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:
Here is the trouble with vaccines, in 10 sentences:
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
Federal law should be passed prohibiting the mandating of any and all vaccines at all levels of government.
Federal law should be passed prohibiting all direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Thanks for reading The Forgotten Side of Medicine! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
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:
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.
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 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:
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.
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.
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.
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].
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].
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.
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 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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._
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Thanks for reading The Forgotten Side of Medicine! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
In the previous article , I introduced the concept of two different types of scientific fraud:
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:
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.
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.
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 essential purpose of the COVID-19 vaccine trials was to do the following:
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.
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.
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.
_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:
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).
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.
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).
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].
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 .
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 trial was not blinded, and protocols that should have been followed to ensure blinding were flagrantly violated.
Vaccinated individuals with COVID-19 were not being tested for COVID-19.
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)
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:
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._
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).
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).
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
They also provided the information at the end of the episode for Maddie’s lifefunder .
[
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:
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 .
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 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.
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 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:
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).
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).
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 ).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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]
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.
The asymptomatic vaccinated are spreading the virus equally as with unvaccinated symptomatic infected.
The vaccines cannot protect adequately against new variants, such as Delta and Omicron.
Natural immunity is far superior to vaccine immunity and is most likely lifelong.
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.
COVID vaccines can cause a significant incidence of blood clots and other serious side effects
The vaccine proponents will demand numerous boosters as each variant appears on the scene.
Fauci will insist on the covid vaccine for small children and even babies.
Vaccine passports will be required to enter a business, fly in a plane, and use public transportation
There will be internment camps for the unvaccinated (as in Australia, Austria and Canada)
The unvaccinated will be denied employment.
There are secret agreements between the government, elitist institutions, and vaccine makers
Many hospitals were either empty or had low occupancy during the pandemic.
The spike protein from the vaccine enters the nucleus of the cell, altering cell DNA repair function.
Hundreds of thousands have been killed by the vaccines and many times more have been permanently damaged.
Early treatment could have saved the lives of most of the 700,000 who died.
Vaccine-induced myocarditis (which was denied initially) is a significant problem and clears over a short period.
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.
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.
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.
They have never been tested for long term effects
They have never been tested for induction of autoimmunity
They have never been properly tested for safety during any stage of pregnancy
No follow-up studies have been done on the babies of vaccinated women
There are no long-term studies on the children of vaccinated pregnant women after their birth (Especially as neurodevelopmental milestone occur).
It has never been tested for effects on a long list of medical conditions:
Diabetes
Heart disease
Atherosclerosis
Neurodegenerative diseases
Neuropsychiatric effects
Induction of autism spectrum disorders and schizophrenia
Long term immune function
Vertical transmission of defects and disorders
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
How to cite this article: Blaylock RL. COVID UPDATE: What is the truth? Surg Neurol Int 2022;13:167.
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.
1. Abelson R. Buoyed by federal Covid aid, big hospital chains buy up competitors. The New York Times Mat 21, 2021 (updated Oct 22, 2022) https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/health/covid-bailout-hospital-merger.html .
2. Albright L. Medical nonconformity and its persecution. Brownstone Institute. https://brownstone.org/articles/medical-nonconformaity-and-its-persecution [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]
3. Ausman JI, Blaylock RL. What is the truth? United States: James I. and Carolyn R. Ausman Education Foundation (AEF); 2021. The China Virus. [Google Scholar]
4. Beder A, Buyukkocak U, Sabuncuoglu H, Keskil ZA, Keskil S. Preliminary report on surgical mask induced deoxygenation during major surgery. Neurocirugia. 2008;19 [Google Scholar]
5. Bhakdi S. Presentation of autopsy findings. https://www.brighteon.com/4b6cc929-f559-4577-b4f8-3b40f0cd2f77 Pathology presentation on findings https://pathologie-konferenz.de/en [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]
6. Blaylock RL. Covid-19 pandemic: What is the truth? Surg Neurol Inter. 2021;12(151) [Google Scholar]
7. Blaylock RL. National Health Insurance (Part 1): the socialist nightmare. Aug 19, 2009 https://haciendapublishing.com/national-health-insurance-part-i-the-socialist-nightmare-by-russell-l-blaylock-md [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]
8. Blaylock RL. Regimentation in medicine and its human price (part 1 & 2) Hacienda publishing. March 20, 2015 https://haciendapublishing.com/regimentation-in-medicine-and-its-human-price-part-2-by-russell-l-blaylock-md [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06] [Google Scholar]
9. Blaylock RL. Haciendia Publishing; When rejecting orthodoxy becomes a mental illness. Aug 15, 2013 https://haciendapublishing.com/when-rejecting-orthodoxy-becomes-a-mental-illness-by-russell-l-blaylock-m-d [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06] [Google Scholar]
10. Bloche MG. Corporate takeover of Teaching Hospitals. Georgetown Univ Law Center. 1992. https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1731&context=facpub [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]
11. Bosh X, Ross JS. Ghostwriting: Research misconduct, plagiarism, or Fool’s gold. Amer J Med. 2012;125(4):324–6. [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
12. Breggin PR, Breggin GR. Breggin PR, Breggin GR. Covid-19 and the Global Predators: We are the Prey. Ithaca, NY: Lake Edge Press; 2021. Top Medical Journals Sell their Souls; pp. 285–292. [Google Scholar]
13. Breggin, p133 [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]
14. Bulik BS. The top 10 ad spenders in Big Pharma for 2020. Fierce Pharma Apr 19, 2021 https://www.fiercepharma.com/special-report/top-10-ad-spenders-big-pharma-for-2020 [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]
15. Children’s Health Defense Team Harvard experts critique cozy FDA-Pharma relationship. The Defender. Jan 28, 29020.
16. Chughtai AA, Stelzer-Braid S, Rawlinson W, Pontivivi G, Wang Q, Pan Y, et al. Contamination by respiratory viruses on outer surface of medical mask used by hospital healthcare workers. BMC Infect Dis. 2019. Article number 491.
17. Coleman-Lochner L. U.S. Hospitals pushed to financial ruin as nurses quit during pandemic. Bloomberg. Dec 21, 2021 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-21/u-s-hospitals-pushed-to-financial-ruin-as-nurses-quit-en-masse [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]
18. D’Souza K. Pandemic effects may have lowered baby’s IQs, study says EdSource. https://edsource.org/2021/pandemic-may-have-lowered-baby-iq-study-says/661285. [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]
19. Davis GG, Williamson AK. Risk of covid-19 transmission during autopsy. Arch Path Lab Med. 2020;144(12):1445a–1445. [Google Scholar]
20. Department of Health and Human Services: Part 1. Overview Information. https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-HD-20-013.html [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]
21. Durden T. Life Insurance CEO says deaths up 40% among those aged 18 to 64. Tyler Durden Report. 2022. Jan 3,
22. Elder C, Schroder AS, Aepfelbacher M, Fitzek A, Heinemann A, Heinrich F, et al. Dying with SARS-CoV-2 infection an autopsy study of the first consecutive 80 cases in Hamberg, Germany. Inter J Legal Med. 2020;134:1275–84. [Google Scholar]
23. Front Line Covid Critical Care Alliance. https://covid19criticalcare.com [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]
24. Gueriero M. Restriction of autopsies during the Covid-19 epidemic in Italy. Prudence or fear? Pathologica. 2020;112:172–3. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
25. Hope JR. Sudden death by “hot lot”—Dr. Michael Yeadon sounds the alarm. The Desert review. 2022. Jan 24,
26. Huff E. Idaho doctor reports “20 times increase” in cancer among those “vaccinated” for covid. Natural News. 2021. Sept 14, https://www.naturalnews.com/2021-09-14-idaho-doctor-20times-increase-cancer-vaccinated-covid.html [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]
27. Ioannou P, Karakonstantis S, Astrinaki E, Saplamidou S, Vitsaxaki E, Hamilos G, et al. Transmission of SARS-C0V-2 variant B1.1.7 among vaccinated health care workers. Infect Dis. 2021:1–4. [Google Scholar]
28. James Thorpe interview by Dr. Steve Kirsch. Rumble https://rumble.com/vru732-dr.-james-thorp-on-medical-censorship.html [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]
29. Jiang H, Mei Y-F. SARS-CoV-2 spike protein impairs DNA damage repair and inhibits V(D)J recombination in vitro. Viruses. 2021;13:2056. doi: 10.3390/10.3390/v13102056. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [CrossRef] [Google Scholar] Retracted
30. Jimenez J, Vigdor N. Covid-19 news: Over 150 Texas hospital workers are fired or resign over vaccine mandates. The New York Times. 2021. Jun 22, https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/06/22/world/covid-vaccine-coronavirus-mask [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]
31. Katz E. Postal service seeks temporary exemption from Biden’s vaccine-or-test mandate. Government Executive. 2022. Jan 22, https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2022/01/postal-service-seeks-temporary-exemption-bidens-vaccine-or-test-mandate/360376 [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]
32. Kennedy R., Jr . Skyhorse Publishing; 2021. The Real Anthony Fauci. Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health; pp. 24–29. [Google Scholar]
33. Kennedy RF., Jr pp. 24–25.
34. Kennedy RF., Jr pp. 26–30.
35. Kennedy RF., Jr p. 32.
36. Kennedy RF., Jr pp. 35–56.
37. Kennedy RF., Jr pp. 47–56.
38. Kennedy RF., Jr p. 135.
39. Kennedy RF., Jr p. 217.
40. Lee M. University of Florida finds dangerous pathogens on children’s face mask. NTD https://www.ntd.com/university-of-florida-lab-finds-dangerous-pathogens-on-childrens-face-masks_630275.html [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]
41. Liu Q, Wang RS, Qu GQ, Wang YY, Liu P, Zhu YZ, et al. Gross examination report of a Covid-19 death autopsy. Fa Yi Xue Za Zhi. 2020;36:21–23. [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
42. Loffredo J. Fully vaccinated are Covid ‘Superspreaders’ Says inventor of mRNA technology. https://childrenshealthdefernce.org/defender/justin-Williams-Robert-Malone-fully-vaccinated-covid-super-spreaders [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]
43. Marik PE, Kory P, Varon J, Iglesias J, Meduri GU. MATH+ protocol for the treatment oof SARS-CoV-2 infection: the scientific rationale. Exp rev Ant-infective Ther. 2020 doi: 10.1080/14787210.2020.1808462. [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]
44. McCullough P, Kelly R, Ruocco G, Lerma E, Tumlin J, Wheeland KR, et al. Pathophysiological basis and rationale for early outpatient treatment of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) Infection. Amer J Med. 2021;134:16–22. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
45. McCullough P. Study: Fully vaccinated healthcare workers carry 251 times viral load, pose threat to unvaccinated patients, Co-workers. The Defender 08/23/21. [Google Scholar]
46. McCullough P. “We’re in the middle of a major biological catastrophe”: Covid expert Dr. Peter McCullough. 2021. Oct 6, https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/were-in-the-middle-of-a-major-biological-catastrophe-top-covid-doc-mccullough/?_kx=9EtupqemhhFXJ1kgCo9W3xUNfwrkqB5nT7V2H15fUnA%3D.WXNMR7 [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]
47. McGovern C. Thousands report developing abnormal tumors following Covid shots. LifeSite News. Nov 1, 2021 https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/thousands-report-developing-abnormal-tumors-following-covid-shots [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]
48. Mercola J. Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci: a ‘formidable, nefarious’ partnership. Mercola.com. https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/rfk-jr-the-real-anthony-fauci-bill-gates [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]
49. Moffatt B, Elliott C. Ghost Marketing: Pharmaceutical companies and ghostwritten journal articles. Persp Biol Med. 2007;50(1):18–31. [Google Scholar]
50. Mulvany C. Covid-19 exacerbates bankruptcy for at-risk hospitals. Health Care Financial Management Association. 2020. Nov 9,
51. Muoio D. How many employees have hospitals lost to vaccine mandates? Here are the numbers so far. Fierce Healthcare. 2022. Jan 13, https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/hospitals/how-many-employees-have-hospitals-lost-to-vaccine-mandates-numbers-so-far [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]
52. Nalivaeva NN, Turner AJ, Zhuravin IA. Role of prenatal hypoxia in brain development, cognitive functions, and neurodegeneration. Front Neurosci. 2018 doi: 10.3389/fnins.2018.00825. [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]
53. Nicole Sirotek shares what she saw on the front lines in NYC. # Murder. https://rumble.com/vt7tnf-registered-nurse-nicole-sirotek-shares-what-she-saw-on-the-front-lines-in-n.html [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]
54. Noether M, Mat S. Hospital merger benefits: Views from hospital leaders and econometric analysis. Amer Hospital Assoc. Charles Rivers Associates. Jan, 2017 https://www.aha.org/guidesreports/2017-01-24-hospital-merger-benefits-views-hospital-leaders-and-econometric-analysis [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]
55. Nurse Colette Martin testimony to Louisiana House of Representatives. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBwnIRUav5I [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]
56. Nurse Dani: It’s the Covid-19 hospital protocols are killing people. https://rumble.com/vqs1v6-nurse-dani-its-the-covid-19-hospital-protocols-are-killing-people.html [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]
57. Parpia R. Mayo Clinic fires 700 employees for refusing to get Covid-19 vaccinations. The Vaccine Reaction. https://thevaccinereaction.org/2022/01/mayo-clinic-fires-700-employees-for-refusing-to-get-covid-19-vaccinations [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]
58. Pomara C, Li Volti G, Cappello F. Covid-19 deaths: are we sure it is pneumonia? Please, autopsy, autopsy, autopsy! J Clin Med. 2020 doi: 10.3390/jcm9051259. [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]
59. New York Post. Post Editorial Board Facebook admits the truth: “Fact checks” are just (lefty) opinion. Dec 14,2021. https://nypost.com/2021/12/14/facebook-admits-the-truth-fact-checks-are-really-just-lefty-opinion [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06] [Google Scholar]
60. Rancourt DG. Mask don’t work. A review of science relevant to the covid-19 social policy. https://archive.org/details/covid-censorship-at-research-gate-2 [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]
61. Redshaw M. As reports of injuries after Covid vaccines near 1 million mark. CDC, FDA clear Pfizer, Moderna boosters for all adults. The Defender 11/19/21.
62. Roche D. Boston Herald. 2021. Sept 14, Members of Congress and their staff are exempt from Biden’s vaccine mandate, Newsweek 9/10/21 Boston Herald Editorial Staff. Editorial: Political elites exempt from vax mandates. [Google Scholar]
63. Ross E. How drug companies’ PR tactics skew the presentation of medical research. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/may/20/drug-companies-ghost-writing-journalism [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]
64. Saul S. Ghostwriters used in Vioxx studies, article says. New York Times. April 15, 2008 https://www.fpparchive.org/media/documents/public_policy/Ghostwriters%20Used%20in%20Vioxx%20studies_Stephanie%20Saul_Apr%2015,%202008_The%20New%20Times.pdf [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]
65. Saxena V. Doctors loses medical license. Ordered to have Psych Eval for Ivermectin Scrits, Sharing Covid “misinformation” BRP News. Available from: https://bizpacreview.com/2022/01/16/doctor-loses-license-orderedto-have-psych-eval-for-prescribing-ivermectin-sharining-covid-falsehoods-1189313. [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]
66. Schwab K, Malleret T. Cologny/Geneva: The Covid-19 Pandemic and the Great Reset. Forum Publishing 2020 World Economic Forum. [Google Scholar]
67. Sen. Ron Johnson on Covid-19 vaccine injuries to test subjects. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mxqC9SiRh8 [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]
68. Sperhake J-P. Autopsies of Covid-19 deceased? Absolutely! Legal Med. 2020 doi: 10.1016/j.legalmed.2020.101769. [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]
69. Svab P. Non-Covid death spike in Americans aged 18-49. The Epoch Times. Jan 26-Feb 1 2022.
70. US Medical, Scientific, Patient and Civic Organization Funding Report: Pfizer: Fourth Quarter 2010. https://cdn.pfizer.com/pfizercom/responsibility/grants_contributions/pfizer_us_grants_cc_q4_2010.pdf [Last accessed on 2022 Feb 06]
71. Vivek Saxena. Doctors loses license, ordered to have psych eval for Ivermectin scrits, sharing Covid ‘misinformation’ BPR News. https://www.bizpacreview.com/2022/01/16/doctor-loses-license-ordered-to-have-psych-eval-for-prescribing-ivermectin-sharing-covid-falsehoods-1189313 .
72. Westendorf AM, et al. Hypoxia enhances immunosuppression by inhibiting CD4+ effector T cell function and promoting Treg activity. Cell Physiol Biochem. 2017;41:1271–84. [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
73. Wood PM. Coherent Publishing; 2018. Technocracy: The Hard Road to World Order. [Google Scholar]
74. Wood PM. Coherent Publishing; 2015. Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation. [Google Scholar]
Articles from Surgical Neurology International are provided here courtesy of Scientific Scholar
Via Steve Kirsch, I just saw this substack article about a scary topic that many of us have been following for a few months: international voting on giving up sovereignty to the World Health Organization (WHO).
The very idea of doing this is mind-boggling insane. But I want to take a moment and break down why it's a terrible idea, and in a way that will hopefully clarify (to me if nobody else) what this chaotic and hard-to-define struggle we're in is all about.
How do you feel when you read that phrase?
Would you have felt differently reading it 20 years ago?
I think that's a good exercise because many of us do not fall into overly simple categories like liberal/convervative/left/right/centrist/moderate, as if there were ever a committee somewhere who defined how each category of people would think and in all situations. But whatever skin we're wearing (and some people try on more than others) may cause us to either embrace or recoil from the idea. Though personally, I think that ideology is not so much the point at this juncture.
Can we ever get political language correct?
The more local politics is, the less confusing the language, but the politics of nations is already very large, and world politics is ever larger.
But let's back up before we take discussions of the value of nations too far. Let's make a simple assumption that requires no definitions or ideological acceptance either way:
One day will be the last day in which rival nations exist on Earth.
Maybe that'll be a few months from now. Maybe it'll be closer to the time when the sun burns out. I really don't know, and I'm not particularly worried about it happening thousands of years after I die. But I feel existentially concerned with whether it happens this year or any time soon.
Why?
Because if it happens, I don't want for it to happen the wrong way. And if it happens so quickly that endangers billions of people, and in a way that suits powerful psychopaths, then it's happening the wrong way.
The bottom-up discussion isn't exactly "simple" per se. The game theory of how organic circles of trust grow is a richly complex subject. But that is to say that nations (as rivalrous organizations) may one day become irrelevant as the need for militaristic distrust (yes, you need to protect your children from strangers) diminishes in relative influence, while the grand game of healthy human economic growth keeps sovereign people stocked with all the resources they can handle. That may only happen on a very long time horizon, though I personally suspect that absent current corporatist powers, it might happen over a few short decades. Perhaps that is why the world's most powerful people feel the need to rush their own top-down plan?
This is the proper description of what I (believe I) am seeing in the world.
1) The fiat currency system is failing. Centralized systems always attract parasites that consume until the top-heavy Molochian monstrosity fails. Moloch eats itself. Now the Bitcoiners (or other, but I doubt the competitors) threaten the entire systemic revolution from one fiat currency to the next. This time might be different: a truly new era.
2) There is a plan known only at high levels. We could talk about evidence of plandemic or plandemonium (my preferred term) all day. We could speculate about what exactly it entails. But let's start simple: there is a plan. That is to say, there is a high level conspiracy.
If the plan involves ending the sovereignty of nations in favor of a New World Order (NWO), then what we're talking about is one world government. That's no longer a controversial statement. The rhetoric at the World Government Summit 2022 demonstrates that.
World Government Summit 2022 Livestream
Look past the virtue signaling words like "empowerment" (in well-designed commercials that play between the discussion) that seem designed to coopt a more democratic discussion, and the power behind the curtain is boldly advertised.
I added the pointer to the WHO, but we'll come back to that. It is interesting to see that, aside from the consulting firms and media enterprising listed at the bottom, the world's real corporate powerhouses seem to be hiding behind the NGOs. That is to say that the NGOs have been erected as the centerpieces within the NWO.
This is the moment when you may wish to reread The Doctrine of Fascism.
The Fascism of the NWO is the same as that of Mussolini in its architecture. And remember what happened to Mussolini, whose early rhetoric was that of hyper-compassionate leftist who was only kicked out of the Socialist Party due to his desire to take down the national hegemon of the day, Britain, on equal footing. Mussolini laid out an Italy in which all the ethnic groups could be humanized as Italians: whether Greek, visigoth, North African, Jewish, or whoever/wherever their ancestors might have originated.
And then he shook hands with the devil and none of that commitment to the value of every individual in Italy meant anything, anymore, except for the industrial influencers and select insiders.
Even worse, we might note that Hitler was somewhat like the Trudeau of his day. We're told in the history books (or "history" books) that Hitler was a painter, but the more relevant truth is that Hitler was a film actor (which Western academic and media sources go to great lengths to hide). In fact, his head propagandists were mostly the directors of the films in which he had appeared. There is very good reason to suspect that Hitler was a front for more powerful men, including the American banking network that funded his ascension, but that's a discussion for another day. The larger point is that the virtue signaling of ideological platforms gets laundered through a chain of idealists and literal actors to engineer a facade for the politics of the world's oligarchs.
And now that the world currencies are dying, they are working at a breakneck pace to organize top-down governance before their ability to print all the money they want turns into commodity money and Bitcoin.
Let's be clear: the power to take control over governments is the power to govern. The requirement of a pandemic to trigger the event is the ultimate moral hazard. Power attracts the Kunlangeta, and those are people who cannot resist a lever whose instructions say, "Caution, pull this only when you're ready to commit genocide in return for control over hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of wealth."
It's that simple. Need I go on? For whom? For the people who aren't wary of a health NGO now run…not by a doctor, but by a Marxist revolutionary with blood already on his hands? And where in the years leading up to the plandemonium, nobody there was interested in or aware enough to throw a flag on the play?
If you haven't figured this out yet: work backward. Where did the problem begin?
Answer: a long time before now. Also, I'm not even sure when. All I know is that working backward, I just keep finding years and years, maybe even centuries of institutional capture.
This is the ultimate fascist war against all free people. No matter what any of us think, we don't fully understand it yet. But if you sit and meditate on the reality, it's undeniable. Of course, that's for people who didn't have the ability to meditate beaten out of them.
Addendum: Personally, I don’t think that Tedros’s Marxist path is the point so much as the power-seeking is. He is one of many opportunists in the world, and he is now in position to take all manner of bribes, and probably doesn’t even realize his negotiating potential. But the larger point is that the power to declare pandemic and take control of governments would be in the hands of a lever that is bought through a private bidding process. World government then becomes explicitly part of the corporate profit feedback loop. How well could anybody who understands that sleep at night?
"If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one." "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”.
J. Robert Oppenheimer, Scientific director of the Manhattan Project (quoting from the Bhagavad Gita)
by Robert W. Malone MD, MS
Last January, Stew Peters decided to roll out the thesis that I have personal responsibility for the morbidity and mortality associated with the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines consequent to my pioneering work in developing the ideas and reduction to practice of using synthetic mRNA as a transient “gene therapy” method, with the entry level application being for vaccine purposes. This has been echoed by many angry social media detractors seeking to find someone to blame for the lies and adverse events that have been associated with these mRNA vaccines. Mindful of those critics, this Substack essay focuses on some of the differences between what was originally envisioned and the current molecules that are being injected into our bodies. The first section of the essay sets the stage by summarizing (for a general readership) how the whole idea of gene therapy was developed, and then describing how and why this lead to the idea of mRNA as a drug and as a method of generating a vaccine response. The second section gets quite technical, and provides detailed information intended for a scientific audience. The conclusion is written for a general audience.
The core idea captured in the original nine patents which stem from my work between 1987 and 1989 was that there are multiple key problems with the idea of permanent “gene therapy” as originally envisioned by Richard Roblin, PhD and academic Pediatrician Dr. Theodore Friedman in 1972. The modern embodiment of this concept can be found in the many writings from the WEF and others concerning “Transhumanism” and use of CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing technology. To really understand all of this requires a brief journey through the history and logic of “gene therapy”.
The January 2015 UC San Diego News center piece entitled “Friedman Recognized for Pioneering Gene Therapy Research: School of Medicine professor receives prestigious Japan Prize” nicely summarizes the underlying logic of “Gene Therapy” as envisioned by Friedman and Roblin.
“Though posed as a question, Friedmann and Roblin firmly believed the answer was yes, citing emergent thinking, new studies and growing data that suggested “good DNA” could be used to replace defective DNA in people with inherited conditions.
“In our view,” they wrote, “gene therapy may ameliorate some human genetic diseases in the future. For this reason, we believe that research directed at the development of techniques for gene therapy should continue.”
Though Friedmann said initial response to the paper was “not overwhelming,” it’s now commonly cited as a major milestone in the scientific beginnings of gene therapy research, though Friedmann said it was the Asilomar conference three years later (scientists set safety standards for recombinant DNA technology) where interest really “exploded.”
The idea of gene therapy, which quickly captured the public imagination, was fueled by its appealingly straightforward approach and what Friedmann has described as “obvious correctness”: Disarm a potentially pathogenic virus to make it benign. Stuff these viral particles with normal DNA. Then inject them into patients carrying abnormal genes, where they will deliver their therapeutic cargoes inside the defective target cells. In theory, the good DNA replaces or corrects the abnormal function of the defective genes, rendering previously impaired cells whole, normal and healthy. End of disease.”
Nice theory, what could possibly go wrong? The article continues-
“In 1968, Friedmann, working at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland with the late Jay Seegmiller (a founding faculty member of the School of Medicine) and others, showed that by adding foreign DNA to cultured cells from patients with Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, they could correct genetic defects that caused the rare but devastating neurological disorder. The condition was first described by William Nyhan, MD, a UC San Diego professor of pediatrics, and medical student Michael Lesch in 1964.
The feat was a powerful proof-of-concept, but subsequent efforts to advance the work to human clinical trials stalled. “We began to realize that it would be very complicated to take this idea and make it work in people,” Friedmann said, who joined the School of Medicine faculty in 1969.
In 1990, a 4-year-old girl with a congenital disease called adenoside deaminase (ADA) deficiency, which severely affects immunity and the ability to fight infections, became the first patient treated by gene therapy. White blood cells were taken from her, the normal ADA gene was inserted into them using an engineered and disabled virus and the cells re-injected. Despite initial claims of success, Friedmann said the experiment was eventually deemed a failure. The girl’s condition was not cured, and the research was found wanting.
A report commissioned by National Institutes of Health director Harold Varmus, MD, was highly critical of the entire gene therapy field and the ADA effort in particular, chiding investigators for creating a “mistaken and widespread perception of success.” Friedmann says he took the Varmus report “personally. I felt awful. It almost made me feel like I had been deceiving myself and my colleagues for more than two decades about the promise of gene therapy.” But he also knew there were “many more good people doing gene therapy research than rogues” and continued diligently and conscientiously to pursue his own research.
Nonetheless, media attention and hype about gene therapy continued to be rampant, fueled in part by over-enthusiastic opinions by some scientists. Things crashed in 1999 when an 18-year-old patient named Jesse Gelsinger, who suffered from a genetic disease of the liver, died during a clinical trial at the University of Pennsylvania. Gelsinger’s death was the first directly attributed to gene therapy. Subsequent investigations revealed numerous problems in the experimental design.”
The history of the Varmus report provides an early glimpse of the way things work at NIH and the US HHS. The Scientist appointed to head up the commission to review the science of “Gene Therapy” was none other than my graduate mentor Dr. Inder Verma, who had long been one of the leading proponents of gene therapy, and was subsequently forced to resign from the Salk Institute over a decades long record of what might most gently be called ethical lapses. But this was the scientist appointed by the overall Director of the NIH to “independently” investigate the scientific rigor and merits of the field. One hand washes the other.
What is awry with the original “gene therapy” concept? There are multiple issues, and here are a few-
1) Can you efficiently get genetic material (“polynucleotides”) into the nucleus of the majority of cells in the human body so that any genetic defects (or transhuman genetic improvements) can be made? In short, no. Human cells (and the immune system) have evolved many, many different mechanisms to resist modification by external polynucleotides. Otherwise we would already be overrun by various forms of parasitic DNA and RNA- viral and otherwise. This remains a major technical barrier, one which the “transhumanists” continue to overlook in their enthusiastic but naïve rush to play god with the human species. What are polynucleotides? Basically, the long chain polymers composed of four nucleotide bases (ATGC in the case of DNA, AUGC in the case of RNA) which carry all genetic information (that we know of) across time.
2) What about the immune system? Well, this was one of my breakthroughs way back in the late 1980s. What Ted (Friedman) originally envisioned was the simple idea that if a child had a genetic birth defect causing the body to produce a defective or not produce a critical protein (such as Lesch-Nyhan syndrome or Adenosine Deaminase Deficiency), this could be simply corrected by providing the “good gene” to complement the defect. What was not appreciated was that the immune systems of these children were “educated” during development to either recognize the “bad protein” as normal/self, or to not recognize the absent protein as normal/self. So, introduction of the “go od gene” into a person’s body would cause production of what was essentially a “foreign protein”, resulting in immunologic attack and killing of the cells which now have the ‘good gene”.
3) What happens when things go wrong and the “good gene/protein” is toxic? Well, in the current vaccine situation this is essentially the “Spike protein” problem. I get asked all the time “what can I do to eliminate the RNA vaccines from my body”, to which I have to answer – nothing. There is no technology that I know of which can eliminate these synthetic “mRNA-like” molecules from your body. The same is true for any of the many “gene therapy” methods currently being used. You just have to hope that your immune system will attack the cells that have taken up the polynucleotides and degrade (chew up) the offending large molecule that causes your cells to manufacture the toxic protein. Since virtually all current “gene therapy” methods are inefficient, and essentially deliver the genetic material randomly to a small subset of cells, there is no practical way to surgically remove the scattered, relatively rare transgenic cells. Clearance of genetically modified cells by the cellular immune system (T cells) is the only currently viable method to remove cells that have taken up the foreign genetic information (“transfection” in the case of mRNA or DNA, or “transduction” in the case of a viral vectored gene).
4) What happens if the “good gene” lands in a “bad place” in your genome? It turns out that the structure of our genome is highly evolved, and we are still relative neophytes in our current level of understanding. Despite having sequenced the human genome. The method of “insertional mutagenesis” (sticking genetic information in the form of viral DNA or other ways) has long been one of the leading methods to generate new insights into genetics – from fruit flies to frogs to fish to mice. When new DNA is inserted into chromosomes it can cause many unexpected things to happen. Like development of cancers, for example. This is why there is so much concern about the possibility that the mRNA-like polynucleotides used in the “RNA vaccines” may travel into the nucleus (where the DNA chromosomes reside) and insert or recombine with a cellular genome after reverse transcription (RNA-> DNA). Normally, with DNA-based gene therapy technologies, the FDA requires genotoxicity studies for this reason, but the FDA did not treat the “mRNA vaccine” technology as a gene therapy product.
Based on these risk considerations, the original idea behind using mRNA as a drug (for genetic therapeutic or vaccine purposes) was that mRNA is typically degraded quite rapidly once manufactured or released into a cell. mRNA stability is regulated by a number of genetic elements including the length of the “poly A tail”, but typically ranges from ½ to a couple of hours. Therefore, if natural or synthetic mRNA which is degraded by the usual enzymes is introduced into your body, it should only last for a very short time. And this has been the answer which Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna have provided to physicians when asked “how long does the injected mRNA last after injection”.
But now we know that the “mRNA” from the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines which incorporates the synthetic nucleotide pseudouridine can persist in lymph nodes for at least 60 days after injection. This is not natural, and this is not really mRNA. These molecules have genetic elements similar to those of natural mRNA, but they are clearly far more resistant to the enzymes which normally degrade natural mRNA, seem to be capable of producing high levels of protein for extended periods, and seem to evade normal immunologic mechanisms for eliminating cells which produce foreign proteins which are not normally observed in the body.
Key findings from this seminal work by Katharina Röltgen et al include the following:
What is pseudouridine (shorthand symbol Ψ)? Pseudouridine is a modified nucleotide mRNA subunit that is prevalent in natural human mRNAs, and the biologic significance and regulation of the modification process is still being determined and understood. This modification occurs naturally in the cells of our body, in a highly regulated manner. This is in sharp contrast to the random incorporation of synthetic pseudouridine which occurs with the manufacturing process used for producing the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech (but not CureVac) COVID-19 “mRNA” vaccines. The “state of the art” of understanding of the biology of natural pseudouridine modifications is summarized circa late 2020 in this excellent review published in the journal Annual Review of Genetics by Erin K Borchardt et al. The open source version (not paywall protected) can be found here. Hang on, because we are about to dive into some serious immunology, molecular and cell biology.
Abstract as follows:
“Recent advances in pseudouridine detection reveal a complex pseudouridine landscape that includes messenger RNA and diverse classes of noncoding RNA in human cells. The known molecular functions of pseudouridine, which include stabilizing RNA conformations and destabilizing interactions with varied RNA-binding proteins, suggest that RNA pseudouridylation could have widespread effects on RNA metabolism and gene expression. Here, we emphasize how much remains to be learned about the RNA targets of human pseudouridine synthases, their basis for recognizing distinct RNA sequences, and the mechanisms responsible for regulated RNA pseudouridylation. We also examine the roles of noncoding RNA pseudouridylation in splicing and translation and point out the potential effects of mRNA pseudouridylation on protein production, including in the context of therapeutic mRNAs.”
A more recent (peer reviewed) publication in the journal Molecular Cell has shed light on some of the mechanisms of action associated with natural pseudouridine modification. It appears that, in the natural context, various highly regulated cellular enzymes (for example PUS1, PUS7, and RPUSD4) act on specific mRNAs and specific locations within those mRNAs while they are being made in the cell to modify the normal uridine nucleotide subunit to form pseudouridine. These modifications occur at locations associated with alternatively spliced RNA regions, are enriched near splice sites, and overlap with hundreds of binding sites for RNA-binding proteins. Latest data indicate that pre-mRNA pseudouridylation is used by human cells to regulate human gene expression via alternative pre-mRNA processing.
Relevant to the “mRNA” vaccines, the Borchardt review makes the following surprising statement, which is consistent with the Cell paper cited above which demonstrates that the synthetic “mRNA” being used for these vaccines persists in patient lymph node tissue for 60 days or longer-
“An exciting possibility is that regulated mRNA pseudouridylation controls mRNA metabolism in response to changing cellular conditions.”
That is a technically precise way of saying that incorporation of pseudouridine is one factor that controls how long an mRNA stays around in your body.
The review proceeds with the following alarming (from the context of the unregulated incorporation of Ψ into the molecules used for vaccine purposes) statement:
“The biological effects of Ψ must originate in chemical differences between U and Ψ, which primarily affect RNA backbone conformation and the stability of base pairs. Because Ψ can form stable pairs with G, C and U in addition to A, it has been proposed as a “universal” base pairing partner. Despite intensive study of the structural effects of Ψ on short, synthetic RNA oligos, it is currently impossible to predict the structural outcome of site-specific RNA pseudouridylation in longer RNAs. The systematic investigation of sequence-context effects on the stability of Ψ-containing duplexes is an important step towards accurate predictions. It will be important to determine the structural consequences of RNA pseudouridylation in cells, which is possible using improved methods to probe RNA structure in vivo.”
Furthermore,
“The effect of Ψ on the yield of functional protein depends strongly on the specific codons used. The mechanisms underlying this sequence dependence are unknown, highlighting how much remains to be understood about the translational consequences of mRNA pseudouridylation in cells.”
Finally, relevant to the immunosuppression being observed after multiple mRNA vaccine boosters (which is increasingly referred to as an acquired immunodeficiency syndrome or AIDS disease), Borchardt et al teach the following:
“Innate Immunity
Cells are equipped with innate immune sensors, including various Toll-like receptors (TLRs), retinoic acid inducible protein (RIG-I), and protein kinase R (PKR), which detect foreign nucleic acid. RNA modifications have been thought to provide a mechanism for discerning “self” RNA from non-self RNA, and indeed, incorporating RNA modifications, including pseudouridine, in foreign RNA allows for escape from innate immune detection. This makes RNA modification a powerful tool in the field of RNA therapeutics where RNAs must make it into cells without triggering an immune response, and remain stable long enough to achieve therapeutic goals. In addition, the presence of modified nucleosides in viral genomic RNA could contribute to immune evasion during infection.
TLRs Toll-Like Receptors (TLRs) are membrane-associated proteins which detect various pathogen associated molecular patterns (PAMPS) and subsequently stimulate production of proinflammatory cytokines. The RNA-sensing TLRs, TLR3, TLR7 and TLR8 reside within endosomal membranes. TLR3 recognizes dsRNA, while TLR7 and TLR8 recognize ssRNA. Upon target recognition, TLRs activate a signaling cascade that results in the expression of proinflammatory cytokines and interferon. In vitro transcribed RNA is immunostimulatory when transfected into HEK293 cells engineered to express either TLRs and inclusion of Ψ in the RNA suppressed this response (most pronounced for TLR7 and TLR8).
RIG-I Retinoic Acid Inducible Protein (RIG-I) is a cytosolic innate immune sensor responsible for detecting short stretches of dsRNA or ssRNA with either a 5′-triphosphate or 5′-disphosphate group (a feature common to various RNA viruses). Activation of RIG-I relieves its autoinhibition, releasing its CARD domains to interact with MAVS and set off a signaling cascade that ultimately results in expression of immune factors. Inclusion of Ψ in a 5′-triphosphate capped RNA abolishes activation of RIG-I, providing another mechanism for pseudouridine-mediated suppression of innate immune activation. Further, the polyU/UC region of the HCV genome is also potent activator of RIG-I and complete replacement of U with Ψ in this RNA fully abrogates downstream IFN-beta induction, despite RIG-I still binding to the modified RNA, but with reduced affinity. Durbin et al present biochemical evidence that RIG-I bound to pseudouridylated polyU/UC RNA fails to undergo the conformational changes necessary to activate downstream signaling.
PKR RNA-dependent Protein Kinase (PKR) is a cytosolic resident innate immune sensor. Upon detection of foreign RNA, PKR represses translation through phosphorylation of translation initiation factor eIF-2alpha. Molecules which activate PKR are varied, but include dsRNA formed intra- or inter-molecularly, and 5′ triphosphate groups. Inclusion of Ψ in various PKR substrates reduces PKR activation and downstream translation repression relative to unmodified RNAs. For example, a short 47-nt ssRNA potently activates PKR when synthesized with U but not with Ψ (~30-fold reduction with Ψ). Ψ also modestly reduced PKR activity when this short RNA was annealed to a complementary unmodified RNA 170. Likewise, in vitro transcribed, unmodified tRNA acted as much more potent activator of PKR than tRNAs transcribed with pseudouridine. It should be noted that it is unclear whether a fully pseudouridylated tRNA adopts canonical folding and what impact this may have on PKR recognition of this substrate. Finally, transfection of an unmodified mRNA caused a greater reduction in overall cellular protein synthesis in cell culture compared to the same mRNA fully pseudouridylated. Consistent with this result, fully pseudouridylated mRNA reduced PKR activation and subsequent phosphorylation of eIF-2alpha.”
Regarding the consequences for the use of mRNA as a drug for therapeutic or vaccine purposes, Borchardt et al conclude that
“Pseudouridine likely affects multiple facets of mRNA function, including reduced immune stimulation by several mechanisms, prolonged half-life of pseudouridine-containing RNA, as well as potentially deleterious effects of Ψ on translation fidelity and efficiency.”
Based on this information, it appears to me that the extensive random incorporation of pseudouridine into the synthetic mRNA-like molecules used for the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna SARS-CoV-2 vaccines may well account for much or all of the observed immunosuppression, DNA virus reactivation, and remarkable persistence of the synthetic “mRNA” molecules observed in lymph node biopsy tissues by Katharina Röltgen et al. Many of these adverse effects were reported by Kariko, Weissman et al in their 2008 paper “Incorporation of pseudouridine into mRNA yields superior nonimmunogenic vector with increased translational capacity and biological stability” and could have been anticipated by regulatory and toxicology professionals if they had bothered to consider these findings prior to allowing emergency use authorization and widespread (global) deployment of what is truly an immature and previously untested technology. Therefore, neither the FDA, NIH, CDC, nor BioNTech (which employs Dr. Kariko as a Vice President) nor Moderna can claim true ignorance. To my eyes, what we have seen is more appropriately classified as “willful ignorance”.
In conclusion, based on these data it is my opinion that the random and uncontrolled insertion of pseudouridine into the manufactured “mRNA”-like molecules administered to so many of us creates a population of polymers which may resemble natural mRNA, but which have a variety of properties which distinguish them in a variety of aspects which are clinically relevant. These characteristics and activities may account for many of the unusual effects, unusual stability, and striking adverse events associated with this new class of vaccines. These molecules are not natural mRNA, and they do not behave like natural mRNA.
The question that most troubles and perplexes me at this point is why the biological consequences of these modifications and associated clinical adverse effects were not thoroughly investigated before widespread administration of random pseudouridine-incorporating “mRNA”-like molecules to a global population. Biology, and particularly molecular biology, is highly complex and matrix-interrelated. Change one thing over here, and it is really hard to predict what might happen over there. That is why one must do rigorously controlled non-clinical and clinical research. Once again, it appears to me that the hubris of “elite” high status scientists, physicians and governmental “public health” bureaucrats has overcome common sense, well established regulatory norms have been disregarded, and patients have unnecessarily suffered as a consequence.
When will we ever learn.
Immune imprinting, breadth of variant recognition and germinal center response in human SARS-CoV-2 infection and vaccination Cell. Published:January 24, 2022DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2022.01.018
Highlights (per the journal)
The hidden highlight (lede) buried in this peer reviewed paper is that protein production of spike in people vaccinated with the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine is higher than those of severely ill COVID-19 patients! A person might ask, “How could that be?” In order to understand this, we must carefully analyze what the study shows.
This study asserts that the mRNA and the spike protein produced persists for weeks in lymph node germinal centers in human patients. Having worked with mRNA for decades, I can attest that this is highly unusual.
One very real hypothesis is that the substitution of pseudouridine for uridine to avoid the immune response is working so well that the mRNA is completely evading the normal clearance/degradation pathways. Hence, mRNA that is not being incorporated into cells at the injection site, is migrating to the lymph nodes (and throughout the body as the non-clinical Pfizer data suggest?) and continuing to express protein there. In this case, the cytotoxic protein antigen is spike. Spike protein can be detected for at least 60 days after administration of dose. Note that the duration of the protein expression was only tested for 60 days.
The spike protein, let’s review what it is and how it is being used (from the Daily Skeptic):
These new gene-based ‘vaccines’ are working in a completely novel way – nothing remotely resembling that of traditional vaccines. Given that pharmaceutical companies work competitively it was also somewhat of a surprise they took the same approach of targeting what has been termed the ‘spike protein’ of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
This (spike) protein is nasty – sometimes being referred to as a ‘pathogenic protein’ – and is recognised as causing many of the awful pathologies associated with the disease of COVID-19. Logically you would inactivate or at least attenuate this nasty spike protein and develop a vaccine around the attenuated virus. But that’s not what was done. These ‘vaccines’ do not contain any of the offending virus at all but rather the gene sequence that causes the nasty spike protein to be made in the body. We have little idea how much of this nasty protein is produced or for how long it lasts after an injection of the gene sequence. Furthermore, stimulating the body’s own complex biological systems to produce the spike protein will mean that the amount of protein produced will vary from person to person. The idea is that the spike protein produced by the gene encoding it elicits a response by our immune system to produce antibodies directed against the spike. When the wild virus comes along and infects us the antibodies recognise the spike protein and attack it thus preventing its nasty effects. And it does, though as we have since learnt this approach isn’t very good at preventing infection or stopping its transmission. Are we perhaps clutching at straws too in claiming that these ‘vaccines’ are preventing serious disease and death? Have we not learnt anything over the past two years in treating Covid symptoms with conventional therapeutic drugs?
Knowing what we know about the spike protein in these vaccines, the study quantitatively measured spike protein levels in plasma after vaccination. Which, it turns out, are higher than the levels observed in a person with a severe COVID-19 infection. Just to write it, the fact that this only now being discovered or it it was known, released to the public is criminal in my opinion. This should have been characterized long ago, including prior to beginning human clinical trials.
That this has not been published or investigated more demonstrates the gross regulatory dereliction of duty by Pfizer, Biointech, Moderna, NIAID VRC and that whole crew. Using these vaccines, which include pseudouridine without fully understanding the implications and without the FDA requiring a complete pre-clinical toxicology regulatory package, including long-term follow-up, as is done with any other unique chemical or adjuvant additive is shocking. Then there is the novel use of the unique nano particles being used in these vaccines, which also were only marginally assessed, as shown by the Japanese Pfizer data.
Protein expression is not being turned off, because the immune response against the mRNA/pseudouridine complex is either not happening or is ineffective. It may also be that the mRNA/pseudouridine complex has a longer half-life than normal mRNA. The In either case, this is regulatory nightmare.
I do not know how to write this more strongly. This technology is immature. The WHO has approved six, more traditional vaccines, all of which the US government could license. These genetic vaccines are not the only option.
To note: The use of pseudouridine in these mRNA vaccines is not the only option. It has often been hypothesized that the reason Dr. Kariko added pseudouridine to the mRNA vaccine was to make an improvement to the original mRNA patents that I was an inventor on. An improvement to an existing patent allows commercialization of that patent. It is an old trick. Remember, that Curevac does not use pseudouridine in its formulation and it is not required or necessary for a significant immune response. In the next generation of mRNA vaccine experiments (hopefully done in an animal model), it is clear that the issues of adding pseudouridine need to be addressed prior to any more of these vaccines going into humans.
I know the following from the paper is long, but it is very important.
Prolonged detection of vaccine mRNA in LN GCs, and spike antigen in LN GCs and blood following SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccination
The biodistribution, quantity and persistence of vaccine mRNA and spike antigen after vaccination (with the Pfizer vaccine), and viral antigens after SARS-CoV-2 infection, are incompletely understood but are likely to be major determinants of immune responses. We performed in situ hybridization with control and SARS-CoV-2 vaccine mRNA-specific RNAScope probes in the core needle biopsies of the ipsilateral axillary LNs that were collected 7-60 days after 2nd dose of mRNA-1273 or BNT162b2 vaccination, and detected vaccine mRNA collected in the GCs of LNs on day 7, 16, and 37 post vaccination, with lower but still appreciable specific signal at day 60 (Figures 7A -7E). Only rare foci of vaccine mRNA were seen outside of GCs. Axillary LN core needle biopsie of non-vaccinees (n = 3) and COVID-19 patient specimens were negative for vaccine probe hybridization. Immunohistochemical staining for spike antigen in mRNA vaccinated patient LNs varied between individuals, but showed abundant spike protein in GCs 16 days post-2nd dose, with spike antigen still present as late as 60 days post-2nd dose. Spike antigen localized in a reticular pattern around the GC cells, similar to staining for follicular dendritic cell processes (Figure 7B). COVID-19 patient LNs showed lower quantities of spike antigen, but a rare GC had positive staining (Figure 7F). Immunohistochemical staining for N antigen in peribronchial LN secondary and primary follicles of COVID-19 patients (Figures 7F - 7I) was positive in 5 of the 7 patients, with a mean percentage of nucleocapsid-positive follicles of more than 25%.
Discussion One of the positive developments amid the global calamity of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has been the rapid design, production and deployment of a variety of vaccines, including remarkably effective mRNA vaccines encoding the viral spike (Baden et al., 2021; Polack et al., 2020). We find that BNT162b2 vaccination produces IgG responses to spike and RBD at concentrations as high as those of severely ill COVID-19 patients and follows a similar time course. Unlike infection, which stimulates robust but short-lived IgM and IgA responses, vaccination shows a pronounced bias for IgG production even at early time point
Read that again: Protein production of spike is higher than those of severely ill COVID-19 patients!
The paper also notes that the antibody response is IgG, not IgA or IgM. IgA and IgM antibodies produce a strong mucosal immune response needed for respiratory diseases, unlike IgG.
