to Israel. Everything the British Embassy do in Lebanon is intrinsically linked to the overriding goal of promoting the interests of Israel, particularly through weakening Hezbollah, and this is especially true when it comes to programmes into Syria running out of Beirut.
So how did Khalil move from British government operative to Palestinian student activist?
And then, why on earth did the Trump regime pick him for its first high-profile deportation?
I can see three plausible explanations for Khalil’s behaviour:
1) He was never pro-British but was infiltrating the Embassy for the Palestinians
2) He was never pro-Palestinian but was infiltrating the protest movement for the British government
3) He was not very political but was moved recently to activism by the genocide in Gaza
Of these, option 3) seems to me the most plausible, though all are certainly possible.
It would be a delicious irony if the Trump regime had arrested a British agent by accident, but this seems to me unlikely. I do not think MI6 would run a Palestinian agent in the USA without informing the CIA – although they may have done if there were a specific concern that the CIA would leak the identity.
If Khalil were a British agent he could have been arrested for protection if there were concerns he had been “made”, or he could have been arrested because the Americans found out and were furious at not being informed. But I do not think these are the likely scenarios.
It seems to me much more probable that a once-complacent Khalil changed his mind and became more – righteously – radical due to the genocide in Gaza.
In which case the motive for choosing him as the target for arrest is very plain. Both the US and UK will be worried about revelations Khalil might make about support to jihadists in Syria from his time working on this in Lebanon. Whisking him into incommunicado detention, whilst maximum pressure is applied to persuade him to keep silent, is then an obvious move.
It is important for freedom of speech and for the rights in general of immigrants in the USA that Mr Khalil is free. It is obviously profoundly important for him and his family. I do not want anything I have written to detract from that.
But the puzzle of why such an extremely complicated target for the test case was chosen, when there exist far lower-hanging fruit, is one that needs to be considered. I hope I have offered some possible lines of thought you find useful.
Biotech billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy stirred up a political firestorm not long ago when, in attempting to defend the importation of foreign workers through the H-1B visa program, he criticized America’s native culture as one of “mediocrity” and “normalcy.” Calling for “more math tutoring” and “fewer sleepovers” for America’s youth in order to render them employable, he declared on X that “‘Normalcy’ doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent.” Jumping into the ensuing debate, Elon Musk offered an alternative analogy, portraying America as a global sports franchise that ought to contract the best players no matter their origin. “Thinking of America as a pro sports team that has been winning for a long time and wants to keep winning is the right mental construct” for Americans to hold, he wrote.
Unsurprisingly, neither proposed mental construct landed very well with President Trump’s populist-nationalist base and Ramaswamy was soon duly shuffled off to a term of exile in Ohio. In the one view, “America” is merely a glorified economic zone, just one part of a “competitive global market” in which labor and capital flow freely. In the other, America is a professional franchise whose sole objective is to maximize winnings. In both cases America is viewed as analogous to a corporation. In such a corporation, management’s only responsibility is to profits; it has no inherent responsibility to employees or their wellbeing, something of interest only insofar as it translates into productivity.
The corporate machine views employees merely as interchangeable human resources, to whom it owes no loyalty. Indeed, if it is to effectively devote itself to profit maximization the company can afford no permanent relational bonds with any of those who work for it, as it must be able to fire or replace them based on cold utilitarian calculus. There are thus few experiences employees find as irritating as that common workplace psyop in which management proclaims the corporate office to be a “family.” Employees know implicitly that it is natural affections and iron-clad mutual loyalties, or at least strong relational bonds, that are precisely what distinguish a family. Their corporate employer, in contrast, won’t hesitate to dump them by the wayside the moment they fall into the wrong column of a spreadsheet. For their part, employees are liable to return the sentiment and retain no lasting loyalty to the company – though perhaps plenty of resentment.
What angered people about the two CEOs’ comments was that – like so many of today’s elites – they displayed no sense of loyalty or obligation to Americans as a nation. A nation is not a corporation. A nation is a particular people, with a distinct culture, permanently bound together by shared relationship with place, past, and each other. A house becomes a home through relationship with the family that lives in it, a connection forged out of time and memory between concrete particularity of place and the lives of a specific group of people present, past, and yet unborn. We can say this house is home because it is our home. In much the same way, a country becomes our homeland because it is ours – and the we of that “ours” is the nation, which transcends geography, government, and GDP.
Unlike a corporation, a nation really is much like a family. And, like a family, it is characterized by strong relational bonds that are covenantal, not contractual. It establishes moral obligations of solidarity and subsidiarity that cannot be simply abandoned. Much as we naturally would, and should, put our own children’s lives and wellbeing ahead of others’, a nation is obligated to distinguish its own from others and to put the wellbeing of its own first. If it fails to do so then it can no longer remain a nation any more than a family could remain a family were it to try to extend the fold of its care equally to all humanity. Only once our immediate duties to those closest to us are fulfilled can concern for the good of others be rightly extended further outward. And though we may choose to adopt a child into our family, we cannot as readily toss them aside. We cannot, say, swap out our child for a different one who is more likely to get better grades in math class or is willing to perform chores for a lesser allowance. A nation-state is no more justly able to replace its own people or neglect its unique obligations to them simply because doing so seems more profitable or convenient.
Yet a family is hardly built on obligation alone. A healthy family is founded, ordered, governed, and sustained by love. It is love that binds its members together, forges their sense of responsibility, guides their conduct, and directs their proper care for one another. And it is love that directs us to rightly set our concern for these particular people above others, in the proper ordo amoris, or order of loves.
Love is not, cannot be, universal. It is born in particulars and defined by distinction. Should we say we love our neighbor, yet we do not love him for himself – with, or despite, all his unique eccentricities – but only insofar as we claim to love all people in the abstract, then we do not really love him. We cannot love our wife because she is a woman; we can only really love a particular woman. Thus believers must have faith that even the infinite God loves each of us in particular, numbering the very hairs on our heads; for his love to extend no further than to the mass of humanity as a species, as to a mass of sparrows, would be cold comfort indeed.
We love those people and those good things which are distinct and special to us, and those that are particularly our own all the more, but this hardly implies that we must then automatically hate all others. We do not hate other families’ children just because we love our own. Still, this twisted logic is today widely ascribed to one important expression of love: love for our own nation. For this is indeed what it means to be a nationalist: to love one’s own nation – in much the same way (if not quite as deeply) as one loves one’s own family.
As C.S. Lewis observed, patriotic love for one’s nation grows organically from that which is most local, familiar, and meaningful to us – from our love for our family, our land, and our community. From “this love for the place there goes a love for the way of life” of our nation, in all its many common particularities, all tied up together. In the case of Lewis’ England, “for beer and tea and open fires, trains with compartments in them and an unarmed police force and all the rest of it.” It is from this particular sense of love that he seeks to conserve his country. As Lewis reminds us (paraphrasing G.K. Chesterton), “a man’s reasons for not wanting his country to be ruled by foreigners are very like his reasons for not wanting his house to be burned down; because he could not even begin to enumerate all the things that would be lost.”
None of this implies that we then desire to impose this particular way of life on the rest of the world. But we should not be surprised that men might lay down their lives to defend their own nation as their own, and not for any other reason. They do so for the same reason they would lay down their lives to defend their children, or their friends: because they love them. Common loves are the source of common loyalties, and of common life.
A scene practically indistinguishable from fascism.
Yet, at least among our ruling classes, this natural reciprocal love between citizen and nation, which sustains our countries and our societies, seems to have long since frayed. This is no great shock, given that in our age the very idea of nationhood is itself decried, or outright denied, the nation-state stripped of the nation, the world reduced to a network of special economic zones. A man cannot love a special economic zone. Nor can its administrators possess any special feeling for its temporary inhabitants.
This grim status quo is no accident, however. It is the result of a deliberate, 80 year conspiracy against love, conducted out of fear. As I’ve argued before, after WWII, with the trauma of war and totalitarianism haunting the world, the American and European leadership class resolved that these evils should never again threaten society. And they concluded that the emotional power of nationalism had been the central cause of the 20th century’s catastrophes, leading them to make anti-nationalism the cornerstone of the liberal establishment consensus that came to dominate culture and politics after the war.
The philosopher Karl Popper, in his sweepingly influential 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, denounced the idea of national community writ large, labeling it disastrous “anti-humanitarian propaganda” and smearing anyone who cherished his particular homeland and history as a “racialist.” Theodor Adorno, who set the direction of American psychology and education policy for decades, classified natural loyalties to family and nation as the hallmarks of the “authoritarian personality” that drove the common man inexorably toward fascism.
But the aversions of the post-war elite ran deeper than a philosophical anti-nationalism. As R.R. Reno writes, the visceral imperative became to fully banish all the “strong gods” that fueled conflict, meaning all those “objects of men’s love and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that unite societies.” Strong bonds and strong loves of any kind – of family, nation, truth, God – came to be seen as dangerous, as sources of dogma, oppression, hatred, and violence. The peaceful and prosperous “open society” the post-war establishment set out to instantiate would, as Reno puts it, “require the reign of weak loves and weak truths,” with all dangerous sentiment subordinate to the rule of cool rationality and tepid impartiality.
In this belief post-war leaders embraced the legacy of Thomas Hobbes, who had viewed the wars which upended his own century as a product of the state of nature – the “war of all against all” – that constantly threatened to emerge from the pride and spiritedness (thumos) of mankind’s base natural personality. He saw the solution to this risk as man’s submission, out of fear, to the absolute power of a political leviathan – but also to an anthropological project, a program of metaphysical reeducation to turn man’s eye away from any summum bonum and downward toward only the fearful summum malum of struggle and death. As Matthew Crawford has succinctly explained, Hobbes believed that “any appeal to a higher good threatens to return us to the horrors of civil strife and must be debunked,” all our spirited passions and “vainglorious self-assertion” drained away so that we can consent to rule by Leviathan, “King of the Proud.”
With Hitler having firmly established himself as the summum malum of the post-war order, the liberal establishment embarked on their own version of Hobbes’ political-anthropological project. Seeking to dissolve the traditional “closed society” they feared was a breeding ground for authoritarianism, this “open society consensus” drew on theorists like Adorno and Popper to advance a program of social reforms intended to open minds, disenchant ideals, and weaken bonds. New approaches to education, psychology, and management sought to relativize truths, elevate “critical thinking” over character development, cast doubt on authorities, vilify collective loyalties, break down boundaries and borders, and free individuals from the “repression” of moral and relational bonds. Soon only economic prosperity and a vague universal humanitarianism became the only higher goods that it was morally acceptable to aim for as a society.
As government joined forces with post-war psychoanalysis, this program of subtle social control solidified into the modern therapeutic state – a regime that, as Christopher Lasch noted, successfully “substituted a medical for a political idiom and relegated a broad range of controversial issues to the clinic – to ‘scientific’ study as opposed to philosophical and political debate.” This removal of the political from politics lay at the heart of the post-war project’s aims. Its central desire was to reduce politics to mere administration, to bureaucratic processes, legal judgements, expert committees, and technocratic regulation – anything but fraught contention over such weighty matters as how we ought to live, organize society, or define who “we” are.
Public contention over genuinely political questions was now judged to be too dangerous to permit, even – indeed especially – in a democracy, where the ever-present specter of the mob and the latent emotional power of the masses haunted post-war leaders. They dreamed of governance via scientific management, of reducing the political sphere to the dispassionate processes of a machine – to “a social technology… whose results can be tested by social engineering,” as Popper put it. The operation of such a machine could be limited to a cadre of carefully educated “institutional technologists,” in Popper’s words, or rather to Hegel’s imagined “universal class” of impartial civil servants, able to objectively derive the best decisions for everyone through the principles of universal Reason alone.
The result was the construction of the managerial regimes that dominate the Western world today. These are characterized by vast, soulless administrative states of unaccountable bureaucracies, a litigious ethos of risk-avoidance and “harm-reduction,” and a technocratic elite class accustomed to social engineering and dissimulation. In such states the top priority is the careful management of public opinion through propaganda and censorship, not only in order to constrain democratic outcomes but so as to smooth over or avoid any serious discussion of contentious yet fundamentally political issues, such as migration policy.
Meanwhile the common people of such regimes are practically encouraged to live as distracted consumers rather than citizens, the invisible hand of the free market and the inducements of commercial and hedonistic pursuits serving not only profits but a political function of pacification. It is preferable that the masses simply not care very much – about anything, but especially about the fate of their nation and the common good. That sort of collective consciousness, transcending self-interest and seeking higher order, was after all identified as a foreboding mark of the closed society.
Here, then, can we see the long historical roots of the open, neoliberal state pointed to as an ideal by Ramaswamy and Musk. Innocently or not, these libertarian-leaning businessmen’s conception of the polity is almost indistinguishable from the “post-national state” that devoutly left-wing leaders like Canada’s Justin Trudeau have set out to devolve their countries into. The “globalism” so often decried by populists is neither left nor right but the logical product of the rationalist universalism embraced by the 20th century’s post-war consensus. It is the inevitable result of treating people, and peoples, as interchangeable units in a mechanical system – that is, of regarding them without any distinguishing sense of love.
But, as is increasingly obvious in our turbulent 21st century, these loveless machine-states are deeply unstable. It turns out that attempting to remove all bonds of affection from politics introduces some fundamental problems of political order. Most importantly, it has left us a leadership class essentially incapable of responsible leadership.
The noble classes of the pre-modern world’s closed societies were still capable of displaying a real sense of noblesse oblige: of having a sacred obligation to and responsibility for the people they ruled. Though modern cynics may dismiss this sentiment as a myth, it was often genuine. It is a striking fact, for instance, that the last real generation of Europe’s aristocratic elite was disproportionately savaged in the trenches of WWI, the flower of its youth voluntarily marching off to die leading from the front in defense of their nations at a significantly higher rate than ordinary soldiers. Eton, the nursery of the British aristocracy, lost more than a thousand of its students during the war – a 20% casualty rate compared to the army’s national average of 12%.
Today our elites no longer betray any similar sense of special obligation to their people. But then we can hardly expect them to, given that all the strong bonds of loyalty that once tied them to their countrymen, transcending divides of wealth, education, and class, have been severed. They conceive of themselves as meritocrats, of no special birth and therefore no special responsibility. More importantly, they have been taught from birth that they ought not even conceive of their nation as particularly their own or to love it any more than any other portion of humanity; their self-conceived domain is one without borders, the global empire of the open society.
Whom does government serve? This is perhaps the most pressing question of politics. In theory the leadership class that rules us is supposed to represent and govern on behalf of the common people and their best interests. This is meant to be precisely what distinguishes our regimes from tyranny, “tyranny” in the classical lexicon meaning rule for private gain rather than for the common good. But no one can truly represent or act rightly for the wellbeing of another if they bear no particular concern for them. It is love, and only love, that can really guarantee that anyone acts in the best interest of another when they could do otherwise. Love is the only force capable of genuinely liberating us from selfishness.
It is a modern conceit that those with power are kept restrained, uncorrupted, and ordered to justice and the common good primarily by lifeless structural guardrails, by the abstract checks and balances of constitutions and laws. The ancients would have maintained that it is far more important that a king be virtuous, and that he love his people. And is this not plausible? Fundamentally, a father doesn’t treat his children well, refraining from abusing or neglecting them and raising them rightly, just because he obediently follows the law or some correct set of rules and standard operating procedures. He does so because he loves his family, and from that love flows automatically a spontaneous ordering of all his intentions toward their good. He would do so even in the absence of externally imposed rules. Love is an invisible hand all its own.
It is this invisible hand, not that of the market, that is so glaringly absent from the heart of our nations. If ours seems a cold and callous age in general, our ruling class characterized by its indifference and our societies by division, dissolution, and despair, surely this lack is the real cause. As Reno writes, “the greatest threat to the political health of the West is not fascism or a resurgent Ku Klux Klan but a decline in solidarity and the breakdown of the trust between leaders and the led. Fearful of strong loves and committed to ever-greater openness, the postwar consensus cannot formulate, much less address, these problems.” With today’s elite “unable to identify our shared loves—unable even to formulate the ‘we’ that is the political subject in public life – we cannot identify the common good, the res in the res publica.”
The enlightened man, the conservative Russell Kirk once observed, “does not believe that the end or aim of life is competition; or success…” Nor does he hold any foolish political “intention of converting this human society of ours into an efficient machine for efficient machine-operators, dominated by master mechanics.” What he recognizes instead is that “the object of life is Love.” And so he knows, what’s more, “that the just and ordered society is that in which Love governs us, so far as Love ever can reign in this world of sorrows; and he knows that the anarchical or the tyrannical society is that in which Love lies corrupt.”
If the countries of the West are still capable of renewal, that renewal will come only when our leadership classes recover an uncorrupted love for the particular people – the nation – over which they govern and commit to placing their wellbeing first. We will be fortunate then if, in the hearts of some at least, this recovery may have at last begun.
On 4 October I spoke to a meeting of the United European Left group of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. Arriving a bit early, I sat through a presentation by a Moldovan judge, Victoria Sanduta, who was formerly the President of the Association of Judges in Moldova.
She had recently been dismissed, along with other judges, after investigation by a committee set up by the President to vet judges. She said the “vetting” was openly political, and the purpose was to remove any judges who were not “Western-oriented” and who might query the process in a forthcoming EU referendum and Presidential election.
You might think that this was an operation to clear out legacy judges hanging on since the days of the Iron Curtain. It was not; Victoria Sanduta is quite young. There had been no criticism of her judicial decisions. Her fault was that she was suspected of not supporting the President and lacking “Western orientation”.
Both the EU referendum and Presidential election were remarkably close. The EU referendum was “won” by the pro-EU side with 50.34% of the vote. The Presidential election was “won” by pro-EU President Sandu with 55.35% of the vote.
In both elections, the pro-Western side lost substantially on the votes of those living in Moldova, but won with the addition of hundreds of thousands of votes from the diaspora overseas.
There were 235 overseas voting stations in countries outside of Moldova, the large majority within the EU. There were however only two voting stations in Russia – the country where the majority of the Moldovan diaspora live, over half a million of them. Those voting stations (both in Moscow) were provided with only 5,000 ballot papers each. The official justification for this is that that’s the number of Moldovans living in Moscow itself, the majority being in the south of Russia.
As a result, approximately half a million Moldovans living in Russia were disenfranchised, while hundreds of thousands living in the EU voted.
In total 328,855 Moldovans living outside Moldova voted. Only 9,998 of those were in Russia, where most of the diaspora live.
Almost 300,000 of the permitted diaspora votes were for joining the EU – won with a majority of 10,555 – and for President Sandu – majority 179,309. If votes from the diaspora in Russia had been permitted on an equal footing with votes from the diaspora in the West, the EU would certainly have lost and Sandu would very probably have lost.
It was therefore very useful that Sandu sacked any judge who might entertain a challenge to the outcome.
This naturally recurred to me when I saw that pro-Western judges had disqualified the frontrunner in the neighbouring Romanian general election on the grounds of not being a Russophobe and being popular, which is an offence.
Călin Georgescu is not a supporter of the war in Ukraine. His socially conservative views are popular in Romania but are not EU-friendly. However he is absolutely not the far-right nutter he has been portrayed as across the Western media.
In fact Georgescu is a highly regarded developmental economist and a former United Nations Special Rapporteur. His expertise is in sustainable development, and he is one of those who wishes nations to move away from use of the US dollar as the primary medium of trade.
Georgescu has some views with which I agree and some with which I do not, but that is not the point. He won the first round of the Romanian Presidential Elections with a clear lead, and the decision of the judges of the Constitutional Court to disqualify him is clearly wrong and disproportionate.
The main offence he is accused of is sending lines to take to supporters and asking them to post these on social media. But almost every election candidate in the world nowadays does exactly this. It is further claimed that some of his supporters were paid by Russia, and the Constitutional Court was given evidence which originated from “Western security services” of Russian online campaigning for him.
Note the accusation here is not vote-rigging or electoral fraud. The accusation is of people saying things online to try to persuade voters to vote.
Which is what an election is.
It is the same as the Cambridge Analytica scandal which was so hysterically hyped by the Guardian and their deranged Russophobe Carole Cadwalladr (friend of Christopher Steele, author of the famous fabricated Trump “pee dossier”). There was a scandal, which was that Facebook was selling clients’ personal data to enable better targeting of political adverts.
But Cambridge Analytica was never Russian-funded, and the notion that some Facebook posts, among the massive sea of advertising and campaigning of every kind, had swung the Brexit vote is nonsense clung to by losers who cannot get over being defeated.
Targeted advertising, and the sale of your online data, is a horrible, everyday feature of modern life. All political parties and all causes use it nowadays.
I have no doubt Russia does interfere to try to influence elections overseas. So does every major country. I did it myself for the UK – unsuccessfully in Poland when Kwaśniewski was elected and successfully in Ghana when Kufuor was elected. The EU and Western powers fund NGOs and fund journalists all over the world to sway opinion, openly, and covertly Western security services fund “agents of influence”. Let me say it again. I have done it personally.
However it becomes somehow uniquely wrong when Russia does it.
That is not even to mention the absolutely massive role of the Israeli lobby in buying political influence all over the world. That is a far greater threat to democracy than Russia ever is.
I don’t know how Romania’s judges were curated to get the right result, as they were in Moldova, or how they were forced or bribed to change their original decision not to annul the election, just four days later.
I do know that regime change propaganda is in full swing in Georgia, where again the “wrong” party, insufficiently hostile to Russia, had the temerity to win the election. The French President of Georgia is hanging on. Not even large sums of CIA money nor funds channelled through CIA NGOs, nor beautifully printed English language placards, have been able to get enough people out on the streets to make the “colour revolution” demonstrations look convincing.
Georgian opposition supporters rally to protest results of the parliamentary elections that showed a win for the ruling Georgian Dream party, outside the parliament building in central Tbilisi on October 28, 2024. (Photo by Giorgi ARJEVANIDZE / AFP)
Meanwhile back in France, Macron refuses to accept he lost the election and insists on appointing a series of right-wing ministers that cannot possibly get support in the National Assembly.
The pretence of Western Democracy is falling apart, just as the pretence of international law is falling apart, abandoned by the Zionist-bought politicians in their desire to further the genocide and annexation of Gaza.
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Mike Benz delivered this lecture at Hillsdale College reviewing the origin and structure of the "intelligence state," often referred to as "the blob."
Timestamps:
1:19: The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare
11:20: NSC 10/2 and the Plausible Deniability Doctrine
15:08: Diplomacy Thru Duplicity
16:04: Smith-Mundt Act, The CIA Media Empire
19:40: The Department of Dirty Tricks
20:36: The CIA As Servant Of The State…
— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) September 24, 2024
Selected transcript:
MIKE BENZ: The "intelligence state" is a concept that implies that intelligence has taken over the state and that it has somehow gone rogue. Something has gone very wrong -- that intelligence, which is supposed to serve the state, has subsumed it. I will present the essential history of the intelligence state, but there is something beyond it that I think, beginning with, helps elucidate.
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We'll sort of speed-run the essential history all the way up to the present, but we're going to start in the year 1948. This is the sort of "Year Zero" of the founding of the intelligence capacities of the U.S. government. Instead of learning what you'd find in an ordinary history book, we're going to start with a document that I'm curious if anyone has ever seen, called "The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare."
Did you know that George Kennan, in 1948, wrote this memo called "The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare"?
George Kennan is known as a godfather figure of American diplomacy and the Central Intelligence Agency. He was famous for this "long telegram" and was the chief strategist of the containment strategy against the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
But before all that, when all of this was getting started, he penned this top-secret memo, which was not declassified for 60 years. It was declassified in 2005, and I think it helps elucidate the story as we're going to proceed here. We're going to go through this memo, but I want to give some context first. "The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare" was written just 12 days after the Central Intelligence Agency did its first government overthrow operation, its first election-rigging event. That was on April 18, 1948, and this memo was written just 12 days after that.
The particular focus was what had just happened in Italy. Italy was having its first democratic election after World War II, and it posited a U.S.-backed candidate on one side and a Russia-backed candidate on the other. When the rules-based international order was being established in 1948, we had these coordinating bodies through the National Security Council. The very first memo, which I have on screen here, emphasizes how important it is for the U.S. to control the political affairs of Italy. You'll see National Security Council Memo 1-1 is titled "The Position of the United States with Respect to Italy."
Kennan wrote, "Italy is obviously the key point. If the Communists win there, our whole position would probably be undermined."
What happened in this case was that in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency was established under the National Security Act, and it was originally intended to focus on gathering and analyzing intelligence. But because of the key importance perceived by the U.S. State Department to influence the Italian election, the CIA developed a makeshift, ad hoc, thrown-together-at-the-last-minute, $250 million operation to swing that election in favor of the U.S.-preferred candidate. I have some statistics here and a little bit of context because we’re going to see this as a repeating theme.
About $250 million of U.S. taxpayer money was spent to prop up our preferred candidate. The CIA made use of off-the-books sources of funding to finance it. Bags of money were delivered to selected politicians to pay for their political expenses, campaign expenses, posters, and pamphlets. We threatened the Italian government that aid money from the U.S. would be withheld if the wrong person got elected. Newly created CIA proprietary media organizations like Voice of America Radio and Radio Free Europe set up a vast spawn of Italian news networks to create a surround sound inside that country to broadcast U.S. propaganda and messaging. We funneled aid money through churches and charity fronts to mafia and union street muscle. We worked with Hollywood to project Greta Garbo films and others into the country.
The reason I’m starting with this context is not just because it will help explain the rationale for the beast that was created six weeks after this memo was penned—also by George Kennan—but to help understand that this is the intelligence services co-opting all of these organizations. This means that when the U.S. government provides funding or assistance, suddenly the churches they were working with are no longer simply churches—they are instruments of statecraft. The nonprofit charities are no longer simply charities; they become instruments of statecraft. The media is no longer independent; it becomes an instrument of statecraft. Hollywood becomes an instrument of statecraft, and organized criminal mafias do as well.
The predecessor to the CIA, the OSS, together with our War Department (as it was called at the time), was working with criminal groups in Italy as well as with church organizations and others who were being prosecuted by Mussolini. They served as a sort of guerilla resistance to assist the U.S. Army and intelligence operations. We had that network established. It was unseemly but seen as necessary in a time of war, but it was maintained in times of peace for political warfare. Suddenly, organized crime becomes not a criminal offense but rather a sanctioned instrument of statecraft. To drive that point home, Miles Copeland, one of the founding members of the CIA, wrote in his own book that, "Had it not been for the mafia, the Communists would by now be in control of Italy."
Why was all this necessary? Well, in the eyes of the U.S. State Department, we would have lost the election if the intelligence community hadn’t rigged it. They assessed that 60% of the vote would have gone to the Communists -- but for CIA intervention.
I urge you throughout this to remember that when you hear "Communist" or "fascist" in the historical data points we’re going to go over, understand that in the post-2016 world, all of this infrastructure has been repurposed to take out populism. Every time you see "Communism," as much as we abhor that with every fiber in our souls, the biggest threat right now to the intelligence state and to the "blob" (as we’ll come to discuss) is domestic populism. This is actually the language they use.
When you hear them say "the Communists would have won," today they use the exact same language to describe stopping the rise of populism and stopping populist political candidates.
...
This is from George Kennan, April 30th, 1948, just the week before the Central Intelligence Agency had achieved this incredible win in Italy. George Kennan, the State Department, and the White House were so overwhelmed with delight about the world of possibility if we could simply scale the Italian operation.
But the problem was, it was very much against everything this country had stood for, for a century and a half before that. I'm going to read some of the highlighted items here. You’ll see the phrase "political warfare" dots this in a very deliberate way: organized political warfare by the U.S. government to further our national objectives, to further our influence and authority using means both overt and covert, including black psychological warfare and many other techniques.
George Kennan says here, "We have been handicapped, however, by a popular attachment to the concept of a basic difference between peace and war." You’ll see he actually crossed out part of the draft because, again, this is a top-secret memo that was written in 1948 and wasn’t declassified until 2005. The hard record preserves his own scrawls. You’ll see at the bottom, it says, "We’re hamstrung by this basic difference between peace and war, by our public’s yearnings." Then that’s crossed out, and it says, "by a national tendency to seek a political cure-all and a reluctance to recognize the realities of international relations."
Basically, he is saying, "Listen, we answer to the voters, the people, and they’re not going to like this. They don’t understand international relations. They think there’s a difference between peace and war." World War II is over; it just ended three years ago. But if we go into peacetime mode and do not continue political warfare, then we will lose the opportunity to dominate the 20th century.
You’ll see here references to the Italian elections, right? We had just engaged in the Italian elections 12 days prior. This political warfare has to be directed and coordinated by the Department of State. We’ll come back to that because, as we’ll see, the shape of the intelligence state extends far beyond intelligence—it’s really a tool of statecraft.
Here is an interesting and telling vision from this CIA godfather. It says, "We cannot afford in the future, in perhaps more serious political crises, to scramble into impromptu covert operations as we did at the time of the Italian elections." He’s saying, we did this. It was great. It was amazing. But we need this capacity everywhere. We need it in every country on earth where there might be a political crisis, where there might be a need to protect U.S. national interests, trade interests, financial interests, or security interests. We need the same network we had in Italy, working with everyone from cultural influencers to the media, to the churches, to the charities, to organized crime networks—even if we don’t use it, just in case we need it. So we don’t need to scramble if an opposition politician decides to go sideways against a U.S. national interest agenda.
I’m setting the stage with that before we go back in time and go through the history of this. Less than two months after George Kennan wrote "The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare," saying, "Since 1789, we have never done this sort of thing in any organized fashion. The American people aren’t going to like it, but we have to do it." Less than two months after that, George Kennan sponsored the very act that would permanently change the structure of the American government and the way our country works.
This was National Security Council Memo 10/2. Now, for folks who are not familiar, the National Security Council (NSC) is called the "interagency." It coordinates with the State Department, the Defense Department, the CIA -- everyone -- so that they are all working in a complementary fashion. It's in the White House and provides executive oversight of everything.
You’ll see this memo here, NSC 10-2, and it’s right here on the State Department website, under state.gov. What I’m about to read here sanctioned U.S. intelligence to carry out a broad range of covert operations, including propaganda, economic warfare, demolition, subversion, and sabotage. It was sponsored by George Kennan. He pushed for this right after he wrote "The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare," but he would later say it was the greatest mistake he ever made because of the monster it created.
What NSC 10-2 did was give the intelligence community -- this burgeoning, newly created CIA -- and what we now have, 17 intelligence agencies plus the ODNI, not just spy organizations but lie organizations. What I mean by that is because of the phrase used in NSC 10-2, I'm going to read it, "All of these activities, which are normally illegal, can be carried out so long as they are planned and executed so that any U.S. government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons, and if uncovered, the U.S. government can plausibly deny any responsibility for them."
This is from 1948: "All covert operations, including sabotage, demolition, and controlling the media, are now legal as long as they are planned and executed so that any U.S. government responsibility is not evident to unauthorized persons." So, effectively, you are cast out of Eden. If you eat the apple from the tree of knowledge, you are not allowed to know, and they are not allowed to tell you. Their job is to lie to you. If they get caught, the U.S. government can then lie above the agency level, above the CIA. The State Department gets to lie to the world because the CIA had these covert links, and they could say it was not an officially sanctioned U.S. government operation -- something went rogue, someone wasn’t authorized, someone took it into their own hands.
I’m going to read this analysis that I think is a useful summary: "Plausible deniability encouraged the autonomy of this newly created CIA, which was created the year earlier, and other covert action agencies in order to protect the visible authorities of the government."
We’re going to come back to that as we discuss the power structure of all these different organizations. But I want to drive this point home immediately, which is that this was seen as a major growth opportunity because of how effective it was in the 1940s and 1950s to be able to take over the world through diplomacy and duplicity.
The problem with diplomacy through duplicity is that plausible deniability is the core doctrine that governs the interagency, which controls all major U.S. government operations on national security, foreign policy, and international interests. Because you lie to the outside world, you also need to lie to your own citizens to prevent the outside from finding out.
While the lies may help you successfully acquire an empire, you now have to permanently maintain an empire of lies, not just abroad but at home.
...
In 1948, when the founding fathers of the intelligence state were setting this all up, they were intensely aware of the monster they were creating. In 1948, Congress passed the Smith-Mundt Act, because, again, in 1948, as all of this was being established, the CIA was brand new, and NSC 10-2 had just come out. Congress said, "Okay, okay, listen, you guys are creating a monster here. We want to make sure that we don't build this empire of lies and that Americans are not being inundated with this sprawl of information control that you are conducting around the world in order to conduct organized political warfare on all countries on planet Earth."
Many folks in this room are probably familiar with what happened during the Obama administration, which repealed this essential safeguard, which had been with us since the moment all of this was created in 1948, with very little fanfare. It was tucked into an NDAA. It was really only discovered by the public after the damage had been done that the Smith-Mundt Act was modernized to get rid of that restriction. It was effectively amended, and the headline was, "U.S. Repeals Propaganda Ban, Spreads Government-Made News to Americans."
For decades, this anti-propaganda law prevented the U.S. government's mammoth broadcasting arms from delivering programming to American audiences. "Mammoth" is not a big enough word. After World War II, at this exact time in 1948, the UN Declaration for Human Rights came out and forbade the territorial acquisition of other countries by military force. Against these new international norms and standards, international law, you could not simply have a military occupation of the Philippines like the United States had in the early 1900s.
So, with hard power ruled out as the dominant means to have an empire, the U.S. transitioned to a soft power empire, dominated by agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency, democracy promotion programs at the State Department, later USAID, and the whole swarm army we're about to meet. But even right out of the gate, the Central Intelligence Agency immediately moved into the media space to control the messaging that people around the world experienced.
...
One essential way to cut through how this is structured is to understand that there is a key distinction between the American homeland and the American Empire. We live in the American homeland, but the American Empire is everywhere else.
Today, even though all the major U.S.-domiciled corporations get the lion's share of their markets, revenues, and supply chain resources from everywhere else on Earth, we, as a country, pale in comparison to the globe. The issue arises when people on the homeland want to put their own interests first—they run up against the empire managers, and therefore against this blob apparatus, and, by extension, the intelligence state.
In this inauguration of organized political warfare, you see that even though the emphasis is on giving the CIA this capacity, the entire operation is coordinated by the U.S. State Department, which does not have a plausible deniability license. It’s supposed to be our official U.S. government policy, but secretly, the CIA answers to the State Department in all things.
...
What happened after 1948? There is a list of CIA regime change operations after Italy. The CIA orchestrated coups in 85 countries following the Italy operation that George Kennan and other State Department officials were so inspired by. They did achieve their goal of expanding this strategy to virtually every country, continent, and region on earth and building these networks, whether they were needed or not.
Fifty of these regime change operations took place during the Eisenhower administration between 1952 and 1960. By the early 1960s, this began to come home, leading to a chain of events that caused the first real structural change to the intelligence state. During that time, the intelligence state was targeting the New Left within the Democratic Party in much the same way it is targeting the populist right today. There was a new faction within the Democratic Party, made up of not necessarily limousine liberals but anti-war protesters, civil rights activists, and supporters of third-world people's movements. Many in the Democratic Party were socially, politically, and informationally aligned with countries targeted by the CIA.
The CIA was seen as a right-wing force because it was primarily targeting socialist and communist governments, aiming to privatize state-held industries. The agency began to do the same things against the left that they are now doing against the populist right.
Huge CIA operations were reported in the U.S. against anti-war forces. The CIA was bribing the National Association of Students and launched something called Operation Chaos, which was designed to permanently shape the composition of the Democratic Party by purging the popular populist leftist faction. Does that sound familiar? The intelligence state isn’t targeting George Bush, Mitt Romney, or John McCain—it is targeting one faction of the conservative wing of the GOP in order to purge that out.
The next image I have here on screen is COINTELPRO. This was on the FBI side, but it was done in tandem with the Central Intelligence Agency. The "COINTEL" refers to counterintelligence, which is basically when the FBI deals with threats from foreign countries using this foreign predicate. I’ll get to that a little more in a second.
