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WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange isn’t mentally ill and his psychological problems are solely the result of the abuse he suffers in isolation, Nils Melzer, the UN special rapporteur on torture, has told RT’s Going Underground.
It would be a “tragedy” if Assange died in London’s Belmarsh maximum security prison due to his poor health, Melzer replied when asked about such an unsettling scenario by host Afshin Rattansi.
If he should die in prison he’s effectively been tortured to death. That’s the reality of it, and I’m not exaggerating.
The official said he had visited Assange behind bars in May 2019 together with a team of medical experts and “we all independently from each other came to this conclusion at that time that his life was in danger.” The publisher’s mental and physical condition has entered a “downward spiral” since then, he added.
The WikiLeaks co-founder has been held in Belmarsh since April 2019 over breach of bail. Before that, the 50-year-old spent seven years holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in the British capital, where he sought refuge after an arrest warrant was issued over sexual assault allegations that he had always denied. The investigation against him was eventually dropped due to a lack of evidence. Assange’s supporters insisted he was actually being persecuted over his legitimate journalistic activities.
He is wanted in the US on espionage charges over the release of classified documents, including ones on Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, by WikiLeaks. He could face up to 175 years behind bars if he’s extradited to America, despite the fact that the key witness in the case was revealed to have fabricated his claims.
In early 2021, a British judge turned down Washington’s extradition request, citing Assange’s poor health and a risk of suicide. The US’ appeal against the ruling was heard in the UK High Court earlier this week, with no immediate ruling being announced.
“Julian Assange is not mentally ill… He’s a very resilient, intelligent man. He doesn’t belong to a mental institution, right? So, if he has mental issues now it’s because of the abuse that he had suffered,” Melzer insisted.
“Grave medical harm has been caused to him in the last decade through constant isolation” and other abusive means, he said, adding that the WikiLeaks co-founder now suffers from “constant anxiety.”
The UN official slammed the UK prison authorities for the way they have treated the publisher. “You can’t get someone to recover from torture by continuing to torture him. And that’s exactly what they do. They isolate him; they keep him in this limbo,” he argued.
Melzer reiterated that there were no grounds to hold Assange at a maximum security prison, as he’s currently not serving any sentence and not facing actual criminal charges. “Even if we presume for the purpose of the argument that the extradition is legitimate and we have to somehow secure his presence, he can be in house arrest,” the rapporteur argued, adding that the WikiLeaks co-founder is being “isolated absolutely unnecessary and therefore unlawfully.”
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The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has amended its injury recording rule in a way that will hide the true extent of the damage that the COVID jab mandate will have on the American workforce
According to OSHA rules, employers must record and report work-related illnesses, injuries and fatalities. This recording requirement initially also applied to adverse reactions suffered by employees who had to get the COVID shot as a requirement for employment. This rule was changed in late May 2021
OSHA will not enforce the recording requirement if the injury or fatality involves the COVID jab, even if required for employment. The nonenforcement will remain through May 2022. With this change, OSHA is covering up vaccine injuries — and hindering workers from seeking workers’ compensation
Meanwhile, federal employees required to get the COVID jab will be eligible for compensation for injuries through the Federal Employee’s Compensation Act (FECA)
Having large numbers of injury reports can raise a company’s insurance costs. However, if OSHA is going to require all employers with 100 or more employees to implement vaccine mandates, then companies will be in the same boat and none will be at a particular disadvantage, so OSHA really needs to change its recordability guidance back
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As reported by Kim Iversen, around the world people are gathering for massive protests against COVID shot mandates. In mid-September 2021, Italy became the first European country to announce the implementation of mandatory COVID-19 health passes (so-called “Green Pass”) for all workers, both public and private.
The Italian mandate took effect October 15, 2021. Residents have been protesting in the streets for months on end and there’s no sign of them letting up. Demonstrations are also taking place in The Netherlands, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Greece, Romania, Slovenia, Australia and France.
Even in Israel, mass protests are now taking place as it was announced Israeli’s will lose their health pass privileges unless they get a third booster shot six months after their second dose. New York City has also seen large protests in the wake of its vaccine requirement for restaurants and other public venues.
Leaders Turn a Blind Eye
Yet, despite massive protests, the push for vaccine mandates and vaccine passports that will create a two-tier society continue unabated. With few exceptions, world leaders are simply turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to the fact that their residents want nothing to do with their new world order.
At the same time, government agencies charged with keeping us safe are doing the complete opposite. That includes the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which President Biden has placed in charge of enforcing his unconstitutional edict that private companies with 100 employees or more must make COVID “vaccination” a requirement for employment or face fines of as much as $700,000 per incidence.1
OSHA will issue the mandate for employers as an emergency temporary standard (ETS), but as of this writing, no official mandate has actually been issued.
According to an October 18, 2021, report by PJ Media,2 OSHA has sent a draft to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for review. Since it’s being issued as an ETS, there will be no public comment period.
Once the OMB review is finalized, the vaccination rule will be published. Only then will the mandate actually go into effect. That said, OSHA has already amended an already existing rule in a way that will hide the true extent of the damage that this mandate will have on the American workforce.
OSHA Rule Change Covers Up Vaccine Injuries
According to OSHA rules (29 CFR 19043), employers must record and report work-related illnesses, injuries and fatalities, whether the employer was at fault or not. As reported May 26, 2021, by employment law firm Ogletree Deakins,4 this recording requirement initially also applied to adverse reactions suffered by employees who had to get the COVID shot as a requirement for employment.
The original guidance stated that employers were required to record an employee’s adverse reaction to the COVID jab if the shot was a) work-related, 2) a new case under 29 C.F.R. 1904.6 and 3) met one or more OSHA general recording criteria set out in 29 C.F.R. 1904.7. OSHA specified that an adverse reaction to the jab would be considered “work-related” if the shot was required for employment.
Then, in late May 2021, OSHA suddenly revoked this guidance, saying it will not enforce the recording requirement if the injury or fatality involves the COVID jab, even if required for employment. The nonenforcement will remain in place through May 2022, at which time the agency will reevaluate its position.
Why would they remove the requirement to record and report vaccine injuries incurred as a result of a vaccine mandate? According to OSHA, the agency is “working diligently to encourage COVID-19 vaccinations,” “does not wish to have any appearance of discouraging workers from receiving COVID-19 vaccination, and also does not wish to disincentivize employers’ vaccination efforts.”5,6As reported by Ogletree Deakins:7
“There is no doubt that OSHA’s guidance created a disincentive for employers to mandate that their employees get vaccinated. With a mandatory vaccination policy, the guidance ensured that employees’ adverse reactions (with arguably little correlation to actual work-related injuries) could end up on a company’s OSHA recordkeeping logs — which could, in turn, negatively affect its insurance rates and, in some industries, its ability to bid for work.”
What Ogletree fails to address is that by not enforcing this recording requirement for COVID jab injuries, OSHA is intentionally covering up the ramifications these vaccine mandates might have on employees’ health. Meanwhile, employers are still required to record and report COVID-19 infections and COVID-19 deaths among their employees.
Federal Employees Get Special Treatment
In related news, federal employees must be fully “vaccinated” by November 22, 2021, or face the unemployment line. While coercion of this nature is abhorrent under any circumstance, federal employees at least get special treatment if they’re injured by the required jab. As reported by Stacey Lennox for PJ Media:8
“… October 1, 2021, the Federal Employee’s Compensation Act (FECA) issued a bulletin regarding coverage for vaccine injuries.9 FECA did not traditionally cover preventative measures and any resulting illness or injury. As of September 9, 2021, when President Biden announced the federal mandate, adverse reactions to COVID-19 vaccination are covered.”
As indicated in FECA Bulletin No. 22-01, dated October 1, 2021:10
“… this executive order now makes COVID-19 vaccination a requirement of most Federal employment. As such, employees impacted by this mandate who receive required COVID-19 vaccinations on or after the date of the executive order may be afforded coverage under the FECA for any adverse reactions to the vaccine itself, and for any injuries sustained while obtaining the vaccination.”
“This bulletin is an interesting turn of events given previous OSHA guidance to private employers,” Lennox writes.11 Indeed, while OSHA is selectively choosing to hide the vaccine injuries of private employees, federal employees will have access to financial compensation for their vaccine injuries, over and above the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Act (CICP).12
Who Will Pay for Private Employees Injured by the Jabs?
On the whole, it’s clear that private employees will be at a distinct disadvantage in terms of compensation. If their employer requires them to get the jab to keep their job, and they get injured by it, the only recourse they have is to file a CICP claim, which is near-impossible to get. By not requiring companies to record vaccine injuries, it effectively shuts down the path for an employee to seek worker’s compensation if they’re injured by a mandated COVID jab.
“While OSHA recordability does not govern worker’s compensation, after managing both for several employers, I have never seen a compensable injury that is not OSHA recordable,”Lennox writes.13
As for CICP, in its 15-year history, it has paid out fewer than 1 in 10 claims.14,15,16 It also offers rather limited help, as you first have to exhaust your personal insurance before it kicks in to pay the difference.
Even if they can get it, CICP awards are likely to be a drop in the bucket for most people. The average award is $200,000, and compensation for fatalities are capped at $370,376.17 Meanwhile, you can easily rack up a $1 million hospital bill if you suffer a serious thrombotic event.18
Perhaps most egregious of all, it’s your responsibility to prove your injury was the “direct result of the countermeasure’s administration based on compelling, reliable, valid, medical and scientific evidence beyond mere temporal association.”
In other words, you basically have to prove what the vaccine developer itself has yet to ascertain, seeing how you are part of their still-ongoing study. You must also pay for your own legal help and any professional witnesses you may need to support your claim.
Union Workers Now Have Another Bargaining Chip
The fact that federal workers who are injured by the mandated COVID jabs will be covered by FICA now gives unionized employees a new bargaining chip though. As noted by Lennox:19
“Without the OSHA ETS, unions would have bargained about having a vaccine mandate as a term or condition of employment at all. Now, unions should still have an opportunity for effects bargaining to ensure their members are covered if they sustain a vaccine injury.”
Recordability Guidance Must Be Changed Back
As mentioned earlier, the OSHA requirement to record vaccine injuries was scrapped because it disincentivized employers to mandate the shot. Having large numbers of injury reports can raise a company’s insurance costs. However, if OSHA is now going to require all employers with 100 or more employees to implement vaccine mandates, then most companies will be in the same boat.
Since no employer will be at a particular disadvantage, OSHA really needs to change its recordability guidance back, Lennox says, adding:20
“Private sector employees deserve the same protection as federal employees in the face of mandatory vaccines. The mandates will put a severe risk between them and their ability to earn a living for some people.
If they [employers] cave, they should be liable just as every taxpayer is now liable for a vaccine injury to a federal employee. If employers don’t want the liability, they should fight the mandate.”
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November 3rd, 2021 by COVID-19 Mental Disorders Collaborators
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Important study on the impacts of the Covid-19 Crisis on Mental Health. Emphasis added by Global Research
Highlights
“In this study, we estimated a substantial increase in the prevalence and burden of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is, to our knowledge, the first study to systematically identify and analyse population mental health survey data and quantify the resulting impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the prevalence of these two disorders by location, age, and sex in 2020.
Increases in the prevalence of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders during 2020 were both associated with increasing SARS-CoV-2 infection rates and decreasing human mobility. These two COVID-19 impact indicators incorporated the combined effects of the spread of the virus, lockdowns, stay-at-home orders, decreased public transport, school and business closures, and decreased social interactions, among other factors. We estimated that countries hit hardest by the pandemic during 2020 had the greatest increases in prevalence of these disorders.”
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Summary
Background
Before 2020, mental disorders were leading causes of the global health-related burden, with depressive and anxiety disorders being leading contributors to this burden. The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic has created an environment where many determinants of poor mental health are exacerbated. The need for up-to-date information on the mental health impacts of COVID-19 in a way that informs health system responses is imperative. In this study, we aimed to quantify the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the prevalence and burden of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders globally in 2020.
Methods
We conducted a systematic review of data reporting the prevalence of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders during the COVID-19 pandemic and published between Jan 1, 2020, and Jan 29, 2021. We searched PubMed, Google Scholar, preprint servers, grey literature sources, and consulted experts. Eligible studies reported prevalence of depressive or anxiety disorders that were representative of the general population during the COVID-19 pandemic and had a pre-pandemic baseline. We used the assembled data in a meta-regression to estimate change in the prevalence of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders between pre-pandemic and mid-pandemic (using periods as defined by each study) via COVID-19 impact indicators (human mobility, daily SARS-CoV-2 infection rate, and daily excess mortality rate). We then used this model to estimate the change from pre-pandemic prevalence (estimated using Disease Modelling Meta-Regression version 2.1 [known as DisMod-MR 2.1]) by age, sex, and location. We used final prevalence estimates and disability weights to estimate years lived with disability and disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) for major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders.
Findings
We identified 5683 unique data sources, of which 48 met inclusion criteria (46 studies met criteria for major depressive disorder and 27 for anxiety disorders). Two COVID-19 impact indicators, specifically daily SARS-CoV-2 infection rates and reductions in human mobility, were associated with increased prevalence of major depressive disorder (regression coefficient [B] 0·9 [95% uncertainty interval 0·1 to 1·8; p=0·029] for human mobility, 18·1 [7·9 to 28·3; p=0·0005] for daily SARS-CoV-2 infection) and anxiety disorders (0·9 [0·1 to 1·7; p=0·022] and 13·8 [10·7 to 17·0; p<0·0001].
Females were affected more by the pandemic than males (B 0·1 [0·1 to 0·2; p=0·0001] for major depressive disorder, 0·1 [0·1 to 0·2; p=0·0001] for anxiety disorders) and younger age groups were more affected than older age groups (−0·007 [–0·009 to −0·006; p=0·0001] for major depressive disorder, −0·003 [–0·005 to −0·002; p=0·0001] for anxiety disorders). We estimated that the locations hit hardest by the pandemic in 2020, as measured with decreased human mobility and daily SARS-CoV-2 infection rate, had the greatest increases in prevalence of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders. We estimated an additional 53·2 million (44·8 to 62·9) cases of major depressive disorder globally (an increase of 27·6% [25·1 to 30·3]) due to the COVID-19 pandemic, such that the total prevalence was 3152·9 cases (2722·5 to 3654·5) per 100 000 population. We also estimated an additional 76·2 million (64·3 to 90·6) cases of anxiety disorders globally (an increase of 25·6% [23·2 to 28·0]), such that the total prevalence was 4802·4 cases (4108·2 to 5588·6) per 100 000 population. Altogether, major depressive disorder caused 49·4 million (33·6 to 68·7) DALYs and anxiety disorders caused 44·5 million (30·2 to 62·5) DALYs globally in 2020.
Interpretation
This pandemic has created an increased urgency to strengthen mental health systems in most countries. Mitigation strategies could incorporate ways to promote mental wellbeing and target determinants of poor mental health and interventions to treat those with a mental disorder. Taking no action to address the burden of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders should not be an option.
Funding
Queensland Health, National Health and Medical Research Council, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
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Introduction
Mental disorders are among the leading causes of the global health-related burden. The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) 2019 showed that the two most disabling mental disorders were depressive and anxiety disorders, both ranked among the top 25 leading causes of burden worldwide in 2019.1, 2 This burden was high across the entire lifespan, for both sexes, and across many locations.2 Perhaps more importantly, no reduction in the global prevalence or burden was detected for either disorder since 1990, despite compelling evidence of interventions that reduce their impact.3
The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 against this backdrop has raised many questions around the resulting effects on mental health via its direct psychological effects and long-term economic and social consequences.4 COVID-19 continues to spread across most of the world’s populations1,2 with significant health consequences and mortality among those who become infected.5In addition to the direct effects of COVID-19, the pandemic has created an environment in which many determinants of mental health are also affected. Social restrictions, lockdowns, school and business closures, loss of livelihood, decreases in economic activity, and shifting priorities of governments in their attempt to control COVID-19 outbreaks all have the potential to substantially affect the mental health of the population. The need for up-to-date information on the global prevalence and burden of mental disorders incorporating the mental health impacts of COVID-19 in a way that informs health system responses has never been more urgent.
GBD 2020 is in the process of estimating the burden of 370 diseases and injuries 88 risk factors across 204 countries and territories. GBD 2020 is quantifying the burden using disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs), which represent the number of years of healthy life lost to either mortality or disability. Here, as part of GBD 2020, we present a method built on the mental disorder estimates presented in GBD 2019 by incorporating the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic. We quantify the impact of COVID-19 on the prevalence and burden of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders by location, age, and sex in 2020.
Methods
Overview
First, we conducted a systematic literature review to assemble data from surveys measuring the effect of COVID-19 on the prevalence of depressive and anxiety disorders. Second, we used these data in a meta-analysis to (1) estimate the change in prevalence of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders before versus during the COVID-19 pandemic, (2) predict (through the use of selected indicators of COVID-19 impact) the resulting change in prevalence of each disorder across all GBD locations, and (3) translate changes in prevalence to corresponding changes in burden estimates as years lived with disability (YLDs) and DALYs. A conceptual overview of this process is shown in the appendix (p 17). This study complies with the Guidelines for Accurate and Transparent Health Estimates Reporting (GATHER) recommendations (appendix pp 26–27)
6 and all code used in the analyses can be found online.
Case definitions
To ensure comparability in measurement, we used case definitions for major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders used within the GBD framework. These definitions adhere to criteria presented in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder fourth edition text revision (DSM-IV-TR)7 and the tenth International Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-10).8 Detailed case definitions are in the appendix (p 6).
Data sources
We conducted a systematic literature search to identify population surveys reporting on the prevalence of depressive or anxiety disorders, or both, during the COVID-19 pandemic. We used the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines;9 our PRISMA checklist is in the appendix (pp 28–31), and the search protocol was registered with the International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews (PROSPERO, CRD42021216590).
Eligible studies reported prevalence of depressive or anxiety disorders during the COVID-19 pandemic and had a pre-pandemic baseline. We used timelines for these periods as defined by each study. Prevalence surveys conducted during the pandemic could not be included without comparable pre-pandemic data (ie, using the same instrument, location, and age group) collected since 2013 to assess the change in prevalence. Longitudinal studies using samples representative of the general population were preferred, but cross-sectional studies were also included if comparable pre-pandemic prevalence data existed. Studies using random sampling were preferred; however, due to challenges imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, there were few studies of this type. Studies using market research quota sampling were also included but were controlled for with a covariate in our analysis. Market research quota sampling is a non-probabilistic sampling strategy whereby participants are identified from a database to match the population of interest (a discussion of the use of these estimates is in the appendix [p 7]).10Samples obtained via this method might produce results that differ from the general population.11, 12
Studies reporting probable cases of depressive or anxiety disorders using established screening measures were included due to the paucity of available survey data from during the COVID-19 pandemic using diagnostic instruments. In these instances, only prevalence estimates for cases that reached established thresholds for probable depressive or anxiety disorder were included. We assumed the predictive validity between probable versus diagnosed cases using these screening measures did not change during the COVID-19 pandemic compared with before the pandemic, and therefore the change in the prevalence of probable cases would be equivalent to the change in the prevalence of diagnosed cases (additional discussion of this assumption is in the appendix [pp 8–9]). We also included measures capturing symptoms of both depressive and anxiety disorders (eg, the K-6 Distress Scale), which were also controlled for with a covariate in analyses. For eligible studies, we extracted information on location, age, sex, prevalence, uncertainty, number of cases, sample size, recall period, disorder, diagnostic instrument, sampling strategy, and dates between which the survey was conducted. We extracted the most detailed data reported by age and sex.
We required indicators of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic that had an association with prevalence of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders, hereafter referred to as COVID-19 impact indicators. The risk factor of interest was the COVID-19 pandemic, with the COVID-19 impact indicators acting as proxies for the effect of COVID-19 in the population. A COVID-19 impact indicator had to capture an effect of COVID-19, be consistently measured across locations, and be consistently measured with sufficient granularity across time (preferably daily or weekly) over the course of the pandemic. Our process of selecting the COVID-19 impact indicators is detailed in the appendix (p 10). Ultimately, we considered three novel indicators of the COVID-19 pandemic: decreasing human mobility,13 estimated total (as opposed to reported) daily SARS-CoV-2 infection rate, and estimated daily excess mortality rate during the pandemic (including excess deaths occurring during the pandemic where COVID-19 was not reported as the underlying cause of death).5, 13
The estimation of human mobility, daily SARS-CoV-2 infection rate, and daily excess mortality rate was done by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) COVID-19 Forecasting Team and is described in detail elsewhere.13 In summary, human mobility was represented by a composite human mobility index representing daily change from pre-pandemic mobility. Data from mobile phone users provided by Facebook, Google, Descartes Labs, Safegraph, and Baidu, and data on physical distancing mandates informed a Gaussian process regression to estimate a time series for human mobility. Daily SARS-CoV-2 infection and excess mortality rates were estimated via a deterministic susceptible, exposed, infectious, and recovered (known as SEIR) compartmental framework and was informed by daily confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infections, COVID-19-related deaths, SARS-CoV-2 tests conducted, antibody seroprevalence, human mobility, physical distancing mandates, pneumonia seasonality, facemask use, and vaccine coverage.5, 13
GBD conducts routine systematic reviews of the epidemiology of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders as part of the estimation of YLDs (and separately to the aforementioned systematic review of the change in prevalence due to COVID-19). The compiled epidemiological data for GBD 2020 includes studies done from 1980 to 2019 on the prevalence, incidence, remission, duration, and excess mortality of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders. These data were identified through routine electronic searches of PubMed, PsycINFO, Embase, grey literature sources (including a review of the Global Health Data Exchange library), and consultation with experts. GBD 2020 uses Disease Modelling Meta-Regression version 2.1 (known as DisMod-MR 2.1), a Bayesian disease modelling meta-regression tool, to analyse these data and generate internally consistent estimates of prevalence, incidence, remission, and mortality by sex, location, year, and age group for each disorder.
14 It also estimates prevalence for locations that are missing raw epidemiological data. GBD 2020 does this by estimating prevalence across a cascade down five levels of a geographical hierarchy: global, super-region, region, country or territory, and subnational locations. The prevalence from locations higher in the hierarchy act as priors for the prevalence for locations lower in the hierarchy. More detail on DisMod-MR 2.1 and the estimation of prevalence data for major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders has been published elsewhere.1, 14 Because no epidemiological data from the year 2020 informed the DisMod-MR 2.1 model for major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders, the prevalence produced for 2020 by age and sex and for each of the 204 countries and territories represented the prevalence of each disorder without the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
We made use of severity distributions and disability weights in GBD 2020 (appendix p 32). We apportioned the final disorder prevalence for the year 2020 into the categories of asymptomatic, mild, moderate, and severe with corresponding disability weights. Disability weights in GBD 2020 quantify health loss from a health state on a scale of 0 (no health loss) to 1 (equivalent to death). The process to estimate severity proportions and disability weights in GBD 2020 has been described elsewhere.2,15
Statistical analysis
We estimated the prevalence of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders during the COVID-19 pandemic by first developing a model to predict adjustments to pre-pandemic prevalence of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders based on COVID-19 impact indicators, and then modifying the pre-pandemic prevalence of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders estimated from DisMod-MR 2.1. We conducted meta-regressions, using meta-regression—Bayesian, regularised, trimmed16 (MR-BRT), on the difference between logit disorder prevalence before the COVID-19 pandemic and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The process to build a final meta-regression model is described in detail in the appendix (pp 6–7). Briefly, potential bias covariates that were identified were cross-sectional comparisons informed by random samples, longitudinal comparisons informed by market research and quota samples, cross-sectional comparisons informed by market research and quota samples, and estimates representing combined symptoms of depressive and anxiety disorders (appendix p 32). Because only three studies used diagnostic instruments to measure prevalence, we did not have sufficient data to explore the effect of a bias covariate on data from screening scales identifying probable cases of depressive or anxiety disorders (appendix pp 8–9). Each unique sample was given a random intercept and random effects were placed on the COVID-19 impact indicators. We ran models separately for major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders. We also included age, sex, and most bias covariates as effect modifiers to ensure that the prevalence change remained zero when the COVID-19 impact was zero. The exception was the bias covariate for cross-sectional comparisons informed by market research and quota samples, which had random sample pre-pandemic baselines and therefore had a prevalence difference even when the COVID-19 impact indicator was zero. Sex was quantified by the proportion of female participants in the sample, and age was quantified as the mean age of the sample (or midpoint of the age range of the study sample when mean age was not reported).
Due to the strong collinearity between the COVID-19 impact indicators (inspected via Pearson correlation coefficients) and the need for age, sex, and bias covariates to be treated as effect modifiers on the impact indicators, we developed prevalence adjustment models via a two-step process. In step one, we used indicator models to develop a so-called index for the impact of COVID-19. Human mobility, daily SARS-CoV-2 infection rate, and daily excess mortality rate were included simultaneously in a meta-regression on the change in logit prevalence to quantify their independent effect on prevalence change. We used the coefficients from these models to calculate a single COVID-19 impact indicator for each disorder. In step two, we developed a final model for each disorder via backward elimination to regress the COVID-19 impact indicator, age, sex, and the bias covariates on the change in logit prevalence. The least significant covariate was iteratively removed until no improvement was seen in the Akaike information criterion. We assessed the generalisability of the model using a leave-one-country-out cross-validation analysis (appendix p 11).
We used the final disorder-specific models to predict the change in logit prevalence of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders and adjust the DisMod-MR 2.1 prevalence estimates for the year 2020 via a Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation. We extracted 1000 samples from the probability distributions of the change in logit prevalence of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders, and their logit prevalences from DisMod-MR 2.1, by age, sex, and location for every day of the year 2020, based on daily estimates of the significant COVID-19 impact indicators. We adjusted the logit prevalence by the change and inverse-logit transformed the result to estimate the adjusted daily prevalence. We estimated the average daily prevalence for the year 2020 by age, sex, and location as the point prevalence for the year (an applied example is shown in the appendix [p 18]). Once estimated, we divided the prevalences of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders into sequela-specific prevalences using the GBD 2020 severity splits (appendix p 32). We report estimates with 95% uncertainty intervals (UIs), which represent the 25th and 975th ranked results across the 1000 samples and can be interpreted similarly to 95% CIs.