This Substack article has only skimmed the surface of the implications of this paper in terms of both the science and the malfeasance on the part of our government and pharmaceutical corporations. There is more to come on this issue.
To get to the full paper to download, click here.
Why Weren’t These Vaccines Put Through the Proper Safety Trials For Gene Technology, Asks a Former Pharmaceutical Research Scientist The Daily Skeptic 7 February 2022 by Dr. John D. Flack
This article by the daily skeptic does a great job at documenting that appropriate studies have not been done and even attempts to answer the question why:
Are we perhaps clutching at straws too in claiming that these ‘vaccines’ are preventing serious disease and death? Have we not learnt anything over the past two years in treating Covid symptoms with conventional therapeutic drugs?
Perhaps this has driven Big Pharma to pursue a new more profitable model based on protecting the healthy rather than treating the sick? Enter the era of the gene-based ‘vaccines’. The new technologies have had a long and difficult gestation period with several stillbirths. But perhaps their time had come with the ‘unprecedented’ virus from the East. A declared worldwide health emergency demanded a technological response, and it was there in waiting. But have we been blinded and duped by technology and lost sight of the end game of providing safe and effective medicines? Was it a judicious use of the PCR, rapid antigen test technology and information APP technology to drive the test and trace fiasco?
Was the gene technology ready to be used in a mass world-wide vaccination programme without a thorough examination of the potential problems of short- and long-term safety of this previously untested technology?
In my view, technocracy has trumped the sound principles, established over decades and centuries, of basic medical practice, immunology, virology, pharmaceutical sciences and public health generally. In the process, political democracy, personal freedoms, free speech and choice have been dangerously sidelined and even censored.
Peter Doshi, senior editor,
Fiona Godlee, former editor in chief,
Kamran Abbasi, editor in chief
The BMJ, London, UK
Correspondence to: P Doshi Pdoshi{at}bmj.com
Data should be fully and immediately available for public scrutiny
In the pages of The BMJ a decade ago, in the middle of a different pandemic, it came to light that governments around the world had spent billions stockpiling antivirals for influenza that had not been shown to reduce the risk of complications, hospital admissions, or death. The majority of trials that underpinned regulatory approval and government stockpiling of oseltamivir (Tamiflu) were sponsored by the manufacturer; most were unpublished, those that were published were ghostwritten by writers paid by the manufacturer, the people listed as principal authors lacked access to the raw data, and academics who requested access to the data for independent analysis were denied.1234
The Tamiflu saga heralded a decade of unprecedented attention to the importance of sharing clinical trial data.56 Public battles for drug company data,78 transparency campaigns with thousands of signatures,910 strengthened journal data sharing requirements,1112 explicit commitments from companies to share data,13 new data access website portals,8 and landmark transparency policies from medicines regulators1415 all promised a new era in data transparency.
Progress was made, but clearly not enough. The errors of the last pandemic are being repeated. Memories are short. Today, despite the global rollout of covid-19 vaccines and treatments, the anonymised participant level data underlying the trials for these new products remain inaccessible to doctors, researchers, and the public—and are likely to remain that way for years to come.16 This is morally indefensible for all trials, but especially for those involving major public health interventions.
Pfizer’s pivotal covid vaccine trial was funded by the company and designed, run, analysed, and authored by Pfizer employees. The company and the contract research organisations that carried out the trial hold all the data.17 And Pfizer has indicated that it will not begin entertaining requests for trial data until May 2025, 24 months after the primary study completion date, which is listed on ClinicalTrials.gov as 15 May 2023 (NCT04368728).
The lack of access to data is consistent across vaccine manufacturers.16 Moderna says data “may be available … with publication of the final study results in 2022.”18 Datasets will be available “upon request and subject to review once the trial is complete,” which has an estimated primary completion date of 27 October 2022 (NCT04470427).
As of 31 December 2021, AstraZeneca may be ready to entertain requests for data from several of its large phase III trials.19 But actually obtaining data could be slow going. As its website explains, “timelines vary per request and can take up to a year upon full submission of the request.”20
Underlying data for covid-19 therapeutics are similarly hard to find. Published reports of Regeneron’s phase III trial of its monoclonal antibody therapy REGEN-COV flatly state that participant level data will not be made available to others.21 Should the drug be approved (and not just emergency authorised), sharing “will be considered.” For remdesivir, the US National Institutes of Health, which funded the trial, created a new portal to share data (https://accessclinicaldata.niaid.nih.gov/), but the dataset on offer is limited. An accompanying document explains: “The longitudinal data set only contains a small subset of the protocol and statistical analysis plan objectives.”
We are left with publications but no access to the underlying data on reasonable request. This is worrying for trial participants, researchers, clinicians, journal editors, policy makers, and the public. The journals that have published these primary studies may argue that they faced an awkward dilemma, caught between making the summary findings available quickly and upholding the best ethical values that support timely access to underlying data. In our view, there is no dilemma; the anonymised individual participant data from clinical trials must be made available for independent scrutiny.
Journal editors, systematic reviewers, and the writers of clinical practice guideline generally obtain little beyond a journal publication, but regulatory agencies receive far more granular data as part of the regulatory review process. In the words of the European Medicine Agency’s former executive director and senior medical officer, “relying solely on the publications of clinical trials in scientific journals as the basis of healthcare decisions is not a good idea ... Drug regulators have been aware of this limitation for a long time and routinely obtain and assess the full documentation (rather than just publications).”22
Among regulators, the US Food and Drug Administration is believed to receive the most raw data but does not proactively release them. After a freedom of information request to the agency for Pfizer’s vaccine data, the FDA offered to release 500 pages a month, a process that would take decades to complete, arguing in court that publicly releasing data was slow owing to the need to first redact sensitive information.23 This month, however, a judge rejected the FDA’s offer and ordered the data be released at a rate of 55 000 pages a month. The data are to be made available on the requesting organisation’s website (phmpt.org).
In releasing thousands of pages of clinical trial documents, Health Canada and the EMA have also provided a degree of transparency that deserves acknowledgment.2425 Until recently, however, the data remained of limited utility, with copious redactions aimed at protecting trial blinding. But study reports with fewer redactions have been available since September 2021,2425 and missing appendices may be accessible through freedom of information requests.
Even so, anyone looking for participant level datasets may be disappointed because Health Canada and the EMA do not receive or analyse these data, and it remains to be seen how the FDA responds to the court order. Moreover, the FDA is producing data only for Pfizer’s vaccine; other manufacturers’ data cannot be requested until the vaccines are approved, which the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines are not. Industry, which holds the raw data, is not legally required to honour requests for access from independent researchers.
Like the FDA, and unlike its Canadian and European counterparts, the UK’s regulator—the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency—does not proactively release clinical trial documents, and it has also stopped posting information released in response to freedom of information requests on its website.26
As well as access to the underlying data, transparent decision making is essential. Regulators and public health bodies could release details27 such as why vaccine trials were not designed to test efficacy against infection and spread of SARS-CoV-2.28 Had regulators insisted on this outcome, countries would have learnt sooner about the effect of vaccines on transmission and been able to plan accordingly.29
Big pharma is the least trusted industry.30 At least three of the many companies making covid-19 vaccines have past criminal and civil settlements costing them billions of dollars.31 One pleaded guilty to fraud.31 Other companies have no pre-covid track record. Now the covid pandemic has minted many new pharma billionaires, and vaccine manufacturers have reported tens of billions in revenue.32
The BMJ supports vaccination policies based on sound evidence. As the global vaccine rollout continues, it cannot be justifiable or in the best interests of patients and the public that we are left to just trust “in the system,” with the distant hope that the underlying data may become available for independent scrutiny at some point in the future. The same applies to treatments for covid-19. Transparency is the key to building trust and an important route to answering people’s legitimate questions about the efficacy and safety of vaccines and treatments and the clinical and public health policies established for their use.
Twelve years ago we called for the immediate release of raw data from clinical trials.1 We reiterate that call now. Data must be available when trial results are announced, published, or used to justify regulatory decisions. There is no place for wholesale exemptions from good practice during a pandemic. The public has paid for covid-19 vaccines through vast public funding of research, and it is the public that takes on the balance of benefits and harms that accompany vaccination. The public, therefore, has a right and entitlement to those data, as well as to the interrogation of those data by experts.
Pharmaceutical companies are reaping vast profits without adequate independent scrutiny of their scientific claims.33 The purpose of regulators is not to dance to the tune of rich global corporations and enrich them further; it is to protect the health of their populations. We need complete data transparency for all studies, we need it in the public interest, and we need it now.
Competing interests: We have read and understood BMJ policy on declaration of interests and declare that The BMJ is a co-founder of the AllTrials campaign. PD was one of the Cochrane reviewers studying influenza antivirals beginning in 2009, who campaigned for access to data. He also helped organise the Coalition Advocating for Adequately Licensed Medicines (CAALM), which formally petitioned the FDA to refrain from fully approving any covid-19 vaccine this year (docket FDA-2021-P-0786). PD is also a member of Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency, which has sued the FDA to obtain the Pfizer covid-19 vaccine data. The views and opinions do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Maryland.
Provenance and peer review: Commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
This key post in the Politics of Care series stems from an invite from Norman Fenton to give a lecture on December 6 to a group interested in the evidence swirling around vaccines. It is accompanied by The Handmaid’s Vaccine on RxISK, which gives a video of the talk, whose text and slides are below. The sound effects in the video are slightly mixed at one or two point and you might need the text to clarify the points made.
This talk is for all who are interested in evidence and how we generate it as well as for a group of people who are pro-vaccine, to the point of being volunteers in clinical trials, but who have ended up being harmed by them. They are the ones doing the science and demonstrating what science means – as I’ll explain – but their work is written off as misinformation.
The company handling of SSRI harms shows we came to classify real Evidence as misinformation. Many of the company tricks involved in this effort to persuade us the world is flat will be known to you but the brazenness with which they were deployed and the failure of physicians to spot what was going on may be new.
I have a doctorate in Serotonin Reuptake and was keen to try the SSRIs early on. Two men I put on Prozac became suicidal. Their problems cleared after stopping and re-emerged on starting another serotonin reuptake inhibitor and stopped again after stopping. See Creaney et al.
This is as clear a causal connection as you can get anywhere in science. I sent the cases to Lilly for comment and presented them in forums. No-one offered alternate explanations. Others reported similar cases during the year to publication of this article.
This rash of cases forced FDA to require Lilly to defend their drug. As my article came out, Lilly published this Beasley et al article in the BMJ. It came out on the same day the company presented their case at an FDA hearing – September 20, 1991 – stating:
The BMJ article shows more suicidal events on Prozac but the paper said these were not statistically significant and so there was no problem. FDA talked about heart-breaking cases reported to them but concluded the science didn’t link Prozac to the problem.
Here is Tony Hill, who created RCTs, saying 20 years later RCTs can help assess one of the 100 things a drug does – something we might be able to use for treatment purposes. This, by definition, means RCTs are not a good way to evaluate a drug. See Clinical Trials are not Safe.
Saying RCTs are not the way the truth and the light, these days, is like saying the Bible, the Koran or the US Constitution aren’t reliable.
In a depression trial, investigators focus intensely on one thing – does Prozac have an effect on mood. Pretty well everything else is ignored. The statistics we use don’t work unless there is an intense effort to collect everything we can about this one outcome.
And so, depression trials miss something that happens to almost everyone who takes an SSRI within 30 minutes of the first pill – your genitals go numb. You can search the RCTs on these drugs and all you will find is that perhaps 5% of people have sexual issues on these drugs.
Emotional numbing is another extremely common effect almost completely missed. This is how these drugs help. This is how these drugs might help someone diagnosed as depressed but the key point is that it is much more common than depression recovery.
Similarly in the vaccine trials, the common thing is a multiplicity of Spike protein effects – doing this we hope might help but if we are hypnotized by what is hoped for we will miss and have missed what these Spike proteins are actually doing.
If we just depend on RCTs, we end up knowing almost nothing about a drug.
The idea that an RCT shows there is a favourable Risk-Benefit ratio for a drug or vaccine can only hold true if the thing we are looking at is the commonest thing this vaccine does – like a parachute for instance. The commonest thing is a life saved and the Risk Benefit is favourable but we don’t need an RCT for parachutes.
If what we are hoping for is pretty rare – as in vaccine or SSRI trials – and in particular if we don’t know what we are missing, such as an obliteration of our ability to make love, perhaps for all time, then claiming a favourable Risk Benefit ratio is psychotic.
The first rating scale for behaviour was the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression. An aid to make sure physicians checked on most of the things that might be abnormal in depression while they were interviewing a patient. An aid to help a doctor do an interview that would help the patient to live the life they wanted to live.
If you cleave to the checklist you will do very standardized but possibly disastrous interviews. For instance, on the Hamilton Scale, there is an item on suicide which could stem from the illness or from the drug – it needs a judgement call as to which of these is responsible. Ditto for sex, for sleep. Just checking yes for suicidality risks going badly wrong.
Checklists like these however became viewed as scientific instruments. They look better to hospital managers than DH asking about your daughter or partner. Without judgements, in medicine we call these diagnoses, rating scales are meaningless – other than to help a doctor to help you to live the life Pfizer want you to live.
The latest twist on this story are the rating scales for adverse events companies now run electronically which let people rate up to 12 things that happen after the vaccine – such as sore arm, headache, nausea etc. This ensures certain events become statistically significant – and are put forward as a result as the only things we know for sure happen on the vaccine. See Johanna Ryan’s work on Virtual Trials.
There is no area for people to contribute anything else – so reports of other adverse events end up coming from outside the trial and are viewed anecdotes – misinformation. Companies like Pfizer tally anecdotes. What else would you do with misinformation?
Here is Fluvoxamine, an SSRI supposedly good for Covid. There have been lots of dropouts in the trials done on this, enough to invalidate the trial.
Side effects though could be endorsed on pre-populated lists that included cough, fever, nausea etc but not suicidality, homicidality, sexual dysfunction or the other things this drug causes that were likely responsible for the huge dropout rate.
Many look to drugs like this as an alternate to vaccines. Some doctors advocate them as our Hi Tech versus Albert Bourla’s Hi Tech. There are lots of low tech things that might be more helpful like getting you off some of the Tech you’re on rather than throwing more Hi Tech at you.
As we throw Hi Tech at you, we miss the fact that RCTs convert poisons, from whose use we hope to bring some good, into sacraments – something that can only do good. Most believers figure having as many sacraments as you can daily is a good thing where its seems equally obvious to most of us that taking more than one poison at the same time is unlikely to be all that safe.
One more quirk is companies always want their Ugly Ducklings to have an I’m a Swan moment – thalidomide was the fourth most profitable drug in the US last year but will be pushed down to fifth by Albertine this year. Thalidomide is a drug that causes suicidality, sexual dysfunction and birth defects – just like the SSRIs including fluvoxamine.
For drug companies, rating scales ensure you do an interview that produces figures which are the most seductive way to get the patient on their drug. The interview helps you to help them to live the life Pfizer want them to live.
This is not just true for rating scales, it is true for any measure – peak flow rates, bone densities, blood pressure or lipids, or sugar. It may be important to do something about some figures, but the goal is to help people to live the life they want to live – not the life Pfizer want them to live.
A stopwatch can be a wonderful motivator to achieve a dream – it provides data from one fraction of our lives. If we remain on top of that fine – but what about weighing scales? Just after they were introduced we got the first descriptions of anorexia nervosa. In the 1920s, they had norms for ideal weight attached to them and eating disorders mushroomed. They migrated into our homes in the 1960s and eating disorders became epidemic.
It’s very difficult to ignore figures for weight. Without data from every other aspect of our lives at the same time, we risk being trapped by this one data source. We become neurotic.
Can we let bone densities remain thin, or lipid levels remain high? Yes, we can. You think of post-mortems as something that reveal what we died from – they more often reveal what we can live with.
Figures create risks and pharma makes money from treating risks rather than diseases. We are seduced into taking drugs when we are healthy.
The Covid dashboards are a great mechanism to generate perceptions of risk and fear. The vaccines of course treat risks – not disease.
The Meatloaf title Paradise by the Dashboard Light is what Pfizer sees but its Hell by the Dashboard Light for us – this now extends to the evaluation of lectures and ensures we pander to people rather than challenge them.
It’s extraordinary how little we have put into treating SARS-Cov, the disease in this case and its associated pneumonia. Curing diseases is not a good business model.
The goal of marketing is to make selling superfluous. The aim is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits and sells itself.
Imipramine was the first antidepressant. It beats the later SSRIs in RCTs. It treats melancholia – they can’t. They are useless for severe depression. Melancholia comes with a high risk of suicide.
Imipramine was launched in 1958. A year later at a meeting in England, Danish psychiatrists made it clear that while it was a wonderful treatment it made some people suicidal.
Let’s do a thought RCT of imipramine versus placebo in melancholia. Even though it can cause suicide, we would expect it to reduce the number of suicides because it treats the condition. This RCT would be great evidence antidepressants do not cause suicide.
Here is the data on the trials in mild depression that brought the SSRIs to market – a doubling of suicidal events compared to placebo.
Imipramine looks the same in mild depressions. Now it too causes suicides. So RCTs tell us nothing about cause and effect – they can give us diametrically opposite answers. This is because these aren’t drug trials. They are Treatment Trials and in any clinical Trial, the condition confounds the effects of the drugs.
People evaluating drugs pre-RCTs knew this. When a patient becomes suicidal in a trial you have to use your judgement to work out what has happened but you are told not to.
This is true in every clinical situation where drugs and conditions cause superficially similar effects – diabetes and glitazones both cause heart failure, osteoporosis and bisphosphonates both cause fractures – and this makes it impossible for an algorithmic exercise as most RCTs are to establish what is happening.
Here is what a real drug trial looks like. Companies ran these studies in the 1980s and found that SSRIs make healthy volunteers suicidal, cause dependence and sexual dysfunction but we heard nothing about this when the drugs launched. These Trials enabled companies to game their Treatment Trials to hide these problems.
Vaccine trials are healthy volunteer trials.
This slide shows data straight from a 2006 GlaxoSmithKline paper. GSK’s SSRI paroxetine was in trouble – the RCTs data for Major Depressive Disorder seem to show paroxetine causes suicidal events. The real data are likely worse that GSK admit to here.
But never fear RCTs come to the rescue. GSK also did trials in people with Intermittent Brief Depressive Disorders – IBDD. These are borderline personality disorder to most people – patients who have suicidal events much more often than anyone else. But these patients can meet criteria for depression and could be entered into Depression RCTs.
Prozac in these patients didn’t work. Paroxetine didn’t either and had a 3-fold higher suicidal act rate than placebo. GSK then did another trial in a similar group of patients. Why?
The answer is here. Here are IBDD data from the two GSK trials. I have seen other data for these two trials which make paroxetine look worse but let’s stick with GSK’s story. We could even add 16 more events to the paroxetine arm and still get the same magical outcome
When you add the IBDD data to the MDD data – all of a sudden paroxetine doesn’t cause suicidal events it protects against them.
Something like this must happen in every treatment trial with heterogenous patients – back pain, breast cancer, diabetes, hypertension, osteoporosis, parkinson’s disease. We can use an effect a drug causes to hide an effect a drug causes.
RCTs are not a way to work out what is going on. Back pain trials will insist you use analgesics rather than antibiotics – which is wrong for the 10% of backpains caused by infections.
You’ve seen the son of this slide before. Here are the parents. In all AD RCTs there was a 2-week washout period during which patients were whipped off prior medicines. We now know this was a tricky thing to do – it gives lots of suicides – a bit like the two-week post vaccine period.
But companies argued as the patients were on nothing, all these events should be counted as placebo events – as the diagram here illustrates.
The Prozac 1991 paper had an increased number of suicidal events – but hey not statistically significant. Undo this maneuver –– and they are statistically significant.
Here are the paroxetine data presented to FDA. We’d prefer the figures for paroxetine to be better than placebo but what’s a fraction between friends.
Undo the washout maneuver and this is what the data looked like. FDA knew what was going on and that it breached regulations and did nothing. And these figures don’t look like a drug that should be approved without warnings.
When that was rumbled, companies changed the game. Patients terminated from their SSRI who went into withdrawal and became suicidal were viewed as placebo, while those who stopped placebo and were put on an SSRI and committed suicide were classified as a placebo suicide – on an intention to treat basis. Regulators didn’t ask questions.
Sylvia Plath committed suicide a week into an antidepressant – a common timeframe.
This advert is for the type of antidepressant she was given, an MAOI, featuring a space shuttle, aimed to giving doctors the impression this drug will get their patients into orbit faster.
Here is a space shuttle – the safest transport ever per million miles travelled – but not so safe if expressed in terms of exits from and entries back into earth’s atmosphere.
Rather than express suicidal events per patient exposed companies stuck to events per thousand patient years – having taken care to ensure some patients doing well remained in extended follow-up for months or years.
When the RCT data turned tricky and we got Black Box Warnings – companies turned to Real World Evidence – like national suicide rates. Here you see the claims for Norway which were typical of all Nordic countries – as SSRI use increased suicide rates fell – which is not compatible with the SSRI data.
If you look though suicide rates are going up with pre SSRI AD use until about 1988 – 3-4 years pre SSRI when they begin to fall.
Here is Norway again where you see suicide rates falling from 88 or so and what you see if them rising as autopsy rates rise and then falling in step – as ill-defined deaths fall and rise.
Slide 30 This is true for all the Nordic countries – See Reseland et al.
We routinely hear that SSRI use is escalating. It’s not – the same number of people go on them each year. The increase speaks to the growing numbers who are dependent on them.
This has implications for suicide rates – you are only likely to see an effect on an index like this during the first few years. In the case of vaccines, this years rate of myocarditis and thromboses will become the new normal – See Healy and Aldred 2005.
In 1999 I was asked to participate as a speaking at a company symposium in London – speakers would need to produce articles for a supplement. I said yes and soon after had an email with my article. It was a great Healy article saying the things Healy say in the way he says them with Healy references. No one who knew my stuff would pick it out as not mine.
I emailed back saying I figured on writing my own. There was surprise at the other end but they said okay. I sent it on to them and they said this is rather good but there are some important commercial messages in the other one – we’ll get Siegfried Kasper to put his name on it.
Here it is – only one word changed from the original paper – the name of author Kasper. Everybody in Vienna knows this but its done no harm to SK’s career. You can find materials saying you can trust doctors like Kasper because they have written a 1000 articles or more. Its still a great Healy article etc.
A year later I was in Pfizer’s archive where even the loo-paper was stamped confidential. I came across this working document – which was the articles on Pfizer’s SSRI Zoloft being managed by Current Medical Directions – a medical writing company.
Inside there are pages listing the articles published or in train on Zoloft for the anxious, the depressed, the young, the old etc – here you see the PTSD page.
You will see on the right – the articles were written for these essentially negative studies saying the drug worked wonderfully well. One would go to NEJM – the other to JAMA. And on the left – you see TBD – authors names are To Be Determined. Pfizer’s marketing department will work out who would be the best sales people for the drug.
This is not just a mental health issue. It holds for all treatments across medicine.
Here is the most famous RCT of all time. It has a distinguished authorship line and is in the journal with the highest impact factor in child psychiatry and says paroxetine works wonderfully well and is entirely safe for children who are depressed.
This internal GSK document from 1998 shows the company knew the trial had shown the drug didn’t work and proposed taking out the good bits of the data and publishing those which is the article you have seen. New York State took a fraud action against GSK on this basis who were also fined $3 billion which led to access to the trial data and what you are going to see next.
Through this legal action we got access to company data no one ever sees. The efficacy data is pretty irrelevant, but it was still possible to show that no matter which way you cut the data paroxetine was not more efficacious than placebo.
The tricks used to hide the problems were the real interest in these data.
The original article had 10 pages. Regulators see an 800-page Clinical Study Report (CSR) plus nearly 5000 pages of appendices – these are notional they are there but no-one in MHRA or FDA will look at them. We saw these and a further 77,000 Clinical Record Form (CRF) pages.
Point 2 points to data that just didn’t get transcribed from the 77000 pages to the 5000 pages. Point 10 is patients on placebo got SSRIs – I can explain how. But I want to focus on the coding issues.
The psychiatric adverse events all got grouped in CNS or neurological events – into which the groupers also put headaches and dizziness. The dizziness was not neurological – it was cardiovascular because it this case the comparator drug lowers BP especially when used in double or triple the adult dose.
The effect of this was to drown out the signal from psychiatric adverse events. So there is an issue about grouping. We were sensitized to this by Elizabeth Loder, the BMJ editor handling out paper – which took over a year to publish with 7 review rounds and 7 reviewers – who objected to our every mention of headache. As it turned out was a headache-ologist, who was an opinion leader for GSK but above all was the wife of an attorney working in Ropes and Gray who had been the lawyers defending GSK against the $3 billion fine.
So here, leaving out headache and dizziness, in the lower bar you see the number of suicidal events in the Keller paper – once you decode them from emotional lability. In the middle bar, GSK revised this after being asked to do so by FDA when a fuss blew up. In the upper bar you see that we found more again – and there were more than we missed as I’m about to tell you.
How does this fit Co-Vaccines? Well, here you see Pfizer’s report of their adverse event data – a ton of them have disappeared into a higher order coding group called General Disorders. The crimson half of the bar shows you these are serious, potentially lethal. General Disorders is a meaningless group – it needs unpacking.
In a Pfizer trial, one man poured petrol over himself and set a match to it, intending to kill himself. He died 5 days later from his burns. His death was coded as burns. But the company had to write a Serious Adverse Events narrative and if you got to see that you could work out that he should have been coded as suicide.
Companies have found a way to get around this, as found out after Study 329 finished. Here is a young man on a street waving a gun. Its Kyle Rittenhouse. In Study 329 a boy of 15 was picked up out on the street waving a gun around and threatening to kill people. He was hospitalized and should therefore have had an SAE narrative but the company coded him as intercurrent illness.
Four children dropped out of Study 329 coded as intercurrent illness – all were taking paroxetine. Add them into the picture you have just seen and things look a lot worse.
What is intercurrent illness? This was almost certainly an adverse event on paroxetine but invoking an intercurrent illness that means you really should not have been entered into this study means there is no need to write a narrative. This loophole has been there for 25 years and FDA have not moved to close it.
We know Astra-Zeneca broke the blind and got rid of serious adverse events like the ones that happened to Bri Dressen – see New England J of Misinformation. Here you see intercurrent illnesses turning up in this same Astra-Zeneca trial.
Here you have Maddie de Garay who has been tube fed and needs a wheelchair since a few days after the second dose of Pfizer’s vaccine in their trial for 12-15 year olds. But the company says no serious vaccine-related adverse events happened in this trial. They claim she has hysteria and of course that antedates the trial and so the vaccine can’t have caused it.
Few people know that FDA approved paroxetine for children – here is part of FDA’s 2002 letter of approval to GSK. The key bit is typed up so you can read it. The date is important – the Keller paper was 2001.
You can see here GSK told FDA that Study 329 was negative and you see that FDA agreed to approve the drug on the back of three negative studies and also agreed that there was no need to mention this in the labelling. Why would FDA do this?
Here are the published results of adult trials of antidepressants nearly a decade earlier. The picture looks pretty good.
But as Erick Turner has shown, this is how these studies looked to FDA. A different picture. Companies don’t leave negative studies unpublished, they know FDA are happy to let them publish negative studies as positive.
Why? Did GSK tell FDA – if you tell the world Study 329 was negative, we might get sued for fraud – which they did and fined for $3 billion. FDA don’t feel inclined to blow this whistle and MHRA and EMA have even less incentive.
So here is Study 329 again. The author is not listed. In the case of trials done in children, pretty well the entire literature was company written. The mismatch between what articles claim and the data when we see is the greatest known divide in medicine but likely not atypical. Study 329 was a good and ethical trial compared to some of the current vaccine trials.
There are now 45 negative trials for antidepressants in minors – out of 45 trials done. Yet antidepressants appear now to be the second most commonly taken drugs by teenage girls.
In this New England J of Misinformation article, the first thing to note is the author is not listed here. Twenty of the 29 apparent authors are company people. Few are clinicians and none are likely to have seen anyone harmed.
Second the trial was run by I Con rather than Pfizer who subcontracted to Palladium Research, who subcontracted to Ventavia and we know Ventavia ran a shit-show.
Anyone with experience of company trials knows that it is worth looking at the centres involved because for instance in a trial of aripiprazole where there might be 33 centres with 30 producing results for the drug that would not get approval, but perhaps 3 in places FDA won’t visit that found every patient put on the drug did fabulously and every on placebo was seriously injured or died a horrible death and adding both together produces a result that can squeak by FDA.
There is scope to wonder if something similar happened in this trial.
What we do know is that more people died on vaccine than placebo and lots more people disappeared on vaccine and FDA’s current leadership for whatever reason would prefer to be dead before anyone gets access to the data and their correspondence with Pfizer.
Is there a House in the Doctor? The medical drama House was watched and loved by many. Dr House was good at solving puzzling clinical cases by pulling on the thread of some minor detail which led to the answer.
Doctors today have close to lost the ability to say an evident X causes an evident Y – largely down to the mantra that only RCT evidence tells us what a treatment does and we can’t believe the evident anymore. Wife shoots husband point blank in chest – did she kill him? Who knows. In perhaps 1 case in 100 he had a heart attack just beforehand – we need to pass the 100 cases on to those experts in CDC, FDA, EMA etc and let them work it out.
As a result docs report maybe 1 in 10 or 1 in 100 serious side effects to regulators who file these away and do nothing with them.
This is unlike airline pilots who also report near misses and refuse to fly if these reports are not taken into account – after all if the customer dies the pilot does too. This is not true of doctors.
There is a profound misapprehension of the role of a regulator. They are not part of the health apparatus. Their job , perhaps easier to see in the case of food, is to decide if this yellow stuff is butter or lard colored to look like butter. If butter – it is not their job to decide if this is good butter or not or if butter is good for us or not. Ditto with drugs – the role is just to tick a box if certain criteria are met.
They have no abilities to or training in establishing if a drug or vaccine causes a problem.
Here is Walter Raleigh getting his head chopped off. After the fact legal systems recognized the injustice of convicting someone based on hearsay and said cases could only be decided on the basis of evidence in the room that can examined and cross-examined.
The first thing MHRA do with any reports is to remove the names of doctors and patients. This converts them into hearsay, anedcotes, misinformation. It means no-one can decide if there is a link.
MHRA will say till the crack of doom they are looking to find causal needles in the haystack of reports but faced with a needle-stack they can’t seem to spot a needle.
The key to determining cause and effect is an encounter between a doctor and patient. All the data is there. After a first run through there is a chance to follow up when oddities about the data come to mind. Remove the possibility for an ongoing two-way encounter like this and you remove the ability to establish cause and effect.
The one tool regulators have with anonymized drug reports is proportional reporting rates but as Matthew Crawford pointed out you can’t even use this for VAERS because you need lots of drugs in the mix for this to work properly. Besides proportional reporting rates are a cop-out. They might look more scientific than interviewing someone but they aren’t.
If someone commits suicide on an SSRI, their doctor will be advised by their insurer not to say the drug caused it or say anything that might lead to a further legal case. Insurance is supposed to be a business that supports us to take risks but is not doing this here.
If the doctor breaks ranks and blames the drug, a coroner, who can say a street drug caused a death, has no box to tick to implicate a prescription drug in a death.
Media guidance equally ensures journalists cannot say the obvious – the drug caused the suicide if the coroner hasn’t done so – and all this will apply to vaccines also.
If the coroner goes rogue and writes to the regulator and intimates that the evident cause of death was the drug or vaccine, the regulator will check on what the doctor has said and if the doctor didn’t finger the drug or vaccine – they won’t.
If the case is so Evident that both doctor and coroner go rogue, as in the Alana Cutland case, the regulator will respond, as MHRA did, that we only have a handful of reports like this – not enough to let us work out what might have gone on.
In the TV series House, the hero pays heed to tiny things that don’t fit the pattern and after twists and turns finds how it all hangs together.
When a wife shoots her husband in front of Dr House these days he seems unable to work out what’s gone on. Ok the guy may have had a heart attack at the same time and she shot him afterwards out of spite at being cheated out of a pleasant moment but 99 times out a 100 it’s pretty simple, she killed him. House though has lost this plot.
Some great doctors encourage their colleagues to report adverse events to regulators – which makes the problem worse. Regulators will file these reports away until the crack of doom. Unless doctors have the courage to say – look I know what I have seen and the vaccine or the drug killed my patient, they make things worse.
Dr House can’t get his head around the fact that with drugs and vaccines we hope to bring good out of the use of a poison, and sometimes people get poisoned. We and he prefer the idea he is giving sacraments – things that can only do good.
F Scott Fitzgerald once said that a sophisticated mind can hold two contradictory things in mind at the same time and still function – doctors could do this once but can’t now.
Science challenges Muslims and Jews, Xtians and Atheists to leave their biases at the door and come to a consensus about the data. But as in a jury trial, sticking with the data we still have to come to a verdict. A judgement. A diagnosis. It is not the role of a regulator to make diagnoses or deliver verdicts.
A verdict has effects in the real world just as much as shooting someone. There are evident effects from shooting on a husband who dies, and equally evident effects on the wife being tried.
This is important but more important for all of us just now are the effects on the doctor or failing to make any verdict, and just as much failing to make the diagnosis they know or suspect is the right one.
This failure transforms them into Model Doctors – a shrunken replica of the real thing.
When treating a patient, following the evidence can’t mean doing what ghostwritten fraudulent articles say. It has to mean following the person in front of me and coming to a consensus view just as a jury would.
If there is a mismatch between that and the so-called evidence – well all the books say that’s what moves science forward.
See The Handmaid’s Vaccine on RxISK – and its message about Albert and Ursula, the happy couple you see here.
Pfizer/BioNTech’s Comirnaty COVID shot was approved (licensed) by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in late August 2021, but only for adults, and only when carrying the Comirnaty label. No other COVID shot has been FDA approved. However, Comirnaty is currently not available, and while the experimental, emergency use authorized (EUA) Pfizer shot is substituted for Comirnaty, the two products are clearly legally distinct and not the same
A licensed vaccine is not shielded from liability until or unless it’s added to the recommended childhood vaccination schedule by the CDC. So, if you were injured by Comirnaty, you could sue Pfizer. You cannot sue if injured by the EUA Pfizer shot (or any of the other EUA COVID injections)
Even though several hundred claims have been filed with the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP) for injuries resulting from the COVID shots — which is the only possible avenue to obtain damages — not a single claim has been paid out
Natural immunity is much stronger than what you can achieve from the injection, which only provides antibodies against the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and wanes within a few months. The shots may in fact permanently limit the kind of immune response you would make were you to later be exposed or infected with COVID
Children’s Health Defense has filed a lawsuit arguing you cannot have a vaccine that is both an emergency use product and a licensed product at the same time. That’s against the law, but the government has done it anyway. Remarkably, the request for an injunction was initially thrown out, but the CHD has not given up and is still pursuing the case
In this interview, Dr. Meryl Nass, an internist specializing in toxicology, vaccine-induced illnesses and Gulf War illness, shares her insights into the dangers of the COVID jab, which received an emergency use authorization October 26, 2021, for children as young as 5.
We also discuss the conflicts of interest within the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that seem to be behind this reckless decision, and how the agency pulled the wool over our eyes with its approval of Pfizer/BioNTech’s Comirnaty COVID injection.
Is the COVID Jab Approved or Not?
As explained by Nass:
“All of the COVID ‘vaccines,’ and most of the COVID treatment products, have not been [FDA] approved. Approved means licensed. All except one, which is the Pfizer vaccine for adults, age 16 and up, which got approved, i.e., licensed on August 23 [2021].
But every other vaccine, and for every other age group, including the boosters, have only been authorized under emergency use authorizations (EUAs). There’s a critical difference [between licensing and EUA]. Once a drug is fully licensed, it is subject to liability.
If the company injures you with that product, you can sue them, unless it later gets put on the CDC’s childhood schedule or is recommended by the CDC [U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] [during] pregnancy, in which case it obtains a different liability shield.
It then becomes part of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP, established under the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act), and 75 cents from every dose of vaccine that is sold in the United States goes into a fund to pay for injuries that way.”
The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act removed liability for all vaccines recommended by the CDC for children. Since 2016, they’ve also removed liability for vaccines given to pregnant women, a category that has become the latest “gold rush” for vaccines. Naturally, once a company is no longer liable for injuries, the profitability of the product in question increases dramatically.
Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program Is Nearly Useless
Products under emergency use have their own special government program for liability called the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP). “It is a terrible program,” Nass says. CICP is an offshoot of the 2005 PREP Act.
“The PREP act enabled the CICP to be created by Congress,” Nass explains. “Congress has to allocate money for it. If you are injured by an emergency use product, you don’t get any legal process. The companies have had all their liability waived. There is a single process that is administered through HHS [Health and Human Services].
Some employees there decide whether you deserve to be compensated or not. The maximum in damages you can obtain is about $370,000 if you’re totally disabled or die, and the money is only to compensate you for lost wages or unpaid medical bills.”
So far, even though several hundred CICP claims have been filed for injuries resulting from the COVID shots, not a single claim has been paid out. This is important, because the statute of limitations is one year. “It’s getting close to running out for people who were vaccinated early,” Nass says.
If you fail to apply in time, you lose the opportunity to get any compensation entirely. “Of course, in fact, it’s really ‘an opportunity’ to apply and get nothing because almost nobody gets paid,” she says. At that point, you have no further recourse. There’s no appeals process to the judicial system.
“You can ask the HHS twice to compensate you, and if they say no, that’s it,” Nass explains. “You can attempt to sue the company that made the product, if you’re convinced it was improperly made, but the secretary of HHS has to give you the permission to sue.
You have to prove that there was willful misconduct and no one has ever reached that bar. So, there has never been a lawsuit under this. Anyway, that’s what you’re looking at. If you get the vaccine under EUA and are injured, you’re on your own. People have no idea about this when they vaccinate themselves or their children.”
Why Were the Shots Mandated?
As you know by now, president Biden decided to mandate the COVID jab for most federal employees (but not all) and private companies with 100 employees or more. “We don’t know why that is,” Nass says. It doesn’t make sense, as large numbers of Americans have already recovered from COVID-19 and have durable, long-lasting immunity already.
As correctly noted by Nass, natural immunity is much stronger than what you can achieve from the injection, which only provides antibodies against the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and wears off within a few months. The shots “may in fact permanently limit the kind of immune response you would make were you to be infected with COVID later,” Nass says.
For these reasons, there’s absolutely no good reason to vaccinate people who have recovered from the infection and several bad reasons. There’s evidence showing the shot can be more harmful for those with existing immunity.
“But for reasons best known to itself, the Biden administration feels so certain it needs to vaccinate everybody that it has used illegal means to tell employers they will lose federal contracts if they don’t force their employees to be vaccinated immediately, and must fire them — if they’re health care workers, for example, or government employees, or military — if they have not been vaccinated.
Obviously that is creating a great deal of chaos, particularly within the health care industry, particularly in my state, Maine, where these draconian rules have gone into effect and many fire department, police, EMTs, nurses and doctors can no longer work.
The one thing that was necessary to push mandates forward was for the government to be able to say it had a licensed product. Before the emergency use authorization was created in 2005, you had licensed drugs and you had experimental drugs and nothing else.
There was no gray area between them. Any use of a medication or vaccine that is not fully licensed is still experimental, despite the fact that a new category of drugs has been created with emergency use authorizations.
These are still experimental drugs, so under emergency use, you can’t force people [to take them]. You have to offer them options and they have the right to refuse. Since that is part of the statute, the federal government can’t get around it.
Therefore, attorneys in the Biden administration knew they could not legally impose mandates under an EUA, and so they demanded that FDA provide a COVID vaccine full approval, aka, an unrestricted license. This was believed to enable them to impose mandates.
They must have put pressure on the FDA, and FDA gave them what they wanted, which was a license for the Pfizer vaccine called Comirnaty on August 23 [2021].”
Comirnaty Approval Includes Important Caveats
In the documents released August 23, 2021, by the FDA, there were some interesting caveats. They said the Comirnaty vaccine is essentially equivalent to the EUA vaccine and the two vaccines may be used interchangeably. However, they pointed out that the two are legally distinct. Curiously, FDA didn’t specify what these legal distinctions are.
“I concluded that the legal distinctions were the fact that under EUA, there was essentially no manufacturer liability, but once the vaccine got licensed, the manufacturer would be subject to liability claims unless and until the vaccine was placed on the childhood schedule or recommended in pregnancy, in which case it would then fall … under the NVICP,” Nass says.
“Right now, Comirnaty is still not in that injury compensation program, and it’s licensed, so it no longer falls under the CICP. So, it is in fact subject to liability if you get injured with a bottle that says Comirnaty on it. Of course, if you’re Pfizer, what do you want to do?
You don’t want to make that licensed product available until several months have gone by and Comirnaty has been put into the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. So, Pfizer and FDA have not made the licensed product available yet.
What has happened instead, in the military, is the FDA has made a secret deal with the military and said, certain emergency use lots can be considered equivalent to the licensed vaccine, and [told military medical staff] which QR codes — which lots can be used. [These specific lots] can then be given to soldiers as if they’re licensed.
Subsequently, we’re told that military clinics are actually putting Comirnaty labels onto bottles that are under EUA. Now, that probably can happen in the military, but only in the military, because there are likely to be memoranda of understanding within the military that we haven’t seen yet that say soldiers cannot sue Pfizer for injuries …
In the military, the government and Pfizer feel like they have set up a situation where nobody can sue, but in the civilian world, that has not happened, and so there is no Comirnaty available.
Yet, on the basis that FDA licensed this product, the federal government is still telling employers that they can mandate it and that they must fire employees that have not taken the vaccine, or they will lose government contracts. We’re in a very interesting situation that is ripe for litigation, and Children’s Health Defense, which is an organization I represent, is litigating some of this.
However, the litigation situation has been very difficult since the pandemic began. Cases that normally would’ve been easy wins are being thrown out by the courts, both in the U.S. and in Europe. Something strange has happened and the judges are looking for any way out, so they don’t have to rule on the merits of these cases.”
The organization Children’s Health Defense has filed a lawsuit arguing you cannot have a vaccine that is both an emergency use product and a licensed product at the same time. That’s against the law, but the federal government did it anyway. Remarkably, the request for an injunction was initially thrown out, but Children’s Health Defense hasn’t given up and is still pursuing that case.
COVID Jab Is Authorized for 5- to 11-Year-Olds in the US
As mentioned, the FDA recently authorized the EUA COVID jab for children between the ages of 5 and 11, which is simply appalling, considering they are at virtually no risk from COVID-19. I’ve not seen a single recorded case in the entire world of anyone in that age group dying of COVID that didn’t have a serious preexisting comorbidity, such as cancer.
If you have a healthy child, they are at no risk from the infection, so there’s only danger associated with this shot, which in this age group would be one-third the adult dose. Typically, when you’re giving a drug to a child, the dose is calculated based on the child’s weight. Here, they’re giving the same dose to a 5-year-old as an 11-year-old, despite there being a significant difference in weight. So, it’s pure guesswork.
Worse yet, the mRNA vaccines produce an unpredictable amount of spike protein, and even if they produce much too much, there is no way to turn off the process once you have been injected.
Despite clear safety signals, the FDA’s advisory committee authorized the Pfizer jab for 5- to 11-year-olds unanimously, 17-to-0 (with one abstaining vote). However, when you look at the roster of the FDA’s committee members1 who reviewed and voted to authorize the Pfizer shot for children as young as 5, the unanimous “yes” vote becomes less of a mystery.
Abhorrent Conflicts of Interest
As reported by National File2 and The Defender,3 the membership of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) has had staggering conflicts of interest. Members have included:
In addition to that, former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb is currently on Pfizer’s board of directors. As noted by Nass, two of the members, one permanent and one temporary, are also CDC career employees whose job it is to push vaccines at the CDC.
“If they voted against authorizing a vaccine, they would be out of a job,” Nass says. “They have no business on that committee … It’s a very unethical stew of advisory committee members …
What happened is Pfizer delivered a large package of information to the FDA on October 6, 2021. FDA staff had to go through this large packet of information on the 5- to 11-year-olds and produce their own report, which was about 40 pages long, and create talks to give to the advisory committee, and they did all of this in 17 days.
There was apparently very little critical thought that went into their presentations. Before the meeting, Children’s Health Defense, and I was one of the authors, wrote to the committee and to FDA officials saying, ‘Look, there’s all these reasons that don’t make logical or medical sense for vaccinating kids in this age group, because they almost never get very ill or die, and the side effects of the vaccine are essentially unknown.
We know there are a lot of side effects, but the federal government has concealed from us the rate at which these side effects occur. But we know that the rate from myocarditis is very high, probably at least 1 in 5,000 young males … which is a very serious side effect. It can lead, probably always leads, to some scarring. It can lead to sudden death, to heart failure.”
Trials in Young Children Were Insufficient
As explained by Nass, in the clinical trial, there were two groups of children. The first group was enrolled for two to three months, while the second group was enrolled for just 17 days after receiving the second dose. (Pfizer added the second group because FDA claimed there weren’t enough volunteers in the first group.)
These two groups comprised over 3,000 children who got the jab and 1,500 or 2,000 who got a placebo. None suffered serious side effects. This was then translated into the claim that the injection was safe. However, as noted by Nass:
“They didn’t look at safety in all these kids. Even though FDA had said, ‘Add kids to your clinical trial,’ Pfizer created a ‘safety subset’ of one-tenth of the vaccinated subjects.
It was this small number of kids from whom they drew blood to show they had adequate levels of neutralizing antibodies, which was a surrogate for efficacy, because they didn’t have enough cases of COVID in this abbreviated trial to show that the vaccine actually works in this age group.”
Even though the advisory committee acknowledged that the blood test done for efficacy had not been validated, and wasn’t reliable evidence of effectiveness, they still decided that all children, regardless of health status, would benefit from the injection.
They also ignored the fact that at least half the children are already immune, and giving them the injection will provide no additional benefit in terms of immunity, while putting them at increased risk for serious side effects.
“Nobody said, ‘Look, the parents of healthy kids may be dying for a vaccine, but that’s because we haven’t told them the truth about the vaccine. We haven’t told them their kids don’t need it. We haven’t told them it’s going to potentially damage future immunity.
We haven’t told them they’re at higher risk of side effects than if they never had COVID. We’re not allowing them to go get antibody tests to establish that they’re already immune and therefore should be waved from being vaccinated.’
The committee members were aware of all this stuff, but in the end [they voted yes] … apart from one very smart member of the committee who works for the National Institutes of Health. He abstained. He didn’t have the guts to vote no, but he knew this was a bad idea.”
Children Are Being Injected Without Parental Consent
While all of that is bad enough, parents of young children now face the possibility of their children being injected against their will and without their knowledge. Nass comments:
“As I said, we don’t know why the government wants everybody vaccinated, but there’s probably a reason that goes beyond protecting us from COVID.
The government got the FDA to authorize the vaccine for 12- to 15-year-olds on May 10 [2021], and subsequently that group, which is about 6 million kids, has been getting vaccinated across the country. That’s under emergency use so, again, you can’t sue.
But something kind of evil happened, which was many cities began vaccinating 12- to 15-year-olds in the absence of parental permission. So, a child could show up with their friends or a friend’s mother at a vaccine center and get vaccinated with no one asking about their medical history, nobody calling the parents. No notation got entered into the child’s medical record that they were vaccinated.
Vaccinators were told to make their own assessment. If they thought this child could give consent, go ahead and vaccinate. Now, that is a gross violation of our laws, and yet it was happening in Boston, in Philadelphia, in Seattle, in San Francisco, and we have good documentation of it.
The government currently is planning for mobile vaccination clinics for kids and vaccinations in schools, and they may take this program of vaccinating without parental consent down to the 5- to 11-year-olds …
In fact, we may see clinics popping up that don’t require informed consent in the 5- to 11-year-old group. Let me just mention that the chief medical officer in Canada’s British Columbia said they have brought laws that allow children of any age to consent for themselves. Think about that. A baby can consent for vaccinations for itself. It would be funny if it wasn’t so diabolical.”