Now, the first thing that forced the restructuring of the intelligence state into its current form was a series of scandals that led up to and ultimately culminated in what was called the Church Committee hearings. Also, there was the Pike Committee. On the left here is Frank Church. He was the Democratic senator who spearheaded those hearings. It was the first time the Central Intelligence Agency ever had congressional oversight. It had been around for 30 years, and members of Congress were not allowed to see what it was doing. There was no oversight, no accountability—no one was saying, "Hey, let me look at that." There was no gang of eight. It was only with the Church Committee that we created a House Intelligence Committee to allow a select handful of members of the House to conduct oversight. It was only then that we created the Senate Intelligence Committee to do the same on the Senate side.
This is Frank Church here on the left, holding up the famous "heart attack gun," which was in the CIA assassination guide and part of their research and development. They were assassinating world leaders, political dissidents all over the world, and were working on ever more extreme ways to kill people and get away with it, adhering to their government license for plausible deniability. The heart attack gun, which you can look up on YouTube, was discussed in an open hearing of Congress, with the director of the Central Intelligence Agency testifying. It was essentially a dart gun that induced a heart attack, making the cause of death appear natural.
On the right here is Christopher Pyle. He was one of the first whistleblowers to expose what was going on—not from the CIA, but from the U.S. Army. He provided very damning evidence that the U.S. military had active operations to survey and infiltrate any public meeting of 20 or more people in the United States, regardless of the group’s political affiliation—right, left, mothers’ knitting groups, religious groups, etc. He revealed troves of documents showing that the U.S. military perceived it was necessary to maintain political control over the civilian population to prevent any popular bills from getting passed or people from getting elected who might undermine the military agenda. This amounted to a basic usurpation of the concept of civilian-run government in a democracy.
At that time, many thought leaders within the targeted section of the Democratic Party began to realize, due to these disclosures, that almost everything around them was not real—their media, culture, and music were all being used as instruments of statecraft, often directly against them. On the left is a memo from the Church Committee hearing notes on the CIA's use of journalists and clergy in intelligence operations. The center picture is the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a giant network of CIA-funded and directed cultural and media institutions, primarily in Europe but extending globally. The CIA co-opted thought leaders in leading magazines, musicians, poets, and even hosted musical events to attract people in dozens of countries, aligning them with the U.S. State Department agenda.
Very famous figures were involved in this, including many from spaces you might not expect. For example, Gloria Steinem, the famous feminist, was funded by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. At the time, our State Department was using this as a means to win the Cold War by promoting feminism to oppose patriarchal structures in countries east of Germany.
Even in the 1960s, labyrinthine money laundering and hiding it from public accountability were already very robust. The Church Committee hearings popped off, and then Jimmy Carter won in 1976, coasting on popular resentment against the intelligence state. He was fiercely opposed by the intelligence state and conducted what became known as the "Halloween Massacre," where he fired 30% of the CIA’s operations division in a single night, dramatically cutting the agency’s budget. There was this brief moment of accountability and a rollback of these plausibly deniable octopus-like operations against the American people.
Then Ronald Reagan came to power. In 1983, he embarked on structural changes to the way the intelligence state worked in order to restore the powers the CIA had lost during the Carter administration, including signing into law the bill that established the National Endowment for Democracy, which is now today's premier CIA cutout. The CIA became less visible because of its previous scandals and diffused itself into a liaison role within a public-facing network of captured institutions. The intelligence state moved into the whole of society, embedding itself into cultural and media organizations, universities, NGOs, and other publicly visible sectors.
Fast forward to 2016, and I’ll wrap this up. As our NGO sphere, university centers, media organizations, union groups, and cultural groups developed a "favors for favors" relationship—this "you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours" dynamic—they would get grants from the State Department, USAID, or the National Science Foundation in exchange for cooperation. What we are up against is this network, this blob, this congealed structure where the intelligence state serves the public-facing functions of government. The CIA is simply a support agency for the State Department on national interest grounds and for the Pentagon on national security grounds.
When you see the CIA or the intelligence state do something, understand that it’s to serve a State Department official, a Pentagon official, or the stakeholders around them. It’s not a rogue agency in the sense that it answers to the State Department and does the dirty work.
Maybe I’ll close with a Sopranos reference. Tony Soprano runs a mafia outfit in New Jersey, and he has these goons, these enforcers who do the plausibly deniable dirty work so that the FBI can’t trace it back to him. There’s a character, Furio, who is the muscle, breaking into people’s homes, beating them up, and undermining their "democracy." If you are in that home and it’s your democracy being destroyed, your friends and family being arrested, you might say, "Oh, the CIA did that." But what’s gone rogue is something much deeper than just the intelligence state—it’s the entrenched forces in diplomacy and defense that the CIA is tasked with serving and doing the dirty work for.
I recently shared a list of 26 essential books about technology.
But there was an unusual twist to this list—none of these books were written by technologists. They all came from wise humanists, philosophers, novelists, and social thinkers.
This is quite unconventional nowadays—STEM rules everything and everywhere, while the humanities are in crisis. But these are the books I’d assign if I taught in Stanford’s entrepreneur program.
They would give techies a mind-expanding vision from outside the Silicon Valley echo chamber. These books would guide them to concepts and solutions that tech, on its own, will never deliver.
Back in August, I promised that I’d write about some of the individual books on my list.
Today I’m doing just that—offering a rapid-fire overview of some insights from Hannah Arendt, one of the deepest thinkers of the 20th century.
Hannah Arendt
As many of you know, I often study predictions made 50 or 100 years ago, and try to see how accurate they were.
I have done this in the past with J.G. Ballard, Arnold Mitchell, Chris Anderson, Paul Goodman, Oswald Spengler, and others.
Today I turn my attention to an extraordinary analysis from Hannah Arendt’s book The Human Condition (1958). It’s so accurate, it’s almost scary.
Arendt is a constant source of inspiration for me. In this book, she warns us about technologists who are dangerous becuse they are so completely out-of-touch with their humanity. She wrote this book in the mid-1950s, but you might think she was living in Silicon Valley today.
Here’s what she says about these dangerous individuals in the opening pages of her 1958 book:
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On page one she says that people who are disconnected with the human condition are obsessed with outer space and want to “escape man’s imprisonment to the earth.”
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On page two, she says that these people are “directed towards making life artificial”—sort of like virtual reality.
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On page three, she claims that they will eventually want to create “artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking….we would become the helpless slaves…at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is.”
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On page four, she warns us that scientists have already shown (with the development of the atomic bomb) that they create dangerous things but are “the last to be consulted about their use.” So any prediction a scientist makes about the use of new tech is totally worthless—politicians and tyrants will decide how it is used.
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On page five, she explains that in this kind of society, freedom becomes almost worthless, because people are deprived of the “higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won.”
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On page six, she says that the people pursuing this escape from the human condition are thus creating “modern world alienation.”
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On page seven, she says that they inhabit “an ‘artificial’ world of things distinctly different from all natural surroundings”—so that their tech innovations will lead to an inevitable degradation of the environment, and a detachment from the real world.
I read all this in astonishment.
It sounds like Arendt had anticipated my recent article about Silicon Valley turning into a creepy cult—and grasped this potentiality more than 60 years ago.
In other word, she saw all this even before Silicon Valley had a name or a mission.
Arendt’s entire book is filled with insights. I won’t try to summarize everything, but I will share a few more of her provocative views.
Here are 12 more key passages from The Human Condition:
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“Our whole economy has become a waste economy, in which things must be almost as quickly devoured and discarded as they have appeared in the world.” [It sounds like she is describing scrolling on a smartphone but Arendt wrote this before the first integrated circuit was built!]
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“The question therefore is not so much whether we are the masters or the slaves of our machines, but whether machines still serve the world and its things, or if, on the contrary, they and the automatic motion of their processes have begun to rule and even destroy the world and things.” [Does that sound familiar?]
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“The phenomenon of conformism is characteristic of the last stage of this modern development.”
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“Large numbers of people, crowded together, develop an almost irresistible inclination toward despotism.”
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“Society always demands that its members act as though they were members of one enormous family which has only one opinion….imposing innumerable and various rules, all of which tend to ‘normalize’ its members, to make them behave, to exclude spontaneous action or outstanding achievement.”
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“Behavior has replaced action as the foremost mode of human relationship.”
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“The mass phenomenon of loneliness…has achieved its most extreme and antihuman form. The reason for this extremity is that mass society not only destroys the public realm but the private as well, deprives men not only of their place in the world but of their private home, where they once felt sheltered against the world.”
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“The loss of human experience in this development is extraordinarily striking. It is not only and not even primarily contemplation which has become an entirely meaningless experience. Thought itself, when it became “reckoning with consequences,” became a function of the brain, with the result that electronic instruments are found to fulfill these functions much better than we ever could.”
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“We have begun to live in a labor society which lacks enough laboring to keep it contented.”
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“For mortals, the ‘easy life of the gods’ would be a lifeless life.”
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“This does not mean that modern man has lost his capacities….although these faculties are more and more restricted to the abilities of the artist.”
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“It is quite conceivable that the modern age—which began with such an unprecedented and promising outburst of human activity—may end in the deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known.”
Does any of that ring true today? Let me remind you that all this was written in the mid-1950s.
I will have more to say in the future about other books on my subversive tech reading list. But even this quick survey of Hannah Arendt’s worldview shows how much we gain from adopting a larger vision of technology from a wise and compassionate human standpoint.
On history's repeating itself
Excerpts from the History of the Peloponnesian War
So revolutions broke out in city after city, and in places where the revolutions occurred late the knowledge of what had happened previously in other places caused still new extravagances of revolutionary zeal, expressed by an elaboration in the methods of seizing power and by unheard-of atrocities in revenge.
To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings.
What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his back was perfectly legitimate self-defense.
Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect. To plot successfully was a sign of intelligence, but it was still cleverer to see that a plot was hatching. If one attempted to provide against having to do either, one was disrupting the unity of the party and acting out of fear of the opposition. In short, it was equally praiseworthy to get one’s blow in first against someone who was going to do wrong, and to denounce someone who had no intention of doing any wrong at all.
Family relations were a weaker tie than party membership, since party members were more ready to go to any extreme for any reason whatever.
These parties were not formed to enjoy the benefits of the established laws, but to acquire power by overthrowing the existing regime; and the members of these parties felt confidence in each other not because of any fellowship in a religious communion, but because they were partners in crime.
If an opponent made a reasonable speech, the party in power, so far from giving it a generous reception, took every precaution to see that it had no practical effect.
Revenge was more important than self-preservation. And if pacts of mutual security were made, they were entered into by the two parties only in order to meet some temporary difficulty, and remained in force only so long as there was no other weapon available. When the chance came, the one who first seized it boldly, catching his enemy off his guard, enjoyed a revenge that was all the sweeter from having been taken, not openly, but because of a breach of faith. It was safer that way, it was considered, and at the same time a victory won by treachery gave one a title for superior intelligence.
And indeed most people are more ready to call villainy cleverness than simple-mindedness honesty. They are proud of the first quality and ashamed of the second.
Love of power, operating through greed and through personal ambition, was the cause of all these evils. To this must be added the violent fanaticism which came into play once the struggle had broken out.
Leaders of parties in the cities had programs which appeared admirable—on one side political equality for the masses, on the other the safe and sound government of the aristocracy—but in professing to serve the public interest they were seeking to win the prizes for themselves.
In their struggles for ascendancy nothing was barred; terrible indeed were the actions to which they committed themselves, and in taking revenge they went farther still. Here they were deterred neither by the claims of justice nor by the interests of the state; their one standard was the pleasure of their own party at that particular moment, and so, either by means of condemning their enemies on an illegal vote or by violently usurping power over them, they were always ready to satisfy the hatreds of the hour.
Thus neither side had any use for conscientious motives; more interest was shown in those who could produce attractive arguments to justify some disgraceful action.
[… the search for truth strains the patience of most people, who would rather believe the first things that come to hand.]
As for the citizens who held moderate views, they were destroyed by both the extreme parties, either for not taking part in the struggle or in envy at the possibility that they might survive.
As the result of these revolutions, there was a general deterioration of character throughout the Greek world. The simple way of looking at things, which is so much the mark of a noble nature, was regarded as a ridiculous quality and soon ceased to exist. Society had become divided into two ideologically hostile camps, and each side viewed the other with suspicion.
As for ending this state of affairs, no guarantee could be given that would be trusted, no oath sworn that people would fear to break; everyone had come to the conclusion that it was hopeless to expect a permanent settlement and so, instead of being able to feel confident in others, they devoted their energies to providing against being injured themselves. As a rule those who were least remarkable for intelligence showed the greater powers of survival. Such people recognized their own deficiencies and the superior intelligence of their opponents; fearing that they might lose a debate or find themselves out-maneuvered in intrigue by their quick-witted enemies, they boldly launched straight into action; while their opponents, overconfident in the belief that they would see what was happening in advance, and not thinking it necessary to seize by force what they could secure by policy, were the more easily destroyed because they were off their guard.
Certainly it was in Corcyra that there occurred the first examples of the breakdown of law and order.
There was the revenge taken in their hour of triumph by those who had in the past been arrogantly oppressed instead of wisely governed; there were the wicked resolutions taken by those who, particularly under the pressure of misfortune, wished to escape from their usual poverty and coveted the property of their neighbors; there were the savage and pitiless actions into which men were carried not so much for the sake of gain as because they were swept away into an internecine struggle by their ungovernable passions.
Then, with the ordinary conventions of civilized life thrown into confusion, human nature, always ready to offend even where laws exist, showed itself proudly in its true colors, as something incapable of controlling passion, insubordinate to the idea of justice, the enemy to anything superior to itself; for, if it had not been for the pernicious power of envy, men would not so have exalted vengeance above innocence and profit above justice.
Indeed, it is true that in these acts of revenge on others men take it upon themselves to begin the process of repealing those general laws of humanity which are there to give a hope of salvation to all who are in distress, instead of leaving those laws in existence, remembering that there may come a time when they, too, will be in danger and will need their protection.
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People always think the greatest war is the one they are fighting at the moment, and when that is over they are more impressed with wars of antiquity; but, even so, this war will prove, to all who look at the facts, that it was greater than the others.
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, late 400s BC
The latest judgment by the High Court in the Assange case achieved completely the objectives of the UK and US states. Above all, Julian remains in the hell which is Belmarsh maximum security prison. He is now safely there alone and incommunicado, from the authorities’ point of view, for at least several more months.
Importantly, the United States has managed to keep him detained without securing his actual appearance in Washington. It is crucial to grasp that the CIA, who are very much controlling the process, do not actually want him to appear there until after their attempt to secure the re-election of Genocide Joe. No matter what your opinion of Donald Trump, there is no doubt the CIA conspired against him during his entire Presidency, beginning with the fake Russiagate scandal and ending with their cover-up of the Hunter Biden laptop story. They do not want Trump back.
Biden is politically in deep trouble. Biden’s lifelong political support for Israel has been unwavering to the point of fanaticism. In the process he has collected millions of dollars from the Zionist lobby. That always seemed a source of political strength in the United States, not of weakness.
The current genocide in Gaza has changed all those calculations. The sheer evil and viciousness of the Israeli state, the open and undisguised enthusiasm for racist massacre, has achieved the seemingly impossible task of turning much American public opinion against Israel.
That is particularly true among key elements of the Democratic base. Young people and ethnic minorities have been shocked that the party they have supported is backing and supplying genocide. The mainstream media have lost control of the narrative, when the truth is so widely available on mobile phones, to the point that the MSM have actually been forced to change course and occasionally tell truths about Israel. That also was unthinkable a few months ago.
Precisely the same groups who are outraged by Biden’s support for genocide are going to be alienated by the attack on a journalist and publisher for revealing true facts about war crimes. Assange is not currently a major public issue in the United States, because he is not currently in the United States. Were he to arrive there in chains, the media coverage would be massive and the issue unavoidable in the presidential election campaign.
The extradition proceeding has therefore had to be managed in such a way as to keep Assange locked in a living hell the whole time, without actually achieving the extradition until after the presidential election in November. As the years of hearings have rolled by this has become increasingly difficult for the British state to finesse on behalf of their American masters.
In this respect, and only in this respect, Dame Victoria Sharp and Lord Justice Johnson have done brilliantly in their judgment.
Senior British judges do not have to be told what to do. They are closely integrated into a small political establishment that is socially interlinked, defined by membership of institutions, and highly subject to groupthink.
Dame Victoria Sharp’s brother Richard arranged an £800,000 personal loan for then Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and subsequently became chairman of the BBC despite a complete lack of relevant experience. Lord Justice Johnson as a lawyer represented the intelligence services and the Ministry of Defence.
They did not have to be told what to do in this case explicitly, although it was very plain that they entered the two-day hearing process knowing nothing except a briefing they had been given that the crux of the case was the revelation of names of US informants in the Wikileaks material.
The potential danger of an appeal, the granting of which would achieve the United States’ objective of putting the actual extradition back beyond the election date, was that it would allow the airing in public of a great catalogue of war crimes and other illegal activity which had been exposed by Wikileaks.
Sharp and Johnson have obviated this danger by adjourning the decision with the possibility of granting an appeal, but only on extremely limited grounds. Those grounds would explicitly gag the defence from ever mentioning again in court inconvenient facts, such as United States war crimes including murder, torture and extraordinary rendition, as well as the plans by the United States to kidnap or assassinate Julian Assange.
All of those things are precluded by this judgment from ever being raised again in the extradition hearings. The politically damaging aspect of the case in terms of the Manning revelations and CIA behaviour has been cauterised in the UK.
There has been some confusion because the judgment stated that three grounds of possible appeal were open. But in fact this was really only two. The judgment states that freedom of expression under article 10 of the European Convention is adequately covered by the First Amendment protections of the US Constitution. Therefore this point can only be argued by the defence against extradition if the First Amendment will not be applied in the case.
The second ground of appeal which they stated may be allowed was discrimination by nationality, in that the prosecution has stated that as a foreign citizen who committed the alleged acts whilst outside of the United States, Julian may not have the protection of the First Amendment or indeed of any of the rights enshrined in the US Constitution.
So the first two grounds are in fact identical. Sharp and Johnson ruled that both would fall if an assurance were received from the government of the United States that Julian would not be denied a First Amendment defence on grounds of nationality.
The other ground on which an appeal may be allowed to go forward is the lack of an assurance from the United States that, following additional charges, Julian may not become subject to the death penalty.
I shall go on to analyse what happens now and the chances of success on any of these allowed appeal points, but I wish first to revisit the points which have not been allowed and which are now barred from ever being raised in these proceedings again.
The most spectacular argument in the judgment, and one which I trust will become notorious in British legal history, refers to the application to bring in new evidence regarding the US authorities’ illegal spying on Julian and plotting to kidnap or assassinate him.
There are any number of things in this case over five years which are so perverse that they have to be witnessed to be believed, but none has risen to this height and it would be a struggle for anybody to come up with anything in British legal history more brazen than this.
Judge Johnson and Judge Sharp accept that there is evidence to the required standard that the US authorities did plot to kidnap and consider assassinating Julian Assange, but they reason at para. 210 that, as extradition is now going to be granted, there is no longer any need for the United States to kidnap or assassinate Julian Assange: and therefore the argument falls.
It does not seem to occur to them that a willingness to consider extrajudicial violent action against Julian Assange amounts to a degree of persecution which obviously reflects on his chances of a fair trial and treatment in the United States. It is simply astonishing, but the evidence of the US plot to destroy Julian Assange, including evidence from the ongoing criminal investigation in Spain into the private security company involved, will never again be allowed to be mentioned in Julian’s case against extradition.
Similarly, we are at the end of the line for arguing that the treaty under which Julian is being extradited forbids extradition for political offences. The judgment confirms boldly that treaty obligations entered into by the United Kingdom are not binding in domestic law and confer no individual rights.
Of over 150 extradition treaties entered into by the United Kingdom, all but two ban extradition for political offences. The judgment is absolutely clear that those clauses are redundant in every single one of those treaties.
Every dictatorship on Earth can now come after political dissidents in the UK and they will not have the protection of those clauses against political extradition in the treaties. That is absolutely plain on the face of this ruling.
The judgment also specifically rejects the idea that the UK court has to consider rights under the European Convention of Human Rights in considering an extradition application. They state that in the United States—as in other Category 2 countries in terms of the Extradition Act 2003—those rights can be presumed to be protected at trial by the legislation of the country seeking extradition.
That argument abdicating responsibility for application of the ECHR is one that is not likely to be accepted if this case ever gets to Strasbourg (but see below on the possibility of that happening).
By refusing to hear the freedom of expression argument, the court is ruling out listening to the war crimes exposed by the material published and hearing that the publication of state level crime is protected speech. That entire argument is now blocked off in future hearings and there will be no more mention of US war crimes.
The judges accept—hook, line and sinker—the tendentious argument that Julian is not being charged with the publication of all of the material but only with those documents within the material which reveal the name of US informants and sources. As I reported at the time, this was plainly the one “fact” with which the judges had been briefed before the hearing.
That it is a legitimate exercise to remove entirely from consideration the context of the totality of what was revealed in terms of state crimes, and to cherry pick a tiny portion of the release, is by no means clear; but their approach is in any event fatally flawed by a complete non sequitur:
At para. 45 they argue that none of the material revealing criminal behaviour by the United States is being charged, only material which reveals names. Their argument depends upon an assumption that the material revealing names of informants or sources does not also reveal any criminal behaviour by the United States. That assumption is completely and demonstrably false.
Let us now turn to the grounds on which a right to appeal is provisionally allowed, but may be cancelled in the event of sufficient diplomatic assurances being received from the United States.
To start with the death penalty, which has understandably drawn the most headlines: it astonishes me, as this argument has been in play now for several months, that the United States has not provided the simple assurance against imposition of the death penalty which is absolutely bog standard in many extradition proceedings.
There is no controversy about it, and it is really quick and easy to do. It is a template: you just fill in the details and whiz off the diplomatic note. It takes 5 minutes.
I do not believe the Biden administration is failing to provide the assurance against the death penalty because they wish to execute Julian Assange. They do not need to execute him. They can entomb him in a tiny concrete cell, living a totally solitary existence in a living hell. Arguably, he is of more value alive that way as a terrible warning to other journalists, rather than an executed martyr.
I view the failure so far to produce a guarantee against the death penalty as the clearest evidence that the Biden administration is trying simply to kick this back past the election. By not providing the assurance, already they have achieved a delay of another few weeks which they have been given to provide the assurance, and then further time until the hearing on 20 May to discuss whether assurances produced have been adequate. Not giving the death penalty assurance is simply a stalling tactic, and I am sure they will go right up to the deadline given by the court and then provide it.
The second assurance requested by the court is actually much more interesting. They have requested an assurance that Julian Assange will be able to plead a First Amendment defence on freedom of expression and will not be prevented from doing so on the grounds of his Australian nationality.
The problem which the United States faces is that it is the federal judge who will decide whether or not Julian is entitled to plead that his freedom of speech is protected by the First Amendment. Neither the Department of Justice nor the State Department can bind the judge by an assurance.
The problem was flagged up by the US prosecutor in this case who stated that it is open to the prosecution to argue that a foreign national, operating abroad as Julian did, does not have First Amendment rights. It is extremely important to understand why this was said.
The prisoners in Guantanamo Bay are deemed not to have any constitutional rights, despite being under the power of the US authorities, because they were non-US citizens acting abroad.
A key US Supreme Court judgment in the case of USAID versus Open Society stated unequivocally that non-US citizens acting abroad do not have First Amendment protection. At first sight that decision appears to have little relevance. It concerns foreign charities in receipt of US aid funds which, as a condition of aid, they must oppose sex work. They attempted to claim this was in breach of First Amendment rights but the Supreme Court ruled that, as foreigners acting abroad, they did not have any such rights.
While that may appear of limited relevance, referring to NGOs not individuals, there is a paragraph in the Open Society judgment which states as a rationale that were First Amendment rights to be granted to those NGOs they would also have to be granted to foreigners with whom the US military and intelligence services were in contact – i.e. the Guantanamo problem.
This paragraph of the Supreme Court ruling appears inescapable in the Assange case:
Julian was a foreign national operating abroad when the Wikileaks material was published. So I do not see how the United States can simply give an assurance on this point, and indeed it seems to me very likely that Julian would indeed be denied First Amendment rights at trial in the United States.
The sensible solution would of course be that as a non-US citizen publishing material outside the United States, Julian should not be subject to US jurisdiction at all. But that will not be adopted.
So I anticipate the United States will produce an assurance which tries to fudge this. They will probably give an assurance that the prosecutor will not attempt to argue that Julian has no First Amendment rights. But that cannot prevent the judge from ruling that he does not, especially as there is a Supreme Court judgement to rely on.
In May when we come to the hearing on the permitted points of appeal, it is vital to understand that there will be two parts to the argument. The first part will be to consider whether the assurances received by diplomatic note from the United States are sufficient for the grounds of appeal to fall completely.
However if it is decided that the assurances from the United States are insufficient, that does not automatically mean that the appeal succeeds. It just means that the appeal is heard. The court will then decide whether the death penalty or nationality discrimination points are strong enough to stop the extradition.
The absence of the death penalty assurance should end the extradition process. But the hearing would see the prosecution argue that it is not necessary, as there are no capital charges currently and none are likely to be added. The judges could go with this, given the undisguised bias towards the United States throughout.
The state will again kick in with its iron resolve to crush Julian. I don’t think that the United States will be able, for the reasons I have given, to provide assurances on the nationality and First Amendment rights, but I think the court will nonetheless order extradition.
The United States will argue that it is a free country with a fair trial system and independent judges and that Julian will be allowed to make the argument in court that he should have First Amendment rights. The UK court should accept that the US judge will come to a fair decision which protects all human rights considerations. They will say that it is perfectly reasonable and normal for states to treat citizens and foreign nationals abroad in different ways in different contexts, including consular protection.
A justice system which is capable of ruling that a person should be handed over to his attempted kidnapper, because then the kidnapper does not have to kidnap him, and ruling that the clauses of the very treaty under which somebody is being extradited do not apply, is capable of accepting that the ability to argue in court for a First Amendment defence is sufficient, even if that defence is likely to be denied.
There is, however, plenty of meat in those questions that would allow another adjourned hearing, another long delay for a judgment and plenty of leeway to get past the November election for Genocide Joe.
The British establishment continues to move inexorably towards ordering Julian’s extradition at the time of its choosing. Once extradition is ordered, Julian in theory has an opportunity to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.
The European Court of Human Rights can delay the extradition until it hears the case by a section 39 order. But there are two flaws: firstly the extradition may be carried out immediately upon the court judgement before a section 39 order can be obtained, which would take at least 48 hours. Secondly the Rwanda Safety Act has provision, though specifically in the Rwanda context, for the government to ignore section 39 orders from the ECHR.
It cannot be ruled out that the British government would simply extradite Julian even in the face of an ECHR hearing. That would be popular with the Conservative base and, given Starmer’s extremely extensive and dubious role in the Assange saga while Director of Public Prosecutions, I certainly do not put it past him either. It is worth noting that there have been several occasions in recent years when the Home Office has deported people despite British court orders putting a stay on the deportation. There has never been any consequence other than a verbal rap on the knuckles for the Secretary of State from the court.
So the struggle goes on. It is a fight for freedom of speech, it is a fight for freedom of the press, and above all it is a fight for the right of you and me to know the crimes that our governments commit, in our name and with our money.
I am ever more struck by the fact that in fighting for Julian I am fighting exactly the same power structures and adversaries who are behind the genocide in Gaza.
I need to close with an appeal. Please do not stop reading. You will recall that I recently addressed the UN Human Rights Committee on Julian’s case and in doing so had the opportunity to state a few hard truths about the war crimes of the United States.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/video.mp4
My opportunity to do so was organised by the Swiss NGO Justice For All International, who submitted a shadow report (open link and click on red icon) by their lawyers to the UN 7 year Periodic Review of the UK’s human rights record. Justice For All also carried out a great deal of lobbying activity in connection with this to get me onto that stage and into meetings with key officials.
I had agreed a fee to pay Justice For All for this legal and lobbying activity, in the expectation that it would be met from the substantial funds held by the bodies comprising the US/European institutions of Julian Assange campaign.
Unfortunately the Assange campaign has refused to meet the bill and I have been left holding it.
I have been told that I failed to follow correct procedures to apply for the spending. I am frankly in shock and a form of grief, because I thought we were friends working for a common cause, in my own case for free. I am reminded of the brilliant perception of Eric Hoffer: “Every great cause begins as a movement and becomes a business”.
I am left with this bill I cannot pay for the work at the UN. Justice For All could not have been nicer about the situation, but if you could contribute to this Justice For All crowdfunder, I should be very grateful.
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The uncritical, blind faith in vaccines is the preeminent sacred cow of modern medicine. (It happens to be its preeminent cash cow as well.) It is a quasi-religious, dogmatic article of conviction, rather than a sound scientific theory or an empirically-based clinical precept.
Vaccines have been controversial since their introduction centuries ago. Only in very recent history has there been a rigidly enforced orthodoxy of belief within the medical establishment that vaccines must be unanimously regarded as “safe and effective,” no questions asked.
Even more recent is the practice of smearing and labeling anyone questioning this doctrine as a heretic: an “anti-vaxxer.” In fact, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the earliest known use of that now-ubiquitous epithet was only in 2001.
Religious faith has tremendous potential for good in society, but when it is misrepresented as science, its track record is miserable and deadly. “Safe and effective” is not scientific shorthand, or even an advertising slogan; it is a mantra. “Anti-vaxxer” is not a category of person, it is a charge of heresy. And just as vaccine critics are heretics, so the high priests of vaccines, the Faucis of the world, the people who in their own words “represent science,” are fanatics.
Does that really sound like science to you? Galileo, Semmelweis, and a few others might disagree.
Any honest person who lived through the COVID-19 era in the United States will acknowledge that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) with its lengthy “alphabet soup” of agencies (CDC, NIH (with its NIAID), FDA (with its CBER), etc., etc.), promoted and repeated the “safe and effective” mantra regarding the COVID-19 vaccines throughout an era of intense public fear.
Any honest person will also acknowledge that the mainstream media avidly repeated and amplified the “safe and effective” mantra and stoked the fear, all while ruthlessly attacking anyone questioning that same dogma, labeling them “anti-vaxxers,” or sometimes even “murderers.”
Little to no mention was made – or allowed – of the gigantic financial incentives and other entanglements these powerful entities have with the vaccine manufacturers, nor the trillions of dollars involved.
Religious dogmas, especially those relentlessly inculcated by powerful forces under extreme conditions, are hard to break free from.
To readers who may know people caught in the rigid, dogmatic belief in the infallibility of vaccines, I offer the following 10 sentences.
Share them with friends, family, and colleagues who cannot seem to reconsider vaccine dogma, especially those with an uncritical view of the current vaccine schedules. Ask them to carefully read each of the 10 sentences below, one at a time, and ask themselves: does this sentence seem true or false to me? If it seems false, on what basis do I think it is false? Then move on to the next one and do the same.
(Some of the sentences are complex, but I am confident an intelligent layperson can understand them all.)
When they are finished with all 10 sentences, encourage your friends to ask themselves:
- Do they truly believe that every child in the United States should receive 20 or more different vaccines before age 18?
- Should vaccines ever be mandated?
- Shouldn’t we, as an educated, free society, systematically review the official vaccine recommendations, and, just as we would do with Grandma’s overflowing pill box, reduce them to the truly necessary minimum?
- Shouldn’t we reassert the autonomy of patients over their own bodies?
Here is the trouble with vaccines, in 10 sentences:
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Like “antibiotics,” “vaccines” are a large and diverse class of medicines, and as with all large classes of medicines, different products in the class work by different mechanisms, some being quite effective while others are ineffective, some being reasonably safe for appropriate human use while others are fraught with side effects and toxicities, and therefore to assume that any large class of medicines – including vaccines – is categorically “safe and effective,” is naïve, illogical, false, and dangerous.
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While the full extent of vaccine toxicity is undetermined, it is a historical fact that numerous vaccines have been proven to be highly toxic and even deadly to patients, via multiple pathophysiological mechanisms, including: a) direct contamination of the vaccine (e.g. the Cutter Incident), b) disease caused by unintended, pathological immune response to the vaccine (e.g. Guillain–Barré syndrome caused by the swine flu vaccine), c) unintended contraction and/or transmission of the disease the vaccine was designed to prevent, caused by the vaccine itself (e.g. the current oral polio vaccine), and d) vaccine toxicity of unknown or uncertain cause (e.g. intestinal intussusception with the rotavirus vaccine, and fatal blood clots with the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine).
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In fact, the known toxicity of vaccines is so well-established that a Federal law – the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986 (42 U.S.C. §§ 300aa-1 to 300aa-34) was passed to specifically exempt vaccine manufacturers from product liability, based on the legal principle that vaccines are “unavoidably unsafe” products.
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Since the 1986 NCVIA act protecting vaccine manufacturers from liability, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of vaccines on the market, as well as the number of vaccines added to the CDC vaccine schedules, with the number of vaccines on the CDC Child and Adolescent schedule rising from 7 in 1986 to 21 in 2023.
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Of the 21 vaccines on the 2023 CDC Child and Adolescent Immunization Schedule, only a small minority (e.g. measles, mumps, rubella, varicella, and HiB) are capable of providing genuine herd immunity, a fact that negates the common, population-based arguments for mandating the other vaccines, which comprise the sizable majority of the vaccines on the schedule.
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The pharmaceutical industry has established an almost unimaginable degree of media control, institutional influence, and regulatory capture, via its funding of other entities, as it is a) the largest industry lobby in Washington, DC, b) the second largest industry in TV advertising, c) a major source of personal revenue for high-level HHS “alphabet soup” agency bureaucrats, many of whom hold patent and royalty rights on pharmaceutical products, d) a major funder of influential physician organizations (e.g. the American Academy of Pediatrics and prominent medical journals, and e) involved in payment-based incentivization of practicing physicians, who frequently receive monetary bonuses for high rates of vaccination in their patient panels.
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The COVID-19 mRNA vaccines were developed and administered to the public a) much faster and with much less testing than any other vaccines on the market, b) under Emergency Use Authorization, c) utilizing a technological platform that had never seen commercial use before, and, despite generating reports of vaccine-related deaths and serious adverse events at much higher rates than traditional vaccines, and despite the fact that they have been removed from the pediatric market in multiple other developed countries, the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines have already been placed on the CDC Child and Adolescent Immunization Schedule, just a little over 2 years after their introduction to the public.
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There has been no systematic public accounting by the CDC (or any of the HHS agencies) for the more than 35,000 reported COVID-19 vaccine-related deaths and more than 1,500,000 reported COVID-19 vaccine-related adverse events reported as of July 7, 2023, to the CDC’s own Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), nor for the corresponding numbers of COVID vaccine-related deaths and adverse events reported to Eudravigilance (the European Union’s equivalent to VAERS), even as the CDC continues to strongly promote these vaccines for use, including placing them on the CDC Child and Adolescent Immunization Schedule.
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By labeling the novel COVID mRNA products as “vaccines,” the definition of the term “vaccine” has become so broadened that essentially any medication that induces an immune response against a disease may now be dubbed a “vaccine,” thereby shielding pharmaceutical companies from liability under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 to a previously unimagined extent.
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Vaccine mandates thereby compel citizens to submit to medical treatments a) that are regarded under Federal law to be “unavoidably unsafe,” b) that because they are unavoidably unsafe, their manufacturers are protected by Federal law from liability for harm done to citizens, c) whose manufacturers and government agencies nevertheless promote publicly as “safe and effective,” in direct contradiction to their legal status as “unavoidably unsafe,” and d) that have increased tremendously in number in recent decades, and, with mRNA technology and a broadened definition of the term “vaccine,” stand to multiply at an even greater rate in the future.
I hope these 10 sentences will help the unconvinced to reconsider the central dogma surrounding vaccines. We, as a society, need to reject the article of faith that vaccines are fundamentally “safe and effective.”