Consistent with GBD methods, we followed ICD rules for determining the underlying cause of death. DALYs for major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders were composed entirely of YLDs, which meant that, despite potential excess deaths, major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders were not considered underlying causes of death.2We first estimated sequela-specific YLDs by multiplying sequela-specific prevalences by their respective disability weights. We then corrected the sequela-specific YLDs for comorbidities to adjust for the co-occurrence of causes of YLDs within GBD 2020; these methods have been described in detail elsewhere.1 For GBD 2020, burden is only estimated using the COVID-19-adjusted prevalence estimates. Therefore, we calculated baseline burden estimates by adjusting GBD 2020 burden estimates by the ratio between baseline prevalence and adjusted prevalence.
p values of less than 0.05 were considered to be significant. We did all analyses using DisMod MR-2.1, MR-BRT, and R (version 3.6.3).
Role of the funding source
The funders of the study had no role in the study design, data collection, data analysis, data interpretation, or the writing of the report.
Results
Of the 5683 unique data sources obtained from the systematic review, 1674 remained following title and abstract screening. In total, 46 studies met inclusion criteria for major depressive disorder and 27 for anxiety disorders (48 in total, one of which reported data across two regions; appendix p 19). A supplemental search for pre-pandemic baseline measures provided an additional 11 studies for major depressive disorder and seven studies for anxiety disorders. Study characteristics of included studies are in the appendix (pp 33–34). Most studies were from western Europe (n=22) and high-income North America (n=14), and the remaining studies were from Australasia (n=5), high-income Asia Pacific (n=5), east Asia (n=2), and central Europe (n=1; appendix p 20).
Human mobility and daily SARS-CoV-2 infection rate were significantly associated with the change in major depressive disorder and anxiety disorder prevalence (table 1). After controlling for human mobility and daily SARS-CoV-2 infection rate, daily excess mortality rate was not associated with the change in prevalence for either major depressive disorder or anxiety disorders. This was likely due to high collinearity between the daily excess mortality rate and the other two COVID-19 impact variables (r = 0·8 with daily SARS-CoV-2 infection rate and r = 0·8 with human mobility), which was less of an issue shared between the daily SARS-CoV-2 infection rate and human mobility (r = 0·5).
Table 1. Meta-regression coefficients from the indicator model on the change in major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders logit prevalences over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020
All indicators included in the model simultaneously and therefore control for each other. UI=uncertainty interval.
* Square-root transformed before analysis to correct for positive skew appendix pp 6–7.
† Bayesian directional prior specified due to strong collinearity with other indicators.
Increases in the COVID-19 impact index (informed by the significant indicators of human mobility and daily SARS-CoV-2 infection rate) were associated with an increase in prevalence of major depressive disorder (0·4 [95% UI 0·1–0·6]) and anxiety disorders (0·4 [0·3–0·5]; table 2). For both disorders, females were affected more than males, and younger age groups were affected more than older age groups. Bias covariates for cross-sectional comparisons informed by random samples and longitudinal comparisons informed by market research and quota samples were not significant for either disorder (appendix p 67) and subsequently were dropped from the final models (table 2). Estimates representing combined depressive and anxiety disorder symptoms significantly overestimated the increase in prevalence for anxiety disorders 0·3 (0·1–0·4) but not for major depressive disorder (appendix p 67) and were not included in the major depressive disorder model. Cross-sectional market research and quota samples significantly overestimated the increase in prevalence for both major depressive disorder (0·9 [0·6–1·2]) and anxiety disorders (0·6 [0·2–1·0]; table 2). Results of our leave-one-country-out cross-validation analysis are in the appendix (p 11).
Table 2. Meta-regression coefficients on the change in major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders logit prevalences over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020
Longitudinal market research and quota sample was not significant, and so not included in the final model.
* Coefficients are estimated using the B of the COVID-19 impact index multiplied by the B of the COVID-19 impact indicators from the signal model and 95% UIs estimated via multiplying 1000 samples of the posterior distribution of these impact indicator covariates from the indicator model with 1000 samples of the posterior distribution of the indicator coefficient.
† Square-root transformed before analysis to correct for positive skew of the COVID-19 impact index coefficient appendix pp 6–7. UI=uncertainty interval.
Before adjustment for the COVID-19 pandemic, the estimated global prevalence of major depressive disorder in 2020 was 2470·5 cases (95% UI 2143·5–2870·7) per 100 000 population, equivalent to 193 million (167–224) people (appendix pp 35–50). After adjustment for the COVID-19 pandemic, the estimated prevalence of major depressive disorder was 3152·9 cases (2722·5–3654·5) per 100 000 population, equivalent to 246 million (212–285) people. We estimated an additional 53·2 million (44·8–62·9) cases of major depressive disorder globally in 2020 due to the effects of COVID-19 (682·4 [574·1–807·2] new cases per 100 000 population, an increase of 27·6% [25·1–30·3]; table 3). Females had a greater increase in prevalence of major depressive disorder than males did, with 35·5 million (30·0–41·8) additional cases among females (equivalent to 912·5 [772·1–1075·2] per 100 000 females; a 29·8% [27·3–32·5] increase) compared with 17·7 million (14·7–21·3) additional cases in males (equivalent to 453·6 [376·3–545·0] per 100 000 males; a 24·0% [21·5–26·7] increase; data by sex by super-region and region are available on the Global Health Data Exchange). Global patterns of prevalence before and after adjustment for (ie, during) the COVID-19 pandemic, by age and sex, are presented in figure 1, and estimates of the change in prevalence of major depressive disorder are shown in figure 2 and in the appendix (p 21).
Table 3. Prevalence of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders, by super-region, 2020
UI=uncertainty interval.
Figure 1. Global prevalence of major depressive disorder (A) and anxiety disorders (B) before and after adjustment for (ie, during) the COVID-19 pandemic, 2020, by age and sex
Figure 2. Change in the prevalence of major depressive disorder after adjustment for (ie, during) the COVID−19 pandemic, 2020
Before adjustment for the COVID-19 pandemic, the estimated global prevalence of anxiety disorders in 2020 was 3824·9 (95% UI 3283·3–4468·1) per 100 000 population, which is equivalent to 298 million (256–348) people (appendix pp 51–66). After adjustment for the COVID-19 pandemic, the global prevalence of anxiety disorders in 2020 was 4802·4 (4108·2–5588·6), equivalent to 374 million (320–436) people. We estimated an additional 76·2 million (64·3–90·6) cases of anxiety disorders in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic (977·5 [824·8–1161·6] new cases per 100 000 population; an increase of 25·6% (23·2–28·0) globally (table 3). Females had a greater increase in prevalence than males did, with 51·8 million (43·8–61·1) additional cases among females (equivalent to 1332·1 [1126·1–1573·2] per 100 000 females; a 27·9% [25·6–30·4] increase) compared with 24·4 million (20·3–29·5) additional cases among males (equivalent to 625·0 [518·3–755·3] per 100 000 males; a 21·7% [19·3–24·1] increase; data by sex by super-region and region will be available on the Global Health Data Exchange after full release of GBD 2020). Global patterns of prevalence before and after adjustment for (ie, during) the COVID-19 pandemic, by age and sex, are presented in figure 1, and estimates of the change in prevalence of anxiety disorders are shown in figure 3 and in the appendix (p 22).
Figure 3. Change in the prevalence of anxiety disorders after adjustment for (ie, during) the COVID−19 pandemic, 2020
Before adjustment for the COVID-19 pandemic, major depressive disorder was responsible for 38·7 million (95% UI 26·4–53·9) DALYs globally, equivalent to 497·0 DALYs (338·3–691·1) per 100 000 population. After adjustment for the COVID-19 pandemic, major depressive disorder was responsible for 49·4 million (33·6–68·7) DALYs, equivalent to 634·1 DALYs (431·3–881·0) per 100 000 population (appendix pp 35–50). We estimated that the COVID-19 pandemic led to an additional 10·7 million (7·21–14·9) DALYs for major depressive disorder globally, of which 7·07 million (4·80–9·80) were among females and 3·62 million (2·40–5·09) were among males. The global major depressive disorder additional DALY rate due to the COVID-19 pandemic was 137·1 DALYs (92·5–190·6) per 100 000 population, 182·0 (123·5–252·2) per 100 000 females, and 92·5 (61·5–130·3) per 100 000 males (DALY rates by sex by region will be available on the Global Health Data Exchange after full release of GBD 2020). The burden of DALYS due to major depressive disorder by age and sex is presented in figure 4.
Figure 4. Global burden of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders by age and sex, 2020
Before adjustment for the COVID-19 pandemic, anxiety disorders were responsible for 35·5 million (95% UI 23·9–50·1) DALYs globally, equivalent to 454·8 DALYs (307·0–642·5) per 100 000 population (appendix pp 51–66). After adjustment for the COVID-19 pandemic, anxiety disorders were responsible for 44·5 million (30·2–62·5) DALYs globally, equivalent to 570·9 (387·3–802·2) per 100 000 population. Anxiety disorders were responsible for an additional 9·05 million (6·18–12·8) DALYs due to the pandemic, of which 6·11 million (4·21–8·56) DALYs were among females and 2·94 million (1·97–4·19) among males. The global anxiety disorder additional DALY rate due to the COVID-19 pandemic was 116·1 (79·3–163·8) per 100 000 population, 157·2 (108·3–220·3) per 100 000 females, and 75·3 (50·3–107·1) per 100 000 males. The burden of DALYS due to anxiety disorders by age and sex is presented in figure 4.
Discussion
In this study, we estimated a substantial increase in the prevalence and burden of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is, to our knowledge, the first study to systematically identify and analyse population mental health survey data and quantify the resulting impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the prevalence of these two disorders by location, age, and sex in 2020.
Increases in the prevalence of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders during 2020 were both associated with increasing SARS-CoV-2 infection rates and decreasing human mobility. These two COVID-19 impact indicators incorporated the combined effects of the spread of the virus, lockdowns, stay-at-home orders, decreased public transport, school and business closures, and decreased social interactions, among other factors. We estimated that countries hit hardest by the pandemic during 2020 had the greatest increases in prevalence of these disorders.
The two COVID-19 impact indicators used in our model should not be interpreted as risk factors for major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders. The risk factor of interest was the COVID-19 pandemic, with these two indicators acting as proxies for the effect of COVID-19 in the population. The COVID-19 pandemic is occurring against a complex backdrop of a range of social determinants of mental health, as well as well known inequalities within these determinants. The greater increase in disorder prevalence among females than among males, which resulted in an even greater sex difference in prevalence than before the pandemic, was anticipated because females are more likely to be affected by the social and economic consequences of the pandemic.17, 18, 19 Additional carer and household responsibilities due to school closures or family members becoming unwell are more likely to fall on women.17Women are more likely to be financially disadvantaged during the pandemic due to lower salaries, less savings, and less secure employment than their male counterparts.17, 18, 19 They are also more likely to be victims of domestic violence, the prevalence of which increased during periods of lockdown and stay-at-home orders.20, 21 We also estimated greater change in the prevalence of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders among younger age groups than among older age groups. UNESCO declared COVID-19 to be the most severe disruption to global education in history, estimating 1·6 billion learners in over 190 countries to be fully or partially out of school in 2020.22 With school closures and wider social restrictions in place, young people have been unable to come together in physical spaces, affecting their ability to learn and for peer interaction. Furthermore, young people are more likely to become unemployed during and following economic crises than older people.23
Our study is not the first to show how population shocks (ie, unexpected or unpredictable events that disrupt the environmental, health, economic, or social circumstances within a population) can increase the prevalence of depressive and anxiety disorders. In their review of mental health outcomes after the economic crisis in 2009, Frasquilho and colleagues24 identified several studies showing an increase in common mental disorders in the general population. After the 2009 financial crisis in Greece, point prevalence of major depressive episodes increased from 3·3% (95% UI 3·1–3·5) in 2008 to 6·8% (6·4–7·2) in 2009 and 8·2% (8·1–8·3) in 2011.25 Survey respondents reporting serious economic hardship were most at risk of developing a major depressive episode.25, 26 Similarly, after the 2008 financial crisis in Hong Kong, past-year prevalence of major depressive episodes increased from 8·2% (95% UI 7·2–9·2) in 2007 to 12·5% (11·0–13·9) in 2009.27 The extent of the increase in prevalence differed across studies, which might be due to study or population characteristics or different combinations of health and socioeconomic determinants of poor mental health, or a combination of these factors. Another point of difference is the time period over which the impact of the shock is measured. This period might be a single point in time, weeks or months, or, as in our analysis, an average over the course of a longer period (eg, a year) during which there would have been fluctuating effects from the pandemic (ie, the shock).
Both major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders increase the risk of other diseases and suicide.28, 29 In their time-series analysis of the impact of COVID-19 on suicide rates across 21 high-income and middle-income countries, Pirkis and colleagues30 found no significant increases in suicide rates between April and July, 2020. This finding raises the question of whether or not the increased prevalence of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders we found was accompanied by a significant increase in suicide rates. We have insufficient data to draw any conclusions on this matter. Pirkis and colleagues30 relied on data in the first few months of the pandemic, which might have been too early in the pandemic to detect an association between a new diagnosis of major depressive disorder or anxiety disorders and suicide. Suicide trends might vary over extended periods, and as we progress through different phases of the pandemic the full scale of economic consequences and their effects will emerge, and their subsequent effects on suicide trends. For example, Tanaka and Okamota31 found that, although suicide rates in Japan decreased by 14% during the first 5 months of the pandemic (February to June, 2020), they then increased by 16% (between July and October, 2020), with a larger increase among females and younger populations than among males and older populations.
Even before the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders (and mental disorders overall) were among the leading causes of health burden globally, with the mental health system in most countries being under-resourced and disorganised, despite evidence that effective prevention and intervention tools exist.2, 3, 32, 33 Meeting the added demand for mental health services due to COVID-19 will be difficult. Strategies to reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2, such as physical distancing and restricted travel, have made it more difficult to acquire medication, attend treatment facilities, and receive in-person care. In some settings, outpatient and inpatient services have been interrupted or resources redirected to treat those with COVID-19.4, 34, 35, 36 In other settings, individuals have become less likely to seek care for their mental health issues than before the pandemic because of concerns about becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2 in the process.4, 34, 35, 36 The COVID-19 pandemic has created a greater urgency for governments and policy makers to strengthen their mental health systems, and now with the added priority of integrating a mental health response within their COVID-19 recovery plan. In the wake of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the prevalence and burden of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders, taking no action cannot be an option. Resources exist to guide the development of mitigation strategies for reducing the mental health burden imposed by COVID-19. These resources include strategies that make efficient use of already limited resources, consider the local context and vulnerable populations, and prioritise key principles such as inclusivity, stigma reduction, and human rights.4, 34, 35, 36 Strategies should promote mental wellbeing and target determinants of poor mental health exacerbated by the pandemic and interventions to treat those who develop a mental disorder.4, 34, 35, 36 They should consider public health messaging about the mental health impacts of COVID-19, how individuals can best manage their mental health, and well defined pathways to assessment and service access. A mixture of digital, telehealth, and face-to-face services have been suggested that can be tailored to individual need.4, 34, 35, 36 There is already encouraging emerging evidence of the implementation of some of these strategies;4 however, the full effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are still unfolding in many countries, with most programmes implemented under a public health emergency, with little capacity to fully assess their performance.
Here, we estimated the change in disorder prevalence in 2020 using the best data at our disposal, but these data will continue to be updated throughout the different phases of the pandemic. This ongoing work will also explore ways to improve the following limitations in the analyses reported here. First, we were limited by the data available to consistently measure the effect of COVID-19 across all GBD locations using our choice of COVID-19 indicators. Human mobility and SARS-CoV-2 infection rates are unlikely to have captured the full impact of the pandemic on mental health across all countries. The precision in these two indicators can be improved, for example, in countries where infection rates are not consistently measured or reported. Reliance on mobile phone tracking technology to monitor human mobility will also not be accurate in locations where subgroups of the population (eg, people of low socioeconomic status) have little or no mobile phone use. Some subgroups might not be able to reduce their mobility because of their employment type and might be more prone to infection, and so reductions in human mobility might be exaggerated in these locations. As we progress through the pandemic and the full economic effects on some populations emerge, re-evaluation of available indicators will be important. For example, we made no distinction in prevalence between those with and without previous SARS-CoV-2 infection within the population. Emerging evidence suggests people with post-acute sequelae of COVID-19 (sometimes known as long COVID) might develop depressive and anxiety disorder symptoms,37, 38 and so prevalence of long COVID might be a potential indicator in future work. Second, we found very few surveys that met our inclusion criteria from low-income and middle-income countries, meaning that findings from our regression analysis might be less generalisable to these locations. For example, we estimated large increases in prevalence within Latin America and the Caribbean, north Africa and the Middle East, and south Asia, despite not finding any surveys from these super-regions that met our inclusion criteria. Given the absence of high quality data for most countries, and the wide UIs around our estimates, we emphasise caution against extrapolating direct rankings between countries and territories. Our leave-one-country-out cross-validation analysis showed that although our estimates are generally within the bounds of uncertainty for re-predicting data for missing locations, the relative rankings of locations were affected by data availability. Precise rankings between countries and territories would require substantially more high quality data and improved data coverage globally. Third, most surveys in our dataset used symptom scales that only estimate probable cases of depressive and anxiety disorders. Where these scales were used, we assumed the predictive validity of symptom scales in diagnosis via established thresholds remained constant between before and during the pandemic. However, this assumption has the potential to bias our estimates. For example, high scores on anxiety disorder symptom scales might reflect a natural psychological and physiological reaction to a perceived threat (ie, the COVID-19 pandemic) rather than a probable anxiety disorder. At the time of publication, not enough data were available to assess this assumption. We identified only three diagnostic mental health surveys that had been done since the beginning of the pandemic. Increases in prevalence were observed in two of the three diagnostic surveys.39, 40 The study that did not report an increased prevalence was conducted in one specific city in Norway (Trondheim) using very small cross-sectional samples.41 The authors of this study also reported that the shift from face-to-face to telephone survey administration occurred at the onset of the pandemic, which might have affected interviewers’ ability to identify mental disorders, especially in the early stages of this shift when they were less experienced with telephone survey administration. The paucity of diagnostic surveys conducted during the pandemic also meant that we were unable to explore its effect on the severity distribution of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders. We estimated prevalent cases of each disorder but could not assess how existing cases changed in their severity. Existing cases might have worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic, while novel cases might have had milder disorder severity. For the burden analysis presented, we had to assume that the severity distribution of both existing and new cases remained unchanged from before the COVID-19 pandemic. Fourth, many studies needed to be excluded from our systematic review because of reliance on convenience sampling strategies (eg, snowball sampling), case definitions that did not adhere to internationally accepted definitions for mental disorders, and use of survey instruments for which no comparable pre-pandemic estimate was available. Given the paucity of studies using random sampling of the general population, we took advantage of studies using market research and quota sampling during the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that cross-sectional (but not longitudinal) studies that used market research quota sampling significantly over-estimated the increase in disorder prevalence. Samples obtained via this method might be more prone to mental disorders than the random samples that informed their pre-pandemic baseline estimates. We also found instruments that captured symptoms of both depressive and anxiety disorders combined overestimated the increase in prevalence of anxiety disorders, but not major depressive disorder. This could be because they captured more new depressive disorder cases than anxiety disorder cases. We hope that the data standards set for this analysis will guide decisions in the field for future mental health surveys done as a response to COVID-19 or other population shocks. Fifth, prevalences of mental disorders other than major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders might have also been affected by COVID-19. For instance, emerging evidence suggests that other disorders such as eating disorders have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic but these data have yet to be appropriately assessed.42Most of the available scientific literature focuses on changes in symptoms of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorder as a result of COVID-19 because these are historically more sensitive to population shocks. As new mental health surveys are undertaken, the effect of COVID-19 on other disorders will need to be quantified. The methodological framework we have developed can be adapted to other mental disorders. It can also be adapted to measure other population shocks on prevalence and disease burden.At the time of writing this Article, the COVID-19 pandemic is ongoing and its full impact on mental health outcomes is not known. We continue to observe shifts in SARS-CoV-2 infection rates and human mobility as lockdown and stay-at-home orders are re-implemented or eased and COVID-19 vaccination programmes are rolled out. Our work is ongoing and will continue to be updated over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. To inform this ongoing work, high quality surveys conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic are needed within regions that are not represented by available data. Researchers planning surveys during the pandemic should strive to align their sample representation and measures of mental health with existing pre-pandemic baseline estimates to ensure appropriate comparable data from before and during the pandemic. Where feasible, researchers should consider including diagnostic measures of mental disorders, alongside widely used screening questionnaires (eg, Patient Health Questionnaire-9 or General Anxiety Disorder-7). With the addition of more estimates derived via diagnostic instruments, we could explore the robustness of (or correct for) our assumption that the predictive validity of screening questionnaires for diagnosis of probable cases is unchanged by the pandemic, and explore any shifts in the severity distribution among individuals diagnosed with major depressive disorder or anxiety disorders.
Unlike other population shocks, COVID-19 has become global, disrupting many aspects of life for most, if not all, of the world’s populations. Our analysis suggests that the impacts on the prevalence and burden of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders were substantial, particularly among females and younger populations. Ongoing and additional mental health surveys are necessary to quantify the duration and severity of this impact. Unfortunately, even before the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders were leading causes of disease burden, with the mental health-care system in most countries being under-resourced and disorganised in their service delivery. Therefore, tackling this increased mental health burden will present immediate challenges in most nations, but it is also an opportunity for countries to broadly reconsider their mental health service response. Recommended mitigation strategies should incorporate ways to promote mental wellbeing and target determinants of poor mental health exacerbated by the pandemic, as well as interventions to treat those who develop a mental disorder. Taking no action in the face of the estimated impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the prevalence and burden of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders should not be an option.
Contributors
Please see appendix (pp 80–81) for more detailed information about individual author contributions to the research, divided into the following categories: managing the estimation or publication process; writing the first draft of the manuscript; primary responsibility for applying analytical methods to produce estimates; primary responsibility for seeking, cataloguing, extracting, or cleaning data; designing or coding figures and tables; providing data or critical feedback on data sources; development of methods or computational machinery; providing critical feedback on methods or results; drafting the manuscript or revising it critically for important intellectual content; extracting, cleaning, or cataloguing data; designing or coding figures and tables; and managing the overall research enterprise. Members of the core research team (D F Santomauro, A M Mantilla Herrera, J Shadid, P Zheng, C Ashbaugh, D Pigott, S I Hay, T Vos, C J L Murray, H A Whiteford, and A J Ferrari) for this topic area had full access to the underlying data used to generate estimates presented in this Article. All authors had access to and reviewed estimates as part of the research evaluation process, which includes additional stages of formal review.
COVID-19 Mental Disorders Collaborators
Damian F Santomauro, Ana M Mantilla Herrera, Jamileh Shadid, Peng Zheng, Charlie Ashbaugh, David M Pigott, Cristiana Abbafati, Christopher Adolph, Joanne O Amlag, Aleksandr Y Aravkin, Bree L Bang-Jensen, Gregory J Bertolacci, Sabina S Bloom, Rachel Castellano, Emma Castro, Suman Chakrabarti, Jhilik Chattopadhyay, Rebecca M Cogen, James K Collins, Xiaochen Dai, William James Dangel, Carolyn Dapper, Amanda Deen, Megan Erickson, Samuel B Ewald, Abraham D Flaxman, Joseph Jon Frostad, Nancy Fullman, John R Giles, Ababi Zergaw Giref, Gaorui Guo, Jiawei He, Monika Helak, Erin N Hulland, Bulat Idrisov, Akiaja Lindstrom, Emily Linebarger, Paulo A Lotufo, Rafael Lozano, Beatrice Magistro, Deborah Carvalho Malta, Johan C Månsson, Fatima Marinho, Ali H Mokdad, Lorenzo Monasta, Paulami Naik, Shuhei Nomura, James Kevin O’Halloran, Samuel M Ostroff, Maja Pasovic, Louise Penberthy, Robert C Reiner Jr, Grace Reinke, Antonio Luiz P Ribeiro, Aleksei Sholokhov, Reed J D Sorensen, Elena Varavikova, Anh Truc Vo, Rebecca Walcott, Stefanie Watson, Charles Shey Wiysonge, Bethany Zigler, Simon I Hay, Theo Vos, Christopher J L Murray, Harvey A Whiteford, Alize J Ferrari.