All of this goes against the most basic concept of medical ethics, which is informed consent. No one has the right to perform a medical procedure on you without your consent, or the consent of a legal guardian. The government, again, without establishing any new laws, is simply bypassing the legal system.
Will Young Children Be at Risk for Myocarditis?
Based on her review of the scientific literature, Nass suspects younger children in the now COVID jab-approved, 5- to 11-year-old age group will be at exponentially higher risk of myocarditis and other side effects compared to the 12- to 15-year group, where we’ve already seen a documented increase.
“In the letter that Children’s Health Defense wrote to the advisory committee for the FDA, we created a graph based on the reporting rate of myocarditis versus age, and we showed there was an exponential curve.
Men aged 65 and up had a rate that was 1/100th the rate of boys aged 12 to 17. If that exponential curve keeps going up, the rate in the 5- to 11-year-olds could be even dramatically higher. In those young men, a 1 in 5,000 rate was reported to VAERS [Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System]. That’s not a real rate.
That just tells us how many people got diagnosed with myocarditis, and then went to the trouble of reporting it to the FDA. The FDA and CDC have a large number of other databases from which they can gather rates of illness.
VAERS is considered passive reporting. It is not considered fit for purpose to establish illness rates because we don’t know how many people report. Do 1 in 10 report, 1 in 100, 1 in 50? Nobody knows.
However, again, because everything is crazy since the pandemic came in, the CDC has tried to pull the wool over our eyes and has claimed that the rate of anaphylaxis in the population from COVID vaccines is identical to their reporting rate to VAERS. We know that’s not true.
On the CDC’s website, that’s what they have. Elsewhere on the website, they say you can’t take a VAERS rate and call it an actual rate of reactions, but they’ve done that [for anaphylaxis]. And they’re trying to obfuscate the fact that they’re not giving you real rates, and sort of pretending that the myocarditis rate is probably the VAERS reporting rate of myocarditis, although they’re not saying so directly.”
Nass goes on to recount an example from the smallpox vaccine, which also caused myocarditis. A military study that just looked at cases sent to specialists found roughly 1 in 15,000 developed myocarditis. A military immunologist then dug deeper, and drew blood on soldiers before and after vaccination, and found a myocarditis rate of 1 in 220 after receiving the smallpox vaccine.
However, 1 soldier in 30 developed subclinical myocarditis where troponin rose from normal to more than two times the upper limits of normal. While asymptomatic, 1 in 30 had measurable inflammation of the heart. “Right now, in terms of what the rate is for COVID, nobody is looking, no federal agency wants to find out the real rate,” Nass says.
You Can’t Find Problems You Refuse to Look For
A simple study that measures troponin levels — a marker for heart inflammation and damage — before and after each dose, could easily determine what the real rate of myocarditis is, yet that is not being done.
“This is what we’re dealing with,” Nass says. “All these databases, which is about a dozen different databases, that CDC and FDA said they could access to determine the rates of side effects after vaccination with COVID vaccines, they’re either not being used or being used improperly,” Nass says.
“It was discovered that a new algorithm was being used to study the VAERS database that only came into use in January 2021, immediately after the vaccines were authorized, and the algorithm was developed such that you compare two vaccines to each other.
If the pattern of side effects was similar between the two vaccines — which is often the case because there’s a limited number of general vaccine adverse reactions — even if one vaccine has a thousand times more side effects as the one it is being compared to, by using this flawed algorithm, if the pattern of reactions was the same, even though the rates were 1,000 times higher for one, the algorithm would fail to detect a problem.
That is the algorithm they’re using to analyze VAERS [data]. They’re also using bad methods … to analyze the vaccine safety database, which encompasses 12 million Americans who enrolled in HMOs around the country. The CDC pays for access to their electronic medical records and their data.
Somehow when these databases have been looked at carefully, they’re finding very low rates of myocarditis in boys, approximately equal to the VAERS reporting. It was said months ago, ‘We can’t find a safety signal for myocarditis. We’re not finding an anaphylaxis signal. we’re not finding a Bell’s palsy signal.’
The FDA’s and CDC’s algorithms couldn’t pick up for most known side effects. So, there’s something wrong with the analytic methods that are being used, but the agencies haven’t told us precisely what they are. What we do know is that the rates of side effects that are being reported to VAERS are phenomenal.
They’re orders of magnitude higher than for any previous vaccines used in the United States. An order of magnitude is 10-fold, so rates of reported adverse reactions are 10 to 100 times higher than what has been reported for any other vaccine. Reported deaths after COVID in the United States are 17,000+. It’s off the charts.
Other side effects reported after COVID vaccinations total over 800,000. Again, more deaths and more side effects than have ever been reported for every vaccine combined in use in the U.S. cumulatively over 30 years.”
Despite all this shocking data, our federal agencies look the other way, pretending as if nothing is happening, and no matter how many people approach them — with lawsuits, with public comments, reaching out to politicians — they refuse to address blatantly obvious concerns. This is clear evidence that they’re acting with intentional malice.
FDA has become Clown World, and what they do now is to perform a charade of all the normal regulatory processes that they are expected to perform … You’re the guinea pigs, but they’re not collecting the data. Nobody should get these shots. ~ Dr. Meryl Nass
The FDA and CDC are supposed to protect the public. They’re supposed to identify safety concerns. They’re not supposed to act as marketing firms for drug companies, but that’s precisely what they’ve been converted to.
New Formulations Have Never Been Tested
Another truly egregious fact is that Pfizer has altered its formulation, allegedly to make it more stable, but this new formulation has never been included in any of the trials. Nass explains:
“During the October 26, 2021, VRBPAC [Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee] meeting, Pfizer said, ‘Look, we want to give the vaccines in doctor’s offices and we’ve found a way to stabilize the vaccine so we don’t need those ultra-cold fridges anymore. We can put these vials in a doctor’s office and, once defrosted, they can sit in a regular fridge 10 weeks and they’ll be fine.’
Some committee members asked, ‘OK, what’d you do? How did you make this marvelous discovery?’ And they said, ‘We went from the phosphate buffered saline buffer to a Tris buffer, and we slightly changed some electrolytes.’ A committee member asked, ‘OK, how did that make it so much more stable?’ And everybody in the meeting from FDA and Pfizer looked at each other and said, ‘We don’t know.’
An hour later, Pfizer had one of their chemists get on the line, but he couldn’t explain how the change in buffer led to a huge increase in stability, either. Then, later in the meeting, one of the members of the committee asked, ‘Did you use this new formulation in the clinical trial?’
And Dr. Bill Gruber, the lead Pfizer representative, said, ‘No, we didn’t.’ In other words, Pfizer plans, with FDA connivance, to use an entirely new vaccine formulation in children, after their clinical trials used the old formulation. This is grossly illegal. They’ve got a new formulation of vaccine. It wasn’t tested in humans. And they’re about to use it on 28 million American kids.”
It’s nothing short of a dystopian nightmare. Completely surreal. You can’t make this stuff up. Yet as shocking as all this is, earlier this year, Dr. Anthony Fauci projected that these COVID jabs would be available for everyone, from infants to the elderly. Now they’ve got the 5-year-olds, and there’s every reason to suspect they’ll go after newborns and infants next.
Whose Babies Will Be Offered Up as Sacrificial Lambs?
According to Nass, Pfizer and the FDA have struck a deal that will allow Pfizer to test on babies even younger than 6 months old, even if there’s no intention to inject infants that young. Those trials may begin as early as the end of January 2022.
“This arrangement between FDA and Pfizer will give Pfizer its extra six months of patent protection, whether or not these vaccines are intended to be used in those age groups. So, you can look at these trials as a way of almost sacrificing little children, because when you start a trial, you don’t know what the dangers are going to be.
I could be wrong, but I doubt we’re going to give these to newborn babies the way we give the hepatitis B vaccine on the date of birth, yet they will be tested in very young babies. The question is, whose babies get tested? In the past, sometimes the babies that got tested were foster children, wards of the state. Sometimes parents offer up their children. But there will be clinical trials.”
When will we get the data from those trials? It turns out that in the agreements reached between Pfizer and the FDA, some of those trials won’t conclude until 2024, 2025 and 2027. The goal here is to vaccinate all Americans, children and adults, within the coming few months or a year, yet it’ll be five years before we actually know from clinical trials what the side effects may be.
We’re Living in Clown World
As noted by Nass, this is yet another crime. It may fulfill the letter of the law, but it doesn’t fulfill the meaning of the law. It makes no sense to run clinical trials that won’t be completed until five years after your mass vaccination program has been completed and the entire population is injected.
“It’s just a joke to do that,” Nass says. “But FDA has become Clown World, and what they do now is to perform a charade of all the normal regulatory processes that they are expected to do, but they’re only doing them in an abbreviated or peculiar manner so that they don’t really collect the important data.
For example, the control group has been vaccinated two months into the Pfizer trials, which effectively obscures side effects that develop after two months. Blood is not tested for evidence of myocarditis or blood clots using simple tests (troponin and D-dimer levels).
For all the Americans out there who haven’t spent 20 years examining the FDA procedures like I have, these FDA advisory committee meetings are it’s designed to make you think a real regulatory process is going on, when it’s not. Instead we are all guinea pigs, but no one is collecting the data that would normally be required to authorize or approve a vaccine. Therefore, in my opinion, nobody should get these shots.“
To make matters even worse, it’s actually illegal to grant EUAs for these vaccines, because there are drugs that can prevent the condition (COVID), as well as treat it. EUAs can only be granted if there are no existing approved, available alternatives to prevent or treat the infection.
The effective drugs most have already heard of are ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, but there are a number of other drugs that also have profound effects on COVID, Nass says, including TriCor and cyproheptadine (Periactin).
TriCor, or fenofibrate, emulsifies lipid nanoparticles and fatty conglomerations that contain viruses and inflammatory substances. The drug essentially allows your body to break down the viral and inflammatory debris better. As such, it might also help combat complications caused by the nanoliposomes in the COVID shot.
According to Nass, Pepcid at high doses of up to 80 milligrams three times a day is also useful for treatment. Dr. Robert Malone is starting a clinical trial using a combination of Pepcid and celecoxib (brand name Celebrex). Many are also recommending aspirin to prevent platelet activation and clotting.
I believe a far better alternative to aspirin is lumbrokinase, and/or serapeptase. Both are fibrinolytic enzymes that address blood clotting. You can develop sensitivity to them, so I recommend alternating the two on alternate days for about three months if you’ve had COVID.
You could rule out blood clotting by doing a D-dimer test. If your D-dimer is normal, you don’t need an anticlotting agent. If clotting is a concern, you could also use NAC in addition to these fibrinolytic enzymes. It too helps break up clots and prevent clot formation.
A funny thing happened this afternoon. Not funny as in “haha”. More like funny as in, “ohhhhh that’s how the FDA rigs the process.”
I was reading the CDC’s “Guidance for Health Economics Studies Presented to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), 2019 Update” and I realized that the FDA’s woeful risk-benefit analysis in connection with Pfizer’s EUA application to jab children ages 5 to 11 violates many of the principles of the CDC’s Guidance document. The CDC “Guidance” document describes 21 things that every health economics study in connection with vaccines must do and the FDA risk-benefit analysis violated at least half of them.
Today I want to focus on a single factor: the Number Needed to Vaccinate (NNTV). In four separate places the CDC Guidance document mentions the importance of coming up with a Number Needed to Vaccinate (NNTV). I did not recall seeing an NNTV in the FDA risk-benefit document. So I checked the FDA’s risk-benefit analysis again and sure enough, there was no mention of an NNTV.
Because the FDA failed to provide an NNTV, I will attempt to provide it here.
First a little background. The Number Needed to Treat (NNT) in order to prevent a single case, hospitalization, ICU admission, or death, is a standard way to measure the effectiveness of any drug. It’s an important tool because it enables policymakers to evaluate tradeoffs between a new drug, a different existing drug, or doing nothing. In vaccine research the equivalent term is Number Needed to Vaccinate (NNTV, sometimes also written as NNV) in order to prevent a single case, hospitalization, ICU admission, or death (those are 4 different NNTVs that one could calculate).
Pharma HATES talking about NNTV and they hate talking about NNTV even more when it comes to COVID-19 vaccines because the NNTV is so ridiculously high that this vaccine could not pass any honest risk-benefit analysis.
Indeed about a year ago I innocently asked on Twitter what the NNTV is for coronavirus vaccines.
Pharma sent a swarm of trolls in to attack me and Pharma goons published hits pieces on me outside of Twitter to punish me for even asking the question. Of course none of the Pharma trolls provided an estimate of the NNTV for COVID-19 shots. That tells us that we are exactly over the target.
Various health economists have calculated a NNTV for COVID-19 vaccines.
Ronald Brown, a health economist in Canada, estimated that the NNTV to prevent a single case of coronavirus is from 88 to 142.
Others have calculated the NNTV to prevent a single case at 256.
German and Dutch researchers, using a large (500k) data set from a field study in Israel calculated an NNTV between 200 and 700 to prevent one case of COVID-19 for the mRNA shot marketed by Pfizer. They went further and figured out that the “NNTV to prevent one death is between 9,000 and 100,000 (95% confidence interval), with 16,000 as a point estimate.”
You can see why Pharma hates this number so much (I can picture Pharma’s various PR firms sending out an “All hands on deck!” message right now to tell their trolls to attack this article). One would have to inject a lot of people to see any benefit and the more people who are injected the more the potential benefits are offset by the considerable side-effects from the shots.
Furthermore, the NNTV to prevent a single case is not a very meaningful measure because most people, particularly children, recover on their own (or even more quickly with ivermectin if treated early). The numbers that health policy makers should really want to know are the NNTV to prevent a single hospitalization, ICU admission, or death. But with the NNTV to prevent a single case already so high, and with significant adverse events from coronavirus vaccines averaging about 15% nationwide, Pharma and the FDA dare not calculate an NNTV for hospitalizations, ICU, and deaths, because then no one would ever take this product (bye bye $93 billion in annual revenue).
As Bobby Kennedy explains, Pfizer’s clinical trial in adults showed alarming increases in all cause mortality in the vaccinated:
In Pfizer’s 6 month clinical trial in adults — there was 1 covid death out of 22,000 in the vaccine (“treatment”) group and 2 Covid deaths out of 22,000 in the placebo group (see Table s4). So NNTV = 22,000. The catch is there were 5 heart attack deaths in the vaccine group and only 1 in placebo group. So for every 1 life saved from Covid, the Pfizer vaccine kills 4 from heart attacks. All cause mortality in the 6 month study was 20 in vaccine group and 14 in placebo group. So a 42% all cause mortality increase among the vaccinated. The vaccine loses practically all efficacy after 6 months so they had to curtail the study. They unblinded and offered the vaccine to the placebo group. At that point the rising harm line had long ago intersected the sinking efficacy line.
Former NY Times investigative reporter Alex Berenson also wrote about the bad outcomes for the vaccinated in the Pfizer clinical trial in adults (here). Berenson received a lifetime ban from Twitter for posting Pfizer’s own clinical trial data.
Pfizer learned their lesson with the adult trial and so when they conducted a trial of their mRNA vaccine in children ages 5 to 11 they intentionally made it too small (only 2,300 participants) and too short (only followed up for 2 months) in order to hide harms.
All of the NNTV estimates above are based on data from adults. In kids the NNTV will be even higher (the lower the risk, the higher the NNTV to prevent a single bad outcome). Children ages 5 to 11 are at extremely low risk of death from coronavirus. In a meta-analysis combining data from 5 studies, Stanford researchers Cathrine Axfors and John Ioannidis found a median infection fatality rate (IFR) of 0.0027% in children ages 0-19. In children ages 5 to 11 the IFR is even lower. Depending on the study one looks at, COVID-19 is slightly less dangerous or roughly equivalent to the flu in children.
So how many children would need to be injected with Pharma’s mRNA shot in order to prevent a single hospitalization, ICU admission, or death?
Let’s examine Pfizer’s EUA application and the FDA’s risk-benefit analysis. By Pfizer’s own admission, there were zero hospitalization, ICU admissions, or deaths, in the treatment or control group in their study of 2,300 children ages 5 to 11.
So the Number Needed to Vaccinate in order to prevent a single hospitalization, ICU admission, or death, according to Pfizer’s own data, is infinity. ∞. Not the good kind of infinity as in God or love or time or the universe. This is the bad kind of infinity as in you could vaccinate every child age 5 to 11 in the U.S. and not prevent a single hospitalization, ICU admission, or death from coronavirus according to Pfizer’s own clinical trial data as submitted to the FDA. Of course Pfizer likes this kind of infinity because it means infinite profits. [Technically speaking the result is “undefined” because mathematically one cannot divide by zero, but you get my point.]
Everyone knows that Pfizer was not even trying to conduct a responsible clinical trial of their mRNA shot in kids ages 5 to 11. Pfizer could have submitted to the FDA a paper napkin with the words “Iz Gud!” written in crayon and the VRBPAC would have approved the shot. They are all in the cartel together and they are all looking forward to their massive payoff/payday.
But let’s not be like Pharma. Instead, let’s attempt to come up with a best guess estimate based on real world data. Over time, others will develop a much more sophisticated estimate (for example, Walach, Klement, & Aukema, 2021 estimated an NNTV for 3 different populations based on “days post dose”). But for our purposes here I think there is a much easier way to come up with a ballpark NNTV estimate for children ages 5 to 11.
Here’s the benefits model:
As of October 30, 2021, the CDC stated that 170 children ages 5 to 11 have died of COVID-19-related illness since the start of the pandemic. (That represents less than 0.1% of all coronavirus-related deaths nationwide even though children that age make up 8.7% of the U.S. population).
The Pfizer mRNA shot only “works” for about 6 months (it increases risk in the first month, provides moderate protection in months 2 through 4 and then effectiveness begins to wane, which is why all of the FDA modeling only used a 6 month time-frame). So any modeling would have to be based on vaccine effectiveness in connection with the 57 (170/3) children who might otherwise have died of COVID-related illness during a 6-month period.
At best, the Pfizer mRNA shot might be 80% effective against hospitalizations and death. That number comes directly from the FDA modeling (p. 32). I am bending over backwards to give Pfizer the benefit of considerable doubt because again, the Pfizer clinical trial showed NO reduction in hospitalizations or death in this age group. So injecting all 28,384,878 children ages 5 to 11 with two doses of Pfizer (which is what the Biden administration wants to do) would save, at most, 45 lives (0.8 effectiveness x 57 fatalities that otherwise would have occurred during that time period = 45).
So then the NNTV to prevent a single fatality in this age group is 630,775 (28,384,878 / 45). But it’s a two dose regimen so if one wants to calculate the NNTV per injection the number doubles to 1,261,550. It’s literally the worst NNTV in the history of vaccination.
If you inject that many children, you certainly will have lots and lots of serious side effects including disability and death. So let’s look at the risk side of the equation.
Here’s the risk model:
Because the Pfizer clinical trial has no useable data, I have to immuno-bridge from the nearest age group.
31,761,099 people (so just about 10% more people than in the 5 to 11 age bracket) ages 12 to 24 have gotten at least one coronavirus shot.
The COVID-19 vaccine program has only existed for 10 months and younger people have only had access more recently (children 12 to 15 have had access for five months; since May 10) — so we’re looking at roughly the same observational time period as modeled above.
During that time, there are 128 reports of fatal side effects following coronavirus mRNA injections in people 12 to 24. (That’s through October 22, 2021. There is a reporting lag though so the actual number of reports that have been filed is surely higher).
Kirsch, Rose, and Crawford (2021) estimate that VAERS undercounts fatal reactions by a factor of 41 which would put the total fatal side effects in this age-range at 5,248. (Kirsch et al. represents a conservative estimate because others have put the underreporting factor at 100.)
With potentially deadly side effects including myo- and pericarditis disproportionately impacting youth it is reasonable to think that over time the rate of fatal side effects from mRNA shots in children ages 5 to 11 might be similar to those in ages 12 to 24.
So, to put it simply, the Biden administration plan would kill 5,248 children via Pfizer mRNA shots in order to save 45 children from dying of coronavirus.
For every one child saved by the shot, another 117 would be killed by the shot.
The Pfizer mRNA shot fails any honest risk-benefit analysis in children ages 5 to 11.
Even under the best circumstances, estimating NNTV and modeling risk vs. benefits is fraught. In the current situation, with a new and novel bioengineered virus, where Pfizer’s data are intentionally underpowered to hide harms, and the FDA, CDC, & Biden Administration are doing everything in their power to push dangerous drugs on kids, making good policy decisions is even more difficult.
If the FDA or CDC want to calculate a different NNTV (and explain how they arrived at that number) I’m all ears. But we all know that the FDA refused to calculate an NNTV not because they forgot, but because they knew the number was so high that it would destroy the case for mRNA vaccines in children this age. Your move CDC — your own Guidance document states that you must provide this number.
Update: CDC finally mentions NNTV, but . . .
Toward the end of the six-hour CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) Nov. 2 meeting where the committee voted to recommend Pfizer’s EUA vaccine for children 5 - 11, there was finally a mention of NNTV. It was on slide 36 of a presentation by CDC official D.r Sara Oliver. Unfortunately the CDC estimate was untethered from reality. I’ll explain:
Oliver claimed the NNTV to prevent a single case is 10, even though the best lower bound estimate is 88 and other estimates are 200 or higher (see calculations here and here).
Then she claimed the NNTV to prevent a single hospitalization is between 2,213 and 8,187. This is dishonest and a violation of scientific norms.
NNTV is calculated by dividing 1 by the Absolute Risk Reduction. There was no Absolute Risk Reduction in hospitalizations in the Pfizer clinical trial in kids 5 to 11, because no one was hospitalized in either the treatment or control group. 1/0 is “undefined” not 8,187.
Oliver made no estimate of NNTV to prevent a single COVID-19-related death because that is also undefined (again, there were no COVID-related deaths in the treatment or placebo group in the trial so the absolute risk reduction was zero).
Oliver also did not model injuries or deaths from the vaccine (she immuno-bridged from an older age group to show benefits but ignored the reported harms from the vaccine in the older age group).
I should also note that my estimates of NNTV were based on CDC data showing 170 deaths from COVID-19-related illness in kids ages 5 to 11 over the last 18 months (I got the number directly from the CDC COVID tracking website).
However at the ACIP meeting, the CDC said the number of children in this age group who have died of COVID-19-related illness is 94.
If 94 is the correct number to use, then the NNTV to prevent a single death from COVID-19 related illness in this age group would be 28,384,878 / 31 = 915,641. But it’s a two-dose regimen, so if one wants to calculate the NNTV-per-injection the number doubles to 1,831,282.
I imagine that at most, half of American parents will be foolish enough to inject this toxic product into their kids. At a 50% uptake rate, the ACIP decision to approve the Pfizer shot will likely kill 2,624 children via adverse reactions in order to potentially save 12 from COVID-19-related illness.
Now you know why the CDC did not release the meeting materials prior to the ACIP meeting — they could not stand up to any public scrutiny.
Update 11/05/21:
I see that El Gato Malo engaged in a similar set of calculations back in September when Pfizer first released its “results.” He faced the same challenges as I did — namely, there is no usable data from Pfizer and so one has to pull from others sources. He builds a steel man case (the most generous possible defense of the Pfizer product) and yet his results are still in line with mine (my numbers are higher though because I use a lower estimate of vaccine effectiveness and correct for VAERS underreporting). So again, even under the most generous assumptions, the Pfizer mRNA shot fails any honest risk benefit assessment in connection with children 5 to 11.
• Pfizer-BioNTech Vaccine Becomes First To Win FDA’s Full Approval (USAT)
• Does The FDA Think These Data Justify Approval Of A Covid-19 Vaccine? (BMJ)
• Fully Vaccinated Healthcare Workers Carry 251 Times Viral Load (McCullough)
• FDA Ignores Both Science and Law (Denninger)
• Pfizer and Moderna Lost The Clinical Trial Control Group (CTH)
• Everything You Need to Know About Informed Consent (21CW)
• Statistical Fraud in the FDA Vaccine Approval Process (JoshM)
• The More Masks Fail, The More We Need Them (Ian)
• Pentagon To Mandate Covid-19 Vaccinations For All Military Personnel (RT)
• NYC Orders 150,000 Teachers & School Staff To Get Vaccinated (ZH)
• Truckers Threaten To Shut Down Australia Due to Covid Insanity (OI)
• Keeping Fear Alive (Tierney)
It’s been an insane 24 hours. You’d think a full approval of a vaccine would be a straightforward event, but the FDA just made things more, and extremely, complicated. First, a few bits and pieces from what they issued:
“COMIRNATY is the first COVID-19 vaccine to be granted FDA approval ”
also:
“These may not be all the possible side effects of the vaccine. Serious and unexpected side effects may occur. THE VACCINE IS STILL BEING STUDIED IN CLINICAL TRIALS.”
On August 23, 2021, FDA approved the biologics license application (BLA) submitted by BioNTech Manufacturing GmbH for COMIRNATY (COVID-19 Vaccine, mRNA) for active immunization to prevent COVID-19 caused by SARS-CoV-2 in individuals 16 years of age and older…
…the EUA will remain in place for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for the previously-authorized indication and uses, and to authorize use of COMIRNATY (COVID-19 Vaccine, mRNA) under this EUA for certain uses that are not included in the approved BLA…
COMIRNATY (COVID-19 Vaccine, mRNA) is the same formulation as the PfizerBioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine and can be used interchangeably with the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine to provide the COVID-19 vaccination series…
C. There is no adequate, approved, and available [see Note 9] alternative to the emergency use of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID 19 Vaccine to prevent COVID-19.
[Note 9:] Although COMIRNATY (COVID-19 Vaccine, mRNA) is approved to prevent COVID-19 in individuals 16 years of age and older, there is not sufficient approved vaccine available for distribution to this population in its entirety at the time of reissuance of this EUA. Additionally, there are no products that are approved to prevent COVID-19 in individuals age 12 through 15, or that are approved to provide an additional dose to the immunocompromised population described in this EUA.
Conditions Related to Printed Matter, Advertising, and Promotion
X. All descriptive printed matter, advertising, and promotional material, relating to the use of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID 19 Vaccine shall be consistent with the authorized labeling, as well as the terms set forth in this EUA, and meet the requirements set forth in section 502(a) and (n) of the FD&C Act and FDA implementing regulations.
Y. All descriptive printed matter, advertising, and promotional material relating to the use of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID 19 Vaccine clearly and conspicuously shall state that:
” This product has not been approved or licensed by FDA, but has been authorized for emergency use by FDA, under an EUA to prevent Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) for use in individuals 12 years of age and older; and
” The emergency use of this product is only authorized for the duration of the declaration that circumstances exist justifying the authorization of emergency use of the medical product under Section 564(b)(1) of the FD&C Act unless the declaration is terminated or authorization revoked sooner.
The original documents. Just check the dates. What happened to those?
Two high vaccination rates: Iceland Full Vaxxed 74%, Israel 62%
“The Pfizer-BioNTech emergency use authorization was based on clinical trials involving about 37,000 people.”
Well, not really, because they stopped those trials.
• Pfizer-BioNTech Vaccine Becomes First To Win FDA’s Full Approval (USAT)
Eight months after authorizing the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use in the USA, the Food and Drug Administration issued its full stamp of approval. Now that the companies’ detailed, so-called biologics license application has been granted, it’s likely that vaccination will be required by many companies, schools and other entities. The FDA decision clears the way for the companies to market their vaccine, which is not permitted without full licensure. And it may launch a race for booster shots, allowing doctors to prescribe extra Pfizer-BioNTech shots “off label” to anyone they think should get one. The FDA confirmed late last year through a more streamlined evaluation process that the vaccine, from pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and its partner, German startup BioNTech, was safe, effective and could be reliably produced.
The review of the 340,000-page license application was completed in just 97 days by FDA staff working “night and day,” said Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, which approves vaccines “We completed this in about 40% of the normal clock time for a submission of this magnitude,” he said. The license application was three times the size of the emergency use authorization submission, which weighed in at 110,000 pages. The companies have manufactured more than 2 billion doses, more than 200 million of which were administered in the USA, the most of any of the three vaccines allowed for use in the country. The full license includes four more months of efficacy and safety data, confirming trial results and detailing manufacturing processes.
The Pfizer-BioNTech emergency use authorization was based on clinical trials involving about 37,000 people. The full approval was based on study results involving more than 44,000 people followed for six months. The license applies only to those 16 and over, but the vaccine is allowed for those 12 to 15 under the previous authorization. “Based on the longer-term follow-up data that we submitted, today’s approval for those aged 16 and over affirms the efficacy and safety profile of our vaccine at a time when it is urgently needed,” Pfizer chairman and CEO Albert Bourla said in a statement. “I am hopeful this approval will help increase confidence in our vaccine, as vaccination remains the best tool we have to help protect lives and achieve herd immunity.”
Not sure it’s a great idea for the FDA to have pissed off Peter Doshi, senior editor at The BMJ, one of the most reputable magazines around. Much more at the original (link).
• Does The FDA Think These Data Justify Approval Of A Covid-19 Vaccine? (BMJ)
On 28 July 2021, Pfizer and BioNTech posted updated results for their ongoing phase 3 covid-19 vaccine trial. The preprint came almost a year to the day after the historical trial commenced, and nearly four months since the companies announced vaccine efficacy estimates “up to six months.” But you won’t find 10 month follow-up data here. While the preprint is new, the results it contains aren’t particularly up to date. In fact, the paper is based on the same data cut-off date (13 March 2021) as the 1 April press release, and its topline efficacy result is identical: 91.3% (95% CI 89.0 to 93.2) vaccine efficacy against symptomatic covid-19 through “up to six months of follow-up.” The 20 page preprint matters because it represents the most detailed public account of the pivotal trial data Pfizer submitted in pursuit of the world’s first “full approval” of a coronavirus vaccine from the Food and Drug Administration. It deserves careful scrutiny.
[..] The elephant named “waning immunity”…“Waning immunity” is a known problem for influenza vaccines, with some studies showing near zero effectiveness after just three months, meaning a vaccine taken early may ultimately provide no protection by the time “flu season” arrives some months later. If vaccine efficacy wanes over time, the crucial question becomes what level of effectiveness will the vaccine provide when a person is actually exposed to the virus? Unlike covid vaccines, influenza vaccine performance has always been judged over a full season, not a couple months. And so the recent reports from Israel’s Ministry of Health caught my eye. In early July, they reported that efficacy against infection and symptomatic disease “fell to 64%.” By late July it had fallen to 39% where Delta is the dominant strain. This is very low. For context, the FDA’s expectation is of “at least 50%” efficacy for any approvable vaccine.
_
Delta may not be responsible Enter Pfizer’s preprint. As an RCT reporting “up to six months of follow-up,” it is notable that evidence of waning immunity was already visible in the data by the 13 March 2021 data cut-off… And it’s hard to imagine how the Delta variant could play a real role here, for 77% of trial participants were from the United States, where Delta was not established until months after data cut-off. Waning efficacy has the potential to be far more than a minor inconvenience; it can dramatically change the risk-benefit calculus.
The “six month” preprint based on the 7% of trial participants who remained blinded at six months Despite the reference to “six month safety and efficacy” in the preprint’s title, the paper only reports on vaccine efficacy “up to six months,” but not from six months. This is not semantics, as it turns out only 7% of trial participants actually reached six months of blinded follow-up (“8% of BNT162b2 recipients and 6% of placebo recipients had ≥6 months follow-up post-dose 2.”) So despite this preprint appearing a year after the trial began, it provides no data on vaccine efficacy past six months, which is the period Israel says vaccine efficacy has dropped to 39%. It is hard to imagine that the <10% of trial participants who remained blinded at six months (which presumably further dwindled after 13 March 2021) could constitute a reliable or valid sample to produce further findings.
Severe disease And on preventing death from covid-19, there are too few data to draw conclusions—a total of three covid-19 related deaths (one on vaccine, two on placebo). There were 29 total deaths during blinded follow-up (15 in the vaccine arm; 14 in placebo). The crucial question, however, is whether the waning efficacy seen in the primary endpoint data also applies to the vaccine’s efficacy against severe disease. Unfortunately, Pfizer’s new preprint does not report the results in a way that allows for evaluating this question.
_
Approval imminent without data transparency, or even an advisory committee meeting? …But here we are, with FDA reportedly on the verge of granting a marketing license 13 months into the still ongoing, two year pivotal trial, with no reported data past 13 March 2021, unclear efficacy after six months due to unblinding, evidence of waning protection irrespective of the Delta variant, and limited reporting of safety data. (The preprint reports “decreased appetite, lethargy, asthenia, malaise, night sweats, and hyperhidrosis were new adverse events attributable to BNT162b2 not previously identified in earlier reports,” but provides no data tables showing the frequency of these, or other, adverse events.) It’s not helping matters that FDA now says it won’t convene its advisory committee to discuss the data ahead of approving Pfizer’s vaccine. (Last August, to address vaccine hesitancy, the agency had “committed to use an advisory committee composed of independent experts to ensure deliberations about authorization or licensure are transparent for the public.”)
“..the jab allows vaccinated individuals to carry unusually high viral loads without becoming ill at first, potentially transforming them into presymptomatic superspreaders.”
• Fully Vaccinated Healthcare Workers Carry 251 Times Viral Load (McCullough)
A groundbreaking preprint paper by the prestigious Oxford University Clinical Research Group, published Aug. 10 in The Lancet, includes alarming findings devastating to the COVID vaccine rollout. The study found vaccinated individuals carry 251 times the load of COVID-19 viruses in their nostrils compared to the unvaccinated. While moderating the symptoms of infection, the jab allows vaccinated individuals to carry unusually high viral loads without becoming ill at first, potentially transforming them into presymptomatic superspreaders. This phenomenon may be the source of the shocking post-vaccination surges in heavily vaccinated populations globally. The paper’s authors, Chau et al, demonstrated widespread vaccine failure and transmission under tightly controlled circumstances in a hospital lockdown in Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam.
The scientists studied healthcare workers who were unable to leave the hospital for two weeks. The data showed that fully vaccinated workers — about two months after injection with the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine (AZD1222) — acquired, carried and presumably transmitted the Delta variant to their vaccinated colleagues. They almost certainly also passed the Delta infection to susceptible unvaccinated people, including their patients. Sequencing of strains confirmed the workers transmitted SARS-CoV-2 to one another. = This is consistent with the observations in the U.S. from Farinholt and colleagues, and congruent with comments by the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conceding COVID-19 vaccines have failed to stop transmission of SARS-CoV-2.
_
On Feb. 11, the World Health Organization indicated the AZD1222 vaccine efficacy of 63.09% against the development of symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection. The conclusions of the Chau paper support the warnings by leading medical experts that the partial, non-sterilizing immunity from the three notoriously “leaky” COVID-19 vaccines allow carriage of 251 times the viral load of SARS-CoV-2 as compared to samples from the pre-vaccination era in 2020. Thus, we have a key piece to the puzzle explaining why the Delta outbreak is so formidable — fully vaccinated are participating as COVID-19 patients and acting as powerful Typhoid Mary-style super-spreaders of the infection.
_
Vaccinated individuals are blasting out concentrated viral explosions into their communities and fueling new COVID surges. Vaccinated healthcare workers are almost certainly infecting their coworkers and patients, causing horrendous collateral damage. Continued vaccination will only make this problem worse, particularly among frontline doctors and nurses workers who are caring for vulnerable patients. Health systems should drop vaccine mandates immediately, take stock of COVID-19 recovered workers who are robustly immune to Delta and consider the ramifications of their current vaccinated healthcare workers as potential threats to high risk patients and coworkers.
“..prior infection and recovery produces durable and stable immunity in essentially everyone who has a competent immune system..”
• FDA Ignores Both Science and Law (Denninger)
So the FDA has “fully approved” the Pfizer jab for Covid. In doing so standing alone they have broken the law and thus have irrevocably destroyed their authority and any reason for anyone to ever do anything based on them ever again. Let me explain. Under black letter law an EUA is illegal if there is an alternative that is considered safe, effective and available. This was the reason the FDA did not (for 18 months!) run the studies and evaluate them on other early-intervention drugs for Covid-19. We all know what they are. I’m living proof they work too, as are millions of others worldwide. But, more-importantly, this “full approval” voids all other vaccine EUAs for Covid-19. That is, under the law the Moderna and J&J instantly became illegal to offer or use within the United States.
The makers can apply for full authorization, of course, but the EUAs are void as of this morning and under black letter law cannot be administered to anyone in the United States as they are now unlicensed and unlawful products in human beings until and unless they are given full approval themselves. No medical provider can offer or administer any other than the Pfizer Covid-19 shot in the United States as of the moment of that approval. You can bet the law will be ignored; note MRNAs stock price this morning. It should have instantly been cut in half. In addition the FDA broke the law itself when it issued the “approval.” The law requires a full hearing and the data from the full set of trials; the trials are not capable of being completed until early 2022 by the original submissions and they deliberately did not hold the hearing. This is a black letter violation of the law as well, but nobody cares.
_
As for me, I don’t give a crap. I’ve been infected, 98% certain it was Delta (because that’s all that’s circulating right now in the US where the index case I got infected by came from, and I know who it was) and am recovered. I hit it with meds immediately and I’m fine. I know, scientifically, it was Covid-19 and not some other virus as I now have IgG antibodies and did not for the previous 18 months which I know factually as I repeatedly tested myself. There is thus exactly zero medical benefit I can derive from the jabs. I will walk without fear into a Covid-19 ICU unit right now without any PPE on whatsoever.
_
I have no fear of this virus because as with every other viral infection of note including those that are much more-dangerous than Covid, such as measles, prior infection and recovery produces durable and stable immunity in essentially everyone who has a competent immune system, and I do. Those of you who trust the jabs to be equally effective to an active infection and recovery are free to come with me. I will bet my life that I’m sterile immune to the virus as a result of said infection and recovery. Are you willing to place the same bet, given the many known failures to protect by the shot, including Jesse Jackson and his wife, both of whom are in the hospital with Covid-19 despite being vaccinated in a very public spectacle in January of this year? There you have it.
“..the FDA will grant approval on results that were intentionally constructed to produce only one outcome.”
• Pfizer and Moderna Lost The Clinical Trial Control Group (CTH)
According to the New York Times and multiple media outlets, Pfizer is expected to get full FDA approval today. “The move would make it the first Covid vaccine to go from emergency use authorization to full FDA approval.” With that in mind, it is worth a reminder that both Pfizer and Moderna stopped the clinical trials the FDA was using in their review: The Moderna and Pfizer vaccine tests were conducted, as customary, with a control group; a group within the trial who were given a placebo and not the test vaccine. However, during the trial -and after the untested vaccines were given emergency use authorization- the vaccine companies conducting the trial decided to break protocol and notify the control group they were not vaccinated. Almost all the control group were then given the vaccine.
Purposefully dissolving the placebo group violates the scientific purpose to test whether the vaccine has any efficacy; any actual benefit and/or safety issues. Without a control group there is nothing to compare the vaccinated group against. According to NPR, the doctors lost the control group in the Johnson County Clinicial Trial (Lexena, Kansas) on purpose: “(Via NPR) […] “Dr. Carlos Fierro, who runs the study there, says every participant was called back after the Food and Drug Administration authorized the vaccine. “During that visit we discussed the options, which included staying in the study without the vaccine,” he says, “and amazingly there were people — a couple of people — who chose that.” He suspects those individuals got spooked by rumors about the vaccine. But everybody else who had the placebo shot went ahead and got the actual vaccine. So now Fierro has essentially no comparison group left for the ongoing study. “It’s a loss from a scientific standpoint, but given the circumstances I think it’s the right thing to do,” he says.
_
People signing up for these studies were not promised special treatment, but once the FDA authorized the vaccines, their developers decided to offer the shots. Just so we are clear, the final FDA authorization and approval for the vaccines are based on the outcome of these trials. As noted in the example above, the control group was intentionally lost under the auspices of “the right thing to do”, so there is no way for the efficacy, effectiveness or safety of the vaccine itself to be measured. There’s no one left within the control group, of a statistically valid value, to give an adequate comparison of outcomes for vaxxed -vs- non-vaxxed. This is nuts. That NPR article is one to bookmark when people start claiming the vaccination is effective. How can the vaccine not be considered effective when there is no group of non-vaccinated people to compare the results to?
_
Good grief, the entire healthcare system is operating on a massive hive mindset where science, and the scientific method, is thrown out the window in favor of ideological outcomes and self-fulfilling prophecies. The fact that the researchers and doctors, apparently under the payroll of the pharmaceutical companies that have a vested financial interest in the vaccine outcome, lost the control group on purpose is alarming. Of course, Big Pharma will promote the vaccine as beneficial, and the controlled media will promote that message with a complete disconnect from the clinical trial details, and the FDA will grant approval on results that were intentionally constructed to produce only one outcome.
Another video on informed consent is way below. Also from Canada.
• Everything You Need to Know About Informed Consent (21CW)
In Canada, informed consent to medical interventions – including vaccines – is the law. The same is true in the US, UK, EU, Australia, and New Zealand. But these governments, along with corrupt drug regulators, are now running roughshod over what were once sacrosanct laws prohibiting misleading and coercive medical procedures, and instead have unleashed a multibillion dollar media campaign of fear and mass-panic designed to pave-over the right to informed consent.
“Vaccine A is quite safe, and vaccine B is extremely dangerous. And yet the formula for PRR will produce the same result for vaccine A and B!”
• Statistical Fraud in the FDA Vaccine Approval Process (JoshM)
There are several systems for reporting vaccine reactions, including deaths, but the only one available to the public is VAERS. It is incomplete, because it relies on voluntary reporting, there is no incentive to report to VAERS, and it is a cumbersome process. We may compare reports of the COVID vaccines to past years, when there were also hundreds of millions of vaccinations, including annual flu shots and childhood vaccine schedules. The comparison is dramatic. There were more than twice as many deaths related to the COVID vaccines this year as the sum total of all vaccine deaths in the 30-year history of VAERS. Given this safety record, how is there any possibility of approval? Here is where the statistical fraud comes in. [I am grateful to have been alerted to this situation by Matthew Crawford]
The safety criterion they have chosen is an obscure computation called PRR for Proportional Reporting Ratio. As the name implies, it is based on RATIOS of different event types and is utterly blind to the ABSOLUTE RATE of such events. PRR measures the distribution of different kinds of adverse events, e.g. blood clots, heart attacks, and deaths. If those ratios are severely out of line with the great variety of vaccine reactions in the past, PRR would detect that. For example, if the new vaccines caused an extraordinary risk of myocarditis, but everything else was low, then PRR would flag that. But if myocarditis was just one risk among many that have been reported from past vaccines, then PRR would not pick that up.
_
The real scandal is that PRR is blind to the absolute risk numbers. PRR is defined in such a way as to look for unusual PATTERNS of adverse events, but it is completely insensitive to unusual RATES of adverse events. Of course, it is the rates and not the patterns that are of primary concern, and the PRR is designed NOT to reflect that.
For example, suppose we have 2 vaccines:
Vaccine A has 1 reported death per million vaccinations, 3 reported heart attacks per million, and 20 reported headaches per million.
Vaccine B has 1 reported death per hundred vaccinations, 3 reported heart attacks per hundred, and 20 reported headaches per hundred.
Vaccine A is quite safe, and vaccine B is extremely dangerous. And yet the formula for PRR will produce the same result for vaccine A and B!
_
Clearly, PRR is not an appropriate criterion for evaluating safety of any particular vaccine. Someone has arranged to cook the books.
“Regardless of the anti-science, despicable pieces regularly appearing in those outlets, such as suggesting that actually, masking kids is good for their learning ability.”
• The More Masks Fail, The More We Need Them (Ian)
The push for masking, as always, boils down to a combination of incompetence, cowardice, fear, and political pressure. Experts enjoy the ability to be seen as “doing something,” and must never appear to be “anti-mask,” since it would immediately discredit them in the eyes of their peers, the greater scientific community and their ideological compatriots. Politicians want the “get out of jail free” card that masking provides; the opportunity to blame others for poor results. The “it would have worked if you’d all just listened to me” line of defense. The media simply outsources all critical thinking to like-minded ideologues and refuses to acknowledge or take seriously the few brave experts willing to tell the truth.
And as a result, corporations, whose decision makers are exclusively influenced by the same media sources, like The New York Times, follow right along. Regardless of the anti-science, despicable pieces regularly appearing in those outlets, such as suggesting that actually, masking kids is good for their learning ability. But everywhere you look, the cultural groupthink is dramatically failing. Counties and states following the CDC’s new guidance are not succeeding, and those ignoring it are faring no worse. Locations that never removed masks, such as Hawaii and Japan, are seeing their highest numbers of the pandemic, but manage to escape the vitriol and hatred leveled at Ron DeSantis because they’re following orders and implementing what the hive mind of acceptable opinion mandates.
The dramatic, predictable failure resulting from the CDC’s science-ending reversal would, in a sane world, be cause for intellectually honest experts to revisit their guidance and accept that their efforts to “control” infections is always doomed to fail. But naturally, we’re seeing the exact opposite. The more masks fail, the more we need them.
Best VIDEO of 2020 pic.twitter.com/y3iK1ZoBFM
— Nicolas Teterel ∞/21 (@CryptojournalFr) August 19, 2021
One third has said they won’t comply. Maybe this is where the real fight will happen.
• Pentagon To Mandate Covid-19 Vaccinations For All Military Personnel (RT)
The Pentagon has said it will update its own guidance on Covid-19 vaccinations, mandating the jab for all military personnel, following the US drug regulator’s decision to fully approve the Pfizer vaccine. Speaking on Monday, US Department of Defense spokesman John Kirby said the military was aware of the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) decision to fully approve the Pfizer vaccine for use in people over 16, and was preparing to issue updated guidance to all service personnel. “We’re going to move forward making that vaccine mandatory,” Kirby told reporters. “We’re preparing the guidance to the force right now,” he stated, adding that the exact timetable for mandating the jab was still being worked out. Earlier on Monday, the FDA announced that the Pfizer jab had been fully approved for use in the US.
The shot has been administered under emergency-use authorization since mid-December 2020. The FDA added that the Pfizer vaccine will retain its emergency-use authorization for use in adolescents and for those requiring a third dose due to other health conditions. Earlier in August, the Washington Post reported that around 65% of active-duty military personnel were fully vaccinated, compared to around 59% of eligible Americans. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has previously encouraged all military personnel to get vaccinated against Covid. “To defend this nation, we need a healthy and ready force. I strongly encourage all DoD military and civilian personnel – as well as contractor personnel – to get vaccinated now and for military service members to not wait for the mandate,” Austin stated earlier in August.
“I do not expect a staffing shortage,” Porter said.”
• NYC Orders 150,000 Teachers & School Staff To Get Vaccinated (ZH)
As the NYT explained, education staffers are the first group of city workers to face a full vaccine mandate. The announcement also opens the door to a broader vaccine mandate of city workers, which the mayor said Monday the city was considering. Last month, Mayor Bill de Blasio issued a mandate for city workers that allowed for those unvaccinated to submit for weekly coronavirus testing. “We know this is going to help ensure that everyone is safe,” Mr. de Blasio said during a news conference on Monday, adding that city schools had extremely low virus transmission last year. The mandate, the mayor said, will help the city “build on that success.”
While the mayor’s push is likely to prove unpopular with many rank-and-file members; the city’s teacher’s unions, and unions representing other DoE staff, have signed off on the new mandate (though they’re still negotiating about what might happen to workers who continue to refuse). UFT President Michael Mulgrew acknowledged that the city had the legal right to impose the mandate, but he told reporters details were still being hashed out. The city announced last month that any teacher who failed to comply with both the vaccination requirement, and the required weekly testing for those who didn’t get the jab, would be suspended without pay.
“While the city is asserting its legal authority to establish this mandate, there are many implementation details, including provisions for medical exceptions, that by law must be negotiated with the U.F.T. and other unions, and if necessary, resolved by arbitration,” Mr. Mulgrew said in a statement. Mayor de Blasio has insisted that even if negotiations stall, the mandate will still be implemented. Meisha Porter, the chancellor of NYC’s schools, said she expects a high level of compliance from school staff on the mandate. “I do not expect a staffing shortage,” Porter said.