Vaccines, due to their unavoidably unsafe nature, should NEVER be mandated, and a thorough, product-by-product accounting of the individual vaccines needs to be done outside of government agencies.
How can we accomplish this?
Please forgive me if you thought I was done. I have 10 more sentences listing my proposed solutions to the trouble with vaccines. I ask you to trudge through these as well. Most of them are shorter than the first 10. Thank you.
A Proposed Solution to the Trouble with Vaccines in 10 (more) Sentences:
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The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986 (42 U.S.C. §§ 300aa-1 to 300aa-34) should be repealed, returning vaccines to the same liability status as other drugs.
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Federal law should be passed prohibiting the mandating of any and all vaccines at all levels of government.
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Federal law should be passed prohibiting all direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs.
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Federal law should be passed prohibiting all collaboration between the Department of Health and Human Services’ “alphabet soup” agencies (FDA, CDC, NIH, etc.) and either the Department of Defense (US Army, DARPA, etc.) or the Federal Intelligence Agencies (CIA, DHS, etc.) with regard to vaccine development or vaccine distribution to the public.
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Federal law should be passed prohibiting all persons working within the HHS agencies from gaining any personal financial benefit from vaccines, including the gaining and holding of patents or royalties, and civil servants in those agencies should be required to take an oath of office not to profit off of any products they approve, regulate, or about which they advise the public.
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A thorough and public investigation, including criminal prosecutions where appropriate, should be made regarding the key players (both public and private) involved in the development, marketing, manufacture, sale, and administration of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, and following the investigation, there should be appropriate reform within the HHS agencies.
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Detailed, independent, Cochrane-style reviews of every vaccine on the CDC vaccine schedules should be undertaken and made public, and no scientists with financial interests within the pharmaceutical industry should conduct these reviews.
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Detailed, independent reviews of all reports from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) related to the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines should be undertaken and made public, and appropriate reforms to VAERS should be made.
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A detailed Congressional review of the money trails related to COVID-era programs, including Operation Warp Speed and the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, should be conducted, focusing on fraud and abuse at all levels, including how private companies such as Pfizer and Moderna profited so enormously from taxpayer-funded initiatives.
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A open, public discussion and debate should be undertaken on the appropriate role of vaccines in public health, including, among other issues, a) a critical review of the current medical dogma on vaccines, b) an accounting of the mistakes, abuses, and potential lessons of the COVID-19 era, and c) a thorough discussion of the undeniable conflicts between public health as it is now practiced and the fundamental civil rights of citizens.
The medical establishment’s current dogma on vaccines (“safe and effective,” no questions asked) and its corresponding catechism (the ever-expanding vaccine schedules) are in desperate need of reform. I submit that we begin with the above steps.
Reformers are not heretics, although they are commonly labeled as such by powerful persons resisting reform. I, for one, am not a heretic, nor am I an “anti-vaxxer.” I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The problem is, when one looks closely at the vaccine schedules, there turns out to be a lot more bathwater and a lot less baby than advertised.
It is time for the profession of medicine, and society as a whole, to come out of the Dark Ages on this topic. It is time for an open, forthright reevaluation of vaccines and their role in public health.
Clayton J. Baker, MD
C.J. Baker, is an internal medicine physician with a quarter century in clinical practice. He has held numerous academic medical appointments, and his work has appeared in many journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine. From 2012 to 2018 he was Clinical Associate Professor of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester.
When I originally made this Substack, I found myself in a very frustrating position—I had something I felt was essential for the world to know (that we were repeating the disastrous smallpox vaccination campaign, its cruel mandates, and the widespread counterprotests against them by the working class). Still, I had no way to get the message out. I tried to find a way to do so for a while, and eventually, Steve Kirsch generously gave me a platform to do so.
Because of this, I have a considerable degree of empathy with people who find themselves in a similar position to mine. Thus one of my goals in building the subscriber base here has been to make that platform available to those in a similar situation to me, and I periodically publish compelling things readers share with me I believe are accurate (e.g., this citizen’s survey of blood clots amongst the vaccinated).
Recently a longtime reader contacted me to share his story. Based on my previous correspondences with him over the last year, I believe he has accurately represented himself here. I also want to note that his story shares many parallels to the treatment of other doctors attempting to do the right thing throughout COVID-19 (e.g., Paul Marik’s experience).
One of the reasons we lack doctors everyone wants to see is because those who try to do the right thing get pushed out of the system. Because there is so much corporate control of medicine, even doctors who want to do the right thing know they have no recourse if the hospital turns against them. Those doctors thus have to choose between toeing the line and doing their best within those circumstances or leaving the system entirely.
Their leaving thus leaves even fewer physicians that patients would want to see available within the corporate medical system. For many things like emergent hospital care, the patients cannot address the issue by simply opting out of the system. These problems worsened during COVID-19, particularly in the blue states, which has created the unfortunate situation where patients often have to travel out of state for the care they need, which is immensely unfair, especially to those who aren’t somewhat wealthy.
Dr. Miller’s Story
My Covid 19 Cancellation Story April 9, 2023
I am a physician who stood against the false narratives swirling around COVID and for a time, it seemed like I lost.
Before COVID became a public reality, I was working as a successful Trauma Surgeon and Surgical ICU Physician in the hospital that had the first diagnosed COVID case in America. I was working as one of the more senior surgeons of a team of 12 surgeons. The hospital and medical community had already been struggling prior to COVID with various departures from reality with narratives including ‘racism everywhere’ and ‘diversity as long as it supports deviancy,’ but it wasn’t appearing to dramatically affect patient care.
[Dr. Miller’s surgical specialty currently requires 6-7 years of grueling training after completing medical school and thus pays a high salary. Because of the investment required to obtain it, most doctors are reluctant to ever part with it].
In 2018-2019, I stumbled onto a fraud scheme perpetrated by some of the administrative doctors in our hospital that did cause patient harm, so I reported our hospital administration for fraud. I similarly observed and discovered other connected issues that caused patient harm, by various other providers, that I tried to bring to light in our hospital. I was “rewarded” with 12 complaints filed against me over a 2-week period, in retaliation. These complaints accused me of breaches of almost every aspect of professional behavior and ethics. It followed one of the administrators sending out an email asking her colleagues to ‘get rid of Dr. Miller.’ None of these allegations stood (they were all false to begin with), and I continued to do my job to the best of my abilities in this hostile situation, but it became increasingly difficult. Eventually, every single complaint was dismissed as unsubstantiated.
Then, through February and March of 2020, our hospital had a large number of COVID patients including a real upsurge of many sick patients in early March. A couple weeks later, it hit the news, but only AFTER the virus had passed its inflection point in our hospital and AFTER our healthcare system was not in any threat of having inadequate resources. Things then went completely mad with hype and fear- again, this was AFTER the real infectious surge was past.
Suddenly, our hospital outcomes and quality data became hidden and opaque to us. Prior to this, most all data was openly shared and discussed in quality assurance meetings. The hospital forced upon us a narrative that was pure lunacy and contrary to all available observations and previously available data. A chilling example is the following: I was working a shift in the ICU in late April 2020 and had basically nothing to do because greater than half our beds were empty. We were “low censusing” any nurses willing to go home because there were so few sick patients. I was having a cup of coffee, chatting with the staff and another ICU physician, who was in leadership, when the daily newspaper was delivered. Prior to the paper being delivered, we were all relaxed, jocular, and noting how little work we all had. The other ICU physician picked up the local paper where the main headline said, ‘Local ICU Overwhelmed.’ The article was referencing our ICU, as we were the only hospital in the county. He looked at me, started sweating, panicked, and said, “What are we going to do? We may not be able to handle this!” I replied with, “Pour another cup of coffee and laugh at the morons writing the paper.” He became visibly distressed and left to call the hospital administration about the situation, who confirmed they were complicit with the newspaper article. This colleague was one of the medical directors of our ICU. Our hospital and ICU were not overfull at the peak number of infections in March 2020. In fact, the ICU was never overfull, even after the horrible protocols that hurt so many patients were established. I knew we were in serious trouble as a medical community when clinical leaders started believing the words in a newspaper and hospital administrators more than their own eyes and experience.
[Mattias Desmet’s mass formation hypothesis helps explains how people can delude themselves into a reality in stark contrast to the objective evidence in front of them].
Then, I watched as every policy, practice, and quality metric that makes a trauma and surgical program have good patient outcomes be undermined or abandoned by my colleagues and hospital administration. I filed countless complaints to our quality department for disgusting breaches of care that were now becoming commonplace. I could not turn my back on my oaths taken to advocate for patients. Between mid-2020-2021, following a leak of information from the opaque administration, I learned that our unanticipated morbidity and mortality numbers had more than doubled for indexed trauma patients. It was horribly demoralizing to watch.
[This is an excellent example of a society in decline].
After the vaccine was rolled out in late 2020, it became a functional mandate in the broader community, and then definitively mandated by the late summer of 2021. The medical community in the county I was working in (Snohomish, WA) started refusing to care for unvaccinated patients, except in the hospital setting. I couldn’t believe that patients were banned from accessing basic primary care at first, but then I spoke to a man at my church who was denied both refills of his diabetic medications and treatment for a sinus infection by his primary care provider, all because of his COVID vaccination status. This was so inconceivable that I still didn’t believe it! Even when patients did make it to the hospital, I learned that the physicians and staff in the emergency room were directed to provide a lower tier of medicine to this group of patients. It was less than acceptable, and worse, less dignified, than the care given to any other patients pre and post COVID. I had to verify with physician leaders that they approved of this inhumanity. I found out that all the major healthcare systems in the county had agreed to this action, and drove the creation of the policies that demanded physicians act in direct opposition to their oaths. After discovering this, I departed from the medical community in spirit.
[My observation throughout history has been that when a malignant collective ideology takes hold, only 5-10% will be willing to go against it].
Working with my pastor, we turned our church into a free clinic to care for those ostracized from society. I obtained independent malpractice insurance, and we started seeing patients. People were desperate. We didn’t advertise, but there were so many people seeking basic healthcare that we struggled to see everyone. I did my best to see people in their time of need, but it was hard. I was still working in my full-time hospital position. I just didn’t have enough hours in the day. Most of the people I cared for were seen at the church - they were met with maskless smiles, prayer, support, and free medical care. Sometimes, people would be waiting in my driveway for me when I arrived home in the early morning after a night shift or late at night after I finished a day shift. What became obvious as the most important thing about our clinic, is that our patients needed to be treated as valuable people created in God’s image.
Prior to this experience, I was a seasoned/hardened subspecialist with the best reputation one could hope for in the hospitals I worked. When other doctors, health executives, nurses, and local politicians or their families had surgical problems, I was often the one asked to deliver their care even if I wasn’t scheduled to be working. After our health care system abandoned the oaths we took as physicians, I had an identity crisis and pivoted to putting more efforts into the free clinic, caring for the dispossessed patients.
[Throughout my career, I have tried to volunteer in free clinics because I frequently find they are the only place you can focus on helping patients rather than dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s the corporate medical system requires everyone to do].
Eventually, my work at the free clinic treating unvaccinated patients became known, and the hospital administration learned of it. Subsequently, the real pressure against me started. The hospital responded by opening an investigation of me on synthesized charges of ‘micro-aggression.’ There ended up being 2 separate and independent investigations (one by the hospital, one by my physician group leadership who were working in tandem with the hospital) into my conduct. My colleagues, who months earlier asked for my help and guidance about both professional and personal matters, would no longer return my calls, text messages, emails, or speak to me in public, for fear of being labeled as affiliated with me while in my state of political disfavor. The investigations themselves and the repercussions to my reputation were the punishment. I was treated as guilty, even when proven innocent, by the hospital administration and my colleagues. The investigations eventually exonerated me, my behavior, and my healthcare delivery, but left open the possibility for immediate suspension/termination if I committed a ‘micro-aggression’ in the future. Obviously, this was a no-win scenario for me since micro-aggressions are subjective, undefinable, unprovable, and therefore indefensible. I refused to continue working without an independent mediator, so the hospital gladly paid out my contract instead of mediation and restoration.
[One of the things that surprised me about working in hospitals was seeing things I’d previously associated with high school drama transpire inside the facility—something many of my colleagues have also observed].
Separately during this time, I was reported to the State Medical Board by an outpatient pharmacist for prescribing a 2-week course of Fluvoxamine (an anti-depressant) prescription to help a patient recovering after COVID. This prescription had been banned by the Washington State Medical Association as a treatment for COVID or its repercussions. Incidentally, the patient had a positive response and near complete recovery from her illness, but the pharmacist and WSMA didn’t seem to care about that data point but were apparently offended that I violated their protocol.
By March/April of 2022, multiple other clinics in the county began to accept care for most patients, regardless of vaccination status, and so we wound down the free clinic at my church, transitioning people’s care to physicians in established practices who would now agree to deliver appropriate care. As I had been reported to the state (although no formal charges were brought) and I was being pushed out of hospital medicine for practicing ethical medicine, I knew it was time to leave Washington State. The message to me was clear: if I stayed, I would have formal investigations that would prohibit me from obtaining a medical license in another state. My livelihood would be stripped away. So, we sold our homes and boats, liquidated our assets, and moved to South Florida in May 2022. I was, and am, bitter at the establishment of medicine that committed these crimes, so I planned to retire at age 50 with the move and have nothing further to do with the establishment.
[Dr. Miller made the correct decision. Had he not left, he likely would have been permanently barred from practicing medicine in the future. This illustrates a major issue with the current medical board system].
However, after the hurricane came through Florida in the fall of 2022, I started doing volunteer work for hurricane victims. This included some medical relief work. I realized there is still good that can be done in medicine, that people need healthcare providers, and that by nature, I am a healer.
So, in February of 2023, I returned to practicing medicine and started working as a Primary Care Physician at a holistic clinic where no patient is turned away. I discovered that I enjoy being a Family Physician, too. I lost my prestigious career and my social position, but I did not lose my ethics or integrity. I did not violate my oaths of practice. So, ultimately, I have won. And I’m happy.
Conclusion
I applaud Dr. Miller for being willing to share his story publicly. Many physicians over the years have told me that the medical profession's mistake was surrendering too much of each doctor's power to the corporate medical machine. Over the last few years, we have witnessed a direct consequence of this unchecked power grab.
In the future, I believe three concrete steps need to be taken to address this issue:
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The first is that patients living in blue states must create the political will to have their state governments stop pushing these ridiculous actions. Doing so will likely require directly informing the public that most of the laws and policies being enacted are being done to support corporate interests rather than patients—as directly attacking specific violations of medical freedom has been largely unsuccessful thus far due to it being blended into the red vs. blue partisan dichotomy (which is very difficult to shift in either direction) rather than being portrayed as corruption affecting the entire electorate.
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The second is that patients need to financially support services and physicians they believe in and, as much as possible, opt out of ones that don't. We are seeing a miniature version of that with Substack, as the legacy media is rapidly losing viewership (since most of what they publish is garbage). Simultaneously journalists are making more on Substack than they did at their old jobs—both of which are putting pressure on the legacy media to stop publishing garbage and making many journalists want to jump ship to Substack.
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The third is the doctors need to be much more aggressive in taking their power back (they need to band together—potentially with the correct type of union). The corporate medical system cannot function without them, and there is a constant shortage of physicians in the United States, so that position needs to be leveraged to force the corporate medical system to behave rather than perpetuate the current corporate status quo
Most sane people believe that the burden of proving safety should lie on the party conducting a questionable action, rather than their victim. For example, if a criminal shot someone, the prosecution would not be required to prove that the victim’s sudden death after the gunshot wound was not just a spontaneous coincidence, a result of extreme stress from the situation, or due to a pre-existing medical condition.
Unfortunately, the pharmaceutical industry has been able to establish a special type of privilege within the legal system which has made it very difficult to demonstrate that vaccines (along with many other pharmaceuticals) can ever be at fault for anything. Because of this, we recently had a flood of experimental vaccines mandated upon the population, which were never tested for safety (despite many serious concerns with their design), whose (likely fraudulent) clinical trial data was never made accessible to the public.
We then had, as far as I know, the most aggressive propaganda campaign in history, and I watched the majority of my colleagues lose the ability to recognize any problems related to the vaccines. Instead, they developed an almost surreal religious devotion to the coming salvation of the vaccines becoming available.
Once the vaccines entered the market, a variety of red flags began going off indicating that these vaccines were killing people, and rather than address these concerns, the government—in concert with the media—chose to deny any of this was occurring. Instead they mandated the vaccines upon the entire population. I was understandably worried that the vaccines would cause problems and tried to do my part to head this off in 2020, but I did not expect anything on the scale of what we have encountered since then.
I personally became involved in all of this because soon after the vaccines entered the market, I began to have many friends and patients reach out to ask me if the vaccine could kill as someone they knew had had a tragic sudden death after vaccination. Once the magnitude of the problem dawned on me, I realized that even though my available options were limited, I could at least do my best to document each case sent my way so that someone would bear witness to what had happened. Otherwise, the dead had no voice. Beyond knowing I had a duty to compile this list however, I was not sure what to do with it. Later after someone kindly helped launch this Substack, I decided to post it, it ended up being seen by a lot of people…and that is how I ended up writing here.
Because of how long it took to verify each case, I realized that I had to end it a year in (at which point I knew of 45 individuals who had either critical or fatal injuries of a similar nature in close proximity to vaccination). Since that time, I still continue to hear reports I periodically document and discuss.
For example, a good friend is a nurse in a cardiac unit and has told me many of the patients she sees now with heart failure are much younger than they were a few years ago. I previously advised her against getting the vaccine due to her history of rheumatic fever (a condition where the immune system attacks and damages part of the heart). This was because I had noticed both COVID-19 and especially its vaccine seemed to cause inflammatory flares at previous sites of injuries or inflammation (Lyme is also known for doing this). The vaccine also has a remarkably high rate of exacerbating pre-existing autoimmune conditions—such as the 24.2% rate found in a recent Israeli survey which is comparable to what a few colleagues have observed, and I suspect exacerbation of preexisting inflammation within the circulatory system, like what this study of 566 patients found, is a key mechanism behind vaccine deaths.
A month ago, the nurse informed me that she had decided to vaccinate and had subsequently developed a heart condition. Additionally, she shared that the same had also happened to her mother following vaccination and that her sibling's partner is suffering longterm complication from a large stroke that immediately followed receiving a booster.
Looking back on it, the thing I found the most disappointing about my own documentation project was that once it went viral, it should have triggered the drug regulators evaluating the vaccines to take preventative action. Instead, due to the meticulously planned campaign of mass censorship that we all found ourselves in, more red flags than I can count were ignored by the “very rigorous” vaccination surveillance systems that were allegedly ensuring there were no safety issues with these vaccines.
Because of the immense power behind the medical-industrial complex, those debating this program have been stuck fighting an uphill battle. However, despite the immense degree of corruption, withholding of critical data, and censorship, these vaccines are dangerous enough that more and more evidence is nonetheless emerging of their danger, and the public is beginning to recognize it (e.g., consider how resistant the public has been to get COVID boosters). The previous article here discusses polling that shows this appears to be happening:
We Now Have A Clear Estimate Of The Rate Of Vaccine Injuries
Throughout my entire life, I’ve always found that trying to argue against Big Business is like fighting with one or both hands tied behind your back because large industries can always co-opt and buy out every authoritative source on the subject, and then censor any inconvenient facts that still persist. This is an immensely challenging situation.
Immediately after it was published, I was informed by a reader that possibly the most important dataset over the last two years was released today. For those interested, much of the context for today’s article can be found in the article above.
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German Data
One of the depressing realizations one gains from studying the evidence-based literature is discovering how many issues exist within it and how difficult it is to know which data sources can be trusted. One of my favorite authors, Dr. Malcom Kendrick, devoted a book to addressing this subject and shared a pertinent anecdote for today’s events:
“In truth, the figures on vaccine damage are exceedingly difficult to analyse, because causality is very difficult to prove on a case by case basis. However, when it comes to negative findings I always like to go to Germany. It has been demonstrated many times that the Germans are the most likely to report negative findings accurately. Yes I know, terrible racial stereotyping, but a fact is a fact. What do the Germans have to say on the matter?
“Between 1978 and 1993 approx. 13,500 cases of undesired effects resulting from medications for vaccinations was reported to the Paul Ehrlich-Institute [PEI]…the majority was reported by the pharmaceutical industry. In 40% [5,400] of these cases the complications were severe, 10% [1,350] pertained to fatalities on account of effects.”
Additionally, as I learned from Kendrick, since early 2001, the federal infection protection law has mandated that specific severe vaccine injuries be immediately reported directly to the PEI (Germany’s equivalent of the FDA for vaccines and biologics). The German’s list of reportable injuries is much broader than what I have seen acknowledged by many other countries (e.g., those which are possible to receive compensation for within the United States) and includes the previously discussed complications of DPT along with many of the reactions typically associated with the COVID-19 vaccines. However, while that historical trend exists, Germany has not been one of the best countries for reporting COVID vaccine injuries (which I suspect is due to the political direction their government has moved in).
(The above graph illustrates why many of my German friends are not happy with their government)
Because of their tradition of reporting adverse reactions to vaccination, Germans (or at least some of them) have been more resistant to toeing the party line on concealing the dangers of the COVID-19 vaccines than citizens of many other countries (my friends there are enraged by the egregious concealment of critical safety data by the German government). In turn, some of the most critical vaccine data available comes from the German people as many of them have retained their intellectual integrity throughout the pandemic.
For instance, although autopsies should always be conducted on those who died suspiciously after vaccination, due to the global climate of intimidation against conducting any type of research that challenges the COVID vaccine program, it is rarely done. Instead, almost every autopsy has been performed by a few brave pathologists in Germany, and I have tried to detail the pathologist’s work throughout my postings (e.g., see here).
Some of the most important contributions of these autopsies include:
- Demonstrating that there is highly unusual tissue inflammation in those who died after vaccination. Pathologists had not observed this phenomena before the COVID-19 vaccines, and stated the inflammation they observed would likely be fatal.
- Demonstrating that the COVID spike protein could also be found in the tissues of those who died.
- Demonstrating that another key part of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was not present, meaning that the only possible source of the spike protein was the vaccine.
The most definitive study on this subject was recently completed. It examined 35 individuals who died within 20 days of vaccination, and after a lengthy examination excluded 10 who had a potential cause of death other than vaccination. Of the remaining 25, most had causes of death that frequently been linked to vaccination, and of those, 5 were found to have myocarditis potentially linked to the vaccine, and in 3 cases the vaccine was determined to be the definitive cause of their myocarditis and death. These results are very important for convicting the vaccines if it can also be proven that a large number of unexpected deaths are occurring following vaccination.
The Religion of Data
Every group needs to have some type of ideology to unite behind. Presently, one of the fixations within the Western world is on more and more data being the solution to everything. In turn, there are many concerns with this approach (e.g., it dehumanizes people, its “necessity” is used to justify violating citizen’s right to privacy while collecting it and it is being used to build an infrastructure that controls every aspect of our lives).
Although data is often claimed to be our salvation, and I will admit sometimes is quite helpful, in many other cases, it fails abysmally to address our problems. A major reason for this failure is that no one wants to critically analyze data this is gathered if that data suggests we should stop supporting an entrenched financial interest.
I am most aware of this in healthcare, as I know of numerous systems which were designed to analyze electronic medical records and either identify which pharmaceutical worked best for a condition, or if a pharmaceutical (or vaccine) was unsafe. Not surprisingly, all of these systems were never adopted, and the endless data we collect in healthcare (e.g., all the diagnostic coding data which medical insurance providers provide as a condition of reimbursement to healthcare providers) is rarely utilized to improve the public good. However, while prevailing biases frequently produces flawed analyses of data, data itself does not lie and has immense potential to expose dangerous health care practices if people are willing to look at it.
The largest insurance provider in Germany, BKK, provides coverage to approximately 10.9 million Germans. A board member, Andreas Schöfbeck, observed some very concerning signs in their data, and unlike everyone else, had the courage to disclose it in a letter to the German government (e.g. he addressed the PEI), after which, he was dismissed from his position. The BKK dataset (discussed by Jessica Rose) was the one which showed 2.05% of vaccine recipients subsequently sought medical care with a healthcare provider (others estimated it demonstrated 3.5% were struggling with persistent vaccine side effects).
This concerning safety signal prompted one German Political Party, the AFD (a controversial right wing party that has gained appeal through opposing the mandates) to file the German equivalent of FOIA for the rest of the insurance data (note: a few friends in Germany who are lifelong liberals joined AFD told me they believe “conservative” is a more appropriate label for AFD). Recently AFD obtained AOK Sachsen-Anhalt’s data, which once analyzed, demonstrated that many of the conditions we associate with COVID-19 injuries noticeably increased when the vaccination campaign initiated. According to this interview and Google translate, the conditions which rose five-fold or more were:
AFD’s FOIA Request
AFD also submitted a FOIA request to KBV, the association which represents all physicians who receive insurance in Germany and thus the largest insurance dataset available. The official response to their FOIA request reads as follows (this was my attempted translation):
”Dear Mr. Sichert,
With an e-mail dated October 27th, 2022 you have submitted an application to the KBV after the Freedom of Information Act (IFG) on access to data of the diagnostic codes by law health-insured patients.
You have asked for the following data packages to be sent by email:
Package 1: Filtering of all insured persons who will have an ICD coding in 2021 had vaccine side effects. You have applied for the codes T88.1, T88.0, U12.9 and Y59.9 apply.
Package 2: You request the transmission of a list of the frequency of all ICD codes of the insured persons from package 1 for the period 2016 to 2021, if proportionately available also for 2022, by quarter. The data query should after your request with V and G.
Package 3: You request the transmission of a listing of the frequency of all ICD codes of all insured persons - without the number of insured persons from package 1 - for the period from 2016 to 2021, if proportionately available also for 2022 quarters. The data query should be done with V and G.
The KBV corresponds to your application and includes a tabular overview as an attachment with the desired information about the frequency of at.
The abbreviations used in the table have the following meaning:
nw= number of patients with “vaccination side effects” (defined according to requested Filtering 1 in 2021)
onws= patient numbers "without vaccination side effects" (defined according to requested Filtering 2 in 2021)Quarters of the reporting period are set as YYYYQ (e.g. 20214=Q4 2021).
The small font size in the printout is again unavoidable, since we want to make it easier to compare wanted to show all quarters of the two comparison groups on one sheet (the pdf document). However, like last time, it can be enlarged.
Today, the AFD hosted a press conference to unveil the data of those 72 million patients (the 90% of Germans with statutory health insurance) AFD had obtained from KBV. This data summarizes the number of times all ICD-10 (an international standard) diagnostic codes were used by German healthcare providers for these patients (outside of hospitals) from the first quarter of 2016 to the first quarter of 2022.
Tom Lausen is a data activist who had previously revealed the PEI and the RKI (the German equivalent of the CDC) were concealing concerning vaccine safety data and was allowed to analyze both BKK and AOK’s data. For this presentation, Lausen was able to provide a preliminary summary of the KBV data a few days after it was released:
A rough translation of this presentation can be found here (additionally YouTube now will translate the subtitles). If this video is deleted it can also be found here.
A few of the points emphasized in this presentation include:
- The [PEI](http://Paul Ehrlich Institute), the RKI and the German government have failed in their duty by federal law to evaluate COVID-19 vaccine injuries. Many of my friends and readers likewise believe they have done an atrocious job by attempting to conceal the vaccine injuries, and these agencies are frequently chastised by the German people for their conduct. Many of the arguments against the validity of this data must be viewed in the context of the fact it would be very easy to the government agencies to access and analyze this data, but despite many requests to over the last two years, they have all adamantly refused to, which is why AFD had to force them to act with its FOIA.
- It is estimated that 90% of the suspicious deaths that occur after vaccination are not reported to the PEI, and approximately 90% of those reported come from the patient themselves or their relative (which again demonstrates that German healthcare providers are failing in their duty to report vaccine injuries).
- The PEI has nonetheless received over 3,000 reports of suspicious deaths following vaccination, but has refused to perform any autopsies on those deaths. The excuse the PEI has used for their inaction is not having the explicit authority to order the autopsies (which is a spurious excuse). Fortunately as noted above, other groups without any official authority to order autopsies have nonetheless taken the initiative to perform them.
For this press conference, a presentation was put together detailing Lausen’s preliminary findings and the correspondences with the regulatory agencies, all of which can be found here. To the best of my ability, I translated and slightly modified the key portions of the presentation so that they could be accessible to English speakers, but I am certain more will be translated in the upcoming days.
The KBV Data
All of the KBV data can be reviewed with a simple search tool here, although it does not seem to work for certain ICD-10 codes. Due to the importance of this data, for data preservation purposes, I am also providing a copy of the raw data the AFD received:
Germany Total Icd 10 Code Submissions 2016 2022 1.87MB ∙ PDF File
This PDF file was supplied in a manner that makes the data quite difficult to analyze. Fortunately, one of my readers was able to move the above file into an easily sortable spreadsheet and thereby address some of the challenges with the PDF:
German Data Sortable Sheet 3.06MB ∙ XLSX File
Finally, the above sheet was sorted by that reader into a smart spreadsheet which allows you to easily observe which codes had the greatest increase in 2021-2022 (e.g. to sort them or create graphs). For those of you who are data inclined, you will likely want to create this sheet yourself, but for everyone else this is an excellent reference to start with). They were also able to use a script to put about one third of the names for the ICD-10 codes, but since there are fifteen thousand of them, it wasn’t practical for us to manually add in the rest and you will frequently need to directly look up the codes themselves (if a group wants to add the other codes in, I will be happy to repost that).
When Lausen presented the data, for each time period (e.g., 2016 quarter 1), he chose to add two different values together (code_20161 and nocode_20161). As best as I can tell from reviewing the FOIA request and the provided data, these categories represent those who also received a vaccine injury code and those who did not (as a result the majority of Germans belong to the “nocode” category).
I believe Lausen’s rationale for presenting the data in this manner was that a large number of vaccine injuries will go unreported and many vaccine injured patients are thus within the “nocode” category. Conversely, the total number of medical conditions observed in the country is not dependent upon accurate recognition of vaccine injuries.
Separating the patients by (the somewhat inaccurately classified) vaccine injury status is nonetheless a helpful means for evaluating vaccine injuries (I saw a variety of interesting trends in my preliminary examination). However, for the reasons outlined in this article, for the initial spreadsheet presented below, those result are combined.
Additionally, some of the extreme outliers exist because new ICD-10 codes are added each year and thus did not exist prior to 2021/2022. Finally, some of the codes you would expect to have large changes may not show in this dataset if they are codes typically used in a hospital setting as this dataset does not include hospital code submissions.
Kbv Data Sorted Into Accessible Excel Sheet - 9.46MB ∙ XLSX File
In the coming days, I know many will use this data to verify our work identifying which codes in 2021-2022 had the greatest increase (you can also do that piece by piece with the already available tool), and then cross reference those to the increases reported in VAERS or other datasets. There is an immense amount to be ascertained here, and I believe it represents the credible evidence we have been looking for since the start of the pandemic to have an objective metric for quantifying the impact of vaccine injury. However, it is also critical we determine which of the observed trends are not due to artifacts within the data.
Lausen’s Presentation of the KBV Data
This is probably the most important graph of Lausen’s presentation. We have all heard stories of individuals dying suddenly after vaccination (I’ve even read a report of an individual who appeared to be in good health making a thump in another room and being found dead shortly after by their spouse).
This issue was recently brought to the public’s attention with Died Suddenly, a documentary that effectively brought attention to this issue, but also had factual errors which were counterproductive for persuading the public that this issue is real. However, while some of the proof that Died Suddenly provided to assert the existence of the sudden death phenomenon could not stand up to outside scrutiny, the same cannot be said of the KBV data.
Additionally, one way that individuals have analyzed the unusual changes in health following the vaccination campaigns has been to assess how far they fall outside of the expected range of variation (this was also done for the final spreadsheet). I did a quick calculation for the above graph and found that 2021’s increase from 2016-2020 was 37.7σ, while 2022’s was 41.0σ. This is quite a big deal (the rarity of an event happening by chance increases exponentially as the σ increases). For context, a 7σ event has a 1/390,632,286,180 chance of spontaneously occurring (it is thought to occur once in a billion years), a 10σ event happens spontaneously once every 5.249e+020 years, and a 25σ event happens by chance every 1.309e+135 years (I was not able to find a reference on the probabilities for the even higher σ events observed here).
Given these numbers, it is very difficult to argue that these events were not caused by something. In this regard, we are also quite fortunate that while the vaccines were rushed to the market over a period of time far too short to establish safety, that process still took a year. Because of this lag, it is possible to refute the reflexively cited counterargument that these changes were due to COVID-19 or the lockdowns, as these only occurred in 2020 (the only possible exception I can think of is that Delta emerged near the end of 2020, but the spike started well before Delta became prevalent in Europe later in 2021).
This is a similar graph to the previous one, but include sudden cardiac death, which as many of you know also “unexpectedly” increased. Many authoritative sources have argued Lausen made a mistake to correlate vaccine injuries with the spike in sudden death because very few vaccines were given at the start of 2021 and thus if a correlation was there, it should have been not emerged until the second quarter.
For context, this was the rate of COVID vaccination in Germany:
As you can see, many vaccines were given in the first quarter of 2021.
COVID-19 is not the only vaccination regularly received. For example in Germany in 2019, it was estimated that 39% of those 65 and older received an influenza vaccination. However, unlike previous vaccines, the introduction of the COVID-19 vaccine caused far more people to require medical care for a vaccine side effect.
Given that Germany has a longstanding practice of evaluating vaccine injuries, this graph makes a very important point. An actual increase in vaccine injuries is occurring and it is not a result of a bias leading to over-reporting; it is a result of the vaccines being dangerous and patients needing medical care for the injuries.
Additionally, an outside team which looked at this data concluded approximately 5% of vaccine recipients subsequently required medical care, which is in line with the 7.7% discovered in V-Safe’s data and required a court order to be released as the CDC understandably did not wish to disclose this information. Note: I believe this discrepancy could be partially explained by the undercounting of vaccine codes highlighted in this article.
The general correlation between these two datasets is important. V-safe monitored 10 million vaccine recipients for a few specific things and was arguably the best surveillance system in place for tracking the side effects of these vaccines as it had a large but defined sample who were provided an easy way to report the chosen side effects. Since one of its key metrics matches the KBV data, this argues that at least some of the KBV data is valid.
Note: I am not sure if this specific dataset is referring to the total number of patients who sought care or the total number of times codes were submitted for vaccine injuries (which would mean a smaller number in total were injured).
Given that there are thousands of ICD codes that I could search the database for (many other increases, such as those of certain cancers, were highlighted in Lausen’s presentation), I had to put some thought into which of those many increases would be the best to show for this article (there were a lot of compelling candidates).
Previously, I proposed a model for the unusual fibrous clots observed in Died Suddenly that revolved around spike proteins causing protein misfolding. In support of this model, I highlighted an observed increase of an extremely rare protein misfolding disease which continues to be reported in VAERS.
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease typically develop over years and occurs in approximately one in a million people annually, making its occurrence immediately after vaccination rare to the point that suggests causation (and as Jessica Rose noted, new reports are continuing to arrive in VAERS). The increase I proposed was a key point of contention for those who did not agree with my misfolded clot hypothesis, so I was eager to see if a current dataset could evaluate what was occurring.
This increase is also quite large, and for all practical purposes impossible to have occurred by chance (although I will mention the authors who published the original case series linking COVID vaccination to 26 cases of CJD also determined that Delta appeared to have an increased capacity to trigger protein misfolding but I do not believe that can explain the above trend).
Since this article was published, one reader has now attempted to present a longer analysis of this data which shows multiple interesting trends (e.g., many of the side effects commonly attributed to COVID vaccination appeared to have increased) along with raising additional questions about this data. It is my hope others will also do so!