Affiliations
School of Public Health (D F Santomauro PhD, A M Mantilla Herrera PhD, J Shadid BSc, A Lindstrom MEpi, Prof H A Whiteford PhD, A J Ferrari PhD), The University of Queensland, Herston, QLD, Australia; Queensland Centre for Mental Health Research (D F Santomauro PhD, A M Mantilla Herrera PhD, J Shadid BSc, A Lindstrom MEpi, Prof H A Whiteford PhD, A J Ferrari PhD), Wacol, QLD, Australia; Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (D F Santomauro PhD, A M Mantilla Herrera PhD, J Shadid BSc, P Zheng PhD, C Ashbaugh MA, D M Pigott PhD, J O Amlag MPH, A Y Aravkin PhD, B L Bang-Jensen MA, G J Bertolacci BS, S S Bloom BA, R Castellano MA, E Castro MS, S Chakrabarti MA, J Chattopadhyay MS, R M Cogen BA, J K Collins BS, X Dai PhD, W J Dangel Med, C Dapper MA, A Deen MPH, Miss M Erickson MA, S B Ewald MS, A D Flaxman PhD, J J Frostad MPH, N Fullman MPH, J R Giles PhD, G Guo MPH, J He MSc, M Helak BA, E N Hulland MPH, E Linebarger BA, Prof R Lozano MD, J C Månsson MS, Prof A H Mokdad PhD, P Naik MSPH, J K O’Halloran MS, S M Ostroff PhD, M Pasovic MA, L Penberthy MS, G Reinke MA, R C Reiner Jr PhD, A Sholokhov MSc, R J D Sorensen MPH, A T Vo BSc, S Watson MS, B Zigler MPH, Prof S I Hay FMedSci, Prof T Vos PhD, Prof C J L Murray DPhil, Prof H A Whiteford PhD, A J Ferrari PhD), Department of Health Metrics Sciences, School of Medicine (D M Pigott PhD, A Y Aravkin PhD, X Dai PhD, A D Flaxman PhD, Prof R Lozano MD, Prof A H Mokdad PhD, R C Reiner Jr PhD, Prof S I Hay FMedSci, Prof T Vos PhD, Prof C J L Murray DPhil), Department of Political Science (Prof C Adolph PhD), Department of Applied Mathematics (A Y Aravkin PhD), Department of Global Health (S Chakrabarti MA, E N Hulland MPH, R J D Sorensen MPH), Henry M Jackson School of International Studies (S M Ostroff PhD), Evans School of Public Policy & Governance (R Walcott MPH), University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA; Department of Juridical and Economic Studies (C Abbafati PhD), La Sapienza University, Rome, Italy; Department of Health Systems and Policy (A Z Giref PhD), Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; National Data Management Center (A Z Giref PhD), Ethiopian Public Health Institute, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Infectious Diseases Department (B Idrisov MD), Bashkir State Medical University, Ufa, Russia; Laboratory of Public Health Indicators Analysis and Health Digitalization (B Idrisov MD), Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Moscow, Russia; Department of Medicine (Prof P A Lotufo DrPH), University of Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil; Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy (B Magistro PhD), University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada; Department of Maternal and Child Nursing and Public Health (Prof D C Malta PhD), Public Health (F Marinho PhD), Department of Internal Medicine (Prof A P Ribeiro MD), Centre of Telehealth (Prof A P Ribeiro MD), Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil; Public Health (F Marinho PhD), Vital Strategies, Sao Paulo, Brazil; Clinical Epidemiology and Public Health Research Unit (L Monasta DSc), Burlo Garofolo Institute for Maternal and Child Health, Trieste, Italy; Department of Health Policy and Management (S Nomura PhD), Keio University, Tokyo, Japan; Department of Global Health Policy (S Nomura PhD), University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan; Central Research Institute of Cytology and Genetics (E Varavikova PhD), Federal Research Institute for Health Organization and Informatics of the Ministry of Health (FRIHOI), Moscow, Russia; Cochrane South Africa (Prof C S Wiysonge MD), South African Medical Research Council, Cape Town, South Africa; School of Public Health and Family Medicine (Prof C S Wiysonge MD), University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa
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Notes
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Prevalence of mental disorders, suicidal ideation and suicides in the general population before and during the COVID-19 pandemic in Norway: a population-based repeated cross-sectional analysis.
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In an op-ed, “Fauci Fooled America,” published Monday in Newsweek, two scientists accusedDr. Anthony Fauciof bungling the government’s response to COVID by getting “major epidemiology and public health questions wrong.”
Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D., an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, and Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D., professor of Health Policy at Stanford University School of Medicine wrote: “Reality and scientific studies have now caught up with him.”
“The evidence is in. Governors, journalists, scientists, university presidents, hospital administrators and business leaders can continue to follow Dr. Anthony Fauci or open their eyes. After 700,000-plus COVID deaths and the devastating effects of lockdowns, it is time to return to basic principles of public health.”
The authors ticked off a list of “key issues” Fauci got wrong, including failure to recognize natural immunity, protecting the elderly, school closures, masks and contact tracing.
“By pushing vaccine mandates, Dr. Fauci ignores naturally acquired immunity among the COVID-recovered, of which there are more than 45 million in the United States,” the authors wrote. “Mounting evidence indicates that natural immunity is stronger and longer lasting than vaccine-induced immunity.”
Kulldorff and Bhattacharya cited a study from Israel, which concluded the vaccinated were 27 times more likely to get symptomatic COVID than the unvaccinated who had recovered from a prior infection.
They pointed out that the scientific community has known about natural immunity from disease “at least since the Athenian Plague in 430 BC.”
On Fauci’s dictates to mandate the vaccine for healthcare workers, the two argued:
“Under Fauci’s mandates, hospitals are firing heroic nurses who recovered from COVID they contracted while caring for patients. With their superior immunity, they can safely care for the oldest and frailest patients with even lower transmission risk than the vaccinated.”
On school closures they wrote:
“Considering the devastating effects of school closures on children, Dr. Fauci’s advocacy for school closures may be the single biggest mistake of his career … While children do get infected, their risk for COVID death is minuscule, lower than their already low risk of dying from the flu.”
Kulldorff and Bhattacharya pointed to Sweden, noting that during the 2020 spring wave of COVID, the country kept daycare and schools open for all 1.8 million children ages 1 to 15, with no masks, testing or social distancing.
The authors argued contact tracing “was a hopeless waste of valuable public health resources that did not stop the disease,” and that Fauci failed at protecting the vulnerable.
“After more than 700,000 reported COVID deaths in America, we now know that lockdowns failed to protect high-risk older people,” they said.
On collateral public health damage, they argued that a “fundamental public health principle is that health is multidimensional; the control of a single infectious disease is not synonymous with health.”
They wrote that Fauci:
“ … failed to properly consider and weigh the disastrous effects lockdowns would have on cancer detection and treatment, cardiovascular disease outcomes, diabetes care, childhood vaccination rates, mental health and opioid overdoses, to name a few. Americans will live with — and die from — this collateral damage for many years to come.”
In private conversations, Kulldorff and Bhattacharya said, most of their scientific colleagues agree with them on these points but few have spoken up out of fear of “financial censorship.”
“Many are afraid of losing positions or research grants, aware that Dr. Fauci sits on top of the largest pile of infectious disease research money in the world,” they wrote.
In his forthcoming book, “The Real Anthony Fauci,” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. includes a comprehensive discussion of Fauci’s influence and power over the scientific community, revealing how Fauci uses the “financial clout at his disposal to wield extraordinary influence over hospitals, universities, journals and thousands of influential doctors and scientists — whose careers and institutions he has the power to ruin, advance or reward.” Kennedy’s book is due out Nov. 16.
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Jeremy Loffredo is a freelance reporter for The Defender. His investigative reporting has been featured in The Grayzone and Unlimited Hangout. Jeremy formerly produced news programs at RT America.
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A 12-year-old girl is fighting for her life in ICU after suffering heart complications caused by the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. The 12-year-old Grade 6 pupil, who is a student at Wat Don Sai School, received her shot on October 19th. Several days later, she complained to her mother about chest pain and shortness of breath. Her symptoms gradually worsened and she was hospitalized at Ratchaburi Hospital. She was then transferred to the Children’s Hospital in Bangkok where she’s currently intubated on a ventilator.
The heartbroken mother posted a message on Facebook yesterday with a picture of her daughter receiving the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine at Chet Samian Hospital.
She said:
“My 12-year-old daughter is now in the ICU. A ventilator is required after she was diagnosed with coronary thrombosis. This occurred less than a week after she was vaccinated.
She was always a strong child.”
The father of the pupil, Mr. Pipatpong Tanpanich, said that on October 19th, at 2 pm, she and her siblings had received their first dose of the Pfizer vaccine. She had pain in her arm for 3 days but recovered. 2 days later, she developed a dry cough and chest pain so she was taken to Ratchaburi Hospital where her condition was considered so severe, that she was rushed to the Children’s Hospital in Bangkok where she was diagnosed with coronary thrombosis.
Dr. Pajaree Areerob, an MD at Ratchaburi Hospital, told reporters that they’d never seen a case like this before.
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All images in this article are from The COVID World
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The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is considering a proposal by Oxitec, a UK-based corporation, to introduce billions of genetically engineered (GE) mosquitoes across 12 undisclosed counties in California.
Thousands of comments, including comments from Center for Food Safety (CFS), opposing this release were submitted in early October on the last day of EPA’s public comment period amid growing concerns raised by scientists, public health experts and environmental groups. If approved, the release would be the largest ever release of genetically engineered (GE) insects in the U.S., following an initial release earlier this year in Florida.
“EPA is not doing its job. Releasing billions of GE mosquitoes could affect our food chains and ecosystems. If the female mosquitoes are released, GE hybrid mosquitoes could spread diseases more efficiently,” said Jaydee Hanson, policy director at the Center for Food Safety and the International Center for Technology Assessment. “The GE mosquito is a Trojan horse for a pipeline of other GE insects to be used in agriculture.”
In the public comments, critics cited the lack of public notification and transparency around where the releases would occur along with environmental and public health risks, such as the introduction of more aggressive mosquito species and potential allergic reactions to bites from GE mosquitoes. The public documents in the proposal do not include an endangered species assessment, public health impact analysis, or data about the first experimental field trials in the Florida Keys. There is no data to support Oxitec’s claims that open releases of GE mosquitoes will reduce incidence of mosquito-borne diseases.
“We need sound science and transparency, not a rubberstamp on a secretive experiment that poses risks to California’s environment and our health,” said Dana Perls, Food and Technology program manager at Friends of the Earth, and a resident of California.”We must prioritize less risky, less costly, proven measures to address mosquito-borne disease, not a corporate boondoggle.”
In March 2021, a public panel of independent experts spoke about the regulatory gaps and scientific risks associated with GE mosquitoes prior to the release in Florida, concluding that GE mosquitoes could pose a significant threat to humans and the environment in the Florida Keys. Recently, a group of scholars from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign questioned proceeding with the release in Florida on scientific and ethical concerns.
Although mosquito control boards are focused on reducing mosquito-borne diseases, scientists have raised major concerns that GE mosquitoes could create hybrid wild mosquitoes which could worsen the spread of mosquito-borne diseases and which may be more resistant to insecticides than the original wild mosquitoes. A recent field study in Brazil by researchers from the Powell Lab at Yale University confirmed that the mosquito’s engineered genes had spread into wild populations.
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There are plenty of votes in France in bashing Muslims, bashing Brussels or bashing America. There are even some in bashing Germany. But there are none in bashing Britain.
Many votes in France turn on immigration, jobs, education or agriculture. There are few to be won or lost on sea fishing (which is 0.06% of the French economy).
Why then has President Emmanuel Macron gone out of his way to pick a quarrel with Britain over, at most, 180 fishing licences for French boats in English and Channel Islands waters? The simple answer to the question is: “He hasn’t.”
The British media — encouraged by the British government — has worked itself into a self-pleasing froth of Macronphobia in recent days. There are, of course, elements of French policy and behaviour which deserve criticism in this fundamentally silly dispute (silly to all but a handful of French fishers and their families). The same can also be said of some aspects of the British government’s behaviour — and its frequently misleading communication — on the Great Franco-British Fish War of 2021.
The French presidential elections on April 10 and 24 may be in the back of Macron’s mind as he fights, as he sees it, to prevent Britain from unravelling the Brexit agreement that it signed only 11 months ago. But it is fatuous to suggest — as parts of the UK media and the some members of the UK government do — that the whole row has been confected by Macron to appeal to French Anglophobes (who are a very tiny constituency) or the mighty French fishing vote (a few thousand people at most).
The licensing row directly affects, overall, fewer than 200 French boats and 1,000 people whose catches of fish and shellfish are worth €6m annually – 0.0000025% of French GDP. The economic implications for Britain are close to zero. They are scarcely bigger for the Channel Islands (many of whose fishermen are supportive of the French claims).
It is a small, very messy, very technical dispute which could be solved, with goodwill on all sides, in an afternoon; it may be resolved tomorrow when the British Brexit minister, Lord Frost, meets the French Europe minister, Clément Beaune, in Paris.
On Monday, Macron pulled back from the brink of an explosive trade war with Britain. He suspended until Friday his threat to block British fishing boats from selling their catches in French ports and, worse, imposing full-scale customs checks on all trucks crossing the English Channel. The political body language on both sides suggests that a deal is close — though it could yet slip through the net.
Why has such a small quarrel become so huge? The simple answer is that it is part of a pattern of deteriorating post-Brexit relations between Britain and France — quarrelsome neighbours at the best of times.
Johnson knows that sticking it to the French is always an excellent tactic in a time of crisis. Meanwhile, Macron has been determined, partly for electoral reasons but mostly from personal conviction, to ensure that Britain does not slide out of its Brexit commitments. His aim is not to “punish” Britain, but to ensure that Britain should not be allowed to leave the EU and keep the benefits of staying in.
This was the argument made in a clumsily written letter to the European Commission last week by Macron’s Prime Minister, Jean Castex. It was mistranslated and misconstrued — as “lets damage the UK all we can” — by both the British government and much of the British media.
There have been several nadirs in Anglo-French relations in my almost quarter century living in and writing about France: mad cow disease, foot and mouth, Jacques Chirac’s refusal to join Tony Blair in the second Iraq war. But the tone of this year’s Franco-British quarrels have been nastier than any of those which came before. Both leaders are partly to blame. They have encouraged, or allowed, the disputes to become too personal.
In the case of Macron, the animus, I believe, is not against Britain. It is against Boris Johnson. Macron detests populism but he has a moth-like attraction to populists, which usually goes astray. Macron once thought that he could charm and handle the British leader, just as he once thought that he could schmooze Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.
Downing Street says that the two men are “pals”. Nonsense. Neither Johnson nor Macron has pals. The French president has come to think of Johnson, Elysée sources say, as an unreliable but crafty buffoon. In other words, he has allowed the British leader to get under his skin.
Macron is leader of one of the world’s richest and most powerful countries, but he has only just over four years’ experience as a politician — let alone as a statesman. And as Macron’s recent decision to call Australia’s Prime Minister a liar shows, sometimes that lack of political education shows. Macron may be right about Scott Morrison. Many Australian politicians and officials would agree with his criticism of the AUKUS deal. But the President came over as being petty and lacking emotional control.
Something similar happened earlier this year when Macron made slighting remarks to foreign journalists on the effectiveness of the AstraZeneca Covid vaccine on the elderly. Macron was angry with AstraZeneca at the time for failing to meet its commitments to supply the EU-27 — while providing plenty of doses for the UK.
Macron does not do “palliness” but he does do pique. The standard British view — that he has sought cross-Channel quarrels from the beginning — could not be more wrong. His anger is driven by disappointment and a sense of betrayal. He had hoped that France, as a neighbour and important military partner, would play the key role in keeping Johnsonian Britain in the European orbit.
Instead the last ten months have been scarred by a succession of Anglo-French disputes, starting with big tail-backs of trucks in England in January after France imposed strict Covid controls on travel across the Channel. There was then the row over Astra-Zeneca supplies. Then Britain accused France in July of failing to stop illegal migrants from crossing the Channel in small boats. The French retorted that Britain had promised to pay for extra police on the Calais side of the water but never handed over the money.
Britain also imposed harsh controls on travellers from France in the summer — on the bizarre grounds that a new variant of Covid was raging in the French Indian Ocean island of Réunion. The Australian submarine row merely plunged their relationship to new depths. The French government accused Britain of being an “opportunistic fifth wheel”, while Johnson responded in French-baiting franglais: “Donnez-moi un break.”.
And so to the great fish row. France does have a case. The UK also has a case. Both have acted badly. The British and Jersey governments, by imposing strict proofs of past fishing on small boats, are trying to claw back some of what was lost in the fisheries part of the Brexit negotiations. France has turned too rapidly to disproportionate threats — such as cutting the power cable from Normandy to Jersey (a threat now withdrawn). The blocked licences are not of enormous economic interest but Macron is convinced that they fit a pattern of Johnsonian Britain trying to slide out of its Brexit commitments.
Was next April’s election also an issue? Perhaps at the margins. The President is doubtless anxious but his electoral position is the strongest for a sitting president in 20 years. His approval ratings are in the low 40s, high for a late term French president. The French economy is booming, growing 3% in the third quarter and likely to approach 7% in 2021 as a whole — the best among large and medium EU economies.
If Macron had electoral motives in the fisheries row, they were defensive, not proactive. He would certainly have been attacked by his rivals if French interests were seen to be steamrollered by Britain.
The big question is what happens next. Macron has come to believe that negotiation with Johnson is pointless without threats. If Britain does back down and issue more fishing licences this week, he will assume that this judgement is correct.
Things could still go wrong. The talks could collapse. Macron would then be obliged to give Johnson what Johnson (maybe) wants: a mega-row with France on which all of Britain’s post-Brexit ills can be blamed.
More likely the dispute will be resolved, or sent for arbitration. That could be the occasion for a new push to improve Franco-British relations across the board.
But even if the Fish War is ended, I suspect it won’t be the last post-Brexit, Franco-British row. Despite their surface chumminess at the COP26 conference on Glasgow, relations between Johnson and Macron have gone past the point of repair.
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At the beginning of October, Italy hosted the preparatory meeting of the UN Conference on Climate Change, currently taking place in Glasgow. Two weeks later Italy hosted another international event that, unlike the first widely advertised, was passed over in silence by the government: the NATO exercise of nuclear warfare Steadfast Noon in the skies over northern and central Italy.
The elected EU Parliament has recently come forward in various Press Conferences and in news articles for the public to understand that the EU is everything but a democracy.
Of course, news reports flash daily showcasing the brave young movement of “eco-warriors” led by Sweden’s “forever 15 year old” [now 18] Greta Thunberg or America’s 17 year old Jamie Margolin who have become a force across Europe and America leading such movements as the Extinction Rebellion, This is Zero Hour, the Sunrise Movement and Children’s eco-crusade.
Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley claimed last week that China was close to a “sputnik moment” due to its successful test of a hypersonic missile. However, U.S. space-based early warning systems can detect hypersonic missiles, marking them as no threat at all.
Chen defines “misinformation” as anything that contradicts the Pharma narrative. Chen is adamant that nothing be allowed to pierce his protective Pharma information bubble.
On October 28, the state of Florida sued the Biden administration over the mandate, which Republican Gov. Ron DeSantissaid “is unlawfully jeopardizing thousands of jobs.”
Right after voting unanimously to recommend the Pfizer-BioNTech “vaccine” for the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) “vaccine” in children as young as five, this committee was outed for direct conflicts of interest that clearly impacted its decision.
Julian Assange is a truth-teller who has committed no crime but revealed government crimes and lies on a vast scale and so performed one of the great public services of my lifetime. Do we need to be reminded that justice for one is justice for all?
He was not alone in his decision to withdraw from this increasingly oppressive system. Dr. Mark Trozzi, a 25-year veteran of Ontario’s healthcare system, not only closed his practice but decided to devote his time to warning the public, via his website, about the dangers of the medical tyranny that is unfolding.
By pushing vaccine mandates, Dr. Fauci ignores naturally acquired immunity among the COVID-recovered, of which there are more than 45 million in the United States. Mounting evidence indicates that natural immunity is stronger and longer lasting than vaccine-induced immunity.
The FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee voted 17 to 0, with one abstention, to give a green light allowing Emergency Use Authorization for the Pfizer-BioNTech experimental mRNA to children between 5 and 12 years. The expert who abstained later explained he did so because of limited safety and efficacy data provided.
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It looked like something of an ambush, but a coterie of Australian journalists had their man where they wanted him. Between sessions at the G20 Summit in Rome, and French President Emmanuel Macron found himself blunter than usual. The sundering of the relationship between Australia and France over the new trilateral security relationship between Canberra, Washington and London, and, more importantly, the rescinding of the submarine contract with Australia, was playing on his mind. Did he think, came the question, whether he had been lied to by the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, about the intended scrapping of the Franco-Australian submarine deal with the creation of AUKUS? “I don’t think, I know,” came the definitive answer.
The response from Morrison was one of shameless dissembling. Making sure that Australian audiences and the news waves would only pick up select gobbets, he told the press that the French president had attacked, or “sledged” Australia and its good burghers. He expressed concern about “the statements that were made questioning Australia’s integrity and the slurs that have been placed on Australia”. He was “not going to cop sledging at Australia.”
A full reading of Macron’s words in the brief encounter suggests nothing of the sort. Australia and France were bound up in history and blood enriched ties going back to two world wars. “Your country was shoulder to shoulder with us during the wars. You had fighters with us when our freedom was at stake. We have, we do have the same values.” He respected “sovereign choices” but it was also vital to “respect allies and partners.” It was the conduct of the Australian government he had issue with, something that Macron thought “detrimental to the reputation of your country and your Prime Minister.”
Morrison’s defence proved shoddy, confusing the issue of having difficulties with the contractual relationship with France to build twelve diesel electric submarines with the issue of announcing an intended divorce. As with lovers who read off different relationship scripts, the Australian Prime Minister is convinced that Macron must have known when they met in June that something had soured. He had “made it very clear that a conventional diesel-powered submarine was not going to meet Australia’s strategic requirements. We discussed that candidly.” He did, however, say that alternatives were not discussed, they being “in confidence”.
The strategic environment, claimed Morrison with tediousness, had changed. There were also issues specific to the contract with the French defence firm Naval, including “following through with commitments on Australian industry content.” There were issues with delays; issues with cost. “These were matters that we raised quite regularly and indeed I raised with President Macron at each opportunity when we either spoke over the phone or we had our bilateral meetings going on for a number of years.”
Morrison’s mendacity is also pronounced in how he justifies pursuing the nuclear submarine option with the United States. Wishing to cuckold France, the Australian prime minister began to look around, with eyes firmly fastened on Washington’s formidable hardware. But, using the reasoning of any adulterer who is found out, it wasn’t a true relationship at that point; Washington and Canberra were dealing with “the nuclear stewardship issues”. “At the same time, we were working through in good faith with Naval to address the problems that we had in the contract.” Such a marriage; such a commitment.
In the Scotty from Advertising appraisal of the world, dissatisfaction can be retooled and packaged as separation and nullification. What Macron thought he heard or understood is less relevant than what Morrison thought he said. He might even believe it.
The Biden administration has also done its fair share of dissimulative manoeuvring in this affair. In his meeting with Macron at the Villa Bonaparte in Rome on October 29, President Joe Biden was fluffy and buttery. France, he assured the French President, was “the reason, in part, why we became an independent country.” Asked on whether the relationship between France and the US had been “repaired”, Biden was apologetic: “Well, the answer is: I think what happened [over the announcement of the submarines] – to use an English phrase, what we did was ‘clumsy’. It was not done with a lot of grace.”
This gave Biden the cue to place Morrison before an oncoming truck. “I was under the impression certain things had happened that hadn’t happened.” To clarify, he was “under the impression that France had been informed long before that the [French-Australian submarine] deal was not going through. I, honest to God, did not know you had not been.”
What, then, had Morrison told Biden he was doing about the French and ending the conventional submarine affair? The Australian, equipped with a confidential document detailing a communications timeline on the new submarine nuclear announcement, suggests that Biden’s full grasp of the verity should also be questioned. The 15-page document, approved by officials of Biden’s National Security Council, makes the point that France would only be informed of the new arrangements on September 16.
Time was also spent in the Eisenhower Executive Office building pondering how Australia might best calm an indignant France. There was also concern expressed on how other powers might react. Little consideration was given to the fact that any anger might be directed against the US, least of all from France. Perhaps, suggests Greg Sheridan of the same newspaper with a degree of charity, Biden has reached a point in his life where he can’t remember what he can’t remember.
The Morrison government has also taken to the distasteful practice of selective leaking in bolstering its quicksand position, a tactic which further suggests a diminution of an already less than impressive political office. A prodding text from Macron to Morrison, sent two days prior to the AUKUS announcement and the cancellation of the contract, involved a query as to whether good or bad news could be expected about the French submarines. The vulgar insinuation here is that Macron supposedly had an inkling that something was afoot from the Australian side, which hardly counts as fully informed awareness. Naturally, Morrison’s response is not noted. The Elysée further denies suggestions that Canberra made several warning efforts regarding the AUKUS announcement.
An Elysée official expressed bafflement at the tactic. “Disclosing a text message exchange between heads of state or government is a pretty crude and unconventional tactic.” It may be crude, and it may be unconventional, but this furnishes an apt summation of the Australian Prime Minister’s view of diplomacy.
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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]
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At the beginning of October, Italy hosted the preparatory meeting of the UN Conference on Climate Change, currently taking place in Glasgow. Two weeks later Italy hosted another international event that, unlike the first widely advertised, was passed over in silence by the government: the NATO exercise of nuclear warfare Steadfast Noon in the skies over northern and central Italy. For seven days, under US command, the air forces of 14 NATO countries participated, with dual-capacity nuclear and conventional fighter-bombers deployed at the bases of Aviano and Ghedi.
At Aviano the 31st U.S. Squadron with F-16C/D fighter-bombers and B61 nuclear bombs is permanently deployed. At Ghedi. the 6th Wing of the Italian Air Force with Tornado PA-200 fighter-bombers and B61 nuclear bombs. The Federation of American Scientists confirms in 2021 that “the Italian Air Force is assigned nuclear strike missions with U.S. bombs, maintained in Italy under the control of the U.S. Air Force, the use of which in war must be authorized by the President of the United States.”
The bases of Aviano and Ghedi have been restructured to accommodate the F-35A fighters armed with the new B61-12 nuclear bombs. Last October, the final test was carried out in Nevada with the release of inert B61-12 from two F-35A fighters. Soon the new nuclear bombs will arrive in Italy: in the base of Ghedi alone 30 Italian F-35A fighters can be deployed, ready to attack under US command with 60 B61-12 nuclear bombs.
A week after participating in the nuclear warfare exercise, Italy attended the UN Climate Change Conference, chaired by the UK in partnership with Italy. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned that “there is one minute to midnight and we need to act now” against global warming that is destroying the planet. In this way, he instrumentally uses the symbolic Doomsday Clock, which in reality indicates how many minutes away we are from nuclear midnight.
A few months ago, in March, Boris Johnson himself announced the upgrading of British nuclear attack submarines: the Astute (price 2.2 billion dollars each), armed with U.S. Tomahawk IV nuclear cruise missiles with a range of 1,500 km, and the Vanguard, armed with 16 U.S. Trident D5 ballistic missiles with a range of 12,000 km, equipped with over 120 nuclear warheads. The latter will soon be replaced by the even more powerful Dreadnought class submarines.
The British nuclear attack submarines, which cross deep along the coasts of Russia, now also sail along those of China, starting from Australia to which the U.S. and Britain will provide nuclear submarines. Great Britain, which is hosting the conference to save the planet from global warming, is thus contributing to the arms race that is leading the world towards nuclear catastrophe.
Against this backdrop the promotional video of the Conference is misleading: the Dinosaur, symbol of an extinct species, from the podium of the United Nations warns humans to save their species from global warming. In fact, scientific studies confirm that dinosaurs became extinct not because of warming, but because of the cooling of the Earth after the impact of a huge meteorite that, raising clouds of dust, darkened the Sun.