No clue how serious this is, but it’s a good idea.
• Truckers Threaten To Shut Down Australia Due to Covid Insanity (OI)
Australia seems to be in the grips of COVID-induced insanity as people across the country are vigorously protesting against the lockdown measures imposed to curb the spread of the renewed bout of coronavirus outbreak. After violent ruckus witnessed on the streets of major Australian cities, including Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, and dogs shot dead by a rural council in New South Wales to prevent volunteers from travelling during Covid restrictions, Australian truck drivers have threatened to shut down major highways across the country as a mark of protest against Covid lockdowns. Social media websites are awash with a video of a truck driver who said in his video that truck drivers are ‘planning to shut down the country’ to ‘remove the s*** government’.
He further warned the Aussies that their demonstration could end up choking supply chains and urged them to stock up on groceries to get them through the next couple of weeks. “It’s on. The truckies are doing it. The truckies are going to shut down the country,’ the man says in the video. What that means is you need to go shopping now, get what you can for the next week or two, load your fridge, freezers,” the truck driver could be seen saying in the video.
“The same progressives who regularly denounce “systemic racism” and “Western imperialism” are now enforcing policies that disproportionately punish minorities and the poor..”
• Keeping Fear Alive (Tierney)
Throughout the pandemic, American political and public-health leaders have been following Rahm Emanuel’s classic dictum for power-seeking officials: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Now they’ve adopted a corollary: you never want a crisis to end. So they are prolonging the national misery instead of easing it, which could be done with a few simple strategies. Explain to the public that the virus will never disappear but is no longer a mortal threat to the vast majority of Americans. Encourage the minority still at risk to get vaccinated by honestly discussing who is in jeopardy and what scientists have learned about infections. Promote treatments proven to prevent infection and speed recovery while avoiding unproven treatments and mandates that cause collateral damage and generate mistrust.
Above all, make it clear to Americans that we finally have reason to celebrate: what once seemed an unprecedented danger is now just one of many pathogens that we know how to live with. But the nation’s crisismongers aren’t about to relinquish their hold over the public, so they’ve set new goals that are as unachievable as they are unnecessary and harmful. Making vaccines available to every American adult is no longer sufficient; now the crisis cannot end until the entire population has been vaccinated. Instead of focusing efforts on vaccinating the vulnerable, officials obsess on compelling universal obedience, even if that means squandering vaccines on people who already have acquired natural immunity or are at minimal risk of serious illness.
_
The same progressives who regularly denounce “systemic racism” and “Western imperialism” are now enforcing policies that disproportionately punish minorities and the poor, both in the United States (the majority of black teenagers and young adults in New York have been banished from much of public life by the city’s new vaccine-passport policy) and in the rest of the world. The hypocrisy was deftly captured in a tweet by Martin Kulldorff, the Harvard epidemiologist: “If you favor university vaccine mandates for low-risk American and European students, when there is not enough vaccine for older high-risk people in Asia, Africa and Latin America, please remove your #BLM tags from your Twitter/Facebook profiles.”
Children are being sentenced to another round of unnecessary mask mandates and probably more school closures based on evidence-free warnings from Anthony Fauci and others that the Delta variant will be more deadly to them than the original virus. While the variant is more infectious, the evidence does not show it to be any more lethal. In fact, the current mortality rate among American children with Covid is lower than it was last year—and last year many more children died of the flu than of Covid. One of the most thorough studies, in England, shows that the survival rate for those under 18 with Covid is 99.995 percent. But instead of emphasizing these reassuring statistics, public-health officials like Jerome Adams, the surgeon general, keep looking for new ways to scare parents and children.
_
“I’m an anesthesiologist,” he tweeted last weekend. “And a dad. And I can assure you in both capacities that your child will be far more comfortable if they’re in a face mask, than on a ventilator. If you’re making a choice on behalf of a child, please choose based on their comfort, vs yours.” He offered no new evidence that children are at heightened risk from the virus, much less any evidence that a mask would make any difference, but he did make sure to include a gruesome photograph of a child on a ventilator. It was a new low in public-health demagoguery, but unfortunately not so different from the fearmongering of other officials, the press, and social-media platforms. They lament that a minority of the public remains reluctant to get vaccinated without recognizing that their own tactics are a likely a chief cause of this reluctance. They have been misleading people for so long—and censoring challenges to their misinformation—that it’s no wonder polls show that an overwhelming majority of unvaccinated Americans say they don’t trust Fauci or the CDC.
Nation-building in Afghanistan arrived in 2001. Western interventions into the old Eastern bloc in the 1980s and early 1990s had been spectacularly effective in destroying the old social and institutional order; but equally spectacular in failing to replace imploded societies with fresh institutions. The threat from ‘failed states’ became the new mantra, and Afghanistan – in the wake of the destruction wrought post-9/11 – therefore necessitated external intervention. Weak and failed states were the spawning ground for terrorism and its threat to the ‘global order’, it was said. It was in Afghanistan that a new liberal world vision was to be stood-up.
At another level, the war in Afghanistan became another sort of crucible. In very real terms, Afghanistan turned into a testbed for every single innovation in technocratic project management – with each innovation heralded as precursor to our wider future. Funds poured in: Buildings were thrown up, and an army of globalised technocrats arrived to oversee the process. Big data, AI and the utilization of ever expanding sets of technical and statistical metrics, were to topple old ‘stodgy’ ideas. Military sociology in the form of Human Terrain Teams and other innovative creations, were unleashed to bring order to chaos. Here, the full force of the entire NGO world, the brightest minds of that international government-in-waiting, were given a playground with nearly infinite resources at their disposal.
This was to be a showcase for technical managerialism. It presumed that a properly technical, and scientific way of understanding war and nation-building would be able to mobilize reason and progress to accomplish what everyone else could not, and so create a post-modern society, out of a complex tribal one, with its own storied history.
The ‘new’ arrived, as it were, in a succession of NGO boxes marked ‘pop-up modernity’. The 18th century British statesman Edmund Burke, of course, had already warned in Reflections on the Revolution in France, as he witnessed the Jacobins tearing down their old order: “that it is with infinite caution” that anyone should pull down or replace structures that have served society well over the ages. But this managerial technocracy had little time for old ‘stodgy’ ideas.
But, what last week’s fall of the western instituted regime so clearly revealed is that today’s managerial class, consumed by the notion of technocracy as the only means of effecting functional rule birthed instead, something thoroughly rotten — “data-driven defeat”, as one US Afghan veteran described it — so rotten, that it collapsed in a matter of days. On the extended blunders of the “system” in Afghanistan, he writes:
“A retired Navy SEAL who served in the White House under both Bush and Obama reflected,[that] “collectively the system is incapable of taking a step back to question basic assumptions.” That “system” is best understood, not simply as a military or foreign policy body, but as a euphemism for the habits and institutions of an American ruling class that has exhibited an almost limitless collective capacity for deflecting the costs of failure.
“This class in general, and the people in charge of the war in Afghanistan in particular, believed in informational and management solutions to existential problems. They elevated data points and statistical indices to avoid choosing prudent goals and organizing the proper strategies to achieve them. They believed in their own providential destiny and that of people like them to rule, regardless of their failures”.
Whatever was not corrupt before America arrived, became corrupt in the maelstrom of that $2 Trillion of American money showered on the project. American soldiers, arms manufacturers, globalised technocrats, governance experts, aid workers, peacekeepers, counter-insurgency theorists and lawyers — all made their fortunes.
The flaw was that Afghanistan as a liberal progressive vision was a hoax in the first place: Afghanistan was invaded, and occupied, because of its geography. It was the ideal platform from which to perturb Central Asia, and thus unsettle Russia and China.
No one was truly committed because there was really no longer any Afghanistan to commit to. Whomsoever could steal from the Americans did so. The Ghani regime collapsed in a matter of days, because it was ‘never there’ to begin with: A Potemkin Village, whose role lay in perpetuating a fiction, or rather the myth of America’s Grand Vision of itself as the shaper and guardian of ‘our’ global future.
The true gravity for America and Europe of the present psychological ‘moment’ is not only that nation-building, as a project intended to stand up liberal values been revealed as having ‘achieved nothing’, but Afghanistan débacle has underlined the limitations to technical managerialism in way that is impossible to miss.
The gravity of America’s present psychological ‘moment’ – the implosion of Kabul – was well articulated when Robert Kagan argued earlier, that the ‘global values’ project (however tenuous its basis in reality) nonetheless has become essential to preserving ‘democracy’ at home: For, he suggests, an America that retreats from global hegemony, would no longer possess the domestic group solidarity to preserve America as ‘idea’, at home, either.
What Kagan is saying here is important — It may constitute the true cost of the Afghanistan débacle. Every élite class advances various claims about its own legitimacy, without which a stable political order is impossible. Legitimating myths can take many forms and may change over time, but once they become exhausted, or lose their credibility – when people no longer believe in the narrative, or the claims which underpin that political ‘idea’ – then it is ‘game over’.
Swedish intellectual, Malcolm Kyeyune writes that we may be “witnessing the catastrophic end of this metaphysical power of legitimacy that has shielded the managerial ruling class for decades”:
“Anyone even briefly familiar with the historical record knows just how much of a Pandora’s box such a loss of legitimacy represents. The signs visibly have been multiplying over many years. When Michael Gove said, “I think the people in this country have had enough of experts” in a debate about the merits of Brexit, he probably traced the contours of something much bigger than anyone really knew at the time. Back then, the acute phase of the delegitimization of the managerial class was only just beginning. Now, with Afghanistan, it is impossible to miss”.
There is therefore, little mystery as to why the Taliban took over Kabul so quickly. Not only did the project per se lack legitimacy for Afghans, but that aura of claimed expertise, of technological inevitability that has protected the élite managerial class, has been exposed by the sheer dysfunctionality on display, as the West frantically flees Kabul. And it is precisely how it has ended that has really drawn back the curtain, and shown the world the rot festering beneath.
When the legitimating claim is used up, and people no longer believe in the concepts or claims that underpin a particular system or claim to rule, the extinction of that particular élite, Kyeyune writes, becomes a foregone conclusion.
I’ve been watching the unfolding of the current Covid-19 pandemic since the first news stories about it in the late fall of 2019, and like many people, I find the official story that’s grown up around the virus and the response to it impossible to take seriously. Partly that’s because the official narrative has been veering around like a well-greased weathercock on a blustery day, and partly it’s because large elements of that narrative are contradicted by scientific studies or, in many cases, the press releases on which the narrative itself is based. The fact that people are now being banned from social media for quoting pharmaceutical companies’ own documents is a good indication that there’s some serious falsification going on here.
Yet I find it just as hard to believe the main alternative story on offer these days. This is the claim that the virus and the vaccine are part of a sinister plan to take away what remains of civil liberties worldwide, along the lines of Klaus Schwab’s maunderings about a Great Reset. The problem here is that this sort of scheme would require governments and corporations everywhere to behave with a degree of competence they very clearly don’t display in any other context.
On reflection, it seems to me that what’s happened over the last two years makes sense if you simply factor in the shortsightedness, incompetence, and venality that government and corporate sectors alike have displayed in all their other dealings of late. With this in mind, I’ve sketched out a hypothetical reconstruction of what has actually been happening. It’s speculative but it accounts for the facts as I know them. As usual, I’ve focused on events in the United States, the one country I know tolerably well; readers in other countries will need to modify this story to fit their own local conditions. I haven’t footnoted anything; do your own internet searches on the important concepts listed below and you’ll find plenty of data.
At any rate, here’s a hypothesis about the real story behind Covid-19.
*****
Stage One: Business as Usual
The Covid-19 coronavirus was manufactured as part of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China. Gain-of-function research? That’s one of the currently hot fields of virus research, involving genetic engineering to make viruses more virulent in their effects on tissue cultures. It’s dangerous enough that federal regulations prohibit it in the US, which is why it was going on in China. Funding for the research, however, came from one of the many US government slush funds that prop up the pharmaceutical industry, by way of a pass-through entity to provide a fig leaf of plausible deniability. This is normal practice, part of the culture of kleptocracy that funnels tax dollars into corporate pockets with zero accountability.
Stage Two: A Minor Little Oopsie
Someone made a mistake, and the Covid-19 coronavirus got outside the supposedly secure facility where it was being kept. People in and around Wuhan started getting sick. Early on, there were a lot of deaths, but the death rate slid as the virus adapted to its new hosts in the usual way, ending up about as serious as a bad flu. (Respiratory viruses reliably do this: the sicker a patient gets, the fewer people on average they can infect, and this selection differential very rapidly turns novel respiratory viruses into highly transmissible but not especially dangerous members of the ordinary human respiratory flora.) So we saw an initial wave of stark panic and overreaction on the part of politicians and the media, followed by reassurances that everything would be fine after all, along with various more or less frantic attempts to keep anyone from finding out that the US government funded the creation of the virus.
Stage Three: Cashing In On The Sick
Then the pharmaceutical industry realized that Covid-19 had the potential to be a gargantuan cash cow. Since the Covid-19 virus could be counted on to mutate at the usual pace, if they could come up with a vaccine, they could count on being able to release a new booster shot every single year, and make the kind of reliable profits they now make from the annual flu vaccine. Since big pharma’s profiteering at the expense of patients has become a political hot potato in the US of late, the idea of a new source of extreme profits had a very definite appeal. This is why several effective dietary and pharmaceutical treatments for the virus got deep-sixed, since nobody was going to make billions off them, and it’s also why dud pharmaceuticals such as Remdesvir got hauled off the shelf and heavily marketed—they’re still patented and so can be sold for hundreds or thousands of dollars a dose.
Stage Four: Super Geek To The Rescue
At this point Bill Gates comes into the picture. Most of our current crop of kleptocratic godzillionaires like to play at saving the world in one way or another. (It apparently helps them avoid thinking about the way their firms maltreat their employees, cheat their suppliers, and screw the public.) Gates’ save-the-world hobby is vaccines, and the Gates Foundation is accordingly a major player in the vaccine industry. One of the foundation’s biotechnology patents was well suited to the situation, at least on paper. Pharma corporations thus churned out competing versions of a Covid-19 vaccine using that patent. Mind you, the technology in question has had very mixed results, because it has serious problems with antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), a known complication of immunization in which an ineffective vaccine makes it easier for a virus to make you sick. Nor was adequate testing done to find out if the Covid vaccines had that problem. The vaccines went into production anyway, since the pharmaceutical industry has a long history of launching inadequately tested drugs on the market with serene disregard for safety issues. (Remember Fen-Phen?)
Stage Five: Marketing Maneuvers
The political systems of modern industrial nations are riddled with graft, and so corporate interests can reliably get politicians to say and do whatever will help boost their profits. Once the goal du jour became marketing the vaccine to as many people as possible, therefore, politicians did what they were paid to do and turned on a dime, insisting that Covid-19 was sure to kill us all unless we all got vaccinated, and slapping on mask mandates and shutdowns as part of the political theater. That was purely a marketing gimmick. Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer was one among many official voices telling people in smug tones that if they wanted to have their lives back they’d better hurry up and get vaccinated. Various interesting irregularities in what counted as a case of Covid and what counted as a Covid fatality were also put to work in this cause. This served the necessary purpose of whipping up a classic media panic, to try to make everyone run out and get vaccinated.
Stage Six: The Pushback Begins
The problem is that a great many Americans do not trust the medical industry. There’s good reason for their mistrust, as medical malpractice has long been among the leading causes of death in the United States, and medical profiteering is far and away the leading cause of bankruptcy here as well. Thus an impressive number of people—possibly as many as half the population—flatly refused to get the vaccines. It didn’t help that the vaccines themselves turned out to have serious immediate side effects, including sudden death, at a rate a couple of orders of magnitude higher than any other vaccine currently in use. Though Soviet-style censorship was slapped on social media to keep “misinformation” from spreading, hard questions about the official narrative got asked with increasing frequency, and the number of people getting the Covid-19 shots flatlined: while the US government is now claiming that 70% of adult Americans are vaccinated, other sources of data suggest that the actual number is much less than that.
Stage Seven: Don’t Breathe A Word Of This
There was another reason for people to be suspicious, though that wasn’t clear at first. Everyone who’s had to use Microsoft programs knows that Bill Gates’ management style tends to produce second-rate, bug-ridden products that don’t work the way they’re supposed to work, and have to be pushed on reluctant consumers via high-pressure marketing and monopolistic practices. It turns out that the same was true of the biotechnology on which the Covid-19 vaccines are based. That would have been discovered in the usual way during the two to five years of testing a new vaccine normally gets, but the Covid vaccines didn’t get that; the first one to be authorized had a total of eight weeks of not especially rigorous testing, the others didn’t get much more, and so a far from minor problem slipped past. In the spring of 2021 word thus began to trickle out that the Covid-19 vaccines had a serious problem with ADE: once the initial protection wore off, a process which took a few months, people who’d been vaccinated were much more likely to get seriously ill from repeat exposure to Covid-19 than people who hadn’t. Thus the federal government and the medical industry suddenly had a self-inflicted disaster on their hands.
Stage Eight: Panic In The C-Suites
The first response of the people in power, of course, was to find somebody else to take the blame. That’s when politicians and the media turned on a dime (again) and suddenly started admitting that the virus could have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That’s when Bill Gates suddenly stopped being the poster child for the vaccine effort and got dumped in a hurry by his wife and kids, and when Anthony Fauci suddenly had to deal with a flurry of negative publicity and the unexplained cancellation of his ghostwritten memoirs. The goal was to find someone—Gates, Fauci, the Chinese, anyone—who could be made into the fall guy and blamed for the impending mess. Apparently that first round of bad news was followed by even worse news, however; I suspect that the news was that the ADE caused by the vaccine had a noticeable fatality rate, but that’s just a guess. One way or another, finding fall guys wasn’t an adequate dodge any more, since at this stage it wasn’t just careers that were at risk: it was potentially the viability of the entire political-economic establishment.
Stage Nine: Things Get Serious
All of a sudden, as a result, it was no longer enough to vaccinate 70% of the US population. Everyone without exception had to get vaccinated—if everyone gets the vaccine, after all, it will be easier to claim that what’s happening is a nasty new variant rather than vaccine-driven ADE, since nobody will be able to point out that the unvaccinated aren’t getting it. All of a sudden, officials dropped the (inaccurate) claim that the vaccines keep you from getting Covid-19. New outbreaks flared in which most people who got sick had been fully vaccinated; stories surfaced in the media about how strange it was that so many people were getting really nasty summer colds; the labor shortage somehow just kept getting worse and other shortages snowballed, but if you suggested that it was because too many people were sick you could count on being shouted down. Authorities began to talk earnestly about how a new variant might show up soon that would kill a third of the people who caught it. Under normal circumstances, there’s no way they could know that in advance. It makes perfect sense, however, if the vaccines have been found to cause serious ADE and they already have a good idea of what the fatality rate will be.
This is where we are as I write this. If my hypothesis is right, here’s what we can expect.
Stage Ten: Hoping for a Miracle
As ADE becomes more common, breakthrough infection clusters will pop up with increasing frequency, and the higher the percentage of the population in that region is vaccinated, the worse they will be. Variants will be blamed for this. Word of the imminent crisis will spread through the upper levels of society, however, causing increasingly frantic and irrational behavior, until it becomes next to impossible to get anything done if it depends on the government or big corporations. Medical laboratories will scramble to find a way to counteract ADE, though that’s been tried for decades now without success. Meanwhile the people who refuse to get vaccinated won’t budge no matter how much furious rhetoric and punitive policy gets dumped on them. Once this becomes clear, authorities will insist that everyone but a few holdouts has been vaccinated, in the fond hope that people will believe them one more time.
Stage Eleven: Into The Endgame
When ADE becomes too widespread to ignore and people begin to die in significant numbers, expect governments to proclaim the arrival of the predicted new hyper-lethal variant and impose a new round of shutdowns, mask mandates, and the like. The media will insist that the people who are dying are all unvaccinated as long as they can get away with it; pay attention to the vaccination status and health outcomes of people you know for a reality check. Unless some way of stopping ADE-enhanced infections can be found in a hurry, medical systems will buckle under the caseload and triage will become the order of the day. How soon this will happen, if it does, is impossible to say in advance. It’s also impossible to know in advance how soon it will become clear that the vaccines are responsible—or just how violent a backlash against the political and economic establishment this could provoke.
*****
So that’s my hypothesis. I hope I’m wrong. If anything like what I’ve sketched out does happen, I have friends and family members I care about who almost certainly won’t survive, given their current health and vaccination status. I also know enough about what happened during the Black Death, the Spanish flu, and other situations where a lot of people got sick and died in a hurry, to hope I can avoid seeing the same sort of events in my own time.
Nonetheless, it’s possible that the scenario I’ve sketched out is going to happen in the months immediately ahead of us. I would encourage my readers to assess this possibility and consider getting ready to weather a crisis several months in length, during which food and other necessities may be available only intermittently, medical care may be completely out of reach, and local, state, and national governments may not be able to do much more than flail helplessly and try to pass the buck. If anything like what I’ve described here happens, it will be a world-class mess, and a few basic preparations might go a long way to keep you and your loved ones safe and sound.
One more thing. I'll be moderating comments on this post very strictly. I'm not interested in arguing about whether the hypothesis I've offered is true or not -- that will be demonstrated by events, not by who yells the loudest. I've decided, after much brooding and some favorable divinations, to put this into circulation on the off chance that it may help some people. Make up your own mind and don't let anyone bully you into doing something you don't want to do.
Probably the reason I looked at the Nature Medicine paper carefully was that I knew 2 of its authors. I had contacted Robert Garry about 22 years ago, when he and Pam Asa were claiming that squalene had caused Gulf War syndrome and was the cause of the illnesses that followed anthrax vaccinations. I purchased a vial of a novel vaccine adjuvant from Fisher Scientific (this was when the adjuvant was owned by a small company, before these adjuvants were traded off to Glaxo and Novartis for $billions) and had it shipped to Garry to see if soldiers had antibodies to it. I think the adjuvant was MF59, but I am not positive. Garry told me the sera he had were negative for antibodies. Looking back, I doubt he did the experiment. It cost me about $100, but now I have the story to tell.
Later, Garry's co-investigator Pam Asa accused me of being an "agent" in her interactions with soldiers and veterans, which got back to me. I didn't talk to Garry after that.
Then, in 2014, I found out that the same Bob Garry was running a Lassa/Ebola lab in Kenema before and during the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone. Kenema was ground zero for the Ebola outbreak. Soon his grant was cancelled. Hmmm. To get the lab out of there before questions were asked?
One more Garry connection. He has no real history with human vaccines, he is not an MD, yet Bob Garry joined a Brighton Collaboration committee to evaluate eighth nerve disorders as a side effect of vaccines. This group sets vaccine safety standards (or lack thereof) they want the whole world to adopt. Brighton is funded by CDC and recently moved to Atlanta. Is Garry there to help control the narrative on vaccine side effects? Truly bizarre.
Then in 2020 I learned that although Garry is a professor at Tulane, in New Orleans, he had formed a biodefense company in Maryland, halfway between Washington, DC and Fort Detrick (which is in Frederick, Maryland). Okay. By this time I felt pretty convinced that Bob Garry was an undercover agent who got called on to carry out unusual operations, while masquerading as a microbiology professor.
He was sought for the Feb 1-2 calls with Fauci/Farrar/Collins but could not be reached. Still, he signed the Nature Medicine article.
Ian Lipkin, MD was the other name I knew. Lipkin had done research and published lots of papers on chronic fatigue syndrome and Lyme disease. But somehow he never got the right answers, no treatments ever worked, he never contributed any new understanding. Yet he was extremely well funded. I think his work was central to the false narratives about those 2 conditions, which officially have no accepted treatments.
Lipkin had been in China at the start of the pandemic. He is very close to the Chinese, as is Eddie Holmes--both teach and are celebrated in China. In March 2020 Lipkin came down with Covid after he was home. He caught it in New York. He was interviewed for TV while he was sick, and probably was too impaired to lie well. By chance I caught the interview. He said he had been offered convalescent serum by his Chinese counterparts, but instead decided to take hydroxychloroquine, at the suggestion of his doctor.
Lipkin was the mastermind of the Judy Mikovits research published in Science that got retracted. Basically, Judy's story is that he double-crossed her: after initially collaborating on the research, he destroyed her and it.
By chance, I once spent time with Lipkin's ex-lover at an immunology conference, and got an earful. Lipkin too seemed like an agent, while he holds an authoritative position at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia U.
What about the other 3 authors, all of whom I believe came from the UK? When I mentioned this story to my friend Ed Hooper (the author of the acclaimed book The River), both of us were shocked to learn that he had had run-ins with Garry, Rambaut and Holmes himself! The plot thickened. Holmes and Rambaut had disputed the theory of the origin of AIDS as coming from a polio vaccine grown on monkey kidneys in Africa, many years ago. Might Fauci have put them up to it back then?
Every one of the authors (except Andersen, the youngest) seemed to me to have been a scientist plus 'operative' for many years.
And how did these 5 come together to write this paper? Holmes is in Sydney, Andersen in California, Garry in New Orleans, Lipkin in NYC and Rambaut in Edinburgh. Garry and Lipkin weren't in the same field as the others. The tie that bound them seemed to be that all were willing to carry out nefarious schemes. And all were apparently trusted to carry out the coverup by Fauci, Farrar and Collins.
Here is what I wrote about this topic in May 2020:
http://www.aidsorigins.com/covid-19-and-origins-aids-debate
Ed Hooper took a very deep dive into the origin of AIDS in his highly lauded book, The River. How did HIV jump species from monkey to man? While blamed by some on the consumption of bush meat, Hooper suggested that the use of monkey kidneys to manufacture live polio vaccines, in the Belgian Congo, was a much more likely explanation. Today, the consumption of bat meat has been offered as the route by which SARS-CoV-2 leapt to humans.
Nature Medicine ran a highly cited (including by the Director of the NIH, Francis Collins) article on March 17 which insisted that it was the final word on the subject of COVID'S origin, and should "end any speculation about deliberate genetic engineering." Yet the argument was full of holes.
While there are many curious things about that article, which I and others have noted, Ed Hooper discovered an astonishing coincidence. Three of the five authors of the Nature Medicine paper had tried to influence him regarding the origin of AIDS, separately, many years earlier. Two of them had debated him and published papers insisting they had disproved the oral polio vaccine theory of AIDS origin. The third author, a virologist who frequently strays from virology, had 2 peculiar encounters with Hooper, and claimed AIDS had been around for hundreds of years.
This coauthor, Robert Garry, also had some run-ins with me about 21 years ago. His research partner on the issue of anti-squalene antibodies in anthrax vaccine, Pam Asa, claimed to a number of sick soldiers and veterans, who then related the story to me, that I (Meryl Nass) was an intelligence asset.
Garry and Asa attempted to misdirect the discourse on the cause of anthrax vaccine's toxicity. They reported it was exclusively due to squalene. Had their claim been accepted, anthrax vaccines that omitted squalene would have been wrongly deemed safe.
You have to scratch your head. Are these scientists longstanding members of a "clean-up" crew, whose role is to misdirect us from a potential laboratory contribution in the two most deadly epidemics of modern times? And to misdirect us about potential safety issues in vaccines?
The Bible says, "Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them."
Here are Ed Hooper's thoughts on the debate regarding the origins of COVID-19 and AIDS.
You know, as I write these things down, I can hardly believe that I have crossed paths with so many people who were involved with the anthrax letters and Covid coverups. I think it is because there is a fairly small biodefense fraternity. And while I was never a member, I did important independent research, and a lot of people respected that, and were happy to talk to me. I was on the outside looking in. And I soon learned that when you were dealing with anthrax and bioterrorism, a number of scientists moonlighted as spooks. My first paper on biodefense was published 30 years ago, so there has been a lot of time to accumulate encounters.
Everything I write here is the truth, and I provide details so it can be checked. I am trying to leave a record for humanity in this blog.
The U.S. ruling class deploys the military for three main reasons: (1) to forcibly open up countries to foreign investment, (2) to ensure the free flow of natural resources from the global south into the hands of multinational corporations, and (3) because war is profitable. The third of these reasons, the profitability of war, is often lacking detail in analyses of U.S. imperialism: The financial industry, including investment banks and private equity firms, is an insatiable force seeking profit via military activity.
The war industry is composed of corporations that sell goods and services to the U.S. government and allied capitalist regimes around the world. Investment banks and asset management firms hold most shares of every major public war corporation.
The best-known financial firms holding the stock of war corporations include: Vanguard Group, BlackRock, State Street, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Wellington Management.
Consider Parsons, a corporation that sells goods and services pertaining to construction, command and control, espionage, and day-to-day military operations. Parsons’ initial public offering in May 2019, valued at roughly $3 billion, earned it an industry Corporate Growth Award. The top holders of Parsons stock are investment banks and asset management firms—including the familiar Vanguard Group, BlackRock, and State Street.
BlackRock offices on “the street.” [Source: fortune.com]
New business sectors of war are created and then flooded. For example, the provision of “cyber” was virtually nonexistent in U.S. military contracting until roughly four years ago. A war industry push to militarize IT infrastructure has yielded a bonanza in cyber contracts. Today, “cyber” goods and services are sold stand-alone or as additions to previous contracts.
Nearly every major war corporation sells cyber goods and services.
The top public war corporations include Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Technologies, Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, L3Harris, Textron, SAIC, Booz Allen Hamilton, Leidos, CACI, Honeywell, PAE, Accenture, KBRWyle, Amentum, Jacobs, and AECOM.
They all sell cyber. The main exception is Huntington Ingalls, a major shipbuilder, which does not sell stand-alone cyber goods, although it does mandate cybersecurity as part of its supply chain. The top private war corporations—Sierra Nevada Corp. and General Atomics, run by the billionaire Ozmens and Blue Brothers, respectively—also sell cyber goods and services.
This single business sector of war, cyber, is worth billions annually. Claims of Chinese and Russian cyber hacks, fabricated or hyped by war industry think tanks and media affiliates, fuel government purchases of cyber goods and services. For its part, the U.S. government—first to use devastating new weaponry, from atomic weapons to cyber weapons, and first to attack Moscow with cyber weapons—positions its aggression as purely defensive.
Accusations of Russian hacking lend support to huge investment in cyber-security. [Source: theintercept.com]
In November 2018, Parsons—whose leadership is packed with bankers, career war profiteers, military and intelligence retirees, and a coal tycoon—was contracted for cyberspace operations mission planning in Centerville, Virginia. In May 2019, Parsons was contracted with nine other corporations to expand the cyberspace backbone of the Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific of San Diego, California, a military unit whose mandate is to dominate all forms of space (cyberspace, airspace, and Earth’s orbit).
In January 2020, Parsons and other corporations were contracted by the same unit to further develop, oversee, and employ broad cyber technology integral to that mandate, from the continental United States, to Guam, Japan, Australia, and Singapore, to Bahrain, Djibouti, and Italy. This is just one example of one corporation. Corporate America blankets U.S. military cyber operations worldwide.
Parsons Corp. executives at New York Stock Exchange for launch of firm’s public listing. [Source: enr.com]
No business sector of war is off limits.
As recently as the early 1990s, it was considered sacrilege for corporate employees (“contractors”) to be involved in intelligence matters. Not anymore. U.S. intelligence (both civilian and military) is corporatized.
Consider the Defense Intelligence Agency. DIA was established in the 1960s to consolidate the military’s disparate intelligence activities. It did not consolidate much, as the individual military branches continued to run distinct military-intelligence operations.
Since the 1960s, DIA has expanded dramatically in size. Corporations carrying out DIA’s activities during the most recent fiscal year included work in its Science & Technology Directorate (five years, $990,000,000), its National Media Exploitation Center, and its Missile & Space Intelligence Center (MSIC).
Parsons carries out modeling and simulation and analysis within DIA’s MSIC. Corporations also run planning and analysis of DIA’s workforce, sell technical support to DIA, conduct employee vetting and background investigations, and work on technology transfer analysis and assessment.
Corporations like CACI, whose stocks are owned mostly by financial firms, functionally run U.S. military-intelligence. [Source: bizjournals.com]
Corporations even develop and run software that aids “in the identification of intelligence requirements, management of priorities, planning and production of intelligence products, enterprise data analytics, communication and other associated processes,” offering further opportunities for profit-hungry entities to steer the espionage ship. Corporations (e.g., Accenture, Booz Allen Hamilton, CACI, General Dynamics, Leidos, L3Harris, ManTech, PAE and SAIC, whose stocks are owned mostly by financial firms) functionally run U.S. military-intelligence, the operations of which ultimately enrich the U.S. ruling class.
[Source: scheerpost.com]
Wall Street plays the foundational role in the war industry by outright owning war corporations. Consider PAE, a subtle, potent corporation, which operates such diverse business sectors of war as vehicle maintenance, base operations, military construction, and military training. Gores Holdings III acquired PAE from Platinum Equity in early 2020. Gores then adopted the name PAE and took PAE public. PAE has since acquired the corporations CENTRA and Metis Solutions, which further increase PAE’s operations carrying out former governmental tasks within the U.S. military establishment and espionage agencies.
PAE CEO John Heller (right) accepting an award in 2016 as an “influential leader” in the area of government contracting. [Source: govconexec.com]
Again, all military and intelligence activity is up for grabs, even the Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center (AUTEC), a military range for testing and evaluating the war industry’s technology (e.g., anti-submarine weapons, sonar tracking, and communications). Some have nicknamed AUTEC the “Navy’s Area 51” because of the testing of high-tech unconventional weapons. [Area 51 is a testing range in Nevada where classified programs are worked on and experimental aircraft are flown.]
The Navy established AUTEC on Andros Island in the Bahamas to take advantage of the deep oceanic trench that runs along the east coast of the island. PAE is traditionally the go-to corporation that operates and maintains AUTEC, though a newly formed corporation known as Amentum recently took over some of these functions.
Aerial map of the Navy’s Area 51 in the Bahamas operated primarily by PAE. [Source: mysterywire.com]
The private equity firm Lindsay Goldberg owns Amentum, which was created in 2020 when AECOM, a massive engineering and project management firm, sold its management services business. Amentum now directs this business. Overseas, this management services business has recently transported equipment, cargo, and personnel around Europe; run logistics for prepositioned matériel in Germany, Kuwait, and Qatar; supported drone operations in the Middle East; and repaired support equipment and helped with maintenance at Navy sites in Comalapa, El Salvador. These operations now all belong to Amentum.
Virginia class submarine under construction for the Navy. [Source: lindsaygoldberg.com]
In November 2020, Amentum made another move: It acquired DynCorp, a corporation reported to have a deep history of mercenary activity in Latin America and the Middle East.
DynCorp CEO Lewis “Lou” Von Thaer (featured with DynCorp cap) visits with security contractors and soldiers in Afghanistan. [Source: twitter.com]
According to contract announcements, DynCorp has recently overseen war reserve matériel in the U.S., Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the UAE; maintained military aircraft around the world, including in Honduras, Germany, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Kuwait; sold aircraft maintenance to Sweden and Saudi Arabia; and run substantial worldwide training and equipping of forces, emergency construction, and logistics.
Big Finance wheels and deals war corporations, viewing bases, troops, and warzones as numbers through which to profit.
Another prominent financial player is Veritas Capital, which once owned DynCorp and now owns such corporations as Alion and Peraton, the latter of which is about to acquire Northrop Grumman’s IT business. Peraton’s recent sales to the U.S. military establishment have included: portable systems to foil radio-controlled explosive devices that sundry groups use to attack Western military forces that invade or occupy their countries; work on undersea drones; work to ensure nuclear missiles reenter Earth’s atmosphere properly; IT work that “directly supports American national security interests on the continent of Africa,” according to the contracting announcement; cyber activities for the Air Force Research Lab; and commercial satellite communications for Central Command. All is fair in profit and war.
Satellite device manufactured by Peraton. [Source: breakingdefense.com]
Big Finance sits at the top of the war industry by purchasing most shares of war corporations and by owning war corporations. Insatiable demand for profit places immense structural pressure on the Pentagon and Capitol Hill for sky-high U.S. military and intelligence budgets, broad deployment of troops overseas, and the opening up of governmental jobs to corporations.
The most well-known industry pressure comes in the form of lobbying both political parties and funding their congressional campaigns (with extra focus on members of pertinent committees, such as Armed Services, Intelligence, Appropriations, and Foreign Relations).
This produces tangible results. As Steven Semler of the non-corporate Security Policy Reform Institute calculated, Democratic votes on the National Defense Authorization Act
correlate strongly with the campaign cash members accepted from the war industry. On average, House Democrats who voted for the NDAA accepted four times the amount of war industry cash as those who voted against it. In the Senate, Democrats who cast supporting votes took in six times as much industry cash.
The Executive Branch is not exempt. Rapacious financiers—including hedge fund chiefs and venture capitalists—top the list of donors to the Biden Administration, though dark money groups prevent a full understanding of the overall campaign finance picture. Between July and September at least 67 billionaires and their spouses made contributions of more than $100,000 to committees supporting Joe Biden and the Democratic Party, according to records filed with the Federal Election Commission.
[Source: trendmo.io]
Biden’s campaign received over $9 million from Donald Sussman, CEO of Palmora Partners, a multi-billion dollar hedge fund, which has more than 260,000 shares in Raytheon, a preeminent weapons manufacturer and supplier of weapons to Saudi Arabia, which recently won a $100 million contract for Afghan Air Force training.
Donald Sussman [Source: businessinsider.in]
Another of Biden’s top donors, Jim Simons, who gave over $7 million, founded Renaissance Capital, which owns 1.2 million shares in Raytheon worth over $75 million, and 130,000 shares in Lockheed Martin worth $50 million.
Hedge fund billionaire and war profiteer James Simons was one of Biden’s top campaign donors. [Source: Mother Jones]
Big Tech is positioned prominently among donors to the Biden inauguration celebration. Biden has been clear on the campaign trail that he does not intend to cut the military budget, even going so far as stating, “I’ve met with a number of my advisors and some have suggested in certain areas the budget is going to have to be increased.” Biden’s advisors are part and parcel of the military-industrial-congressional complex. Cozying up to wealthy donors, Biden infamously assured them that “nothing would fundamentally change” in a Biden presidency.
Remnant of a Raytheon laser-guided bomb that killed 31 civilians in September 2016 in Yemen. [Source: masspeaceaction.org]
Corporate media prevent the public from understanding the nature of the problem. A handful of business interests owns media outlets in the United States. Profit drives corporate media. U.S. corporate media (e.g. CNN, MSNBC, FoxNews) share the same business model: air what attracts the highest ratings in order to get more advertising revenue.
Corporate media air info-tainment, designed not to inform or foster critical thinking. Informing the public is not a priority. Maintaining the existing economic order is.
To the extent that corporate media air any information at all, the information reflects the opinions of the ruling class and the dogma of Corporate America.
Politically conditioning the U.S. public, corporate media never blame the military-industrial-congressional complex or capitalism for any of the problems in the world. Aiming for high ratings and lucrative advertising revenue, corporate media self-censor and taper the spectrum of acceptable foreign policy debate. War corporations purchase advertisements on corporate “news” shows to further confine the debate. Corporate pundits and newscasters do not speak out against advertisers.
Corporate media hire career militants (e.g. former CIA Director John Brennan, MSNBC; former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morrell, CBS News; retired General Jack Keane, FoxNews) who further confine the debate. Retired generals and admirals regularly contribute to all forms of corporate media, often without disclosing existing ties to war corporations or financial investments in war.
[Source: mediaite.com]
The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 allowed government to increase its propaganda in corporate media. Drawing funding from the wealthy donor class and large corporate interests, National Public Radio is similarly confined. NPR’s new CEO as of September 2019 is John Lansing, who recently led U.S. propaganda at the U.S. Agency for Global Media.
John Lansing, NPR’s new CEO, recently led U.S. propaganda at the U.S. Agency for Global Media. [Source: [npr.org]](https://www.npr.org/about-npr/758067452/npr-names-john-lansing-president-and-ceo)
Other industry pressure comes in the form of funding and running pressure groups [e.g. National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA), Aerospace Industries Association (AIA), Association of the United States Army (AUSA)] to dominate the Pentagon, administer arms fairs, and push favorable policies; funding think tanks to keep the narrative neoliberal and pro-war; recruiting retired generals and admirals (e.g. Dunford at Lockheed Martin, Mattis at General Dynamics, Winnefeld at Raytheon) to leverage their knowledge for financial gain; and flooding the Pentagon’s civilian offices with corporate executives (e.g., Esper and then Austin, Secretary of Defense; Lord, Undersecretary for Acquisition and Sustainment; McCarthy, Secretary of the Army).
War profiteers serve their interests by getting their board members and executives on television to advocate for higher military budgets and war. [Source: nytimes.com]
Wars must be created and expanded, and military bases, through which to route goods and services, must be established and entrenched to satisfy investors. Notwithstanding, ending the wars first requires addressing the embedded profit motive, otherwise it is business as usual.
Christian Sorensen is an Air Force veteran and author of the new book entitled Understanding the War Industry. See CAM’s review of the book: Wars R Us: A Review of Christian Sorensen’s New Book.
By The Ister for the Saker Blog
The origin of modern banking can be found in the early days of the gold trade. In the Middle Ages, goldsmiths accepted deposits of gold in return for paper notes, which could be exchanged for the deposits at a later date. Because these paper notes were more convenient for commercial use than physical metal, they were usually not redeemed for gold right away. The goldsmiths noticed their customers’ deposits could be used in the meantime to generate interest and began surreptitiously lending out the savings of their depositors. Over time fractional reserve banking developed from this tendency of lending out money in excess of the actual reserves being held.
Goldsmith became banker, and from this early monetary system, banking families emerged. Prior to the existence of modern financial institutions, these houses were the entities which could be relied upon for large amounts of credit. A reputable surname gave confidence to depositors that their gold was in good hands, and from the intergenerational accumulation of wealth grew large pools of loanable capital. As nobles required weapons and pay for their armies, the conflicts of medieval Europe were fueled by families such as the Medici, Fuggers, and Welsers. Today, it is the Federal Reserve which finances America’s enormous military and conquests abroad.
To truly understand banking, the concept of free markets must be cast aside. Just as oil is a strategic resource for the real economy capitalist, gold and silver are strategic resources for the financial capitalist. Physical bullion is the basis from which all other lines of credit extend; we know this because the same central banks which publicly proclaim gold to be a barbarous relic still feel the need to maintain enormous hordes in their vaults.
As in oil markets, pricing is not influenced primarily by a large number of producers and buyers but by concentrated cartel dynamics. So while we witness yet another energy battle between OPEC and Russia unfold, it should be understood that similar dynamics are at play in the upper echelons of the monetary world as bankers seek to fix prices and control physical bullion flows in a manner which is beneficial to their interests.
A key difference from oil is that while the pump leads to the refinery and the refinery to the end-user, bankers do not generally like to part with their gold. Accordingly, markets have been designed so that prices are determined not by physical delivery but by the trading of unbacked or fractionally backed “claims” on the underlying metal: certificates, ETFs, and futures. We can be certain that there is not enough physical bullion to cover all these paper metal claims, just like the medieval goldsmith did not hold his deposits in full.
These paper markets set the price, although bars rarely leave the vault
Where is the vault? While Fort Knox claims the largest holdings, the price is set by the London Bullion Market Association and CME Group which together account for around 70% and 20% of global trading volume respectively. The London Bullion Market began in 1850, when N. M. Rothschild and Sons and several other banking families created a cartel to oversee the operations of the global gold market, including the establishment of the “London good delivery” list which created trading standards for size, dimensions, shape and fineness of bullion; today trading on London markets requires a high purity and being between 350-450 ounces.
This domination of the world’s gold market was not achieved through peaceful means: look into the forces behind the conquest of Transvaal’s gold mines, for it bears a direct parallel to America’s invasions of oil-rich nations today. Another similarity with oil markets is that military interventions have a habit of “liberating” the target nation of their gold: just ask Muammar Gaddafi.
The price of such a strategic resource could not be determined by an open market, thus alongside good delivery standards the “gold fix” was established in 1919 and was held in the offices of New Court until 2004, when its operations were passed on to a cartel of bullion banks such JP Morgan and HSBC. Ever since, these banks have been investigated and convicted countless times of manipulating and spoofing the prices.
How do we know that there isn’t enough gold to cover physical deliveries? Back in the 1970s the dollar was under a lot of pressure and Western banks maintained secret gentlemen’s agreements not to request delivery of bullion. In 1971 Dutch central bank chief Jelle Zjilstra ignored these formalities and planned to convert $600 million of the Dutch dollar reserves to gold, prompting Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker to fly out to the Netherlands and warn him: “you’re rocking the boat.” Shortly after Zijlstra refused Volcker’s pressure and continued with the purchase, the US decoupled from the gold standard.
Abandonment of the gold standard risked a reduction in dollar demand, so Nixon enlisted Wall Street scion Gerry Parsky to negotiate with oil exporting Arab nations. After discussion, the Saudi state agreed to sell oil priced exclusively in dollars and to invest the proceeds of oil sales in America.
To those who say dismissively that the dollar is now backed by “nothing,” I say it is backed by oil and the threat of the US military.
Look at the somber fates of those that tried to ditch the dollar for gold or the Euro: Libya in a state of permanent civil war; starving Syrians picking through landfills in search of food only miles from occupied wheat fields.
So maintaining confidence in our reserve currency requires the undermining of confidence in gold, as its reemergence would unnecessarily democratize the international monetary order. Confidence is undermined first by price suppression, which is accomplished by the manipulation of precious metals futures markets. While it would be hugely wasteful for a private individual or consortium to manipulate such a market with their own money, that is where the unlimited fiat available at central bank trading desks come in: and we know central banks are secretly trading precious metals futures due to leaked documents from CME Group.
Leo Melamed, chairman of CME Group and the putative father of modern commodity futures markets noted in his book Escape to the Futures that CME’s Globex system was inspired by the original London gold fix:
Sandner, Kilcollin and I were in London with the chairman of the Rothschild Bank seeking his advice on how to bring the “gold fix” to Chicago. From the heated debate that followed one would have concluded that Kilcollin knew more about the subject than the legendary Rothschilds, the people who had founded the concept ages before.
What we can see from this is that strategic commodities such as gold and oil are far from a free market: recall my previous article The Empire is Losing the Energy War which described how the Saudi state functions as a price-suppression weapon against Russia’s oil exports. This global commodity suppression schema allows the importation of the planet’s finite resources at a fraction of the true cost in return for theoretically unlimited currency. Recall Fed governor Kevin Warsh’s comments in December of 2011 when gold hit an all time high that banks were:
“finding it tempting to pursue financial repression- suppressing market prices that they don’t like”
There are signs, however, that the thin pool of physical bullion which exists to maintain confidence in paper markets is drying up. In March of 2020, CME Group had to relax its own requirement of 100oz bars to allow 400oz London good delivery bars to be shipped from overseas and used for trade settlement. Some would say: if price suppression exists then why has the gold price gone up over the last few years?
The middle ground between setting the price to very low or very high levels, say, $100 or $10,000, is that the prices are set high enough to minimize outflows from vaults, while at the same time using futures to hammer down the prices at psychologically important levels and initiating margin calls on those who are long gold using leverage. Those who have watched gold for a long time can attest to the sudden and inexplicable drops which originate in the futures market and which occur every time the gold price appears *just* ready to break out.
It’s a very complicated charade for the bullion bank cartel. Allow the price per ounce to go too low and you risk running out of the gold necessary to facilitate markets. At the same time, if the price rises too high it attracts international attention and risks gold reemerging in monetary policy. Notice how as soon as the supply shortages became apparent in March 2020 the bankers were forced to reset gold from $1230 to over $2000 in order to stem the outflows of physical delivery.
Putin is intentionally exacerbating this drought of physical gold in Western banks by expanding the Russian central bank’s purchases of gold. For the past few years Russia has been the number one global purchaser of bullion, having spent over $40 billion to bring Moscow’s reserves to the highest level in history: a sum close to the annual military budget because it is a strategic asset.