Finally, the presentation on the KBV data proposes a fatality rate for the COVID vaccines. This chart was compiled by Lausen from the officially reported adverse events to the vaccines and likely are significantly undercounting the vaccine fatality rate.
Is This Data Valid?
Following the AFD’s press conference, the leading medical research institute in Germany, ZI, acted as a third party to present a rebuttal of how AFD interpreted KBV’s data. I did not agree with their argument (that there results were an artifact of AFD also requesting for everyone who specifically died in 2021), but did note that their response acknowledged the authenticity of this data.
The primary argument presented by ZI was that since the FOIA request selected for all patients who were vaccine injured in 2021-2022, the rise in deaths observed in 2021-2022 was simply due to the fact anyone who was vaccinated in 2021-2022 could not have died prior to 2021-2022 and thus the increase in deaths observed in 2021-2022 compared to what occurred prior to this time was due to the cohort effect.
On the surface this seems like a credible way to dismiss anyone who would make such an elementary mistake and believe in this data. However, the German authorities have a long track record of attempting to cover up evidence of COVID vaccine harm (in addition to the points discussed above, the German government has been perpetually delaying releasing the death statistics for 2021), so these arguments require a critical evaluation. In turn, there is a few major issue with it:
First, the “nocode” group should not suffer from the cohort effect and it was this group that comprised the majority of the increase in sudden deaths (review the wording of the FOIA request shown above). If the “code” group were to be removed (which potentially suffers from the cohort effect), an almost identical trend would still be present. Lausen presented his data by merging the code and nocode groups together which invalidated this counterargument, and I cannot see how a “cohort effect” is present in the combined data unless KBV failed to fulfill the FIOA in the manner that was requested (Lausen also subsequently provided an interview addressing the government criticisms of his analysis).
An outside analyst also looked at this data and demonstrated that other fatal conditions (which should be vulnerable to same the cohort effect ZI is asserting) did not have the same 2021 spike:
Second, the large σ found for many, (but by no means all) non-fatal conditions in the dataset indicates that something besides artifacts relating to time of death is causing the changes observed. I acknowledge that it is very possible some of the discrepancies present are due to not yet identified artifacts within the data, but at this point in time I have not been able to identify them. I believe that since KBV was focused on debunking the rise in sudden death codes, they did not focus on the rise in other codes for conditions associated with COVID vaccine injuries that were also observed. However, while this was not their focus, this point must nonetheless be considered since it does negate their counterargument.
Additionally, The death argument ZI made was also inconsistent with the death codes in question nonetheless being reported prior to 2021, which they attributed to “coding errors or unaddressed billing fraud.” To some extent this is hand-waving that many others have contested (and something any type of auditing algorithm should have caught years before), but I do not believe it is as important as the first two points.
Conversely, the strongest argument ZI put forward to establish that a cohort effect was occurring for the reported deaths was this spreadsheet. I have not yet been able to discern how the data in it was derived as it does not match the other things I looked at, so I cannot comment on if this is correct (an independent analyst arrived at the same conclusion I did). This spreadsheet is the one source of data that could refute AFD’s argument so I would greatly appreciate any additional thoughts on this one). However, I must also note that if this data is actually correct, it still does not negate the non-fatal complications of vaccination being observed.
A German rebuttal of ZI’s arguments was posted here. AFD also discussed the above rebuttal in a thread here stating:
"Hello all. The death-numbers that we have published are being hotly debated right now. Now the Central Institute for the KBV has joined in has said that the data we presented were quite easy to explain: 'The data is only for people who have accessed a medical service in 2021 and only such people had been billed and therefore would be in the data and everything in the years before are statistical runaways. There are also different causes of death that were significantly higher in the years before such as I46.9 (heart attack without successful reanimation). ' All together 104 000 people have been coded as deaths in the years 2016-2020 of whom the Central Institute of the KBV now says that they were billed medical services in 2021. Now we have a question: If this is really true, we demand an explanation from the Central Institute of the KBV how 104 000 persons that have died in the years 2016-2020 have been billed medical services in 2021.” [Translated courtesy of a reader]
The following was also written in the tweet: “Allegedly, the figures from the KBV are only for patients with health insurance, for whom services were billed in 2021. However, the causes of death were coded for 104,000 patients in previous years. Do we have a data scandal or a billing scandal?”
This table also refutes ZI’s argument that only those who were able to see a doctor and thus were alive in 2021 comprised the cohort of the insurance data.
Many of the German commentators I saw online were also skeptical of the official rebuttals to this data. I was recently sent a detailed summary of the events after the press conference which demonstrated that the rationale for debunking the data changed as time went forward. As best as I can tell, no clear reason was presented for why Lausen’s analysis was flawed given. Instead it was insinuated either that Lausen incorrectly filtered the data (my team and others however arrived at the same results Lausen did) or that there was a data transmission error from the KBV (which is possible but would have had to have been deliberate or inconceivable incompetence).
KBV also issued an astonishing statement refuting AFD’s presentation:
The KBV board clarifies: Based on the billing data transmitted by the KBV to the AfD or. ICD-10 codes cannot be used to establish causal relationships between COVID-19 vaccinations and deaths. From the KBV's point of view, the increase in deaths shown in quarters I-IV 2021 and quarter I 2022 is largely pandemic-related mortality. This once again illustrates the importance of COVID 19 vaccination as an effective measure to prevent serious forms of progress up to deaths. Without the vaccination, mortality would probably have been much higher.
This statement also cited the previously referenced ZI letter and another one which noted:
-
The codes in this database do not include codes entered on death certificates and thus cannot be assigned as the cause of death [however all of these codes cannot be entered unless the patient died; also as the statement above shows KBV is admitting an increase in deaths did occur].
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The codes in this database cannot be correlated with vaccination status because many people received the COVID vaccines in settings that did not result in codes being submitted and coding for COVID vaccination has not yet been included in the dataset due to special regulations [I agree with this point, but it fails to refute this dataset since Lausen chose to combine the code and nocode groups; instead, it simply argues that vaccine injuries are underreported in this dataset].
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This database was not created for the purpose of conducting medical research and therefore no conclusion can be drawn from it [I don’t believe this is a valid argument; a lot can be inferred from it and it is the best available database we have, so until the government chooses to make a better database available, it is “the evidence.” Additionally, this is a very similar argument to what is said for VAERS, but unlike VAERS there is not an over or underreporting issue present with this dataset].
I do not believe any of the above points refute the sudden increases in submitted billing codes (hypothesized to correlate with vaccine injuries) that occurred a year after the pandemic started at the exact same time the vaccination campaign began. However, I also believe some type of not yet identified artifact could account for at least some of what was observed and I have spent the last week revising this article to account for the additional information I come across. If anyone can provider a stronger refutation of the data presented here (preferably, at the pinned comment), I would greatly appreciate it. We need to help each other stay honest and I will gladly retract this article if a critical mistake was made.
Note: An independent analyst who reviewed the entire dataset found that it showed many other signs of being plausible.
Conclusion
Given the extremely concerning implications of the German data, it is not surprising that governments around the world and healthcare systems or insurance providers have been reluctant to release their own data. It is my sincere hope that this release will open the flood gates to additional disclosures and I am in complete agreement with the conclusion of this presentation:
I wish we had an American political party stating the same. There are signs of hope however; today Ron DeSantis did something incredible and requested a grand jury against Pfizer and Moderna, an essential step a few leaders in our movement have been working to lay the groundwork for over the last two years. I am also hopeful that this grand jury will compel the state of Florida to release similar data that can be used to assess the safety of these vaccines.
I strongly encourage those of you who who are able to begin looking through the KBV dataset and identifying important trends that can be correlated to other observations we have made over the last two years. I believe there are many excellent articles that could be written on them. I sincerely thank all of you for your continued support!
My primary goal is to draw attention to this data so numerous independent parties can objectively analyze it and independently verify if the trends it shows correlate to “controversial” increases observed in other datasets like VAERS. This data is extremely important as it is the only access we have ever been given to observe the changes in illness that follow the COVID vaccination campaigns. I also suspect the most important use of this data **will be to establish causality for specific vaccine injuries.
**This matters because typically when someone suffers a pharmaceutical injury, it is not acknowledged by the the government and the courts because “there is no evidence the product is associated with that injury,” and as you might expect, the pharmaceutical industry work tirelessly to make sure the evidence that could implicate their product never emerges.
At this point I’ve lost track of how many sad instances I’ve seen where this happened to a medically injured patient (in some cases to the point the gaslighted victim gives up and ends their lives), so I greatly support having an independent means to assess causality for vaccine injuries. Those injured by the COVID-19 vaccines are profoundly suffering and they really need help (on the bright side however, recently Senator Johnson and shortly after Governor DeSantis gave a voice to these victims).
Postscript: It appears a similar rise in unexplained deaths is occurring in Canada.
In this article, I will discuss the observations of unethical and criminal activity that have been repeatedly made by whistleblowers in the pharmaceutical industry. The focus will be on insider disclosures of the toxic corporate culture at Pfizer and the company’s habitual tendency to conduct illegal activity in order to maximize pharmaceutical sales. In many cases, this misconduct has lead to disastrous consequences (e.g., for participants in its experimental trials or for the public at large their drugs were marketed to), and in each case, Pfizer has done everything it can to conceal its illegal activity.
In the first part of this series, I discussed the profound challenges a whistleblower faces when they break the code of silence held by the pharmaceutical industry. Nonetheless, a few people have been willing to make that sacrifice, and there is so much to learn from each of them. If you have not yet read it, I would highly recommend reading it first.
The Forgotten Side of Medicine -- What Can We Learn From the Pfizer Whistleblowers?
Because that code of silence has been in place for decades, the public is relatively unaware of what goes on within the industry. When insiders provide a window into that dark world, it is both shocking and difficult to believe. I had been working on this series for a while and felt that this was the time to release it because it helps create the context for both what Jordan Walker confided to Project Veritas about Pfizer and his surreal breakdown once he realized what he had done.
In this series, I chose to focus on Peter Rost, a pharmaceutical executive who, through a very odd set of circumstances, became a Pfizer Vice President (Pfizer typically never lets outsiders assume that role). Once appointed, he found himself in the very odd position of having to dig up as much dirt on Pfizer as possible to avoid getting fired. Rost witnessed the Pfizer company cruelly abusing his Pharmacia coworkers and to a lesser extent Pfizer’s own employees (detailed in part 1); therefore, he was not opposed to unearthing information that incriminated Pfizer. Best of all, because Rost had been stripped of his work responsibilities, he had plenty of time to investigate his employer.
Rost’s Vendetta
Rost’s talent was recognized by his sales-focused industry, and many of his superiors held him in high regard. Unfortunately for Pfizer, as detailed in part 1, Rost was not comfortable being complicit in criminal activity, so when he encountered it, he would choose to take action against it (thereby putting himself in conflict with the ethos of his industry).
In a previous job, Rost had reported Wyeth (another large pharmaceutical company) for tax evasion, and as fate would have it, that lawsuit became publicized shortly after Rost had managed to put himself in a position where Pfizer could not fire him. Nonetheless, Pfizer did all that they could against Rost, including providing much of the incriminating information they had collected on him to Wyeth.
Due to the previous lawsuit against Wyeth, Rost was able to obtain a copy of all documentation on him that Pfizer and Pharmacia had sent to his previous employer to Wyeth (which began occurring once they were made aware of his lawsuit against Wyeth). From these documents, Rost learned that Pfizer and Pharmacia had hired private investigators to dig up as much dirt as possible on him to prove that he was a security risk, and then they had forwarded these documents to Wyeth:
I had never seen anything like this before and I was truly shocked and appalled. I had gone from company high performer to security threat in a matter of days. This was something I couldn’t have imagined in my wildest dreams. Pharmacia was a company that I had trusted—the fact that I had found illegal marketing and sales methods in my department didn’t mean that I stopped trusting the entire corporation. But now, I felt as if I had been in a beautiful candlelit room, only to have a lightning flash suddenly reveal cracks, mold, and cob- webs. I just couldn't believe what I saw, and even worse, they had sent all this to Wyeth. All the loyalty I had felt to the company, all the respect I had had for executives in the organization vanished. And I was left with the ugly truth: I couldn’t trust anyone. To even try to talk to them and reason with them was futile.
But it got worse. As I flipped through the pages, I found more notes that Pharmacia’s lawyer had written after I had spoken with him. The most sensitive parts were blocked out by a fat black marker, but what remained was astonishing in itself. According to his conclusions, I had no choices; I was out of a job with no likelihood of employment in the industry; I had every incentive to fight Pfizer, and he also claimed that I already hated them. This was news to me: I hardly knew Pfizer, but I certainly was reevaluating what I thought of Pharmacia after reading this. Then came the whopper—the notes implied that I might put a gun to my head so my family could get my life insurance.
All of a sudden I realized what a mistake I had made, trying to get help from a Pharmacia lawyer. I recalled that during our conversation he had suggested for me to contact the Employee Assistance Program. Perhaps this attitude shouldn’t have been surprising; Pharmacia’s lawyer clearly thought that anyone who tried to resolve potential criminal acts within the company and keep his job was a mental case [_Rost also highlighted that a common tactic utilized by the Soviet Union against political dissidents was to diagnose them as being psychotic and then forcefully confine them to asylums_].
Fortunately, Pfizer failed to realize the mess they were in, because they had never dealt with someone who knew how to fight back:
In the next round of documents Pharmacia delivered to Wyeth a few weeks later, I saw Ronald’s reaction first-hand. His first mail to Pharmacia’s chief legal officer asked, “What the heck is this all about?”? Pharmacia responded that I seemed to believe that by not offering me a job, Pfizer was unlawfully retaliating against me. Then Pharmacia’s general counsel wrote, “I haven't done the research, but the theory seems dubious.”
This was very interesting. Pharmacia’s most senior legal officer admitted that he hadn't checked the legal implications of the actions they had taken against me. They clearly didn’t think I was al that important. While this is always a sobering realization, it also showed me how unprepared they were for dealing with an employee who actually knew some of his rights.
In short, a wonderful confluence of circumstances arose, which positioned Rost to do something no one else to my knowledge has ever done.
Digging for Dirt
Since he needed to ensure his job security, Rost decided that the best use of his time at work was to dig up as much dirt on Pfizer as possible:
I went on an info hunt, and it didn’t take long until I found my next surprise. Back in 2001, thirty Nigerian families had sued Pfizer in federal court, saying the company conducted an unethical clinical trial of an antibiotic [as the sole treatment for meningitis] on their children. The suit referred to a letter from the hospital saying the study had been approved by the ethics committee, and the suit claimed that Pfizer had backdated the letter.
Moreover, a Pfizer infectious disease specialist [discussed later in the article] had repeatedly told Pfizer management that the company was violating international law and medical ethics standards. He was subsequently dismissed and later settled with the company, according to other newspaper reports. Clearly, the fact that Pfizer was accused of backdating one letter and that I might have received another one was significant. And so was the fact that they had fired one alleged whistleblower already.
One of the many red flags raised here is Pfizer’s tendency to repeat the same criminal activity (Rost uncovered this series of events shortly after receiving a legal letter which he was almost certain was backdated).
Pfizer’s Employee Survey
Note: The quotations in this section and the next one comprise what is arguably the most important parts of the article.
Given that I didn’t have much to do anymore I had ample time to seek out Pfizer's weaknesses. As I searched the corporate intranet, I found exactly what I needed. Pfizer had done an exhaustive employee survey in 2001, and it was clear from the first page that CEO Hank McKinnell was proud about the fact that 88 percent of Pfizer’s employees had responded. There was lots of wonderful information about what Pfizer employees thought of the company; the highest ranked statement was, “I like working for Pfizer.” A whopping 89 percent of the employees agreed with this sentence.
The second most favorable result was generated by the statement, “I am proud to work for Pfizer,” a full 88 percent agreed with this. Only a contrarian might wonder why 12 percent weren't proud to work at Pfizer, or what those employees might have known about the company. At the time this survey was taken, 12 percent was equivalent to 6,000 employees.
But those weren't the numbers I was interested in. There was a different table in the survey that showed the lowest-ranked statements, and here things started to get interesting. The two most unfavorable ratings were given to the statements, “The right people get promoted,” and “People are promoted for the right reasons.” Only 36 percent and 42 percent agreed with these statements.
Soon I also discovered some data that didn’t rank at the bottom, but still was a major red flag to anyone that cares about corporate ethics. Some 30 percent of Pfizer’s employees, or about 15,000 persons at the time, didn’t agree with the statement, “Senior management demonstrates honest, ethical behavior.” And 34 percent didn’t agree with, “I have confidence and trust in senior management.” But the real surprise was that 49 percent didn’t agree with the statement, “Management is willing to give up short-term gain to do the right thing.” What was going on in Pfizer’s executive suite?
Note: Pfizer subsequently tried to bury these embarrassing results. The 2004 survey removed the embarrassing questions and the 2001 survey was wiped from the server after Rost discovered it. As this article will show, Pfizer has a tendency to make inconvenient documents disappear.
Unprofessional Boundaries
It wasn't hard to make the connection with the rumors I had heard before the acquisition. Pfizer had a stellar public reputation, but what Pharmacia employees had been told by their Pfizer counter- parts was something very different. This was a company managed by a group of people who had grown up together, partied together, and some of them had also allegedly spent time together between the sheets. What we heard was amazing—almost unbelievable.
I set out to find the truth. First I spoke to someone I knew well, an HR manager who had left Pfizer quite recently. He had spent many years working at Pfizer and believed the rumors were true—a group within Pfizer’s management had been in and out of bed with each other for a number of years. In one instance a senior person allegedly dated a direct report while he was married. Soon after, that direct report turned and dated a guy reporting to her. And then this guy dated several women in his department.
The problem with this alleged situation was that it could create tensions if someone thought someone else received a favorable treatment because of sexual favors. Real or imagined, this is a situation that can’t be tolerated by any management, since senior executives need to lead by example and can’t be effective if they aren't respected, which, clearly, certain Pfizer executives were not.
I actually knew someone who had worked with the woman in one of these alleged relationships. We met over lunch and I asked him to confirm if the stories were true. He claimed that not only were the stories true, he had personally observed the woman and her subordinate touch and make loving gestures. He also said that their behavior had been embarrassing to other people who were in the same room as these two.
He explained how they'd had to make special arrangements when the female executive was dating her boss, whenever his wife appeared at corporate functions.
I realized that if any of this were true, it could cause a public meltdown of Pfizer’s management team, much like the recent scandal at Boeing that had forced the CEO’s resignation. I also sensed that if Pfizer knew that I knew, they might just handle me more carefully.
After Rost alerted Pfizer to these issues, he succeeded in further raising their alarm, and their legal team immediately moved to investigate them. In the process, he learned even more about Pfizer’s leadership structure:
Before the meeting ended I repeatedly asked them to hire an independent law firm that could shield the identities of the people who had given me this information. In response, they made it clear that was not “how they operated.” They also discussed, and half laughed, about the impossibility of approaching the managers that were allegedly involved in these affairs. It was clear to me that they didn’t think they could confront members of senior management. I wondered if they would have been so cautious if this had been, for example, a district manager having an affair with a sales rep or someone else further down in the power structure.
More Fraud
In Rost’s continued quest to investigate wrongdoings, he found evidence that executives from Pharmacia’s Japan division had been cooking the books to inflate their sales numbers by reassigning sales from the next year to the previous one, in order to inflate their sales numbers to obtain a bonus. They also paid off wholesalers to go along with them. As he continued to look further into it, he also found evidence that this practice was also occurring in Pharmacia’s European markets.
This deceptive method is known as channel stuffing (“selling” more to the distribution channels than they can sell) and it inevitably unravels itself, since that increase keeps on needing to pull from more and more revenue in subsequent years to sustain itself.
Since channel stuffing constitutes investor fraud (as it provides incorrect data used to determine stock prices), the government will frequently prosecute it. Channel stuffing caused Enron’s downfall (the CEO was criminally sentenced but died shortly before his sentencing). In 2004, another pharmaceutical company, Bristol-Myers Squibb, was fined 150 million dollars for doing this. Similarly, another lawsuit involving channel stuffing eventually resulted in a 750 million dollar fine for ArthroCare, a surgical medical device manufacturer (along with prison sentences for its CEO and CFO).
I believe this prioritization of legal prosecution has developed because the wealthy write our laws, and the government is more incentivized to protect the interests of the rich (as opposed to those of the general public who are harmed by bad drugs). Similarly, my friends in the financial industry have seen that the most truthful information you can ever get from a pharmaceutical company is in its financial reports to investors.
Given the penalties for channel stuffing, this report also was of great concern to Pfizer, and gave Rost even more leverage over them. This was especially the case once Pfizer failed to appropriately address the issues, which in return gave Rost the grounds to open a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission( SEC) investigation.
Pfizer’s Purgatory
Because Pfizer could not fire Rost, they tried to make things uncomfortable for him. He soon was reduced to having one employee (a secretary), isolated from everyone while at work, and left with nothing to do except show up at his office. They also repeatedly moved his office, until he pointed out that this constituted illegal harassment of a whistleblower. Since Rost was not allowed to do any work for Pfizer, he used that free time to research Pfizer’s internal workings, motivated also by their unconscionable abuse of their employees.
As Rost began bringing more improper and even illegal activity to Pfizer’s attention, he also noted this his emails would disappear, and incriminating documents he’d located would disappear. Eventually, Pfizer cut his access to his email without stating who had done it. Similarly, his communications (email and phone) were constantly monitored (despite this being against company policy), and Pfizer’s operators were instructed to prevent anyone from reaching him over the phone (although a sympathetic employee in the PR department sometimes would put them through).
To evaluate exactly how Pfizer was treating him behind his back, Rost would periodically utilize contacts in the industry to probe their behavior:
I spoke to the recruiter later in the day and I asked her where she had called and what the operator had said. The recruiter told me she had called Pfizer in New York, they had asked what her name was and the reason she wanted to talk to me, as well as some other questions.
“This happens al the time,” she said.
“Does this happen with al the pharmaceutical companies?” I asked.
“No, only with Pfizer. No one else does this.”
I asked her why she thought Pfizer did this, and she responded that based on the questions she had received she thought they recorded the information.
Rost Goes Public
The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) is considered to be one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world, and is also a frequent repository for fraudulent studies used to push some of the best selling pharmaceutical products onto the market (e.g., the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine or the COVID vaccine). In 2004, four years after her retirement (and a year into Rost’s purgatory), the chief editor of the NEJM, Marcia Angell M.D., published an excellent exposé of the issues within the drug industry, and the medical journals' complicity in this enterprise.
One of the quotes Dr. Angell is best known for is:
“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.”
_Note: More quotes from Dr. Angell can be found here._
On a whim, Rost decided to pen a review on Amazon, strongly endorsing Dr. Angell’s book, and within it openly declared that he was a Pfizer executive (it’s worth reading). This quickly got the attention of a journalist from USA Today who quoted Rost’s review in an article on the subject:
"It's really hard to find new drugs, and it's getting harder and harder," Rost, representing himself, not Pfizer, said in an interview. "There is a lot of low-hanging fruit out there that has been picked off. It is very, very difficult to really find a breakthrough." Instead, Rost says, drugmakers focus on tweaking existing drugs to make money, not to advance science.
_Note: As discussed in the previous article, in recent decades the inability to produce breakthrough drugs has been a major challenge for the industry (most of the new drugs are redundant unneeded “Me-too” drugs). I believe this dearth was a key motivation for why the mRNA technology was pushed through, as there is an almost limitless number of proprietary drugs that could be made with it._
Drug Reimportation
For decades, America has been known for having the worst ratio between healthcare expenditures and healthcare quality in the world (i.e., many places that spend far less than us have much better healthcare outcomes for their populace). Most tragically, this ratio only continues to worsen as we move forward in time (presently about 20% of all spending in the United States goes to healthcare).
Because there is so much money involved, I would argue that the systemic corruption within our healthcare system is almost inevitable. There is the tendency towards monopolization to protect its industry from competition In turn, the debacle we’ve witnessed throughout COVID-19 represented the inevitable progression of this industry’s greed.
It should, thus, come as no surprise that the drug industry charges as much for medications as it believes it can get away with. The cost of the same drugs varies widely from country to country, and as you might guess, the worst price-gouging occurs within the United States. Many people who struggle to afford their medications in the U.S. have noticed that these medications are much cheaper on the other side of the U.S. border (e.g., a Canadian pharmacy).
This observation has given rise to the practice of “drug reimportation” where drugs made in the United States that were exported for sale are bought in the international market and then imported back to the United States, and sold for a much lower price than they typically cost domestically. If you believe in capitalism and the free-market, drug reimportation should be allowed to correct market imbalances created by price gouging. However, if your business goal is to maintain a monopoly (and pay off the government to enforce it), drug reimportation is a huge problem, as it cuts into a lot of the profits made by ripping off the American public.
At this point, I have watched decades of failed attempts to reform the out-of-control costs in the healthcare system. In each case, because the legislators responsible for writing those laws (in one way or another) are bought out, no one was willing to tackle the real sources of price gouging in our healthcare marketplace, and each of those attempts failed. I would argue that this is why healthcare spending continues to rise in the United States.
As luck would have it for Rost, at the time he penned his review, the hot political issue was allowing drug reimportation (which the pharmaceutical was trying to torpedo by arguing that it somehow threatened consumer safety). Since Rost was a pharmaceutical executive willing to speak out against these practices (something virtually unheard of due to the consequences of doing so), and he knew a lot about the subject (e.g., Europe had had no issues with drug reimportation), he rapidly attracted the attention of the press and politicians who were trying to advance this issue.
I have to admit that my lawyer was not happy about al this. His job was to protect my legal case, which he told me was excellent. The fact that I was speaking up made me vulnerable and could have ruined the whole case. He was surely right that I took a big risk, but I felt that it was more important that I got the message out. And after a few months, Jon even said that I was doing a pretty good job. “Who knows,” he admitted. “You might actually achieve some change.”
Before long, Rost was called before congress to testify on the reimported drug issue. This was a nightmare for Pfizer (as their business depended upon inflated American drug prices), and in their panic, Pfizer managed to make things even worse for themselves through their crude attempts to discredit Rost and prevent him from communicating with the public. Before long, Rost’s message was heard throughout America.
But journalists and news anchors were still very surprised that I didn’t get fired [Rost could not publicly disclose his whistleblower status at the time]. It was as if everyone had forgotten that we live in a democracy with freedom of speech and other basic rights.
The biggest surprise, however, wasn't the flood of e-mails, or that many employees were upset about what I had said. The biggest surprise was that so many actually agreed with my comments. In fact, about 40 percent of the e-mails I received were supportive. I imagine it took a lot more guts to write a positive e-mail than to send a critical message and copy a superior. In truth, I wished my supporters hadn’t written, since I assumed that Pfizer was reading my e-mail.
Even a retiree wrote and agreed with me, “I applaud your efforts to encourage a more constructive approach to pharmaceutical importation. As a recent retiree from Pfizer, I am worried that by being short- sighted, Pfizer is doing something that is not its own best interest.”
_Note: Alex Berenson who wrote for the New York Times when Rost went public played a critical role in bringing Rost’s story to America. I suspect one of the reasons Berenson later became a critic of the COVID-19 response was because his career began in a bygone era when liberal journalists could still criticize the pharmaceutical industry and Bernson made a point to do just that during his time at the NYT._
Ultimately, Rost became too hot for anyone at Pfizer to handle, eventually leading to a situation where:
I never heard from either one of them [his assigned supervisors] again. To the best of my knowledge, I became the only Pfizer employee without a boss.
Pfizer nonetheless continued to harass Rost (e.g., they sent lawyers to monitor him at presentations he gave), while Rost continued to find creative ways to cause headaches for Pfizer (many are detailed within his book). One of the most impressive results he achieved was a group of doctors (unhappy with how Pfizer was treating Rost) independently deciding to ban Pfizer sales reps from their practices.
Pfizer is a very sales-oriented company and these events shook them up. Their worst nightmare would be a national boycott of their products.
What Happened with Drug Reimportation?
Although Rost was able to make the issue of drug reimportation a nationwide issue, it ultimately failed to be legalized because the “safety concerns could not be addressed.” While this result was expected, there were three interesting things I took away from all of it.
The first was how the issue was squashed (this should sound familiar to all of you):
By the end of December 2004, the Department of Health and Human Services came out with their report on drug importation. The report admitted that it would be possible to safely import drugs on a large scale, but claimed that establishing such a system wouldn't be cost effective.' The report also concluded that such a system would harm pharmaceutical companies’ research and development efforts.
The report was required by the new Medicare law, and had been developed by a thirteen-member panel led by U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona. Not surprisingly, the panel consisted of many rep- resentatives from several government agencies that oppose prescrip- tion drug reimportation.
They [and later Pfizer] used a study by the London School of Economics, which claimed that national health systems within the EU realized minimal savings from parallel- traded products. There was just one thing both the HHS report and the Pfizer letter forgot to mention. This “study” had been funded by the drug industry.
The second was the FDA’s promises to develop a “safe” way to import and reimport pharmaceuticals which two decades later still has not happened.
The final one was that some congressmen who had supported Rost at the time were still in the government twenty years later (e.g., Bernie Sanders), at which point, they chose to switch sides and stand behind Pfizer and their COVID-19 vaccine. Somewhat analogously, although many of my friends love Bernie Sanders, I have always been suspicious of him, because I know of cases where parents of vaccine-injured children tried to raise this issue with him and he shut them down instead of listening (Sanders has built a reputation as an advocate for disenfranchised groups that no one else will listen to).
Other Whistleblowers
John Virapen
The only other whistleblower I know of who was a pharmaceutical executive was John Virapen, so I will include him even though he was not involved with Pfizer. Virapen began life as a colonial subject of the British Empire (which translated to a childhood of abuse, discrimination, and poverty), in British Guyana, and eventually became a pharmaceutical sales rep. He excelled at what he was doing and eventually became an Eli Lilly executive in Sweden, who played the pivotal role in getting Prozac approved globally. Like Rost, he was backstabbed by the industry. Specifically, Eli Lilly fired Virapen after he won the approval, something he believed was due to Eli Lilly, like Pfizer being an old boys’ network that did not want an outsider of color like him in the management (Rost’s story likewise shows a similar old boys’ network existing at Pfizer).
Virapen experienced a great deal of guilt for what he was complicit in, and like Rost after he was fired, found himself in circumstances where he could speak out against the industry. In his memoir, he shared the routine criminal activity he engaged in (e.g., he had to make bribes to get Prozac approved in Sweden). He resorted to blackmail, such as photographing physicians with Eli-Lilly-provided prostitutes, to pressure them to conform to Eli Lilly’s sales requirements.
Note: a more detailed version of Virapen’s story can be found here. If Youtube pulls the above video, it can also be found here.
Dr. Juan Walterspiel
Although to my knowledge, no other executive has come forward, the pharmaceutical industry has many other whistleblowers including former Pfizer employees. For example, in the previously mentioned illegal Pfizer experiment in Nigeria, 11 of the 200 children with meningitis who were studied died [most of whom should not have with proper care], and later the highly toxic antibiotic they tested was subsequently pulled from the market.
One of the doctors at Pfizer’s research center tried to warn them about the trial but was ignored and eventually fired despite being a whistleblower (all of the events and the whistleblower lawsuit are summarized here and here). In addition to the trial being conducted in a reprehensible way (and was thought to have inspired the Constant Gardener), evidence also emerged that Pfizer bribed the Nigerian government to conduct the trial, and falsified documentation to appease the regulatory authorities.
John Kopchinski
Pfizer is also notorious for being greedy enough with their sales practices to be repeatedly fined for their criminal conduct (sadly this is not a complete list of Pfizer’s criminal settlements):
The 2.3 billion dollar settlement was for Bextra. Bextra was Pfizer’s version of Vioxx, and, like Vioxx, was aggressively promoted for off-label uses, and eventually was pulled from the market for causing too many fatal heart attacks and strokes (Bextra was pulled in 2005, Vioxx in 2004).
The whistleblower who helped initiate the lawsuit, John Kopchinski, was a sales rep who was recruited by Pfizer’s CEO during his early 1990s acquisition of veterans. In early 2003, Kopchinski raised concerns over Bextra, and instead of being listened to, was summarily dismissed from the company and left jobless. A few excerpts from his story mirror the experiences of many other Pfizer whistleblowers:
“Particularly in pharma, it’s no secret that it’s an industry that can blackball former employees,” Kelton [Kopchinski’s attorney] said, “so the reward is important both to encourage people to step forward and to recognize that their contributions are huge.”
[Less than a year after being hired by Pfizer], Kopchinski was selling the epilepsy drug Neurontin when a previous whistleblower’s suit was unveiled against [Pfizer] over similar illegal promotion tactics that led to stiff penalties and a form of corporate probation [Pfizer has been repeatedly forced to sign a corporate integrity agreements with the U.S. government].
At the time, [Kopchinski] was told by managers that the Neurontin suit would be in the news and any physicians who asked questions should be told it was just complaints from a disgruntled former employee, Kopchinski said. Ironically, after filing the Bextra suit, “I was the disgruntled former employee,” he said. [
In both the Bextra case (detailed here) and the Neurontin case (detailed here), Pfizer followed a fairly similar pattern. They aggressively pushed their sales reps to prescribe as many drugs as possible (and provided bonuses for doing so), and they used an elaborate scheme of bribes to incentivize doctors to prescribe these drugs. Most of the uses Pfizer made up for the drugs had nothing to do with the drug’s intended use, and in many cases, these reckless uses were quite dangerous to patients.
Note: Another drug in the same class as Bextra, Celebrex, was also aggressively promoted by Pfizer (and sold by reps like James Reidy). Instead of being pulled from the market, it received a black box warning from the FDA. Later in 2016, Pfizer was forced to pay 406 million dollars to shareholders because of the losses they incurred from Pfizer concealing the harms of Bextra and Celebrex.
Jamie Reidy
Most of the pharmaceutical employees who worked on the retail end of the business have come forward with similar stories of their sales culture. The below video, although not from Pfizer, gives one of my favorite windows into this world (I hope you liked the ending I added to it):
This circa 2000 clip shows how Pharma sales reps are trained behind the scenes. Like Pfizer, GSK aggressively and illegally promotes drugs (like this one) and has received billions in fines. I can't even imagine how much wilder the industry has become since this was filmed.
Jamie Reidy was one of the many veterans picked up in Pfizer’s recruitment drive for ex-military in the early 1990s, and his story mirrored what other former Pfizer representatives have told me—they were an ideal demographic because Pfizer wanted a pool of candidates who would follow corporate’s sales scripts and not deviate from them. Reidy eventually published his experiences within a comical memoir released while Rost was making waves in the national press (Rost likewise helped Reidy on the national PR front). Reidy’s self-deprecating memoir was later adapted into a popular romantic comedy, Love and Other Drugs, so his story is one of the better-known peeks inside Pfizer (it also resulted in him immediately being fired by the new pharmaceutical company employing him).
Since Pfizer established their dominance in the market through the success of their sales division, I was quite interested to hear Reidy’s perspective on the the nuts and bolts of the operation.
Pfizer being Pfizer, however, it didn’t have to resort to trolling college campuses; Pfizer could pick and choose its sales force from candidates who got their start at other companies.
Pfizer’s approach was built around utilizing algorithms their marketing research team had developed, which identified the most effective scripts for each stage of the sales process (from opening the encounter through closing the deal). Pfizer essentially practiced evidence-based sales and had the results to validate their model. Many of these scripts are quite interesting to read through. Each illustrates how each pharmaceutical company would twist the data to support their drug, and how much of a doctor’s education and comprehension of the drugs they prescribed resulted from what the sales reps primed them to focus on (note: so much of human behavior is explained by what people have been primed to focus on).
Pfizer’s model thus required inspiring zealotry and standardization in its salesforce (as Rost detailed in the first half of this series, Pfizer reps were well known for this tactic):
From Day One, people told us how great we were. “Pat yourselves on the back,” our first speaker said, “because you are the cream of the crop.” I had already noticed that our class did not lack confidence, and the knowing grins on people’s faces confirmed my perception.