Exactly what would happen after a nuclear war: in addition to catastrophic destruction and radioactive fallout on the entire planet, it would cause, in urban and forest areas, huge fires that would put in the atmosphere a blanket of sooty smoke, darkening the Sun. This would determine a climatic cooling of the duration of years: the nuclear winter. The majority of plant and animal species would become extinct, with devastating effects on agriculture. The cold and malnutrition would reduce the ability to survive of the few survivors, leading the human species to extinction.
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This article was originally published on Il Manifesto. Translated from Italian.
Manlio Dinucci, award winning author, geopolitical analyst and geographer, Pisa, Italy. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
Featured image: One of the F-15E Strike Eagles deployed to Aviano AB for Steadfast Noon 2021. (All images: Claudio Tramontin)
Agli inizi di ottobre l’Italia ha ospitato la riunione preparatoria della Conferenza Onu sul cambiamento climatico, attualmente in corso a Glasgow. Due settimane dopo l’Italia ha ospitato un altro evento internazionale che, a differenza del primo ampiamente reclamizzato, è stato passato sotto silenzio dal governo: l’esercitazione Nato di guerra nucleare Steadfast Noon nei cieli dell’Italia settentrionale e centrale. Vi hanno partecipato per sette giorni, sotto comando Usa, le forze aeree di 14 paesi Nato, con cacciabombardieri a duplice capacità nucleare e convenzionale dislocati nelle basi di Aviano e Ghedi. Ad Aviano è schierata in permanenza la 31a squadriglia Usa. con cacciabombardieri F-16C/D e bombe nucleari B61.
A Ghedi il 6° Stormo dell’Aeronautica italiana con cacciabombardieri Tornado PA-200 e bombe nucleari B61. La Federazione degli Scienziati Americani conferma nel 2021 che «all’Aeronautica italiana sono assegnate missioni di attacco nucleare con bombe Usa, mantenute in Italia sotto controllo della US Air Force, il cui uso in guerra deve essere autorizzato dal Presidente degli Stati uniti». Le basi di Aviano e Ghedi sono state ristrutturate per accogliere i caccia F-35A armati delle nuove bombe nucleari B61-12. Lo scorso ottobre è stato effettuato nel Nevada il test finale con lo sgancio di B61-12 inerti da due caccia F-35A. Tra non molto le nuove bombe nucleari arriveranno in Italia: nella sola base di Ghedi possono essere schierati 30 caccia italiani F-35A, pronti all’attacco sotto comando Usa con 60 bombe nucleari B61-12.
Una settimana dopo aver partecipato all’esercitazione di guerra nucleare, l’Italia ha partecipato alla Conferenza Onu sul cambiamento climatico, presieduta dal Regno Unito in partenariato con l’Italia. Il premier britannico Boris Johnson ha avvertito che «manca un minuto a mezzanotte e abbiamo bisogno di agire ora» contro il riscaldamento globale che sta distruggendo il pianeta. Usa in tal modo strumentalmente il simbolico Orologio dell’Apocalisse, che in realtà segna a quanti minuti siamo dalla mezzanotte nucleare. Lo stesso Boris Johnson pochi mesi fa, in marzo, ha annunciato il potenziamento dei sottomarini britannici da attacco nucleare: gli Astute (prezzo 2,2 miliardi di dollari ciascuno), armati di missili nucleari Usa da crociera Tomahawk IV con raggio di 1.500 km, e i Vanguard, armati di 16 missili balistici Usa Trident D5 con raggio di 12.000 km, dotati di oltre 120 testate nucleari.
Questi ultimi verranno presto sostituiti dagli ancora più potenti sottomarini della classe Deadnough. I sottomarini britannici da attacco nucleare, che incrociano in profondità lungo le coste della Russia, navigano ora anche lungo quelle della Cina, partendo dall’Australia a cui Usa e Gran Bretagna forniranno sottomarini nucleari. La Gran Bretagna, che ospita la Conferenza per salvare il pianeta dal riscaldamento globale, contribuisce in tal modo alla corsa agli armamenti che porta il mondo verso la catastrofe nucleare.
Su questo sfondo è fuorviante il video promozionale della Conferenza: il Dinosauro, simbolo di una specie estinta, che dal podio delle Nazioni Unite avverte gli umani di salvare la loro specie dal riscaldamento globale. In realtà, confermano studi scientifici, i dinosauri si estinsero non per il riscaldamento, ma per il raffreddamento della Terra dopo l’impatto di un enorme meteorite che, sollevando nubi di polveri, oscurò il Sole.
Esattamente ciò che avverrebbe in seguito a una guerra nucleare: oltre a catastrofiche distruzioni e alla ricaduta radioattiva sull’intero pianeta, essa provocherebbe, in aree urbane e forestali, enormi incendi che immetterebbero nell’atmosfera una coltre di fumo fuligginoso, oscurando il Sole. Ciò determinerebbe un raffreddamento climatico della durata anche di anni: l’inverno nucleare. Si estinguerebbe di conseguenza la maggior parte delle specie vegetali e animali, con effetti devastanti anche sull’agricoltura. Il freddo e la denutrizione ridurrebbero la capacità di sopravvivenza dei pochi superstiti, portando la specie umana all’estinzione.
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Das Krisenjahr 1930 war der Anfang vom Ende der Weimarer Republik, der ersten parlamentarischen Demokratie in Deutschland: Drei Millionen Arbeitslose, Notverordnungen und Hitlers Triumph. Es war der Beginn einer finsteren Zeit. In der Parabel „Maßnahmen gegen die Gewalt“ machte Brecht schon frühzeitig auf die Gefahr von Willkür und Gewalt im Nationalsozialismus aufmerksam. Parallelen zur weltpolitischen Situation der Gegenwart springen jedem wachen Bürger sofort ins Auge. Ein Nachdenken über Brechts Gleichnis zum Umgang mit staatlicher Gewalt aus dem Jahr 1930 kann deshalb hilfreich sein.
Staatliche Gewaltmaßnahmen zur Behebung der COVID-19- und Klima-Krise
Gewalt wird uns auch heute angetan – und ein Ende ist nicht in Sicht. Auf die COVID-19-Krise wird die Klima-Krise folgen. Und wir Bürger weichen vor der Gewalt der verordneten illegalen und brutalen Maßnahmen der Regierungen, die unser aller Gesundheit schützen soll, zurück und sagen nicht „Nein“. Wir beginnen bereits, uns mit der heraufziehenden Tyrannei zu arrangieren.
Werden wir uns weiterhin der staatlichen Gewalt unterziehen, weil wir wie Herr Keuner in Brechts Gleichnis „kein Rückgrat zum Zerschlagen“ haben? Werden wir den Agenten einer fremden Macht deshalb jahrelang gehorchen und dienen, weil wir auf den richtigen Zeitpunkt warten, um „Nein“ zu sagen wie Herr Egge?
Anhand der Brecht‘schen Parabel sollte sich jeder erwachsene Bürger mit der Thematik auseinandersetzen und durch selbständiges Denken zur Erkenntnis sinnvollen und überlegten Handelns kommen.
Brechts Parabel aus dem Jahr 1930
Brecht beschreibt in seiner lehrhaften, auf einem Vergleich beruhenden Kurzgeschichte, wie die beiden Hauptfiguren, Herr Keuner und Herr Egge, auf ihre Weise auf staatliche Gewalt reagieren: Herr Keuner – der Denkende – rechtfertigt seine unterwürfige Reaktion gegenüber der Gewalt gegenüber seinen Schülern mit den Worten: „Ich habe kein Rückgrat zum Zerschlagen. Gerade ich muss länger leben als die Gewalt.“ (1)
Anschließend belehrt Herr Keuner seine Schüler mittels einer brutalen Geschichte aus der Zeit der Illegalität: Eines Tages tritt ein Agent der neuen Herrscher der Stadt ungefragt in das Haus und in das Leben von Herr Egge. Diesem fremden Agenten gehorcht und dient Herr Egge, „der gelernt hatte, nein zu sagen“, sieben Jahre lang – spricht aber kein einziges Wort mit ihm. Erst nach dessen Tod atmet er auf und antwortet auf die vor sieben Jahren gestellte Frage des Agenten „Wirst du mir dienen?“ mit einem „Nein“.
Möglichweise ist es das kleinere Übel, sich dem Schicksal zu fügen, keinen offenen Widerstand zu leisten und auch seine Meinung nicht offen zu sagen, wenn man erkannt hat, dass man im Moment nicht die Macht hat, etwas gegen die Gewalt zu tun. Vielleicht ist es klüger, auf den richtigen Zeitpunkt zu warten, um „nein“ zu sagen.
Doch, lieber Leser, bilden Sie sich Ihre eigene Meinung. Ich zitiere:
„Als Herr Keuner, der Denkende, sich in einem Saale vor vielen gegen die Gewalt aussprach, merkte er, wie die Leute vor ihm zurückwichen und weggingen. Er blickte sich um und sah hinter sich stehen – die Gewalt. ‘Was sagtest du?‘ fragte ihn die Gewalt. ‚Ich sprach mich für die Gewalt aus‘, antwortete Herr Keuner. Als Herr Keuner weggegangen war, fragten ihn seine Schüler nach seinem Rückgrat. Herr Keuner antwortete: ‚Ich habe kein Rückgrat zum Zerschlagen. Gerade ich muss länger leben als die Gewalt.‘
Und Herr Keuner erzählte folgende Geschichte:
In der Wohnung des Herrn Egge, der gelernt hatte, nein zu sagen, kam eines Tages in der Zeit der Illegalität ein Agent, der zeigte einen Schein vor, welcher ausgestellt war im Namen derer, die die Stadt beherrschten, und auf dem stand, dass ihm gehören sollte jede Wohnung, in die er seinen Fuß setzt; ebenso sollte ihm auch jedes Essen gehören, das er verlange; ebenso sollte ihm auch jeder Mann dienen, den er sähe. Der Agent setzte sich in einen Stuhl, verlangte Essen, wusch sich, legte sich nieder und fragte mit dem Gesicht zur Wand vor dem Einschlafen: ‚Wirst du mir dienen?‘
Herr Egge deckte ihn mit einer Decke zu, vertrieb die Fliegen, bewachte seinen Schlaf, und wie an diesem Tage gehorchte er ihm sieben Jahre lang. Aber was immer er für ihn tat, eines zu tun hütete er sich wohl: das war, ein Wort zu sagen.
Als nun die sieben Jahre herum waren und der Agent dick geworden war vom vielen Essen, Schlafen und Befehlen, starb der Agent. Da wickelte ihn Herr Egge in die verdorbene Decke, schleifte ihn aus dem Haus, wusch das Lager, tünchte die Wände, atmete auf und antwortete: ‚Nein.‘“ (2)
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Dr. Rudolf Hänsel ist Rektor a.D., Erziehungswissenschaftler und Diplom-Psychologe. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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The crisis year 1930 was the beginning of the end of the Weimar Republic, the first parliamentary democracy in Germany: three million unemployed, emergency decrees and Hitler’s triumph. It was the beginning of a dark period. In the parable “Measures against Violence”, Brecht drew attention early on to the danger of arbitrariness and violence under National Socialism. Parallels to the world political situation of the present immediately leap to the eye of every alert citizen. Reflecting on Brecht’s parable on dealing with state violence from 1930 can therefore be helpful.
State violence measures to remedy the COVID 19 and climate crisis
Violence is still being done to us today – and there is no end in sight. The COVID-19 crisis will be followed by the climate crisis. And we citizens are backing away from the violence of the governments’ imposed illegal and brutal measures to protect all of our health, not saying “no”. We are already beginning to come to terms with the tyranny that is coming.
Will we continue to submit to state violence because, like Mr Keuner in Brecht’s parable, we have “no backbone to break”? Will we obey and serve the agents of a foreign power for years because we are waiting for the right time to say “no” like Mr Egge?
On the basis of Brecht’s parable, every adult citizen should deal with the topic and come to the realisation of sensible and considered action through independent thinking.
Brecht’s parable from 1930
In his instructive short story based on a comparison, Brecht describes how the two main characters, Mr Keuner and Mr Egge, react in their own way to state violence: Mr Keuner – the thinking man – justifies his submissive reaction to violence towards his students by saying, “I have no backbone to smash. I of all people must live longer than violence.” (1)
Mr Keuner then lectures his pupils by means of a brutal story from the time of illegality: one day an agent of the new rulers of the city enters Mr Egge’s house and life without being asked. This foreign agent obeys and serves Mr Egge, “who had learned to say no”, for seven years – but does not speak a single word to him. Only after his death does he breathe a sigh of relief and answer the agent’s question of seven years ago, “Will you serve me?” with a “No”.
Perhaps it is the lesser evil to resign oneself to fate, not to offer open resistance and also not to speak one’s mind openly when one has realised that at the moment one does not have the power to do anything about the violence. Perhaps it is wiser to wait for the right time to say “no”.
But, dear reader, form your own opinion. I quote:
“When Mr Keuner, the thinker, spoke out against violence in front of many in a hall, he noticed how people backed away from him and walked away. He looked around and saw standing behind him – violence. ‘What did you say?’ the violence asked him. ‘I spoke in favour of the violence,’ Mr Keuner replied. When Mr Keuner had walked away, his pupils asked him about his backbone. Mr Keuner replied, ‘I have no backbone to smash. I of all people must live longer than violence.’
And Mr Keuner told the following story:
In the flat of Mr Egge, who had learned to say no, an agent came one day in the time of illegality, who produced a note which was issued in the name of those who ruled the city, and on which it was written that every flat in which he set foot should belong to him; likewise also every meal he demanded should belong to him; likewise also every man he saw should serve him. The agent sat down in a chair, demanded food, washed himself, lay down, and, facing the wall before falling asleep, asked, ‘Will you serve me?’
Mr Egge covered him with a blanket, drove away the flies, guarded his sleep, and as on that day, he obeyed him for seven years. But whatever he did for him, there was one thing he was careful not to do: that was to say a word.
When the seven years were up and the agent had grown fat from eating, sleeping and giving orders, the agent died. Then Mr Egge wrapped him in the rotten blanket, dragged him out of the house, washed the camp, whitewashed the walls, breathed a sigh of relief and answered: ‘No.'” (2)
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Dr Rudolf Hänsel is a retired rector, educationalist and qualified psychologist.
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Stand strong, not only with Palestinian civil society, but with all forms of legitimate resistance to Israel’s domination, control and oppression in Palestine from the river to the sea.
That’s the powerful message I am anticipating to hear tomorrow at Masar Badil, Conference of the Alternative Palestinian Path: Towards a new revolutionary commitment, here in Madrid (Oct 30, 2021).
Madrid! No Palestinian can hear the name of this wonderful European city without thinking of the ill-fated Madrid Conference of 1991, which dragged on until August 1993 without any progress, when Israel and the PLO entered into negotiations in Oslo with Norwegian mediation, in the utmost secrecy. The Palestinian delegation at the Madrid negotiations, led by Haidar Abdel Shafi (Haydar Abd al-Shafi), found out about the talks from a radio announcement.
Fifty percent of Palestinians today were born after what came to be known as the Oslo Accords. This younger generation of Palestinians, especially those within the West Bank, like the younger generation of Israeli Jews, is only now awakening to the reality of the disinformation in which they grew up believing. I see Masar Badil as the first step in the re-education of this generation of Palestinians and Israelis alike.
It is sometimes argued that the failure of the “peace process,” a euphemism for the Oslo Accords that is anything but, is due to issues of identity and how “both sides construct the National narratives.” In this argument, the Palestinian National identity emerged only as a response to the threat of Zionism in the early 20th century and was confined at the time to the educated elite. Historian Walid Khalidi described its rise as follows: “If the Arab population of Palestine had not yet been sure of their identity before 1948, the experience of defeat, dispossession, and exile guaranteed that they knew what their identity was very soon afterwards. They were Palestinians.”
The so-called Arab revolt of 1936–1939 against the British was a Palestinian revolt. In the face of continued defeat and exile, Masar Badil understands that the only recourse for Palestinians, then as now, is continued revolt.
The first objective of the alternative path envisioned by the Conference states:
Asserting the Palestinian, Arab and international popular response to the path of Madrid and Oslo, the declaration of the failure of this catastrophic road, from the heart of Madrid, Spain, in October 2021, and renewing the rejection by the supporters of Palestine everywhere in the world of all agreements and treaties that undermine the rights of the Palestinian people, from the colonial “Balfour Declaration” to the last negotiations that the Palestinian Authority may have concluded with the Zionist state. We consider all of them null and void, illegitimate and unlawful. Accordingly, Palestinian, Arab and international popular participation is critical to achieve the democratic, popular content of the conference and its outcomes. Participation in preparing for the conference and ensuring its results are individual and collective responsibilities.
Much of what activist groups on social media, including some Jewish groups, have long been doing and continue to do, is to expose the Israeli Zionist National identity narrative for what it is: a settler-colonial, apartheid, Jewish supremacist identity that robs Palestinians, not only of their land, but also of their own national identity on that homeland.
At a time when Israel is orchestrating a smear campaign to discredit and de-legitimize Palestinian essential human rights work by equating it to terrorist acts, it is more important than ever not to allow Israel and its allied disinformation groups, as Shawan Jabarin put it in a recent opinion piece in the EU Observer “to shatter the trust and confidence at the basis of the European-Palestinian relationship, and entrench its domination on the ground by taking effective control and assuming oversight over European funding to the Palestinian civil society. In doing so, Israel and its allied disinformation groups not only ensure the actual shrinking of the Palestinian civil space, but also that of the European civil society, its values and its human rights legacy.”
One thing Masar Badil will be looking into is how to bypass the Palestinian dependence on financing by the EU and member states.
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Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank.
She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: Rima Najjar in Madrid blogging on Masar Badil, Conference of the Alternative Palestinian Path: Towards a new revolutionary commitment
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What are western values? One often hears a representative of a western country praising its western values. In a 2017 statement Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau adumbrated Canadian values as “openness, compassion, equality, and inclusion.”
Given the psychological torture that Julian Assange has been subjected to over the years at the hands of western nations like the Britain, the United States, Sweden, and the silent host of western states and their media, one wonders where the compassion is. At the heart of the case against Assange is an antipathy to openness, as evidenced by the vituperation directed at Assange for publishing the truth; WikiLeaks has a perfect record of publication. And by promoting the right to know, Assange sought to include the public.
Given the historical trajectory of the West, how might purportedly virtuous western values have arisen? Enlightened Europeans set sail for distant shores, claimed the inhabited lands as their own, derided the locals as savages, enslaved them, raped the women, chopped off body parts, spread disease, murdered multitudes, robbed the resources, destroyed the cultures, among a host of atrocities. Despotic monarchism, Nazism, fascism, and capitalism would be spawned by Europeans.
Are westerners more enlightened today?
The United Nations General Assembly 72nd session in December 2017, seems an apt barometer of current western values. The UNGA’s resolution 72/157, called for concrete action for the total elimination of racism globally.
The resolution was resumed as 75/237, still entitled as “A global call for concrete action for the elimination of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance and the comprehensive implementation of and follow-up to the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action.” It was adopted by the General Assembly on 31 December 2020.
Of the total votes cast, 106 were in favor, 14 were against, and there were 44 abstentions.
The votes on Resolution 75/237 are very revealing of western values. Consider that among the 14 nay votes were a bevy of western countries:
In his book, Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians, professor Noam Chomsky made crystal clear the Israeli racism toward Arabs: “Contempt for the Arab population is deeply rooted in Zionist thought.” Chomsky also alluded to western permissiveness toward Israeli racism: “Anti-Arab racism is … so widespread as to be unnoticeable; it is perhaps the only remaining form of racism to be regarded as legitimate.” [1]
The US is a country established through genocide and dispossession of the Indigenous peoples, and it set up an apartheid reservation system for those Indigenous peoples that survived. From this vantage point, it seems no wonder that Israel escaped criticism by the US since the US lacks a moral basis from which to castigate Israel. The same holds true for Canada, a country that still practices apartheid with its Indian Act and reserve system. Canada also steadfastly supports Israeli apartheid.
Several other western or western-aligned countries abstained, among them: Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Monaco, Aotearoa (New Zealand), Norway, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Korea (South), Romania, San Marino, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Ukraine. These countries refused to take a stand on the anti-racism resolution.
What about the other countries that supported the resolution? In particular, how did the countries subjected to disinformation, persistent criticism, sanctions, and provocative military maneuvers from countries crowing and preening about their western values vote? China, Cuba, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North), Iran, Iraq, Russia, and Syria all voted in favor of the anti-racism resolution.
Which countries’ values best represent those embraced by people of conscience?
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Kim Petersen is a former co-editor of the Dissident Voice newsletter. He can be emailed at: kimohp@gmail. Twitter: @kimpetersen.
Notes
1. Colleague B.J. Sabri and I explored in a 12-part series what Israeli racism is: “Defining Israeli Zionist Racism,” Dissident Voice, read parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12.
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The elected EU Parliament has recently come forward in various Press Conferences and in news articles for the public to understand that the EU is everything but a democracy. Parliament members presented their views, most of them representative for a majority of the EU Parliament, with regard to the Covid measures, i.e. a dictatorship that Europe is following – actually, the path to an outright tyranny, with vaxx passports, or Green Passes, or whatever these discriminatory certificates may be called. They are now depriving unvaccinated people from their right to work, from their right to earn a living, from their possibility to sustain their families.
Can you imagine a Human Rights abuse that knows hardly any precedents since the German Nazi-Government in the 1930s and 40s? It is noticed, but governments just roll over it, always with lies and deceptions, and falsehoods. The EU Parliament speaks out against the EU Commission’s path towards outright tyranny.
Th EU Parliament has been elected by the parliaments and / or people of their respective EU member countries, depending on country-by-country rules. But they have been elected. Whereas, the members of the EU Commission, including the President of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has not been elected, as she is a political appointee. As such she must defend and represent a narrative, especially in matters of Covid and the pharma industry, that has nothing to do with the well-being of the People of Europe. To the contrary. It’s a repressive narrative.
She and her unelected Commission colleagues represent the interests of Big Pharma and other influential lobby groups. That is certainly not what the European people wanted, and is not what they would have voted for. And it is not what makes the EU sustainable. To the contrary. The EU risks falling apart.
In a series of recent Press conferences, members of the EU Parliament came forward to speak out. It is important that they have a voice.
And for us, People of Europe, it is important being reminded that the EU is NOT a democratic organism, all to the contrary. We must change that. Or if it is not possible, then there is only one way forward, exiting this undemocratic unit and become again what we were before the EU, i.e. some 20 years ago – a Europe of sovereign independent countries, with diplomatic and trade relations among our nations – but not obedient to a dictatorship, calling the shots on our monetary systems and on our freedom.
Watch for yourself – 5-min video Press Conference.
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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he has worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020)
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
Comments Off on Vaxx Passports: “When You Know Everything About Your Government, that’s Democracy. When the Government Knows Everything About You, that’s Tyranny.”
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The first signs of more significant escalation, involving all sides in northern Syria are being observed.
On November 1st, all eyes are on Turkey and whether it would kick off the month with a large-scale military operation against the Kurdish groups in northeastern Syria.
On the days leading up to it, the Turkish military and the militant factions it backs continued to carry out small attacks, similar to a constant harassment, on the US-backed Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
In the afternoon of October 30, a Turkish combat drone, reportedly a Bayraktar TB2, carried out an airstrike on a checkpoint of the SDF near the town of Ain Issa in the northern countryside of Raqqa.
After that, the Turkish military and its proxies shelled SDF positions in the outskirts of Ain Issa with artillery.
This is a very obvious attempt to force some sort of response by the SDF or other Kurdish groups that would justify the beginning of further military actions.
The Syrian Arab Army (SAA) maintains a strong presence around Ain Issa.
The Russian Military Police are also present in the town to monitor the 2019 Russian-Turkish de-escalation agreement on northeastern Syria.
On the next day, October 31st, Russian warplanes were spotted over different parts of Syria’s northeastern region.
Media released videos of a Su-35S fighter jet of the Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) maneuvering over the town of al-Qamishli in the northern al-Hasakah countryside, along the Turkish border.
Videos showing a number of Russian Ka-52, Mi-8 and Mi-35 helicopters landing in al-Qamishli airport were also shared.
These are just some of a plethora of videos showing increased activity.
According to some reports, a Su-35S fighter jet intercepted a Turkish ANKA-S in the skies above al-Qamishli.
The drone attempted to approach the Syrian border and enter the airspace over the city where the Russian military airbase is located.
It is likely that Turkey has attempted to gather some intel, as VKS and SAA kicked off joint ground and aerial drills in the northeastern region, in a very apparent show of force.
According to SDF-affiliated media, during the joint drills SAA troops moved near the town of Tell Tamr along the frontlines with Turkish forces as VKS warplanes dropped flares and launched rockets.
Just in time to further exacerbate the chaos, Israel carried out a rare daytime missile attack on Damascus.
Syrian air-defense systems intercepted two out of eight missiles launched by Israeli fighter jets during the recent attack on the northwestern suburbs of the city.
Additionally, in the southern province of Daraa three separate militant attacks were reported within 24 hours on October 30th.
The reconciliation process was reportedly completed, but the situation seems volatile.
It is also notable that these attacks take place while the SAA and the VKS are planning to tackle a potential Turkish military attack, and also deal with the Ankara-backed militant factions in the north.
ISIS in the central region ramped up its activity, as if in concert with the rest of the chaos.
Nine pro-government fighters were killed in three separate ISIS attacks, while the VKS ramped up its airstrike activity on militant positions.
The Turkish military with its allied factions, as well as Israel, Daraa’s former rebels and even the ISIS terrorists, all of them, will benefit if chaos spreads further.
There is a strong impression that they are carrying out their actions in a single coordinated effort.
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A vast sweeping change towards a “green economy” is now being pushed by forces that may make an educated citizen rather uncomfortable.
Of course, news reports flash daily showcasing the brave young movement of “eco-warriors” led by Sweden’s “forever 15 year old” [now 18] Greta Thunberg or America’s 17 year old Jamie Margolin who have become a force across Europe and America leading such movements as the Extinction Rebellion, This is Zero Hour, the Sunrise Movement and Children’s eco-crusade. The young face of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez daily sells the idea that the only way for outdated capitalist forces that have plagued the world for decades to be replaced is by imposing a sweeping Green New Deal that priorities de-carbonization as a goal for humanity rather than continuing to allow the mindless forces of the markets to determine our destiny.