Just last week, Russia’s gold reserves passed its dollar reserves for the first time reaching a sum of $583 billion, highlighted by the central bank as part of Putin’s de-dollarization agenda. Given that purchases have grown at roughly 15% per year we can predict that even if the price does not rise, the value of these holdings will be around $1 trillion in three years. Read the anxious commentary about these purchases in Bloomberg and Forbes, and remember the nervousness in the business press when Germany demanded its gold back in 2013, which would only exist if behind-the-scenes physical gold flows were disjointed and there was internal muttering in the financial world as to whether the demand could be fulfilled.
To any who doubt that this is an overt move, in the pre-WW2 monetary system the mass accumulation of gold was well understood among central bankers as an aggressive act intended to starve competitor states of their ability to create credit. For example, French and American hoarding resulted in hyperinflation for Germany and forced Britain’s pound sterling off the gold standard.
Russia’s acquisition of precious metal is a direct threat to the financial system. How funny that the system is so fraudulent that it is an act of aggression to simply demand in physical form what one has paid for in full on an open market; an act which the designers of the system cannot protest lest they reveal their own bankruptcy. Just as it did in the 1920s, the hoarding of gold in the East will eventually limit the West’s ability to extend credit, it is simply unfolding on a longer time frame.
So why is a tiny stock like GameStop causing billionaire Leon Cooperman to cry on CNBC, and why is the SEC threatening small-time investors?
Simply, the financial markets are being revealed as a highly illiquid house of cards. Retail investors from Reddit began trolling short-sellers by rapidly buying small stocks and causing hedge funds to blow up from expensive margin calls. The losses are now estimated at around $70 billion, and as these small-time investors funnel their unemployment and stimulus checks into their aggressive trades they have fought wealthy investors in a more effective way than Occupy Wall Street ever did. They have now turned their eyes to the small and illiquid silver market…
Look at the fate of the Hunt brothers fortune: they were oil billionaires who tried to exercise their legal right to take physical delivery of a large volume of silver futures contracts and had CME pull the rug out from under them before it could be achieved. CME Group defeated the Hunt brothers by instituting Silver Rule 7 which limited the dollar amount of physical silver that an individual investor could buy. But how will that stop the hordes of young low net worth traders who are now telling one another to purchase physical bullion and intentionally strain the rigged silver market?
This arcane financial system is doomed to fail because it is based on ever-higher and more unstable abstractions of underlying wealth: CDOs squared and cubed, dark pool derivatives markets totaling trillions of dollars, and so on: all of which depends on the financial sector sucking as much money as possible out of a shrinking global economy through securitization. Now that people are demanding the underlying assets themselves, change is beginning.
What an interesting timeline: where Russia and unemployed youths have come to the same conclusion for how to defeat the banks.
The Ister is a researcher of financial markets and geopolitics. Author of The Ister: Escape America
In mid-December of 2020, a massive hack compromised the networks of numerous US federal agencies, major corporations, the top five accounting firms in the country, and the military, among others. Despite most US media attention now focusing on election-related chaos, the fallout from the hack continues to make headlines day after day.
The hack, which affected Texas-based software provider SolarWinds, was blamed on Russia on January 5 by the US government’s Cyber Unified Coordination Group. Their statement asserted that the attackers were “likely Russian in origin,” but they failed to provide evidence to back up that claim.
Since then, numerous developments in the official investigation have been reported, but no actual evidence pointing to Russia has yet to be released. Rather, mainstream media outlets began reporting the intelligence community’s “likely” conclusion as fact right away, with the New York Times subsequently reporting that US investigators were examining a product used by SolarWinds that was sold by a Czech Republic–based company, as the possible entry point for the “Russian hackers.” Interest in that company, however, comes from the fact that the attackers most likely had access to the systems of a contractor or subsidiary of SolarWinds. This, combined with the evidence-free report from US intelligence on “likely” Russian involvement, is said to be the reason investigators are focusing on the Czech company, though any of SolarWinds’ contractors/subsidiaries could have been the entry point.
Such narratives clearly echo those that became prominent in the wake of the 2016 election, when now-debunked claims were made that Russian hackers were responsible for leaked emails published by WikiLeaks. Parallels are obvious when one considers that SolarWinds quickly brought on the discredited firm CrowdStrike to aid them in securing their networks and investigating the hack. CrowdStrike had also been brought on by the DNC after the 2016 WikiLeaks publication, and subsequently it was central in developing the false declarations regarding the involvement of “Russian hackers” in that event.
There are also other parallels. As Russiagate played out, it became apparent that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and a foreign power, but the nation was Israel, not Russia. Indeed, many of the reports that came out of Russiagate revealed collusion with Israel, yet those instances received little coverage and generated little media outrage. This has led some to suggest that Russiagate may have been a cover for what was in fact Israelgate.
Similarly, in the case of the SolarWinds hack, there is the odd case and timing of SolarWinds’ acquisition of a company called Samanage in 2019. As this report will explore, Samanage’s deep ties to Israeli intelligence, venture-capital firms connected to both intelligence and Isabel Maxwell, as well as Samange’s integration with the Orion software at the time of the back door’s insertion warrant investigation every bit as much as SolarWinds’ Czech-based contractor.
In the month since the hack, evidence has emerged detailing the extent of the damage, with the Justice Department quietly announcing, the same day as the Capitol riots (January 6), that their email system had been breached in the hack—a “major incident” according to the department. This terminology means that the attack “is likely to result in demonstrable harm to the national security interests, foreign relations, or the economy of the United States or to the public confidence, civil liberties, or public health and safety of the American people,” per NextGov.
The Justice Department was the fourth US government agency to publicly acknowledge a breach in connection to the hack, with the others being the Departments of Commerce and Energy and the Treasury. Yet, while only four agencies have publicly acknowledged fallout from the hack, SolarWinds software is also used by the Department of Defense, the State Department, NASA, the NSA, and the Executive Office. Given that the Cyber Unified Coordination Group stated that “fewer than ten” US government agencies had been affected, it’s likely that some of these agencies were compromised, and some press reports have asserted that the State Department and Pentagon were affected.
In addition to government agencies, SolarWinds Orion software was in use by the top ten US telecommunications corporations, the top five US accounting firms, the New York Power Authority, and numerous US government contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton, General Dynamics, and the Federal Reserve. Other notable SolarWinds clients include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Microsoft, Credit Suisse, and several mainstream news outlets including the Economist and the New York Times.
Based on what is officially known so far, the hackers appeared to have been highly sophisticated, with FireEye, the cybersecurity company that first discovered the implanted code used to conduct the hack, stating that the hackers “routinely removed their tools, including the backdoors, once legitimate remote access was achieved—implying a high degree of technical sophistication and attention to operational security.” In addition, top security experts have noted that the hack was “very very carefully orchestrated,” leading to a consensus that the hack was state sponsored.
FireEye stated that they first identified the compromise of SolarWinds after the version of the Orion software they were using contained a back door that was used to gain access to its “red team” suite of hacking tools. Not long after the disclosure of the SolarWinds hack, on December 31, the hackers were able to partially access Microsoft’s source code, raising concerns that the act was preparation for future and equally devastating attacks.
FireEye’s account can be taken with a grain of salt, however, as the CIA is one of FireEye’s clients, and FireEye was launched with funding from the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-tel. It is also worth being skeptical of the “free tool” FireEye has made available in the hack’s aftermath for “spotting and keeping suspected Russians out of systems.”
In addition, Microsoft, another key source in the SolarWinds story, is a military contractor with close ties to Israel’s intelligence apparatus, especially Unit 8200, and their reports of events also deserve scrutiny. Notably, it was Unit 8200 alumnus and executive at Israeli cybersecurity firm Cycode, Ronen Slavin, who told Reuters in a widely quoted article that he “was worried by the possibility that the SolarWinds hackers were poring over Microsoft’s source code as prelude to a much more ambitious offensive.” “To me the biggest question is, ‘Was this recon for the next big operation?’” Slavin stated.
Also odd about the actors involved in the response to the hack is the decision to bring on not only the discredited firm CrowdStrike but also the new consultancy firm of Chris Krebs and Alex Stamos, former chief information security officer of Facebook and Yahoo, to investigate the hack. Chris Krebs is the former head of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and was previously a top Microsoft executive. Krebs was fired by Donald Trump after repeatedly and publicly challenging Trump on the issue of election fraud in the 2020 election.
As head of CISA, Krebs gave access to networks of critical infrastructure throughout the US, with a focus on the health-care industry, to the CTI League, a suspicious outfit of anonymous volunteers working “for free” and led by a former Unit 8200 officer. “We have brought in the expertise of Chris Krebs and Alex Stamos to assist in this review and provide best-in-class guidance on our journey to evolve into an industry leading secure software development company,” a SolarWinds spokesperson said in an email cited by Reuters.
It is also worth noting that the SolarWinds hack did benefit a few actors aside from the attackers themselves. For instance, Israeli cybersecurity firms CheckPoint and CyberArk, which have close ties to Israeli intelligence Unit 8200, have seen their stocks soar in the weeks since the SolarWinds compromise was announced. Notably, in 2017, CyberArk was the company that “discovered” one of the main tactics used in an attack, a form of SAML token manipulation called GoldenSAML. CyberArk does not specify how they discovered this method of attack and, at the time they announced the tactic’s existence, released a free tool to identify systems vulnerable to GoldenSAML manipulation.
In addition, the other main mode of attack, a back door program nicknamed Sunburst, was found by Kaspersky researchers to be similar to a piece of malware called Kazuar that was also first discovered by another Unit 8200-linked company, Palo Alto Networks, also in 2017. The similarities only suggest that those who developed the Sunburst backdoor may have been inspired by Kazuar and “they may have common members between them or a shared software developer building their malware.” Kaspersky stressed that Sunburst and Kazuar are not likely to be one and the same. It is worth noting, as an aside, that Unit 8200 is known to have previously hacked Kaspersky and attempted to insert a back door into their products, per Kaspersky employees.
Crowdstrike claimed that this finding confirmed “the attribution at least to Russian intelligence,” only because an allegedly Russian hacking group is believed to have used Kazuar before. No technical evidence linking Russia to the SolarWinds hacking has yet been presented.
The implanted code used to execute the hack was directly injected into the source code of SolarWinds Orion. Then, the modified and bugged version of the software was “compiled, signed and delivered through the existing software patch release management system,” per reports. This has led US investigators and observers to conclude that the perpetrators had direct access to SolarWinds code as they had “a high degree of familiarity with the software.” While the way the attackers gained access to Orion’s code base has yet to be determined, one possibility being pursued by investigators is that the attackers were working with employee(s) of a SolarWinds contractor or subsidiary.
US investigators have been focusing on offices of SolarWinds that are based abroad, suggesting that—in addition to the above—the attackers were likely working for SolarWinds or were given access by someone working for the company. That investigation has focused on offices in eastern Europe, allegedly because “Russian intelligence operatives are deeply rooted” in those countries.
It is worth pointing out, however, that Israeli intelligence is similarly “deeply rooted” in eastern European states both before and after the fall of the Soviet Union, ties well illustrated by Israeli superspy and media tycoon Robert Maxwell’s frequent and close associations with Eastern European and Russian intelligence agencies as well as the leaders of many of those countries. Israeli intelligence operatives like Maxwell also had cozy ties with Russian organized crime. For instance, Maxwell enabled the access of the Russian organized crime network headed by Semion Mogilevich into the US financial system and was also Mogilevich’s business partner. In addition, the cross-pollination between Israeli and Russian organized crime networks (networks which also share ties to their respective intelligence agencies) and such links should be considered if the cybercriminals due prove to be Russian in origin, as US intelligence has claimed.
Though some contractors and subsidiaries of SolarWinds are now being investigated, one that has yet to be investigated, but should be, is Samanage. Samanage, acquired by SolarWinds in 2019, not only gained automatic access to Orion just as the malicious code was first inserted, but it has deep ties to Israeli intelligence and a web of venture-capital firms associated with numerous Israeli espionage scandals that have targeted the US government. Israel is deemed by the NSA to be one of the top spy threats facing US government agencies and Israel’s list of espionage scandals in the US is arguably the longest, and includes the Jonathan Pollard and PROMIS software scandals of the 1980s to the Larry Franklin/AIPAC espionage scandal in 2009.
Though much reporting has since been done on the recent compromise of SolarWinds Orion software, little attention has been paid to Samanage. Samanage offers what it describes as “an IT Service Desk solution.” It was acquired by SolarWinds so Samanage’s products could be added to SolarWinds’ IT Operations Management portfolio. Though US reporting and SolarWinds press releases state that Samanage is based in Cary, North Carolina, implying that it is an American company, Samanage is actually an Israeli firm. It was founded in 2007 by Doron Gordon, who previously worked for several years at MAMRAM, the Israeli military’s central computing unit.
Samanage was SolarWinds’ first acquisition of an Israeli company, and, at the time, Israeli media reported that SolarWinds was expected to set up its first development center in Israel. It appears, however, that SolarWinds, rather than setting up a new center, merely began using Samanage’s research and development center located in Netanya, Israel.
Several months after the acquisition was announced, in November 2019, Samanage, renamed SolarWinds Service Desk, became listed as a standard feature of SolarWinds Orion software, whereas the integration of Samanage and Orion had previously been optional since the acquisition’s announcement in April of that year. This means that complete integration was likely made standard in either October or November. It has since been reported that the perpetrators of the recent hack gained access to the networks of US federal agencies and major corporations at around the same time. Samanage’s automatic integration into Orion was a major modification made to the now-compromised software during that period.
Samanage appears to have had access to Orion following the announcement of the acquisition in April 2019. Integration first began with Orion version 2019.4, the earliest version believed to contain the malicious code that enabled the hack. In addition, the integrated Samanage component of Orion was responsible for “ensuring the appropriate teams are quickly notified when critical events or performance issues [with Orion] are detected,” which was meant to allow “service agents to react faster and resolve issues before . . . employees are impacted.”
In other words, the Samanage component that was integrated into Orion at the same time the compromise took place was also responsible for Orion’s alert system for critical events or performance issues. The code that was inserted into Orion by hackers in late 2019 nevertheless went undetected by this Samanage-made component for over a year, giving the “hackers” access to millions of devices critical to both US government and corporate networks. Furthermore, it is this Samanage-produced component of the affected Orion software that advises end users to exempt the software from antivirus scans and group policy object (GPO) restrictions by providing a warning that Orion may not work properly unless those exemptions are granted.
Around the time of Samange’s acquisition by SolarWinds, it was reported that one of Samanage’s top backers was the company Salesforce, with Salesforce being both a major investor in Samanage as well as a partner of the company.
Salesforce is run by Marc Benioff, a billionaire who got his start at the tech giant Oracle. Oracle was originally created as a CIA spin-off and has deep ties to Israel’s government and the outgoing Trump administration. Salesforce also has a large presence in Israel, with much of its global research and development based there. Salesforce also recently partnered with the Unit 8200-linked Israeli firm Diagnostic Robotics to “predictively” diagnose COVID-19 cases using Artificial Intelligence.
Aside from leading Salesforce, Benioff is a member of the Vatican’s Council for Inclusive Capitalism alongside Lynn Forester de Rothschild, a close associate of Jeffrey Epstein and the Clintons, and members of the Lauder family, who have deep ties to the Mega Group and Israeli politics.
Benioff is also a prominent member of the board of trustees of the World Economic Forum and the inaugural chair of the WEF’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR), making him one of the most critical players in the unfolding of the WEF-backed Great Reset. Other WEF leaders, including the organization’s founder Klaus Schwab, have openly discussed how massive cyberattacks such as befell SolarWinds will soon result in “even more significant economic and social implications than COVID-19.”
Last year, the WEF’s Centre for Cybersecurity, of which Salesforce is part, simulated a “digital pandemic” cyberattack in an exercise entitled Cyber Polygon. Cyber Polygon’s speakers in 2020 included former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of Russia Mikhail Mishustin, WEF founder Klaus Schwab, and IBM executive Wendi Whitmore, who previously held top posts at both Crowdstrike and a FireEye subsidiary. Notably, just months before the COVID-19 crisis, the WEF had held Event 201, which simulated a global coronavirus pandemic that crippled the world’s economy.
In addition to Samanage’s ties to WEF big shots such as Marc Benioff, the other main investors behind Samanage’s rise have ties to major Israeli espionage scandals, including the Jonathan Pollard affair and the PROMIS software scandal. There are also ties to one of the WEF’s founding “technology pioneers,” Isabel Maxwell (the daughter of Robert Maxwell and sister of Ghislaine), who has long-standing ties to Israel’s intelligence apparatus and the country’s hi-tech sector.
At the time of its acquisition by SolarWinds, Samanage’s top investor was Viola Ventures, a major Israeli venture-capital firm. Viola’s investment in Samanage, until its acquisition, was managed by Ronen Nir, who was also on Samanage’s board before it became part of SolarWinds.
Prior to working at Viola, Ronen Nir was a vice president at Verint, formerly Converse Infosys. Verint, whose other alumni have gone on to found Israeli intelligence-front companies such as Cybereason. Verint has a history of aggressively spying on US government facilities, including the White House, and created the backdoors into all US telecommunications systems and major tech companies, including Microsoft, Google and Facebook, on behalf of the US’ NSA.
In addition to his background at Verint, Ronen Nir is an Israeli spy, having served for thirteen years in an elite IDF intelligence unit, and he remains a lieutenant colonel on reserve duty. His biography also notes that he worked for two years at the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC, which is fitting given his background in espionage and the major role that Israeli embassy has played in several major espionage scandals.
As an aside, Nir has stated that “thought leader” Henry Kissinger is his “favorite historical character.” Notably, Kissinger was instrumental in allowing Robert Maxwell, Israeli superspy and father of Ghislaine and Isabel Maxwell, to sell software with a back door for Israeli intelligence to US national laboratories, where it was used to spy on the US nuclear program. Kissinger had told Maxwell to connect with Senator John Tower in order to gain access to US national laboratories, which directly enabled this action, part of the larger PROMIS software scandal.
In addition, Viola’s stake was managed through a firm known as Carmel Ventures, which is part of the Viola Group. At the time, Carmel Ventures was advised by Isabel Maxwell, whose father had previously been directly involved in the operation of the front company used to sell bugged software to US national laboratories. As noted in a previous article at Unlimited Hangout, Isabel “inherited” her father’s circle of Israeli government and intelligence contacts after his death and has been instrumental in building the “bridge” between Israel’s intelligence and military-linked hi-tech sector to Silicon Valley.
Isabel also has ties to the Viola Group itself through Jonathan Kolber, a general partner at Viola. Kolber previously cofounded and led the Bronfman family’s private-equity fund, Claridge Israel (based in Israel). Kolber then led Koor Industries, which he had acquired alongside the Bronfmans via Claridge. Kolber is closely associated with Stephen Bronfman, the son of Charles Bronfman who created Claridge and also cofounded the Mega Group with Leslie Wexner in the early 1990s.
Kolber, like Isabel Maxwell, is a founding director of the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation. Maxwell, who used to chair the center’s board, stepped down following the Epstein scandal, though it’s not exactly clear when. Other directors of the center include Tamir Pardo, former head of Mossad. Kolber’s area of expertise, like that of Isabel Maxwell, is “structuring complex, cross-border and cross industry business and financial transactions,” that is, arranging acquisitions and partnerships of Israeli firms by US companies. Incidentally, this is also a major focus of the Peres Center.
Other connections to Isabel Maxwell, aside from her espionage ties, are worth noting, given that she is a “technology pioneer” of the World Economic Forum. As previously mentioned, Salesforce—a major investor in Samanage—is deeply involved with the WEF and its Great Reset.
The links of Israeli intelligence and Salesforce to Samanage, and thus to SolarWinds, is particularly relevant given the WEF’s “prediction” of a coming “pandemic” of cyberattacks and the early hints from former Unit 8200 officers that the SolarWinds hack is just the beginning. It is also worth mentioning the Israeli government’s considerable ties to the WEF over the years, particularly last year when it joined the Benioff-chaired C4IR and participated in the October 2020 WEF panel entitled “The Great Reset: Harnessing the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”
Start Up Nation Central, an organization aimed at integrating Israeli start-ups with US firms set up by Netanyahu’s longtime economic adviser Eugene Kandel and American Zionist billionaire Paul Singer, have asserted that Israel will serve a “key role” globally in the 4th Industrial Revolution following the implementation of the Great Reset.
In addition to Viola, another of Samange’s leading investors is Gemini Israel Ventures. Gemini is one of Israel’s oldest venture-capital firms, dating back to the Israeli government’s 1993 Yozma program.
The first firm created by Yozma, Gemini was put under the control of Ed Mlavsky, who Israel’s government had chosen specifically for this position. As previously reported by Unlimited Hangout, Mlavsky was then serving as the executive director of the Israel-US Binational Industrial Research and Development (BIRD) Foundation, where “he was responsible for investments of $100 million in more than 300 joint projects between US and Israeli high-tech companies.”
A few years before Gemini was created, while Mlavsky still headed BIRD, the foundation became embroiled in one of the worst espionage scandals in US history, the Jonathan Pollard affair.
In the indictment of US citizen Pollard for espionage on Israel’s behalf, it was noted that Pollard delivered the documents he stole to agents of Israel at two locations, one of which was an apartment owned by Harold Katz, the then legal counsel of the BIRD Foundation and an adviser to Israel’s military, which oversaw Israel’s scientific intelligence-gathering agency, Lekem. US officials told the New York Times at the time that they believed Katz “has detailed knowledge about the [Pollard] spy ring and could implicate senior Israeli officials.”
Subsequent reporting by journalist Claudia Wright pointed the finger at the Mlavsky-run BIRD Foundation as one of the ways Israeli intelligence funneled money to Pollard before his capture by US authorities.
One of the first companies Gemini invested in was CommTouch (now Cyren), which was founded by ex-IDF officers and later led by Isabel Maxwell. Under Maxwell’s leadership, CommTouch developed close ties to Microsoft, partially due to Maxwell’s relationship with its cofounder Bill Gates.
If the SolarWinds hack is as serious as has been reported, it’s difficult to understand why a company like Samanage would not be looked into as part of a legitimate investigation into the attack. The timing of Samanage employees gaining access to the Orion software and the company’s investors including Israeli spies and those with ties to past espionage scandals where Israel used back doors to spy on the US and beyond raises obvious red flags. Yet, any meaningful investigation of the incident is unlikely to take place, especially given the considerable involvement of discredited firms like CrowdStrike, CIA fronts like FireEye and a consultancy firm led by former Silicon Valley executives with their own government/intelligence ties.
There is also the added fact that both of the main methods used in the attack were analogous or bore similarities to hacking tools that were both discovered by Unit 8200-linked companies in 2017. Unit 8200-founded cybersecurity firms are among the few “winners” from the SolarWinds hack, as their stocks have skyrocketed and demand for their services has increased globally.
While some may argue that Unit 8200 alumni are not necessarily connected to the Israeli intelligence apparatus, numerous reports have pointed out the admitted fusion of Israeli military intelligence with Israel’s hi-tech sector and its tech-focused venture capital networks, with Israeli military and intelligence officials themselves noting that the line between the private cybersecurity sector and Israel’s intelligence apparatus is so blurred, it’s difficult to know where one begins and the other ends. There is also the Israeli government policy, formally launched in 2012, whereby Israel’s intelligence and military intelligence agencies began outsourcing “activities that were previously managed in-house, with a focus on software and cyber technologies.”
Samanage certainly appears to be such a company, not only because it was founded by a former IDF officer in the military’s central computing unit, but because its main investors include spies on “reserve duty” and venture capital firms linked to the Pollard scandal as well as the Bronfman and Maxwell families, both of whom have been tied to espionage and sexual blackmail scandals over the years.
Yet, as the Epstein scandal has recently indicated, major espionage scandals involving Israel receive little coverage and investigations into these events rarely lead anywhere. PROMIS was covered up largely thanks to Bill Barr during his first term as Attorney General and even the Pollard affair has all been swept under the rug with Donald Trump allowing Pollard to move to Israel and, more recently, pardoning the Israeli spy who recruited Pollard during his final day as President. Also under Trump, there was the discovery of “stingray” surveillance devices placed by Israel’s government throughout Washington DC, including next to the White House, which were quickly memory holed and oddly not investigated by authorities. Israel had previously wiretapped the White House’s phone lines during the Clinton years.
Another cover up is likely in the case of SolarWinds, particularly if the entry point was in fact Samanage. Though a cover up would certainly be more of the same, the SolarWinds case is different as major tech companies and cybersecurity firms with ties to US and Israeli intelligence now insist that Microsoft is soon to be targeted in what would clearly be a much more devastating event than SolarWinds due to the ubiquity of Microsoft’s products.
On Tuesday, CIA-linked firm FireEye, which apparently has a leadership role in investigating the hack, claimed that the perpetrators are still gathering data from US government agencies and that “the hackers are moving into Microsoft 365 cloud applications from physical, on-premises servers,” meaning that changes to fix Orion’s vulnerabilities will not necessarily deny hacker access to previously compromised systems as they allegedly maintain access to those systems via Microsoft cloud applications. In addition to Microsoft’s own claims that some of its source code was accessed by the hackers, this builds the narrative that Microsoft products are poised to be targeted in the next high-profile hack.
Microsoft’s cloud security infrastructure, set to be the next target of the SolarWinds hackers, was largely developed and later managed by Assaf Rappaport, a former Unit 8200 officer who was most recently the head of Microsoft’s Research and Development and Security teams at its massive Israel branch. Rappaport left Microsoft right before the COVID-19 crisis began last year to found a new cybersecurity company called Wiz.
Microsoft, like some of Samanage’s main backers, is part of the World Economic Forum and is an enthusiastic supporter of and participant in the Great Reset agenda, so much so that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote the foreword to Klaus Schwab’s book “Shaping the Fourth Industrial Revolution.” With the WEF simulating a cyber “pandemic” and both the WEF and Israel’s head of Israel’s National Cyber Directorate warning of an imminent “cyber winter”, SolarWinds does indeed appear to be just the beginning, though perhaps a scripted one to create the foundation for something much more severe. A cyberattack on Microsoft products globally would certainly upend most of the global economy and likely have economic effects more severe than the COVID-19 crisis, just as the WEF has been warning. Yet, if such a hack does occur, it will inevitably serve the aims of the Great Reset to “reset” and then rebuild electronic infrastructure.
The small camarilla that has taken over the USA has censured the incumbent president, Donald Trump. Here is the richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon, of Blue Origin and the Washington Post.
Each of the two camps that are fighting in the United States, the Jacksonians and the Neopuritans, wants to end the other. The former speak of insurrection, while the latter want repression, but all are preparing for confrontation. So much so that two thirds of the citizens are preparing for Civil War.
The Jacksonians take their name from President Andrew Jackson who, before the Civil War, opposed the creation of the Federal Reserve (an independent central bank). They disappeared from political life for a century until one of them, Donald Trump, was elected to the White House. Above all, they oppose the incestuous links between private banks and the US central bank, the publisher of the dollar.
In many states, officials counting the November 3, 2020, presidential election votes have been instructed to expel observers and block windows from their offices. In doing so, they deprived the result - whatever it was - of any democratic legitimacy.
The problem is not who was elected, but what to do when the national pact has been broken.
According to the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, citizens have a duty to arm themselves and organise themselves into militias to defend the freedom of their state when it is threatened.
This amendment is part of the "Bill of Rights," the adoption of which was the non-negotiable condition for citizens who had fought for independence to accept the Constitution drafted by the Philadelphia Convention. It implied that any citizen could possess weapons of war, whatever they might be, and made possible the repeated massacres that plunged American society into mourning. However, despite the human cost of these crimes, it has always been maintained as essential to the balance of the US political system.
Precisely, according to 39% of US citizens, resorting to arms against corrupt authorities is not an option, it is a duty. According to 17% of citizens, the time to act is now [1].
Armed groups are preparing to demonstrate in every state on the occasion of Joe Biden’s induction in Washington on January 20, 2021. The FBI fears serious riots in 17 of them.
These facts can be interpreted in many ways and the insurgents can be accused of being either "conspirators" or "neo-Nazis" or both. The fact remains that their revolt is the only legitimate attitude with regard to American history and law.
This revolt can be linked to the bizarre and ephemeral capture of the Capitol on January 6th. Nevertheless, the two events are not linked. It is not a question of overthrowing the legislative power, but of neutralising the whole political class and proceeding with new elections, transparent this time.
The citizens protesting against the "theft of the electoral system" are mainly, but not only, Donald Trump’s voters. These are not recriminations by Donald Trump’s supporters because he was declared defeated, but a fundamental problem about the necessary transparency in a democracy.
The opacity of the presidential vote count has unleashed passions, already tormented since the 2007-10 financial crisis. The majority of the population did not accept President Barack Obama’s proposed $787 billion bank bailout plan (in addition to the $422 billion in toxic loan repurchases by George W. Bush). At the time, millions of citizens claiming to be "already taxed enough" (Taxed Enough Enough Already) had founded the TEA Party, in reference to the Boston Tea Party that opened the War of Independence. This movement against heavy taxes aimed exclusively at rescuing ultra-billionaires grew both on the right and on the left, as evidenced by the campaigns of Governor Sarah Palin (Republican) and Senator Bernie Sanders (Democrat).
The massive downgrading of the petty bourgeois due to the consequences of relocation now leads 79% of US citizens to claim that "America is collapsing"; a proportion of disillusioned people without equivalent in Europe, except among the French "yellow jackets".
It is obviously highly unlikely that if riots broke out on January 20, they would turn into a revolution. But this movement has been carving out a place for itself among the population for about ten years now. It has enough supporters, across the political spectrum, to start the battle and to last.
In contrast to the Jacksonians, the groups raging against the still-in-office president Donald Trump are just as sure of their rightful place. Like Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, they claim a higher moral standard than the law; but unlike the English Republican, they do not use religious references. They are Calvinists without God.
They intend to create a Nation for all, not with their opponents, but by excluding all those who do not think like them. That is why they welcome the decisions of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitch to censor those who challenge the regularity of the election. They do not care if these multinationals arrogate to themselves a political power that contravenes the spirit of the First Amendment of the Constitution, since they share the same conception of Purity as they do: freedom of expression does not apply to heretics or “trumpists”.
Carried away by their zeal, they rewrite the history of this Nation, "light on the hill", which came to enlighten the world. They do away with all class consciousness and magnify all minorities, not because of what they do, but because they are a minority. They purify the universities, practice inclusive writing, sacralise the wilderness, distinguish information from fakenews, overthrow statues of great men. Today, they are trying to remove President Trump from office, not because he organized the capture of the Capitol, but because he is the champion of those who took it. None of these heretics can have a place in the sun.
In the seventeenth century, the Puritans practiced public confessions in order to gain access to eternal life. In the 21st century, their successors, the Neo-Puritans, are still beating their chests for the "white privilege" they believe they enjoyed in order to attain immortality. Ultra-billionaires such as Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Arthur Levinson, Sundar Pichai, Sheryl Sandberg, Eric Schmidt, John W. Thompson and Mark Zuckerberg are promoting a new ideology that claims the superiority of the digital man over the rest of humanity. They hope to defeat disease and death.
These very rational people have long ago abandoned reason to the extent that it is now impossible, according to two-thirds of Americans, to agree with them on basic facts. I am writing here about neopuritans, not trumpists.
Their fanaticism had already provoked the English Civil War, then the American War of Independence and the American Civil War. President Richard Nixon’s first fear was that it would open a fourth war that would tear the USA apart. That is where we are now.
Part of the power has already tipped democratic institutions into the hands of a few ultra-billionaires. The United States that we knew no longer exists. Their agony has begun.
Among the final acts of Donald J. Trump’s time in office was to approve a last-minute flurry of presidential pardons. On the list are many of his disgraced cronies, including Steve Bannon, Paul Manafort, and Roger Stone. But there was no mercy, evidently, for whistleblowers like Edward Snowden or Reality Winner, nor for Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange.
Yet even as Trump’s team was preparing a clemency list of dozens of people, the president was overseeing a record number of federal executions. Trump has made executing people a priority during his final few months in office, overseeing more federal execution than any other president. Indeed, there have been more federal executions in the past six months than in the previous 56 years.
“How ironic that Donald Trump could show clemency and mercy in his final days, whilst also being the country’s most prolific executioner President in more than a century,” wrote lawyer and anti-war campaigner Aamer Anwar.
Breaking with traditional protocol, the Trump administration has rushed to oversee 13 executions by lethal injection since July. There had previously been no federal executions since 2003. Among the 13 was Lisa Montgomery, the first woman to be put to death by the federal government since 1953. Human rights groups, and even the United Nations, condemned the execution, arguing that Montgomery was clearly psychotic and in no state to stand trial, let alone be executed.
While Trump has rushed to execute death row inmates, he also made a point of granting clemency to his political associates. Bannon, who was Trump’s chief strategist and advisor on his 2016 presidential campaign, is a particularly contentious recipient of clemency, as he is yet to stand trial, let alone be convicted. He is accused of fraud stemming from a case where prosecutors allege he swindled Trump supporters out of millions of dollars intended for the construction of a privately funded wall on the Mexican border. In 2019, Bannon joked on a YouTube live stream about “[taking] all that money from Build The Wall.” The campaign, which Bannon ran, had raised over $25 million. A White House statement noted that “Mr. Bannon has been an important leader in the conservative movement,” when explaining the president’s decision.
Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, was found guilty in 2018 of eight financial crimes, including filing false tax returns attempting to hide tens of millions of dollars he received lobbying for Ukrainian politicians. Stone, the 45th president’s longtime friend, was convicted of lying to Congress and trying to impede the government’s investigation into Trump’s connections to Russia.
Trump’s daughter Ivanka and his son-in-law Jared Kushner were reportedly key figures in drawing up the list of figures to pardon. It is perhaps not surprising that Kushner’s family and friends also feature prominently on the list. Jared’s newly-pardoned father Charles was convicted in 2005 for preparing false tax returns, witness retaliation, and making false statements to the Federal Election Commission. He pleaded guilty and served two years in prison. After he found out his brother-in-law was cooperating with federal authorities investigating, Charles also hired a prostitute to lure him to a New Jersey motel room where he filmed their encounter, sending it to the man’s wife (and Charles’ sister). Jared’s friend Ken Kurson, charged with cyberstalking and harassing a woman by sending her threatening emails and phone calls and sending messages to her coworkers claiming she was having an affair with her boss, was also pardoned.
And while Trump was keen to punish civilian murderers like Montgomery, throughout his tenure, he has gone out of his way to show sympathy to killers in uniform. In December, he pardoned four Blackwater mercenaries convicted for the Nisour Square Massacre — the murder of 17 Iraqi civilians, including children as young as 9 years old. In 2019, he also freed Lt. Michael Behenna, who had stripped an Iraqi prisoner naked, blindfolded, and handcuffed him, drove him out into the desert and shot him in the back of the head. Behenna said he felt “no remorse” and “would do it again,” as he was acting in “self-defense.”
In contrast, there was no clemency granted for prominent whistleblowers, including Edward Snowden or Reality Winner, nor for publisher Julian Assange, who, despite being an Australian living in Europe, remains incarcerated at the behest of Washington. While there had been a large public campaign in his name, privately, Republican lawmakers were lobbying Trump not to entertain the idea of pardoning them. As CNN reported: “Trump decided against it because he did not want to anger Senate Republicans who will soon determine whether he’s convicted during his Senate trial.
The United States is one of the very few Western countries that still practice capital punishment. In 2019, only China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt executed more of its citizens than the U.S. Incoming president Joe Biden ran on a platform advocating the abolishment of the federal death penalty and giving states financial incentives to do the same.
The final few months of each president’s rule presents them with an opportunity to frame how they wish to be remembered. Obama commuted the sentences of over 1,500 people, including whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who leaked the Iraq War Logs to Assange. Trump, by contrast, has pardoned far fewer people and used his power to save many of his political associates and disgraced members of the American war machine. All the while, he has personally overseen a dramatic spate of federal executions. If he did not want to be remembered as a corrupt individual with a penchant for violence, this was not the way to go about his final days.
Before we dive into the current COVID-19 crisis, a bit more background on Gates is needed. In the last piece we discussed the history of the Gates Foundation’s investments. What is important to note is that by using the Foundation as the front organization, Gates can donate and influence hospitals, universities, media, governments, and health organizations. The Foundation clearly has the ability to shape the decisions made by some of the institutions they fund, including when these decisions go against the desires of the masses they claim to be helping.
For example, in 2017 Independent Science News released a report detailing how the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation paid PR firm Emerging Ag $1.6 million to “recruit a covert coalition of academics to manipulate a UN decision-making process over gene drives.” Emails released by Freedom of Information Act Request reveal that the Gates’ recruitment effort was part of a plan to “fight back against gene drive moratorium proponents.” Gene drives are a controversial genetic extinction technology promoted as a way to eliminate mosquitoes with malaria, agricultural pests, and invasive species.
At the 2016 United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, 179 international organizations called for a UN moratorium on gene drives. The opponents of this technology also circulated a letter, “A Call for Conservation with a Conscience: No Place for Gene Drives in Conservation,” signed by 30 environmental leaders who called for a “halt to all proposals for the use of gene drive technologies, but especially in conservation.” The Gates Foundation is heavily invested in gene driving technology and was not happy to see a diverse and unified push-back against gene driving. The Foundation hired Emerging Ag — who have their own web of connections to Big Pharma and Big Ag — to shut down the opponents of gene driving. Emerging Ag was successful and the moratorium was shot down.
Coincidentally, in 2016, the US National Academy of Sciences released a report on gene driving which was co-funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. DARPA is also invested in gene drive research. As The Guardian noted after the release of the NAS report:
“The same US defense research agency (DARPA) who paid for the NAS study have made it known that they are going all-in on gene drive research and development of ‘robust’ synthetic organisms. There is good reason to be worried.”
Moreover, Jim Thomas of the ETC Group, which monitors the impact of emerging technologies and corporate strategies on biodiversity, agriculture and human rights, told ISN that he believes gene drives are potential biological weapons that could have a “disastrous” impact on human life and food security. “The fact that gene drive development is now being primarily funded and structured by the US military raises alarming questions about this entire field,” he stated.
Independent Science News also noted:
“This is also not the first time that the Gates Foundation has used academics to influence public and private opinion on genetic engineering technologies, as witnessed by its funding of the Cornell Alliance for Science.”
The private emails obtained by Independent Science News add to the mountains of evidence detailing how Gates is able to pressure organizations to carry out his interests, and that of his foundation.
Considering these alarming reports of Gates’ influence on public health policy, it is important to take a moment to examine the current response to COVID-19. When we look at the players and institutions involved, do we see Gates’ influence and money? If so, what does this mean for public health? Will Gates’ mammoth influence and finances allow him to personally direct the course of the COVID-19 recovery?
Let’s start by looking at Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, Director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, and a leader in the fight against COVID-19. Unfortunately, when it comes to Fauci and NIAID we clearly see the influence of Bill Gates. In 2010, NIAID and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced their “Decade of Vaccines Collaboration,” calling for coordination across the “international vaccine community” and the creation of a “Global Vaccine Action Plan.” Dr. Fauci was appointed to the Leadership Council of the partnership. Similarly, Bill Gates has been partnering with the NIH for several years.
In late April, the news broke that Fauci’s NIAID donated a total of $7.4 million to research involving bat coronaviruses. The investments added fuel to the theory that COVID-19 might be a bioengineered virus which was purposefully or accidentally released from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China. The news of the funding begs the obvious question; did Gates’ money influence or fund the NIAID’s coronavirus research? Time will tell.
Another important player with connections to Gates is Dr. Deborah Birx, an American physician and diplomat serving as the United States Global AIDS Coordinator for Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump since 2014. She is currently the Coronavirus Response Coordinator for the Trump Administration’s White House Task Force. Birx also sits on the Board of The Global Fund, an organization which was promised a $750 million investment by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2012. The Global Fund also features board member Kieran Daly, the Deputy Director of Global Policy and Advocacy for the Gates Foundation.
“The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is a key partner of the Global Fund, providing cash contributions, actively participating on its board and committees, and supporting the Global Fund’s advocacy, communications and fundraising efforts,” the Global Fund states.
The Johns Hopkins University has been an equally important member of the global response to COVID-19. The university’s calculations of global infection and death rates are commonly cited in mainstream media. Yet, once again, we find the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been investing in Johns Hopkins for two decades.
Finally, it was recently reported that the organization known as the Wellcome Trust has partnered with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and MasterCard to “catalyze the initial work” of the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator. The Accelerator is supposed to accelerate and evaluate “new and repurposed drugs and biologics to treat patients with COVID-19 in the immediate term.” What was not mentioned is that the Gates Foundation has been a “Trustee” of the Wellcome Trust for several years. Interestingly, in 2017, Mark Henderson, Director of Communications for Wellcome Trust participated in a panel called “Deep Dive: Preventing Pandemics.” Dr. Anthony Fauci also participated in the panel discussion.
One could chalk up Fauci and Wellcome Trust’s involvement with a panel about pandemics as perfectly reasonable — after all, these are professionals who are focused on global health. However, to ignore that Bill Gates’ fingerprints are all over the global health industry would be a mistake.
Based on The Gates Foundation’s track record of hiring PR firms to shut down detractors or using their money to influence institutions, one could be forgiven for assuming that the foundation would not be high on the list of potential leaders for a public health crisis. Unfortunately, as of May 2020, Bill Gates and his Foundation are still being promoted as heroes in the fight against COVID-19.
Since the outbreak of COVID-19, both Bill Gates and the World Health Organization have stepped onto the center stage as the world looks to them for answers. By now, it is common knowledge that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the number one non-state donor to the WHO. The United States has been the top state donor but that may change under the Trump administration. Gates was also the first non-state individual to give a keynote address to the WHO general assembly.
According to a report by Politico, Bill Gates’ opinion (and money) has so much influence on the WHO that officials privately call it “the Bill Chill.” Sixteen officials speaking on the condition of anonymity told Politico that Gates has an out-sized influence on the politics of the WHO and few dare challenge him. “He is treated liked a head of state, not only at the WHO, but also at the G20,” a Geneva-based NGO representative stated.
The accusations of Gates’ influence were seconded by Foreign Affairs when they reported that “few policy initiatives or normative standards set by the World Health Organization are announced before they have been casually, unofficially vetted by Gates Foundation staff.”
The WHO’s current Director General is Tedros Adhanom, a former Health Minister of Ethiopia. During his tenure as Minister of Health of Ethiopia, Tedros collaborated with the Clinton Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to work on vaccines, among other health measures. Politico reported that prior to Tedros being selected for the WHO position in 2017 Gates was accused of supporting Tedros and using his influence to help win the nomination.
While most of the member country delegates expressed their belief that Gates is well intentioned, some feared that the Gates Foundation’s money comes from “big business” and could “serve as a Trojan horse for corporate interests to undermine WHO’s role in setting standards and shaping health policies.”
The most important takeaway is that the fees paid by WHO member countries account for less than a quarter of the $4.5 billion biennial budget — leaving Gates, governments, and other foundations to fill the gap. These donations are allocated for specific projects and the WHO cannot decide how to use them. In the case of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, those funds typically go towards vaccine programs.
No matter which way you approach the solutions being presented as the answer to the COVID-19 pandemic you will find Bill Gates’ fingerprints. Repeatedly he has used his money and influence to profit and steadily gain power without ever being elected to political office.
In part 3 of this investigation we will examine the strategies Bill Gates has called for in response to COVID-19. We will also see how Bill Gates and the Rockefeller family have both been predicting a situation like the one we are currently witnessing unfold. Finally, we will show how this crisis presents the perfect opportunity for Gates and his cohorts to reap massive profits and position themselves at the head of an emerging Technocratic State.
Soon after having been fired from his post as secretary of the treasury in December 2002, after a policy clash with the president, Paul O’Neill became a trustee of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Despite having just worked under and clashed with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, it wasn’t until O’Neill began answering to UPMC CEO Jeffrey Romoff as a member of the Center’s board that he chose to publicly denounce a superior as “evil.”
“He wants to destroy competition. He wants to be the only game in town,” O’Neill would later state of Romoff, adding that “after 18 months I quit [the UPMC board] in disgust” due to Romoff’s “absolute control” over the board’s actions. O’Neill subsequently noted that UPMC “board members who have wealth of hundreds of millions of dollars are not willing to take this guy on.” When pressed by a local reporter, O’Neill further elaborated that he had been told by other board members that they were “afraid” of Romoff because Romoff might “harm them in some way.”
O’Neill’s criticisms of Romoff are hardly an outlier, as local community activists and even a state attorney general have noted that UPMC’s board lets Romoff do as he pleases.
Jeffrey Romoff has ruled UPMC with an iron fist since his predecessor, Thomas Detre, had a heart attack in 1992. As a result of the Center’s massive wealth accumulation, at first spurred by his magic touch for receiving National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants, Detre was able to use the financial power afforded to him to consolidate control over enough of the University of Pittsburgh to create his “own personal fiefdom,” which is now the stand-alone corporation known as UPMC.
Not long after Romoff took over the Center’s reins, he made his intentions clear to faculty and staff, stating at one 1995 UPMC meeting that his “vision” for the future of American health care was “the conversion of health care from social good to a commodity.” Motivated by profit above all else, Romoff aggressively expanded UPMC, gobbling up community hospitals, surgery centers, and private practices to create a “health-care network” that has expanded throughout much of Pennsylvania and even abroad to other countries, including China. Under Romoff, UPMC has also expanded into the health-insurance business, with 40 percent of the medical claims it pays out going straight back into places of care that are owned by UPMC—meaning UPMC is essentially paying itself.
In addition, since UPMC is officially a “charitable nonprofit corporation,” it is exempt from property taxes and has special access to the tax-exempt municipal bond market. UPMC can also solicit tax-deductible grants from private individuals and organizations, as well as governments. These grants totaled over $1 billion dollars between 2005 and 2017.
Despite these perks being officially justified because of UPMC’s “charitable institution” status, the UPMC board, with Romoff at the top, have seen their own multimillion-dollar-per-year salaries continue to climb. Perhaps this perk also comes from UPMC being a nonprofit corporation, as there are no stockholders to whom Romoff and the board must explain their increasingly exorbitant salaries. For instance, Romoff made $8.97 million last year as UPMC’s CEO, a marked increase over the $6.12 million he had raked in the prior year.
UPMC’s financial chicanery is so out of control that even Pennsylvania’s attorney general has taken action against it, suing UPMC in February 2019 for violations of the state’s charity laws based on their “unjust enrichment” and engaging in “unfair, fraudulent or deceptive acts or practices.” Though UPMC decided to settle out of court, the Center and Romoff came out of the affair relatively unscathed.
Now, thanks to the crisis caused by Covid-19, UPMC is once again on the path toward growing even larger and more powerful in pursuit of Romoff’s ultimate goal, which is, in his own words, to make UPMC the “Amazon of health care.”
In this fourth installment of the The Last American Vagabond series “Engineering Contagion: Amerithrax, Coronavirus and the Rise of the Biotech-Industrial Complex”, the “nonprofit” health-care behemoth that is UPMC is squarely placed at the intersection of post-9/11 “biodefense” public-private partnerships; corporate-funded academics who shape public policy on behalf of their private-sector benefactors; and risky research on dangerous pathogens that threatens to unleash the very “bioterror” that these institutions claim to guard against.
In January 2020, when much of the world remained blissfully unaware of the coming global pandemic, UPMC was already at work developing a vaccine to protect against the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19, known as SARS-CoV-2. That month, before the state of Pennsylvania had a single case of Covid-19, UPMC formed a “coronavirus task force,” which was initially focused on lobbying the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to obtain samples of live SARS-CoV-2 for research purposes. That research was to be conducted at the Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) Regional Biocontainment Laboratory (RBL) housed within UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research. A day after the director of UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research, W. Paul Duprex, revealed UPMC’s efforts to access the SARS-CoV-2 virus, he announced that the virus samples, containing an estimated 50 to 60 million coronavirus particles, were already en route to the university. At the time, UPMC was one of only a handful of institutions on the CDC’s short list to receive live SARS-CoV-2 samples.
UPMC later stated that they began work on a vaccine for Covid-19 on January 21st, weeks before the February 14th announcement that the virus was on its way to the university. That original vaccine candidate used the published genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2, released in early January 2020 by Chinese researchers, to synthetically produce SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins that would be transported into cells by an adenoviral vector, which is commonly used in a variety of vaccines. The vaccine candidate was nicknamed PittCoVacc, short for Pittsburgh Coronavirus Vaccine.