“Any drug rep from any company will tell you that he left initial training thinking that his drugs were the best in the industry, such was the power of pharmaceutical brainwashing [I wonder if this also applies to Jordan Walker’s department]. Pfizer reps departed training with a “Pass me the Kool-Aid” conviction that not “only were our drugs the best in the industry, but also that our company was the best in the world. Doctors and competing reps alike routinely commented on a “Pfizer attitude,” a tangible vibe suggesting we were intrinsically better than any other salespeople. Interestingly, army trainees emerge from boot camp with a similar sense of indestructibility, an unshakable belief that there could not be a more prepared soldier on earth. The key to creating this self-confidence [bravado] in both arenas was the same: an endless repetition of messages and tasks [Note: Pfizer would also frequently tell reps in service about how wonderful Pfizer was].”
“The brainwashing was not limited to our view of ourselves, however. Rather, the Pfizer training staff instilled within us indelibly negative impressions of our competitors, creating a hatred for people we had yet to compete against, let alone meet”
“They lied. They cheated. Their women dressed slutty. They bought physicians’ love with extravagant dinners and golf at Pebble Beach, instead of earning it through ethical practices. (I later learned that every company told its reps that they did things the “right way,” while the other companies cheated.) ”
Although Pfizer had been repeatedly fined for criminal sales activity, I didn’t see anything within Reidy’s memoir that was clearly illegal. Much to the disdain of the sales reps, although headquarters was always pushing the reps to sell more, headquarters was also shutting down any plan reps implemented which was potentially illegal (bribes to prescribe or promoting a drug for uses it was not approved for—known as off-label marketing).
The only cases I found in his book where the sales reps employed external incentives to influence a physician to prescribe their drug was through utilizing their sex appeal (and sometimes seducing either the physician or their staff). However, unlike monetary bribes, this is nearly impossible to outlaw so it has never been made illegal.
At the time Viagra came out, because no reasonable treatments for erectile dysfunction existed, everyone was clamoring for it (to the point that Viagra samples were regularly stolen). Not surprisingly, it was soon sought out by individuals beyond those it had been approved for (old men with poor circulation impeding erections). As a result, some off-label marketing to women and younger men for increased sexual performance did eventually occur (even though Pfizer at the start told its reps not to do this, because the accelerated approval of the then-novel drug put them in a precarious position with the FDA).
In summary, I do not believe Reidy provided any concrete proof of illegal activity within Pfizer, so he is not technically a whistleblower. However, he did provide an invaluable window into the corporate culture of Pfizer which also helps put their behavior into context.
Note: Ever since its approval, a variety of side effects (including heart attacks, strokes, blindness, hearing loss, or melanoma) have been attributed to Viagra. As Reidy detailed, many of these were known from the start by Pfizer. Many lawsuits have been thus filed for these injuries. Unfortunately, the legal system rarely supports these types of lawsuits, so Pfizer (along with subsequent manufacturers of similar drugs) have been able to dodge most of them and settle the rest.
Allen Jones
I mention this story last because it is potentially the most important one in this series (and resulted in him being named whistleblower of the year in 2012). Jones initially worked at Pennsylvania’s Office of the Inspector General (PA’s OIG) for 5 years (1986-1991), retired to be closer to his family, and then returned 11 years later in 2002, once his situation changed.
When he returned, he was assigned to investigate PA’s chief pharmacist, who Jones found was managing an unregistered bank account into which Johnson and Johnson (J&J) was essentially depositing illegal bribes. Additionally, some of that money was then transferred to the Director of Texas’s Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation. In return for these funds, state officials traveled across the country to promote switching large numbers of patients to J&J’s new antipsychotic medication (which cost ten times as much as other similar drugs, and frequently created significant side effects).
Jones reported the case to his boss, and was told to drop the case as it was “too political” to touch. Since Jones did not comply, he was taken off the case. Then in 2003, he found out that J&J’s bribery lobbying was successful and everyone in PA would soon be switched to J&J’s drugs, regardless of their medical needs or background. Given that many of the people subject to this edict cannot oppose it (e.g., prisoners with mental illnesses or the many children who are pushed into the state mental health system), there were significant ethical issues with allowing it to proceed, which led to Jones deciding to risk his livelihood to stop it.
Note: I know a few people in foster care who were forcefully medicated with psychiatric drugs and had terrible experiences from them. To appreciate the full human cost of this greedy industry’s initiative to push their dangerous anti-psychotics on children, please read this article.
Jones filed a first amendment suit to protect himself, reported what was happening to the New York Times, and then was fired. Jones then filed suit against PA and set off a series of lawsuits (some of which were pursued by state Attorney Generals) and J&J ultimately had to pay billions of dollars in fines for their conduct. PA’s state Pharmacist was also convicted, but I feel his ultimate punishment was relatively minor. His conviction, however, is important to the current story because he was convicted of taking bribes from J&J and Pfizer.
Like Pfizer and J&J, AstraZeneca has also been fined billions for off-label-marketing, bribing physicians to prescribe their drugs, and was involved in the initiative to bribe state officials to push these medications on mental health patients. This bribery was not exclusive to the United States either; these three companies are currently being tried in court for bribing terrorists within the Iraqi government to coerce their Ministry of Health into using their products, and a few years ago, AstraZeneca was fined for bribing state health care providers in Russia and China to push their products.I hold the opinion that once the corruption of this industry is understood (which will probably always exist because of how much money there is to be made in medicine), the best path forward is to prohibit mandating of their products. If a product is safe and effective, it will sell itself and does not need to be forced on people.Unfortunately, the systemic fraud within this industry regularly brings bad pharmaceuticals to market that are neither safe nor effective.
As the examples with the state psychiatric programs show, this is a longstanding issue. It is my hope that bringing the public’s attention to the unjustifiable COVID-19 vaccine mandates can help bring about critical changes for medical autonomy that are needed throughout medicine.
Note: Since Moderna is a much newer company, an equivalent track record does not exist for them. I also believe this accounts for why they had a much less elaborate system in place to gaslight the participants in their clinical trials compared to the other COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers.
Conclusion
Pfizer eventually got fed up with Rost humiliating them on national television. He was fired and entered a protracted legal battle with Pfizer that eventually concluded in 2013 with an undisclosed settlement. At the time this happened, Pfizer made a point to widely publicize his termination in the national media. In Rost’s own words:
There is no question in my mind that Pfizer's [illegal] termination of whistleblowers [highlighted through this article] sends chilling signals to honest employees within the company. The media campaign they unleashed when they fired me served the same purpose. Pfizer’s outrage was apparent.
I hope that this article has made the case that Pfizer has a culture of corruption and a sociopathic leadership that has absolutely no problem with harming people or breaking the law to drive up sales. Assuming you accept that premise, I would argue that that means Pfizer was probably the worst party that could have been given a blank check by the government for the purpose of forcing an extremely dangerous experimental vaccine gene therapy onto the American people. Just think—if Pfizer already was that bad with government oversight--how bad do you think they would be once the government actively conspired to conceal their criminal activity and the harms of their product?
Similarly, if we consider the plight of many of the recent whistleblowers like Brook, the degree to which the government has chosen to ignore their claims is truly incredible. Similarly, nine months ago I covered an investigation by one of the less corrupt agencies of the government into HHS’s COVID-19 response, where they essentially concluded corruption trumped sound scientific policy (because employees in each department confided this in private interviews).
One of the most interesting things I discovered in it was just how hostile the U.S. Health and Human Services department (HHS,e.g., the CDC, NIH, and FDA) was to whistleblowers. None of the typically required safeguards existed to support employees blowing the whistle, and when queried, officials in each department could not cite a specific reason for why they had never gotten around to creating those safeguards.
Additionally, most of the employees felt that their leadership was already aware of the issues (and to some extent complicit in them), and they feared retaliation if they complained. Not surprisingly, between 2010-2021, there were zero cases where misconduct was officially reported by an employee of the HHS, and when asked, officials in each department interpreted this as a sign that no problems requiring reporting existed.
Sadly, corruption is not unique to the pharmaceutical industry, and many of the experiences shared by the brave whistleblowers in this series are mirrored by those outside of the medical industry. As you might expect, Pfizer and many of the other pharmaceutical companies involved in the COVID-19 vaccines (along with many defense contractors and other members of the medical industrial complex), have lobbied aggressively to restrict the ability of whistleblowers to uncover and correct their misdeeds. For example, consider what they did at the end of 2021, a year after their vaccines had entered the market.
As I look at how things have transpired decade by decade, it never ceases to amaze me how much more corrupt our government (and media) have become in a relatively short period of time. At the same time though, I believe Team Humanity still wins, because the internet has made it impossible to prevent the general public from becoming aware of these misdeeds.
As I end this series, I would like to share one of Rost’s concluding remarks which, like many other things he has shared, is just as true now as it was twenty years ago:
I didn’t always think this way. I didn’t want to become a whistleblower. I didn’t want to write this book. But in the end, I had to; I just couldn’t let the crooks win. The fact that you have just read this book means—to me—that I have won my fight against an overpowering opponent.
I for one, decades later, am profoundly grateful for the odd quirks of fate that led Rost to speak out against Pfizer.
I hope this article has provided some valuable context to fully appreciate Jordan Walker’s previous remarks to Project Veritas and his new ones today:
What goes on inside Pfizer and the pharmaceutical industry is surreal, and I hope the window opened for you by these whistleblowers will allow you to draw your own conclusions about Pfizer’s culture and what really goes on behind the scenes. I admit I avoided discussing much of what jumped out to me from their testimonies (and those of whistleblowers from other pharmaceutical companies) since this series was already pushing the limit of how much people will read.
I thank each of you for the time you took to read this article and those who shared the series with the audience that needed to hear it.
Postscript: I meant to include this but completely forgot to. One of my colleagues occasionally saw a patient who was a vaccine sales rep for Pfizer that would actively boast about how often their entire family was vaccinated. In the middle of the vaccine roll-out, that patient showed up asking for a medical exemption from their vaccine.
Note: This article is primarily a human story. The most important parts of this article are the videos (if you only have time to watch one, watch Maddie’s, below) that were compiled and edited for this article. The written details are just to provide the necessary context for the significance of their testimonies.
In the first part of this series, I discussed how the gross malfeasance observed by many in the COVID-19 vaccine trials did not come out of nowhere. Rather, it is yet one more occurrence in a chronic pattern of egregious conduct by the pharmaceutical industry, which has progressively worsened because there has not been the political will to address the growing corruption within the biomedical establishment.
There, I focused upon the events within the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine trials (and the subsequent red flags which emerged after they entered the market), because many at the time had difficulty believing something like that could even happen and it was possible to sweep the issue under the rug, since the vaccines were only targeted on one segment of the population—women. Now, not only has the exact same thing happened (to a very eerie degree) with the COVID vaccines across the globe, but what is happening now is even worse than what happened less than a decade ago.
The best metaphor I have come up with to describe what I’ve observed in the pharmaceutical clinical trial process is that enrolling in one is akin to entering an abusive relationship. The abuser will initially flatter you and promise you one thing after another in return for your consent to enter their web of deception. Then, once they have you, they will break each promise they made, gradually treating you worse and worse, and gaslight ing you into believing that those issues are not really happening. Finally, once they no longer need you, they will discard you and leave you to pick up the pieces (which is often almost impossible if you have a life-changing medical injury).
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In the previous article , I introduced the concept of two different types of scientific fraud:
- Soft fraud is when the data is presented misleadingly to propose a conclusion that's not supported by the data, or some of the data is intentionally omitted (e.g., you do not publish an incriminating study or you find a way to reclassify an adverse event so it does not show up in the final clinical trial report).
- Hard fraud is when the data itself is just fabricated.
While many are comfortable with committing "soft” fraud, very few will commit “hard” fraud (although this cannot necessarily be said of India or China ). Instead, most of the fraud we encounter is soft fraud (e.g., this characterizes many of the studies used to try to debunk hydroxychloroquine in the treatment of COVID-19). This, in turn, makes it possible for outside investigators (e.g., this community) to read between the lines, identify what actually happened, and determine what the results of a given study should have been, had it not been twisted to provide the results desired by its sponsor.
Conversely, I believe that the general reluctance to commit hard fraud exists because it crosses a line that even the fairly corrupt academic and legal systems still stand behind. However, we frequently see things that come quite close to that line, such as dishonest researchers altering a trial midway through so it arrives at the needed results. Fauci, for example, did this repeatedly with remdesivir to get it onto the market, and similarly, the COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers like Pfizer ended their previously promised long-term placebo groups once they got their emergency-use authorizations (which should have required that long-term follow-up), so the long-term side effects of these vaccines could never be assessed.
Note: Although you can conceal most things by manipulating clinical trials, the one thing that is very difficult to hide is the total number of deaths (as they cannot be reclassified to something else). When Pfizer prematurely ended their trial at 6 months, more people had died in the vaccine group than the placebo group (and I suspect that this would have further worsened with time). The report disclosing this inconvenient fact (which destroyed the entire rationale for vaccine mandates) was released over a year ago .
Much of modern (industry-sponsored) science is designed to conceal things that would create problems for those sponsoring the science. Similarly, an ethos has been installed within our culture to doubt our own observations, and instead defer to the evidence-based scientific consensus, as the former, but not the latter is allegedly highly susceptible to biases that invalidate its conclusions. I disagree with this, and would argue that important things can often only be discerned by perceptive anecdotal observations.
Many organized religions throughout history have sought to control their populations by monopolizing the truth, and modern science is no different, monopolizing the evidence so that only a costly industry narrative can constitute "truth.” All of this is why we repeatedly see situations where someone has an undeniable medical injury, and afterwards, every professional they talk to tells them the injury could not have possibly been linked to the medication because there is “ no evidence ” it could have happened (also known as medical gaslighting ).
With the COVID-19 vaccines, we have seen alarming evidence of their harm across the board. For example, so many people are being harmed that VAERS has received more serious adverse events from the COVID vaccines than all other vaccines in history-- 28% of Americans know someone whom they believe the vaccines killedThe life insurance industry shows an unprecedented spike in deaths amongst working-age Americans following workplace-mandated vaccines being forced upon them. However, all of these safety signals are being ignored and dismissed as erroneous products of cognitive biases because they don’t meet the elusive bar for “evidence.”
Our current society has been conditioned to worship “evidence-based” science, and believes that it should be the sole arbiter of truth. One of the core tenets of evidence-based medicine is that the best available evidence should be used to inform clinical decisions. This is now widely interpreted to mean that large randomized controlled trials (RCTs) or clinical guidelines produced by committees of ( often corrupt ) experts are the “best” forms of evidence, and thus are the only things allowed to inform clinical decisions.
One of my largest disagreements with this dogma occurs when a situation arises where observations suggest something inconvenient to commercial interests, but the question at hand has not been formally assessed by large RCTs. The observations are summarily dismissed because “there is no evidence” for them. In these cases, I believe that the more limited data point (e.g., a series of similar clinical cases) constitutes the best available evidence, and should be treated as such until more comprehensive evidence is arrived at through a clinical study.
Much of my success as a clinician has arisen from utilizing more “limited” forms of evidence to inform my clinical decisions rather than waiting for an RCT (which may take years to be done) to settle the question—unfortunately many doctors become paralyzed and cannot act unless they have something like that to back them up. In contrast, if you read medical journals from earlier eras, physicians regularly made remarkable discoveries utilizing inductive reasoning, which is why I frequently study those ancient documents.
Overall, I believe there are three major issues with relying excessively upon RCTs:
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The first, summarized in this essay by Harvey Risch, is that the value of (perfect) RCTs is heavily over-emphasized. In my eyes, most individuals who fixate on RCTs view an investigation being randomized and controlled as a necessary box to check off, rather than (like Risch) actually understanding what it entails from a statistical perspective.
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Secondly, if the magnitude of an effect is small (e.g., this drug might reduce your risk of a heart attack years down the road by 5%), it takes an elaborate and costly trial to detect that faint effect, and it is very likely that you will have a greater chance of being harmed by a side effect than benefiting from the drug. Conversely, if the effect is large (e.g., shooting someone with a gun typically kills them), you don’t need an elaborate trial to detect the effect; a very small one will suffice to identify it. I subscribe to the belief that many useful medical interventions have a large enough magnitude of effect that it is not necessary to do complex testing to tease out their benefits.
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The third point is that large RCTs are extremely expensive to conduct (meaning that only industry and occasionally vested interests within the government can fund them, which is why many therapies I stand behind have never been able to achieve this gold standard in research performed for them). The rarely considered cost of doing an RCT frequently invalidates the entire RCT model, because study after study has shown that the financial interests of a study’s sponsor heavily influence its conclusion, and that influence is much greater than any benefit that can be obtained through randomization or controlling for the placebo effect.
Because of the “sponsor bias”, large studies need to have a way to arrive at a sponsor’s desired conclusion without committing hard scientific fraud. Over the years, a relatively consistent toolbox has evolved for committing soft scientific fraud, and those familiar with it were able to immediately recognize it being applied throughout the COVID-19 clinical trials
The COVID-19 Vaccine Trials
The essential purpose of the COVID-19 vaccine trials was to do the following:
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Be completed in a much shorter time frame than normal so that the vaccines could make it to the market before the pandemic ended on its own (which is essentially what has happened in Africa where vaccines were never used ).
Note: The FDA also understood the urgency to open this long-term marketplace and waived a variety of oversights that would normally be required using the present “emergency” as the justification for doing so.
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Come up with something that could be used to justify that the vaccines were “effective” so that the medical profession would wholeheartedly support and promote them.
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Conceal any adverse reactions from the vaccines that would make the medical profession reluctant to recommend the vaccines, and, more importantly, ensure doctors would deny any harms they observed in patients during the rollout could be linked to the vaccine (as doctors acknowledging widespread injuries would destroy the public’s willingness to continue vaccinating).
Long before the vaccines entered the market, I started to see the signs that an elaborate publicity campaign was being put together to frame the vaccines as the miraculous “ solution ” to the horrific pandemic situation we were experiencing (which was largely self-inflicted). Once the vaccines became available, that publicity campaign kicked into high gear and became the most aggressive propaganda campaign we had ever witnessed in our lifetimes. I tried to cover some of the most insane examples here:
Not surprisingly, this scheme also led to the vaccine manufacturers having the audacity to use titles like “ Safety and Efficacy of the BNT162b2 [Pfizer] mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine ” for the publications of their trials . Simultaneously, we were hit with the same soundbite over and over “ well we had hoped the vaccines would be effective, but we never imagined they would be this effective .” My colleagues ate that up, and it became nearly impossible to provide any piece of evidence with which to challenge this modern-day miracle.
Problems With Pfizer’s Trials
_Note: I mostly critique Pfizer. This is not because Pfizer is the only bad actor. It’s because I’ve spent the majority of my time reviewing their work (I can’t read everything), and because Pfizer received full approval for their vaccine, it was possible to view many of their regulatory submissions through FOIAs (and their equivalents)_
When I read through the Pfizer trial , a few red flags jumped out at me:
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The vaccines were never tested for preventing transmission, and based on their design and my knowledge of precisely how previous vaccines failed to prevent transmission , I did not believe you could take it on faith that the vaccine's efficacy in reducing symptoms translated to the benefit all my colleagues ultimately cared about (reducing the transmission of COVID-19).
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The actual benefits provided by the vaccine were very small. You had to vaccinate 119 people to prevent one minor case of COVID-19 (e.g., a sore throat + a positive test), 2711 people to prevent one “severe” case of COVID-19, and since no deaths were prevented in the trial, well over 21,720 people needed to be vaccinated (21,720 is the total number who were vaccinated in the trial) to prevent a single death from COVID-19.
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Most of the suspected adverse reactions to these vaccines did not appear to have been amongst the adverse events that were monitored (they were also unlikely to appear in the brief timespan of symptoms being monitored within this trial).
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The adverse events that were reported were much higher than what has typically been reported in trials for other vaccines [e.g., 59% experienced fatigue after Pfizer's vaccine, whereas around 10-15% experience fatigue after an influenza vaccine].
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The actual benefit that the vaccines provided was much less than these adverse events that were acknowledged within the trial report. Arkmedic did an excellent breakdown of it here .
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The noteworthy adverse events about which I remembered reading in the online support groups I had joined in 2020 for vaccine trial participants were not accounted for in any of the trial reports I read (Pfizer included). I had joined these online groups because I was suspicious of the vaccines and felt that doing this would be the only way to find out what the pharmaceutical companies had actually done.
From looking at all of this, my immediate thought was “if this was the best they could do using every possible trick at their disposal to rearrange their data to paint a positive picture of the vaccines, just how bad was the actual trial data ?”
Unfortunately, my physician colleagues (who frequently lectured us on how to skeptically dissect scientific publications) were so enraptured by the “the vaccine is even more safe and effective than we imagined” meme, that all these points fell on deaf ears. Fortunately, some did notice these issues, and Peter Doshi published a series of editorials (summarized here ) in the British Medical Journal (BMJ - considered to be one of the top 5 medical journals in the world ) that explained why the design of the vaccine trials and the evidence for Pfizer’s vaccines was very poor, and could not justify an FDA approval. Sadly, his experience with his colleagues mirrored my own, and his points were almost entirely ignored by the medical profession.
One of Doshi’s many observations was that there were signs in the data that the trial was not blinded, and the entire benefit of the vaccine may have been due to a failure to test vaccinated individuals for COVID-19 (thus creating the illusion that vaccinated individuals were less likely to have laboratory-confirmed COVID-19).
Subsequently, a whistleblower, Brook Jackson , who helped run one of Pfizer’s clinical trials, came forward and testified to the following:
- The COVID-19 vaccine trial she participated in was run in a much more haphazard way than any others she had worked on throughout her career.
•The trial was not blinded, and protocols that should have been followed to ensure blinding were flagrantly violated.
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Vaccinated individuals with COVID-19 were not being tested for COVID-19.
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Adverse reactions in vaccinated individuals were not adequately recorded.
Due to a concern that this conduct would violate the FDA’s requirements for clinical trial sites, Brook alerted her superiors about what was happening so that these issues could be addressed. After her pleas repeatedly fell on deaf ears, she eventually notified the FDA directly. Although the FDA did not investigate her concerns, they appeared to have informed her employer, as Brook was terminated the same day.
Note: As detailed by Doshi , there has been a longstanding issue with the FDA providing insufficient oversight for clinical trial sites, and as a separate investigation into vaccine oversight revealed, it was suspected that their laxity in oversight would dramatically worsen during Operation Warp Speed, which was the partnership between the Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Defense(DOD) aimed at helping to accelerate the development of a COVID-19 vaccine.
After these events transpired, Brook submitted her story to the BMJ who corroborated her allegations through documents she provided, and through other employees at the trial site. I would strongly recommend reading the BMJ’s investigation to understand exactly what happened there. Since her termination, Brook filed a whistleblower lawsuit against Pfizer which is presently in the federal courts.
Later, when I reviewed the events with Brook, one of the most interesting things I learned is that most of the data which is collected at clinical trial sites never even makes it to the FDA. Instead the FDA only receive a very small sample of it that is trusted to be representative of everything that occurs. I suspect this is one of the many reasons why the FDA could truthfully claim they had no knowledge any of this happened, although as this article shows they are clearly also culpable since they did not choose to pursue getting the reports for adverse events (like Maddie’s) they knew were happening.
In summary, as you can see from the above information, there was a real risk that soft fraud would occur during the clinical trials. However, unlike the many cases in which this has happened in the past, for the COVID-19 vaccine, we also had the unique opportunity to have numerous whistleblowers come forward and corroborate that this happened for the COVID-19 vaccines.
[
A Midwestern Doctor @MidwesternDoc
Whistleblowers are critical for righting the wrongs in government and healthcare. They always pay a steep price, but still would choose to do it again. Gøtzsche's presentation provides the best explanation I have ever seen on what drives the heroes we need now more than ever.
](https://twitter.com/MidwesternDoc/status/1609225914885476353)
The COVID-19 Vaccine Trial Strategy
Pfizer and Moderna knew quite early on (although exactly how early is a matter of speculation) that there were serious risks involved in using the mRNA spike protein platform for vaccination (this was also most likely the case for AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson with their spike protein vaccine). This left them in a bit of a bind; how could the vaccines they were committed to making for Operation Warp Speed be “safe” enough to win the vaccine race and get the market share they wanted?
As far as I can tell from reading the preclinical documents (e.g., this one ), this was initially accomplished by opting out of much of the safety testing on non-human subjects, which would normally be required before proceeding to human studies (e.g., Pfizer was allowed by regulators to exempt itself from testing for autoimmunity or cancer risks). I took this as a tacit admission that it was known that there were serious issues here (given that there were major concerns with these issues and they have since become some of the most common serious complications of the vaccines). In turn, they concluded that their best option was to never formally test for them so they could plausibly deny knowing that the issue existed (this is a common industry tactic) and claim that there was no evidence that the issue exists.
Once the human trials began, the goal shifted to doing everything possible to minimize the number of inevitable adverse events which occurred. This was essentially accomplished by:
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Making it very difficult for trial subjects to report any complications from the vaccines except for a very narrow subset of symptoms that were not a major publicity issue for the vaccine manufacturers. This characterizes both the limited V-safe data (which was still incriminating enough that a lawsuit was needed to get it from the CDC) and the even more limited list of adverse reactions found within the main section of Pfizer’s clinical trial report [fever, headache, fatigue, chills, vomiting, diarrhea, muscle pain, joint pain, or use of a fever medication along with pain, redness, or swelling at the vaccination site]. Furthermore, all of these symptoms were only monitored for 7 days post- vaccination (many vaccine injuries do not occur within this brief window, which was a well known fact prior to the COVID-19 vaccines).
_Note: the more severe injuries in Pfizer’s study were reported in an extremely vague manner ( see page 9 ), which made it impossible to determine anything._
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Aggressively reclassifying each serious complication as unrelated to the vaccines (typically by claiming it was in fact due to a pre-existing psychiatric condition or COVID-19).
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Avoiding any type of long-term followup on patients which could provide incriminating safety data, regardless of prior commitments to do so.
Because of this strategy, the vaccine manufacturers could not acknowledge any complications that research participants experienced as being related to the vaccines. Instead, all they could do was gaslight the patients into believing that the injury was unrelated to the vaccine, and have healthcare providers collude to create the narrative that the injury was not related to vaccination.
One of the cruel complications of this approach was that it required reneging on the promises that were given to the trial subjects at the start of the research study—any medical complications they received would be covered (because providing any type of help would require acknowledging that there were potential complications from the vaccine). The one, possibly unanticipated, downside of choosing not to help with medical expenses accrued in the trial is that it could solicit the outrage necessary for trial participants to speak out publicly about what happened to them, and for the public to listen…which to some extent has now happened.
All of these potential issues were why the BMJ has repeatedly called for the raw data for the COVID-19 vaccine trials to be released. It is almost certain that the scant clinical trial data we have been provided by the pharmaceutical companies is highly misleading, and that lack of information makes it completely unethical to mandate the vaccines on the population. This is especially true because the lack of data acknowledging the injuries makes it impossible for those who are injured to receive any type of medical care or support (hence, why many providers are now labeling vaccine injuries as long-covid, because it represents the best shot they have of getting help).
The COVID-19 Vaccine Trial Participants
When you review these cases, it does appear that they were all coordinated as a very similar playbook was used on each participant. However, I believe this was more of an emergent phenomenon because very similar things to the approaches used here have occurred in the past. Much of what follows is déjà vu from Merck’s HPV vaccine trials, and to a lesser extent these examples also match what friends of mine experienced with complications from other pharmaceuticals that were already FDA approved (as doctors are often very resistant to believing drugs they prescribed could cause harm).
For example, many of the adverse events shown below were reclassified as being a complication of pre-existing psychiatric conditions, and this has been the default strategy for gaslighting patients throughout the history of medicine . I believe the new emphasis on reclassifying injuries as COVID-19 resulted from a climate of hysteria, where anything could be labeled as COVID-19 and there is enough of an overlap between spike protein injuries from COVID-19 to the vaccine itself, that it could be rationalized that many vaccine injuries were actually due to the virus.
Maddie’s story
To expand the market for the COVID-19 vaccines, a case needed to be made that they were safe and effective for children (who had for all practical purposes a 0% chance of dying from COVID-19). For this reason, we saw a variety of predatory advertisements such as this one from Pfizer:
An individual who was severely injured in the above trial has dedicated her life to making her story known around the world:
Much of the time that went into this article came from editing Maddie de Garay’s story on the Highwire into a shorter version (as I recognize that while the entire presentation is extremely compelling, far fewer people will watch a full episode—as you’d guess it was extremely challenging to decide which parts to cut out of it).
Because of how important I felt this story was for the world to see, I emailed it to Pierre Kory for him to share it (he has a lot more followers), and I would request that you both watch this and consider sharing it as well, because it has a really powerful message:
[
Pierre Kory, MD MPA @PierreKory
Pfizer's trial only vaccinated 1,131 children so a single serious injury would have made the vaccine too dangerous. Maddie's story shows just how far medicine will go to betray and gaslight patients who threaten its narrative. We may never know who else was swept under the rug.
](https://twitter.com/PierreKory/status/1613319015178330113)
Most of what is in this video should speak for itself. A few additional things I’d add though:
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Maddie’s attitude is remarkable. I am genuinely amazed that she is not more bitter about her situation, especially given how healthy and active she was before her injury (it is incredibly difficult for people who have serious injuries to come to terms with what has happened to them, and accept that they can no longer do what they had previously been able to do). Instead, she is almost entirely focused on preventing others from also experiencing her nightmare.
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One of the issues highlighted in the Real Anthony Fauci is that Fauci has developed a network of principal investigators (PIs) to conduct questionable research trials for his drugs.
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There is absolutely no question that Maddie’s PI, Dr. Frenck, knew what her injury was the moment it started (as it had previously been reported in many adults), knew what it meant for Pfizer if the injury was acknowledged by the trial (given how few people were in the trial), and that he had enough influence to shape the medical process which Maddie received so that it would not be something that had to go in the clinical trial report. His choice to initiate this coverup resulted in necessary care (which could have prevented her paralysis) being delayed until it was too late, and he is directly responsible for what happened to Maddie.
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The allergist that Maddie worked with who diagnosed her with a faux condition, Functional Neurological Disorder (FND) to conceal the adverse event, according to Open Payments (a required database for pharmaceutical payments to physicians), from 2015-2021, had received $652,650.65 for associated research funding (with the amount increasing year by year).
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FND is an extremely disingenuous disease that is frequently used to gaslight patients who have received severe neurological injuries. I wrote much more about it here , including how neurologists lack the insight to recognize what they are doing when they authoritatively throw this diagnosis around.
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The experience Maddie had at the hospital was awful, and to some extent surreal, but for length considerations, I cut it from the presentation. Amongst other things, Maddie became much worse after she was at the hospital (e.g., she lost her ability to walk), and believes it was due to her MRI. I periodically encounter people with complex issues who get much worse from MRIs (especially the COVID-19 vaccine injuries). I’ve seen a few explanations for this, and of those, the most likely (but not only) explanation is it being due to the MRI’s contrast agent. Gadolinium is quite toxic for some, but this toxicity is rarely considered in medicine.
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Maddie was very fortunate to have a parent who was a nurse. Similar situations are even worse for those who have no direct experience in health care.
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They also provided the information at the end of the episode for Maddie’s lifefunder .
Brianne’s story
[
A Midwestern Doctor @MidwesternDoc
Exactly what happened in the clinical trials is critical to uncover as they are the basis for the lie the vaccines are safe and all other evidence is "anecdotal." Dressen (and others she's found) were erased and left to fend for themselves once their reactions raised red flags.](https://twitter.com/MidwesternDoc/status/1613370463958212608)
Many of the key points that needed to be made are contained within the above clip (I put two different presentations together). The key points I had to edit out to shorten it were:
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Brianne was actively communicating with the National Institute of Health (NIH) as part of a study for treating COVID-19 neurological injuries, which were repeatedly delayed by the NIH for political reasons (but was eventually published). In that study, they eventually settled on using intravenous immunoglobulin to treat the injury (which interestingly, also sometimes helps HPV vaccine injuries, but is also an expensive treatment requiring a large donor pool, and thus has limits to its scalability ). I wrote more about Brianne’s experience with the NIH and their study here .
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Brianne founded an organization dedicated to helping COVID-19 vaccine injury victims. According to their organization (this was in response to Maddie’s story):
In the longer version of the above presentation, she mentions she and three other individuals injured in the clinical trials (each detailed in this article) all had their injuries classified as something innocuous to conceal them (e.g., Maddie’s injury was functional abdominal pain, Olivia’s T-cell lymphoma was lymphadenopathy). If I find out who the other 3 participants were, I will update the article to include them.
Note: The reason I now post tweets with videos throughout these articles is because Substack only allows videos from a few platforms to be embedded in articles (this matters because most people understandably won’t click through to outside videos). Of those platforms, Twitter is the only one that does not censor or delete controversial videos (I thought Vimeo worked as well, but a month and a half ago Vimeo deleted my entire channel).
Olivia’s story
Olivia’s story is the video at the top of this article (presented in that way due to its length) and in the Rumble video below:
Although her story is very similar to the others, there are a few important takeaway points from Olivia’s story which may not be immediately apparent.
First, for a variety of reasons detailed here, it’s often difficult for doctors to recognize subtle medical injuries unless they have been specifically trained to look for them . Instead, doctors tend to rationalize all of them as being due to psychiatric issues . What is unique about Olivia’s situation is that because everything that happened to her was so unusual, and most importantly, could be directly observed visually (so you could not deny it was happening), outside doctors were actually willing to acknowledge her injuries. Despite that, this is how Moderna’s PI treated her (clipped from the above video):
[
A Midwestern Doctor @MidwesternDoc
If you are injured in a vaccine clinical trial, they will deny your injury, not help you as promised, and not report it. This story is remarkable because Olivia had such strong evidence linking her injury to Moderna, outside doctors agreed, but even then, this is what happened](https://twitter.com/MidwesternDoc/status/1612625075022491648)
Nonetheless, despite it being unambiguous that her injury was due to the vaccine, Moderna did not pay for her medical care as promised, and did not report her injury. Additionally, the clinical trial site director said she would only be able to acknowledge that the cancer Olivia had was linked to the vaccine if “ more research emerged in the future linking it ” even though this happened at the trial that was supposed to determine if this could happen ( note: this example illustrates a common deficit in critical thinking that exists throughout my profession ).
Although her shoulder injury is alarming (and like Maddie, the physical therapy Olivia was forced to go through to “address” it should never have been conducted), the cancer she has is much worse. Based on her history, there is a very strong case that it was linked to her vaccination, and had this been presented in Moderna’s trial report, would have had huge implications for the many patients now developing cancers who are told they cannot possibly be related to the vaccine, and thus these victims are denied the support they need.
Unnamed Moderna Trial Participant’s Story
A while back, I was requested to review 865 vaccine injuries that were submitted in a survey to assess the plausibility thatthe deaths described were due to the vaccine. One of the reports caught my eye since it represented a critical incident that was not reported within Moderna’s trial report (see page 40 ), so I reached out to the doctor (who will remain unnamed) who submitted the report and had good reason to be knowledgeable of this patient’s history.
According to the doctor, the gentleman who passed away was part of the clinical trial at Research Atlanta that was paid for by Moderna. He developed atrial fibrillation after the vaccine, and approximately 3 months after vaccination, he was hospitalized (but never vented or sent to the ICU) at Grady Memorial Hospital (which is very close to the CDC).
At the hospital, he received a CT scan, which revealed blood clots in his lungs. At the time, no one was aware that the vaccine could cause blood clots (both Moderna and the CDC had insisted that the vaccine was safe, and had not revealed it was associated with blood clots). The blood clots were then assessed to have been due to metastatic cancer, as there was no other explanation for them, despite the fact that a full cancer workup was conducted which could not detect any signs of cancer in the patient. The doctor I corresponded with (who I deemed competent to assess this question) is certain that the patient did not have metastatic cancer.