When EU President Ursula von der Leyen had stepped into her office, she lost no time attacking China’s Belt and Road Initiative (which is ironically representing a true 21st century New Deal) by saying “some are buying their influence by investing in dependence from ports and roads”… but “we go the European way”. What is the “European way”? Not the development plans of Charles De Gaulle or Konrad Adenauer who envisioned industrial growth and increasing population as positives, but rather a Green New Deal. Von der Leyen then announced that “I want Europe to become the first CO2 neutral continent in the world by 2050! I will put forward a Green New Deal for Europe in my first 100 days in office…”
Attacking the “mindless forces of the market” and vested power structures of capitalism are not bad things to do… but why must we de-carbonize?
Re-regulating the too-big-to-fail banks is long overdue, but why do so many assume that a “Green New Deal” won’t just empower those same forces that have run havoc upon the world for the past half century and just cause more death and starvation than has already been suffered under Globalization?
One might only think to even ask such questions by first confronting the uncomfortable fact that behind such young cardboard cut outs as Thunberg, Margolin, Cortez or the Green New Deal are figures whom one would not associate with humanitarianism by any measure.
Green Bonds and Oligarchs
When we begin to pull back the curtain we quickly run into figures like Prince Charles, who recently met with the heads of 18 Commonwealth countries to consolidate climate emergency legislation which was promptly passed in the UK and Canadian Parliaments. At the end of the meeting Charles said that we “have 18 months to save the world from climate change” and called for “increasing the amount of private sector finance flowing towards the supporting sustainable development throughout the commonwealth”.
Following the royal decree, the Bank of England and some of the dirtiest banks in the Rothschild-City of London web of finance have promoted “green financial instruments” led by Green Bonds to redirect pension plans and mutual funds towards green projects that no one in their right minds would ever invest in willfully. The Ecological, Social, Governance Index (ESGI) has now been set up across 51% of Germany’s banks including the derivatives-bomb waiting to blow named Deutschebank. Leading bankers supporting the ESGI like Mark Carney of the Bank of England have said that over 6.5 trillion Euros could be mobilized under this new index (which currently accounts for about $160 billion). The creation of these “green bonds” run hand-in-hand with the Bail-in mechanisms which have now been implemented across the trans-Atlantic nations in order to steal trillions of dollars of from pension funds, RRSPs and Mutual funds the next time a bail out is needed to prop up the “too big to fails” which currently sit atop a $1.2 trillion derivatives bubble waiting to blow.
On top of heading the Bank of England, former Goldman Sachs-man Carney has also endorsed the Financial Stability Board’s Task Force on Climate Related Financial Disclosures which was created in 2015 and was used as a guideline for the UK government’s July 2019 White Paper “Green Finance Strategy: Transforming Finance for a Greener Future”. The White Paper proposed to “consolidate the UK’s position as a global hub for green finance and positioning the UK at the head of green financial innovation and data and analytics… endorsed by institutions representing $118 trillion of assets globally”. The Carney-led Task Force also spawned the Green Finance Initiative in 2016 which is now a primary vehicle designed to divert international capital flows into green tech.
Carney’s former employer at Goldman Sachs has also created a “Green Index for ‘virtuous investing” including two new sustainability indices to promote heavy investment in to green infrastructure called CDP Environment EW and CDP Eurozone EW. The acronym CDP originates from the Climate Disclosure Project – a London-based think tank that generated Goldman Sachs’ program. Goldman Sachs’ Marine Abiad promoted the CDP index saying on July 10 “we are convinced that sustainable finance enables financial markets to play a virtuous role in the economy.”
Just in case you thought the Extinction Rebellion was somehow untouched by the hand of social engineers, a leading figure behind the movement named Alex Evans was a former consultant on the Prince’s International Sustainability Unit, and co-author of the US National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World which became an environmental/foreign policy blueprint for the Obama Administration in 2008. Currently Evans also runs the Collective Psychology Project“where psychology meets politics”.
Other leading British intelligence figures managing the Extinction Rebellion movement included Farhana Yamin and Sam Gaell of Chatham House (the controlling institution behind the New York Council on Foreign Relations).
Could a ‘Benevolent’ Green Dictatorship be a Good Thing?
The devil’s advocate speaks: Can’t we presume that these central banks, oligarchs and hedge fund managers just care about the environment? So what if they are trying to modify humanity’s behaviour in order to save the environment? After all, humanity itself is a selfish, gluttonous pollution-making machine and isn’t better for everyone if those enlightened elite just transform the world economy so that we consume less, and think more about the future?
If this line of thinking approximates something you’ve felt inside yourself then you’ve been brainwashed.
Of course, the world has turned into a consumerist cult over the past few decades which has sacrificed long term thinking for short term gain and of course we need a re-organization of the system. Thunberg and the Green New Dealers aren’t wrong about that stuff. That’s all fine and dandy.
But if you think that going along with the types of reform that aspires to put dollar values on reducing carbon footprints or spreading low quality (and very expensive) windmills and solar panels across the globe with the expectation that somehow these sources of energy will not cause a vast collapse of industrial capacity of civilization (and an associated loss of capacity to sustain human life), then you are fooling yourself. One kilowatt of windmill energy is only the same as one kilowatt of nuclear power when applied to a mathematical equation but not in real life. When applied to capital-intensive work functions needed to melt industrial steel, run machine tools, power a vast agro-industrial complex, high speed rail system or construct things like Belt and Road Initiative, “green” energy sources do not come even close to cutting the iron.
The issue has always been population control
The oligarchs running the “grand green design” since the Club of Rome’s Sir Alexander King began the Limits to Growth study in 1970 knew that green “low energy flux density” sources of energy would constrict global population and that is exactly what they wanted. Sir King said so much in 1990 when he wrote
“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill….All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”
Sir King was, after all just following the lead of UNESCO founder (and Eugenics president) Sir Julian Huxley who wrote in 1946
“Political unification in some sort of world government will be required… Even though… any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable.”
It was only a few years later that Huxley would co-found the World Wildlife Fund alongside Prince Philip Mountbatten and Prince Bernhardt of the Netherlands. All three were present at Bernhardt’s founding meeting of the Bilderberg group to advance this grand conversion of society into a willful self-extermination in 1954 and while Huxley wasn’t present in 1970, the other two oligarchs co-founded the 1001 Nature Trust alongside 999 other wealthy misanthropes to fund the blossoming environmental movement. These forces were also behind the coup d’état in America which put the Trilateral Commission in power under Jimmy Carter and unleashed the “controlled disintegration of the US economy” from 1978-1982 (this will be the topic of another study). This grouping, led by Zbigniew Brzezinski not only played the radical Islam card against the Soviet Union, but also established a program of population reduction through the promotion of green energy sources long before it was popular.
The oligarchs that are currently trying to reform humanity today don’t care about the environment. Prince Philip and Bernhardt have been recorded to have killed more endangered species on safari than most people have killed mosquitos. They just don’t like people. Especially thinking people. Thinking people who question how and why arbitrary rules are applied to justify wars, poverty and oligarchism which destroys lives both now and in the future.
The Belt and Road Initiative and the tendency to grow the human population both quantitatively and qualitatively which such great projects entail is the target of the Green New Deal.
The legacy of scientific and technological progress that launched western civilization out of a dark age and into a renaissance in the 15th century is under attack because it is that lost ethic which the oligarchy KNOWS may yet be awoken and which would bring the west into harmony with the Russia-China program for growth and development under a philosophy of “win-win cooperation” both on Earth and also in space.
The effects of the ideas of the renaissance coincided with the greatest rate of discoveries of universal principles as mankind sought to come to know the mind of god by studying the book of nature with a heart of love and attitude of humility exemplified in the figure of Leonardo Da Vinci. The explosion of new technologies that arose not only revolutionized astronomy, medicine and engineering but gave birth to the modern industrial economy which coincided with the greatest rise of population in history. This exponential rise has been used by Malthusians for centuries as the proof that mankind is “just another cancerous growth” on the “purity of mother Gaia”.
So if you don’t agree with humans=cancer philosophy and want something a bit more optimistic in your life, then support a real New Deal today.
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Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley claimed last week that China was close to a “sputnik moment” due to its successful test of a hypersonic missile.
However, U.S. space-based early warning systems can detect hypersonic missiles, marking them as no threat at all.
General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned on Wednesday, October 27th, that China’s development of a hypersonic missile system is “very concerning,” calling it “very close” to a “sputnik moment”that triggered the space race during the Cold War.
Sputnik was the first artificial satellite launched into low Earth orbit in 1957 by the Soviet Union, which sparked the space race between the U.S. and USSR.
Theodore Postol, professor emeritus of Science, Technology, and International Security at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a former top policy adviser to the Chief of Naval Operations, says that the Sputnik analogy advanced by General Milley is off base.
“The launching of Sputnik,” Postol said in an interview with CAM, “signaled at the time that the Soviet Union was able to compete with the U.S. in space and had been a surprise.” However, in the case of China and the testing of a hypersonic missile, U.S. intelligence agencies were “already aware about it and knew that China is very advanced in science and technology.”
The hypersonic missile, furthermore, “does not threaten the U.S. population in any way or provide China any military-technological edge.”
This is because the U.S. has “extraordinary space-based early warning infrared systems with the ability to detect hypersonic vehicles as they descend into the atmosphere and become heated to very high temperatures.”
General Milley’s statement, according to Postol, reflects how “idiots in the Pentagon” and political appointees are trying to “push us [the U.S.] into military confrontation with China over nothing.”[1]
“Pushing us into military confrontation over nothing”
Launched via rocket, the hypersonic missile can travel over 6,000 miles at five times the speed of sound (3,836 mph). It releases a hypersonic vehicle that runs parallel to the earth’s surface and can skip off it like a rock before reaching its destination after heating up to a very high temperature.
The space-based early warning system can see the hot spots of the hypersonic missile that’s moving when it dips into the atmosphere. The exhaust from the hypersonic vehicles rocket would also be recognizable.
According to Postol, a more real threat to U.S. national security are ballistic missiles—that Russia and China both possess—which are more accurate and versatile and launch balloons in space that radar cannot peer through and detect.
Arsenal of Chinese ballistic missile. [Source: thedrive.com]
The U.S. military also cannot defend against cruise missiles that the Russians and Chinese have in their arsenals.
Testing the hypersonic missile, according to Postol, may provide “a statement from China that they are a technological competitor to the U.S.,” but it will “have little or no meaning in terms of adding significant nuclear-strike capabilities.”
“Someone gave Milley false information”
Postol says that he “does not think that Milley is a liar, but believes that he was provided false information from someone within the U.S. military or intelligence agencies and didn’t know any better.”
According to Postol, “Milley is both an unsophisticated consumer of intelligence and someone who is easily manipulated.”
“A dysfunctional system” and culture that “hypes threats”
Trained as a nuclear engineer at MIT, Postol said that his experience as a scientific policy adviser to the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Jim Watkins, from 1982 to 1984, “left him with a low regard for the accuracy of information provided by high-level government employees.”
This low regard has only intensified with time.
When Colin Powell gave his infamous speech at the UN in February 2003 about Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) in Iraq, Postol—then a Pentagon adviser—knew right away that every line in the speech was wrong and that Powell himself knew this.
Ted Postol holds a model of a Scud missile launcher at MIT. After the Gulf War, the Patriot missile system won praise for shooting down Iraqi Scuds—until Postol spoke up. [Source: archive.boston.com]
Since that time, Postol has been highly critical of the tearing up of arms control agreements like the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with Russia reducing cruise missiles, and U.S. government investment in ineffective weapons systems that waste taxpayer dollars.
In Postol’s view, the intelligence agencies have some good people working for them, but have developed into “rigid, dysfunctional bureaucracies with weak leaders who are often politicized.”
Those who gain promotion “have their own motivations” and “do not always provide the best information.” They are “part of a culture that hypes threats,” and “provides higher ups with a storyline that is useful to the larger agenda which is to get more money from Congress.”
By amplifying threats, the intelligence agencies want to “scare people” so they will “sanction huge military budgets” and big-ticket “defense projects that often add little to national security.”
Syrian chemical gas hoax
According to Postol, the intelligence agencies deliberately deceived the American public when they claimed that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad carried out chemical weapon attacks against his own people—a claim that was adopted as a pretext for military strikes against Syria.
Postol reviewed key evidence about alleged attacks in August 2013 in the Ghouta district of Damascus and in April 2017 in the town of Khan Shaykhun in the Idlib Governate of Syria.
In the case of Ghouta, Postol said that the Obama White House presented a false intelligence report like in the Gulf of Tonkin incident that could have caused the nation to go to war.
According to Postol, the reason the White House was lying was simple: The rockets that delivered the Sarin gas could only travel two kilometers. The White House map in turn showed that they would have had to have been delivered from inside rebel-controlled areas.
In the case of the attack on Khan Shaykhun, Postol said that the Syrian air force bombed a building—a meeting place for extremist leaders—with a supply store in its basement that stored pesticides and other chemicals which released toxic materials when it was struck.
The crater in the building had to have been caused by artillery rockets, and the scene was later staged to make it look like it was the target of a sarin nerve gas attack by Assad.
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Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine. He is the author of four books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019) and The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018). He can be reached at: [email protected].
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He’s upset the peasants have access to common sense and reason!
He’s upset the peasants actually read scientific studies for themselves!
And he’s very upset that the peasants are speaking to him without his express written permission!
Apparently, he’s also clairvoyant (like Santa) because he knows what you are writing before you even send it to him, so he has set up an auto-reply on his email account to let you know he’s very important, he gets lots of emails and he does not like “misinformation.”
Chen defines “misinformation” as anything that contradicts the Pharma narrative. Chen is adamant that nothing be allowed to pierce his protective Pharma information bubble.
I’m reminded of the phrase, “Methinks thou doth protest too much.”
What Chen is actually mad about is that he got caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
A search of the government website Open Payments reveals Chen accepted $437,250.70 from Emergent BioSolutions and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) in 2020.
GSK is one of the four largest vaccine makers in the world. GSK makes the incredibly toxic Hep B vaccine (Engerix-B), the troubled HPV vaccine (Cervarix), a meningococcal vaccine that is loaded with aluminum (Bexsero) and various flu vaccines among others.
All of GSK’s products must go before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), that Chen sits on, in order to be approved.
Emergent BioSolutions has an abysmal safety record. Even though federal regulators are generally like Mr. Magoo when it comes to spotting safety problems, the issues at Emergent’s plant in Baltimore were so egregious that earlier this year the U.S. Food and Drug Administration shut down the plant and ordered J&J to take it over and run it themselves.
The FDA also ordered 75 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines manufactured at that plant be destroyed because of contamination. All of the vaccines manufactured at the Emergent BioSolutions plant must first be approved by the ACIP where Chen is a member.
This is completely unacceptable. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 27,550 pediatricians employed in the U.S. There is absolutely no reason for the ACIP to utilize a person with such extensive financial conflicts of interest.
The CDC) must be above reproach in order to have any credibility with the general public. Sadly the CDC appears to do whatever it can get away with — a classic example of the fox guarding the henhouse.
The fact that these decisions involve the health of our children makes corruption all the more appalling.
Please contact the following four officials (as well your elected representatives) to let them know that you are troubled by Chen’s extensive financial conflicts of interest and please ask that he be removed from the ACIP before it meets on Tuesday, Nov. 2.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky Director, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Roybal Building 21, Rm 12000
1600 Clifton Rd, Atlanta, GA 30333
phone: (404) 639-7000 [email protected]
Xavier Becerra Secretary, Health and Human Services
200 Independence Avenue S.W., Washington, D.C. 20201
c/o Sean McCluskie [email protected]
Captain Amanda Cohn Chief medical officer
National Center for Immunizations and Respiratory Diseases
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
1600 Clifton Rd, Atlanta, GA 30333 MS C-09
phone: (404) 639-6039
fax: (404) 315-4679 [email protected] [email protected]
Grace Lee, M.D. Chair, Advisory Committee on Immunizations Practices
Center for Academic Medicine
Pediatric Infectious Diseases, Mail Code: 5660
453 Quarry Road, Stanford, CA 94304
phone: (650) 497-0618
phone: (650) 498-6227
fax: (650) 725-8040 [email protected]
It is beyond alarming that the ACIP has failed to properly monitor financial conflicts of interest amongst its members. All prior ACIP votes involving Chen should be reviewed by an independent outside review board to see if they must be thrown out because of this blatant corruption.
The CDC should also examine and release publicly all financial conflict of interest statements from all remaining ACIP members to determine if there are additional problems before Tuesday.
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Alexey Arestovich, adviser to the head of the President’s Office and a spokesman for the Kiev delegation in the Tripartite Contact Group for Donbass, boldly announced that Ukraine may acquire their own missile system with the potential to strike Moscow. It is expected to have a development time of about 10 years.
It is recalled that Arestovich often makes audacious predictions, such as claiming that Russia would occupy Belarus and that “Poles, the inhabitants of the Baltic states, and with them other Europeans, will suddenly feel that the war (…) is right on their doorstep.” This of course never materialized, but does demonstrate that Arestovich is a populist that makes bombastic rhetoric far removed from reality.
None-the-less, Ukraine has always had potential to develop powerful missile systems. From the famous Soviet defense industry, Ukraine inherited the Yuzhnoy rocket design office in Dnepropetrovsk, the chemical company in Pavlograd, the Kiev-based AGAT design office, and other companies. By inheriting Soviet-era defense industries, the Ukrainian military industrial complex could theoretically develop a missile system of any class. In practice, this will prove much more difficult despite the overconfidence of Arestovich.
Ukraine first decided to develop its own operational tactical system in 1997 by piggybacking off the Borisfen project. The development of Borisfen was probably inspired by Russia’s development of the Iskander missile system. In this period, both countries cooperated and Ukrainian engineers took part in numerous Russian missile projects. By 2007, Ukraine started developments on the Sapsan missile system with a range of 280km. However, in 2013, the Ukrainian Defense Minister Pavlo Lebedyev abolished the development of Sapsan.
Later in the same year, Saudi Arabia was reportedly interested in developing a Grom-2 missile, which was to be developed on the basis of an unrealized Sapsan. In 2016, Ukrainian companies reportedly received foreign funding for this development. Work on the rocket system progressed, and models of the launcher and rockets, as well as the first samples of solid fuel engines, were created. In 2018, Ukraine conducted fire tests of the engine of a new combat ballistic missile. It was expected that testing of the new missile system would be conducted in 2020 or 2021, but thus far Ukraine and Saudi Arabia have not. The transition from the engine and model of the launcher to real combat operability obviously requires more force and resources than originally planned.
Despite this stop and start ambition to have powerful missiles, Arestovich appears confident that future Ukrainian missiles can penetrate Russian air defenses and threaten Moscow. The Grom-2 missile, with an official increased range of 500km, could reach Moscow as eastern Ukraine brings it within range.
The range for the Grom-2 missile could unofficially be over 600km. It may also have the advantages of the Russian Iskander missiles, such as the ability to control the missile along the entire flight path, anti-missile manoeuvring in the final part of the flight, and other perks. This could make it difficult for Russian air defense systems to deal with because Grom-2 was created on the model of low altitude intercontinental missiles.
It is recalled that Russia has in service the S-500 missile defense systems, something not yet available for export and would more than likely be able to deal with any missiles developed by Ukraine. Given Ukraine’s decades long failure to produce an ambitious missile, it leads to the question on whether the current project will be a repeat of all previous attempts, which is a reflection of the failures of the entire Ukrainian military industry as a whole since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Ukraine is desperate to kickstart its military industrial complex again, and is partially hinging its bets on Turkey to assist in this. Turkey and Ukraine pledged earlier this year to continue their military cooperation, with Turkish drones making their way to the Donbass battlefield. Ukraine will also assist Turkey in creating an engine to finally complete the Turkish-assembled Altay tank and Storm Howitzer that have been plagued with issues since their conceptions.
However, building a tank engine is far different to creating an ambitious missile that can penetrate Russian air defenses and strike Moscow. It is unlikely that Ukraine will be able to create such a missile, especially as it has a development period of 10 years, in which time Russian air defenses would be far more advanced.
It is likely that Arestovich recognizes this fact, but for him it is about spouting out anti-Russian rhetoric in a populist manner to appeal to reactionary elements in Ukraine. Kiev continues to struggle to deal with the economic situation and faces isolation as most of Europe is disinterested in inheriting new issues and differences with Russia. With this in mind, Arestovich attempts to distract Ukrainians from the difficult domestic situation by instigating Russophobia with threats that are unlikely to be realized.
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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.
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Dear readers, give the extraordinary coercive Covid vaccination program a moment of thought.
What explains the emphasis, even the use of tyrannical methods in free societies, to force vaccination on populations when even Big Pharma and the corrupt medical establishment only claim a short-run and steeply declining protection from the vaccine? According to the medical establishment itself, double-vaxxed is no longer protection. Booster shots are needed every six months for the rest of your life.
This is especially puzzling when we consider the known facts that
(1) The mortality of Covid is very low. It kills mainly those with co-morbidities and those who are untreated or wrongly treated.
(2) The vaccine reduces our natural immunity.
(3) The vaccine causes a large number of adverse reactions including deaths and lifelong disabilities. The CDC and WHO admit that the adverse reactions reporting system vastly underreports deaths and adverse reactions from the vaccine. No vaccine or medicine ever before in history has been kept in use that produced even a tiny fraction of the reported deaths and injuries.
(4) The vaccine causes variants that are immune to the vaccine and to the weakened immune system of the vaccinated. New vaccines are needed to deal with the new variants, producing still more new variants.
(5) The medical establishment has blocked to the extent of its ability the treatment of Covid with two known, safe, effective, and inexpensive medicines–Ivermectin and HCQ. Doctors who have saved lives with these medicines have been fired for using them.
(6) Distinguished and renowned scientific and medical experts, including Nobel laureates, have been censored and deplatformed for warning about the dangerous vaccine and advocating effective treatment instead.
(7) The media speaks with one lying voice that vaccination is our only hope.
(8) Evidence from a number of countries (I have reported it) demonstrates that Covid cases and deaths rise with vaccination and that the majority of cases and deaths for most age groups are the vaccinated.
(9) The science is clear that the vaccinated spread the virus as easily, or more so, than the unvaccinated.
(10) Indeed, the evidence is clear that the unvaccinated relying on natural immunity are better protected than the vaccinated.
With these known, established scientific facts, what is the justification for mass vaccination? Why the emphasis on vaccinating children when it is known that the spike protein attacks ovaries and testes unless the plan is to reduce fertility? Why can ignorant talking heads on TV who can barely spell their own name feel secure attacking renowned scientists who are telling us the truth?
There are certainly many sound reasons to conclude that the “Covid pandemic” is an orchestrated plot.
What are the obvious elements of the plot?
(1) Profits forever for Big Pharma, the medical school recipients of Big Pharma grants, the profits of patents shared with NIH and NIH personnel, campaign contributions for Senators, Representatives and presidential candidates.
(2) The use of fear to remove civil liberty protections and extend control over people. These two elements are obvious.
The third element of the plot is almost as obvious but much harder for many people to believe–population reduction. Before scoffing, ask yourself:
(1) why vaccinate children, who are essentially unaffected by Covid, with a vaccine known to attack the reproductive system and to cause abortions.
(2) Why vaccinate anyone when there are known, safe, and inexpensive cures?
(3) Why attack these cures as dangerous and strive to prevent their use? How can the medical establishment claim safety and caution for blocking Ivermectin and HCQ when it has unleashed a dangerous experimental vaccine on the world’s population?
(4) Why suppress the warnings of renowned experts? If the vaccine was the only solution or even a solution, it could stand public discussion.
Consider that the World Economic Forum has had a half century to indoctrinate and brainwash business and other leaders.
Founded January 24, 1971, the annual meeting in Davos has become a prestigious event. Leaders compete for invitations as attendance is a sign of prestige. The World Economic Forum is financed by 1,000 multi-billion dollar global corporations whose leaders have been sold on the “Great Reset” comprised of population reduction and the termination of national sovereignty and human autonomy. The “Great Reset” is a prescription for tyranny.
The orchestrated push for universal vaccination is so extreme that countries formerly considered part of the “free world” are now totalitarian states–witness Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Italy. The effort to extend the tyranny into France and Germany is meeting with strong public resistance. In America the main resistance comes from nurses and other medical-related personnel who have witnessed the devastating impact of the vaccine on those injected.
Every person needs to consider the implication of silencing independent experts who know the truth while ignorant talking heads dictate the official narrative.
When truth is murdered, so is all freedom, all morality, all justice. Are you just going to sit there and let it happen?
The PCR “Covid Test” Was Used to Create the Appearance of a Pandemic
Nobel Prize Laureate Kary B. Mullis was the inventor of the polymerase chain reaction technique, which is analyzed in this article.
Dr. Kary B. Mullis, who passed away on August 7, 2019 at age 74, stated emphatically that no infection or illness can be accurately diagnosed with the PCR-RT.
“PCR is a Process. It does not tell you that you are sick. … The measurement is not accurate”.
Mullis described the PCR-RT as a “technique” rather than “a test”.
7,200 physicians and medical scientists worldwide have signed the “Rome Declaration” to alert citizens about the deadly consequences of Covid-19 policy makers’ and medical authorities’ unprecedented behavior, read here.
57 Top Scientists and Doctors Release Shocking Study on COVID Vaccines and Demand Immediate Stop to All Vaccinations, read here.
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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts writes on his blog site, PCR Institute for Political Economy, where this article was originally published.
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On October 28, the state of Florida sued the Biden administration over the mandate, which Republican Gov. Ron DeSantissaid “is unlawfully jeopardizing thousands of jobs.”
Then on October 29, the states of Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming filed a lawsuitthat called the mandate “unconstitutional, unlawful, and unwise.” The states of Georgia, Alabama, Idaho, Kansas, South Carolina, Utah, and West Virginia also filed a similar lawsuit on Friday. The state of Texas also filed its own lawsuit on Friday.
“If the Federal government attempts to unconstitutionally exert its will and force Federal contractors to mandate vaccinations, the workforce and businesses could be decimated, further exacerbating the supply chain and workforce crises,” Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt said in a statement on Friday. “The Federal government should not be mandating vaccinations, and that’s why we filed suit today – to halt this illegal, unconstitutional action.”