A little over a month after the live SARS-CoV-2 samples were received by UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research, UPMC received a $5 million grant from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), an international organization founded in 2017 by the governments of Norway and India along with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The grant was officially awarded to “an international academic-industry partnership” that the Center for Vaccine Research had recently formed with the Institut Pasteur in France and Austrian vaccine manufacturer Themis. Soon after, in May, Themis was acquired by vaccine giant Merck, which began recruiting volunteers for human trials earlier this month on September 11. Merck has incredibly close ties with UPMC, particularly its commercialization arm known as UPMC Enterprises.
The CEPI grant seems to have drastically altered the Center for Vaccine Research’s interest in the original adenovirus-vector vaccine candidate, PittCoVacc, as the CEPI grant was specifically aimed at funding a different vaccine candidate that instead uses the measles virus as a vector. The measles virus and the genetic manipulation of measles for use in the measles vaccine is, notably, the principal research interest and expertise of Center for Vaccine Research director Paul Duprex.
This measles-based vaccine candidate has been described as “a modified [genetically altered] measles virus that delivers bits of the new coronavirus into the body to prevent Covid-19” as well as an “attenuated [genetically modified yet weakened] measles virus as a vector with which to introduce genetic material from SARS-[CoV-]2 to the immune system.” The combination of this weakened measles virus and SARS-CoV-2, per Duprex, will produce a “more benign version of coronavirus [that] will acquaint a person’s immune system” with SARS-CoV-2. No vaccine using this modality has ever been licensed.
On April 2nd, less than a week after the CEPI award had been announced, the UPMC researchers who had developed the original vaccine candidate using the more traditional adenovirus-vector approach published a study in EBioMedicine (a publication of the medical journal Lancet) that reported promising results of their vaccine candidate in animal studies. The news that a US institution was among the first in the world to develop a Covid-19 vaccine candidate with promising results from an animal study was heavily amplified by mainstream US media outlets, with those reports noting that UMPC was requesting government permission to quickly move onto human trials.
This original vaccine candidate, however, was mysteriously dropped from subsequent reports and statements from UPMC regarding its Covid-19 vaccine efforts. Indeed, in recent months, Duprex’s statements on the center’s Covid-19 vaccine candidates no longer mention the once-promising PittCoVacc at all. Instead, new reports, citing Duprex, claim that the only UPMC vaccine candidates are the CEPI-funded measles-vaccine candidate and another, more mysterious vaccine candidate, whose nature has only been recently revealed by documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
Equally odd is that recent media reports on the original vaccine candidate have stopped mentioning UPMC at all, instead citing only Themis, its new owner Merck, and France’s Institut Pasteur. There are no reports indicating a break-up of the original “academic-industry partnership” that had received the CEPI grant. It seems that this is what may have come to pass, as Duprex stated that the UPMC measles-vector vaccine candidate had partnered with the Serum Institute of India for mass production, first for trials and then for public use, depending on how the vaccine advances through the regulatory process. In contrast, Themis/Merck have stated that their vaccine is being produced in France. It remains unclear what the relation is between these two, and apparently analogous, vaccine candidates.
Though Duprex has been relatively forthcoming about the nature of the first UPMC vaccine candidate (i. e., the CEPI-funded measles-vector vaccine), he has been much more tight-lipped about its second vaccine candidate. In late August, he told the Pittsburgh Business Times that the second vaccine candidate that UPMC was developing “works by delivering genetic material coding for a viral protein instead of the entire weakened or killed virus as is standard in other vaccines.” Yet Duprex declined to state what vector will be used to deliver the genetic material into human cells. Recent FOIA revelations, nevertheless, have revealed that UPMC’s second vaccine candidate involves genetically engineering a combination of SARS-Cov-2 and anthrax, a substance better known for its potential use as a bioweapon.
The recently obtained documents reveal that the BSL-3 lab that is part of UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research is conducting eyebrow-raising research involving combining SARS-CoV-2 with Bacillus anthracis, the causative agent of anthrax infection. Per the documents, anthrax is being genetically engineered by a researcher, whose name was redacted in the release, so that it will express the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which is the part of the coronavirus that allows it to gain access into human cells. The researcher asserts that “the [genetically engineered anthrax/SARS-CoV-2 hybrid] can [be] used as a host strain to make SARS-CoV-2 recombinant S protein vaccine,” and the creation of said vaccine is the officially stated purpose of the research project. The documents were produced by the University of Pittsburgh’s Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC), which held an emergency meeting on June 22nd of this year to “discuss specific protocols involving research with the coronavirus,” which included a vote on the aforementioned proposal.
UPitt-IBC-Minutes-from-July-2019-to-June-20201_Redacted
Edward Hammond, the former director of the Sunshine Project, an organization that opposed chemical and biological weapons and the expansion of “dual use” biodefense/bioweapon research, obtained the documents. Other FOIA documents recently obtained by Hammond have revealed an “explosion” of risky Covid-19-related research at other academic institutions, such as the University of North Carolina, which has already had lab accidents involving genetically engineered variants of SARS-CoV-2.
Hammond told The Last American Vagabond that the experiment, which he dubs “Corona-thrax,” is “emblematic of the pointless research excesses that often characterize the response of scientists to the federal government throwing billions of dollars at health crises.” Hammond added, “While I don’t think that Corona-thrax would be infectious, it falls into the categories of pointless and crazy. The biggest immediate risk of all this activity is that a researcher will deliberately or inadvertently create a modified form of SARS-CoV-2 that is even more difficult to treat, or more deadly, and this virus will escape the lab. It only takes a stray droplet.”
Jonathan Latham, a virologist who previously taught at the University of Wisconsin and who is the current editor of Independent Science News, agreed with Hammond that the Corona-thrax experiment is odd and said that he was “concerned here specifically about the research process and the risks of these specific experiments at Pittsburgh.” In an interview with The Last American Vagabond, Latham asserted that it is “unusual by historical standards . . . the combining of two highly pathogenic organisms in a single experiment.” He did note, however, that such studies for the purposes of vaccine research have become more common in recent years, as is made clear in a 2012 study.
Few experiments have been conducted that specifically utilize anthrax in this way. Since 2000, the studies that have examined the use of genetically modified anthrax as a potential vaccine vector have been affiliated with Harvard University. One of these studies was on the use of anthrax as a vector in a potential HIV vaccine and was jointly conducted in 2000 by Harvard researchers and the vaccine company Avant Immunotherapeutics (now part of Celldex).
Despite reporting positive preliminary results in their experiments, Avant/Celldex did not fund further experiments into a vaccine that used this anthrax-based modality, and it does not currently market or have any such vaccine in its product pipeline. This suggests that, for whatever reason, this company did not see much value in this vaccine, despite the preliminary study with Harvard claiming that the methodology was safe and effective.
The Harvard researchers involved in that 2000 study, however, continued to investigate the possibility of an anthrax-based HIV vaccine in 2003, 2004, and 2005, though without corporate sponsorship. Related yet different research has explored the use of “disarmed” anthrax components as an adjuvant in vaccines and as the basis for enzyme-linked immunospot assays.
The aforementioned Harvard researchers patented their methodology of using anthrax in this way for the production of a vaccine in 2002. This means that the anthrax-based “vaccine” currently being developed by UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research would have to develop a new method that utilizes anthrax in much the same way so as not to infringe on the patent, which is unlikely. The other alternative is that UPMC would pay the patent holders for use of their methodology if they want to commercialize it in a vaccine. Yet, given UPMC’s business model in general, as well as that of UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research specifically, this also seems unlikely.
Also odd is what sort of incentive UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research possesses for the Corona-thrax experiment. There are currently over a hundred vaccine candidates that use existing and tested vaccine platforms in pursuit of a Covid-19 vaccine, a fact Duprex himself has acknowledged. As Hammond told The Last American Vagabond, “It is perfectly obvious that there are numerous existing vaccine platforms for Covid-19 and that some of them will, sooner or more likely later, succeed. There is no serious need for some sort of quite strange bacterial platform, much less one that happens to be anthrax. It’s completely unnecessary and frankly bizarre.”
Ribbon cutting for the Center for Vaccine Research – From left: Donald S. Burke, U. S. Congressman Mike Doyle, Arthur S. Levine, Dan Onorato, Mark A. Nordenberg.
The Corona-thrax experiment is being conducted at the Center for Vaccine Research’s Regional Biocontainment Laboratory (RBL), where the center’s work with pathogenic agents, such as anthrax and SARS-CoV-2, is conducted.
The creation of UPMC’s RBL was first announced in 2003, when the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID, then and currently led by Anthony Fauci) stated it would fund the laboratory’s construction with an $18 million grant. It was originally planned to be mainly “dedicated to research on agents that cause naturally occurring and emerging infections, as well as potential agents of bioterrorism.” The plan to create the lab was part of the US government decision to dramatically ramp up “biodefense” research in the wake of the 2001 anthrax attacks.
The lab was also intended to work on “developing a vaccine program focusing on basic and translational research” related to viruses of pandemic potential that are at risk of being “weaponized,” including SARS. After the creation of the lab was initially announced, the project expanded, eventually becoming UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research, which was launched in 2007. The Center for Vaccine Research was the second such institution to be officially added to the NIAID’s “biodefense” RBL network.
The opening of both this lab and UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research was made reality thanks to the efforts of the main authors of the June 2001 Dark Winter bioterror simulation, a controversial exercise that eerily predicted the 2001 anthrax attacks as well as the initial, yet bogus, narrative that Iraq and Islamic extremist terror groups were responsible for those attacks. However, the anthrax used in the attacks was later revealed to be of US military origin. As noted in Part I of this series, participants in the Dark Winter exercise had foreknowledge of the anthrax attacks and others were involved in the subsequent “investigation,” which many experts and former FBI investigators describe as a cover-up.
Dark Winter was largely written by Tara O’Toole, Thomas Inglesby, and Randall Larsen, all three of whom played integral roles in the founding or operations of UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity, along with O’Toole’s mentor, D. A. Henderson. UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity was launched in September 2003, just days before the NIAID announced it would fund the RBL lab that would later become the UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research.
Notably, just days after the attacks on September 11, 2001, O’Toole, Inglesby, and Larsen personally briefed Vice President Cheney on Dark Winter. Simultaneously, Cheney’s office at the White House began taking the antibiotic Ciprofloxacin to prevent anthrax infection. In the weeks between that briefing and the 2001 anthrax attacks, Dark Winter participants and several associates of Cheney, namely members of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) like Donald Kagan and Richard Perle, asserted that a bioterror attack involving anthrax would soon take place.
In the aftermath of the 2001 anthrax attacks, Henderson “was tapped by the federal government to vastly increase the number of [biodefense] labs, both to detect suspected pathogens like anthrax and to conduct bio-defense research, such as developing vaccines,” with the announcement of UPMC’s RBL being part of the launch of the O’Toole-led Center for Biosecurity at UPMC, where Henderson was named senior adviser. In 2003, the Center for Biosecurity was set up at UPMC partially at the request of Jeffrey Romoff to be “the country’s only think tank and research center devoted to the prevention and handling of biological attacks,” with UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research being the hub of a new “biodefense research” lab network Henderson was setting up and managing at the time. That network remains technically managed by the Fauci-led NIAID.
Also noteworthy is that the Center for Vaccine Research’s director, from its opening in 2007 until 2016, was Donald Burke. Burke is a former biodefense researcher for the US military at Fort Detrick and other installations and, immediately prior to heading the UPMC center, was a program director at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where he worked closely with O’Toole and Inglesby.
At the time of the 2003 announcement regarding the creation of what would become UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research, Tara O’Toole stated:
“This new laboratory will enable University of Pittsburgh medical researchers to delve further into possible treatments and to develop vaccines against diseases that might result from bioterrorist attack or from natural outbreaks.”
A few years later, after she was nominated to a top post at the Department of Homeland Security, O’Toole was slammed by experts over her excessive lobbying “for a massive biodefense expansion and relaxation of provisions for safety and security.” Rutgers microbiologist Richard Ebright remarked at the time that “she makes Dr. Strangelove look sane.” It was also noted in hearings that O’Toole had worked as a lobbyist for several “life sciences” companies specializing in the sale of biodefense products to the U.S. government, including Emergent Biosolutions – a very controversial company and a key suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks.
The history of the Center for Vaccine Research’s RBL, particularly the network of people who prompted the lab’s creation, raises concerns about the nature of the Corona-thrax experiment currently being conducted within the facility. This is especially true because the researcher conducting the experiment appears to be ignorant about key parts of the research he or she is conducting.
For instance, the FOIA-redacted researcher incorrectly states that a recombinant virus proposed for use in the study is incapable of infecting human cells, while the IBC members note that this is not the case. In addition, the unnamed researcher falsely claimed that one of the viral vectors for use in the investigator’s study did not express Cas9 (a protein associated with CRISPR gene editing) and gRNA (“guide RNA,” also used in CRISPR) and was unaware that handling those agents requires an enhanced BSL-2 lab (BSL-2+) as opposed to a typical BSL-2 lab.
Apparently such errors among researchers involved in Covid-19 research at UPMC is not an anomaly. During another UPMC IBC meeting included in the FOIA release, the IBC noted the following about a separate research proposal:
“In the investigator’s notes in responses to changes requested by the IBC pre-reviewers, the investigator indicates that RNA from SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 infected cells will be obtained from BEI resources. Genomic RNA isolated from cells infected with SARS-CoV-1 is regulated as a Select Agent by the Federal Select Agent Program and neither the University nor this investigator are registered for possession and use of these materials [emphasis added] (SARS-CoV-1). The investigator must NOT obtain SARS-CoV-1 genomic RNA without prior consultation with the University’s RO/AROs for Select Agents.”
This part, in particular, caught the attention of Jonathan Latham, who noted that it was odd that “a university researcher is trying to obtain approval for an experiment which no one at the university is allowed to do.” Latham added in an interview that “apparently this applicant is totally ignorant of the regulatory environment and by extension the risks of SARS-CoV, which is a highly infectious virus whose escape from a lab has already led to at least one death.”
While Latham assumed that this was a “university researcher,” it is worth noting that the use of the UPMC Center for Vaccine Research’s RBL is not exclusive to researchers affiliated with the university. Indeed, as noted on the NIH website, “Investigators in academia, not-for-profit organizations, industry, and government studying biodefense and emerging infectious diseases may request the use of biocontainment laboratories,” including the RBL managed by the Center for Vaccine Research.
In addition, the Center for Vaccine Research website notes that “scientists from outside the University of Pittsburgh can work in the RBL through a collaboration or contract. Outside scientists must comply with all University of Pittsburgh training, documentation, regulatory, and medical requirements.” This means that outside scientists using the facility are also subject to IBC review. Both the NIH and Center for Vaccine Research sites note that, for an outside researcher to use the UPMC RBL facility, approval from the center’s director must be obtained.
Since the name of the Corona-thrax researcher is redacted, there is no way of knowing if he or she is affiliated with the university or a separate institution, corporation, or government agency. Regardless of who is conducting this experiment, however, it is possible to examine the history and motivations of the man who ultimately signed off on it—the Center for Vaccine Research’s director, Paul Duprex.
Director of UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research, W. Paul Duprex
Paul Duprex is a former chief scientist for Johnson & Johnson whose subsequent foray into academia was largely funded with research grants from the NIH and the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Much of Duprex’s research has focused on recombinant (i. e., genetically engineered) viruses or viral evolution.
In terms of his research funded by DARPA, Duprex was most closely associated with DARPA’s “Prophecy” program, the creation of which was overseen by Michael Callahan. Callahan’s suspect past and his ties to the origin of the current Covid-19 crisis in Wuhan, China, were the subject of a recent Unlimited Hangout article by Raul Diego.
In that article, Diego notes that the now-defunct Prophecy program had “sought to ‘transform the vaccine and drug development enterprise from observational and reactive to predictive and preemptive’ through algorithmic programming techniques” and that the program further “proposed that ‘viral mutations and outbreaks’ could be predicted in advance to more rapidly counter the unknown disease with preemptive drug and vaccine development.”
By all indications, Prophecy was DARPA’s first major foray into “predictive” AI-powered health care, which has expanded considerably in the years since. It also involved a component, which Duprex was particularly involved in advancing, whereby the “predictive” viral evolutions algorithms would be “validated and tested . . . by using multiple selective pressures on at least three closely related virus strains in an experimental setting.”
Such experiments, like this study by Duprex, involved the genetic engineering of three viral pathogen strains and then seeing which would become most transmissible and virulent in an animal host. Such studies are often referred to as gain-of-function (GOF) research and are incredibly controversial given that they often create pathogens that are more virulent and/or transmissible than they otherwise would be. It is also worth noting that UPMC, before Duprex joined the center, had also received millions in funding from DARPA’s Prophecy program “to develop in vitro and computational models for predicting viral evolution under selection pressure from multiple evolutionary stressors.”
Duprex has also been involved in conducting research for DARPA’s current INTERfering and Co-Evolving Prevention and Therapy (INTERCEPT) program, a successor to Prophecy that “aims to harness viral evolution to create a novel, adaptive form of medical countermeasure—therapeutic interfering particles (TIPs)—that outcompetes viruses in the body to prevent or treat infection.” TIPs are genetically engineered viruses with defective genomes that theoretically compete with real viruses for viral components in the human body but “evolve with” the viruses they are meant to protect the body against and are “susceptible to mutation over time.”
The goal of the INTERCEPT program is to use TIPs as “therapeutics” and have them injected into the human body to “preemptively” protect against the virus from which a particular TIP was developed. It is worth noting that, while DARPA frames much of its gene-editing research (including its “genetic extinction” technology research) as being aimed at promoting either human or environmental health, it has also openly admitted that these same technologies are of interest to DARPA for their ability to “subvert” the genes of human adversaries of the US military via “genetic weapons.”
Duprex led an INTERCEPT study published in February of this year in which he and his coauthors explored how to create a synthetic TIP of the Nipah virus, a deadly virus with a fatality rate of over 70 percent. In that study, they used both wild and genetically engineered strains of Nipah virus. Notably, the Clade X pandemic simulation, which will be discussed in detail in the next installment of this series, involved a genetically engineered combination of the Nipah virus and a parainfluenza disease.
Clade X took place in 2018 and was led by much of the same team that was responsible for the 2001 Dark Winter bioterrorism simulation, including former FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg and Tara O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby of the UPMC Center for Biosecurity. Another notable participant at Clade X was Julie Gerberding, former CDC director and current executive vice president at Merck, which has close ties to UPMC as well as the Center for Biosecurity’s failed “21st Century Biodefense” project.
A few months after publishing the study funded by DARPA’s INTERCEPT program, Duprex coauthored another study on the use of synthetic “nanobodies” (i. e., bioengineered synthetic nanoparticles acting as antibodies) that was published in August. This effort mirrors other DARPA “health-focused” projects. That study was funded by the University of Pittsburgh, the NIH, and Israel’s Ministry of Science and Technology.
In addition to his ties to DARPA programs involving the genetic engineering of viral pathogens, Duprex is a leading advocate for controversial gain-of-function research and was appointed to direct UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research less than three months after the federal moratorium on GOF research ended.
In October 2014, five days after that moratorium was first imposed, Duprex gave a talk to the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity entitled “Gain-of-Function Studies: Their History, Their Utility, and What They Can Tell Us.” In the talk, he asserted that “cross-species infection studies have already helped to improve surveillance in the field, have shed new light on basic influenza virus biology, and could assist in growing vaccine viruses better” and argues against the recently imposed moratorium.
In 2014, Duprex also wrote in a paper published in Nature that “GOF approaches are absolutely essential in infectious disease research; although alternative approaches can be very useful, these can never replace GOF experiments.” He added that, in his view, there were only two reasons for GOF research, the first being to “improve surveillance or to develop therapeutics” and the second being merely to learn “interesting biology.”
In that same paper, he also argued that “genetic engineering that is intended and likely to endow a low-pathogenicity, low-transmissibility agent with either enhanced pathogenicity or enhanced transmissibility may be appropriate if the benefits are substantial.” He also suggested in this 2014 paper that it “might” be necessary “to enhance pathogenicity of coronaviruses in order to develop a valid animal model for coronaviruses.” Years later, during the current coronavirus crisis, Duprex and other officials from the UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research co-developed a Covid-19 research and development “blueprint” for the UN’s World Health Organization.
In addition, Duprex’s work for DARPA’s Prophecy program involved GOF research, as noted above, and the creator of that program, Michael Callahan – former head of DARPA’s biodefense therapeutics initiatives, is also a proponent of GOF who believes that such risky research is inseparable from “the research and development enterprise in the life sciences and for biotechnology.”
Duprex is also a founding member of Scientists for Science, a group of researchers (most of whom are involved in GOF research) who opposed the GOF moratorium and were “confident that biomedical research on potentially dangerous pathogens can be performed safely and is essential for a comprehensive understanding of microbial disease pathogenesis, prevention and treatment.” Another of the group’s founding members is Yoshihiro Kawaoka, whose controversial GOF experiments that made pathogenic viruses more deadly have garnered considerable media attention.
When the moratorium on GOF was lifted in December 2017, Duprex called it a “sign of progress,” adding that “on a personal level I’m really pleased these NIH funded scientists [conducting GOF research] get some clarity.” As previously mentioned, he became the Center for Vaccine Research’s director less than three months later, in March 2018.
After a cursory examination of the background of UPMC, its Regional Biocontainment Laboratory, and the man directing its Center for Vaccine Research, the question about the nature of the Corona-thrax experiment becomes: Is this yet another ill-advised experiment by a lab led by a GOF enthusiast and fueled by a feeding frenzy over the billions of dollars thrown by the government and other entities into Covid-19 research? Or is there perhaps a more nefarious motive to genetically engineering something as bizarre as Corona-thrax?
While the latter question may appear conspiratorial, it is worth pointing out that the institutions most likely to have been the sources for the anthrax used in the 2001 anthrax attacks were conducting GOF research on anthrax funded by the Pentagon and the CIA that was justified as “improving” the controversial anthrax vaccine known as BioThrax.
For instance, Battelle Memorial Institute—a Pentagon and CIA contractor—began genetically engineering a more virulent form of anthrax “to see if the [anthrax] vaccine the United States intends to supply to its armed forces is effective against that strain.” While these experiments were going on, the embattled manufacturer of the anthrax vaccine now known as Emergent Biosolutions, entered into a contract with Battelle that gave Battelle “immediate exposure to the vaccine” it was using in connection with the genetically modified anthrax program.
As noted in Part II of this series, BioPort was set to lose its Pentagon contract for anthrax vaccine entirely in September 2001, and the entirety of its anthrax vaccine business was rescued by the 2001 anthrax attacks, which saw concerns over BioPort’s corruption and its horrendous safety track record replaced with fervent demands for more of its anthrax vaccine. Furthermore, as noted in detail in Part III of this series, Battelle was the most likely source of the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks. The ties between UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity, Battelle, and Emergent Biosolutions will be discussed in the next installment in the series.
What is also notable about these Corona-thrax experiments occurring at UPMC are the ties of UPMC’s RBL and Center for Vaccine Research to another key component of the center’s “biodefense” complex, the UPMC Center for Biosecurity. As previously mentioned, the people recruited to head this center at its founding in 2003 were intimately involved in the 2001 bioterror simulation Dark Winter, namely Tara O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby.
While leading the UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity, O’Toole and/or her successor Inglesby engaged in other notable bioterror simulations, including one that took place last year— Event 201, which eerily predicted the coronavirus crisis that began this year. Inglesby, who is also the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in addition to his post at UPMC, was the moderator at Event 201.
Though Event 201 has garnered considerable scrutiny in recent months, another but less well-known exercise in 2018 that involved O’Toole and Inglesby, examined how a bioterror attack involving a genetically engineered pathogen could trigger a Continuity of Government (CoG) scenario, a government roadmap for the imposition of martial law in the United States. As other investigative series of mine have noted, there have recently been a myriad of intelligence agency–linked simulations that predict the imminent imposition of martial law in the United States following the 2020 election.
It is also notable that George W. Bush’s controversial and classified update to CoG plans in 2007, known as Executive Directive 51, was directly inspired by Dark Winter, and Barack Obama’s subsequent executive orders on CoG gave near-complete control of American infrastructure to the Department of Homeland Security in a such a situation. At the time Obama issued those executive orders, O’Toole was the DHS undersecretary for science and technology and also influenced those updates to the CoG plans. O’Toole is currently the executive vice president of the CIA’s In-Q-tel.
The simulation known as Clade X will be examined in greater detail in the next installment of this series as will the numerous and recent “predictions” from US government sources, controversial billionaires such as Bill Gates, and a web of individuals tied to UPMC who have warned that a bioterror attack or related public health catastrophe is set to take place in the United States in the latter half of 2020. As one high-ranking government official put it earlier this year, this allegedly imminent event will result in “the darkest winter in modern history.”
In August 2001, biopharmaceutical company BioPort faced imminent disaster. A series of company scandals, controversial federal bail-outs and severe, adverse health reactions among U.S. troops were causing both Congress and the Pentagon to reconsider its multi-million dollar contract to provide the military with an anthrax vaccine.
Formed for the sole purpose of acquiring a publicly-owned company in Michigan that held the exclusive license to manufacture the only FDA-approved anthrax vaccine in the United States, BioPort sought to quickly expand the size and scope of its contracts with the U.S. military. This strategy was made possible thanks to the former head of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, Adm. William Crowe, who would prove highly instrumental in the rise of BioPort’s vaccine monopoly and its subsequent, aggressive hiring of former government officials as lobbyists.
Yet, soon after scoring these multi-million dollar contracts and securing a monopoly on anthrax vaccines, BioPort would claim that they were flailing financially and would subsequently be bailed out to the tune of $24 million at the Pentagon’s request, which cited “national security concerns” as justification.
However, Pentagon auditors had found that much of the money awarded to BioPort was unaccounted for and the money they were able to trace had failed to go towards renovating their vaccine production facility, which had lost its license until numerous sanitary problems (sanitary and otherwise) were fixed. Meanwhile, scores of soldiers who had suffered ill health effects from BioPort’s anthrax vaccine, some disabled for life, began speaking out, bringing BioPort’s most critical product and chief source of income under unwanted scrutiny.
While BioPort seemingly faced imminent ruin from these and other scandals in August 2001, the 2001 anthrax attacks that followed a month later came at just the right time for the company, as demand for their anthrax vaccine soon skyrocketed, resulting in new lucrative government contracts. Their license was also quickly renewed thanks to intervention from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) despite many of the problems with its production facility persisting.
Though they were conveniently rescued by the unfortunate events of 2001, BioPort would soon lobby for larger contracts than ever before, calling for a massive increase in government purchases of their controversial anthrax vaccine. Riding the fear caused by the 2001 anthrax attacks, they pushed for the government to stockpile anthrax vaccines, not just for the military, but for civilians, postal workers, police and many more who could potentially be put in harm’s way were the anthrax attacks to repeat themselves.
Jerome Hauer
One of their biggest proponents of expanding BioPort’s contracts was working for HHS at the time — Jerome Hauer, a man who not only had foreknowledge of the anthrax attacks, but had also participated in the Dark Winter simulation that would also predict those same attacks just months prior. Hauer would, months later, be appointed to a newly created position at HHS, one which oversaw the new biodefense stockpile from which BioPort would be a major beneficiary.
BioPort would be then renamed and repackaged as Emergent Biosolutions in 2004. It would then hire even more well-connected lobbyists and add several big names from government and the private sector to its board. One of these “big names” was none other than Jerome Hauer, who was added to Emergent’s board soon after leaving HHS. Hauer still remains a company director and sits on three of its corporate governance committees.
Not only did Emergent Biosolutions profit from national anthrax fears, they would also cash in on subsequent pandemic panics and later receive substantial backing from the Bill Gates-backed Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). They would then turn their attention to the still-raging opioid addiction and overdose crisis by buying rights to the only drug approved for treating opioid overdoses at the scene while also suing any and all generic producers of this crucial, life-saving treatment.
Given its history, it should come as little surprise that Emergent Biosolutions is now set to profit from the Coronavirus (Covid-19) crisis. They are particularly well-suited to make record profits off of Covid-19, as they are backing not one, but two, vaccine candidates as well as an experimental blood plasma treatment already approved for trials in New York state, thanks in part to Jerome Hauer’s old boss, New York governor Andrew Cuomo. As noted in a previous article for The Last American Vagabond, the other main companies developing Covid-19 vaccines in the U.S. are strategic partners of the controversial Pentagon research agency DARPA, which has become increasingly aligned with HHS in recent years thanks to another Dark Winter participant, Robert Kadlec.
In this second installment of the series “Engineering Contagion: Amerithrax, Coronavirus and the Rise of the Biotech-Industrial Complex,” Emergent Biosolution’s rise to prominence, made possible through acts of blatant corruption and the public-private revolving door, will be explored. The clear nexus between Big Pharma, Government and University-affiliated “Biosecurity Centers” offers a startling look into the Biotech-Industrial Complex that has long dominated U.S. biodefense policy and is now guiding much of the U.S. government’s response to the Coronavirus crisis.
For half a century, Vladimir Pasechnik had been a model Soviet citizen, with his scientific prowess in the field of bioweapons earning him an honorary rank of general. However, having been granted such a title didn’t seem to inspire much loyalty when he made a call to the British embassy from a phone booth in France in 1989. The famed microbiologist subsequently defected to England, a decision that preceded the fall of the Berlin Wall by a matter of months. Yet, few could have provided a more riveting view behind the Iron Curtain than Pasechnik, who regaled Whitehall with shocking tales of monstrous pathogens engineered as part of the Biopreparat, communist Russia’s top secret biological weapons program.
Pasechnik’s MI6 handler, Christopher Davis, shared all of the intelligence gathered with his counterparts in the United States, including claims that Biopreparat programs had developed antibiotic-resistant strains of anthrax, tularemia and botulinum toxin. Ancient diseases like the plague had also been modified, according to Davis. When the stories ran out, Pasechnik was given a job at Britain’s own biodefense facilities at Porton Down, where he would remain for another decade before branching out and founding his own biotech firm.
The Western geopolitical establishment, however, wasted no time in cementing a new narrative of imminent, worldwide bioweapons threats following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev’s resignation in 1991 abruptly crashed the Cold War rhetoric market in the West and the massive military-industrial complex that had profited from those tensions remained revved up, yet lacking a boogeyman.
Pasechnik was just one of several Biopreparat alumni who had defected to Western countries, with another well-known example being Ken Alibek (born Kanatjan Alibekov), who defected to the US as opposed to the UK. Many of Alibek’s sensational claims and dire warnings regarding the Soviet bioweapons program in the 1990s would later be proven to be imaginative falsehoods. Despite this, Alibek retained influence in the biotechnology industry and Washington, where the ability to sell fear is often a sought-after trait.
Pasechnik, however, wasn’t so lucky, dying of a suspected heart attack in November 2001. He was one of 11 of the world’s top microbiologists to die under mysterious circumstances from November 2001 to March 2002.
In light of the claims made by Pasechnik, Alibek and others in the 1990s, a relatively small group of well-connected individuals — many of whom would later participate in the June 2001 Dark Winter simulation — asserted that Biopreparat presented an enduring threat, hypothesizing that defectors from the program might not turn to the West, but instead to rival regimes like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
Anthrax was quickly deemed to be one of the top threats by these bioweapons doomsayers and then, just months after the Soviet Union’s collapse, the U.S. Department of Defense issued a competitive bid solicitation for the production of 6.3 million doses of the anthrax vaccine. Its previous contract, only a year before, had called for merely 700,000 doses by comparison.
The Michigan Biologic Products Institute (MBPI) had been founded in 1926 by the State to serve the vaccination needs of its largely rural population, many of whom worked on farms and required inoculation against naturally occurring anthrax spores and rabies. By the 1980s, the Institute stood alone as the only anthrax vaccine manufacturer in the U.S. after 1970s-era regulations had driven most private vaccine manufacturers out of business. MBPI’s anthrax vaccine was known as Anthrax Vaccine Adsorbed (AVA) or BioThrax.
Aligning himself with policy recommendations issued by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy – a front for the controversial Koch brothers, Michigan’s governor, John Engler, cited the MBPI’s endemic financial losses to justify putting the nation’s only licensed anthrax vaccine manufacturer up for sale in 1996. However, upon closer examination, the real reason behind the decision had more to do with a sudden spike in demand by the lab’s only customer, the US government, and the MBPI’s inability to meet it.
The Michigan facility required massive renovations if it was to fulfill the needs of a national security establishment that had come to reconstitute itself around the threat of weapons of mass destruction and biowarfare, a threat largely manufactured by the stories of Soviet defectors. The Pentagon offered to pony up $1.8 million for the necessary renovations, but there were no takers — at least, none with a US passport.
That same year, perennial US defense contractor, Dyncorp, went into business with a shadowy group of biotech entrepreneurs from across the pond, forming the DynPort Vaccine Company, LLC., a combination of DynCorp’s name with that of its UK-based partner, Porton International, Inc. The latter company’s president, Zsolt Harsanyi, would also lead DynPort as the British firm began to lay the groundwork for its second attempt at securing a crucial monopoly within the American biotech space.
Porton International had come into existence as a result of the Thatcherite revolution that balkanized British public sector assets and distributed them among private interests that frequently had close and cozy ties with Thatcher-era officials and other UK politicians. Among these assets was the Centre for Applied Microbiology and Research (CAMR), a biotechnology arm of the United Kingdom’s infamous Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, commonly referred to as Porton Down, which also happened to house the UK’s own anthrax vaccine program.
Porton International began operations in 1982, when London financier, Wensley Haydon-Baillie, founded the company to develop a herpes medication invented by Dr. Gordon Skinner, which had stalled during clinical trials and never actually entered the market. In 1985, Haydon-Baillie secured exclusive rights to commercialize drugs developed by the CAMR, a sweetheart deal from the Thatcher government that drew in large investments from British Telecom and Lloyds Bank, among others, totaling £76 million. Haydon-Ballie profited handsomely from the venture, collecting annual dividends of half a million pounds and selling some of his shares for £24 million in 1986.
In 1989, Porton International acquired Sera-lab and Hazleton Biologics, Inc., providing it with an established distribution network. The following year, the company’s bid to outright purchase the 650-employee CAMR lab, would be accepted by British Health Secretary, Kenneth Clark, despite opposition from the staff who had voted against the takeover.
By the time the sale closed, Haydon-Ballie — once the 50th richest man in England — was on the brink of being forced out of Porton International over accusations of illicit enrichment. Around the same time, the anthrax vaccine was set to enter a bull market and Porton International was now in a prime position to reap the full benefits.
A year earlier in 1989, Ibrahim El-Hibri, a Venezuelan citizen who had made a fortune working for US telecommunications companies, had become a silent partner in Porton International. His son, Fuad El-Hibri, was made director of Porton Products, Ltd, a Porton International subsidiary, which was the conduit by which the El-Hibri family had made a killing selling anthrax vaccines to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states at $300 to $500 a dose. Fuad El-Hibri had previously been an intelligence contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton and an executive at the Wall Street giant, CitiGroup.
ADM William J. Crowe Jr., USN.
The elder El-Hibri had a knack for business that ran back decades to the 1970s when he lived in Qatar, where he befriended the then-head of US Central Command, Admiral William Crowe. The career military man kept in touch with El-Hibri through the years and perhaps even gave him a few business leads at a time when Crowe was also serving on the board of pharmaceutical behemoth, Pfizer. Crowe would later pick up the phone in late 1997 (officially at least, but probably well before) to make a proposition to his old friend.
In 1997, then-US Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen announced a plan to vaccinate every single member of the US Armed Forces against anthrax, which ultimately resulted in the vaccination of approximately 2.4 million troops by 2003. Admiral Crowe, who was serving as the US ambassador to the UK at the time, quickly contacted El-Hibri to discuss the US government anthrax vaccine market in light of this new Pentagon policy.
The only obstacle was getting his son, Fuad El-Hibri, a U.S. passport so that he could run the business stateside. To easily and quickly circumvent this issue, the politically-connected Admiral — with his deep ties to the Pentagon intact — was made a director of BioPort and given 10% of company stock, despite not having put a single penny into the company.
The stage was set to bring Porton International into the exclusive government contract business in the United States as BioPort, Inc. As luck would have it, Porton International’s president, Zsolt Harsanyi, had just received a ten-year DoD contract worth roughly $322 million through DynPort Vaccine Company, LLC, and — thanks to Michigan’s governor — the only licensed anthrax vaccine manufacturing plant in the country was back on the auction block.
In September 1998, BioPort acquired the MBPI facility through a $25 million package of loans, cash and promises to pay Michigan state more for the company in the future, promises that were later broken. It was later revealed that El-Hibri and other BioPort partners had only placed $4.5 million of their own money into this package.
As previously mentioned, the MBPI plant in Lansing, MI had come with issues and had been closed for renovations six months prior to its purchase by BioPort. However, the MBPI had received millions from the Pentagon to fix the issues identified by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that had affected the vaccine’s “stability, potency and purity.”
Along with these issues, BioPort had also inherited military contracts worth nearly $8 million for anthrax vaccines. They quickly secured another contract for the same totaling more than $45 million, with an additional $16 million in cash for immediate renovations — a sizable deal likely due to BioPort’s aggressive hiring of former Pentagon and federal officials as lobbyists in addition to Crowe’s own deep ties to the Pentagon.
Despite the massive influx of cash, BioPort did not spend the money on renovating the plant and its sanitary issues, likely due to the fact that the deal required the Pentagon to buy anthrax vaccines from BioPort even if the plant and the vaccines it had produced lacked a FDA license.
With the Pentagon obligated to buy the vaccine, regardless of whether it was usable, BioPort spent millions renovating its executives’ offices, as opposed to the vaccine factory, and millions more on bonuses for “senior management.” Pentagon auditors would later find that still millions more had gone “missing” and BioPort’s staff were unaware of the cost of producing a single dose of the vaccine.
Despite the clear mismanagement and corruption, BioPort demanded to be bailed out by the Pentagon, requesting even more money to replace what they had lost and squandered. Though Pentagon auditors argued that the company should be abandoned, top military officials cited “national security” and awarded BioPort with an additional $24.1 million. They also upped the price to be paid for each dose of the anthrax vaccine, which only has a shelf life of 3 years, from $4.36 to $10.64.
Congress would hold hearings on the bail-out, hearings that went nowhere. During one of those hearings, then-Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC) would state the following:
“The message seems clear: If a company wants to make millions without providing a product or service, enter into a sole-source contract with the Department of Defense to produce vaccines. BioPort appears to have the government over a barrel.”
Unsurprisingly, this would only be the first of BioPort’s federal bail-outs.
With BioPort well aware of its powerful position early on, it dragged its feet in getting its factory relicensed and up to federal standards. Meanwhile, due to the nature of the contract, the Pentagon kept buying up large amounts of vaccines that were unusable, and arguably unsafe, while also still paying BioPort for storage of the useless product.
During this time, anthrax vaccine doses made prior to these renovations were being used on U.S. troops, with many of those soldiers claiming that the vaccine produced in the troubled facility had given them permanent headaches, joint pain, loss of memory and other, more severe symptoms. Some were even disabled for life. Congress again held hearings, but they were stuffed with BioPort employees posing as “experts” as well as others who supported the Pentagon’s contract with the company.
However, in 2000, the Pentagon did finally lose patience and demanded that BioPort stop making BioThrax. BioPort obliged, but kept receiving government money to keep it afloat. By August 2001, the Lansing facility was still unlicensed and BioPort was still demanding government money to keep it from going out of business. That month, Congress and the Pentagon began to publicly discuss abandoning BioPort. The Pentagon began preparing a report, due to be released in September 2001, that would detail a plan for letting BioPort go.
Fortunately for BioPort but unfortunately for the nation, the events of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent anthrax attacks led to major increases in fear and panic that anthrax attacks could become a recurrent nightmare for the American public and that radical terror groups and rival nations sought to target, not just American soldiers with anthrax, but also the country’s civilians.
The ensuing panic led the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to intervene, returning BioPort its license in January 2002 despite persisting safety concerns at its vaccine production facility. BioPort was not content to merely see its past contracts with the Pentagon restored, however, as it began lobbying heavily for new contracts for anthrax vaccines intended for American civilians, postal workers and others. They would get them, largely thanks to HHS’ then-counter-terrorism adviser and soon to be HHS’ newest Assistant Secretary — Jerome Hauer.
As BioPort secured its control over the only licensed anthrax vaccine producer in the country in 1998, New York’s emergency crisis manager and bioterrorism expert, Jerome Hauer, was busy working and making doomsday contingency plans from his “bunker” on the 23rd floor of World Trade Center Building 7.
Put on the job by then-NY Mayor Rudy Giuliani in 1996, Hauer had previously managed worldwide emergency response for technology giant IBM. He also was an adviser to the Justice Department, had briefed President Clinton on bioterror threats and was known to “consult regularly with Scotland Yard and the Israeli military.” It was reportedly Hauer’s idea to locate the city’s emergency management office at Building 7, even though placing it there was considered controversial at the time due to the 1993 World Trade Center bombings, bombings that were later revealed to have disturbing links to the FBI.
In 1999, the New York Times would describe Hauer’s job as “sitting around all day thinking up horrifying ways for things to be destroyed and people to die.” It would also note that Hauer described his expertise regarding specific emergency situations as follows: “helicopter crash, subway fire, water main break, ice storm, heat wave, blackout, building collapse, building collapse, building collapse.” His obsession with building collapses even led him to house “trophies” of the building collapses he had overseen and responded to. How odd then that Hauer’s multi-million dollar “bunker” itself would later fall victim to building collapse, falling into its own footprint in 7 seconds on September 11, 2001.
That fateful day, Hauer was no longer with NY’s Office of Emergency Management, having left in February 2000. However, in 2001, Hauer still worked at the World Trade center complex, running security for the buildings as managing director of Kroll Inc. Informally known as the “CIA of Wall Street”, Kroll was alleged to be an actual front for the CIA by French intelligence agencies, according to the Washington Post. Though it claimed to be mainly involved in corporate security and investigations, it also frequently investigated targets of Washington foreign policy, including Saddam Hussein. Kroll was also the company tapped to “reorganize” Enron in 2002.
Though Hauer should have been at his office at the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, he did not show up for work that day and instead made TV media appearances, where he claimed that Osama bin Laden had been responsible for the attacks just hours after the towers collapsed in an interview with Dan Rather.
Yet, not all Kroll employees were as lucky as Hauer. John O’Neill had just begun working for Kroll and was at the World Trade Center that day, dying in the attacks. O’Neill had previously worked with the FBI and was the country’s top expert on Osama bin Laden and his activities. He had resigned in mid-2001 after his investigations into bin Laden were repeatedly blocked by his superiors, something that happened to numerous federal investigators prior to 9/11, and was subsequently offered a job at Kroll by none other than Jerome Hauer himself.
Also on the day of 9/11, Hauer had told top Bush administration officials to start taking the antibiotic Cipro to prevent infection via anthrax and Hauer would subsequently make public hints via mass media that foreign terrorists were working with Saddam Hussein to unleash an anthrax attack on the American public. All of this took place well before the first anthrax attack victim, photojournalist Robert Stevens, would even show symptoms.
Hauer had prepared for a scenario just like the anthrax attacks as part of the Dark Winter biowarfare simulation, which occurred just months prior and at a time when Hauer was a member of the Johns Hopkins Working Group on Civilian BioDefense, part of what is now the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, then led by Dark Winter co-author Tara O’Toole. The Dark Winter exercise and its current relevance are discussed in detail in Part I of this series.
Also of note is the fact that, while working for Kroll Inc. Hauer was also working for the Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a defense and intelligence contractor. There he became a co-worker of Stephen Hatfill, who Hauer had actually met years prior. At SAIC, Hatfill worked on developing protocols for handling “anthrax hoax letters,” a phenomenon present in Dark Winter and later during the actual 2001 anthrax attacks. Hatfill would later be accused of having committed those very attacks, but was later cleared of suspicion, winning a hefty multi-million dollar settlement from the government.
In addition to his work for SAIC and Kroll as the events of September 11, 2001 transpired, Hauer was also a national security adviser to then-head of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Tommy Thompson. Hauer closely advised Thompson during the 2001 anthrax attacks and after, helping to shape HHS response and subsequent biodefense policy, which focused heavily on BioPort’s anthrax vaccine.
As the anthrax attacks unfolded, Hauer advised Secretary Thompson to establish a new office at HHS, the Office of Public Health Preparedness (OPHP), whose first acting director was Dr. D.A. Henderson, a former official with the World Health Organization and the original founder of the Johns Hopkins Working Group on Civilian Biodefense, which had sponsored Dark Winter and included Jerome Hauer as well as Dark Winter co-authors Tara O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby. In early 2002, Hauer himself would replace Henderson as head of the newly created OPHP.
In May 2002, Hauer — while leading OPHP — co-authored a report with members of the Johns Hopkins Working Group, including O’Toole and Inglesby. In that paper, published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Hauer, O’Toole, Inglesby and their co-authors argued that greater production and purchase of anthrax vaccine was necessary in light of the 2001 anthrax attacks and that government funding was also needed to research a new anthrax vaccine. They also asserted that the vaccine did not cause any significant adverse effects.
Notably, just months prior, O’Toole and Inglesby had come under scrutiny in their attempts to link the anthrax attacks to Al Qaeda, several months after that possibility had been ruled out completely by federal investigators and other independent scientists.
The paper authored by the Johns Hopkins Working Group would also come under scrutiny, particularly their recommendation that the government acquire more BioThrax. This was largely because the evidence from the attacks showed that antibiotics were much more effective and less expensive in responding to anthrax attacks, with subsequent studies claiming that calls for stockpiling more BioThrax “defy medical evidence and expert recommendations” based on lessons learned during the anthrax attacks.
Then, in June 2002, the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act was signed into law by President Bush, creating the post of Assistant Secretary for Public Health Emergency Preparedness, which was quickly filled by Hauer and gave him near-complete power over HHS’ biodefense policy and all HHS matters related to “national security.”
In July 2002, Hauer and his deputy William Raub helped push the Pentagon to restart vaccinating the troops, despite long-standing concerns over the vaccine’s safety. Per the new immunization program, the number of troops being vaccinated would “jump,” according to officials. However, the size of that increase was never made public. In addition, half of the Pentagon’s BioThrax purchases would be stockpiled for civilian use.
Though Hauer, O’Toole, Inglesby, the Pentagon and, of course, BioPort, continued to assert that BioThrax was safe for human use, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) would release its findings just months later that showed that the vaccine “caused adverse reactions in most recipients [85%] and helped prompt many Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard members to transfer to other units or leave the military between 1998 and 2000.” The Pentagon and HHS rejected the GAO’s conclusions.
Despite rejections from the Pentagon and HHS, the number of veterans suffering ill effects from BioThrax continued to mount. Even mainstream sources began to report on claims linking BioThrax to over 20 deaths and over 4,000 illnesses, 347 of which were deemed to be “serious.”
As a result, in March 2003, six military service-members and Defense Department civilian contractors sued the Pentagon, HHS and the FDA over the mandatory BioThrax vaccination policy, claiming that the way the vaccine had been administered in the 1990s and in the early 2000s was experimental.
This claim was based on the fact the FDA had not approved BioThrax for use against aerosol exposure to anthrax (i.e. anthrax inhalation). However, the Pentagon was using BioThrax to ostensibly protect soldiers from exposure to aerosol anthrax, which is the form of anthrax that would be encountered by soldiers in a bioweapon or bioterrorist scenario. Thus, the Pentagon was injecting soldiers with BioThrax for a use for which it was not federally approved, rendering its use experimental. Given that the federal mandating of experimental vaccines is illegal, a federal judge ruled that the Pentagon’s mandatory Biothrax vaccination program was illegal in October 2004.
The ruling was a blow to BioPort, which had reorganized that year and took on the name Emergent BioSolutions. However, BioPort/Emergent BioSolutions would find relief in 2006, when the Pentagon decided to resume mandatory anthrax immunizations among U.S. servicemen soon after the FDA decided to approve BioThrax as a treatment for anthrax inhalation.