The patient was then assessed to be terminally ill, discharged to hospice, and then died in hospice care (which may have been partly due to respiratory difficulties resulting from the opioids he was given for hospice). As you might expect, the clinical trial contacts were notified of what happened to this patient, but they ignored the report.
Augusto’s Story
Augusto was another clinical trial participant who was abused by Pfizer. Fortunately, he was a lawyer and did everything he could to hold them accountable.
The only direct summary I have found of Augusto’s experience can be found within this (shortened) interview (an article was also written documenting his experience here ):
Although Augusto had the same experience as everyone else (e.g., they tried to say his issues were due to psychological problems and his adverse event never ended up in Pfizer’s final clinical trial report), there were also some remarkable aspects of his case:
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His hospitalization was initially documented by a senior specialist as an adverse reaction to a coronavirus vaccine (although as the previous examples have shown, this did not ultimately change the course of things).
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In addition to the team erroneously reporting the hospitalization which Augusto had directly told them about, the PI who was supervising his case fabricated a medical record to claim Augusto had an anxiety disorder. His injury (a pericardial effusion suggestive of pericarditis) was attributed to COVID-19 (even though Augusto had a negative test) and anxiety (even though anxiety cannot to my knowledge cause a pericardial effusion).
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The PI who was supervising his clinical trial site was also the lead author of Pfizer’s New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) study . Augusto’s experience and the documentation he had to support the lead author's misconduct is most likely the strongest argument for NEJM retracting Pfizer’s pivotal vaccine study ( note: in addition to the erroneous COVID-19 studies mentioned here, the NEJM also previously published Merck’s highly questionable HPV vaccine study ).
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Augusto obtained the record of another participant who died from a heart attack at the same hospital to which he was admitted, but was not registered in the final Pfizer clinical trial report.
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Augusto formally complained to the Department of Justice about this clinical trial conduct, but the government decided to avoid addressing it, despite their conduct being unlawful.
Pfizer vs. Moderna
Although many things could be said about these cases (which I suspect also holds true for the other ones I am not yet familiar with), one of the things that stands out to me from these reports is the differences in how Pfizer and Moderna conducted their trials.
In Pfizer’s case, they had a robust apparatus in place to have a team of physicians immediately neutralize any claims that the vaccine could be harmful. However, in Moderna’s case, they just told the doctors involved that the events could not be related to the vaccine and most doctors took those claims at face value (as they did not want to believe the vaccine could be harmful). Moderna, in effect, succeeded through inaction (by not documenting injuries or paying compensation for medical care they were obligated to).
I suspect this difference in strategies was due to Moderna being a fledging pharmaceutical company without an apparatus like the one Pfizer had developed over decades. Fortunately for Moderna, their laid-back approach ended up working out just as well since the FDA just rubber-stamped both of their vaccines.
Regardless of the approach that was followed though, I hope this examination into their mutual research misconduct helps to explain how these “impossible to predict” side effects that were never detected in the “robust” clinical trials could have suddenly emerged once the vaccines entered the market.
Conclusion:
Typically, it is nearly impossible to identify clinical trial participants and attempt to re-create what happened within a clinical trial. Due to the diligent work of leaders in this area like Del Bigtree , Aaron Siri , and a few clinical trial participants being brave enough to speak out publicly, we have been able to establish that serious adverse events occurred in all of the spike protein-producing vaccine trials.
More importantly, it should be apparent by now that the FDA has deliberately ignored this misconduct and tried to sweep the known adverse events under the rug. Based on all of this, I can state with near certainty there are other significant adverse reactions that did not make it to the final clinical trial reports.
Note: The fact that news stories like the above (the HPV vaccine trial malfeasance was the focus of the previous article ) received mainstream coverage (e.g., ABC news ) a mere decade ago goes to show just how rapidly the censorship of the media has increased in recent years. It also highlights how consequential failing to report the adverse events from a clinical trial can be for everyone injured after the fact .
Although exactly what degree of underreporting research fraud has occurred will probably never be known unless a legal investigation interviews each participant, as the examples in this article demonstrate, what is already known demonstrates that the vaccines are both ineffective and too dangerous to have on the market. On a more human level, what was done to these trial participants was appalling and needs to be prosecuted, and in the future may even happen if it becomes necessary to restore the public’s willingness to participate in the clinical trials which our medical system depends upon.
A major challenge of politics is catering a message to different political tribes, as each one will support certain messages and vehemently reject others. Most of the work we have done on the vaccine issue has been targeted to further convince those who already have doubts about the vaccines or sway those in the middle (which now represents a large portion of America ). Very little work however has been directed to those who are already committed to the vaccines (since it is largely a lost cause to try to change their minds).
For a variety of reasons detailed in a recent article , I believe the message that has the best shot at reaching those already committed to the vaccines (and motivating congress and the courts to do something) is to prove that fraud was committed by the manufacturers. This is why I attempted to present some of the best evidence we have currently for that assertion here (that Pfizer did not report what is actually in their vaccines). An even more important part of proving that case is showing exactly what actually happened in the clinical trials.
My sincere hope is that this article will inspire others who participated in the trials to come forward, and it is something that can be cited when people (especially doctors) try to argue that the clinical trials proved that the vaccines were “ safe .” I also faintly hope that awareness of this issue can inspire congressional hearings (which did happen previously with the disastrous anthrax vaccines that were forced on the military ). Although I doubt it would ever happen, I believe that the best solution to all the issues outlined in this article is to give trial participants the legal right to sue pharmaceutical companies for compensation if the severe adverse reactions they experience are not included in the final trial report.
Because of the videos, this article was an enormous amount of work to put together. I sincerely believe these stories need to be heard, so if you take the time to listen to them and share the ones that speak to you with others, many would sincerely appreciate that.
Lastly, on a lighter note, one of the practices I occasionally do to calibrate my medical intuition is to guess which fortune cookie best fits each member of a group I am with and then see how accurate the pairings were once they are opened. Sometimes I also go a step further and guess what specific subject the future fortune will address. The one I got today tested as being directed at the readers of this article:
”A dose of adversity is often as needful as a dose of medicine.”
This is the fourth part of a series in which Paula Jardine examines how the Covid vaccine programme was conceived by US defence planners nearly 20 years ago as a 21st century ‘Manhattan Project’ for biodefence. You can read Part 1 here, Part 2 here and Part 3 here.
BILL Frist was the 2003-2007 US Senate majority leader who championed the USA’s biodefence projects and promoted the concept of a ‘Manhattan Project’ against a pandemic, described in Parts 1, 2 and 3 of this series. He was also the politician who sponsored the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP) Act of December 2005 as soon as the World Health Organisation’s International Health Regulations had been amended to include a provision enabling WHO to declare Public Health Emergencies of International Concern (PHEIC). Critically it was this Act that established indemnity for the manufacturers of therapeutics, vaccines or diagnostics released during the course of a public health emergency against any and all harm caused.
Also working to influence US national biosecurity policy was Dr Robert Kadlec, described in Part 3. Working with him, and principally under the auspices of the Johns Hopkins Centre for Health Security (founded by Dr Tara O’Toole in 1998) were other participants in Operation Dark Winter, the code name for a senior-level situational simulation conducted on June 22-23, 2001, designed to wargame a covert and widespread smallpox bio-terrorist attack on the United States. These biosecurity hawks included O’Toole and Tom Inglesby of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies (CCBS).
When O’Toole was nominated some years later to serve in the Department of Homeland Security in 2009, critics warned of her paranoia. Microbiologist Dr Richard Ebright, one of the scientists who, in May 2021, called for a full and unrestricted international forensic investigation into the origins of Covid-19, said it was a disastrous nomination: ‘O’Toole supported every flawed decision and counterproductive policy on biodefense, biosafety, and biosecurity during the Bush Administration. [She] is as out of touch with reality, and as paranoiac, as former Vice President Cheney . . . It would be hard to think of a person less well suited for the position . . . She was the single most extreme person, either in or out of government, advocating for a massive biodefense expansion and relaxation of provisions for safety and security’. Dr Ebright concluded: ‘She makes Dr Strangelove look sane.’
It was Kadlec who formed the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense in 2014 and began the planning his Manhattan Project in earnest. Those involved with him in this commission included Tom Ridge, the first Homeland Security Secretary, Donna Shalala, a former Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary, Dr Margaret Hamburg, a former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner, Scooter Libby, formerly of Project for a New American Century (PNAC), William Karesh, the vice president of EcoHealth Alliance and an adviser to the WHO on reforms to the International Health Regulations (IHR), and Kenneth Wainstein, now the Under Secretary of Homeland Security for Intelligence and Analysis.
The Commission’s National Blueprint for Biodefense published in2015 called for major ‘reform’. Consider it the blueprint for Kadlec’s Manhattan Project, for the CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations) strategy and for the subsequent changes to the WHO IHR required to make the plan work.
The list of the BioDefense Commissions ‘we must’ demands follows:
· revolutionise the development of Medical Countermeasures (MCM, which are vaccines and therapeutics) for emerging infectious diseases;
· fully fund and incentivise the MCM enterprise;
· remove bureaucratic hurdles to MCM innovation;
· develop a system for environmental detection that leverages the ingenuity of industry and meets the growing threat;
· overhaul the Select Agent Program (which oversees the possession, use and transfer of risky biological agents and toxins) to enable a secure system that simultaneously encourages participation by the scientific community;
· help lead the international community toward the establishment of a fully functional and agile global public health response apparatus.
Three years later in May 2018 when Johns Hopkins ran Clade X, a table top simulation around a novel parainfluenza virus, O’Toole was involved once again. Johns Hopkins CHS also co-hosted with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation the better-known coronavirus simulation Event 201 in October 2019.
It was during a Clade X discussion on manufacturing capacity sufficient to end the fictitious pandemic through vaccination that O’Toole said: ‘Industry are more than willing to help but vaccines are very specific creatures that are difficult to turn to new purposes. We’re going to have to go to innovative manufacturing methods that will require a lot of leniency from the FDA and the understanding of the American people that we’re doing things on an emergency basis so every box in terms of safety and risk assessment may not be checked. But the vaccine is the only way forward.’ [My emphasis]
This was clear advocacy for vaccines as the exit strategy for the Clade X novel parainfluenza virus pandemic, and later once the Covid pandemic was underway, was to be the only exit offered to lockdown.
Today, O’Toole is an executive vice-president of the CIA spin-off venture capital firm In-Q-Tel in charge of a strategic initiative called BiologyNext. In April 2020 in a presentation to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) she said: ‘The bio-revolution is really founded on several core technologies that I’m going to simplify greatly. But it is all about being able to read, write, and edit the code of life. One of the most important recognitions of the past century in science, at least, is that life is written in code. And as Jason Kelly of Ginkgo Bioworks has put it: Biology is essentially programmable . . .
‘Ron Weiss, who is a synthetic biologist, predicted in 2014 that an RNA-based delivery method that allowed you to use RNA as a kind of platform to deliver new bits and pieces inside the cell would be a game-changing inflection point in synthetic biology. And the Covid-19 pandemic is giving us a chance to test that out. You may know that one of the vaccines that is coming on very quickly is made by Moderna. And it is a messenger RNA-based vaccine. So if that works, Ron Weiss’s prediction may come true.’ [My emphasis]
In August 2019 Kadlec’s department ran yet another table-top simulation, the Crimson Contagion. It simulated the impact of and response to the arrival in the US of an avian flu from China. It was a scoping exercise to identify legal authorities, US federal government funding resources and manufacturing capabilities for vaccines. It concluded that $10billion would be required to respond to a novel pandemic influenza strain.
A month later on September 19, 2019, President Trump signed the Executive Order on Modernizing Influenza Vaccines which launched the Manhattan Project by directing various US government departments and the US Department of Defense to propose a plan and a budget within 120 days – by January 17, 2020, to be precise.
Anthony Fauci’s diary, released following a freedom of information request, notes a teleconference concerning the ‘Global pandemic’ taking place on January 15, 2020, a date at which a global pandemic existed only in some people’s imaginations.
On January 23, 2020, after the Moderna vaccine announcement in Davos, Fauci had a conference call with Dr Richard Hatchett, CEPI’s CEO, and the following day, a Saturday, he had a senior leadership update with Dr Kadlec in advance of a meeting with Stephane Bancel of Moderna on Monday January 27. Perhaps Kadlec, Hatchett and Bancel were amongst the unnamed people on Fauci’s January 15conference call.
On January 30, 2020, when the WHO declared a SARS CoV2 Public Health Emergency of International Concern, just 7,818 patients were said to be sick with Covid, of whom only 82 were outside China. As far as Kadlec was concerned, this was now a shooting war.
Following CEPI’s announcement in Davos on January 23, US-based manufacturers Innovio Pharmaceuticals were miraculously ready to begin developing a Covid vaccine, and Moderna already had its funding to begin manufacturing the first batch of the vaccine co-owned and co-developed with Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for use in a human clinical trial.
The legislation that he and Frist had shepherded through Congress between 2003 and 2005 had concentrated power in the hands of the US Health and Human Services Secretary (and the US Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response) during public health emergencies.
The basic goals of the architects had been achieved. These, the American investigative paralegal Katherine Watt has argued, were to set up legal conditions in which all governing power in the United States would be automatically transferred from the citizens and the three constitutional branches into the hands of one person, the Health and Human Services Secretary, ‘effective at the moment the HHS Secretary himself declared a public health emergency, legally transforming free citizens into enslaved subjects’.
The HHS Secretary Alex Azar, to whom ASPR’s Kadlec reported, was the senior legal counsel at HHS when the PREP Act was passed in 2005. Azar co-operatively declared a public health emergency on January 30, 2020, backdating it to January 27.
He then made a PREP Act declaration on February 4, enhancing liability protection for any person or firm involved in developing countermeasures, including Innovio and Moderna.
The announcement said: ‘The world is facing an unprecedented pandemic. To effectively respond, there must be a more consistent pathway for Covered Persons to manufacture, distribute, administer or use Covered Countermeasures across the nation and the world.’
HHS Secretary determinations are unreviewable by the US courts.
Further research by Katherine Watt into another PREP Act declaration for medical countermeasures by Azar in March 2020 shows it effectively sidestepped the Nuremberg Code by stipulating that the ‘use’ of any counter measures ‘shall not be considered to constitute a clinical investigation’ while also removing the right to informed consent. As there is, by decree, no clinical trial, there are no stopping conditions for the use of said countermeasures.
It is startling how Dr Kadlec and his few associates have, over a period of more than 20 years, managed to orchestrate an undemocratic and unethical bio-security coup with global reach.
The Manhattan Project was renamed Operation WarpSpeed when it was launched in May 2020. The involvement of the US Federal Government which through the NIAID owns the patent for the spike protein used in the vaccines, and its Department of Defense that ran and financed Operation WarpSpeed, arguably elevates this War on Microbes Manhattan Project to an unprecedented bioweapon attack on humanity using an under-tested novel injectable pharmaceutical.
This is the third part of a series in which Paula Jardine examines how the Covid vaccine programme was conceived by US defence planners nearly 20 years ago as a 21st century ‘Manhattan Project’ for biodefence. You can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
WHEN it comes to the business of vaccines and biosecurity, the land of free enterprise is all up for large-scale state intervention to create and prop up markets. Some of the generals behind the biosecurity ‘Manhattan Project’ believe the War on Microbes is too important to leave to politicians or Adam Smith’s invisible hand.
In June 2020, former Senator Bill Frist appeared before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, reminding them he’d argued the need for this project fifteen years earlier.
‘I called for and had outlined “a greater than Manhattan Project for the 21st century” with no less than “the creation, with war-like concentration, of the ability to detect, identify and model any emerging or newly emerging infection, natural or otherwise; for the ability to engineer the immunization and cure, and to manufacture, distribute and administer whatever may be required to get it done and to get it done in time”,’ Frist told the Senate in his testimony.
‘We have a dangerously inadequate vaccine manufacturing base in the United States. This must be rectified. Bottom line: there’s so little profit and so much uncertainty in vaccine manufacturing today. We must establish longstanding public-private partnerships with industry that are sustained and are not at risk of disappearing with each [Congressional] appropriations cycle. We cannot expect the private sector to independently invest billions of dollars developing antivirals and vaccines for novel viruses that we hope we’ll never need to use. That’s not a sustainable business model.’
For some years to come, Frist asserted, this should be the chief work of the nation, ‘for the good reason that failing to make it so would be to risk the life of the nation’.
Whether this idea originated from Senator Frist is another matter. Dr Robert Kadlec, the ‘General Ripper’ behind this new Manhattan Project, was at that time the leading biosecurity official in President George W Bush’s administration. He was at the April 2005 National Academy of Sciences Pandemic Influenza Symposium where an unidentified participant called for funding for a Manhattan-like Project to protect against a pandemic, calling it an insurance policy.
But the groundwork for this Manhattan Project was being laid even earlier. In June 2001, two months before the 9/11 atrocity, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (CHS) held a table-top exercise it called Dark Winter, simulating a smallpox bioterrorism attack on the US orchestrated by Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda. Dr Tara O’Toole, who founded the CHS in 1998, was the principal designer of the exercise, butKadlec is credited with giving it its name. AColonel Randall Larsen, who’d hired Kadlec to work at the Air War College in the mid-1990s, was another designer of the exercise along with Tom Inglesby, the CHS’s current director.
Kadlec became the Homeland Security Director of Biosecurity Policy in January 2002 and soonafter attempted to restart the smallpox vaccination programme. In 2004, he launched Project Bioshield, a $5.6billion ten-year programme which created BARDA, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. This was intended to motivate US pharmaceutical companies to start developing biodefence products (medical countermeasures which are principally vaccines) ‘by providing a substantial guaranteed market, expediting governmental contracting practices and clarifying FDA regulatory requirements for products used in a public health emergency’.
Project Bioshield funding enabled the US government to stockpile smallpox and anthrax vaccines manufactured by the companies Bavarian Nordic and Emergent BioSolutions. Both companies and the industry lobby group Biotechnology Innovation Organization were amongst the funders of Kadlec’s Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense he founded ten years later, in 2014, when he was working as a paid consultant to Emergent BioSolutions.The company, founded by Fuad El-Hibri and originally known as BioPort Inc, purchased a vaccine factory and the rights to manufacture anthrax vaccine for the US military in 1998.
On his appointment as Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) in 2017, Kadlec failed to declare a conflict of interests on his ethics forms, that in 2012 he and El-Hibri had co-founded an international biodefence company called East West Solutions LLC or that he had been employed by Emergent BioSolutions as a consultant. https://www.help.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/05062020%20Kadlec%20Ethics%20Letter%20Updated%20signed%20pdf.pdf In September 2019, when Kadlec was ASPR and in control of the US national stockpile, Emergent BioSolutions was awarded a ten-year $2billion contract to replenish the US national stockpile of smallpox vaccine.
Emergent BioSolutions was later subcontracted to manufacture Covid vaccines for AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson in the US. However the company’s poor manufacturing standards led to a Congressional investigation being launched in 2021.
Since Covid, the ‘war on microbes’ has not let up: attention simply moved on to the next opportunity to promote a vaccine. Each outbreak seems to follow the oft-repeated pattern of having been preceded by a Strangelove-like situational simulation based on a fictional scenario. Outbreaks of disease, requiring the WHO to declare a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) and public health authorities to announce a vaccination campaign, have a strange knack of occurring soon after the simulation exercises, ensuring the public health community is well prepared in advance.
In December 2020, the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), whose interim vice president is the former US Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Hamburg, conducted a consultation with experts for a table top exercise on ‘reducing high-consequence biological threats’ in preparation for the exercise to run at the Munich Security Conference in March 2021. The scenario involved a fictitious monkeypox outbreak. Hamburg was herself a player in the June 2001 Dark Winter smallpox table top exercise and is a member of the Biodefense Commission. At the 2021 Munich monkeypox simulation she was joined by a familiar roster of biosecurity figures including the ubiquitous Sir Jeremy Farrar, his old friend George Gao, the then head of the China CDC, Dr Chris Elias of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, US Senator Sam Nunn who played the President in Dark Winter, Luc Debruyne, Vice President of CEPI, Dr Michael Ryan, Director of the WHO Emergencies Programme, with whom Anthony Fauci was in weekly contact in early 2020 during the time that Covid was escalated to a pandemic, and Arnaud Bernaert the WEF’s Head of Shaping the Future of Health and Health Care.
Bernaert, Gao and Elias were involved in Event 201, the coronavirus table top exercise co-sponsored by the Johns Hopkins Centre for Health Security, the Gates Foundation and the WEF in October 2019. In the WEF press release for Event 201 Bernaert said, ‘We are in a new era of epidemic risk, where essential public-private cooperation remains challenged, despite being necessary to mitigate risk and impact. Now is the time to scale up cooperation between national governments, key international institutions and critical industries, to enhance global capacity for preparedness and response.’
In May 2022, the WHO declared a monkeypox outbreak which was escalated to a full-scale Public Health Emergency of International Concern in July 2022. Bavarian Nordic, the Danish headquartered vaccine manufacturer belonging to a Washington-based consortium called the Alliance for Biosecurity, signed a contract with an unnamed European country to supply smallpox vaccines for use as a monkeypox vaccine. The company is a sponsor of Kadlec’s Biodefense Commission, and its largest shareholder is ATP, Denmark’s national pension fund. Other notable entities amongst its top five shareholders include Vanguard Asset Management and Norway’s sovereign wealth fund Norge Bank.
In Part 4 I will examine how Kadlec began preparations for his Manhattan Project two years before the 2016 US Presidential election.
This is the second part of a series in which Paula Jardine examines how the Covid vaccine programme was conceived by US defence planners nearly 20 years ago as a 21st century ‘Manhattan Project’ for biodefence. You can read Part 1 here.
THE name Robert Kadlec may mean nothing to you, but anyone who has watched Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War era satirical masterpiece Dr Strangelove will quickly get the idea of who this man is.
Colonel Kadlec is the General Ripper of the War on Microbes. It is no small irony that the Biodefense Commission that Kadlec set up in 2014 is funded by the Hudson Institute, which was co-founded by Herman Kahn, the Rand Corporation war gamer. Kahn’s theory that nuclear war could be deterred if the Soviet Union believed the United States had second strike capability was the inspiration for Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove character and the film.
Kadlecbegan his career as an Air Force physician before he diverted into the world of biological weapons during the first Gulf War of 1990-91. He became an intelligence analyst for the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) on chemical and biological weapons. He subsequently became a member of the UN Weapons Inspection team in Iraq led by Dr David Kelly, who was found dead in 2003.
Kadlec was later (2014) to tell the House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security that ‘while the United States was victorious in 1991, the scale and scope of Iraq’s biological weapons programme remained elusive despite the most intrusive inspection and monitoring regime ever conceived and implemented by the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM).’
No conclusive proof was ever found that Iraq had biological weapons, but testimony in 1995 from a defector, Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law Colonel General Hussein Kamel Hassan al-Majid, intelligence which was later assessed as being of limited content and value, maintained the belief of Kadlec and others that they did exist, providing the pretext for the 2003 Iraq War which removed Hussein from power. This belief was no doubt bolstered in part because in the 1980s the Iraqi Technical and Scientific Import Division had (quitelegally) bought samples of an anthrax strain developed by US germ warfare researchers at Fort Detrick, from the American Type Culture Collection, a non-profit organisation in Manassas, Virginia, that provides samples of bacteria and viruses for scientific study. (Arguably the absence of concrete evidence reinforced rather than diminished this belief in the graveness of the threat.)
Between 1993-96 Kadlec served on the US Delegation to the Biological Weapons Convention. His thinking on biowarfare is set out in his contribution to a 1995 Air War College book called Battlefield of the Future.
In it he argued that biological weapons are the poor nations’ nuclear bombs: they could be made cheaply and easily in facilities with other legitimate purposes, are invisible and, if aerosolised, could be spread over wide areas using an agricultural crop duster. His contention was that they uniquely offered the possibility of ‘plausible deniability’ to the perpetrators because pathogenic agents could be mistaken for naturally occurring epidemics. His particular concern was that vaccines, which are highly specific in what they protect against, take ten to 15 years to develop.
Wired magazine reported on the US military’s desire for genetic vaccines to make soldiers ‘immune to all known pathogens’ in 1996. As if that wasn’t enough of an aspirational Pandora’s Box, it also reported the military’s desire for the capability of targeting enemy leaders using genetically engineered super pathogens ‘so selective in their behaviour they’re capable of targeting specific individuals, verifying their identities by means of their DNA sequences’.
It was immediately after 9/11 in 2001 thatKadlec became a special adviser to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and subsequently appointed Director of Biosecurity Policy in the Homeland Security Department of President George W Bush, where he drafted a document calledNational Biodefense Policy for the 21st Century. This, in April 2004, became the Homeland Security Presidential Policy Directive 10. Kadlec wrote that theUnited States ‘will continue to use all means necessary to prevent, protect against, and mitigate biological weapons attacks perpetrated against our homeland and our global interests’.
Speaking about the need for a Homeland Biosecurity Policy,President G W Bush said: ‘Armed with a single vial of a biological agent, small groups of fanatics, or failing states, could gain the power to threaten great nations, threaten world peace. America, and the entire civilized world, will face this threat for decades to come. We must confront the danger with open eyes, and unbending purpose.’
Notably Kadlec’s 2018 update of this policy went much further. It declared the extraordinary intent to apply the US approach to countering weapons of mass destruction to all infectious disease outbreaks, naturally occurring or otherwise.
Returning to 2005, this was the year that saw Kadlec attending a National Academy of Sciences Symposium on Pandemic Influenza. This centred on the belief of American public health authorities thatthe recurrence of an influenza pandemic with high mortality was both inevitable and posed a grave threat to humanity. Becauseinfluenza rapidly mutates and is not usually particularly lethal it provideda good research model for biosecurity purposes, not to mention a useful tool for advancing policy objectives. The ubiquitous Imperial College London modeller Neil Ferguson told the symposium that disease containment required ‘a concerted international response – probably with teams on the ground chasing cases’, effectively laying the groundwork for ‘all means necessary’ not to stop at the US border.
Though the 1918 influenza pandemic was originally said to have been caused by H1N1 swine flu, today the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) says it was caused by ‘H1N1 with genes of avian origin’. This is based onUS Army researchers who claimed in 1999 to have fully sequenced ‘Spanish Influenza’ (using PCR) from autopsy samples taken in 1918 and a sample retrieved from a victim buried in permafrost since 1918. They said the illness was more closely related to avian flu than any mammalian species.
Ferguson’s modelling on avian flu was published in August 2005, claiming that ‘if targeted action is taken within a critical three-week window, then an outbreak could be limited to fewer than 100 individuals within two months’, but if unchecked up to 200million could die. This was just one of his wildly improbable and spectacularly wrong forecasts.
It was claimed that if bird flu mutated to more readily infect humans, the mortality rate would be more than 50 per cent. Bird flu, which first appeared in Thailand’s huge commercial poultry flocks, serendipitously appeared just as an eight-year marathon effort to have the World Health Assembly of the WHO agree key amendments to the International Health Regulations was coming to a close. The significance of these amendments, finally adopted in 2005, is that they included a new provision toenable the Director General to declare Public Health Emergencies of International Concern (PHEIC) on the recommendation of the WHO Emergency Committee. This mirrored the Public Health Emergency provision added to American public health law in 1983. Covid was declared a PHIEC by the WHO on January 30, 2020.
From 2003 to 2007, only 216 people died from bird flu. The threat and the headline fatality rate appear to have been overstated. Dr Nguyen Tuong Van of Hanoi’s Institute for Clinical Research, who treated some bird flu victims during the 2004 outbreak said, ‘Most people who die of bird flu are poor and not in the best physical condition in the first place.’
Jeremy Farrar’s 2004 paper on the Vietnamese outbreaks says rapid antigen testing was ‘less sensitive than PCR for diagnosis of influenza H5N1.’ Patients were given anti-viral drugs, mainly Tamiflu, which was developed by Gilead Sciences, a company chaired by Donald Rumsfeld, and almost all were mechanically ventilated, which itself elevates the mortality rate. Tamiflu may have been part of the problem. As a recent review of Tamiflu concludes: ‘A cocktail of pandemic panic, publicity propaganda, and scientific misconduct turned a new medicine with only modest efficacy into a blockbuster. It appears that the multiple regulatory checks and balances gave way as science lost its primacy and pharmaceutical enterprise lost no time in making the most of it.’
The 2005 WHO report Avian Influenza: Assessing the pandemic threat itself makes curious, and occasionally implausible, reading. According to this account, the ‘highly pathogenic’ bird flu, as it was usually described, was being spread asymptomatically by wild waterfowl (airborne bioterrorists to Kadlec’s way of thinking) to the small domestic free-range flocks kept by rural families in Asia, and that these birds were transmitting it to people. The real problem according to the business end of the report was that H5N1 bird flu was so ‘highly pathogenic’ that it was killing the chicken embryos used for flu vaccine manufacture. This made finding new methods of manufacturing them all the more desirable. Even better if these new methods could produce more vaccines, faster.
Another conundrum, Dr Jesse Goodman of the FDA told the NAS symposium, was the markets. ‘Markets – that is demand and sales – are the main drivers of manufacturing. No one is going to build factories just for a possible pandemic,’ he said.
The WHO had convened a meeting in November 2004 with all the major vaccine manufacturers to explore ways in which industry, regulatory authorities, governments, and WHO could collectively speed up the development of pandemic vaccines that could be made rapidly and in as large a quantity as possible. It was argued that wider use of seasonal vaccines would make the vaccines more commercially viable and the resulting increased production capacity would enable manufacturers to pivot production to pandemic strains whenever they should be needed.
Senator Bill Frist, the Republican Senate Majority leader at the time Kadlec was the leading bioterrorism expert in the Bush Jr Administration, full-throatedly echoed Kadlec’s thinking at the 2005 WEF at Davos, saying: ‘The greatest existential threat we have in the world today is biological. Why? Because unlike any other threat it has the power of panic and paralysis to be global.’ He also asserted: ‘We need to do something that even dwarfs the Manhattan Project,’ the codename for the US effort to devise an atomic weapon during the Second World War.
Next: Kadlec’s simulation exercises and his conflicts of interest.
In this series, Paula Jardine examines how the Covid vaccine programme was conceived by US defence planners nearly 20 years ago as a 21st century ‘Manhattan Project’ for biodefence.
WHEN Dominic Cummings testified before Parliament in June 2021 and he was asked about the UK Covid Vaccine taskforce, he said: ‘What Bill Gates and people like that said to me and others at No 10 was, “You need to think of this much more like some of the classic programmes of the past – the Manhattan Project in World War Two or the Apollo programme – and build it all in parallel. In normal Government accounting terms, that is completely crazy, because if nothing works out you have spent literally billions building all these things up, and the end result is nothing – you get zero for it, it’s all waste.’
Gates is the promoter, facilitator and profiteer-in-chief of the great vaccine Manhattan Project but he certainly isn’t the originator of it. The call for a biosecurity Manhattan Project dates back to the George W Bush administration.
On July 11, 2019, a think tank called the Biodefence Commission held a panel discussion entitled A Manhattan Project for Biodefence: Taking Biological Threats off the Table. The objective was to ‘create a national, public-private research and development undertaking to defend the United States against biological threats’.
Dr Robert Kadlec, the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) in the US Department of Health and Human Services (HSS) was a panellist. During the discussion Kadlec said, ‘It’s time to say “Go big, or go home” on this issue.’ Covid-19 gave him just the opportunity to implement this Manhattan Project as appears to have been intended.
Kadlec founded the Biodefense Commission in 2014 when he was a consultant to one of its donors, the vaccine manufacturer Emergent Biosolutions. The Hudson Institute, a think tank co-founded by Herman Kahn of the Rand Corporation, the pioneer of war gaming who was satirised as Dr Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick’s film of the same name, is the Commission’s fiscal sponsor.
On Wednesday December 4, 2019, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce held its annual hearing on US public health preparedness and response for seasonal and pandemic influenza. Testifying before it were Dr Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr Nancy Messonnier from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Dr Peter Marks from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Kadlec.
Seventy-six days earlier,on September 19, 2019, an Executive Order on Modernizing Influenza Vaccines in the United States to Promote National Security and Public Health had been signed by President Trump, directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), the CDC and the FDA to ‘accelerate the adoption of improved influenza vaccine technologies’. The Departments of Health and Human Services and the Department of Defense were to propose a plan and a budget for this effort within 120 days, in other words, before January 17, 2020.
The White House said: ‘Unfortunately, many of the vaccines we use today are produced overseas, using time-consuming, egg-based technology, which limits their effectiveness and makes production too slow to effectively combat a potential deadly influenza pandemic.’
Fauci may be the best known of the four witnesses but Kadlec is by far the most consequential. Kadlec, a retired US Air Force Colonel, and former Director of Biosecurity Policy in the George W Bush Administration, is the principal architect of 21st century US biosecurity policy. He said in his testimony: ‘ASPR’s mission is to save lives and protect Americans from 21st century health security threats.’
As a member of Bush’s Homeland Security Council he drafted the 2004 National Biodefense Policy for the 21st Century. He was the instigator behind the 2004 Project Bioshield Act that created a strategic national stockpile of anthrax and smallpox vaccines (manufactured by his Biodefense Commission’s funders). In 2005, as staff director to Senator Richard Burr’s Subcommittee on Bioterrorism, hedrafted the 2006 Pandemics and All-Hazards Preparedness Act (PAHPA, pronounced ‘Papa’). This act created the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) and the Assistant Secretary of Preparedness and Response (ASPR) position. The ASPR controls the national stockpile of smallpox and anthrax vaccines and otherpublic health emergency medical equipment such as ventilators. During emergencies this Assistant Secretary has expansive powers enabling him or her to act as the single point of control co-ordinating national response. Kadlec was confirmed as ASPRin August 2017 after being recommended to President Trump by Senator Burr.
At the December 4, 2019 meeting of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Kadlec was asked what his department was doing to enhance American manufacturing capacity. He said: ‘On the issue of vaccines alone, I think the key thing is, I can’t go into the particulars but we’re going to have an announcement here shortly that will indicate some investments domestically to expand some of our newer technologies for vaccine manufacturing and I think the key thing there is, we are actively pursuing this in accordance with the executive order.’
Fauci testified that pursuant to Trump’s executive order his agency, the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), was conducting and supporting research into new platform technologies including mRNA. Fauci said: ‘State-of-the-art technologies could be used to develop universal influenza vaccines as well as improve the speed and agility of influenza vaccine manufacturing.’
When Kadlec wasasked what the benefits were to the American people of investing in platform technologies such as mRNA he said: ‘The availability of such platform-based approaches would transform national preparedness against currently known threats as well as newly emerging threats in the future.’ Citing theASPR/BARDA funded development of a Zika vaccine made using mRNA technology he went on: ‘This technology has promise as a rapid platform for a number of infectious diseases, including influenza and novel diseases that may emerge in the future.
The Zika vaccine he referred to was being developed by Moderna, the US-based mRNA gene-therapy biotech. It didn’t have an influenza vaccine in development but it was actively working with Fauci’s NIAID to develop a ‘jointly owned coronavirus vaccine’. A prototype of this vaccine was sent to Dr Ralph Baric, the leading coronavirus expert who has worked collaboratively with Dr Shi Zhenghli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, for animal testing on December 17, 2019.
Moderna’s European rival BioNTechannounced in August 2018 that it was in collaboration with Pfizer todevelop an mRNA flu vaccine. It was aiming to move this from the preclinical stage to phase 1 trials by the end of 2020. Professor Dr Ugur Sahin, co-founder and CEO of BioNTech said: ‘A significant presence in infectious disease supports our goal of building a global immunotherapy company that provides more effective and precise immune-mediated approaches for the prevention and treatment of serious illnesses, such as the prevention of flu and the treatment of cancer.’