The White House’s Safer Federal Workforce Task Force guidance for Federal contractors states that “all covered contractor employees” must be fully vaccinated by December 8, unless the employee is legally entitled to an accommodation.
The task force’s guidance for contractors stems from President Biden’s executive order issued in September, which gave Federal employees until November 22 to be fully vaccinated – with limited exceptions – against COVID-19.
However, the task force released new guidance today, which gives Federal contractors more flexibility to enforce the vaccine mandate.
“A covered contractor should determine the appropriate means of enforcement with respect to its employee at a covered contractor workplace who refuses to be vaccinated and has not been provided, or does not have a pending request for, an accommodation,” the new guidance says.
The guidance also notes that “covered contractors are expected to comply with all requirements set forth in their contract,” and an agency contracting officer may terminate a contract if the contractor refuses to comply with “COVID-19 workplace safety protocols.”
The guidance makes clear that “these requirements are promulgated pursuant to Federal law and supersede any contrary state or local law or ordinance.”
Despite the states’ attempts to stop the mandate, a September Gallup poll found that roughly 60 percent of respondents support President Biden’s vaccine mandate for all Federal government employees.
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Several members of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) vaccine advisory committee have financial ties to Pfizer.
Right after voting unanimously to recommend the Pfizer-BioNTech “vaccine” for the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) “vaccine” in children as young as five, this committee was outed for direct conflicts of interest that clearly impacted its decision.
California is already chomping at the bit to mandate the jabs for kindergartners, pending federal authorization. Many other states controlled by leftists will likely try to follow suit, assuming there is no major pushback.
“… the meeting roster shows that numerous members of the committee and temporary voting members have worked for Pfizer or have major connections to Pfizer,” reported National File about the compromised FDA committee.
“Members include a former vice president of Pfizer Vaccines, a recent Pfizer consultant, a recent Pfizer research grant recipient, a man who mentored a current top Pfizer vaccine executive, a man who runs a center that gives out Pfizer vaccines, the chair of a Pfizer data group, a guy who was proudly photographed taking a Pfizer vaccine, and numerous people who are already on the record supporting Coronavirus vaccines for children.”
There is also recent FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, whom we reported now sits on the board of directors at Pfizer.
The FDA is an absolute joke
The following list outlines which FDA vaccine advisory committee board members are compromised and how:
Acting Chair Arnold S. Monto was a paid consultant at Pfizer as recently as 2018.
Steve Pergam received the Pfizer “vaccine” and was featured getting and promoting it by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.
Committee member Archana Chatterjee worked on a research project involving vaccines for infants that took place from 2018-2020 and was sponsored by Pfizer.
Myron Levine has mentored numerous U.S. post-doctoral fellows, and one of his proteges is Raphael Simon, Pfizer’s senior director of vaccine research and development.
James Hildreth, a temporary voting member, made a financial interest disclosure stating that he accepted $1.5 million while serving as president at Meharry Medical College, which administers Pfizer’s covid injections.
Geeta K. Swamy chairs the “Independent Data Monitoring Committee for the Pfizer Group B Streptococcus Vaccine Program,” which is sponsored by Pfizer. Swamy was also listed by Duke University as “a co-investigator for the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine trial.”
Gregg Sylvester used to work as vice president at Pfizer Vaccines where he launched numerous vaccines for the company, including one for children.
Several other “temporary voting members,” including Ofer Levy of Boston Children’s Hospital, Eric Rubin, Jay Portnoy and Melinda Wharton, are all outspoken in their support for injecting children with Pfizer’s covid jabs.
The FDA’s vaccine advisory committee has never really been trustworthy or legitimate. It has pretty much always functioned as a rubber stamp for Big Pharma, approving and pushing all of the latest drugs, both pill and injections, on Americans.
“FDA advisory committee members in the past have frequently been the target of heavy politicking by industry representatives of whatever drug they were considering for a recommendation at in-person meetings,” reported FDA News back in December.
“That process has been somewhat altered by the fact that during COVID-19, meetings are being held virtually. But it’s likely that behind-the-scenes pressuring still goes on. The industry defends the attempts to influence committee members as simply efforts to best present their case.”
It is now an undeniable fact that the FDA cannot be trusted. Since it is run by the pharmaceutical industry, this fake federal agency is always going to push whatever brings in the profits, which in this case include Pfizer’s “Operation Warp Speed” injections.
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Comments Off on The FDA Is an Absolute Joke: Multiple FDA Committee Members Who Green-lighted Pfizer “Vaccines” for Children Have Financial Ties to Pfizer
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When I first saw Julian Assange in Belmarsh prison, in 2019, shortly after he had been dragged from his refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy, he said, “I think I am losing my mind.”
He was gaunt and emaciated, his eyes hollow and the thinness of his arms was emphasised by a yellow identifying cloth tied around his left arm, an evocative symbol of institutional control.
For all but the two hours of my visit, he was confined to a solitary cell in a wing known as “healthcare”, an Orwellian name. In the cell next to him a deeply disturbed man screamed through the night. Another occupant suffered from terminal cancer. Another was seriously disabled.
“One day we were allowed to play Monopoly,” he said, “as therapy. That was our healthcare!”
“This is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” I said.
“Yes, only more insane.”
Julian’s black sense of humour has often rescued him, but no more. The insidious torture he has suffered in Belmarsh has had devastating effects. Read the reports of Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, and the clinical opinions of Michael Kopelman, emeritus professor of neuropsychiatry at King’s College London and Dr. Quentin Deeley, and reserve a contempt for America’s hired gun in court, James Lewis QC, who dismissed this as “malingering”.
I was especially moved by the expert words of Dr. Kate Humphrey, a clinical neuropsychologist at Imperial College, London. She told the Old Bailey last year that Julian’s intellect had gone from “in the superior, or more likely very superior, range” to “significantly below” this optimal level, to the point where he was struggling to absorb information and “perform in the low to average range”.
At yet another court hearing in this shameful Kafkaesque drama, I watched him struggle to remember his name when asked by the judge to state it.
For most of his first year in Belmarsh, he was locked up. Denied proper exercise, he strode the length of his small cell, back and forth, back and forth, for “my own half-marathon”, he told me. This reeked of despair. A razorblade was found in his cell. He wrote “farewell letters”. He phoned the Samaritans repeatedly.
At first he was denied his reading glasses, left behind in the brutality of his kidnapping from the embassy. When the glasses finally arrived at the prison, they were not delivered to him for days. His solicitor, Gareth Peirce, wrote letter after letter to the prison governor protesting the withholding of legal documents, access to the prison library, the use of a basic laptop with which to prepare his case. The prison would take weeks, even months, to answer. (The governor, Rob Davis, has been awarded an Order of the British Empire).
Books sent to him by a friend, the journalist Charles Glass, himself a survivor of hostage-taking in Beirut, were returned. Julian could not call his American lawyers. From the start, he has been constantly medicated. Once, when I asked him what they were giving him, he couldn’t say.
At last week’s High Court hearing to decide finally whether or not Julian would be extradited to America, he appeared only briefly by video link on the first day. He looked unwell and unsettled. The court was told he had been “excused” because of his “medication”. But Julian had asked to attend the hearing and was refused, said his partner Stella Moris. Attendance in a court sitting in judgement on you is surely a right.
This intensely proud man also demands the right to appear strong and coherent in public, as he did at the Old Bailey last year. Then, he consulted constantly with his lawyers through the slit in his glass cage. He took copious notes. He stood and protested with eloquent anger at lies and abuses of process.
The damage done to him in his decade of incarceration and uncertainty, including more than two years in Belmarsh (whose brutal regime is celebrated in the latest Bond film) is beyond doubt.
But so, too, is his courage beyond doubt, and a quality of resistance and resilience that is heroism. It is this that may see him through the present Kafkaesque nightmare – if he is spared an American hellhole.
I have known Julian since he first came to Britain in 2009. In our first interview, he described the moral imperative behind WikiLeaks: that our right to the transparency of governments and the powerful was a basic democratic right. I have watched him cling to this principle when at times it has made his life even more precarious.
Almost none of this remarkable side to the man’s character has been reported in the so-called “free press” whose own future, it is said, is in jeopardy if Julian is extradited.
Of course, but there has never been a ”free press”. There have been extraordinary journalists who have occupied positions in the “mainstream” – spaces that have now closed, forcing independent journalism on to the internet.
There, it has become a “fifth estate”, a samizdat of dedicated, often unpaid work by those who were honourable exceptions in a media now reduced to an assembly line of platitudes. Words like “democracy”, “reform”, “human rights” are stripped of their dictionary meaning and censorship is by omission or exclusion.
Last week’s fateful hearing at the High Court was “disappeared” in the “free press”. Most people would not know that a court in the heart of London had sat in judgement on their right to know: their right to question and dissent.
Many Americans, if they know anything about the Assange case, believe a fantasy that Julian is a Russian agent who caused Hillary Clinton to lose the presidential election in 2016 to Donald Trump. This is strikingly similar to the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, which justified the invasion of Iraq and the deaths of a million or more people.
They are unlikely to know that the main prosecution witness underpinning one of the concocted charges against Julian has recently admitted he lied and fabricated his “evidence”.
Neither will they have heard or read about the revelation that the CIA, under its former director, the Hermann Goering lookalike Mike Pompeo, had planned to assassinate Julian. And that was hardly new. Since I have known Julian, he has been under threat of harm and worse.
On his first night in the Ecuadorean embassy in 2012, dark figures swarmed over the front of the embassy and banged on the windows, trying to get in. In the US, public figures – including Hillary Clinton, fresh from her destruction of Libya – have long called for Julian’s assassination. The current President Biden damned him as a “hi-tech terrorist”.
The former prime minister of Australia, Julia Gillard, was so eager to please what she called “our best mates” in Washington that she demanded Julian’s passport be taken from him – until it was pointed out to her that this would be against the law. The current prime minister, Scott Morrison, a PR man, when asked about Assange, said, “He should face the music.”
It has been open season on the WikiLeaks’ founder for more than a decade. In 2011, The Guardian exploited Julian’s work as if it was its own, collected journalism prizes and Hollywood deals, then turned on its source.
Years of vituperative assaults on the man who refused to join their club followed. He was accused of failing to redact documents of the names of those considered at risk. In a Guardian book by David Leigh and Luke Harding, Assange is quoted as saying during a dinner in a London restaurant that he didn’t care if informants named in the leaks were harmed.
Neither Harding nor Leigh was at the dinner. John Goetz, an investigations reporter with Der Spiegel, actually was at the dinner and testified that Assange said nothing of the kind.
The great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg told the Old Bailey last year that Assange had personally redacted 15,000 files. The New Zealand investigative journalist Nicky Hager, who worked with Assange on the Afghanistan and Iraq war leaks, described how Assange took “extraordinary precautions in redacting names of informants”.
In 2013, I asked the film-maker Mark Davis about this. A respected broadcaster for SBS Australia, Davis was an eyewitness, accompanying Assange during the preparation of the leaked files for publication in The Guardian and The New York Times. He told me, “Assange was the only one who worked day and night extracting 10,000 names of people who could be targeted by the revelations in the logs.”
Lecturing a group of City University students, David Leigh mocked the very idea that “Julian Assange will end up in an orange jumpsuit”. His fears were an exaggeration, he sneered. Edward Snowden later revealed that Assange was on a “manhunt timeline”.
Luke Harding, who co-authored with Leigh the Guardian book that disclosed the password to a trove of diplomatic cables that Julian had entrusted to the paper, was outside the Ecuadorean embassy on the evening Julian sought asylum. Standing with a line of police, he gloated on his blog, “Scotland Yard may well have the last laugh.”
The campaign was relentless. Guardian columnists scraped the depths. “He really is the most massive turd,” wrote Suzanne Moore of a man she had never met.
The editor who presided over this, Alan Rusbridger, has lately joined the chorus that “defending Assange protects the free press”. Having published the initial WikiLeaks revelations, Rusbridger must wonder if the Guardian’s subsequent excommunication of Assange will be enough to protect his own skin from the wrath of Washington.
The High Court judges are likely to announce their decision on the US appeal in the new year. What they decide will determine whether or not the British judiciary has trashed the last vestiges of its vaunted reputation; in the land of Magna Carta this disgraceful case ought to have been hurled out of court long ago.
The missing imperative is not the impact on a collusive “free press”. It is justice for a man persecuted and wilfully denied it.
Julian Assange is a truth-teller who has committed no crime but revealed government crimes and lies on a vast scale and so performed one of the great public services of my lifetime. Do we need to be reminded that justice for one is justice for all?
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John Pilgeris an Australian-British journalist and filmmaker based in London. Pilger’s Web site is: www.johnpilger.com. In 2017, the British Library announced a John Pilger Archive of all his written and filmed work. The British Film Institute includes his 1979 film, “Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia,” among the 10 most important documentaries of the 20th century.
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My family doctor closed his 47-year-old practice a few months ago. I had chosen him back in 2003 because he owned an anti-aging clinic, offering unorthodox services such as chelation therapy, intravenous vitamin drips, hair mineral analysis and acupuncture. These weren’t covered by Ontario’s (mandatory) Health Insurance Plan (OHIP), but my independent reading had convinced me that they were worth trying, so I willingly paid for them privately.
My doctor was intelligent and innovative, with a wide-ranging scientific curiosity and enthusiasm. Back in 2003, he was permitted to demonstrate this by offering eclectic treatment options tailored to individual patient needs.
However, as the years went by, I saw him getting beaten down by ever-increasing regimentation within the government healthcare system. He wrangled once or twice with government agencies, possibly OHIP or the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO), and lost.
He eventually closed the anti-aging clinic, and stopped offering unconventional treatment suggestions. Over the last few years, his practice seemed to have become little more than a prescription assembly line. Watching in the waiting room, I’d see virtually every patient emerge from his office after about four minutes with a drug prescription in hand. Next!
A few times when I grumbled to him about some idiocy in the government healthcare system, he would say, “Welcome to my world.” He had plainly lost his enthusiasm for practising this kind of medicine, so I was not surprised when he read the writing on the wall about coming vaccination mandates and threw in the towel. His prescience became apparent on April 30, when the CPSO announced its new policy forbidding doctors from making any statements that might be considered anti-vaccine, anti-masking, anti-distancing or anti-lockdowns.
This independent, conscientious professional was never going to put up with being told that he had to force all his patients to take the same treatment, regardless of their personal circumstances, when the risk of harm from COVID-19 infection is minimal for most age groups, and the evidence of vaccine injuries continues to mount.
He was not alone in his decision to withdraw from this increasingly oppressive system. Dr. Mark Trozzi, a 25-year veteran of Ontario’s healthcare system, not only closed his practice but decided to devote his time to warning the public, via his website, about the dangers of the medical tyranny that is unfolding. And in Ontario’s Grey Bruce region, Dr. Rochagné Kilianresigned her Emergency Room (ER) position due to ethical concerns. She says 80% of ER patients within the prior three months were fully vaccinated, but this information is being withheld from the public.
Meanwhile, on September 27, the CPSO ratcheted up its persecution – and no, I didn’t mean “prosecution” – of independent-minded Ontario doctors by issuing a Notice of Hearing against Dr. Patrick Phillips of Englehart. It alleges that his communications on social media regarding vaccinations, treatments, and public health measures for COVID-19 have been “misleading, incorrect, or inflammatory”.
Dr. Phillips, on his part, considers vaccine mandates shocking, even criminal. He has been deluged with requests from people seeking vaccine exemptions, people who will lose their jobs and their means of supporting their families due to vaccine mandates imposed by their employers. He describes his situation and front-line experiences eloquently in this video.
The CPSO unilaterally imposed a 12-point order on Dr. Phillips, even before he had an opportunity to present his position (supported by masses of accumulating professional evidence) through a fair hearing process. Portions of the order would be almost comical if they were not so serious. For instance, item 12 commands that Dr. Phillips “shall consent” to the CPSO providing a copy of its order to the head honchos of hospitals or clinics.
Did it never occur to the CPSO that ordering someone to consent makes a mockery of the very concept of consent?
Another prohibition imposed unilaterally upon Dr. Phillips, is that he “shall not prescribe ivermectin”. Yet a plethora of studies and testimony from highly respected experts indicates that ivermectin – a Nobel prize-winning drug – is a safe, inexpensive, and highly effective remedy, both for preventing COVID infections and for treating people after infection. This British site, for instance, contains a resource page with the latest evidence and protocols on ivermectin from around the world. The expert witnesses lined up for the Adamson Barbecue legal challenge in Ontario (especially Dr. Byram Bridle of the University of Guelph and Dr. Harvey Risch the Yale School of Medicine) also testified in sworn affidavits about the merits of ivermectin.
Dr. Phillips is not the only doctor being threatened with de-licensure by his governing body, and Ontario is not the only province making such threats. BC, Alberta, and Quebec have been placing doctors into similar straitjackets.
Benjamin Franklin warned about this stifling of independent thought more than 200 years ago: “If everyone is thinking alike, then no one is thinking,” he said.
Those who value liberty must defend the rights of courageous freethinking doctors to speak their minds without penalty from their licensing bodies or government employers.
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Karen Selick [send her mail] is a retired lawyer who now works as a freelance writer, editor, and video maker.
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When the pandemic hit, America needed someone to turn to for advice. The media and public naturally looked to Dr. Anthony Fauci—the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, an esteemed laboratory immunologist and one of President Donald Trump‘s chosen COVID advisers. Unfortunately, Dr. Fauci got major epidemiology and public health questions wrong. Reality and scientific studies have now caught up with him.
Here are the key issues:
Natural immunity. By pushing vaccine mandates, Dr. Fauci ignores naturally acquired immunity among the COVID-recovered, of which there are more than 45 million in the United States. Mounting evidence indicates that natural immunity is stronger and longer lasting than vaccine-induced immunity. In a study from Israel, the vaccinated were 27 times more likely to get symptomatic COVID than the unvaccinated who had recovered from a prior infection.
We have known about natural immunity from disease at least since the Athenian Plague in 430 BC. Pilots, truckers and longshoremen know about it, and nurses know it better than anyone. Under Fauci’s mandates, hospitals are firing heroic nurses who recovered from COVID they contracted while caring for patients. With their superior immunity, they can safely care for the oldest and frailest patients with even lower transmission risk than the vaccinated.
Protecting the elderly.While anyone can get infected, there is more than a thousand-fold difference in mortality risk between the old and the young. After more than 700,000 reported COVID deaths in America, we now know that lockdowns failed to protect high-risk older people. When confronted with the idea of focused protection of the vulnerable, Dr. Fauci admitted he had no idea how to accomplish it, arguing that it would be impossible. That may be understandable for a lab scientist, but public health scientists have presented many concrete suggestions that would have helped, had Fauci and other officials not ignored them.
What can we do now to minimize COVID mortality? Current vaccination efforts should focus on reaching people over 60 who are neither COVID-recovered nor vaccinated, including hard-to-reach, less-affluent people in rural areas and inner cities. Instead, Dr. Fauci has pushed vaccine mandates for children, students and working-age adults who are already immune—all low-risk populations—causing tremendous disruption to labor markets and hampering the operation of many hospitals.
School closures. Schools are major transmission points for influenza, but not for COVID. While children do get infected, their risk for COVID death is minuscule, lower than their already low risk of dying from the flu. Throughout the 2020 spring wave, Sweden kept daycare and schools open for all its 1.8 million children ages 1 to 15, with no masks, testing or social distancing. The result? Zero COVID deaths among children and a COVID risk to teachers lower than the average of other professions. In fall 2020, most European countries followed suit, with similar results. Considering the devastating effects of school closures on children, Dr. Fauci’s advocacy for school closures may be the single biggest mistake of his career.
Masks. The gold standard of medical research is randomized trials, and there have now been two on COVID masks for adults. For children, there is no solid scientific evidence that masks work. A Danish study found no statistically significant difference between masking and not masking when it came to coronavirus infection. In a study in Bangladesh, the 95 percent confidence interval showed that masks reduced transmission between 0 percent and 18 percent. Hence, masks are either of zero or limited benefit. There are many more critical pandemic measures that Dr. Fauci could have emphasized, such as better ventilation in schools and hiring nursing home staff with natural immunity.
Contact tracing. For some infectious diseases, such as Ebola and syphilis, contact tracing is critically important. For a commonly circulating viral infection such as COVID, it was a hopeless waste of valuable public health resources that did not stop the disease.
Collateral public health damage. A fundamental public health principle is that health is multidimensional; the control of a single infectious disease is not synonymous with health. As an immunologist, Dr. Fauci failed to properly consider and weigh the disastrous effects lockdowns would have on cancer detection and treatment, cardiovascular disease outcomes, diabetes care, childhood vaccination rates, mental health and opioid overdoses, to name a few. Americans will live with—and die from—this collateral damage for many years to come.
In private conversations, most of our scientific colleagues agree with us on these points. While a few have spoken up, why are not more doing so? Well, some tried but failed. Others kept silent when they saw colleagues slandered and smeared in the media or censored by Big Tech. Some are government employees who are barred from contradicting official policy. Many are afraid of losing positions or research grants, aware that Dr. Fauci sits on top of the largest pile of infectious disease research money in the world. Most scientists are not experts on infectious disease outbreaks. Were we, say, oncologists, physicists or botanists, we would probably also have trusted Dr. Fauci.
The evidence is in. Governors, journalists, scientists, university presidents, hospital administrators and business leaders can continue to follow Dr. Anthony Fauci or open their eyes. After 700,000-plus COVID deaths and the devastating effects of lockdowns, it is time to return to basic principles of public health.
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Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D., is an epidemiologist, biostatistician, and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Jay Bhattacharya, MD, Ph.D., is a Professor of Health Policy at Stanford University School of Medicine. Both are Senior Scholars at the newly formed Brownstone Institute.
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On October 27 the US Food and Drug Administration Advisory Panel on Vaccines recommended the agency allow Pfizer to amend its Emergency Use Authorization for its COVID vaccine to include children 5 through 11 years old. Two days later the FDA officially approved the rollout. Major media are treating this as a positive development to protect young children. On closer inspection it is anything but that. The FDA is today shockingly corrupt under the Acting Director and is little more than a rubber stamp for Big Pharma, and especially Pfizer, where the former FDA head sits on the board.
The FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee voted 17 to 0, with one abstention, to give a green light allowing Emergency Use Authorization for the Pfizer-BioNTech experimental mRNA to children between 5 and 12 years. The expert who abstained later explained he did so because of limited safety and efficacy data provided. Previously the FDA had approved the vaccine for 12 and older. Adding to the stench of corruption around the latest vote, the Biden Administration a week earlier announced it had already purchased enough Pfizer vaccine to inoculate all 28 million 5- to 11-year-olds in the US. Did they know the fix was in?
‘…Just the Way it Goes’
The record of the FDA, the major drug oversight agency in the US Government, regarding safety and risks of the experimental gene-altered mRNA vaccines of Pfizer, is one of criminal malfeasance, defined as willful violation of a public trust or obligation that causes harm or death. Their latest ruling is even more egregious for blatant conflicts of interest and scientific fraud. Both Pfizer, who conducted the tests on the efficacy of their own vaccine on the 5-11 year age group, and the FDA experts, admitted that they had no idea if the vaccine was safe for such a young population.
Dr. Eric Rubin, professor of immunology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health voted to approve the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, noting, “The data show that the vaccine works and is pretty safe … and yet we’re worried about a side effect that we can’t measure yet, but it’s probably real.” That is hardly confidence-building. He then stated, “we’re never going to learn about how safe this vaccine is unless we start giving it. That’s just the way it goes.”
This cold-blooded nonchalance is even more astonishing in light of the fact that the incidence of serious side effects in the 5-11 age group who allegedly have tested positive for the corona virus is essentially zero. According to data of the US Government Centers for Disease Control, the Infection Fatality Rate for children from 0-17 years is 0.0002 per 100,000 and far lower for the 5-11 years. A research study by Johns Hopkins University found that risk of severe illness or death from covid19 in a study of 48,000 children is essentially zero if no other morbidity risk such as leukemia, diabetes or asthma is present. Moreover, risk of infecting other children is also very low.
In their submission to FDA for approval, Pfizer stated the vaccination was needed for the 5-11 age group to prevent covid disease transmission. Yet in their FDA hearing on questioning, Dr. William Gruber, senior vice president of Pfizer Vaccine Clinical Research and Development, said they did not even assess whether the vaccine prevents transmission. We might ask why is this at all needed then if the risk to children is zero and there is no evidence of children transmission?
Even more shocking is the statement by Pfizer about its tests. First there were no animal tests on rats or such first. They admitted that the tested human group was so small that they could not test for myocarditis or pericarditis. Yet those are among the most reported negative effects for all others that have had the Pfizer jab. In its FDA application Pfizer noted that the number of participants in the current clinical development program was “too small to detect any potential risks of myocarditis associated with vaccination,” and that “to evaluate long-term sequelae of post-vaccination myocarditis/pericarditis” in participants 5 to <12 years of age will not be studied until after the vaccine is authorized for children.”
Flawed Pfizer Tests
The tests Pfizer made were also fatally flawed. According to Dr. Josh Guetzkow, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Pfizer study was not double-blind. Further, Pfizer cherry-picked subjects to evidently better their results. Three thousand children age 5-11 received Pfizer’s COVID vaccine, but only 750 of those children were selectively included in the company’s safety analysis. And Pfizer dismissed cases with adverse vaccine effects in their FDA filing: “Few serious Adverse Events, none of which were related to vaccine, and no AEs leading to withdrawal were reported.” They give no explanation how that was determined. Just trust Pfizer.
And post-vaccination follow up was less than 2 months for one test cohort and only 2.4 weeks for a second. The Pfizer report to FDA read, “Supplemental safety expansion group data were analyzed from approximately 1500 vaccine recipients with a median follow-up time of 2.4 weeks after Dose 2. These supplemental data demonstrate an acceptable safety profile…” It can take months or longer for side effects to manifest. Vaccine experts recommend at least 18-24 month post-vaccine follow up, not 3 months or 2.4 weeks. This is not serious science.
As well, it seems the FDA and or Pfizer wrongly name the vaccine in the title as “BNT162B2 [COMIRNATY (COVID-19 VACCINE, MRNA)] .“Yet the actual FDA text calls it “Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine (BNT162b2).”