Just months before the Pentagon’s BioThrax vaccine program was deemed illegal, Congress passed the Project BioShield Act, an act that was largely written by Emergent BioSolution lobbyists and greatly influenced by Robert Kadlec, who was then serving as the Homeland Security Council’s Director of Biodefense. The goal of the act was to allocate $5 billion to be used to purchase vaccines, including millions of doses of anthrax vaccine, and stockpile them in the event of a future bioterrorist attack. Given that these vaccines have a limited shelf life (three to four years in BioThrax’s case), the stockpile would continually need to be renewed as its contents gradually expired.
Not long after BioShield was signed into law, Emergent BioSolutions co-founded a lobby group called the Alliance for Biosecurity as part of its strategy to easily secure lucrative BioShield contracts. That lobby group saw Emergent BioSolutions join forces with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Biosecurity, which was created in 2003 and populated with former members of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Civilian Biodefense Strategies. At the time, the University of Pittsburgh’s Center was led by Tara O’Toole.
Though Emergent BioSolutions had contacts with the key organizations and people in the biodefense-industrial complex, the Bush administration and the military, BioShield initially didn’t go as planned for the company. Instead of pumping even more money into the controversial BioThrax, HHS decided to invest in a new anthrax vaccine that involved fewer doses and fewer adverse side effects, and thus less controversy.
In November 2004, HHS through BioShield awarded VaxGen Inc. a $877.5 million contract to produce a recombinant anthrax vaccine and was the first contract made via BioShield. In great contrast to Emergent’s past BioThrax contracts with the government, the VaxGen contract did not provide the company with government money until the vaccine was approved and subsequently delivered.
The VaxGen contract greatly concerned BioPort/Emergent Biosolutions for obvious reasons. In order to avoid losing their vaccine monopoly, they invested heavily in lobbying and spent $5.29 million on lobbyists from 2004 to 2007. By comparison, over that same period, VaxGen spent $720,000 on lobbyists.
One of those lobbyists was Jerome Hauer, who was also added to Emergent’s board shortly after leaving HHS. Despite Hauer having supported a new anthrax vaccine other than BioThrax while he had worked at HHS, Hauer suddenly began to insist that BioThrax was the solution. He also demanded that his replacement at HHS, Stewart Simonson, who was ultimately responsible for VaxGen’s BioShield contract, be stripped of his authority. Other lobbyists hired by Emergent at the time included two former aides to then-Vice President Dick Cheney and former aides to influential members of Congress.
The hiring of Hauer and others well-connected to the Bush administration and Congress was just part of Emergent’s aggressive lobbying against the VaxGen contract, as the company also employed mafia-esque tactics, telling lawmakers and government officials that U.S. civilians “were at risk of death without an immediately expanded stockpile of [BioThrax] anthrax vaccine” and threatening to “stop making the vaccine if the government chose not to buy its product for the stockpile.”
The war between Emergent BioSolutions and VaxGen spread to Congressional hearings, where Congressmen who had received thousands from Emergent’s then-CEO attacked the VaxGen BioShield contract, with one calling it “highly suspect” and angrily demanding that HHS explain why it had not purchased more BioThrax. It also spread to the press, where Emergent lobbyists wrote Op-Eds in influential newspapers.
Emergent even found unlikely supporters in “progressive” journalists like Jeremy Scahill, who wrote an article for The Nation in which he praised Jerome Hauer, framing him as a champion of public health preparedness who was at odds with Bush-era neocons (despite his membership in organizations stuffed with those same neocons). Scahill also strongly criticized Hauer’s successor Stewart Simonson and the VaxGen contract.
Scahill did not mention in his report that Hauer was then working as a lobbyist for Emergent BioSolutions or was a member of its board, despite interviewing him for the piece. Scahill didn’t even mention Emergent BioSolutions (or its previous name BioPort) once in the entire article, despite it being VaxGen’s main competitor.
Finally, in 2006, HHS terminated VaxGen’s contract after the company hit a developmental snag with its vaccine, declining to offer them the type of lifelines that Emergent BioSolutions had received on numerous occasions under its previous name BioPort.
After VaxGen’s contract with HHS was crushed, Emergent BioSolution’s anthrax vaccine monopoly remained intact, at least for a time. However, PharmAthene, another biotechnology company that had co-formed the Alliance for Biosecurity lobby group with Emergent, soon announced its plans to develop its own recombinant anthrax vaccine. This prompted Emergent to end up buying the essentially bankrupt VaxGen and acquiring the very VaxGen anthrax vaccine it had spent millions of dollars over several years to discredit.
A few years later, Emergent’s competitors made inroads with the Pentagon, with the military offering contracts for the anthrax vaccine developed by PharmAthene and another manufactured by PaxVax. Emergent aggressively challenged its competitors or bought them out in order to retain its monopoly, while also developing three new anthrax vaccines (one of which was the VaxGen vaccine) to satisfy government demand for a new anthrax vaccine. Only one, dubbed NuThrax, ever made any progress.
NuThrax, a combination of BioThrax and an adjuvant, would be yet another gold mine for Emergent Biosolutions. The company received $127 million from HHS’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for early development. Meanwhile, they began to dramatically scale up their production of BioThrax with even more grants from BARDA. Then, in 2016, it received an additional $198 million from HHS for further development of NuThrax as well as a government promise to purchase up to 50 million doses for the national biodefense stockpile. That promise was made as part of a contract valued at up to $1.6 billion and was also made before NuThrax received approval by the FDA. To date, NuThrax still remains unapproved by the FDA.
It is worth noting that Hauer was not the only key government official that had aided BioPort and was later awarded with a position on its board of directors. A few years after Hauer became a board member of Emergent Biosolutions, the company added Dr. Sue Bailey to its board in 2007. Bailey had previously served as the Pentagon’s former top medical official during the late 1990s and played a key role in keeping the military’s anthrax vaccine program from being derailed from persistent concerns from veterans about its safety and adverse side effects.
Back in 1999, when Congress had held its hearings into the anthrax vaccine’s safety following concerns raised by affected veterans, Bailey was part of a panel of experts, which had included BioPort’s Admiral William Crowe. In her prepared statement, Bailey began by underscoring the urgency of the bioterrorist threat, claiming that “at least ten nation states and two terrorist groups“ possessed biowarfare capabilities and citing a 1958 study by Johns Hopkins University as proof that anthrax vaccinations were safe. She concluded by reassuring members of Congress that they had a “safe and effective vaccine to respond to a well-documented threat.” Neither of these statements would turn out to be true.
Another expert Dr. Katherine Zoon, who was then director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation, concurred with Dr. Bailey’s assessment regarding the safety of the anthrax vaccine in her statement. Zoon, who would subsequently hold key posts at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), was also added to Emergent’s board of directors.
The statements that had been made by Zoon and Bailey at that hearing were a significant divergence from the FDA’s own appraisal on the long-term safety of the vaccine, according to testimony by Kwai-Cheung Chan of the General Accounting Office (GAO). Chan practically invalidated both Bailey’s and Zoon’s testimony by revealing that the studies they had cited were carried out on a completely different anthrax vaccine that was produced by Merck, not Emergent BioSolutions, among other details. Chan’s testimony made it clear that BioThrax had no safety track record at all. Not unlike Hauer, Emergent later rewarded Bailey and Zoon for their loyalty to the private sector as opposed to public health with board positions and lucrative stock options.
Though Emergent Biosolutions has enjoyed its privileged status regarding the anthrax vaccine for over two decades, it has long since branched out and profiteered from a variety of pandemic scares, including Ebola and Zika, and public health crises both globally and domestically. They have also acquired other vaccine monopolies, including the U.S.’ only licensed smallpox vaccine through their purchase of Sanofi, which came with a $425 million government contract and the promise of subsequent multi-year renewals on that contract for the ever-increasing national biodefense stockpiles.
Another drug monopoly acquired by Emergent Biosolutions has allowed them to profit handsomely off of the U.S.’ devastating opioid epidemic. In 2018, a year when the opioid crisis claimed the lives of nearly 70,000 Americans and was considered the top health crisis facing the nation, Emergent acquired the producer of Narcan, the only FDA-approved nasal spray of naloxone, which is used to treat opioid overdoses at the scene. At the time of acquisition, Emergent BioSolutions executive Daniel J. Abdun-Nabi referred to U.S. high schools and colleges as lucrative, “untapped markets” for Narcan.
Two months after Emergent completed its acquisition of the Narcan monopoly, HHS began recommending that doctors co-prescribe the drug alongside opioid painkillers. However, HHS offered no measures aimed at preventing the over-prescription of opioid painkillers like fentanyl and has remained silent regarding efforts to make opioid painkillers a controlled, schedule 1 substance. After the HHS recommendation regarding Narcan, several states subsequently passed laws requiring doctors to co-prescribe the nasal spray. Emergent’s sale of Narcan, which now costs $150 per dose, predictably spiked.
Regarding its Narcan monopoly, Emergent has long claimed that they are working to keep the drug affordable and they have even donated Narcan to public libraries and YMCAs as part of a major public relations push. However, Emergent’s same-old aggressive tactics still apply to Narcan, as they have sued any competitors aiming to market a cheaper, generic version of the drug. In addition, government promotion of Narcan as opposed to other, longer-term solutions to opioid addiction, have come under scrutiny, with some arguing that Narcan actually enables opioid addiction and may actually be worsening the crisis.
Emergent’s history of corruption and profiteering has in no way prevented them from cashing in on the Covid-19 global health crisis. On March 10, Emergent announced a partnership with Novavax to produce a Covid-19 vaccine, a vaccine also backed by the Bill Gates-backed Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). CEPI had previously partnered with Emergent Biosolutions, giving them over $60 million in 2018. Emergent further expanded its partnership with NovaVax on March 31.
Just 8 days after partnering with Novavax, Emergent partnered with yet another producer of a Covid-19 vaccine candidate, VaxArt. Unlike the Emergent-Novavax vaccine, the vaccine candidate co-produced with VaxArt will be oral and in pill form, “offer[ing] enormous logistical advantages in the roll-out of a large vaccination campaign,” according to VaxArt CEO Wouter Latoud.
While backing two of the most prominent vaccine candidates for Covid-19 gives Emergent an advantage in terms of profiting from whatever vaccines end up being approved for use by the government, Emergent’s star has risen during the current Coronavirus crisis largely thanks to its two experimental blood plasma treatments.
Announced just one day after their Novavax vaccine partnership, Emergent’s first experimental blood plasma treatment involves pooling and concentrating blood plasma from recovered Covid-19 patients, while the second uses plasma taken from horses that have been injected with parts of the virus. These treatments were slated to begin clinical trials later this year, but have been greatly aided by HHS’ BARDA, which falls under the authority of Robert Kadlec. These treatments are now expected to begin Phase II trials by late summer.
On April 3, BARDA awarded Emergent Biosolutions $14.5 million for the development of its blood plasma treatment. Though the sum is smaller than other contracts Emergent has received from BARDA in the past, the partnership allows Emergent to overcome its greatest obstacle in developing this product, a massive supply of blood plasma from recovered Covid-19 patients. Thanks to their partnership with BARDA, Emergent will gain access to blood donations made by recovered Covid-19 to public blood centers.
Emergent’s Dr. Lisa Saward confirmed this in a recent interview with TechCrunch, stating “we are overcoming [the lack of “source material” i.e. blood plasma] with the help of partnerships like that of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority within Health and Human Services, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases announced earlier this week.”
However, Emergent’s use of donated plasma to develop its product may prove controversial, since the plasma donated by recovered Covid-19 patients is currently being used as a treatment for seriously ill Covid-19 patients. The use of plasma to treat critical patients began late last month after New York’s state government first authorized its use in such cases, followed by the FDA’s offer to approve its use for critical Covid-19 patients nationwide on a case-by-case basis. Yet, thanks to the BARDA and Emergent partnership, a significant amount of that plasma will instead go towards helping Emergent corner yet another key market.
China, Russia and Iran are the top three existential “threats” to the U.S., according to the National Security Strategy. Three features distinguish the top three. They are all sovereign powers. They are under varying degrees of sanctions. And they are the top three nodes of the 21st century’s most important, evolving geopolitical process: Eurasia integration.
What do the three sovereigns see when they examine the dystopia that took over Exceptionalistan?
They see, once again, three – discombobulated – nodes in conflict: the post-historic Pacific and Atlantic coasts; the South – a sort of expanded Dixieland; and the Midwest – what would be the American heartland.
The hyper-modern Pacific-Atlantic nodes congregate high-tech and finance, profit from Pentagon techno-breakthroughs and benefit from the “America rules the waves” ethos that guarantees the global primacy of the U.S. dollar.
The rest of America is largely considered by the Pacific-Atlantic as just a collection of flyover states: the South – which regards itself as the real, authentic America; and the Midwest, largely disciplined and quite practical-minded, squeezed ideologically between the littoral powerhouses and the South.
Superstructure, tough, is key: no matter what happens, whatever the fractures, this remains an Empire, where only a tiny elite, a de facto plutocratic oligarchy, rules.
It would be too schematic, even though essentially correct, to assert that in the presidential election, invisible campaigner Joe Biden represented the Pacific-Atlantic nodes, and Trump represented the whole South. Assuming the election was not fraudulent – and that remains a big “if” – the Midwest eventually swung based on three issues.
Everything that lies ahead points to the irreconcilable – pitting the absolute majority that voted Dem in the Atlantic-Pacific nodes versus the South and a deeply divided Midwest. As much as Biden-Harris is bound to isolate the South even more, their prospects of “pacifying” the Midwest are less than zero.
Whose ground control?
Beyond the raucous altercations on whether the presidential election was fraudulent, these are the key factual points.
In any Global South latitude where the empire did “interfere” in local elections, color revolution-style, this set of facts would be regarded by scores of imperial officials, in a relentless propaganda blitz, as evidence of a coup.
On the recent Supreme Court ruling, a Deep State intel source told me, “the Supreme Court did not like to see half the country rioting against them, and preferred the decision be made by each state in the House of Representatives. That is the only way to handle this without jeopardizing the union. Even prominent Democrats I know realize that the fix took place. The error was to steal too many votes. This grand theft indicts the whole system, that has always been corrupt.”
Dangers abound. On the propaganda front, for instance, far right nationalists are absolutely convinced that U.S. media can be brought to heel only by occupying the six main offices of the top conglomerates, plus Facebook, Google and Twitter: then you’d have full control of the U.S. propaganda mill.
Another Deep State source, now retired, adds that, “the U.S. Army does not want to intervene as their soldiers may not obey orders.
Many of these far right nationalists were officers in the armed forces. They know where the nuclear missiles and bombers are. There are many in sympathy with them as the U.S. falls apart in lockdowns.”
Meanwhile, Hunter Biden’s dodgy dealings simply will not be made to vanish from public scrutiny. He’s under four different federal investigations. The recent subpoena amounts to a very serious case pointing to a putative crime family. It’s been conveniently forgotten that Joe Biden bragged to the Council on Foreign Relations
that he forced Ukraine’s chief prosecutor Viktor Shokin to be fired exactly when he was investigating corruption by Burisma’s founder.
Of course, a massive army of shills will always invoke another army of omniscient and oh so impartial “fact checkers” to hammer the same message: “This is Trump’s version. Courts have said clearly all the evidence is baseless.”
District Attorney William Barr is now out of the picture (see his letter of resignation). Barr is a notorious Daddy Bush asset since the old days – and that means classic Deep State. Barr knew about all federal investigations on Hunter Biden dating back to 2018, covering potential money laundering and bribery.
And still, as the Wall Street Journal delightfully put it, he “worked to avoid their public disclosure during the heated election campaign”.
A devastating report (Dems: a Republican attack report) has shown how the Biden family was connected to a vast financial network with multiple foreign ramifications.
Then there’s Barr not even daring to say there was enough reason for the Department of Justice to engage in a far-reaching investigation into voting fraud, finally putting to rest all “baseless” conspiracy theories.
Move on. Nothing to see here. Even if an evidence pile-up featured, among other instances, ballot stuffing, backdated ballots, statistical improbabilities, electronic machine tampering, software back doors, affidavits from poll workers, not to mention the by now legendary stopping the vote in the dead of night, with subsequent, huge batches of votes miraculously switching from Trump to Biden.
Once again an omniscient army of oh so impartial “fact checkers” will say everything is baseless.
A perverse blowback
A perverse form of blowback is already in effect as informed global citizens may now see, crystal clear, the astonishing depth and reach of Deep State power – the ultimate decider of what happens next in Dystopia Central.
Both options are dire.
In either case, The Deplorables will become The Ungovernables.
It gets worse. A possible implosion of the union – with internal convulsions leading to a paroxysm of violence – may even be coupled with an external explosion, as in a miscalculated imperial adventure.
For the Three Sovereigns – Russia, China and Iran – as well as the overwhelming majority of the Global South, the conclusion is inescapable: if the current, sorry spectacle is the best Western liberal “democracy” has to offer, it definitely does not need any enemies or “threats”.
The gigantic headquarters of the largest military organization in history.
While the American hyper-power is in advanced decline and President Donald Trump has evoked a possible exit of his country from NATO, the member states are wondering about the future of the Atlantic alliance. This is why, in April, its Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, set up a Commission of Reflection, composed of 10 Atlantic personalities, to define what NATO would be in 2030.
Its objective was to redefine the alliance, as was the case in 1967, after France’s exit from the integrated command and at a time when the 20-year period during which it was not possible to leave the Treaty was about to come to an end.
At the time, the Belgian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Pierre Harmel, undertook to coordinate a very broad consultation, taking into account the French desire for national independence. Adapting to the logic of President Charles De Gaulle, he distinguished the political aspects (the Treaty) from the military aspects (the Organization).
Of course, Pierre Harmel was fundamentally committed to American domination of the "Free World”. As a Christian Democrat, he was opposed to the USSR as much for its atheism as for its collectivist principles. As such, he was involved in the Christian Leadership Movement [1] organized by the Pentagon.
The new reflection group has just submitted its report on November 25, 2020.
Contrary to expectations, it does not imagine new horizons, but calls for refocusing on what unites the member states: the "common values" defined by the founding treaty of the Alliance: "the principles of democracy, individual liberties and the rule of law. [2] In fact, the principles of democracy have just been violated in the United States by electoral fraud, while individual liberties have been restricted in each member state during the Covid-19 epidemic. As for the rule of law, it no longer exists in Turkey.
Here, a preamble is necessary. NATO has never been an "alliance" in the sense of a free association of partners aimed at strengthening their defense. On the contrary, from its foundation, all have been forced to accept and obey an eternal military command from the United States. In practice, NATO is a foreign legion at the service of the Anglo-Saxons: the Pentagon first, Whitehall second. This blatant violation of the principle of sovereignty set out in the UN Charter has forced NATO to practice biased rhetoric.
Its noble and beautiful rhetoric should not mask its rogue management.
During the Cold War, the Anglo-Saxons used a secret service of the Alliance to ensure that member states always accepted their command. They formed a stay-behind network, allegedly to resist a Soviet invasion. However, they used this network only to eliminate any desire for independence. They organized assassinations of leaders and provoked coups d’état among their partners. These facts are taught today in Anglo-Saxon military academies and have been studied in detail by many historians. [3]
This system has continued since the end of the Cold War in another form. Each member state has been asked to authorize the Anglo-Saxons in writing to spy on them with the help of their own officials, as Edward Snowden revealed, and as we saw again last month in Denmark. . [4]
Finally, the Anglo-Saxon military command does not hesitate to violate the statutes of the Alliance when it suits it. Thus, it was this command, and not the Atlantic Council which was opposed to it, who decided to bomb Libya and overthrow Muamar al-Gaddafi.
Under these conditions, it would be naive to believe that the Reflection Commission had the freedom to think for itself.
It was chaired by Wess Mitchell, former assistant to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson for European and Eurasian Affairs;
Wess Mitchell happens to be the author of a surprising study, The Godfather Doctrine, [5] which does not appear in his biography released by NATO. He compares the three main schools of US foreign policy to the methods of the three sons of the "Godfather", Don Vito Corleone, the heroes of Mario Puzzo’s books and Francis Ford Coppola’s films. He preaches a mixture of soft and hard power, including mafia techniques.
However, how can these methods not be found in the blackmail operations that several other members of the commission have been subjected to in the past years. Warning: the elements we are going to present do not mean that some members of the commission committed very serious crimes, but that they knew about them and did not denounce them.
Take the case of Thomas de Maizière, former director of the Federal Chancellery, then German Minister of the Interior and Defense. [6] Let’s leave aside his indisputable sponsorship by US think-tanks. Before becoming Angela Merkel’s right-hand man, this illustrious personality was, among other things, Interior Minister of Saxony (2004-5), a post during which he had to deal with the "Saxon Marshland" affair (Sachsensumpf). He considered the information gathered by his office as "serious", but did not pass it on to the judiciary. It was a case of underage prostitution involving high-ranking local personalities. It resurfaced years later, when Thomas de Maizière became Minister of Defense, with the revelation of several facts that had been suppressed, the questioning of testimony, and parliamentary debates. [7].
Or again the case of Hubert Védrine, former Secretary General of the Élysée (1991-95) then French Minister of Foreign Affairs (1997-2002). When he was President François Mitterrand’s closest collaborator, [8] he was trapped by NATO in a house where he went twice a month to participate in the municipal council of the small village where he was elected. Before his carefree eyes, neo-Nazi members of the NATO stay-behind network set up the largest child pornography studio in Europe. [9] The affair was hushed up. On his own initiative, the head of security at the Élysée Palace made two actors disappear, one of whom had a "heart attack”. However, the death of the second, probably murdered by an intelligence policeman who improperly came to his home to question him, did not go unnoticed and provoked a debate in Parliament. [10]
In both cases, since the truth has not been exposed, the members of the Commission are susceptible to blackmail.
The report of the Reflection Commission, entitled NATO 2030: United for a New Era, is very enlightening, more by what it should have contained, but did not say, than by what it makes explicit.
In the first place, it insists heavily on "common values", which resonates as an accusation against the United States and Turkey. It proposes to no longer react to the shortcomings observed (which is practically impossible against Washington), but to take initiatives before these values have been violated. This is just another way of making a clean sweep of the past and demanding that it never happens again.
It points to Russia as the only current rival and China as the next.
It recapitulates all NATO’s operations in its geographical area and outside this area, with the exception of the destruction of Libya. One recalls that this decision was taken by the Anglo-Saxon command behind the back of the Atlantic Council. This "omission" manifests resentment.
Now, dealing with the South, the report emphasizes that when NATO’s neighbors are safer, NATO is safer; a roundabout way of rejecting the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine of systemic destruction of state structures in the "Broader Middle East" and thus questioning the destruction of Libya.
Let us recall that in 2011, at the time of this war, Muamar el-Gaddafi had become an ally of the United States. He had been congratulated by President Bush Jr., notably for having renounced nuclear power, and had agreed to entrust Mahmoud Jibril with the reorganization of his economy. However, overnight, Jibril became the leader of the opposition and NATO summoned al-Gaddafi to leave.
On the issue of arms control, the Commission is ignoring the UN Treaty on Nuclear Disarmament, which it has strongly condemned. It refers to the work of Pierre Harmel, in 1967, and to the affirmation of the double objective of deterrence and détente. Here again, it condemns the current drift of the Organization, which is strengthening its arsenal while rejecting President Putin’s proposals on disarmament.
On the subject of energy resources, it states as a matter of course NATO’s right to ensure its full access to hydrocarbon resources in the world regardless of the needs of other powers.
Concerning the information war, the Commission of Reflection invites the Organization to rely on citizens. Without calling into question the call for tenders of October 15, 2020, it approves the objectives of the Riga Centre of Excellence for Strategic Communications, but challenges its methods.
Dealing with the unity of the alliance, the Commission underlines the commitment of all to defend a member when it is attacked (Article 5). It then explains, alluding to Turkey’s behaviour, that this commitment can only be fulfilled if each member state strictly respects the ’common values’ of the Organization. Since the publication of the report, the US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, has come to tell his counterparts how badly he feels about Turkey. He thus made it possible for Ankara to be excluded from the alliance, or even a possible war against it.
Not without humour, the Commission suggested the creation of a Centre of Excellence for Democratic Resilience.
Despite the pressure exerted on members of the Advisory Commission, the Commission did not evade the real problems, but refrained from making them explicit. Everyone is aware that the alliance is a tool of Anglo-Saxon domination, and those who wish to free themselves from it try to avoid being drawn into new conflicts at their own expense.
Why do civilizations collapse? This question bears not only on safeguarding our society’s future but also makes sense of our present. The answer relies on some of the same technē that humanity needed to build civilization in the first place: we have to evaluate the perceptions that mint facts and theory, not merely peruse the body of theories handed down to us.
Institutional failure comes as a surprise because organizations try to hide their shortcomings. They lean on other, more functional organizations in order to keep up appearances. During civilizational collapse, no organization can properly hide its own inadequacy, since the whole interdependent ecosystem of institutions is caving in on itself. States, religions, material technologies, and ways of life that once seemed self-sustaining turn out to have been dependent on the invisible subsidy of just a few key institutions. The environment of societal collapse reveals much of the otherwise obscured inner workings of crucial social technologies. After all, to analyze something is to break it apart!
Despite being an excellent epistemic opportunity, civilizational collapse seldom inspires introspection among thinkers living through it. Mayan or Roman thinkers don’t seem to have reflected on their ongoing collapse. As institutions turn to cannibalizing each other, there is little patronage or emotional energy going towards accurately describing the wider process. The notable exception that proves the rule of civilizational delusion is the Zhou Dynasty of ancient China. It is an encouraging example, since it shows a societal failure arrested and reversed by an intellectual golden age called the Hundred Schools of Thought. Confucianism, Legalism, and Taoism could only come into being with this kind of epistemic opportunity.
In the West today, we operate under the influence of our own key philosophy, which we can call scientism: the tendency to rely on scientific claims to describe the functioning of society, even when there is no empirical reason to assume that they apply. We act as if we are already living in a scientifically-planned society, immune to collapse on a time scale that any of us have to worry about. This is very far from the truth. We are certainly living in socially-engineered societies, but they are not scientifically planned in any straightforward way. Our organs of economic management do not secretly know how the economy really works. Our systems of political regulation are operating on the fumes of their institutional inheritance from two or three generations ago—the last spurt of institutional growth in Western societies happened roughly during the 1970s. At this time in the United States, new federal bodies such as the Department of Energy and Education were created and organizations such as NASA reached their modern form. Concurrently, the United Kingdom dispensed with organized labor as a political force in favor of an expanded administrative apparatus, and France saw the resignation of Charles de Gaulle, the architect of the Fifth Republic; neither country’s political economy has evolved much since.
Civilizational collapse always looms on the horizon. Though we usually think of collapse as a slow process, it can in fact happen very quickly, as was the case with the Late Bronze Age collapse. The old dictum “gradually, then suddenly” is cliché, but accurate. To ascertain whether or not we are headed for collapse, we must first analyze the functionality of our own society and pinpoint where things go wrong.
Mechanisms of Collapse
Our society is dominated by large bureaucracies. These bureaucracies break down the processing of physical goods and information into discrete tasks, such as how a factory worker puts doors on a car, or a stock trader buys futures contracts. These tasks are shorn of their context and executed in a systematized environment whose constraints are quite narrow: put the car door in, increase the portfolio value. Our society is thoroughly compartmentalized. This compartmentalization isn’t driven by the division of labor, but rather by the need to make use of misaligned talent without empowering it. By radically limiting employees’ scope of action, you make office politics more predictable. By fragmenting available knowledge, you can leverage information asymmetries to the intellectual or material advantage of the center. Some of this is necessary for scaling organizations beyond what socially connected networks can manage—but move too far towards compartmentalization, and it becomes impossible to accomplish the original mission of the organization.
Such large bureaucratic systems do not emerge organically; they require design and implementation. Empirically, we can know this simply by examining the intent of the original founders of these systems. If you want to know, say, why the FBI exists, you can find the answer in the documents of its founder, J. Edgar Hoover. You could do the same for the IRS, or for Amazon, or for any other number of institutions.
It is very difficult, though, to apply this analysis to the construction of society. No matter how large or how small, institutions always coexist in a symbiotic relationship with other institutions. There is no Amazon without the United States government, no U.S. government without—at least—some parts of the U.S. economy. Each of these institutions depends on the others in an intricate mesh. Society is not a single institution, after all, but an ecosystem of interdependent institutions.
In addition to this complexity, non-functional institutions are the rule. Our institutions today rarely function in accordance with their stated purpose. Individuals within a given society are often very bad at judging institutional functionality. Some people spend their entire lives ruthlessly profiting from the misery of others, or greatly contributing to the prosperity of others, without even knowing that they are doing so. People who try to effect change are most often frustrated. Countless people spend their lives wrestling with a societal problem, slaving over papers for publication in academia or the nonprofit world. They act as if there is some sort of metaphorical wall which they throw their papers over, with some responsible person on the other side taking the output of their disinterested scientific study and translating it into policy, medical practice, or industrial production.
More often than not, there is nobody on the other side of that wall. Since society is so deeply compartmentalized, it rarely functions as a whole with a single purpose. Note that dysfunctionality is not a normative distinction; it often boils down to the simple reality of whether or not anyone ever follows up on key actions within the institution. It is also a question of whether or not there is a multiplier—be it individual, bureaucratic, oligarchic—behind that metaphorical wall.
Institutions often become non-functional due to the loss of key knowledge at critical junctures. Take, for example, the recent failure of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to reproduce a niche classified material known as FOGBANK that is necessary for manufacturing nuclear weapons. It took the NNSA ten years and millions of dollars to re-engineer a material that their staff in the 1980s knew how to make. That knowledge never should have been lost in the first place, but in a dysfunctional society, such loss of knowledge becomes the rule. Attempts at reverse engineering do not always succeed, if they are even made.
Civilizational collapse, then, looks like this dynamic at the scale of an entire civilization: a low-grade but constant loss of capabilities and knowledge throughout the most critical parts of our institutions, that eventually degrades our ability to perpetuate society. There might be a sudden point where the superstructure gives way dramatically, such as occurred during the Bronze Age Collapse, or there might be slow accommodation to this convergence to zero, as with the Byzantine Empire.
The key dynamic here is the loss of the subtle social technologies that allow us to solve the succession problem. Running a large and complex institution requires skills which are often difficult to fully pass on. How can a successful founder ensure a successor who leads as competently as they did? The succession problem is the central obstacle to transferring the ownership and knowledge of institutions from generation to generation. In the case of the Nobel Committee, for example, the goal of succession is to produce a new chairman with similar faculties of judgment to the original chairman. In the case of ancient Egypt, it would have been making sure that the Pharaoh’s son knows how to interact with all of the powerful people in Egypt and has an intuitive feel for the subtleties of public order, diplomacy, and famine prevention. In addition to knowledge succession, there is also power succession. The son of the Pharaoh may be just as skilled as his father, but if he does not inherit his base of power, the son will be vulnerable to usurpation or invasion.
The succession problem is especially important when transferring secrets. In ancient Egypt, accurate measurement of the Nile river was a state secret, in order to allow the state to monopolize agricultural production and resource flows. This was crucial to the functionality of Egyptian civilization—it was the legitimating story of the state. By design, it was not clear to the Egyptian public how they would go about running their society if it weren’t for the expert knowledge of the state.
The failure to maintain implicit traditions of knowledge speaks to the extreme difficulty of transferring secrets between generations. Often the problem is that the kids “don't get the joke”: if you create an institution with a false premise in order to mislead society as to your true goals, the people you hire into it might be fooled by the propaganda themselves. This is why claims about multigenerational conspiracies are always highly suspect: such organizations are plagued by succession failures in knowledge.
Avoiding collapse is so difficult because succession failure is often opaque. If the Institute of Pottery lost the ability to make good pots—to mold people into skilled pot makers—would they declare it to the world? Of course not—institutions are very rarely self-abolishing. The same holds true throughout crucial niches of our society, from social engineering to science and philosophy. All of these areas could be in profound crisis today, and we wouldn’t even know it. The intellectual apocalypse is invisible if there are no true intellectuals around. Again, institutional failure typically comes as a surprise.
And yet, clearly some functional institutions still exist, or our society would not function at all. At the end of the day, you can still go online and call a cab or go to a dealership and buy a car. This car will have doors bolted on by a worker you’ve never met, and these doors will seem to work. The same cannot always be said of stock portfolios.
History Guides Analysis of Decline
We can define civilizational collapse as a process wherein most recognizable large-scale institutions of a society vanish, coupled with a drop in material wealth, a drop in the complexity of material artifacts and social forms, a reduction in travel distance and physical safety of the inhabitants, and a mass reduction in knowledge.
Loss of knowledge is especially damaging, since it accelerates the other aspects of collapse and ensures that they will be long-lasting. Nearly all of the written evidence we have of societal decline comes from elites. Historically, literacy was restricted to the traditional elite class of a society, as they were the only ones with any use for reading and writing. This accounts for the total disappearance of writing after the Late Bronze Age collapse, since Bronze Age societies had a very small literate class. The result was a wholesale loss of civilizational knowledge. When writing reappeared in the eastern Mediterranean centuries later, it was based on the new Phoenician alphabet, rather than the old hieroglyphic system that gave birth to the cuneiform of the Assyrians or the Linear B of the Minoans. Such losses of knowledge are a constant throughout human history: as with FOGBANK, or as with the state of New Jersey recently scrambling to find a COBOL programmer with the ability to overhaul their legacy information systems.
Despite how difficult it can be to gather historical data, it’s still a far better way to understand societal collapse than purely theoretical models. Rather than picking and choosing our preferred explanations of collapse beforehand, we should first recognize that there are simply too many causal variables to control for. The best we can hope for is rigorous cross-comparison with the historical record, using sets of natural experiments between past societies. A broad historical literature of collapse does exist, especially on the Late Bronze Age collapse and the fall of the Roman Empire. But the scholars that pose these questions often have particular—and popular—answers in mind as to what causes collapse: environmental fragility, moral decline, an overloading of systemic complexity, and so on. The morality play is written first, the facts are found second, and this often results in a shoddy final product of a theory. Thus, the relevance of history for investigating our own society’s potential collapse is also obvious: without comparing the present to other civilizations, we can’t say much of anything useful about it.
It is hard to come to a consensus on historical cause and effect. In geology, we didn’t build another planet to discover the Earth’s plate tectonics, but rather dug among the rocks on which we found ourselves. In our macro-study of history and civilizations, we too must rely on in-depth exploration of historical examples.
That exploration is still itself theory-driven. Good historians and theoreticians explicitly acknowledge the theses they work with, so I will do the same. My theory of history is great founder theory: I propose that social technologies do not evolve out of mass action, but rather are devised by a tiny subset of institutional designers. Looking at history, we see that new organizations and social forms often arise within a single generation, showing jumps in social complexity far too rapid to be explained away by collective action or evolution. This would be the equivalent of expecting a tornado tearing through a junkyard to assemble a Boeing 747 or a Tesla Cybertruck.
Designing complex objects through collective action, or perhaps through an intermittent individual strategy similar to the open software approach, is tempting. However, unowned commons tend to be raided, and individual visions tend to differ massively. It often takes an exceptional individual with exceptional vision to create a new social or material technology. It’s hard to remember nowadays that the smartphone once had to be devised as a combination of the cell phone, the tablet, and the camera, and did not merely emerge out of mass market sentiments. It took a single individual, Steve Jobs, to see that while a combination of the car, the airplane, and the submarine would produce an inferior version of all three, the opposite case would be true in the creation of the smartphone. And then that individual had to implement the vision.
The result is usually one or more institutions, created by the individual to carry out their goals. Institutions are not naturally self-documenting. The descriptions of themselves that they provide can be misleading. Suppose you were watching the birth of a mystical movement like the Franciscans in the 13th century. At the time, you might describe them as the cult of a new god. But an observer in the 15th century would, according to the institutional information available at the time, describe them as a movement firmly within the Catholic Church. In theory, the Franciscans have always been good Catholics, but this only gets recognized after a struggle has played out. In the Middle Ages, you could often believe any heresy you wanted as long as you formally declared your loyalty to the Pope.
A different example might be the United States government today. A keen observer would examine the way that laws are made today and conclude that we have witnessed the emergence of a new legislative body all but in name, with Congress reduced to a vestigial organ of this governing structure. Law today is made mostly by the Supreme Court, or the civil service when it chooses what to implement and how, or occasionally via Presidential executive order. Yet very few people today come to such a conclusion, as the ideology of American government dictates that law is made in Congress, and does not make room for the development of new federal legislative bodies. If no one believes a hypothesis, the evidence for it remains unnoticed, even when such evidence is abundant.
Such thinking requires going beyond both public appearances and official narratives. The popular or expert definition of “law” that we use in 2020 can’t help us here. Rather, we should use the term “law” in the same sense that one would use it to empirically describe the formalized customs of medieval Iceland, or of the function of the Twelve Tables in ancient Rome, or Lycurgus’ Laws in Sparta, or Sharia law in modern-day Somalia. In none of these cases would the official self-documentation of the institutions give you an accurate picture of real conditions. Institutions are similar to individuals in this way. Deep theory-building enabled by thorough scholarship or, better yet, high quality anthropological fieldwork would be needed.
Something as seemingly objective as the occurrence of a battle can only be inferred from scattered artifacts that other people have found, or the writings of long-dead strangers. Moreover, battles are relatively low-complexity—can you imagine trying to parse through Obama’s emails to figure out what his key agenda was during the course of his administration? Could you even do this with your own emails from last year? Establishing historical knowledge is difficult. Narrative fills the gaps; stories are told both by you and Obama and FDR, and by Julius Caesar. These are always a mix of accuracy and self-interest, which is, in fact, what history is.
Material Signs of Collapse
Material evidence can provide something closer to objectivity—at least sometimes. The archaeological record shows that many large Roman cities were depopulated over the course of the 4th and 5th centuries AD. As indicators go, this is a fairly clear and obvious sign of a high urban society’s decay. Indirect evidence corroborates this, such as the reduction in atmospheric lead pollution generated by Roman mining activity leading up to the collapse of the empire. If we assume that mining activity is related to economic production, this is a good indicator of economic decline.
But even material evidence can be unreliable, since understanding it requires a high degree of contextual knowledge. The interesting question for the prospective collapse of our own society is this: if you were a late imperial Roman, and someone told you about the ongoing decline in atmospheric lead, how would you process this information? Today, if we saw a drop in lead pollution, our first assumption might be that this is due to the advent of greener technology. Economic decline wouldn’t naturally come to mind. Victory has many fathers, but defeat is an orphan. We find it hard to believe that we were once more capable of intentionally affecting the world than today. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, wanderers among the ruins of aqueducts concluded that they must have been built by giants. The classical Greeks examined the massive stone ruins of Mycenaean civilization and assumed that the great walls were built by a race of Cyclopes.
Our persistent failure to understand the monumental achievements of the past speaks not to the historical prevalence of pyramid-loving extraterrestrials, but rather to the fact that we often lose the knowledge of the social technology on which such material artifacts rested. It is easier for us to conceptualize an extraterrestrial force that constructed the pyramids than it is to conceive of the political and economic system that made such architectural feats possible. Such loss of knowledge gives us an idea of our limited ability to maintain advanced social systems over generations.
If we compare the roughly twelve identifiable Dark Ages following civilizational collapse on the Eurasian continent—the collapse of the Bronze Age civilizations, the end of Mohenjo Daro, the decline of the Roman Empire, Han China and so on—we always find that nearly all material technology is not self-perpetuating, but rather rests on foundations of social technology. The only material technologies that routinely survive collapse are small-scale agriculture and small-scale metallurgy, likely because the social technologies needed to sustain such smaller communities can arise organically.
Since collapse in material technology is always preceded by collapse in the practice of social technology, Dark Ages are always preceded by Intellectual Dark Ages. Knowledge of these social technologies is highly compartmentalized and, as a result, they are not understood explicitly by all parts of society. This means that a society undergoing an Intellectual Dark Age doesn’t realize it is going through one at all—all the people who would notice are long-gone, and those who remain are miseducated, role-playing the forms left behind by their predecessors without realizing that they’ve lost the substance. Often not just the knowledge, but the socioeconomic niche that once fostered the creation of new social technology has been obliterated in all but name.
Today, our material technology is far superior to that of Rome, but our social technology may not be. Take the Industrial Revolution for example: surely the most interesting thing that has happened within the last 500 years, and a process that most currently assume is still ongoing. But if the Industrial Revolution was over, what would we expect to see? Much as we see a late Roman drop in lead pollution, today we see drops in pollution in the West. The standard explanation is gains in efficiency and greener technology. But if we take a more global perspective, it seems that we outsourced not just production, but also the pollution associated with production to China. The economists’ argument here is that we have intentionally outsourced our industries to China, obeying the industry-agnostic logic of gains from trade. It is worth considering the economists might be wrong if the promised gains from trade haven’t materialized.
One could hypothesize the American worker and manager have, over time, lost the social technology that enabled them to run the assembly lines in the first place and that, now, our support for outsourcing isn’t so much due to greed as it is an adaptation to inability. Europe, arguably, has adapted to its inability to fight wars anymore with a narrative of intentional pacifism. We should seriously consider the possibility that we are a post-industrial society not in a positive sense, but in the sense that in our society the Industrial Revolution has stopped.
Such a hypothesis is strikingly hard to defeat. A civilizational collapse under conditions of advanced material technology might look very much like what we have now. Our society is the product of what were once advanced, rational, self-catalyzing systems of production, but we have now reverted to a more customary system, where things are simply done as they were 40 or 50 years ago. We have the same bureaucratic and economic institutions as we did then, with some marginal tweaks. Thanks to narrow progress in the CPU industry, most of which has left the United States, we are now able to have Zoom calls. Unfortunately, there are few other reasons for optimism.
Collapse Is Silent
When collapses occur more slowly, it is even more difficult to find anyone acknowledging the process at all. This was true of the late Roman Empire, where one finds letters exchanged between patricians complaining that the roads were often unsafe this time of year, but little acknowledgement of the fundamental changes taking place. The collapse of the Roman Empire was much less the constant burning of cities so much as it was GDP-equivalent shrinking by about 1% per year, while remaining more or less the same on the books, for two hundred years in a row.
In the context of adaptation to the COVID-19 pandemic, markets seem to be fairly stable and even slightly better than they were a few months ago, even though common sense tells us that production has fallen massively. If such a huge drop in economic activity can be papered over with government and private sector intervention, can we imagine how many crucial slower-moving changes are going unnoticed? If our actual wealth per capita, say, has been declining 1% per year for the last 20 years, how would we even know? Civilizational collapse happens on similar or even slower time scales—even though coronavirus hasn’t left everything in flames, we may still be on the long road to collapse. Absent reform, I think we are in for a slow century of decline starting in about 2030 or so.
Intentional and, more importantly, successful reform of society is very rare. It does happen, but macro-scale social engineering is exceptionally difficult: Augustus Caesar truly did save the Roman Republic from tearing itself to shreds through unsustainable warfare. His imperial system was in turn torn to shreds through warfare after long-standing economic and intellectual decay 300 years later. The sheer difficulty of reform, coupled with the accumulation of social and cultural technical debt, provides a fairly solid explanation for why civilizations collapse.
The United States is well-positioned to attempt such civilizational reforms, since it has a remarkable ability to integrate exceptional talent from all over the world and has put that talent to work on some of the most successful institutional projects in history, including the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Program. America is, for now, in an unavoidable period of relative decline, and in 2030 or 2040 the largest economy in the world will almost certainly be that of China. But absolute decline is reversible—2060 is still an open question. A deep pragmatism runs through this country, and if reimagined, the 21st century could see another explosion in American economic, social, and cultural development.
The solution lies with a small number of people who can independently judge the generative minds behind the facts, rather than merely minding the integrity of the established body of theories and observations. If there is such a thing as a technē of civilization—the skill of managing the institutions of society and culture—it exists in very narrow corners of society. Engineering society to be self-perpetuating is an extremely difficult challenge, and we can devise all sorts of machinery to do so, but this is the bottom line. Such people are extremely rare, but if we create a socioeconomic niche for them, our civilization can rewrite its own future for the better.
Michael Oswald's film The Spider's Web reveals how at the demise of empire, City of London financial interests created a web of secrecy jurisdictions that captured wealth from across the globe and hid it in a web of offshore islands. Today, up to half of global offshore wealth is hidden in British jurisdictions and Britain and its dependencies are the largest global players in the world of international finance.
Hour long interview with Russ Ramsland giving detailed technical information on how (centralized) voting fraud by Dominion voting machines is accomplished.
Notice - Age-restricted video (based on Community Guidelines)
You will have to sign in to your google account to see this. There is nothing gruesome or "adult" or offensive in this presentation. It is Google suppressing access to political dissidence.
Arise Virtual Solutions, part of the secretive world of work-at-home customer service, helps large corporations shed costs at the expense of workers. Now the pandemic is creating a boom in the industry.
A very long detailed article showing what happens to people who are entrapped by "Make good money working from home" bait. Follow the link to read it from the ssource.
...
By Ajamu Baraka and Bahman Azad
Co-Chairs of the Embassy Protectors Defense Committee
On February 4, Chief Judge Beryl A. Howell issued a ruling on what the jurors will be allowed to be told in the trial of the Embassy Protectors scheduled to begin on February 11. She granted most of the government’s requests to prevent the jury from hearing important facts about the case, leaving the protectors with little in the way of a defense.
The courtroom will not be an oasis of truth in Washington, DC. The fact that Nicolas Maduro is the lawful president of Venezuela, not the coup leader Juan Guaido, cannot be uttered in that courtroom. Even though everyone, including the judge and prosecutors, knows that Guaido has not served one nanosecond as president since his self-declared presidency one year ago, the jurors will not be allowed to be told that critical fact. They will be led to believe that Guaido’s fake ambassador Carlos Vecchio is real.
Judge Howell argued that the court was bound by precedent that says courts must accept the decision of the president as to who is the leader of a foreign country. If the president says Mickey Mouse is president and Donald Duck and Goofy are his ambassadors of another sovereign country, then in the US courts that is the legal fiction they must abide by.
This is important in the Embassy Protectors’ case because the government’s excuse for entering the embassy to make false arrests was based on Carlos Vecchio, a fake ambassador of a fake president, giving them permission and ordering the eviction of the protectors. He was the Donald Duck to Guaido’s Mickey Mouse.
Other relevant topics that cannot be discussed are international law and events during the first 33 days in the embassy. The jury won’t be told that it is standard practice for governments to negotiate protecting power agreements, which was going on while the protectors were in the embassy. The jury will not know that the Protectors were prepared to leave the embassy voluntarily once a protecting power agreement was reached between the US and Venezuela.
The jury won’t know the Trump administration violated the Vienna Convention by raiding the embassy on May 16. The protectors cannot talk about the facts that the State Department failed to protect the embassy from break-ins by pro-coup advocates and that they allowed the breaking of windows and doors, defacing of the embassy and both threats and assaults of people inside and outside of the embassy.
The judge believes this information will confuse the jurors. Yes, the jurors would be confused if they knew the police allowed the Embassy to be damaged and stood by as people were assaulted, but it is members of the Embassy Protection Collective who were charged with interfering with their so-called “protection of the embassy.”
The judge also ruled the protectors could not argue that their First Amendment political rights were violated.
The protectors are not completely defenseless. Judge Howell ruled that the statute for interfering with protective function requires the government to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the four protectors acted knowingly and willfully, meaning they had an intent to break the law. She is permitting the protectors to say they believe that Maduro is president, but they can’t state the fact that he is the president.
The trial of the four Embassy Protection Collective members begins on February 11 and is expected to last about one week. The trial starts at 9:00 am at the Prettyman Courthouse, 333 Constitution Ave., NW, Washington, DC, room 22-A, Judge Beryl Howell.
We want a physical presence at the courthouse on the 11th. However, because individuals entering the courthouse may be potential jurors, we are calling on all supporters of embassy protectors not to approach any individuals with handouts who may be entering the courthouse. For information about what is deemed appropriate behavior on the day of the trial see Call For Support at the Upcoming Hearing and Trial.