BioNTech diversified from developing cancer therapies – none of which was successfully licensed – into vaccines after a provision in a 2009EU directive intended to enable genetic engineered viruses to be used in vaccines was identified in 2016 and interpreted by them and others as a regulatory loophole enabling gene therapies directed at infectious diseases to circumvent the more stringent and onerous Advance Medicines Clinical Trials protocols. In 2020, this flu vaccine research was pivoted to Covid vaccine research.
Using this regulatory back door, both the UK Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) evaluated BioNTech’s mRNA Covid gene therapies as run-of-the-mill vaccines. The mRNA gene therapies contain no viruses; instead they genetically modify the recipient, reprogramming their cells to produce a protein from the virus that will stimulate their immune system to create a response against the virus, meaning the EU directive should not have been applicable.
During the launch of Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) at Davos in January 2017, Gates enthusiastically promoted mRNA vaccines. ‘Now there’s a new class of vaccine, DNA / RNA vaccine that we hope we can just change a small part of it, and so the manufacturing facility would already be there, the trials you would go through would be very quick. You would understand what end point, what correlate you want and so in an emergency, the regulators would understand what sort of protocol we’re going to use,’ said Gates.
‘With Ebola we had a scientific challenge that these platforms weren’t ready, we didn’t understand which country, what type of indemnity, and so there was a lot of fumbling around. It’s only by fixing those regulatory uncertainties and using these new platforms that we have a chance of getting that time to be less than a year.’
Gates’s foundation took an equity stake in BioNTech ahead of its October 2019 US stock market launch. When he was asked in 2017 about the danger of these platform vaccines making people less well, he said: ‘You are right that the safety threshold is really, really extremely high because we have to maintain the reputations of all the vaccines, convince parents in all these countries that these shots are really there to help your child out. Anything that you do to healthy people is going to have a tougher standard than, say, a new cancer drug, where if you don’t have the new drug, the outcome is going to be quite negative.’
This tougher standard was soon forgotten. The Pfizer/BioNTech product was pushed into use by the UK Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Authority (MHRA) on December 2, 2020 using a ‘compassionate use’ mechanism called a Temporary Use Authorisation to bypass the European regulator during the last month that the UK was under European Union law. MHRA reviewed only a few hundred pages of summary data, not the full dossier.
The FDA has a pathway for accelerated approval of ‘vaccines licensed in other countries with competent regulatory authorities.’ p21 Emergency Use Authorisation of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine as provided for under the 2004 Project Bioshield Act quickly followed in the US on December 11, 2020 and the European Medicines Authority (EMA) fell into line on December 21. Kadlec’s long-desired Manhattan Project was now detonating.
Part 2 of this series will focus on Dr Robert Kadlec, the principal planner of the US’s War on Microbes and of this biosecurity ‘Manhattan Project’.
It may seem strange to invite an economist to give a keynote speech to a conference of the social sciences. Economists have been characterized as autistic and anti-social in the popular press for good reason. They are trained to think abstractly and use a priori deduction – based on how they think societies should develop. Today’s mainstream economists look at neoliberal privatization and free-market ideals as leading society’s income and wealth to settle at an optimum equilibrium without any need for government regulation – especially not of credit and debt.
The only role acknowledged for government is to enforce the “sanctity of contracts” and “security of property.” By this they mean the enforcement of debt contracts, even when their enforcement expropriates large numbers of indebted homeowners and other property owners. That is the history of Rome. We are seeing the same debt dynamic at work today. Yet this basic approach has led mainstream economists to insist that civilization could and should have followed this pro-creditor policy from the very beginning.
The reality is that civilization could never have taken off if some free-market economist had got into a time machine and travelled back in time five thousand years to the Neolithic and Bronze Age. Suppose that he would have convinced ancient chieftains or rulers how to organize their trade, money and land tenure on the basis of “greed is good” and any public regulation is bad.
If some Milton Friedman or Margaret Thatcher had persuaded Sumerian, Babylonian or other ancient rulers to follow today’s neoliberal philosophy, civilization could not have developed. Economies would have polarized – as Rome did, and as today’s Western economies are doing. The citizens would have run away, or else backed a local reformer or revolutionist to overthrow the ruler who listened to such economic advice. Or, they would have defected to rival attackers who promised to cancel their debts, liberate the bondservants and redistribute the land.
Yet many generations of linguists, historians and even anthropologists have absorbed the economic discipline’s anti-social individualistic world view and imagine that the world must always have been this way. Many of these non-economists have unwittingly adopt their prejudices and approach ancient as well as modern history with a bias. Our daily discourse is so bombarded with the insistence by recent American politicians that the world is dividing between “democracy” with “free markets” and “autocracy” with public regulation that there is much fantasy at work about early civilization.
David Graeber and I have sought to expand the consciousness of how different the world was before Western Civilization took the Roman track of pro-creditor oligarchies instead of palatial economies protecting the interests of the indebted population at large. At the time he published his Debt: The First Five Thousand Years in 2011, my Harvard group of assyriologists, Egyptologists and archaeologists was still in the process of writing the economic history of the ancient Near East in a way that was radically different from how most of the public imagined it to have occurred. David’s and my emphasis on how royal Clean Slate proclamations cancelling debts, liberating bond-servants and redistributing the land were a normal and expected role of Mesopotamian rulers and Egyptian pharaohs was still not believed at that time. It seemed impossible that such Clean Slates were what preserved liberty for the citizenry.
David Graeber’s book summarized my survey of royal debt cancellation in the ancient Near East to show that interest-bearing debt originally was adopted with checks and balances to prevent it from polarizing society between creditors and debtors. In fact, he pointed out that the strains created by the emergence of monetary wealth in personal hands led to an economic and social crisis that shaped the emergence of the great religious and social reformers.
As he summarized “the core period of Jasper’s Axial age … corresponds almost exactly to the period in which coinage was invented. What’s more, the three parts of the world where coins were first invented were also the very parts of the world where those sages lived; in fact, they became the epicenters of Axial Age religious and philosophical creativity.” Buddha, Lao-Tzu and Confucius all sought to create a social context in which to embed the economy. There was no concept of letting “markets work” to allocate wealth and income without any idea of how wealth and income would be spent.
All ancient societies had a mistrust of wealth, above all monetary and financial wealth in creditor hands, because it generally tended to be accumulated at the expense of society at large. Anthropologists have found this to be a characteristic of low-income societies in general.
Toynbee characterized history as a long unfolding dynamic of challenges and responses to the central concerns that shape civilizations. The major challenge has been economic in character: who would benefit from the surpluses gained as trade and production increase in scale and become increasingly specialized and monetized. Above all, how would society organize the credit and debt that was necessary for specialization of economic activities to occur – and between “public” and “private” functions?
Nearly all early societies had a central authority in charge of distributing how the surplus was invested in a way that promoted overall economic welfare. The great challenge was to prevent credit leading to debts being paid in a way that impoverished the citizenry, e.g., through personal debt and usury – and more than temporary loss of freedom (from bondage or exile) or land tenure rights.
The great problem that the Bronze Age Near East solved – but classical antiquity and Western civilization have not solved – was how to cope with debts being paid – especially at interest without polarizing economies between creditors and debtors, and ultimately impoverishing the economy by reducing most of the population to debt dependency. Merchants engaged in trade, both for themselves and as agents for palace rulers. Who would get the profits? And how would credit be provided but kept in line with the ability to be paid?
Public vs. private theories of how land tenure originated
Ancient societies rested on an agricultural base. The first and most basic problem for society to solve was how to assign land tenure. Even families who lived in towns that were being built up around temples and civic ceremonial and administrative centers were allocated self-support land – much like Russians have dachas, where most of their food was grown in Soviet times.
In analyzing the origins of land tenure, like every economic phenomenon, we find two approaches. On the one hand is a scenario where land is allocated by the community in exchange for corvée labor obligations and service in the military. On the other hand is an individualistic scenario in which land tenure originated by individuals acting spontaneously by themselves clearing land, make it their own property and producing handicrafts or other products (even metal to use as money!) to exchange with each other.
This latter individualistic view of land tenure has been popularized ever since John Locke imagined individuals setting out to clear the land – apparently vacant wooded land – with their own labor (and presumably that of their wives). That effort established their ownership to it and its crop yield. Some families would have more land than others, either because they were stronger at clearing it or had a larger family to help them. And there was enough land for everyone to clear ground for planting crops.
In this view there is no need for any community to be involved, not even to protect themselves from miliary attack – or for mutual aid in times of flood or other problems. And there is no need for credit to be involved – although in antiquity that was the main lever distorting the distribution of land by transferring its ownership to wealthy creditors
At some point in history, to be sure, this theory sees governments enter the picture. Perhaps they took the form of invading armies, which is how the Norman ancestors of landlords in John Locke’s day acquired English land. And as in England, the rulers would have forced landholders to pay part of their crops in taxes and provide military service. In any case, the role of government was recognized only as “interfering” with the cultivator’s right to use the crop as he saw fit – presumably to trade for things that he needed, made by families in their own workshops.
My Harvard-sponsored group of assyriologists, Egyptologists and archaeologists have found an entirely different genesis of land tenure. Land rights seem to have been assigned in standardized plots in terms of their crop yield. To provide food for these community members, late Neolithic and early Bronze Age communities from Mesopotamia to Egypt allocated land to families in proportion to what they needed to live on and how much they could turn over to the palace authorities.
This tax yield turned over to palace collectors was the original economic rent. Land tenure came as part of a quid pro quo – with a fiscal obligation to provide labor services at designated times of the year, and to serve in the military. It thus was taxation that created land-tenure rights, not the other way around. Land was social in character, not individualistic. And government’s role was that of coordinator, organizer and forward planner, not merely predatory and extractive.
Public vs. private origins of money
How did early societies organize the exchange of crops for products – and most important, to pay taxes and debts? Was it simply a spontaneous world of individuals “trucking and bartering,” as Adam Smith put it? Prices no doubt would have varied radically as individuals had no basic reference to cost of production or degrees of need. What happened as some individuals became traders, taking what they produced (or other peoples’ products on consignment) to make a profit. If they traveled large distances, were caravans or ships needed – and the protection of large groups? Would such groups have been protected by their communities? Did supply and demand play a role? And most important, how did money emerge as a common denominator to set prices for what was traded – or paid in taxes and to settle debts?
A century after Adam Smith, the Austrian economist Anton Menger developed a fantasy about how and why ancient individuals may have preferred to hold their savings in the form of metals – mainly silver but also copper, bronze or gold. The advantage of metal was said to be that it did not spoil (in contrast to grain carried around in one’s pocket, for instance). It also was assumed to be of uniform quality. So pieces of metal money gradually became the medium by which other products came to be measured as they were bartered in exchange – in markets in which governments played no role at all!
The fact that this Austrian theory has been taught now for nearly a century and a half is an indication of how gullible economists are willing to accept a fantasy at odds with all historical records from everywhere in recorded world history. To start with, silver and other metals are not at all of uniform quality. Counterfeiting is age-old, but individualist theories ignore the role of fraud – and hence, the need for public authority to prevent it. That blind spot is why U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan was so unprepared to cope with the massive junk-mortgage bank crisis peaking in 2008. Wherever money is involved, fraud is omnipresent.
That’s what happens in unregulated markets – as we can see from today’s bank frauds, tax evasion and crime that pays very, very well. Without a strong government to protect society against fraud, lawbreaking, the use of force and exploitation, societies will polarize and become poorer. For obvious reasons the beneficiaries of these grabs seek to weaken regulatory power and the ability to prevent such grabitization.
To avoid monetary fraud, silver and subsequently gold coinage from Bronze Age Mesopotamia down through classical Greece and Rome was minted in temples to sanctify their standardized quality. That is why our word for money comes from Rome’s temple of Juno Moneta, where Rome’s coinage was struck. Thousands of years before bullion was coined, it was provided in metal strips, bracelets and other forms minted in temples, at standardized alloy proportions.
Purity of metals is not the only problem with using bullion money. The immediate problem that would have confronted anyone exchanging products for silver is how to weigh and measure what was being bought and sold – and also to pay taxes and debts. From Babylonia to the Bible we find denunciations against merchants using false weights and measures. Taxes involve a role of government, and in all archaic societies it was the temples that oversaw weights and measures as well as the purity of metallic metals. And the denomination of weights and measures indicate their origin in the public sector: fractions divided into 60ths in Mesopotamia, and 12ths in Rome.
Trade in basic essentials had standardized customary prices or payments to the palaces or temples. Taxes and debts were the most important used for money. That reflects the fact that “money” in the form of designated commodities was needed mainly to pay taxes or buy products from the palaces or temples and, at the end of the harvesting season, to pay debts to settle such purchases.
Today’s neoliberal economic mainstream has created a fairy tale about civilization existing without any regulatory oversight or productive role for government, and without any need to levy taxes to provide basic social services such as public construction or even service in the military. There is no need to prevent fraud, or violent seizure of property – or the forfeiture of land tenure rights to creditors as a result of debts. But as Balzac noted, most great family fortunes have been the result of some great theft, lost in the mists of time and legitimized over the centuries, as if it were all natural.
These blind spots are necessary to defend the idea of “free markets” controlled by the wealthy, above all by creditors. This is claimed to be for the best, and how society should be run. That is why today’s New Cold War is being fought by neoliberals against socialism – fought with violence, and by excluding the study of history from the academic economics curriculum and hence from the consciousness of the public at large. As Rosa Luxemburg put it, the fight is between socialism and barbarism.
Public vs. private origins of interest-bearing debt
Interest rates were regulated and stable for many centuries on end. The key was ease of calculation: 10th, 12th or 60th.
Babylonian scribes were trained to calculate any rate of interest as a doubling time. Debts grew exponentially; but scribal students also were taught that herds of cattle and other material economic output tapered off in an S-curve. That is why compound interest was prohibited. It also was why it was necessary to cancel debts periodically.
If rulers had not cancelled debts, the ancient world’s takeoff would have prematurely suffered the kind of decline and fall that impoverished Rome’s citizenry and led to the decline and fall of its Republic – leaving a legal system of pro-creditor laws to shape subsequent Western civilization.
What makes Western civilization distinctly Western? Has it all been a detour?
Civilization could not have developed if a modern Milton Friedman or kindred Economics Nobel Prize winner had gone back in time and convinced Hammurabi or the Egyptian pharaoh to just let individuals act by themselves and let wealthy creditors reduce debtors to bondage – and then to use their labor as an army to overthrow the kings and take over government for themselves, creating a Roman-style oligarchy. That is what Byzantine families tried to do in the 9th and 10th centuries.
If the “free enterprise” boys had their way there would have been no temple coinage or oversight of weights and measures. Land would belong to whomever could grab, foreclose on or conquer it. Interest would have reflected whatever a wealthy merchant could force a needy cultivator to pay. But to economists, everything that occurs is a matter of “choice.” As if there is no outright need – to eat or to pay.
An economic Nobel Prize was awarded to Douglass North for claiming that economic progress today and indeed throughout all history has been based on the “security of contracts” and property rights. By this he means the priority of creditor claims to foreclose on the property of debtors. These are the property rights to create latifundia and reduce populations to debt peonage.
No archaic civilization could have survived for long by following this path. And Rome did not survive by instituting what has become the distinguishing feature of Western Civilization: giving control of government and its lawmaking to a wealthy creditor class monopolizing the land and property.
If an ancient society had done this, economic life would have been impoverished. Most of the population would have run away. Or else, the Thatcherite/Chicago School elite would have been overthrown. The wealthy families that sponsored this grabitization would have been exiled, as occurred in many Greek cities in the 7th and 6th centuries BC. Or, discontented populations would have walked out and/or threatened to defect to foreign troops promising to free the bondservants, cancel their debts and redistribute the land, as occurred with Rome’s Secessions of the Plebs in the 5th and 4th centuries BC.
So we are brought back to David Graeber’s point that the great reformers of Eurasia rose at the same time that economies were becoming monetized and increasingly privatized – an epoch in which wealthy families were increasing their influence over how city-states were run. Not only the great religious reformers but the leading Greek philosophers, poets and dramatists explained how wealth is addictive, and leads to hubris that leads them to seek wealth in ways that injure others.
Looking over the sweep of ancient history, we can see that the main objective of rulers from Babylonia to South Asia and East Asia was to prevent a mercantile and creditor oligarchy from emerging and concentrating ownership of land in their own hands. Their implicit business plan was to reduce the population at large to clientage, debt bondage and serfdom.
That is what occurred in the West, in Rome. And we are still living in the aftermath. Throughout the West today, our legal system remains pro-creditor, not in favor of the indebted population at large. That is why personal debts, corporate debts, public debts and the international debts of Global South countries have mounted up to crisis conditions threatening to lock economies into a prolonged debt deflation and depression.
It was to protest this that David helped organize Occupy Wall Street. It is obvious that we are dealing not only with an increasingly aggressive financial sector, but that it has created a false history, a false consciousness designed to deter revolt by claiming that There Is No Alternative (TINA).
Where Western civilization went wrong
We have two diametrically opposed scenarios depicting how the most basic economic relationships came into being. On the one hand, we see Near Eastern and Asian societies organized to maintaining social balance by keeping debt relations and mercantile wealth subordinate to the public welfare. That aim characterized archaic society and non-Western societies.
But the Western periphery, in the Aegean and Mediterranean, lacked the Near Eastern tradition of “divine kingship” and Asian religious traditions. This vacuum enabled a wealthy creditor oligarchy to take power and concentrate land and property ownership in its own hands. For public relations purposes, it claimed to be a “democracy” – and denounced any protective government regulation as being, by definition, “autocracy.”
Western tradition indeed lacks a policy subordinating wealth to overall economic growth. The West has no strong government checks to prevent a wealth-addicted oligarchy from emerging to make itself into a hereditary aristocracy. Making debtors and clients into a hereditary class, dependent on wealthy creditors, is what todays economists call a “free market.” It is one without public checks and balances against inequality, fraud or privatization of the public domain.
It may seem amazing to some future historian that the political and intellectual leaders of today’s world hold such individualistic neoliberal fantasies that archaic society “should” have developed in this way – without recognizing that this is how Rome’s oligarchic Republic did indeed develop, leading to its inevitable decline and fall.
Bronze Age debt cancellations and modern cognitive dissonance
So we are led back to why I was invited to speak here today. David Graeber wrote in his Debt book that he was seeking to popularize my Harvard group’s documentation that debt cancellations did indeed exist and were not simply literary utopian exercises. His book helped make debt a public issue, as did his efforts in the Occupy Wall Street movement.
The Obama administration backed police breaking up the OWS encampments and did everything possible to destroy awareness of the debt problems plaguing the U.S. and foreign economies. And not only the mainstream media but also academic orthodoxy circled their wagons against even the thought that debts could be written down and indeed needed to be written down to prevent economies from falling into depression.
That neoliberal pro-creditor ethic is the root of today’s New Cold War. When President Biden describes this great world conflict aimed at isolating China, Russia, India, Iran and their Eurasian trading partners, he characterizes this as an existential struggle between “democracy” and “autocracy.”
By “democracy” he means oligarchy. And by “autocracy” he means any government strong enough to prevent a financial oligarchy from taking over government and society and imposing neoliberal rules – by force. The ideal is to make the rest of the world look like Boris Yeltsin’s Russia, where American neoliberals had a free hand in stripping away all public ownership of land, mineral rights and basic public utilities.
Syndicates trend to the extreme over time because, as their wares become worthless or evolve to become common fare inside the market, the syndicate must handle more and more exotic forms of commerce, in order to capitalize upon their real value.
When Prohibition ended in 1933, the extant bootleg networks did not simply say, ‘Well done everyone. We can all go home now.’ To the contrary, they escalated their game. The value of a syndicate after all resides not in its illicit product, but rather in the strength and reach of the syndicate itself.
Several years ago my firm had the good fortune to be engaged to survey regions of North Carolina and Virginia for candidate locations where a major sporting goods manufacturer might consider locating their regional operations. The optimization models had all been run, and as is common in this type of discrete optimization, the degrees of freedom on the answer were very forgiving in terms of geography. This simply meant that the company could locate really anywhere they wanted within reason – and further then base their location selection upon subjective and qualitative factors, not hard heuristic-academic math. Most academics fail to grasp the fact that this is how the preponderance of real life, business, and science works. One must actually go there, immerse themself in the subject and observe for a period of time – not simply sit in a cubicle running mildly inductive Bayesian statistics, before attempting to drive home a conclusion. We have long ago lost the ethic to go there, poke it with a stick, and keenly observe. This as much an outcome of our pseudo-intellectual cultural push, as it is a form of syndicated action in itself. But that is the subject of another article entirely.
Skepticism is unrelenting, disciplined, incremental, and critical path foolishness.
It is the eye of neutrality, inside the mercenary tempest of curious passion.I did not know. I went and looked. Everything else was vanity.
Now of course this style of community selection we execute on behalf of a client, involves balancing decision factors which include community demographic strength, existence of similar industry players, existence of a strong base of freight and rail carriers whose nodes are economically leveraged, the availability of higher and technical education, available and negotiated tiered state incentives, Right to Work laws, community lifestyle, along with the overall positive impact the new entity will have on the local community and its true rate of unemployment (not the fake ‘economic’ statistic).
Foremost in this decision process however, is an assessment as to the makeup and feel of the local populace. What are the people in the community like? What does the working class value? Who are their dependents? How many people will show up to interview for a new job opening and how often will the average successful applicant turnover in that type of position? Such evaluations can only be ascertained by having an experienced professional actually go there and gain a feel for the community. I was fortunate that, in this instance that professional was me.
When 400 people showed up to interview for the first ten job openings at the site which we ultimately elected to implement, I got a lump in my throat – taking the impact to heart. The community was starved of such development. Finally, more opportunity lay in store for young persons than simply a challenging career in crystal meth.
Consolidation and extraction of earnings to elite paper-trading cronies and The Party’s socialist taxmasters, requires no business or governance skills at all. This is not ‘capitalism’, nor is it democracy. These are simply the unethical, nay diabolical actions of detached, hidden, and unaccountable Royalty. A syndicate itself, and nothing more.
The despair of a nation subject to such unethical Archons, is both palpable and measurable in terms of innocent lives.
Accordingly, I took 7 days to travel through the region and gain a feel for several candidate communities the team had identified. In order to protect the confidential nature of the expansion strategy my team had just developed for this client, I elected to tour the countryside under the auspices of ‘looking for good places to fly fish’. Although unlike my grandfather who taught me to tie flies and fly fish, I did not bear the rough-hewn hands of a fly fisherman. I was hoping to recapture that past hobby nonetheless. This constituted disinformation of course, in that while it was indeed true, it was not the ‘whole truth’. The whole truth in fact, was that I had been bound by a non-disclosure agreement with the client, from surrendering the whole truth in the first place.
Bootlegging’s Legacy
It was during this journey that I bore the good fortune of staying at an Inn in Saluda, North Carolina called The Orchard Inn. Originally built by the Brotherhood of Clerks for Southern Railway in 1926, the farm-house style lodging named ‘The Mountain Home of Southern Railway Clerks’ was purportedly created as a “summer getaway for railroad employees and their families.” Although lacking actual accommodation for ‘families’ at the time, the lodge was also a convenient staging point around and respite from alcohol and spirits Prohibition laws which had been enacted under the Volstead Act in January of 1919.1 Both the Inn’s location along a famous Bootlegging Highway (Hwy 176 from South Carolina and into North Carolina, along which resides the infamous ‘dead-man’s curve’) and the fact that the lowest level of the lodge consisted of a series of garage doors to conceal and protect bootleg vehicles overnight, were no accident. The Inn is now reputed to be haunted, and possibly even circumstantially connected with several murders in the area, ‘back in the day’.
The Clerks’ Inn is now this elegant mountain retreat called The Orchard Inn (depicted by the color sketch at the top of this article), and is on the National Register of Historic Places.2 The proprietors of the Inn were gracious enough to stay up late with my curious self, and expound upon the entire history of the Inn, replete with old black and white photos of the lodge as it had transitioned through the last nine decades. The night air was cool and of low humidity, making our time on the outside wrap around deck rather enjoyable. My stay at the Inn was both a wonderful and informative experience. The community of Saluda itself ranked highly on our list of final candidates for my client’s regional operations and offices.
Daniel Okrent, in his book ‘Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition’, outlines that once Prohibition was repealed in 1933, very few bootleggers were actually released from prison. In fact, most of these mafia, syndicate, and graft network members were imprisoned for trafficking more than simply booze.3 In the end, the bootlegging networks themselves became the further genesis of mafia and finally drug dealing networks of today. You see, it was never about the ‘product’ in the first place. It is always indeed about the syndicate.
The paradox and point of this article resides in the following principle. The value of a syndicate is never in the product they hawk. The value of the syndicate resides in the strength, reach, and bribed benefactors of the syndicate itself. Once its product becomes accepted or moot, then the syndicate must graduate to even more extreme goods, more extreme forms, and even more extremist agenda. In actuality, they could care less about the people or causes they exploit for gain in this masquerade. Their ’causes’ are simply prima facie. After all, they are there to develop and groom the basis of power for their mafia, their party, their agency.
The syndicate soon realizes that it must escalate from alcohol to drugs, from tax evasion to money laundering, from faith to proscription, from freedom to fanaticism, from registration to control to embargo, from administration of standards to cartel activity, from mercy to profiting from trauma, from pharmaceuticals to removal of human rights, from profit to extraction, from choice to compulsion, from billionaire to trillionaire, from strip clubs to child pornography and sex trafficking, or from equal rights for all, to the moral supremacy of anyone who promotes aberrant behavior – no matter how harmful may be their difference of choice.
The syndicate is performing a puppeteer act for your amazement. They could care less about any of the causes or victims they adorn as badge-of-honor. That is why any form of extremism, the next shocking thing, will always suffice.
This is what a syndicate does after all, it escalates to the extreme as a reaction in keeping with its need to wrest and maintain power from out of the hands of a constitutionally represented populace. Such pretense constitutes our current state as a nation. As an ethical skeptic, I oppose rule by mafia, syndicate, cathedral, cabal, cartel, and finally and especially, The Party.
There was a dream which was America. This is not it. This is …not …it.
The COVID-19 pandemic is one of the most manipulated infectious disease events in history, characterized by official lies in an unending stream lead by government bureaucracies, medical associations, medical boards, the media, and international agencies.[3,6,57] We have witnessed a long list of unprecedented intrusions into medical practice, including attacks on medical experts, destruction of medical careers among doctors refusing to participate in killing their patients and a massive regimentation of health care, led by non-qualified individuals with enormous wealth, power and influence.
For the first time in American history a president, governors, mayors, hospital administrators and federal bureaucrats are determining medical treatments based not on accurate scientifically based or even experience based information, but rather to force the acceptance of special forms of care and “prevention”—including remdesivir, use of respirators and ultimately a series of essentially untested messenger RNA vaccines. For the first time in history medical treatment, protocols are not being formulated based on the experience of the physicians treating the largest number of patients successfully, but rather individuals and bureaucracies that have never treated a single patient—including Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, EcoHealth Alliance, the CDC, WHO, state public health officers and hospital administrators.[23,38]
The media (TV, newspapers, magazines, etc), medical societies, state medical boards and the owners of social media have appointed themselves to be the sole source of information concerning this so-called “pandemic”. Websites have been removed, highly credentialed and experienced clinical doctors and scientific experts in the field of infectious diseases have been demonized, careers have been destroyed and all dissenting information has been labeled “misinformation” and “dangerous lies”, even when sourced from top experts in the fields of virology, infectious diseases, pulmonary critical care, and epidemiology. These blackouts of truth occur even when this information is backed by extensive scientific citations from some of the most qualified medical specialists in the world.[23] Incredibly, even individuals, such as Dr. Michael Yeadon, a retired ex-Chief Scientist, and vice-president for the science division of Pfizer Pharmaceutical company in the UK, who charged the company with making an extremely dangerous vaccine, is ignored and demonized. Further, he, along with other highly qualified scientists have stated that no one should take this vaccine.
Dr. Peter McCullough, one of the most cited experts in his field, who has successfully treated over 2000 COVID patients by using a protocol of early treatment (which the so-called experts completely ignored), has been the victim of a particularly vicious assault by those benefiting financially from the vaccines. He has published his results in peer reviewed journals, reporting an 80% reduction in hospitalizations and a 75% reduction in deaths by using early treatment.[44] Despite this, he is under an unrelenting series of attacks by the information controllers, none of which have treated a single patient.
Neither Anthony Fauci, the CDC, WHO nor any medical governmental establishment has ever offered any early treatment other than Tylenol, hydration and call an ambulance once you have difficulty breathing. This is unprecedented in the entire history of medical care as early treatment of infections is critical to saving lives and preventing severe complications. Not only have these medical organizations and federal lapdogs not even suggested early treatment, they attacked anyone who attempted to initiate such treatment with all the weapons at their disposal—loss of license, removal of hospital privileges, shaming, destruction of reputations and even arrest.[2]
A good example of this outrage against freedom of speech and providing informed consent information is the recent suspension by the medical board in Maine of Dr. Meryl Nass’ medical license and the ordering of her to undergo a psychiatric evaluation for prescribing Ivermectin and sharing her expertise in this field.[9,65] I know Dr, Nass personally and can vouch for her integrity, brilliance and dedication to truth. Her scientific credentials are impeccable. This behavior by a medical licensing board is reminiscent of the methodology of the Soviet KGB during the period when dissidents were incarcerated in psychiatric gulags to silence their dissent.
OTHER UNPRECEDENTED ATTACKS
Another unprecedented tactic is to remove dissenting doctors from their positions as journal editors, reviewers and retracting of their scientific papers from journals, even after these papers have been in print. Until this pandemic event, I have never seen so many journal papers being retracted— the vast majority promoting alternatives to official dogma, especially if the papers question vaccine safety. Normally a submitted paper or study is reviewed by experts in the field, called peer review. These reviews can be quite intense and nit picking in detail, insisting that all errors within the paper be corrected before publication. So, unless fraud or some other major hidden problem is discovered after the paper is in print, the paper remains in the scientific literature.
We are now witnessing a growing number of excellent scientific papers, written by top experts in the field, being retracted from major medical and scientific journals weeks, months and even years after publication. A careful review indicates that in far too many instances the authors dared question accepted dogma by the controllers of scientific publications—especially concerning the safety, alternative treatments or efficacy of vaccines.[12,63] These journals rely on extensive adverting by pharmaceutical companies for their revenue. Several instances have occurred where powerful pharmaceutical companies exerted their influence on owners of these journals to remove articles that in any way question these companies’ products.[13,34,35]
Worse still is the actual designing of medical articles for promoting drugs and pharmaceutical products that involve fake studies, so-called ghostwritten articles.[49,64] Richard Horton is quoted by the Guardian as saying “journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.”[13,63] Proven fraudulent “ghostwritten” articles sponsored by pharmaceutical giants have appeared regularly in top clinical journals, such as JAMA, and New England Journal of Medicine—never to be removed despite proven scientific abuse and manipulation of data.[49,63]
Ghostwritten articles involve using planning companies whose job it is to design articles containing manipulated data to support a pharmaceutical product and then have these articles accepted by high-impact clinical journals, that is, the journals most likely to affect clinical decision making of doctors. Further, they supply doctors in clinical practice with free reprints of these manipulated articles. The Guardian found 250 companies engaged in this ghostwriting business. The final step in designing these articles for publication in the most prestigious journals is to recruit well recognized medical experts from prestigious institutions, to add their name to these articles. These recruited medical authors are either paid upon agreeing to add their name to these pre- written articles or they do so for the prestige of having their name on an article in a prestigious medical journal.[11]
Of vital importance is the observation by experts in the field of medical publishing that nothing has been done to stop this abuse. Medical ethicists have lamented that because of this widespread practice “you can’t trust anything.” While some journals insist on disclosure information, most doctors reading these articles ignore this information or excuse it and several journals make disclosure more difficult by requiring the reader to find the disclosure statements at another location. Many journals do not police such statements and omissions by authors are common and without punishment.
As concerns the information made available to the public, virtually all the media is under the control of these pharmaceutical giants or others who are benefitting from this “pandemic”. Their stories are all the same, both in content and even wording. Orchestrated coverups occur daily and massive data exposing the lies being generated by these information controllers are hidden from the public. All data coming over the national media (TV, newspaper and magazines), as well as the local news you watch every day, comes only from “official” sources—most of which are lies, distortions or completely manufactured out of whole cloth—all aimed to deceive the public.
Television media receives the majority of its advertising budget from the international pharmaceutical companies—this creates an irresistible influence to report all concocted studies supporting their vaccines and other so-called treatments.[14] In 2020 alone the pharmaceutical industries spent 6.56 billion dollars on such advertising.[13,14] Pharma TV advertising amounted to 4.58 billion, an incredible 75% of their budget. That buys a lot of influence and control over the media. World famous experts within all fields of infectious diseases are excluded from media exposure and from social media should they in any way deviate against the concocted lies and distortions by the makers of these vaccines. In addition, these pharmaceutical companies spend tens of millions on social media advertising, with Pfizer leading the pack with $55 million in 2020.[14]
While these attacks on free speech are terrifying enough, even worse is the virtually universal control hospital administrators have exercised over the details of medical care in hospitals. These hirelings are now instructing doctors which treatment protocols they will adhere to and which treatments they will not use, no matter how harmful the “approved” treatments are or how beneficial the “unapproved” treatments are.[33,57]
Never in the history of American medicine have hospital administrators dictated to its physicians how they will practice medicine and what medications they can use. The CDC has no authority to dictate to hospitals or doctors concerning medical treatments. Yet, most physicians complied without the slightest resistance.
The federal Care Act encouraged this human disaster by offering all US hospitals up to 39,000 dollars for each ICU patient they put on respirators, despite the fact that early on it was obvious that the respirators were a major cause of death among these unsuspecting, trusting patients. In addition, the hospitals received 12,000 dollars for each patient that was admitted to the ICU—explaining, in my opinion and others, why all federal medical bureaucracies (CDC, FDA, NIAID, NIH, etc) did all in their power to prevent life- saving early treatments.[46] Letting patients deteriorate to the point they needed hospitalization, meant big money for all hospitals. A growing number of hospitals are in danger of bankruptcy, and many have closed their doors, even before this “pandemic”.[50] Most of these hospitals are now owned by national or international corporations, including teaching hospitals.[10]
It is also interesting to note that with the arrival of this “pandemic” we have witnessed a surge in hospital corporate chains buying up a number of these financially at-risk hospitals.[1,54] It has been noted that billions in Federal Covid aid is being used by these hospital giants to acquire these financially endangered hospitals, further increasing the power of corporate medicine over physician independence. Physicians expelled from their hospitals are finding it difficult to find other hospitals staffs to join since they too may be owned by the same corporate giant. As a result, vaccine mandate policies include far larger numbers of hospital employees. For example, Mayo Clinic fired 700 employees for exercising their right to refuse a dangerous, essentially untested experimental vaccine.[51,57] Mayo Clinic did this despite the fact that many of these employees worked during the worst of the epidemic and are being fired when the Omicron variant is the dominant strain of the virus, has the pathogenicity of a common cold for most and the vaccines are ineffective in preventing the infection.
In addition, it has been proven that the vaccinated asymptomatic person has a nasopharyngeal titer of the virus as high as an infected unvaccinated person. If the purpose of the vaccine mandate is to prevent viral spread among the hospital staff and patients, then it is the vaccinated who present the greatest risk of transmission, not the unvaccinated. The difference is that a sick unvaccinated person would not go to work, the asymptomatic vaccinated spreader will.
What we do know is that major medical centers, such as Mayo Clinic, receive tens of millions of dollars in NIH grants each year as well as monies from the pharmaceutical makers of these experimental “vaccines”. In my view, that is the real consideration driving these policies. If this could be proven in a court of law the administrators making these mandates should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and sued by all injured parties.
The hospital bankruptcy problem has grown increasingly acute due to hospitals vaccine mandates and resulting large number of hospitals staff, especially nurses, refusing to be forcibly vaccinated.[17,51] This is all unprecedented in the history of medical care. Doctors within hospitals are responsible for the treatment of their individual patients and work directly with these patients and their families to initiate these treatments. Outside organizations, such as the CDC, have no authority to intervene in these treatments and to do so exposes the patients to grave errors by an organization that has never treated a single COVID-19 patient.