The separate company, BioNTech of Mainz, Germany, has a similar but “legally different” vaccine, trade-named Comirnaty, that is not available in the USA. The distinction is essential as it was the basis in August for the corrupt FDA to give Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine an extension of Emergency Use Authorization but to misleadingly declare its full approval for Comirnaty vaccine of BioNTech. This is deliberate fraud and allowed the Biden Administration to mandate vaccination of US government workers (curiously except for White House and Congress), military, and any company with more than 100 employees.
Conflicts of Interest?
The corruption of the FDA extends to the members of the Vaccine Advisory Committee. Many of the members of the current 18 person committee have direct ties to Pfizer or to the pro-Pfizer Gates Foundation.
Prof. Holly Janes of the Fred Hutch Cancer Research Center in Seattle designed the flawed Pfizer tests. Her institute is funded by Gates Foundation money. FDA committee member Dr. Steven Pergam is also with the Gates-funded Fred Hutch center. Acting committee chair, Arnold S. Monto was a paid consultant to Pfizer. Committee member Archana Chatterjee worked on a Pfizer research project related to vaccines for infants between 2018-2020. Geeta K. Swamy is chair of the “Independent Data Monitoring Committee for the Pfizer Group B Streptococcus Vaccine Program,” a committee sponsored by Pfizer. Duke University states that “Dr. Swamy serves as a co-investigator for the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine trial.” FDA Committee member Gregg Sylvester was a vice president for Pfizer Vaccines. Ofer Levy, professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School is on record vigorously supporting Pfizer covid vaccines for children 12 and older. And FDA committee member Paul Offit professor of pediatrics at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia called openly last June for covid vaccine permission for children.
When we compare the actions of corrupt FDA Acting Director Janet Woodcock during the August FDA extension of emergency use authorization for Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, she refused then to even allow the vaccine committee to meet to debate the issue. Several months before in June 2021 three members of the FDA Vaccine Committee resigned in protest over Woodcock’s refusal to heed the near unanimous vote of the advisory committee to approve an Alzheimer’s drug called Aduhelm against the wishes of nearly every member on the panel.
Clearly Woodcock has been busy in the meantime stacking the advisory committee with pro-Pfizer members. Not to be forgotten is the fact that after he left as head of the FDA under Trump, Scott Gottlieb immediately joined the board of directors of…Pfizer Inc. Woodcock served under him at FDA.
Woodcock has been at FDA since 1986, almost as long as Fauci at NIAID. Woodcock was Biden’s choice to head FDA, but a massive opposition from 28 groups including state attorneys general and citizen groups forced him to name her “acting,” which does not need Congressional scrutiny. Woodcock was directly responsible for the original FDA approval of deadly opioids over the objections of her own scientists and other advisors.
Already California has moved to make public school admission contingent on covid vaccination, anticipating Pfizer approval. This spread of the deadly Pfizer vaccine to children who have near zero risk of serious disease makes no public health sense. It is simply prima facie evidence of medical malfeasance at the highest levels of the US Government including FDA, with plausible criminal intent. The FDA decision will now be used to argue for similar inclusion of essentially no risk children for the vaccine jab.
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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
Featured image is from NEO
Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation
Author Name: F. William Engdahl
ISBN Number: 978-0-937147-2-2
Year: 2007
Pages: 341 pages with complete index
List Price: $25.95
Special Price: $18.00
This skilfully researched book focuses on how a small socio-political American elite seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival: the provision of our daily bread. “Control the food and you control the people.”
This is no ordinary book about the perils of GMO. Engdahl takes the reader inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms.
The author cogently reveals a diabolical world of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is.
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This week and through November 12, the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) takes place in Glasgow, Scotland. COP26 brings together heads of state and other prominent figures to talk about climate change. However, the conference won’t address the central environmental problem: capitalism. In this interview we talk to Max Ajl, author of A People’s Green New Deal(Pluto Press, 2021), which examines the capitalist roots of the environmental crisis, and addresses its impact on countries of the Global South such as Venezuela.
Venezuelanalysis: It’s important to bring up the Global South’s perspective on climate change in the context of COP26. In A People’s Green New Deal you argue that so called “green economies” (and in general the proposals that we know as the Green New Deal-GND) often replicate the existing logic of domination, particularly when it comes to the Global South. Briefly, can you explain your hypothesis?
Max Ajl: Mao put this simply: “Everything reactionary is the same; if you do not hit it, it will not fall.” We can add: you have to take aim to hit.
The great majority of progressive proposals take aim neither at capitalism nor imperialism. In fact, they are often blind to them. If we want to change the world-system, we need to have a sense of what it is. In the most general sense, drawing on Samir Amin, we can say that it is a system of polarized accumulation, producing great mountains of wealth, on the one hand, and far larger seas of poverty, on the other. That is a feature and not a bug of the system: the wealth accumulated at the core of the system is stolen from the periphery. To change that type of world-system, you need first of all to strike at the current mechanisms of value transfer from periphery to core. Those include uneven exchange of values – or the core receiving goods embodying more labor than those embodied in its exports – and the core receiving goods which concentrate more of the world’s resources than those it exports. Another element is: ongoing primitive accumulation, including the collapse of peripheral sovereignty, as in Yemen and elsewhere, which is part of safeguarding the petrodollar.
The 2010 Cochabamba People’s Agreement went further. It recalled the (unrealized) Bandung-era effort to achieve political and economic decolonization and liberation. But the Cochabamba Agreement added something new: we need to speak of ecological decolonization. In other words, the global ecology’s sinks for waste from CO2 emissions were not just used. They were enclosed by the wealthy states. Because that space cannot be restored in the short term, southern states/peoples are owed some kind of replacement: climate debt, to the tune of six percent of northern GNP per year.
These are structural features of the world system. Unless you identify them, target them, and strike at them, they won’t fall. They will continue. So, logically, the prevailing proposals for a GND, or for a “green economy,” will simply reproduce the polarized system if they do not take into account these logics, diagnoses, structures, and demands. They will tend to look away from the historical sources of wealth and not support reparations. The point is that we cannot subsist on a politics of GNDs based on slogans such as “just transition,” “sustainable development,” or even “a Green New Deal,” socialist or not, unless they specifically mention these demands and the mechanisms of uneven development.
This map shows that the countries of the Global South are the most affected by climate change. (University of Richmond)
V: With that in mind, what kind of reorganization on a global scale is needed so that the people of the Global South don’t end up paying the consequences of the climate crisis?
MA: There are five fundamental elements that are central to reconfiguring North-South relations (the specific internal texture of changes in the Global South’s production and its ecological self-defense strategies are different questions, clearly involving, as the Bolivian leadership has said, food sovereignty and sovereign industrialization among other measures).
One element is the demilitarization of the core states. In effect, southern social movements advanced this demand in the Cochabamba process when they pointed out that the US spends as much on its military as is demanded from the US in climate debt payments. They called for “a new model of civilization in the world without… war-mongering.” Demilitarization is also necessary to achieve a “just transition,” meaning, in concrete terms, stabilization if not improvement in life outcomes for people in the imperial core. Militarization amounts to a horrific use of social surplus and industrial capacity, geared at preserving world accumulation and guaranteeing imperialist value flows. It needs to go.
Second, there needs to be a real respect for sovereignty, and a political struggle to ensure that respect. People in the North need to actively resist their governments’ attempts to economically asphyxiate the South and to impose unilateral coercive sanctions. That means the abolition of the so-called “terror lists,” which are primarily used to criminalize groups in the Arab-Iranian region carrying out any defense of national sovereignty or defense of anti-colonial projects.
The basics of international law need to be respected, including honoring the territorial sovereignty of states like Venezuela and Syria. The latter is occupied by US troops, without any protest from the western left. The former suffers from paramilitary infiltration from Colombia, a US client state – again without much objection from the western left. Needless to say, removing external destabilization does not mean that these countries will suddenly produce autonomist socialist societies. Rather, the removal of external aggression creates a better atmosphere for internal social struggle aimed at more democratic freedoms, internal social(ist) redistribution, and ecological justice.
Third, there needs to be payment of climate debt. Northern environmental movements have purposefully suppressed this demand, inasmuch as they took distance from the Evo Morales and Hugo Chávez governments, all the while hypocritically expressing concern about extractivism (which is an input into the commodities and industrial processes that are key to northern accumulation).
The Cochabamba People’s Agreement and the Bolivian government specifically demanded six percent of northern GNP, around $1.2 trillion from the US, and around $3.2 trillion from the OECD on the whole. This includes an adaptation debt, to help “Poor countries and people who live daily with rising costs, damages and lost opportunities for development,” and an emissions debt, since “developed countries’ historical and current excessive emissions are limiting atmospheric space available to developing countries.”
Fourth, there should be a vast and immediate reduction in fossil-energy use and emissions in the Global North, as a consequence of their current and worsening overuse of atmospheric sinks for CO2.
Fifth, there should be settler-decolonization, including support for the national liberation struggles of peoples still fighting against settler-colonial domination in places like Palestine and current-day Canada and the US.
V: Some people argue for an anti-extractivist solution to the crisis. On paper, that might appear to be a great solution. However, people of course actually live in places like Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nigeria, and the conditions of dependency are such that freezing production would be suicidal for them. What policies should be pursued in the extractivist economies of the periphery?
MA: One should acknowledge that anti-extractivist campaigns often reflect real and desperate social issues that people face. For example, people in Bolivia and in Venezuela must deal with horrible ecological harms of resource extraction in their countries. Nevertheless, these anti-extractivist campaigns in the North are often no more than weapons against Third World development.
There is no possible industrialization in any part of the world without resource extraction, especially of minerals. Are people demanding that we live in grass-covered knolls like hobbits? That extraction will produce political, social, and ecological costs, where it occurs is undeniable. The question is how to balance those costs with the majority’s need to escape poverty. There is obviously no simple answer. One answer is to go back to the demands for changes in the terms of trade, (“international action in favor of fair and stable prices for [Third World] exports,” in Ismail-Sabri Abdallah’s phrase).
My point here is both rhetorical and real: all things being equal, if countries could produce half as much lithium or anything else and receive the same proceeds, then resolving difficult developmental dilemmas would be easier. Instead, extractivist theory leads to the “displacement of the debate over politics and policy from North to South,” in the words of Sam Moyo, Paris Yeros, and Praveen Jha. It sidesteps any question of northerners’ responsibility for political transformation (a cynic would say that is why this discourse is so popular!). So one issue is serious international activism around the terms of trade, with the understanding that changes benefitting the Third World, which are entirely possible, could immediately enhance developmental possibilities.
It would be good to have better terms of trade with the West and China, but it would be better to retain value through in situ industrialization. I have little to say about the technicalities of protecting Venezuelan farmers from cheaper imported food and an overvalued currency. However, the current crisis, including the kidnapping of Alex Saab, is proof that the basis of a national economy, where possible, is food sovereignty with its capacity to keep inflation under control.
Chávez at COP15 in Copenhagen, Denmark, when he said “Let’s not change the climate, let’s change the system!” (Archive)
V: At the COP15 in Copenhagen, Hugo Chávez said: “Let’s not change the climate, let’s change the system!” More recently, Bolivian Vice President David Choquehuanca made a call for an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist approach to climate change. Can you talk to us about these calls from the Global South?
MA: The North is calling for reforms and crisis-management, and for an essentially Keynesian green shift in the industrial composition of the world system. At best, it seeks a transition to socialism in some undefined future moment, or points to unreal solutions like space mining. By contrast, Chávez and Choquehuanca stepped onto the world political stage, in 2009 and 2021 respectively, and called for ending capitalism. Choquehuanca clearly denounced “limitless accumulation.” He spoke of the threats of “green capitalism” when brought to bear on technologies in the fields of biology, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and space colonization. Likewise, Chávez spoke of “global imperial dictatorship,” and placed the responsibility for dealing with climate change primarily on the United States and its allies. They clearly named the global-scale problems their countries and the South confront and demanded a solution for them.
Can we deal with climate change in a way that achieves liberation and justice for all of the oppressed world – including oppressed, alienated, exploited, and colonized people in the core countries – without following these two leaders in identifying capitalism and imperialism as the systems destroying the planet? Is it any wonder that people find it more comfortable to discuss Venezuelan and Bolivian extractivism in the imperial core countries, rather than try to respond to the analysis they put forward and the politics which derive from it?
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This is the demonstration that we organized in Pisa, Italy on October 30, against the “green pass” through which the government wants to force everyone to vaccinate.
Click the image below to access the video or click here.
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Manlio Dinucci, award winning author, geopolitical analyst and geographer, Pisa, Italy. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
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If people who torture animals are psychopaths, then what are government officials who use taxpayer dollars to fund animal torture? Many are asking this question in the wake of revelations that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci – high priest of the COVID cult – funded medical “research” involving the torture of puppies. This led “Fire Fauci” to trend on Twitter, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) to call for his resignation.
The puppy torture story was followed by disclosures that the federal government funded the testing of experimental AIDS vaccines on orphans. Many of the orphans used as human guinea pigs subsequently died, and nurses who assisted in these experiments reported that many children got sick immediately after receiving the vaccines.
Testing dangerous drugs on orphans and torturing puppies in the name of “science” is certainly shocking, but is it really surprising that government would fund these types of activities? What is the difference between using orphans and puppies for cruel experiments in the name of protecting public health and killing innocent children in drone attacks in the name of stopping terrorism?
Ironically, these revelations come when Congress is on the verge of allowing the federal bureaucracy to destroy what remains of our medical privacy. Both the Senate and House versions of the Labor, Education, and Health and Human Services Appropriations bill remove the prohibition on the development of a “unique patient identifier.”
The prohibition on funding for the unique patient identifier, which I sponsored, has been in place since 1998. The push to allow the government to force every American to obtain a unique patient identifier is being justified as a means to efficiently monitor Americans’ “contact and immunization” status.
When I began fighting the unique patient ID in the 1990s, my opponents denied that medical identifiers would make it impossible to ensure confidentiality of medical records. Now, they are saying we should support medical identifiers because they allow government officials, employers, schools, airlines, and even stores and restaurants to discover what, if any, vaccinations or other medical treatments we have or have not received. The result of the identifier will be a medical caste system, where those who refuse to follow the mandates or advice of the “experts” are denied opportunities to work, receive an education, or even go to church or enjoy a night out on the town.
A unique patient identifier will weaken health care by making individuals reluctant to share personal information—such as drug and alcohol use and past sexual history—with health care providers. It will also discourage sick individuals from seeking medical care for fear their physicians will discover they are unvaccinated, smoke, are overweight, or engage in other unapproved behaviors.
A unique medical ID could also be tied to government records of gun purchases. Someone with “too many” guns could be labeled a potential mental health risk and harassed by law enforcement. This is especially likely if the gun grabbers are successful in their push to enact “red flag” laws in every state.
Fortunately, there is a growing resistance to vaccines and other mandates. This resistance is unlikely to passively accept a federally-issued unique patient identifier. If those of us who know the truth take advantage of the opportunity presented by the resistance to COVID tyranny, we can not only stop the scheme to force every American to obtain a “unique patient identifier” but end all government control of our health care.
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Well, it took 19 months, and it’s only one state so far, but we finally have a red state that is living up to its reputation. Over the weekend, the Tennessee legislature passed an omnibus COVID freedom bill that places the state on a completely different path to dealing with this virus from the rest of the country – one rooted in science, compassion, liberty, and health care freedom.
The more the vaccines fail and other treatments rise, the more our federal government and most states continue to mandate the shots and clamp down on safe alternative treatments. The Tennessee legislature has passed a catch-all bill that will do just the opposite. While no bill is perfect, HB 9077/SB9014 will include many of the provisions we need to right the ship on COVID, and certainly much more than any other state has done so far. It is the first state to pass these provisions through a legislative body. The bill now awaits the signature of Governor Bill Lee.
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Japan just flattened their biggest covid curve yet, and they did so by legalizing and using ivermectin. In almost every country, infection rates and daily death records have increased with each new wave of sickness. The public health advice of lockdowns, isolation, mask mandates and mass inoculation programs has only continued to cause larger curves of sickness and hospitalization. The withholding of viable treatments, a crime against humanity, has all but crippled humanity’s ability to adapt to and recover from respiratory infections. But there’s hope in Japan, where ivermectin has been deployed to help people recover from covid-19 so they can have more durable, lasting immunity.
Japan is wary of vaccine companies, more aware of the damage they cause to human life
When it comes to trusting vaccine companies, Japan is one of the most cautious nations in the world. When the first covid-19 vaccines came out, Japan waited two additional months before offering the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine to the public. Historically, the Japanese are quicker to acknowledge vaccine injuries and will move more swiftly to protect the public from poisonous shots.
For example, Japan recommends the fewest number of vaccine doses to infants under one year of age. Not coincidentally, Japan also has the third lowest infant mortality rate among all developed nations. This isn’t a mere correlation. In fact, a study of thirty-four developed nations finds that infant mortality rates regress against the number of vaccine doses routinely given.
Pandemic not nullified by vaccines
Before Japan released the Pfizer covid vaccines to the public, the country was still struggling to come up with a treatment plan and even recorded over 9,000 new infections in early January. Over one hundred deaths were recorded on February 4th, as governments put pressure on Japan to come up with a vaccine campaign. As the vaccines were rolled out, COVID seemed to fade away for a month or two. However, by May 12, infections were peaking again, with over 7,000 new infections recorded. By May 25th, the nation recorded over one hundred deaths in a single day.
By the time July rolled around, the number of shots administered daily rose to about 1.5 million per day. By the end of the August, close to 70 percent of the Japanese population had lined up to get their shots. However, the high vaccination rate showed negative results. On August 20, 2020, when there were no vaccinations, there were 832 new infections. A year later, after most of the population was vaccinated, there were 22,301 new infections on August 22, 2021! The number of recorded deaths in August 2021 was, on average, five times higher each day, when compared to the year before — when there were no vaccines.
Ivermectin helps flatten Japan’s largest covid curve
The vaccine-induced pandemic could have spiraled out of control, but Japan decided to do something different than the U.S. and other failing nations that depend solely on vaccines and masks. In September, the nation deployed ivermectin and began treating patients with more dignity. Caseloads plummeted rapidly. In Tokyo, there were nearly 6,000 cases in the middle of August. By the end of September, the caseload had fallen well below one hundred, an 11-month low. The Associated Presstried to heap praise on vaccines and masks for the sudden success, even though these materials had statistically failed the nation for over a year, leading to massive waves of covid and other diseases.
As more Japanese were properly treated and recovered, the number of covid tests used by the Japanese fell by one third. The positivity rate of these tests also fell from 25% in late August to 1% in mid-October. Ivermectin has helped bring about a more rapid recovery, reducing the spread and imparting more durable immunity. Since its use, Japan has made a serious turnaround, in the midst of their most serious outbreak yet. This doesn’t mean that Japan is in the clear just yet, because vaccine efficacy will inevitably wane, causing new waves of covid in the months ahead. The difference when next time rolls around: Japan has hope with a better treatment plan.
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Comments Off on Japan Ends Vaccine-induced Pandemic by Legalizing Ivermectin, while Pharma-controlled Media Pretends Masks and Vaccines Were the Savior
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Even after 75% of the population has been fully vaccinated, Denmark is still experiencing the COVID spike. Now, in order to control the situation, the Danish health minister has asked more and more people to get vaccinated, else the government will “shut down society”.
In the month of May, Denmark suffered the worst COVID spike where the R number was 2.01. It is the highest since January.
Denmark’s total population is 5.8 million out of which 75 percent inhabitants have been fully vaccinated.
It has been a week since Denmark is getting more than 1000 cases daily. More than 85 percent of the population over the age of 12 has been vaccinated.
Now authorities are threatening to “shut down society,” according to opposition party health spokesman Martin Geertsen, if more Danes don’t take the shot.
“If we are to keep Denmark open, we must have more people get the vaccine,” said Health Minister Magnus Heunicke.
Although the health minister said the vaccine would remain voluntary, he however ominously warned the people to get the jab.
Geertsen said that Heunicke was sending a “completely wild message.” In addition to it, the government was breaking its promise to eliminate lockdowns once a high proportion of the population had been vaccinated.
Last year, Danish authorities tried to pass a law to enforce forced vaccination of anyone, and decided to take the help of police to physically detain people and hold them down while being jabbed. However, this effort was abandoned after mass protests.
Denmark was the first European country to completely stop using AstraZeneca vaccine for causing cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST), a brain blood clot in recipients.
According to the lawsuit, authorities did not recommend a major shutdown, as the PM Mette Frederiksen claimed. It was herself and Barbara Bertelsen, the Prime Minister’s Head of Department, who would send alarm emails with attached articles from the media to the heads of department, creating the panic.
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“When elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled.”
So warned Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte in his address to the UN General Assembly on September 22, 2020. He was referring to the consequences for East Asia of a conflict between the US and China.
Fast forward to October 2, 2021, about one year later, and the first patch of grass has been stomped on by the U.S. elephant, trudging stealthily about, far from home in the South China Sea. On that day the nuclear-powered attack submarine, the USS Connecticut, suffered serious damage in an undersea incident which the US Navy ascribed to a collision with an undersea object.
After sustaining damage, the submarine apparently surfaced close to the Paracel Islands which lie only 150 nautical miles from China’s Yulin submarine base in Hainan Province. The Connecticut is one of only three Seawolf class of submarines, which are assumed to be on spying missions. But they can be equipped with Intermediate Range (1250-2500 km) Tomahawk cruise missiles which can be armed with nuclear warheads. It is claimed that they are not so equipped at present because the Navy’s “policy decisions” have “phased out” their nuclear role, according to the hawkish Center For Strategic and International Studies.
When a US nuclear submarine with such capabilities has a collision capable of killing US sailors and spilling radioactive materials in the South China Sea, it should be front page news on every outlet in the US This has not been the case – far from it. For example, to this day (October 30), nearly a month after the collision, the New York Times, the closest approximation to a mouthpiece for the American foreign policy elite, has carried no major story on the incident and in fact no story at all so far as I and several daily readers can find. This news is apparently not fit to print in the Times. (A notable exception to this conformity and one worth consulting has been Craig Hooper of Forbes.)
A blackout of this kind will come as no surprise to those who have covered the plight of Julian Assange or the US invasion of Syria or the barely hidden hand of the United States in various regime change operations, to cite a few examples.
The US media has followed the narrative of the US Navy which waited until October 7 to acknowledge the incident, with the following extraordinarily curt press release (I have edited it with strike-outs and bolded substitutions to make its meaning clear.):
The Seawolf-class fast-attack submarine USS Connecticut (SSN 22) struck an object while submerged on the afternoon of Oct. 2, while operating in international waters in the Indo-Pacific regionin the South China Sea near or inside Chinese territorial waters.Thesafety of the crew remains the Navy’s top priorityThe crew is being held incommunicado for an indefinite period.There are no life threatening injuries.This allows the extent of injuries to the crew to be kept secret.
The submarine remains in a safe and stable conditionhidden from public view to conceal the damage and its cause. USS Connecticut’s nuclear propulsion plant and spaces were not affected and remain fully operationalare in a condition that is being hidden from the public until cosmetic repairs can be done to conceal the damage. The extent of damage to the remainder of the submarine is being assessedis also being concealed. The US Navy has not requested assistancewill not allow an independent inspection or investigation. The incident will be investigated cover-up will continue.
Tan Kefei, spokesperson for China’s Ministry of National Defense although not so terse, had much the same to say as my edited version above, as reported in China’s Global Times:
“It took the US Navy five days after the accident took place to make a short and unclear statement. Such an irresponsible approach, cover-up (and) lack of transparency .. can easily lead to misunderstandings and misjudgments. China and the neighboring countries in the South China Sea have to question the truth of the incident and the intentions behind it.
But Tan went further and echoed the sentiment of President Duterte:
“This incident also shows that the recent establishment of a trilateral security partnership between the US, UK and Australia (AUKUS) to carry out nuclear submarine cooperation has brought a huge risk of nuclear proliferation, seriously violated the spirit of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, undermined the construction of a nuclear-free zone in Southeast Asia, and brought severe challenges to regional peace and security.
“We believe that the actions of the US will affect the safety of navigation in the South China Sea, arouse serious concerns and unrest among the countries in the region, and pose a serious threat and a major risk to regional peace and stability.”
The crash of the USS Connecticut goes beyond the potential for harmful radioactive leakage into the South China Sea, with potential damage to the surrounding nations including the fishing grounds of importance to the economy. If the US continues to ramp up confrontation far from its home in the South China Sea, then a zone of conflict could spread to include all of East Asia. Will this in any way benefit the region? Does the region want to be turned into the same wreckage that the Middle East and North Africa are now after decades of US crusading for “democracy and liberty” there via bombs, sanctions and regime change operations? That would be a tragic turn for the world’s most economically dynamic region. Do the people of the region not realize this? If not, the USS Connecticut should be a wake-up call.
But the people of the US should also think carefully about what is happening. Perhaps the foreign policy elite of the US think it can revisit the US strategy in WWII with devastation visited upon Eurasia leaving the US as the only industrial power standing above the wreckage. Such are the benefits of an island nation. But in the age of intercontinental weapons, could the US homeland expect to escape unscathed from such a conflict as it did in WWII? The knot is being tied, as Krushchev wrote to Kennedy at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and if it is tied too tightly, then no one will be able to untie it. The US is tying the knot far from its home this time half way around the world. It should not tie that knot too tight.
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John V. Walsh, until recently a Professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and now residing in the Bay Area, has written on issues of peace and health care for Asia Times, EastBayTimes/Mercury News, Antiwar.com, CounterPunch, and others.
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There are few more regions confronted with this crisis more than the Middle East and North Africa. From apocalyptic wildfires in Algeria and devastating floods in Turkey to toxic pollution in Lebanon and widespread drought in Iraq and Syria, humanity is wreaking a terrible toll on the region.
Sometimes the damage is caused not by industrial expansion or conflict but by seemingly innocuous activities such as tourism or sport: the impact however can be just as severe.
The examples below are taken from Middle East Eye reporting during the past two years. The true picture is much wider: please also see our previous piece on the climate crisis and extreme weather from 2019, which highlighted among other issues the impact of sandstorms, water wars, and deforestation among others.
1. Major cities could be lost
Coastal cities in Egypt and Iraq could be submerged by 2050 as a result of rising sea levels, according to a report.