With all these restrictions imposed on the Protectors, the chances of their conviction have increased dramatically. It is clear that we now have a longer, more protracted legal battle on our hands. We therefore need to raise the level of our fundraising goal for their legal defense and ask our supporters to continue making donations. You can contribute to the legal defense fund of the Protectors at DefendEmbassyProtectors.org.
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) released a report on November 21st titled "Russia’s Dead-End Diplomacy in Syria." The report focuses on Russia’s role in supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and calls for the U.S. to maintain a presence in Syria.
The ISW presents itself as a "non-partisan, non-profit, public policy research organization." In reality, the ISW is a neocon think tank funded by some of the country’s largest defense contractors. The ISW has a significant influence in Washington, and its chairman even has direct access to President Trump.
The report argues that Assad does not have the resources to regain and maintain control of the rest of Syria and that his victory would not bring stability. As far as Russia’s role, the report says, "The Kremlin seeks to thwart any Western effort to replace Assad and to instead reach a superficial political settlement that legitimizes his regime and neutralizes his opposition."
The report points to an insurgency in Southern Syria as both an example of Assad’s failure to maintain stability and an opportunity for the US to spread influence. Page 32 of the report reads, "The brewing insurgency in Southern Syria may generate new local leaders with whom the US can engage diplomatically if not support outright."
The report advocates for more US forces in Syria, "The US should recommit to its partnership with the SDF in Eastern Syria to build credible and inclusive governance as an alternative to both Assad and Salafi-Jihadist Groups. The US should deploy additional forces to work with the SDF to stabilize the east and block further Turkish incursions."
Jennifer Cafarella, one of the report’s authors and research director for the ISW, has written on Syria for years and is a major proponent of US intervention in the country. Cafarella wrote an op-ed for Foreign Affairs in July 2018 titled "Don’t Get Out of Syria." After President Trump announced his unfulfilled plan to withdraw troops from Syria in December 2018, Cafarella wrote a piece for The Washington Post titled, "The Islamic State is not defeated. Trump must reverse his decision to withdraw from Syria."
Cafarella appeared on CSPAN on October 16th to discuss Trump’s withdrawal of troops from northeast Syria. When presented with the fact that Trump was facing an imminent Turkish invasion and had no choice but to withdraw, Cafarella said, "The President of the United States always has a choice. We have military options."
The ISW does not provide much detail into its funding, but one page on the ISW website lists some corporate sponsors. Among them are General Dynamics, CACI International, and L3 Harris Technologies. All three of these corporations have a vested interest in keeping the US engaged in the Middle East.
For example, CACI just scored a $907 million five-year contract to provide intelligence analysis to US forces in Afghanistan. ISW employees have written extensively on the dangers of a US withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Retired Gen. Jack Keane serves as chairman of the ISW. On August 28th, Keane and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) wrote an op-ed together in The Washington Post titled, "We can’t outsource our security to anyone — especially the Taliban." The two argued against Trump’s plan to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. Graham is one of the loudest critics of the president’s Middle East policies, and Trump seems to listen to the Senator.
...
Against Hell: A Refutation of the Buddhist Hell Realms, Based on Their Historic Origins, Political Purpose, Psychological Destructiveness, Irrationality, and Demonstrable Inconsistency With the Original Buddhist Teachings, Framed as A Searching Review of Sam Bercholz’s After-Death Memoir, "A Guided Tour of Hell"
We're all familiar with fire and brimstone preachers, and most of us associate that brand of religion with fundamentalist Christianity that still percolates with aggressive heat down in the Bible Belt. But fire and brimstone Buddhism? Who's into that? Well, there comes a time in the development of every religion when some dark and difficult secrets have to be revealed, and for Tibetan Buddhism, that time came in 2016, when Sam Bercholz decided to publish an account of his near-death experience ("NDE") of ten years before.
While it may come as a shock to American Buddhists weaned on the sweetened pap of the Dalai Lama’s message, that carefully avoids revealing the medieval roots of his religion, Buddhists have been notably aggressive about systematizing, concretizing, and inculcating the belief in hell in their followers. The most shocking example accessible online is the Thai Buddhist Wang Saen Suk Hell Garden, built in 1986. Two twenty-foot statues, a man and a woman, tower over the garden, their tongues protruding to below their waists, surrounded by twenty-one animal-headed demons. These are surrounded by a great number of life-sized torture scenes depicting naked men and women being disemboweled, having their tongues pulled out with pincers, being force-fed boiling liquids, having heads and limbs hacked off, being penetrated genitally with huge, bloody implements, being boiled, sawed in half, and in all too many other ways, having their bodies used as vehicles for the infliction of inconceivably severe pain.[2] Chinese Buddhists have created equally ghastly sculptures to terrorize the faithful.[3] By comparison with the Thai and Chinese depictions, Japanese hells are tasteful; however, the motivation behind their creation, and their ultimate effects, are equally disturbing.[4]
Hell Detail from Wheel of Life Thangka, Nechung Oracle Temple
Old Tibet was stuffed with grisly depictions of beings suffering in hell, like this one taken from a wheel-of-life thangka at the monastery of the state oracle at Nechung, that depicts the crushing, disembowelment, impalement, and boiling of the damned, finely adorned with gleaming gold leaf.[5] But until Bercholz recruited an artist to supercharge the traditional Buddhist descriptions of hell with a series of terrifying, surrealistic acrylic paintings, and fired up his printing press to disseminate those lurid visions around the globe, Tibetan Buddhists here in America had gotten by almost entirely without any visual depictions of hell. Now that we have received this questionable gift, however, we have to deal with it.
Who is Bercholz? He's the founder and owner of the world's largest publisher of Buddhist literature -- Boulder-based Shambhala Publishing.[6] It's no coincidence that Shambhala Publishing shares a name, personnel, and agenda with Shambhala International, the Tibetan Buddhist group founded by Bercholz's lama, Chogyam Trungpa. Shambhala International was originally named "Vajradhatu," but changed its corporate name to Shambhala after Trungpa's Vajra Regent, Thomas Rich, brought the name into disrepute by infecting two people with the AIDS virus before dying of the disease himself. Shambhala International is now a spiritual monarchy, led by its "spiritual king," the Sakyong Mipham, who recently fled to Nepal after becoming the focus of a wide-ranging sex scandal. The Sakyong's sexual misdeeds range from drunken groping of party guests, to serial one-night stands with hundreds of willing and unwilling devotees, to rape and child abuse. These facts have been documented in three investigations conducted by his own disciples and attorneys, that strive to avoid revealing unsavory facts, but nonetheless ooze sleaze.
...
HSBC are in the news for attempting to suppress a report into money laundering. This is no surprise as the company’s entire history, right up to the present day, is one of financing drug cartels.
HSBC are not known for their transparency. Britain’s wealthiest company, with a stock market valuation of $215billion, has enough advertising muscle in the British press to ensure that critical investigative pieces have been spiked in both the Sunday Times and the Daily Telegraph – in the latter case, causing that newspaper’s chief political commentator to resign in protest. Then last year, the bank’s friends in the Swiss government sentenced the whistleblower who exposed the bank’s massive facilitation of tax avoidance to five years in prison, the longest sentence ever demanded by the country’s public ministry for a banking data theft case. And back in 2011 HSBC was revealed to be the UK financial sector’s most enthusiastic user of tax havens, with no less than 556 subsidiary companies based in offshore jurisdictions. Tax havens, as leading expert Nicholas Shaxson notes, “are characterised by secrecy…what they are fundamentally about is escape – escape from the rules, laws, regulations of jurisdictions elsewhere. You move your money offshore and you can then escape the laws that you don’t like”. This is clearly an institution with much to hide.
So it should not have surprised anybody when, earlier this month, it was revealed that HSBC are now seeking to block the publication of a report into HSBC’s compliance with anti-money laundering laws. After all, it was only three years ago that HSBC were hit with a massive $1.9 billion fine for laundering around $1 billion on behalf of some of the world’s most vicious gangsters. According to US assistant attorney general Lanny Breuer, “from 2006 to 2010, the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico, the Norte del Valle cartel in Colombia, and other drug traffickers laundered at least $881 million in illegal narcotics trafficking proceeds through HSBC Bank USA. These traffickers didn’t have to try very hard.” This is putting it mildly; in fact HSBC went to great lengths to facilitate the drug cartels. As Matt Taibbi wrote in his definitive piece on the scandal, HSBC “ran a preposterous offshore operation in Mexico that allowed anyone to walk into any HSBC Mexico branch and open a US-dollar account (HSBC Mexico accounts had to be in pesos) via a so-called ‘Cayman Islands branch’ of HSBC Mexico. The evidence suggests customers barely had to submit a real name and address, much less explain the legitimate origins of their deposits.” The bank did have a system in place to identify ‘suspicious activity’; but it routinely flouted it. As Nafeez Ahmed has written, “By 2010, HSBC had racked up a backlog of 17,000 suspicious activity alerts that it had simply ignored. Yet the bank’s standard response when it received its next government cease-and-desist order was simply to ‘clear’ the alerts, and give assurances that everything was fine. According to former HSBC compliance officer and whistleblower Everett Stern, the bank’s executives were deliberately ignoring and violating anti-money laundering regulations.” Taibbi wrote that “In one four-year period between 2006 and 2009, an astonishing $200 trillion in wire transfers (including from high risk countries like Mexico) went through without any monitoring at all. The bank also failed to do due diligence on the purchase of an incredible $9 billion in physical US dollars from Mexico and played a key role in the so-called Black Market Peso Exchange, which allowed drug cartels in both Mexico and Colombia to convert US dollars from drug sales into pesos to be used back home. Drug agents discovered that dealers in Mexico were building special cash boxes to fit the precise dimensions of HSBC teller windows”. HSBC’s customers – cartels like Colombia’s Norte del Valle and Mexico’s Sinaloa – were at the time involved in mass murder and abuse of the most psychopathic variety, including beheadings and torture videos. The official death toll from these groups in Mexico alone is 83,000 over the past decade. That they have the capacity to carry out violence on such a massive scale is the result of the massive financial growth of their industry. And that growth was wilfully facilitated by HSBC.
Given that this has all now been established in court, were the rule of law actually applied, the bank’s Charter would have been revoked, and its directors (including former UK Trade Minister Stephen Green) would now be in jail. The reason this did not happen is that the sheer size of HSBC’s operations make it too strategically important to close down. “Had the US authorities decided to press charges”, explained Assistant Attorney General Lenny Breuer, “HSBC would almost certainly have lost its banking licence in the US, the future of the institution would have been under threat and the entire banking system would have been destabilised.” That is to say, HSBC’s wealth and power put it officially above the law. Even its $1.9 billion fine, massive though it might seem, amounted to a mere five weeks profit for the bank.
But all of this is entirely in keeping for a bank whose roots lie precisely in illegality, drug trading and massive violence.
...
Little wonder, then, that wherever you look – from Afghanistan, to Kosovo, to Libya, to Mexico to Colombia, and even ‘at home’ – the policies of the world’s leading financial centres serve to boost the production, distribution and profitability of the drugs trade. And little wonder that HSBC are still keeping their ‘money laundering checks’ to themselves.
Assessment by the engineering sub-team of the OPCW Fact-Finding Mission investigating the alleged chemical attack in Douma in April 2018
Paul McKeigue, David Miller, Piers Robinson
Members of Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media
In our Briefing note on the Final Report of the OPCW Fact-Finding Mission on the Douma incident, we noted that the FFM had sought assessments in October 2018 from unidentified engineering experts on the “the trajectory and damage to the cylinders found at Locations 2 and 4”. The Final Report provided no explanation for why the FFM had not sought engineering assessments in April 2018, when the experts could have inspected the sites with cylinders in position, rather than six months later when inspection of the sites with cylinders in position was no longer possible and the assessments had to rely on images and measurements obtained by others. We raised this as an obvious anomaly.
OPCW staff members have communicated with the Working Group. We have learned that an investigation was undertaken by an engineering sub-team of the FFM, beginning with on-site inspections in April-May 2018, followed by a detailed engineering analysis including collaboration on computer modelling studies with two European universities. The report of this investigation was excluded from the published Final Report of the Fact-Finding Mission, which referred only to assessments sought from unidentified “engineering experts” commissioned in October 2018 and obtained in December 2018.
A copy of a 15-page Executive Summary of this report with the title “Engineering Assessment of two cylinders observed at the Douma incident” has been passed to us and we have posted it here. Please download and share this document via your own server if you link to it, so as not to overload our server.
We are studying this document, and encourage others with relevant expertise to contribute. We provide some initial comments below:
The report is signed by Ian Henderson, who is listed as one of the first P-5 level inspection team leaders trained at OPCW in a report dated 1998. We have confirmed that as the engineering expert on the FFM, Henderson was assigned to lead the investigation of the cylinders and alleged impact sites at Locations 2 and 4. We understand that “TM” in the handwritten annotation denotes Team Members of the FFM.
In response to an enquiry on 11 May 2019, the OPCW press office stated that “the individual mentioned in the document has never been a member of the FFM”. This statement is false. The engineering sub-team could not have been carrying out studies in Douma at Locations 2 and 4 unless they had been notified by OPCW to the Syrian National Authority (the body that oversees compliance with the Chemical Weapons Convention) as FFM inspectors: it is unlikely that Henderson arrived on a tourist visa.
The OPCW press office also attempted to suggest that the report of the engineering sub-team was not part of the FFM’s investigation. This statement also is false. The sub-team report refers to external collaborators and consultants: we understand that this included two European universities. This external collaboration on such a sensitive matter could not have gone ahead unless it had been authorised: otherwise Henderson would have been dismissed instantly for breach of confidentiality. We can therefore be confident that the preparation of the report had received the necessary authorisation within OPCW. What happened after the report was written is another matter.
As we have repeatedly emphasized, evidence can be evaluated only by comparison of competing hypotheses. This is a corollary of the likelihood principle, which can be derived from simple rules of logical consistency.
We noted that a key weakness of the published Final Report was that no competing hypotheses were considered. Thus the Final Report stated that engineering experts were asked to provide assessments of the “trajectory” of each of the two cylinders found: implying that they were not asked to assess whether the holes in the roof and the positions of the cylinders could be accounted for by anything other than cylinders being dropped from the sky.
The FFM’s Engineering Assessment does not make this error: competing hypotheses are clearly set out in advance.
...
In summary:
We note that several of the anomalies reported by the Engineering Assessment have been identified independently from open source images by members of the Working Group: these include the inability to fit the cylinder through the hole at Location 4, the presence of similar craters on nearby buildings at Location 2, and the incompatibility of the criss-cross pattern on the paintwork of the cylinder with a fall through wire mesh.
The results from both locations are summarized in paragraph 32:
The dimensions, characteristics and appearance of the cylinders, and the surrounding scene of the incidents, were inconsistent with what would have been expected in the case of either cylinder being delivered from an aircraft. In each case the alternative hypothesis produced the only plausible explanation for observations at the scene.
The conclusion of the Engineering Assessment is unequivocal: the alternative hypothesis that the cylinders were manually placed in position is “the only plausible explanation for observations at the scene”.
Our last Briefing Note listed two other key findings:
...
We conclude that the staging of the Douma incident entailed mass murder of at least 35 civilians to provide the bodies at Location 2. It follows from this that people dressed as White Helmets and endorsed by the leadership of that organization had a key role in this murder.
We note that the Douma incident was the first alleged chemical attack in Syria where OPCW investigators were able to carry out an unimpeded on-site inspection. Since 2014, OPCW Fact-Finding Missions investigating alleged chemical attacks in opposition-held territory have relied for evidence on witnesses and materials collected by opposition-linked NGOs of doubtful provenance, including the CBRN Task Force, the Chemical Violations Documentation Centre Syria, and the White Helmets. Even for the investigation of the Ghouta incident in 2013, the OPCW-WHO mission was able to visit the the alleged attack sites for only a few hours, and was under the close supervision of the armed opposition. For those who until now have been prepared to accept the findings of OPCW Fact-Finding Missions that did not include on-site inspections, the finding that the Douma incident was staged, based on a careful on-site inspection, should cast doubt on the findings of these earlier Missions.
In our last Briefing Note, we concluded by asserting that “It is doubtful whether [OPCW’s] reputation as an impartial monitor of compliance with the Chemical Weapons Convention can be restored without radical reform of its governance and working practices”. The new information we have removes all doubt that the organization has been hijacked at the top by France, UK and the US. We have no doubt that most OPCW staff continue to do their jobs professionally, and that some who are uneasy about the direction that the organization has taken nevertheless wish to protect its reputation. However what is at stake here is more than the reputation of the organization: the staged incident in Douma provoked a missile attack by the US, UK and France on 14 April 2018 that could have led to all-out war.
...
South Africa’s sixth election since the introduction of universal suffrage in 1994 takes place on May 8. It has been 25 years since the country cast off the moral abomination of apartheid. But the noble and worthy dreams that took flight in the era of Nelson Mandela have been crushed by reality. Indeed, the dreadful irony is that Afrikaner nationalists’ dire predictions about majority rule seem to have come true.
The country is in a parlous state: A recent Bloomberg report found that on a wide range of indicators, South Africa has done worse over the last five years than any other country in the world save those in a state of war. Corruption is rampant at every level, starting with the police. The power cuts that began in 2007 have gotten steadily worse. And although the government has managed to keep the lights on for the election campaign, the most optimistic forecast is another five years of intermittent supply. This in a country that, in 1994, had an oversupply of electricity at some of the cheapest rates in the world. Aggressive affirmative-action policies have seen the skilled and experienced whites who once ran the power stations dispersed around the world. In their place are many thousands more workers on higher salaries but without sufficient technical knowledge. Eskom, South Africa’s national power supplier, has a debt burden so large that it cannot even pay the interest on its debt, let alone the principal.
Unemployment, which stood at 3.7-million when the African National Congress (ANC) came to power in 1994, now stands at nearly 10-million, and recent data show that South Africa is the most unequal country in the world when it comes to income, consumption and wealth. To be sure, the architects of apartheid bequeathed a society that already was not only racist, but unequal. Yet the situation has become exacerbated by the rise of a vast, overpaid bureaucracy and a corrupt political elite. The program of state-mandated black “empowerment” requires that companies effectively give away equity to silent partners who have no function but to balance the racial books. Few companies are willing to invest on such terms, so even many fabulously rich mines have been closing down, with jobs being lost in the process. South Africa is now in its fifth consecutive year of falling real incomes.
Social unrest is rampant. More than 80 major public-works projects are stalled because they are besieged by local syndicates demanding a share of operating profits. A major cyclone hit the province of KwaZulu-Natal recently, killing 70. The response of local public-sector workers was to cut off water supplies to the wealthier suburbs and threaten electricity cuts, too, as a means to leverage the crisis to advance their own demands. The government, whose army and police force both have become ineffective in recent years, seems powerless to stop such behaviour, even if it wished to.
...
Another possible scenario is more apocalyptic. The downward spiral may be so pronounced that an increasingly desperate political elite will throw all blame on whites and Asians (who represent 9% and 2.5% of the country respectively), setting off the sort of full blown meltdown witnessed under Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. I am far from the first journalist to muse about this, and such fears have been motivating large-scale emigration by skilled and wealthy members of both communities for years.
Another cataclysmic scenario: The government will continue to lose control of the country, leading to a breakup of South Africa into its component regional parts. Frans Cronje, head of the liberal Institute of Race Relations, foresees a future in which a small white and black middle class will continue to live in a prosperous bubble in a few of the bigger cities; while the countryside is ruled by rapacious chiefs, and the rest of urban South Africa is run by murderous gangs. Some would argue that we aren’t far from that now.
Finally, it should be noted that while South Africa’s legacy of apartheid makes it unique, it is dealing with the same problem of uncontrolled migration that afflicts other, far wealthier nations. Border control has broken down, with the result that millions of Zimbabweans, Malawians, Congolese and others have flooded into a country that already doesn’t have enough jobs. Polls show that massive majorities say there are too many foreigners in the country, and some sporadic outbreaks of xenophobic violence have broken out. The government is desperately embarrassed by this situation, but has no means of effectual response. There is a terrible risk of truly catastrophic scenes of violence against new arrivals.
Needless to say, this is not the South Africa that Nelson Mandela and a happy world greeted with enthusiasm in 1994. It always was asking a lot of the ANC elite to step into the ruling role following generations of institutionalized white supremacy. But they have done far worse than anyone expected. If Ramaphosa has the nerve to seize the situation after the election, force through major reforms and start throwing his corrupt colleagues into jail, the situation could still conceivably be saved in the long run. But that is asking an awful lot of a 66-year-old man who still seems trapped within old-style African nationalist platitudes. The sad truth is that he seems more likely to preside over my country’s continued decline into poverty and chaos than avert it.
The US Government’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has decided to approve renewal of the license for the controversial glyphosate pesticide, this, despite mounting and alarming evidence it is not only probably carcinogenic, but also cause of multiple other debilitating health problems. New research also claims glyphosate damage to human or animal DNA extends over generations.
The US EPA has just proposed to re-approve glyphosate, the main component of the widely-used Roundup pesticide marketed by Monsanto, now part of Bayer AG of Germany. The original web link to the EPA ruling, strangely enough, yields the message as of this writing: “Sorry, but this web page is not available for viewing right now.”
This makes detailed critique a bit more difficult. However, certain facts can be stated. First, the specific part of EPA making the ruling, its Pesticide Regulatory Office, according to GMO watchdog website Sustainable Pulse, is long known for ruling in favor of the chemicals industry, even using industry data to approve. They maintain that that was also the case here, with the EPA relying heavily on industry tests, not their own or other independent studies. Many of those studies have been proven false or badly biased, including that of the European Union’s EFSA.
Second, the EPA body chose to dismiss the 2015 determination of the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), that determined glyphosate to be a “probable carcinogen,” a ruling that Monsanto has fiercely tried to deny despite mounting evidence.
Third, and most blatant, the latest EPA ruling ignored an earlier determination of another US Government body, the US Department of Health and Human Services’ Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry that agreed with the IARC that there was a link between glyphosate and certain types of cancer. On April 8, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), of the US Department of Health and Human Services, released its long-awaited draft toxicological report on glyphosate which among other findings determined evidence for a link between glyphosate and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, the form of cancer that resulted in two major court defeats for Monsanto in the last year and another 13,400 pending lawsuits that have severely damaged the stock price of Monsanto parent Bayer by a drop of 40% since the controversial Monsanto acquisition, and caused a recent shareholder revolt against management.
Future Generations Endangered
Now results of an alarming new study have been published. Researchers at Washington State University found that serious tumors and other disease showed up in second and third generation offspring of rats exposed to glyphosate. They found that diseases and health abnormalities including “prostate, kidney and ovarian diseases, obesity, and birth abnormalities seen in second and third generation offspring of rats exposed to glyphosate.” They were “correlated with changes in epigenetic (DNA methylation) patterns in sperm.” The study was headed by Prof. Michael Skinner, a WSU professor of biological sciences.
Skinner’s study found that there were “dramatic increases” in several pathologies in the second and third generations. The second generation had “significant increases” in testis, ovary and mammary gland diseases, as well as obesity. In third-generation males, the researchers saw a 30 percent increase in prostate disease – three times that of the control population. The third generation of females had a 40 percent increase in kidney disease, or four times that of the controls.
The new Skinner study is the first study published that examines what is called the “generational toxicology” of glyphosate. It tested doses of glyphosate below the dose of glyphosate officially classed as harmless. This is highly relevant as glyphosate, by far the world’s most widely used pesticide, is used in agriculture and plant cultivation yearly over decades, leading to human and animal exposure over generations.
The testing methodology used by EPA and recommended by the OECD ignores the generational effects except in a most limited manner, suggesting that major harmful effects are going unnoted by the relevant regulatory authorities. While the Skinner study has been criticized by the industry, it clearly suggests that the rules for EPA or EU and likely other national regulators to determine health and safety of pesticide chemical exposures are in urgent need of revision to examine long-term multi-generational potential effects. The core principle relevant here is the accepted “precautionary principle” that states that governments have a social responsibility to protect the public from exposure to harm, when scientific investigation has found a plausible risk until that risk has been definitely ruled out. With glyphosate that is clearly not the case that the health risks have been ruled out.
The Élysée used the fire of Notre-Dame de Paris to carry out a project that was sleeping in the boxes. It has set new rules, outside tender procedures and respect for heritage not to restore the cathedral, but to transform the Île de la Cité into Europe’s leading tourist’destination on the eve of the Olympic Games of 2024. To avoid judicial constraints, he arbitrarily imposed the hypothesis of a construction incident.
...
In terms of communication, there will probably be a before and after this fire: a majority of French was stunned by this disaster, and revolted by the arrogant indifference of his ruling class.
Immediately, the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron decided not to rebuild Notre Dame, but to realize a difficult project that had been waiting in drawers for two and a half years. In December 2015, a mission was sponsored by the President of the Republic, François Hollande, and the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo. It lasted a whole year while Emmanuel Macron was Minister of Economy, Industry and Digital. Many personalities participated, including Audrey Azoulay, then Minister of Culture and now Director of Unesco [1], or the Prefect Patrick Strzoda, then Chief of Staff to the Minister of Interior and today Emmanuel Macron. It was headed by the President of the National Monuments Center, Philippe Bélaval, and the architect Dominique Perrault.
Noting that the island of the City is, since its remodeling by Baron Haussmann in the nineteenth century, an administrative complex closed to the public, housing the Sainte-Chapelle and the Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris, the mission proposed to transform it into a "Island-monument". The opportunity is provided by the removal of the Palace of Justice, the reorganization of the Prefecture of Police and the hospital of the Hotel Dieu. It will indeed be possible to reorganize everything.
The mission has thus listed 35 coordinated projects, including the creation of underground traffic routes and the canopy of many interior courtyards, to make the island a must-drive for 14 million annual tourists and, possibly, French people. The report of the mission [2] evokes the incredible commercial value of this project, but does not say a word about the heritage value, particularly spiritual, of Sainte-Chapelle and Notre-Dame that it addresses exclusively as tourist sites, sources potential income.
Unfortunately this ambitious project could not, according to its authors, be realized quickly not so much because of the absence of financing as heavy administrative habits and enormous legal constraints. Although there are only a few people on the island, the slightest expropriation can last for decades. More surprisingly, the director of the National Monuments Center seemed to regret the prohibition to destroy part of the heritage to enhance another part. Etc.
In the hours that followed, it was obvious that very large funds would be offered by donors ranging from ordinary citizens to large fortunes. The objective of the Élysée was therefore to set up an authority capable of leading both the reconstruction of Notre-Dame and the transformation of the Ile de la Cité.
The next day, April 16, during a televised speech, President Macron declared: "So, yes, we will rebuild Notre-Dame Cathedral even more beautiful, and I want it to be completed within 5 years" [3]. Let’s forget the "I want" characteristic not of a Republican elected, but of a business leader. Five years is extremely short, especially considering the century and a half of the construction of the cathedral. However, it is the time necessary for the work to be completed in time for tourists from the 2024 Olympic Games. This was the date planned by the Bélaval-Perrault mission.
Two days later, on the 17th of April, the Council of Ministers was entirely devoted to the consequences of the fire. Three important decisions were recorded:
Another decision was made: to stifle any debate on the causes of the fire in order to avoid a judicial inquiry disturbing this beautiful arrangement.
Immediately, the new prosecutor of the Republic of Paris, Rémy Heitz, appointed by personal intervention Emmanuel Macron, ensures that the criminal track is not privileged and that the fire is related to a construction site accident.
This insurance provokes an outcry from the site’s experts, firefighters, craftsmen and architects, for whom no worksite element was able to cause such a fire, at this place and at this speed.
The insistence of the Prosecutor and that of the Prefect of Police, Didier Lallement, to take a stand at a time when no investigator had been able to visit the scene of the fire attests to the development of an official version which does not constrain to long investigations blocking the site. It also feeds the interrogations on the arbitrarily dismissed track, that of an anti-Christian or anti-religious act, especially in the context of the vandalism against the churches (878 profanations in 2017), the voluntary fire of the Saint church -Sulpice on March 17, or even the fire of Al-Marwani mosque on the Al-Aqsa esplanade in Jerusalem.
In addition, knowing that the majority of large fires occur in the context of real estate projects, the hypothesis of a voluntary act to allow the transformation of the Ile de la Cité must be examined. These questions are all legitimate, but in the absence of investigation no definitive answer is.
Certainly, the goal of President Macron is commendable, but his method is very strange. While it is not possible to launch such a project without changing the rules of law, but if the appointment of a senior general officer is a guarantee of effectiveness, it is not a matter of respect for the law.
In recent days Sweden’s largest mortgage bank, Swedbank, fired its CEO amid charges she was involved in a multi-billion dollar money laundering operation. Swedbank now joins Denmark’s largest bank, Danske Bank, and several other European Union banks implicated in laundering what has been claimed amounts to more than $1 trillion in funds of Russian or Ukraine or other origin in recent years. As impressive as the scandal appears, equally interesting is the curious man triggering the scandals.
On March 28 Swedbank AB fired its CEO, Birgitte Bonnesen, amid allegations she was complicit in a conspiracy to launder billions of dollars in money from former Soviet Union states via Swedbank’s Estonia branch. At present Swedish SVT television reports suggest the mortgage bank laundered as much as 20 billion euros ($23 billion) in questionable funds each year, between 2010 and 2016 in Estonia, which, if true, would total some $140 billion. Swedbank allegedly also misled US authorities on its suspicious customer activities. Reportedly the Swedbank Estonia violations are tied to the even more dramatic allegations that Denmark’s largest bank, Danske Bank, laundered an eye-popping $230 billion via its Estonia operation. Bonnesen was in charge of Swedbank’s Baltic banking operations from 2011-2014.
Among those allegedly using the Baltic branch of Swedbank was former Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovytch, ousted in a CIA coup in February 2014 facilitated by Obama State Department official Viktoria Nuland. Another client was reportedly the Russian industrial oligarch, Iskandar Makhmudov, who made his fortune during the Yeltsin years in the “rape of Russia” plunder of Soviet state companies.
The curious whistleblower
The person by all reports responsible for blowing the whistle on what he says is criminal money laundering of funds of Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs by Swedbank, Danske Bank and allegations that Deutsche Bank and other EU banks were also involved, is an American-born British citizen named Bill Browder.
Browder is notorious as a bitter enemy of Russia’s Putin. He has charged Putin’s police of murdering a business associate of Browder, Sergei Magnitsky, Browder’s accountant, in a Russian jail, charges never proven. It was enough however, for the well-connected Browder to get the influential backing of US Senator John McCain to pass the Magnitsky Act of 2012. Today the act has been broadened to apply globally, authorizing the US government to sanction those who it sees as human rights offenders, freezing their assets, and banning them from entering the US.
Putin’s government had charged Browder with theft of $230 million in tax money, after Russian authorities banned Browder and seized his Hermitage Capital hedge fund in Russia. As investigators have pointed out, far from wanting him dead, Magnitsky, as accountant for Browder, was the key state witness for Russia against Browder. The McCain-backed Magnitsky Act gave the US Government unprecedented powers to sanction individuals and companies in the name of “punishing rogue, evil regimes who torture innocents.” The Magnitsky Act paved the way to the Cyprus confiscation of Russian deposits, to post-Crimean US sanctions and beyond. Browder’s Magnitsky games are still very active today.
...
On Sunday an Ethiopian Airlines flight crashed, killing all on board. Five month earlier an Indonesian Lion Air jet crashed near Jakarta. All crew and passengers died. Both airplanes were Boeing 737-8 MAX. Both incidents happened shortly after take off. Boeing 737 MAX aircraft are now grounded about everywhere except in the United States. That this move follows only now is sad. After the first crash it was already obvious that the plane is not safe to fly.
The Boeing 737 and the Airbus 320 types are single aisle planes with some 150 seats. Both are bread and butter planes sold by the hundreds with a good profit. In 2010 Airbus decided to offer its A-320 with a New Engine Option (NEO) which uses less fuel. To counter the Airbus move Boeing had to follow up. The 737 would also get new engines for a more efficient flight and longer range. The new engines on the 737 MAX are bigger and needed to be placed a bit different than on the older version. That again changed the flight characteristics of the plane by giving it a nose up attitude.
The new flight characteristic of the 737 MAX would have require a retraining of the pilots. But Boeing's marketing people had told their customers all along that the 737 MAX would not require extensive new training. Instead of expensive simulator training for the new type experienced 737 pilots would only have to read some documentation about the changes between the old and the new versions.
To make that viable Boeing's engineers had to use a little trick. They added a 'maneuver characteristics augmentation system' (MCAS) that pitches the nose of the plane down if a sensor detects a too high angle of attack (AoA) that might lead to a stall. That made the flight characteristic of the new 737 version similar to the old one.
But the engineers screwed up: The 737 MAX has two flight control computers. Each is connected to only one of the two angle of attack sensors. During a flight only one of two computer runs the MCAS control. If it detects a too high angle of attack it trims the horizontal stabilizer down for some 10 seconds. It then waits for 5 seconds and reads the sensor again. If the sensor continues to show a too high angle of attack it again trims the stabilizer to pitch the plane's nose done.
MCSA is independent of the autopilot. It is even active in manual flight. There is a procedure to deactivate it but it takes some time.
One of the angle of attack sensors on the Indonesian flight was faulty. Unfortunately it was the one connected to the computer that ran the MCAS on that flight. Shortly after take off the sensor signaled a too high angle of attack even as the plane was flying in a normal climb. The MCAS engaged and put the planes nose down. The pilots reacted by disabling the autopilot and pulling the control stick back. The MCAS engaged again pitching the plane further down. The pilots again pulled the stick. This happened some 12 times in a row before the plane crashed into the sea.
To implement a security relevant automatism that depends on only one sensor is extremely bad design. To have a flight control automatism engaged even when the pilot flies manually is also a bad choice. But the real criminality was that Boeing hid the feature.
Neither the airlines that bought the planes nor the pilots who flew it were told about MCAS. They did not know that it exists. They were not aware of an automatic system that controlled the stabilizer even when the autopilot was off. They had no idea how it could be deactivated.
Nine days after the Indonesian Lion Air Flight 610 ended in a deadly crash, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued an Emergency Airworthiness Directive. The 737 MAX pilots were aghast. The APA pilot union sent a letter to its members:
“This is the first description you, as 737 pilots, have seen. It is not in the AA 737 Flight Manual Part 2, nor is there a description in the Boeing FCOM (flight crew operations manual),” says the letter from the pilots’ union safety committee. “Awareness is the key with all safety issues.”
The Ethiopian Airlines plane that crashed went down in a similar flight profile as the Indonesian plane. It is highly likely that MCAS is the cause of both incidents. While the pilots of the Ethiopian plane were aware of the MCAS system they might have had too little time to turn it off. The flight recorders have been recovered and will tell the full story.
Boeing has sold nearly 5,000 of the 737 MAX. So far some 380 have been delivered. Most of these are now grounded. Some family members of people who died on the Indonesian flight are suing Boeing. Others will follow. But Boeing is not the only one who is at fault. The FAA certifies all new planes and their documentation. I was for some time marginally involved in Airbus certification issues. It is an extremely detailed process that has to be followed by the letter. Hundreds of people are full time engaged for years to certify a modern jet. Every tiny screw and even the smallest design details of the hardware and software have to be documented and certified.
How or why did the FAA agree to accept the 737 MAX with the badly designed MCAS? How could the FAA allow that MCAS was left out of the documentation? What steps were taken after the Indonesian flight crashed into the sea?
Up to now the FAA was a highly regarded certification agency. Other countries followed its judgment and accepted the certifications the FAA issued. That most of the world now grounded the 737 MAX while it still flies in the States is a sign that this view is changing. The FAA's certifications of Boeing airplanes are now in doubt.
Today Boeing's share price dropped some 7.5%. I doubt that it is enough to reflect the liability issues at hand. Every airline that now had to ground its planes will ask for compensation. More than 330 people died and their families deserve redress. Orders for 737 MAX will be canceled as passengers will avoid that type.
Boeing will fix the MCAS problem by using more sensors or by otherwise changing the procedures. But the bigger issue for the U.S. aircraft industry might be the damage done to the FAA's reputation. If the FAA is internationally seen as a lobbying agency for the U.S. airline industry it will no longer be trusted and the industry will suffer from it. It will have to run future certification processes through a jungle of foreign agencies.
Congress should take up the FAA issue and ask why it failed.
Between 2001 and 2011 the Canadian construction and engineering company SNC-Lavalin bribed officials in Libya with tens of millions to get contracts in that country. In 2015 the company was charged by the Public Prosecution Service of Canada. It tried to avoid a trial and argued instead for a negotiated settlement since it had cleaned shop by changing its chief executive officer.
In 2016, SNC-Lavalin admitted that some former executives had illegally arranged donations of more than C$80,000 to Trudeau's Liberal Party from 2004 to 2011.
The company had revenues of some C$10 billion in 2018. Some 9,000 of its 52,000 employees work in Canada. The headquarter and 3,400 of its employees are in the province of Quebec where the Liberals need to pick up votes in October's federal election to keep their majority.
It was the task of the Justice Minister and Attorney General, Jody Wilson-Raybould, to decide if the case should go on trial as the law demands, or if it could be settled out of court. A trial would likely end with SNC-Lavalin banned from all public contracts in Canada for 10 years. It would cost jobs and votes.
The company lobbied the Liberal government which brought in a remediation agreement regime in 2018 as part of a massive budget bill.
During the fall of 2018 Trudeau and his allies tried to press the attorney general, a Canadian aboriginal, to overturn the decision of the director of public prosecutions, to apply the new law and to thereby drop the criminal charges against SNC. She would not do that. In January Trudeau fired her from the justice minister and attorney general job and gave her a minor position as veteran's minister. Under solicitor-client privilege and cabinet confidences Wilson-Raybould could not speak out about the issue.
On February 7 the scandal leaked from anonymous sources. Five days later Wilson-Raybould resigned as veterans minister. She hired a retired Supreme Court judge as her lawyer, to advise her on what she could say. On February 18 Gerald Butts, Trudeau's friend and principle secretary, was made the fall guy. He resigned even while he denied that he tried to influence the attorney general. Under pressure, the House of Commons Justice Committee invited Wilson-Raybould to testify. Trudeau had to wave some privilege which allowed her to finally speak out about her time as attorney general.
Yesterday Wilson-Raybould testified.

From her long opening statement:
For a period of approximately four months between September and December 2018, I experienced a consistent and sustained effort by many people within the government to seek to politically interfere in the exercise of prosecutorial discretion in my role as the Attorney General of Canada in an inappropriate effort to secure a Deferred Prosecution Agreement with SNC-Lavalin. These events involved 11 people (excluding myself and my political staff) – from the Prime Minister’s Office, the Privy Council Office, and the Office of the Minister of Finance. This included in-person conversations, telephone calls, emails, and text messages. There were approximately 10 phone calls and 10 meetings specifically about SNC-Lavalin that I and/or my staff was a part of.
Wilson-Raybould gave all the details: who, when, where and how. There is a paper trail. She made detailed notes of everything that happened.
Pressuring the AG to drop charges can be a offense under Canada's criminal code (pdf), section 139(2):
Every one who wilfully attempts in any manner other than a manner. described in subsection (1) to obstruct,pervert or defeat the course of justice is guilty of an in-dictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding ten years.
During her testimony Wilson-Raybould noted that she was not yet allowed to speak out about what happened after she was fired as attorney general. There is likely more to come from her. She says that she believes that no law was broken but that Trudeau behaved inappropriately. A jury and court may see that differently.
The context is one of the CFPB’s most important and useful anti-predatory lending rules by payday lenders. Payday lenders often charge working class Americans interest rates well above 100 percent. (In Missouri, a hotbed of predation, they can charge more than 500 percent.) The ‘sweet spot’ for payday lenders is borrowers who will be unable to repay promptly the initial loan (with an obscene, but vastly lower initial interest rate). This sets off a cycle of additional borrowing and extending of payday loans that places the borrower into a debt spiral that frequently results in bankruptcy. Payday lenders, who exist to predate on customers, make their extraordinary profits largely from borrowers who cannot repay the initial payday loan when it comes due, but have some income and will continue to reborrow and attempt to repay for months. Predatory payday lenders optimize by finding this ‘sweet spot’ of those who have enough income and a compelling intent to repay – but not enough income to pay off the entire series of loans.
Kate Berry’s article reports that Kathy Kraninger, Trump’s new CFPB head (with no experience in consumer financial protection), intends to junk the CFPB rule provisions requiring that payday lenders underwrite their loans by documenting the borrower’s ability to repay the loan when due. She also intends to act to protect the predators’ ‘sweet spot.’ Berry reports that Kraninger also intends to optimize the predators’ ‘sweet spot.’
The latest proposal also is expected to rescind limits that the rule placed on repeat reborrowings by a single consumer; the CFPB’s data shows that payday lenders rely on reborrowings as a major source of revenue.
The two points, capacity and reborrowing, are predatory kissing-cousins. Predatory lenders’ targets reborrow because they lack the capacity to repay the initial loan when it comes due.
Predation and Fraud in the GFC Based on Not Documenting Capacity to Repay
This ‘sweet spot’ strategy is a signature of predatory lending because it optimizes the CEO’s ‘take’ from ‘control fraud’ and predation. “Exploding rate ARMs” were a common late-game strategy in the run-up to the Great Financial Crisis (GFC). An exploding rate ARM was an adjustable rate mortgage with a monthly payment so low that it did not even pay the interest currently due on the mortgage. (In jargon, it was “negatively amortizing.”) This meant that the principal amount of the mortgage debt increased every month. The mortgage contract provided that after three-to-five years (sooner had there been high inflation) the monthly mortgage payment would ‘reset’ (adjust upward) – often doubling the monthly payment. The lenders’ CEOs understood, of course, that this would cause loan defaults and foreclosures to reach tsunami levels.
The defaults were particularly high because the predatory lenders consistently ‘qualified’ the borrower as (purportedly) having sufficient income to repay the loan based on the initial monthly payment – not the 2X reset payment. Indeed, many of them purported to ‘qualify’ the borrower based on a ‘teaser’ interest rate (that last only for one month or three months). The teaser rate produced an initial monthly payment that was exceptionally low. The lenders’ CEOs gamed the ‘qualifying’ standard for the sole purpose of making it appear that borrowers who typically lacked the income to repay the ‘fully indexed’ interest rate had the ability to do so.
Why did the predatory CEOs make exploding rate ARMs their most common mortgage product as the housing bubble was fast approaching its peak? First, it let them loan to millions more people who could not afford to repay their loans – and disguised that fact. Extremely fast growth is the first ‘ingredient’ in the ‘recipe’ for ‘accounting control fraud.’ (See my many columns if this point is new to you).
Second, it slowed down defaults, which is critical to lengthening the ‘sweet spot’ strategy’s period of success. Paying one-half the ‘fully indexed’ monthly payment is obviously far easier, particularly for borrowers with modest incomes. As long as the loan does not default, the accounting alchemy I describe next continues.
Third, accounting is nearly always the ‘secret sauce’ in financial fraud and predation ‘recipes.’ The predatory exploding rate ARM lending CEOs’ were invariably able to suborn top tier audit partners to allow the lender to book currently as income payable the fully indexed (i.e., 2X) interest rate the borrower was contractually committed to paying (eventually). Of course, given the immense defaults certain on exploding rate ARMs as soon as the bubble stalled, the borrowers would frequently have no ability to pay the monthly payment when the interest rate doubled. Lenders called this ‘phantom interest’ because they got to treat it for GAAP accounting purposes as current income even though they frequently would never receive the additional cash from the borrowers when they defaulted in droves when their monthly payments doubled. Phantom interest became massive – producing tens of billions of dollars in largely phony income to predatory lenders – and billions of dollars in real bonuses to bank officers.
Fourth, the predatory exploding rate ARM loans typically had a substantial ‘prepayment penalty’ (very unusual for U.S. home mortgages) that the CEOs designed to lock in victims of their predation. Americans can usually get out of mortgage agreements in which they have agreed to pay too high a rate of interest by refinancing their mortgage without any prepayment penalty. The CEOs of the predatory lenders foreclosed that option (pun intended) so that they could maintain their accounting magic.
Similarly, the CEOs of fraudulent lenders used ‘liar’s’ loans as one of their two primary loan origination fraud strategies. (The other was fraudulently inflated appraisals. The Trump administration is aggressively making finance more criminogenic by reducing appraisal requirements.) Fraudulent CEOs designed liar’s loans to make loans to people who lack the actual capacity (income) to repay the loan while providing a fig leaf of fictional capacity through false ‘stated income.’ Recall that investigators concur that it was the lenders’ officials and their agents that put the lies in liar’s loans.
It has become increasingly common in recent years for universities to contract out their international recruitment efforts to private companies. These companies also often provide a pre-college set of courses designed to get them ready for undergraduate or graduate studies. These “pathway” or “accelerator” programs have come under scrutiny from Inside Higher Ed, the Associated Press, and others over tuition-sharing arrangements.
The University of Kansas’s partnership with Shorelight was one of that company’s first two ever. It began its “accelerator” program in the fall of 2014, and curriculum was decided upon jointly between the company and the university. I taught two of these courses as a masters student. These teaching roles come with considerably more responsibility than a graduate assistant generally has: we teach every class, we assign grades, and so on.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this, and at first I found it very exciting. I think college students at all levels would benefit from being given more responsibility. Most people thrive when given responsibility, and even the failures are usually instructive. Here was a program that was really doing it. I may not have ever taught before, but I had been an editor for five years before coming to grad school, I thought, of course I could help these students with their writing.
I have since come to believe that the reasons for this system have less to do with injecting a little disruptive energy into a moribund academy and more to do with deflecting accountability for the program’s shortcomings. An accelerator program offers to help the university acquire (part of) another year’s worth of pre-college tuition from lucrative international students. Participating academic departments receive a handful of graduate appointments to hand out. Searchlight takes a 50 percent cut as long as students are in the program, which drops to 10 percent when they enter normal classes. Thus there is an incentive, from the university’s perspective, to run students through it, regardless of their level of preparedness. The CEO of Shorelight says 90 percent of their students at KU proceed from their first to their second year, but that is sort of begging the question.
My first course was An Introduction to American Studies, which used films to introduce students to key concepts in the field. It was my first semester teaching and, by a stroke of luck, only five students had signed up for my class. All of them were Chinese. To get a sense of the average student that comprises the boom of Chinese matriculation at American universities, you have to understand a few things. For the most part these are not the entitled children of some high-level party functionary. Those kids are at Oxford or Yale. These are the children of the new Chinese middle class. They come from families that, ten or fifteen years ago, would not have been able to send their children to a university at all. But today, like any family would, they are spending their newfound disposable income on their children.
While I had some flexibility to add or skip certain movies, the curriculum, down to the lecture slides, had been written for me. In the course of the semester, we would take the enormous, world-shaping corpus of American film and feed it through the leftist salami slicer: race, class, sexuality, gender, ability (notably not religion). One film would be assigned to each identity category: Salt of the Earth for Latinos, Karate Kid for Asians, Some Like it Hot for alternative sexualities, and so on.
It occurred to me very early on that this is not the best way to introduce students to film, but that of course is not the point. The course fulfills a core requirement to teach students how to “respect human diversity and expand cultural understanding and global awareness.” We aren’t here to study anything so jejeune as movies. Movies are merely the tortilla chip meant to bear the warm gooey dollop of cultural leftist queso. They’re the delivery vehicle.
....
It’s ironic, given the current debates about Chinese trade, that one of the few sectors where the balance is in our favor is higher education, an enterprise that could not be more antithetical to our protectionist president.
There are probably strategic motives behind a certain amount of Chinese enrollment in American universities; the genuine espionage issues at American universities are evidence enough of that. But the vast majority of Chinese students are here for the same reasons the rest of us dopes are: that we decided, against all evidence, that higher education was a product that was worth buying at the absurdly inflated price at which it is now sold. We value it not because of skills we may learn, but because a degree will give us access to a certain tier of jobs. We buy the product, despite its defects, and the expectation that if you want to work in the ruling class, you have to talk like them. And what could be more baizuo than that?
[Read it all, don't forget the comments]