When this pandemic started, hospitals were ordered by the CDC to follow a treatment protocol that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of patients, most of whom would have recovered had proper treatments been allowed.[43,44] The majority of these deaths could have been prevented had doctors been allowed to use early treatment with such products as Ivermectin, hydroxy-chloroquine and a number of other safe drugs and natural compounds. It has been estimated, based on results by physicians treating the most covid patients successfully, that of the 800,000 people that we are told died from Covid, 640,000 could have not only been saved, but could have, in many cases, returned to their pre-infection health status had mandated early treatment with these proven methods been used. This neglect of early treatment constitutes mass murder. That means 160,000 would have actually died, far less than the number dying at the hands of bureaucracies, medical associations and medical boards that refused to stand up for their patients. According to studies of early treatment of thousands of patients by brave, caring doctors, seventy-five to eighty percent of the deaths could have been prevented.[43,44]
Incredibly, these knowledgeable doctors were prevented from saving these Covid-19 infected people. It should be an embarrassment to the medical profession that so many doctors mindlessly followed the deadly protocols established by the controllers of medicine.
One must also keep in mind that this event never satisfied the criteria for a pandemic. The World Health Organization changed the criteria to make this a pandemic. To qualify for a pandemic status the virus must have a high mortality rate for the vast majority of people, which it didn’t (with a 99.98% survival rate), and it must have no known existing treatments—which this virus had—in fact, a growing number of very successful treatments.
The draconian measures established to contain this contrived “pandemic” have never been shown to be successful, such as masking the public, lockdowns, and social distancing. A number of carefully done studies during previous flu seasons demonstrated that masks, of any kind, had never prevented the spread of the virus among the public.[60]
In fact, some very good studies suggested that the masks actually spread the virus by giving people a false sense of security and other factors, such as the observation that people were constantly breaking sterile technique by touching their mask, improper removal and by leakage of infectious aerosols around the edges of the mask. In addition masks were being disposed of in parking lots, walking trails, laid on tabletops in restaurants and placed in pockets and purses.
Within a few minutes of putting on the mask, a number of pathogenic bacteria can be cultured from the masks, putting the immune suppressed person at a high risk of bacterial pneumonia and children at a higher risk of meningitis.[16] A study by researchers at the University of Florida cultured over 11 pathogenic bacteria from the inside of the mask worn by children in schools.[40]
It was also known that children were at essentially no risk of either getting sick from the virus or transmitting it.
In addition, it was also known that wearing a mask for over 4 hours (as occurs in all schools) results in significant hypoxia (low blood oxygen levels) and hypercapnia (high CO2 levels), which have a number of deleterious effects on health, including impairing the development of the child’s brain.[4,72,52]
We have known that brain development continues long after the grade school years. A recent study found that children born during the “pandemic” have significantly lower IQs—yet school boards, school principals and other educational bureaucrats are obviously unconcerned.[18]
TOOLS OF THE INDOCTRINATION TRADE
The designers of this pandemic anticipated a pushback by the public and that major embarrassing questions would be asked. To prevent this, the controllers fed the media a number of tactics, one of the most commonly used was and is the “fact check” scam. With each confrontation with carefully documented evidence, the media “fact checkers” countered with the charge of “misinformation”, and an unfounded “conspiracy theory” charge that was, in their lexicon, “debunked”. Never were we told who the fact checkers were or the source of their “debunking” information—we were just to believe the “fact checkers”. A recent court case established under oath that facebook “fact checkers” used their own staff opinion and not real experts to check “facts”.[59] When sources are in fact revealed they are invariably the corrupt CDC, WHO or Anthony Fauci or just their opinion. Here is a list of things that were labeled as “myths” and “misinformation” that were later proven to be true.
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The asymptomatic vaccinated are spreading the virus equally as with unvaccinated symptomatic infected.
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The vaccines cannot protect adequately against new variants, such as Delta and Omicron.
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Natural immunity is far superior to vaccine immunity and is most likely lifelong.
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Vaccine immunity not only wanes after several months, but all immune cells are impaired for prolonged periods, putting the vaccinated at a high risk of all infections and cancer.
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COVID vaccines can cause a significant incidence of blood clots and other serious side effects
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The vaccine proponents will demand numerous boosters as each variant appears on the scene.
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Fauci will insist on the covid vaccine for small children and even babies.
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Vaccine passports will be required to enter a business, fly in a plane, and use public transportation
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There will be internment camps for the unvaccinated (as in Australia, Austria and Canada)
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The unvaccinated will be denied employment.
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There are secret agreements between the government, elitist institutions, and vaccine makers
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Many hospitals were either empty or had low occupancy during the pandemic.
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The spike protein from the vaccine enters the nucleus of the cell, altering cell DNA repair function.
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Hundreds of thousands have been killed by the vaccines and many times more have been permanently damaged.
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Early treatment could have saved the lives of most of the 700,000 who died.
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Vaccine-induced myocarditis (which was denied initially) is a significant problem and clears over a short period.
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Special deadly lots (batches) of these vaccines are mixed with the mass of other Covid-19 vaccines
Several of these claims by those opposing these vaccines now appear on the CDC website—most still identified as “myths”. Today, extensive evidence has confirmed that each of these so-called “myths” were in fact true. Many are even admitted by the “saint of vaccines”, Anthony Fauci. For example, we were told, even by our cognitively impaired President, that once the vaccine was released all the vaccinated people could take off their masks. Oops! We were told shortly afterward— the vaccinated have high concentrations (titers) of the virus in their noses and mouths (nasopharynx) and can transmit the virus to others in which they come into contact—especially their own family members. On go the masks once again— in fact double masking is recommended. The vaccinated are now known to be the main superspreaders of the virus and hospitals are filled with the sick vaccinated and people suffering from serious vaccine complications.[27,42,45]
Another tactic by the vaccine proponents is to demonize those who reject being vaccinated for a variety of reasons. The media refers to these critically thinking individuals as “anti-vaxxers”, “vaccine deniers”, “Vaccine resisters”, “murders”, “enemies of the greater good” and as being the ones prolonging the pandemic. I have been appalled by the vicious, often heartless attacks by some of the people on social media when a parent or loved one relates a story of the terrible suffering and eventual death, they or their loved one suffered as a result of the vaccines. Some psychopaths tweet that they are glad that the loved one died or that the dead vaccinated person was an enemy of good for telling of the event and should be banned. This is hard to conceptualize. This level of cruelty is terrifying, and signifies the collapse of a moral, decent, and compassionate society.
It is bad enough for the public to sink this low, but the media, political leaders, hospital administrators, medical associations and medical licensing boards are acting in a similar morally dysfunctional and cruel way.
LOGIC, REASONING, AND SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE HAS DISAPPEARED IN THIS EVENT
Has scientific evidence, carefully done studies, clinical experience and medical logic had any effect on stopping these ineffective and dangerous vaccines? Absolutely not! The draconian efforts to vaccinate everyone on the planet continues (except the elite, postal workers, members of Congress and other insiders).[31,62]
In the case of all other drugs and previous conventional vaccines under review by the FDA, the otherwise unexplained deaths of 50 or less individuals would result in a halt in further distribution of the product, as happened on 1976 with the swine flu vaccine. With over 18,000 deaths being reported by the VAERS system for the period December 14, 2020 and December 31st, 2021 as well as 139,126 serious injuries (including deaths) for the same period there is still no interest in stopping this deadly vaccine program.[61] Worse, there is no serious investigation by any government agency to determine why these people are dying and being seriously and permanently injured by these vaccines.[15,67] What we do see is a continuous series of coverups and evasions by the vaccine makers and their promoters.
The war against effective cheap and very safe repurposed drugs and natural compounds, that have proven beyond all doubt to have saved millions of lives all over the world, has not only continued but has stepped up in intensity.[32,34,43]
Doctors are told they cannot provide these life-saving compounds for their patients and if they do, they will be removed from the hospital, have their medical license removed or be punished in many other ways. A great many pharmacies have refused to fill prescriptions for lvermectin or hydroxy- chloroquine, despite the fact that millions of people have taken these drugs safely for over 60 years in the case of hydroxy chloroquine and decades for Ivermectin.[33,36] This refusal to fill prescriptions is unprecedented and has been engineered by those wanting to prevent alternative methods of treatment, all based on protecting vaccine expansion to all. Several companies that make hydroxy chloroquine agreed to empty their stocks of the drug by donating them to the Strategic National Stockpile, making this drug far more difficult to get.[33] Why would the government do that when over 30 well-done studies have shown that this drug reduced deaths anywhere from 66% to 92% in other countries, such as India, Egypt, Argentina, France, Nigeria, Spain, Peru, Mexico, and others?[23]
The critics of these two life-saving drugs are most often funded by Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci, both of which are making millions from these vaccines.[48,15]
To further stop the use of these drugs, the pharmaceutical industry and Bill Gates/Anthony Fauci funded fake research to make the case that hydroxy chloroquine was a dangerous drug and could damage the heart.[34] To make this fraudulent case the researchers administered the sickest of covid patients a near lethal dose of the drug, in a dose far higher than used on any covid patient by Dr. Kory, McCullough and other “real”, and compassionate doctors, physicians who were actually treating covid patients.[23]
The controlled, lap-dog media, of course, hammered the public with stories of the deadly effect of hydroxy- chloroquine, all with a terrified look of fake panic. All these stories of ivermectin dangers were shown to be untrue and some of the stories were incredibly preposterous.[37,43]
The attack on Ivermectin was even more vicious than against hydroxy-chloroquine. All of this, and a great deal more is meticulously chronicled in Robert Kennedy, Jr’s excellent new book—The Real Anthony Fauci. Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.[32] If you are truly concerned with the truth and with all that has occurred since this atrocity started, you must not only read, but study this book carefully. It is fully referenced and covers all topics in great detail. This is a designed human tragedy of Biblical proportions by some of the most vile, heartless, psychopaths in history.
Millions have been deliberately killed and crippled, not only by this engineered virus, but by the vaccine itself and by the draconian measures used by these governments to “control the pandemic spread”. We must not ignore the “deaths by despair” caused by these draconian measures, which can exceed hundreds of thousands. Millions have starved in third world countries as a result. In the United States alone, of the 800,000 who died, claimed by the medical bureaucracies, well over 600,000 of these deaths were the result of the purposeful neglect of early treatment, blocking the use of highly effective and safe repurposed drugs, such as hydroxy-chloroquine and Ivermectin, and the forced use of deadly treatments such as remdesivir and use of ventilators. This does not count the deaths of despair and neglected medical care caused by the lockdown and hospital measures forced on healthcare systems.
To compound all this, because of vaccine mandates among all hospital personnel, thousands of nurses and other hospital workers have resigned or been fired.[17,30,51] This has resulted in critical shortages of these vital healthcare workers and dangerous reductions of ICU beds in many hospitals. In addition, as occurred in the Lewis County Healthcare System, a specialty-hospital system in Lowville, N.Y., closed its maternity unit following the resignation of 30 hospital staff over the state’s disastrous vaccine mandate orders. The irony in all these cases of resignations is that the administrators unhesitatingly accepted these mass staffing losses despite rantings about suffering from short staffing during a “crisis”. This is especially puzzling when we learned that the vaccines did not prevent viral transmission and the present predominant variant is of extremely low pathogenicity.
DANGERS OF THE VACCINES ARE INCREASINGLY REVEALED BY SCIENCE
While most researchers, virologists, infectious disease researchers and epidemiologists have been intimidated into silence, a growing number of high integrity individuals with tremendous expertise have come forward to tell the truth—that is, that these vaccines are deadly.
Most new vaccines must go through extensive safety testing for years before they are approved. New technologies, such as the mRNA and DNA vaccines, require a minimum of 10 years of careful testing and extensive follow-up. These new so-called vaccines were “tested” for only 2 months and then the results of these safety test were and continue to be kept secret. Testimony before Senator Ron Johnson by several who participated in the 2 months study indicates that virtually no follow-up of the participants of the pre-release study was ever done.[67] Complains of complications were ignored and despite promises by Pfizer that all medical expenses caused by the “vaccines” would be paid by Pfizer, these individuals stated that none were paid.[66] Some medical expenses exceed 100,000 dollars.
As an example of the deception by Pfizer, and the other makers of mRNA vaccines, is the case of 12-year-old Maddie de Garay, who participated in the Pfizer vaccine pre-release safety study. At Sen. Johnson’s presentation with the families of the vaccine injured, her mother told of her child’s recurrent seizures, that she is now confined to a wheelchair, must be tube fed and suffers permanent brain damage. On the Pfizer safety evaluation submitted to the FDA her only side effect is listed as having a “stomachache”. Each person submitted similar horrifying stories.
The Japanese resorted to a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) lawsuit to force Pfizer to release its secret biodistribution study. The reason Pfizer wanted it kept secret is that it demonstrated that Pfizer lied to the public and the regulatory agencies about the fate of the injected vaccine contents (the mRNA enclosed nano-lipid carrier). They claimed that it remained at the site of the injection (the shoulder), when in fact their own study found that it rapidly spread throughout the entire body by the bloodstream within 48 hours.
The study also found that these deadly nano-lipid carriers collected in very high concentrations in several organs, including the reproductive organs of males and females, the heart, the liver, the bone marrow, and the spleen (a major immune organ). The highest concentration was in the ovaries and the bone marrow. These nano-lipid carriers also were deposited in the brain.
Dr. Ryan Cole, a pathologist from Idaho reported a dramatic spike in highly aggressive cancers among vaccinated individuals, (not reported in the Media). He found a frighteningly high incidence of highly aggressive cancers in vaccinated individuals, especially highly invasive melanomas in young people and uterine cancers in women.[26] Other reports of activation of previously controlled cancers are also appearing among vaccinated cancer patients.[47] Thus far, no studies have been done to confirm these reports, but it is unlikely such studies will be done, at least studies funded by grants from the NIH.
The high concentration of spike proteins found in the ovaries in the biodistribution study could very well impair fertility in young women, alter menstruation, and could put them at an increased risk of ovarian cancer. The high concentration in the bone marrow, could also put the vaccinated at a high risk of leukemia and lymphoma. The leukemia risk is very worrisome now that they have started vaccinating children as young as 5 years of age. No long-term studies have been conducted by any of these makers of Covid-19 vaccines, especially as regards the risk of cancer induction. Chronic inflammation is intimately linked to cancer induction, growth and invasion and vaccines stimulate inflammation.
Cancer patients are being told they should get vaccinated with these deadly vaccines. This, in my opinion, is insane. Newer studies have shown that this type of vaccine inserts the spike protein within the nucleus of the immune cells (and most likely many cell types) and once there, inhibits two very important DNA repair enzymes, BRCA1 and 53BP1, whose duty it is to repair damage to the cell’s DNA.[29] Unrepaired DNA damage plays a major role in cancer.
There is a hereditary disease called xeroderma pigmentosum in which the DNA repair enzymes are defective. These ill-fated individuals develop multiple skin cancers and a very high incidence of organ cancer as a result. Here we have a vaccine that does the same thing, but to a less extensive degree.
One of the defective repair enzymes caused by these vaccines is called BRCA1, which is associated with a significantly higher incidence of breast cancer in women and prostate cancer in men.
It should be noted that no studies were ever done on several critical aspects of this type of vaccine.
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They have never been tested for long term effects
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They have never been tested for induction of autoimmunity
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They have never been properly tested for safety during any stage of pregnancy
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No follow-up studies have been done on the babies of vaccinated women
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There are no long-term studies on the children of vaccinated pregnant women after their birth (Especially as neurodevelopmental milestone occur).
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It has never been tested for effects on a long list of medical conditions:
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Diabetes
-
Heart disease
-
Atherosclerosis
-
Neurodegenerative diseases
-
Neuropsychiatric effects
-
Induction of autism spectrum disorders and schizophrenia
-
Long term immune function
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Vertical transmission of defects and disorders
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Cancer
-
Autoimmune disorders
-
Previous experience with the flu vaccines clearly demonstrates that the safety studies done by researchers and clinical doctors with ties to pharmaceutical companies were essentially all either poorly done or purposefully designed to falsely show safety and coverup side effects and complications. This was dramatically demonstrated with the previously mentioned phony studies designed to indicate that hydroxy Chloroquine and Ivermectin were ineffective and too dangerous to use.[34,36,37] These fake studies resulted in millions of deaths and severe health disasters worldwide. As stated, 80% of all deaths were unnecessary and could have been prevented with inexpensive, safe repurposed medications with a very long safety history among millions who have taken them for decades or even a lifetime.[43,44]
It is beyond ironic that those claiming that they are responsible for protecting our health approved a poorly tested set of vaccines that has resulted in more deaths in less than a year of use than all the other vaccines combined given over the past 30 years. Their excuse when confronted was—“we had to overlook some safety measures because this was a deadly pandemic”.[28,46]
In 1986 President Reagan signed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which gave blanket protection to pharmaceutical makers of vaccines against injury litigation by families of vaccine injured individuals. The Supreme Court, in a 57-page opinion, ruled in favor of the vaccine companies, effectively allowing vaccine makers to manufacture and distribute dangerous, often ineffective vaccines to the population without fear of legal consequences. The court did insist on a vaccine injury compensation system which has paid out only a very small number of rewards to a large number of severely injured individuals. It is known that it is very difficult to receive these awards. According to the Health Resources and Services Administration, since 1988 the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) has agreed to pay 3,597 awards among 19,098 vaccine injured individuals applying amounting to a total sum of $3.8 billion. This was prior to the introduction of the Covid-19 vaccines, in which the deaths alone exceed all deaths related to all the vaccines combined over a thirty-year period.
In 2018 President Trump signed into law the “right-to-try” law which allowed the use of experimental drugs and all unconventional treatments to be used in cases of extreme medical conditions. As we have seen with the refusal of many hospitals and even blanket refusal by states to allow Ivermectin, hydroxy-chloroquine or any other unapproved “official” methods to treat even terminal Covid-19 cases, these nefarious individuals have ignored this law.
Strangely, they did not use this same logic or the law when it came to Ivermectin and Hydroxy Chloroquine, both of which had undergone extensive safety testing by over 30 clinical studies of a high quality and given glowing reports on both efficacy and safety in numerous countries. In addition, we had a record of use for up to 60 years by millions of people, using these drugs worldwide, with an excellent safety record. It was obvious that a group of very powerful people in conjunction with pharmaceutical conglomerates didn’t want the pandemic to end and wanted vaccines as the only treatment option. Kennedy’s book makes this case using extensive evidence and citations.[14,32]
Dr. James Thorpe, an expert in maternal-fetal medicine, demonstrates that these covoid-19 vaccines given during pregnancy have resulted in a 50-fold higher incidence of miscarriage than reported with all other vaccines combined.[28] When we examine his graph on fetal malformations there was a 144-fold higher incidence of fetal malformation with the Covid-19 vaccines given during pregnancy as compared to all other vaccines combined. Yet, the American Academy of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology endorse the safety of these vaccines for all stages of pregnancy and among women breast feeding their babies.
It is noteworthy that these medical specialty groups have received significant funding from Pfizer pharmaceutical company. The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, just in the 4th quarter of 2010, received a total of $11,000 from Pfizer Pharmaceutical company alone.[70] Funding from NIH grants are much higher.[20] The best way to lose these grants is to criticize the source of the funds, their products or pet programs. Peter Duesberg, because of his daring to question Fauci’s pet theory of AIDS caused by HIV virus, was no longer awarded any of the 30 grant applications he submitted after going public. Prior to this episode, as the leading authority on retroviruses in the world, he had never been turned down for an NIH grant.[39] This is how the “corrupted” system works, even though much of the grant money comes from our taxes.
HOT LOTS—DEADLY BATCHES OF THE VACCINES
A new study has now surfaced, the results of which are terrifying.[25] A researcher at Kingston University in London, has completed an extensive analysis of the VAERs data (a subdepartment of the CDC which collects voluntary vaccine complication data), in which he grouped reported deaths following the vaccines according to the manufacturer’s lot numbers of the vaccines. Vaccines are manufactured in large batches called lots. What he discovered was that the vaccines are divided into over 20,000 lots and that one out of every 200 of these batches (lots) is demonstrably deadly to anyone who receives a vaccine from that lot, which includes thousands of vaccine doses.
He examined all manufactured vaccines—Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson and Johnson (Janssen), etc. He found that among every 200 batches of the vaccine from Pfizer and other makers, one batch of the 200 was found to be over 50x more deadly than vaccines batches from other lots. The other vaccine lots (batches) were also causing deaths and disabilities, but nowhere near to this extent. These deadly batches should have appeared randomly among all “vaccines” if it was an unintentional event. However, he found that 5% of the vaccines were responsible for 90% of the serious adverse events, including deaths. The incidence of deaths and serious complications among these “hot lots” varied from over 1000% to several thousand percent higher than comparable safer lots. If you think this was by accident—think again. This is not the first time “hot lots” were, in my opinion, purposefully manufactured and sent across the nation—usually vaccines designed for children. In one such scandal, “hot lots” of a vaccine ended up all in one state and the damage immediately became evident. What was the manufacture’s response? It wasn’t to remove the deadly batches of the vaccine. He ordered his company to scatter the hot lots across the nation so that authorities would not see the obvious deadly effect.
All lots of a vaccine are numbered—for example Modera labels them with such codes as 013M20A. It was noted that the batch numbers ended in either 20A or 21A. Batches ending in 20A were much more toxic than the ones ending in 21A. The batches ending in 20A had about 1700 adverse events, versus a few hundred to twenty or thirty events for the 21A batches. This example explains why some people had few or no adverse events after taking the vaccine while others are either killed or severely and permanently harmed. To see the researcher’s explanation, go to https://www.bitchute.com/video/6xIYPZBkydsu/ In my opinion these examples strongly suggest an intentional alteration of the production of the “vaccine” to include deadly batches.
I have met and worked with a number of people concerned with vaccine safety and I can tell you they are not the evil anti-vaxxers you are told they are. They are highly principled, moral, compassionate people, many of which are top researchers and people who have studied the issue extensively. Robert Kennedy, Jr, Barbara Lou Fisher, Dr. Meryl Nass, Professor Christopher Shaw, Megan Redshaw, Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, Dr. Joseph Mercola, Neil Z. Miller, Dr. Lucija Tomjinovic, Dr. Stephanie Seneff, Dr. Steve Kirsch and Dr. Peter McCullough just to name a few. These people have nothing to gain and a lot to lose. They are attacked viciously by the media, government agencies, and elite billionaires who think they should control the world and everyone in it.
WHY DID FAUCI WANT NO AUTOPSIES OF THOSE WHO DIED AFTER VACCINATION?
There are many things about this “pandemic” that are unprecedented in medical history. One of the most startling is that at the height of the pandemic so few autopsies, especially total autopsies, were being done. A mysterious virus was rapidly spreading around the world, a selected group of people with weakened immune systems were getting seriously ill and many were dying and the one way we could rapidly gain the most knowledge about this virus—an autopsy, was being discouraged.
Guerriero noted that by the end of April, 2020 approximately 150,000 people had died, yet there were only 16 autopsies performed and reported in the medical literature.[24] Among these, only seven were complete autopsies, the remaining 9 being partial or by needle biopsy or incisional biopsy. Only after 170,000 deaths by Covid-19 and four months into the pandemic were the first series of autopsies actually done, that is, more than ten. And only after 280,000 deaths and another month, were the first large series of autopsies performed, some 80 in number.[22] Sperhake, in a call for autopsies to be done without question, noted that the first full autopsy reported in the literature along with photomicrographs appeared in a medico-legal journal from China in February 2020.[41,68] Sperhake expressed confusion as to why there was a reluctance to perform autopsies during the crisis, but he knew it was not coming from the pathologists. The medical literature was littered with appeals by pathologist for more autopsies to be performed.[58] Sperhake further noted that the Robert Koch Institute (The German health monitoring system) at least initially advised against doing autopsies. He also knew that at the time 200 participating autopsy institutions in the United States had done at least 225 autopsies among 14 states.
Some have claimed that this dearth of autopsies was based on the government’s fear of infection among the pathologists, but a study of 225 autopsies on Covid-19 cases demonstrated only one case of infection among the pathologist and this was concluded to have been an infection contracted elsewhere.[19] Guerriero ends his article calling for more autopsies with this observation: “Shoulder to shoulder, clinical and forensic pathologists overcame the obstructions of autopsy studies in Covid-19 victims and hereby generated valuable knowledge on the pathophysiology of the interaction between the SARS-CoV-2 and the human body, thus contributing to our understanding of the disease.”[24]
Suspicion concerning the worldwide reluctance of nations to allow full post mortem studies of Covid-19 victims may be based on the idea that it was more than by chance. There are at least two possibilities that stand out. First, those leading the progression of this “non-pandemic” event into a perceived worldwide “deadly pandemic”, were hiding an important secret that autopsies could document. Namely, just how many of the deaths were actually caused by the virus? To implement draconian measures, such as mandated mask wearing, lockdowns, destruction of businesses, and eventually mandated forced vaccination, they needed very large numbers of covid-19 infected dead. Fear would be the driving force for all these destructive pandemic control programs.
Elder et al in his study classified the autopsy findings into four groups.[22]
- Certain Covid-19 death
- Probably Covid-19 death
- Possible Covid-19 death
- Not associated with Covid-19, despite the positive test.
What possibly concerned or even terrified the engineers of this pandemic was that autopsies just might, and did, show that a number of these so-called Covid-19 deaths in truth died of their comorbid diseases. In the vast majority of autopsy studies reported, pathologists noted multiple comorbid conditions, most of which at the extremes of life could alone be fatal. Previously it was known that common cold viruses had an 8% mortality in nursing homes.
In addition, valuable evidence could be obtained from the autopsies that would improve clinical treatments and could possibly demonstrate the deadly effect of the CDC mandated protocols all hospitals were required to follow, such as the use of respirators and the deadly, kidney-destroying drug remdesivir. The autopsies also demonstrated accumulating medical errors and poor-quality care, as the shielding of doctors in intensive care units from the eyes of family members inevitably leads to poorer quality care as reported by several nurses working in these areas.[53-55]
As bad as all this was, the very same thing is being done in the case of Covid vaccine deaths—very few complete autopsies have been done to understand why these people died, that is, until recently. Two highly qualified researchers, Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi a microbiologist and highly qualified expert in infectious disease and Dr. Arne Burkhardt, a pathologist who is a widely published authority having been a professor of pathology at several prestigious institutions, recently performed autopsies on 15 people having died after vaccination. What they found explains why so many are dying and experiencing organ damage and deadly blood clots.[5]
They determined that 14 of the fifteen people died as a result of the vaccines and not of other causes. Dr. Burkhardt, the pathologist, observed widespread evidence of an immune attack on the autopsied individuals’ organs and tissues— especially their heart. This evidence included extensive invasion of small blood vessels with massive numbers of lymphocytes, which cause extensive cell destruction when unleashed. Other organs, such as the lungs and liver, were observed to have extensive damage as well. These findings indicate the vaccines were causing the body to attack itself with deadly consequences. One can easily see why Anthony Fauci, as well as public health officers and all who are heavily promoting these vaccines, publicly discouraged autopsies on the vaccinated who subsequently died. One can also see that in the case of vaccines, that were essentially untested prior to being approved for the general public, at least the regulatory agencies should have been required to carefully monitor and analyze all serious complications, and certainly deaths, linked to these vaccines. The best way to do that is with complete autopsies.
While we learned important information from these autopsies what is really needed are special studies of the tissues of those who have died after vaccination for the presence of spike protein infiltration throughout the organs and tissues. This would be critical information, as such infiltration would result in severe damage to all tissues and organs involved—especially the heart, the brain, and the immune system. Animal studies have demonstrated this. In these vaccinated individuals the source of these spike proteins would be the injected nanolipid carriers of the spike protein producing mRNA. It is obvious that the government health authorities and pharmaceutical manufacturers of these “vaccines” do not want these critical studies done as the public would be outraged and demand an end to the vaccination program and prosecution of the involved individuals who covered this up.
CONCLUSIONS
We are all living through one of the most drastic changes in our culture, economic system, as well as political system in our nation’s history as well as the rest of the world. We have been told that we will never return to “normal” and that a great reset has been designed to create a “new world order”. This has all been outlined by Klaus Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum, in his book on the “Great Reset”.[66] This book gives a great deal of insight as to the thinking of the utopians who are proud to claim this pandemic “crisis” as their way to usher in a new world. This new world order has been on the drawing boards of the elite manipulators for over a century.[73,74] In this paper I have concentrated on the devastating effects this has had on the medical care system in the United States, but also includes much of the Western world. In past papers I have discussed the slow erosion of traditional medical care in the United States and how this system has become increasingly bureaucratized and regimented.[7,8] This process was rapidly accelerating, but the appearance of this, in my opinion, manufactured “pandemic” has transformed our health care system over night.
As you have seen, an unprecedented series of events have taken place within this system. Hospital administrators, for example, assumed the position of medical dictators, ordering doctors to follow protocols derived not from those having extensive experience in treating this virus, but rather from a medical bureaucracy that has never treated a single COVID-19 patient. The mandated use of respirators on ICU Covid-19 patients, for example, was imposed in all medical systems and dissenting physicians were rapidly removed from their positions as caregivers, despite their demonstration of markedly improved treatment methods. Further, doctors were told to use the drug remdesivir despite its proven toxicity, lack of effectiveness and high complication rate. They were told to use drugs that impaired respiration and mask every patient, despite the patient’s impaired breathing. In each case, those who refused to abuse their patients were removed from the hospital and even faced a loss of license—or worse.
For the first time in modern medical history, early medical treatment of these infected patients was ignored nationwide. Studies have shown that early medical treatment was saving 80% of higher number of these infected people when initiated by independent doctors.[43,44] Early treatment could have saved over 640,000 lives over the course of this “pandemic”. Despite the demonstration of the power of these early treatments, the forces controlling medical care continued this destructive policy.
Families were not allowed to see their loved ones, forcing these very sick individuals in the hospitals to face their deaths alone. To add insult to injury, funerals were limited to a few grieving family members, who were not allowed to even sit together. All the while large stores, such as Walmart and Cosco were allowed to operate with minimal restrictions. Nursing home patients were also not allowed to have family visitations, again being forced to die a lonely death. All the while, in a number of states, the most transparent being in New York state, infected elderly were purposefully transferred from hospitals into nursing homes, resulting in a very high death rates of these nursing home residents. At the beginning of this “pandemic” over 50% of all death were occurring in nursing homes.
Throughout this “pandemic” we have been fed an unending series of lies, distortions and disinformation by the media, the public health officials, medical bureaucracies (CDC, FDA and WHO) and medical associations. Physicians, scientists, and experts in infectious treatments who formed associations designed to develop more effective and safer treatments, were regularly demonized, harassed, shamed, humiliated, and experience a loss of licensure, loss of hospital privileges and, in at least one case, ordered to have a psychiatric examination.[2,65,71]
Anthony Fauci was given essentially absolute control of all forms of medical care during this event, including insisting that drugs he profited from be used by all treating physicians. He ordered the use of masks, despite at first laughing at the use of masks to filter a virus. Governors, mayors, and many businesses followed his orders without question.
The draconian measures being used, masking, lockdowns, testing of the uninfected, use of the inaccurate PCR test, social distancing, and contact tracing had been shown previously to be of little or no use during previous pandemics, yet all attempts to reject these methods were to no avail. Some states ignored these draconian orders and had either the same or fewer cases, as well as deaths, as the states with the most strictly enforced measures. Again, no amount of evidence or obvious demonstration along these lines had any effect on ending these socially destructive measures. Even when entire countries, such as Sweden, which avoided all these measures, demonstrated equal rates of infections and hospitalization as nations with the strictest, very draconian measures, no policy change by the controlling institutions occurred. No amount of evidence changed anything.
Experts in the psychology of destructive events, such as economic collapses, major disasters and previous pandemics demonstrated that draconian measures come with an enormous cost in the form of “deaths of despair” and in a dramatic increase in serious psychological disorders. The effects of these pandemic measures on children’s neurodevelopment is catastrophic and to a large extent irreversible.
Over time tens of thousands could die as a result of this damage. Even when these predictions began to appear, the controllers of this “pandemic” continued full steam ahead. Drastic increases in suicides, a rise in obesity, a rise in drug and alcohol use, a worsening of many health measures and a terrifying rise in psychiatric disorders, especially depression and anxiety, were ignored by the officials controlling this event.
We eventually learned that many of the deaths were a result of medical neglect. Individuals with chronic medical conditions, diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and neurological diseases were no longer being followed properly in their clinics and doctor’s offices. Non-emergency surgeries were put on hold. Many of these patients chose to die at home rather than risk going to the hospitals and many considered hospitals “death houses”.
Records of deaths have shown that there was a rise in deaths among those aged 75 and older, mostly explained by Covid-19 infections, but for those between the ages of 65 to 74, deaths had been increasing well before the pandemic onset.[69] Between ages of 18 and aged 65 years, records demonstrate a shocking hike in non-Covid-19 deaths. Some of these deaths were explained by a dramatic increase in drug-related deaths, some 20,000 more than 2019. Alcohol related deaths also increased substantially, and homicides increased almost 30% in the 18 to 65-year group.
The head of the insurance company OneAmerica stated that their data indicated that the death rate for individuals aged 18 to 64 had increased 40% over the pre-pandemic period.[21] Scott Davidson, the company’s CEO, stated that this represented the highest death rate in the history of insurance records, which does extensive data collections on death rates each year. Davidson also noted that this high of a death rate increase has never been seen in the history of death data collection. Previous catastrophes of monumental extent increased death rates no more than 10 percent, 40% is unprecedented.
Dr. Lindsay Weaver, Indiana’s chief medical officer, stated that hospitalizations in Indiana are higher than at any point in the past five years. This is of critical importance since the vaccines were supposed to significantly reduce deaths, but the opposite has happened. Hospitals are being flooded with vaccine complications and people in critical condition from medical neglect caused by the lockdowns and other pandemic measures.[46,56]
A dramatic number of these people are now dying, with the spike occurring after the vaccines were introduced. The lies flowing from those who have appointed themselves as medical dictators are endless. First, we were told that the lockdown would last only two weeks, they lasted over a year. Then we were told that masks were ineffective and did not need to be worn. Quickly that was reversed. Then we were told the cloth mask was very effective, now it’s not and everyone should be wearing an N95 mask and before that that they should double mask. We were told there was a severe shortage of respirators, then we discover they are sitting unused in warehouses and in city dumps, still in their packing crates. We were informed that the hospitals were filled mostly with the unvaccinated and later found the exact opposite was true the world over. We were told that the vaccine was 95% effective, only to learn that in fact the vaccines cause a progressive erosion of innate immunity.
Upon release of the vaccines, women were told the vaccines were safe during all states of pregnancy, only to find out no studies had been done on safety during pregnancy during the “safety tests” prior to release of the vaccine. We were told that careful testing on volunteers before the EUA approval for public use demonstrated extreme safety of the vaccines, only to learn that these unfortunate subjects were not followed, medical complications caused by the vaccines were not paid for and the media covered this all up.[67] We also learned that the pharmaceutical makers of the vaccines were told by the FDA that further animal testing was unnecessary (the general public would be the Guinea pigs.) Incredibly, we were told that the Pfizer’s new mRNA vaccines had been approved by the FDA, which was a cleaver deception, in that another vaccine had approval (comirnaty) and not the one being used, the BioNTech vaccine. The approved comirnaty vaccine was not available in the United States. The national media told the public that the Pfizer vaccine had been approved and was no longer classed as experimental, a blatant lie. These deadly lies continue. It is time to stop this insanity and bring these people to justice.
Footnotes
How to cite this article: Blaylock RL. COVID UPDATE: What is the truth? Surg Neurol Int 2022;13:167.
Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Journal or its management.
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