Research conducted by Climate Central, a US-based non-profit news organisation, has tripled initial estimates of global vulnerability to sea level rises and coastal flooding.
Climate Central’s data shows that Basra, Iraq’s second biggest city, could be partially deluged as a result of rising sea waters, leading to thousands becoming displaced from their homes.
The research also showed that Alexandria in Egypt could be lost to the sea, compounding concerns that parts of the city are already sinking due to rising levels.
2. Temperatures are hitting 50C
Four countries in the Middle East witnessed temperatures surpass 50C in June 2021, amid a continuing pattern of record-breaking heat for the time of year.
Such extreme heat has already been documented as significantly increasing in frequency in the Middle East and North Africa region. In 2020, a study published in Science Advances, suggested that parts of the Middle East, particularly the Gulf, might become uninhabitable for humans if current trends continue.
3. Millions are facing drought
Droughts are putting at risk the lives of more than 12 million people across Iraq and Syria, aid groups warned in August 2021.
In a joint statement, 13 aid groups said there was a risk of “catastrophe” as rising temperatures, record low rainfall, and drought threatened access to drinking water, irrigation water, and electricity as dams begin to run dry.
According to the UN, Syria is facing the worst drought in 70 years while Iraq is facing the second driest season in 40 years as a result of record low rainfall.
4. Floods have wrecked coastlines
Flash floods in early August 2021 devastated Turkey’s Black Sea, killing dozens. The devastation came just as the disaster-hit country was taking control of hundreds of wildfires (see below) along its scenic southern coast.
The floods struck Turkey in the same week that a UN panel said that global warming is dangerously close to spiralling out of control, and that extreme weather would become more severe.
5. Pollution has shut cities
A shroud of toxic smog that hung over Iran for days in November 2019 forced authorities to shut schools and universities and order people to keep inside their homes.
Similar seasonal spikes in the levels of pollution have had deadly effects – in 2016 more than 400 people were estimated to have died in less than a month during a period of heavy pollution.
Most of the city’s pollution is caused by heavy vehicles, motorbikes, refineries, and power plants, according to a World Bank report released in 2018.
6. Lakes are drying up
Lakes across the Middle East have been shrinking due to surface evaporation and poor environmental planning, including the redirection of water from inflowing rivers.
Much of Iran’s Lake Urmia, once the Middle East’s biggest lake, has now been reduced to little more than a salt plain. And Iraq’s Lake Milh, which once attracted thousands of people for day trips, now resembles a deserted land.
7. Tourism is killing coral
Overcrowding is damaging some Red Sea and Arabian Gulf coral reefs as the region struggles to balance tourism and ecological preservation.
Among the threats is sunscreen, which negatively impacts aquatic ecology. Cinzia Corinaldesi, ecology professor at Italy’s Universita Politecnica delle Marche and co-author of a 2018 paper on sunscreen and corals in the Maldives, found that zinc oxide nanoparticles often used in sunscreens cause “severe and fast coral bleaching”, even in minute quantities.
8. Europe is dumping its rubbish
The UK and Germany have continued to illegally export non-recyclable plastic waste to Turkey, where it is burnt at landfill sites and pollutes the environment, a Greenpeace investigation revealed in May 2021.
The report indicated that Turkey received almost 40 percent of the UK’s plastic waste exports (209,642 tonnes) in 2020, nearly half of which was mixed plastic that is mostly non-recyclable.
The report found that EU member states also exported 20 times more plastic waste to Turkey in 2020 compared with 2016 – about 447,000 tonnes – making Turkey the largest export country for plastic waste from the EU.
9. Civil war has claimed another victim
A decade of conflict in Syria has turned its coast into a major environmental concern, according to a study by PAX, a Dutch peace-building organisation, in October 2021.
Leaks from moored tankers, underwater pipelines and wastewater systems have turned the Syrian coast into a major “conflict-linked pollution flashpoint”, the group said.
Much of the Mediterranean has already been suffering from pollution. However, a decade of conflict in Syria has created major new environmental concerns along its coast, PAX’s report found.
10. Heavy rains threaten historic houses
Months of torrential rains in Yemen have killed more than 100 people and pushed many buildings in the Unesco-listed Old City of Sanaa to the brink of collapse in August 2021.
The persistent rains, which began in April, have damaged hundreds of homes, including many of the mud houses in Sanaa’s Old City that were built before the 11th century and are famous for their decorated facades.
Unesco acknowledged that the damage was endangering the lives of the inhabitants of historic centres across Yemen.
11. Livestock farmers are struggling
Kurdish farmers, such as those grazing their animals near Barroy, Sulaymaniyah, say there is not enough pasture to feed their flocks and herds (MEE/Dana Taib Menmy)
In 2021, Iraq’s Kurdish farmers witnessed one of the most severe drops in rainfall they could recall, exacerbating years of drought.
“It has critically affected our livelihoods, which depend on agriculture and breeding sheep and livestock. We lack enough pasture to grow our herds,” Ramazan Ghalib Khurshid, a farmer in the Khwelen village of Sangaw district,” told Middle East Eye.
Iraq is among the countries most vulnerable to climate change. The Kurdistan region falls within the Mediterranean climate zone and, according to a 2020 analysis by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Mediterranean basin has already been widely affected by global warming, and seasonal rainfall could fall by 40 percent over the next three decades.
12. Toxic fish litter lake shores
In 2021, at least 40 tonnes of fish turned up dead on the banks of a lake on Lebanon’s Litani river in a disaster blamed on polluted waters.
Volunteers collected carcasses of rotting fish near the Qaraoun lake, as piles of garbage floated near the thousands of fish decomposing in already dirty waters.
The river authority warned that the fish were toxic and carried a virus.
And then there are the wildfires…
The Middle East, one of the driest regions in the world, is historically no stranger to wildfires.
But in 2021, extreme heat saw a swathe of the region, from Algeria in the west through to Turkey, Lebanon and Syria further east, be scorched.
Behind each disaster are many individual stories of lives lost, communities destroyed and landscapes devastated.
13. Algeria: Communities unite to fight flames
In August 2021, dozens of people, including soldiers, died in “apocalyptic” fires that swept northern and eastern Algeria.
Experts said that heat, drought and wind were contributing to the dramatic spread of the blazes, similar to the climatic conditions behind fires taking place in other Mediterranean countries.
Tragic stories circulated online: one was that of two young girls whose burnt bodies were found clinging to that of their mother; another was that of a young, recently married farmer who asphyxiated when he tried to open the door of his chicken coop to allow the birds to escape.
14. Turkey: Fire torches villages
A resident in Kalemler stands next to the rubble of a neighbour’s house and looks at the burnt remains of his own home (MEE/Yusuf Selman Inanc)
Pressing her back against a wall, Gulsum stared blankly at Kalemler, her devastated village. “We have lost everything. Our house, cattle, furnishings. We have only a goat, whose eyes can’t see properly due to ashes, whose hairs were partially burnt,” she said.
The village is only 15km from Antalya’s Manavgat, a popular tourism destination. In August 2021 it lay in ruins, one of more than 100 across Turkey to have been devastated that month by wildfires.
Experts have warned that climate change in countries such as Turkey increases both the frequency and intensity of wildfires.
15. Lebanon: Homeowners flee flames
Wildfires wreaked havoc across Lebanon in July 2021 as record summer temperatures continue to batter the region. The victims included a 15-year-old boy “who rushed to the scene to help douse the flames”, according to civil defence authorities.
During the last two years, hundreds of fires have swept across Lebanon and the coastal highland regions of Syria during summer heatwaves, forcing hundreds of people to evacuate their homes.
Apart from wildfires, the blazing heat has caused electricity and water shortages, and environmental analysts have said that extreme weather events are likely to become more common as global warming continues to have an impact.
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Featured image: This coral reef at Three Pools off Dahab in Egypt, pictured in June 2021, is largely dead due to the impact of mass tourism in the region (Elizabeth Fitt/MEE)
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Lawyers involved in U.S. litigation accusing Syngenta AG of spending decades selling an herbicide that causes Parkinson’s disease are moving toward selection of a bellwether trial to be held roughly a year from now, according to the federal judge overseeing the litigation.
In a hearing on Friday, U.S. District Judge Nancy Rosenstengel of the Southern District of Illinois told lawyers for the hundreds of plaintiffs so far involved in the cases against Syngenta that they should work quickly to have the plaintiffs complete assessment questionnaires and provide their medical records and other relevant documents.
She said lawyers should be planning for a trial this time next year, though it is not clear yet who the first plaintiff or group of plaintiffs will be.
Rosenstengel is overseeing what is known as “multidistrict litigation (MDL) as a means of consolidating the pretrial proceedings, such as discovery of evidence and depositions of witnesses. There are currently more than 380 cases within the MDL.
The judge also advised lawyers for plaintiffs and the defendants to work to coordinate with lawsuits in state courts that are making the same allegations – that exposure to paraquat weed killer caused the plaintiffs to develop Parkinson’s disease, a devastating neurological disease. Cases are pending in California, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Washington.
Along with Syngenta, the defendants include Chevron Phillips Chemical Company LP, and Chevron USA, Inc. All have denied any liability.
On Friday, lawyers for Chevron USA Inc. filed a stipulation with the court stating that they had reached an agreement with plaintiffs’ co‐lead counsel allowing for the dismissal of Chevron USA and other entities from the litigation.
The stipulation states that Chevron Chemical Company (whose liabilities Chevron U.S.A. Inc.
assumed) stopped distributing paraquat in 1986 and transferred all paraquat registrations held by Chevron to a non‐Chevron entity at that time.
Lawyers around the United States are advertising for plaintiffs, seeking to draw in thousands of people who’ve been exposed to paraquat and now suffer from Parkinson’s.
The lawsuits include allegations “that manufacturers and sellers of paraquat deliberately concealed the dangers of paraquat for at least four decades, hid evidence of its dangers from government safety agencies, and knowingly unleased a product they knew caused Parkinson’s Disease on the public.”
On Oct. 27, Judge Rosenstengel issued an order regarding the “preservation and production” of documents and other information. The defendants had already turned over a large amount of internal documents and other materials in a lawsuit that they settled earlier this year. Those materials are to be provided to the plaintiffs’ attorneys in the MDL action.
Several scientific studies have linked paraquat to Parkinson’s, including a large study of U.S. farmers jointly overseen by multiple U.S. government agencies. Farmers use paraquat in the production of many crops, including corn, soy and cotton. The Agricultural Health Study (AHS) said it found that “exposure to agricultural pesticides may increase a person’s risk of developing Parkinson’s disease.” In 2011, AHS researchers reported that “participants who used paraquat or rotenone were twice as likely to develop Parkinson’s disease as people who didn’t use these chemicals.”
Lawyers for plaintiff George Isaak sought the judge’s permission to grant Isaak an expedited trial early in 2022 but were rejected.
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Get off the crazy train. I know, it is scary, it can hurt, and at the same time, as long as you feel the pain, you are alive. Take back your physical and intellectual autonomy and protect your children. These Young Global leaders who have become “Leaders” (gurus) do not want to do you any good.
Anxiety disorders not only have a negative impact on a person’s mental and physical health, his or her profession and love, they also impair the development of social life, since the ability of adult citizens to make decisions is severely restricted.
Following their “Open Letter to the Unvaccinated”, an expanding group of Canadian scholars has now written a letter addressing “the vaccinated”. The writers expose the divisiveness of vaccination status and denounce the resulting rift in society.
The deadline for New York City firefighters to get vaccinated was yesterday. Enforcement of the vaccine mandate is anticipated to begin Monday. Today, the New York Post is reporting that 26 FDNY firehouses are currently closed due to short staffing directly related to the vaccine mandate.
Public Citizen has now reviewed and published the secret contracts between Pfizer and Albania, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Dominican Republic, the European Commission, Peru, the U.S. and the U.K. These contracts reveal nations have handed over unprecedented power to Pfizer. In virtually all scenarios, Pfizer’s interests come first.
COVID-19 rates in children ages 5 to 11 are so low that there were ZERO cases of severe COVID-19 and ZERO cases of death from COVID in either the treatment (n= 1,518) or control group (n= 750).
A psychological, informational war is raging within the world’s medical community, a community dedicated to human well being, at least in theory. A central feature of the war is the undeniable fact that every aspect of mainstream print and electronic media has coalesced rigidly around a single official narrative regarding treatment of Covid-19.
The word “biodiversity” is explained to mean “genetic resources”. Genes are something to be exploited and used more efficiently than they are used in their natural state.
E-mails sent to millions of employees across Canada titled: ‘COMPULSORY VACCINATION POLICY AGAINST COVID-19’ emphasize that companies are promoting safety in the workplace in order to prevent the potential spread of the virus (today, while writing this text, 34,802 people or 0.09% of the total population are reported to be infected), which is why the decision to apply mandatory vaccination for all employees was enacted.
Lawyer Dipali Ojha of the Indian Bar Association details the efforts she and her colleagues are making to push India’s courts to hold corrupt covid task force officials accountable for multiple acts of malfeasance, to stop the rollout of a newly developed DNA vaccine for children approved under an emergency use authorization [EUA], and to investigate the doctor who issued the EUA.
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Anxiety disorders not only have a negative impact on a person’s mental and physical health, his or her profession and love, they also impair the development of social life, since the ability of adult citizens to make decisions is severely restricted. Fears of life, in the sense of persistent feelings of diffuse anxiety for which there is no real, concrete reason, go beyond the natural sense of anxiety and fear with which human beings are born. Since they are acquired only in the course of upbringing and socialisation, they can in principle be overcome. This specialist article in generally understandable language is also intended to provide the interested layperson with insight into the human soul.
Natural basic feeling of fear versus irrational fear of life
Every child is born with the feeling of fear and anxiety because the essence of life is afflicted with fear and anxiety. Without this fear, without this caution – the fear of losing life – the development of the human being and of life in general would not be possible. Not only the human being, but also the smallest being, which can only be observed under the microscope, paves its way and retreats in the face of danger.
While this basic feeling of human anxiety and fear sustains life, irrational fears of life that arise from an unobjective attitude on the part of parents and educators as well as the environment severely restrict human feeling, thinking and acting. Such fear of life can develop to the point of insanity. The balanced, healthy person who has been less damaged will also feel anxiety and fear, but he will not panic so easily, he will not lose his senses.
The first foundation for these fears of life is laid by the parents, the mother and the father. This is the world of the child. The way the mother and father deal with him, which cultural – and especially religious – values and feelings they pass on to the child, that ultimately results in the person’s attitude to life: the degree of courage and the degree of fearfulness. One has a lot of fear, the other less.
Before the child thinks, it already feels and experiences the attitude of the adults. Even if the mother is wholehearted when she gives birth to her child, she usually does not know how to deal with the child. She brings it up well, but with the portent of authority, force, coercion and rebuke. And this leads to the adult not being able to appreciate the other person. He has not experienced him in his feelings as a friend, but as an opponent. The interpersonal relationship has been disturbed: The authoritarian upbringing leads to fear and partiality towards the other person.
In addition, there is religious upbringing: as soon as the small child shows the first mental impulses and learns to speak, it is “taken into care” by society, i.e. by the parents and the church. It is made clear to him that his nature is not allowed to develop freely with regard to his feeling for nature and his world view. Then, in the 3rd year of life, God and the devil of the religion in question intervene and teach the child not to trust in itself, but to let itself be guided and controlled by supernatural powers. The child learns about the fear of demons and acquires fears that turn against man.
Eventually, the young person steps out into the world and experiences the same thing over and over again. In our culture, violence is always used. Even the teacher’s attitude at school is authoritarian – even when he does not hit. The child does not live in a friendly world. Everything is a continuation of the educational problem at home. Whether in school, in teaching, in the military or in the university: the idea of authority is cultivated everywhere.
The human reflex of absolute obedience as a result of unconscious fears
As already mentioned, most people react to these fears of life as if they were confused and paralysed. As a result, not only their very personal lives suffer, but also their actions in society. Very quickly they are ready to give up their own thinking, to go along with the opinion of supposed authorities and to obey unquestioningly. This happens largely unconsciously. The feeling of fear overtakes the person, he cannot help himself.
A tsunami of anxiety disorders in adults and young people
The measures taken by politicians for more than a year, ostensibly to protect the health of the population, have triggered a veritable tsunami of severe anxiety disorders and helplessness among young and old. The potential for destruction in terms of human health and human life in general is on an enormous scale worldwide. Everything that makes life worth living has been turned upside down. And this damage done will be irreparable. Among the measures taken are all the irregular political decisions. Since every citizen felt and still feels them first hand, there is no need to enumerate them again here.
Raphael Bonelli: “Explosive study! Do MEDIA & CORONA POLITICS have human lives on their conscience?”
Finally, a recent scientific study should be mentioned, to which the Austrian psychiatrist and psychotherapist Raphael M. Bonelli recently referred in a video entitled “Brisante Studie! Do MEDIA & CORONA POLITICS have human lives on their conscience?”. Bonelli concluded: fear kills! The main message of the study is: Fear leads to more severe courses of disease and even death in COVID-19. Anyone interested is recommended to watch the entire video.
Video (German)
The emotional overcoming of fear
How should a person overcome these fears of life? Depth-psychologically oriented psychotherapy has an answer to this question: the emotional overcoming of the partly unconscious fears is best achieved within the framework of psychotherapy in connection with rational knowledge and reading.
Of course, one can always appeal to the fellow citizen that he should give up the general fear of life, or that he need not be afraid of other people because they have nothing against him, or that he should make friends with people. But these appeals will have little success. To be able to give up fear, one needs professional help. The anxious person cannot give up this feeling until he has experiences with a person, for example with a psychotherapist, that are in contrast to his father, mother and teacher, that is, to his experiences in childhood. He has to experience that there is a person who gives him the feeling of trust.
The fears he experienced emotionally with his father and mother, before he could even think about them, he can slowly put aside with the therapist. He experiences that a person understands him. This opens his eyes and he begins to assess himself and the other person correctly and to understand that the parents did not know how to deal with the child. He reconciles with them.
He also begins to read and acquire the necessary knowledge about people and the world, which puts his fears in a realistic light. Psychotherapy is hard work on the character. But when he has changed his feeling, he is no longer afraid of the other person, lightning or even the devil and hell. The wrong opinions of grandparents or parents then fade away.
By means of psychology, one can acquire a new view of life and oneself, of people and the world. Of course, this makes high demands on the psychologist and therapist. The psychologist must be ready to know and explain why the person seeking help has these fears and how to overcome them. He must also know how to talk to the help-seeker. In a way, he has to “blow up” the help-seeker’s opinion that his parents and grandparents have given him and give him a new and realistic one.
Unfortunately, a large percentage of people are unable to confront their own opinion with a new one. However, it is only with a transformation of feelings and thoughts that we begin to see the world differently, abandon the irrational fears of life and stop obeying.
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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, NRhZ-Online.
Dr. Rudolf Hänsel is a graduate psychologist and educationalist. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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The deadline for New York City firefighters to get vaccinated was yesterday. Enforcement of the vaccine mandate is anticipated to begin Monday. Today, the New York Post is reporting that 26 FDNY firehouses are currently closed due to short staffing directly related to the vaccine mandate.
But the vaccine mandate is all about the public health, right?
New York – The FDNY shut down 26 firehouses across the Big Apple as of 7:30 a.m. Saturday because of staff shortages caused by the vaccination mandate, The Post has learned.
[…] “Twenty six companies out of service is an unconscionable number,” said Councilman Joe Borelli, a Staten Island Republican who chairs the committee on fire and emergency management. “The firefighters who are unable to work have all been tested within the week and are not Covid positive, and I doubt New Yorkers care about the vaccine status of the person applying defibrillators to their chest
[…] The FDNY’s vaccination rate was at 72 percent at the end of Friday. the city’s deadline for workers to get at least one shot of the Covid vaccine. The mandate is expected to be enforced beginning Monday. The NYPD’s number stood at 84 percent vaccinated. (read more)
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Public Citizen has reviewed and published the secret contracts between Pfizer and Albania, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Dominican Republic, the European Commission, Peru, the U.S. and the U.K. The contracts reveal nations have handed over unprecedented power to Pfizer, and in virtually all scenarios, Pfizer’s interests come first
Some countries, including Brazil, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic and Peru, have put up sovereign assets as collateral for vaccine injury lawsuits, including bank reserves, military bases and embassy buildings
The contracts not only secure Pfizer’s intellectual property rights, but should Pfizer be found guilty of stealing the intellectual property rights of others, some of the contracts shift the responsibility onto the government purchasers. Pfizer can steal the intellectual property of others without consequence in at least four countries
The contracts also give Pfizer the right to muzzle government. In Brazil, government officials are prohibited from making “any public announcement concerning the existence, subject matter or terms of [the] Agreement” without the written consent of the company. Similar nondisclosure provisions are included in the contracts with the European Commission and the U.S. government. The only difference is that the nondisclosure rules apply to both parties
October 26, 2021, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration voted to extend the emergency use of Pfizer’s COVID jab for children aged 5 through 11. Experts warn this is reckless and unnecessary, and will do far more harm than good, as COVID-19 poses no risk to young children
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In late February 2021, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported1 that Pfizer was demanding countries put up sovereign assets as collateral for expected vaccine injury lawsuits resulting from its COVID-19 inoculation. While at least two countries, Argentina and Brazil, initially rejected the demands, calling them abusive, many others accepted Pfizer’s terms from the start.
Public Citizen has now reviewed and published the secret contracts2,3 between Pfizer and Albania, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Dominican Republic, the European Commission, Peru, the U.S. and the U.K. These contracts reveal nations have handed over unprecedented power to Pfizer. In virtually all scenarios, Pfizer’s interests come first.
Pfizer Is Calling the Shots
Public Citizen points out six ways in which nations are allowing Pfizer to call the shots. For example, Albania, Brazil and Colombia have handed over unilateral authority to the company for the delivery schedule and other key decisions. As reported by Public Citizen:4
“As a condition to entering into the agreement, the Colombian government is required to ‘demonstrate, in a manner satisfactory to Suppliers, that Suppliers and their affiliates will have adequate protection, as determined in Suppliers’ sole discretion’ … from liability claims.
Colombia is required to certify to Pfizer the value of the contingent obligations (i.e., potential future liability), and to start appropriating funds to cover the contingent obligations, according to a contribution program.”
Pfizer also maintains tight control over vaccine supplies, and dictates who can buy their vaccine, when, and who can give and receive vaccine donations. If there are shortages, Pfizer decides which countries get priority.
Bypassing Pfizer can be costly. For example, if Brazil were to accept vaccine donations from another country without Pfizer’s approval, the company can terminate the contract and force Brazil to pay the full prize for all remaining contracted doses. Meanwhile, Pfizer incurs no penalty if its delivery is late, even if it’s so late that the shots are no longer needed.
Some countries, including Brazil, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic and Peru, also ended up agreeing to Pfizer’s demand to put up sovereign assets as collateral for vaccine injury lawsuits, including bank reserves, military bases and embassy buildings.
In short, theses governments are guaranteeing Pfizer will be compensated for any expenses resulting from injury lawsuits against it, so the company won’t lose a dime if its COVID shot injures people — even if those injuries are the result of negligent company practices, fraud or malice!
At the same time, government purchasers must acknowledge that the effectiveness and safety of the shots are completely unknown. This is the ultimate corporate maleficence, using their leverage to force the kill shot down these countries’ throats and avoiding any personal responsibility for damages.
Secret Arbitration
The contracts also dictate how contractual disputes will be settled. As reported by Public Citizen:5
“What happens if the United Kingdom cannot resolve a contractual dispute with Pfizer? A secret panel of three private arbitrators — not a U.K court — is empowered under the contract to make the final decision. The arbitration is conducted under the Rules of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC). Both parties are required to keep everything secret:
‘The Parties agree to keep confidential the existence of the arbitration, the arbitral proceedings, the submissions made by the Parties and the decisions made by the arbitral tribunal, including its awards, except as required by Law and to the extent not already in the public domain.’
The Albania draft contract and Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, and Peru agreements require the governments to go further, with contractual disputes subject to ICC arbitration applying New York law. While ICC arbitration involving states is not uncommon, disputes involving high-income countries and/or pharmaceuticals appear to be relatively rare …
Private arbitration reflects an imbalance of power. It allows pharmaceutical corporations like Pfizer to bypass domestic legal processes. This consolidates corporate power and undermines the rule of law.”
Pfizer Secured Intellectual Property Rights
Amazingly, the contracts not only secure Pfizer’s intellectual property rights, but should Pfizer be found guilty of stealing the intellectual property rights of others, some of the contracts shift the responsibility away from Pfizer onto the government purchasers! What this means is that Pfizer can steal the intellectual property of others without consequence in at least four countries.
“For example, if another vaccine maker sued Pfizer for patent infringement in Colombia, the contract requires the Colombian government to foot the bill,” Public Citizen writes.6 “Pfizer also explicitly says that it does not guarantee that its product does not violate third-party IP, or that it needs additional licenses.
Pfizer takes no responsibility in these contracts for its potential infringement of intellectual property. In a sense, Pfizer has secured an IP waiver for itself. But internationally, Pfizer is fighting similar efforts to waive IP barriers for all manufacturers.”
Pfizer Given Right to Silence Government
Perhaps most egregious of all, some of the contracts give Pfizer the right to muzzle government. In Brazil, government officials are prohibited from making “any public announcement concerning the existence, subject matter or terms of [the] Agreement” without the written consent of the company.
The gag order also includes commenting on the government’s relationship with Pfizer in general. Similar nondisclosure provisions are included in the contracts with the European Commission and the U.S. government. The only difference, Public Citizen notes, is that the nondisclosure rules apply to both parties.
Pfizer Can Prevent Use of Other Remedies
Equally shocking, though, is that countries are forced to follow through on their vaccine orders even if other drugs or treatments emerge that can prevent, treat or cure COVID-19.7 Is it any wonder, then, that governments around the world have suppressed the use of drugs like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin?
If these drugs were allowed to be used and could be proven to work, the COVID injections would be completely unnecessary, yet governments are on the hook for hundreds of millions of doses. While COVID-19 vaccines are “free” to receive in the U.S., they’re being paid for by taxpayer dollars at a rate of $19.50 per dose. In Albania, the cost of each dose is $12, and in the EU, $14.70.
In the case of the price disparity between the U.S. and the EU, Pfizer is said to have given a price break to the EU because it financially supported the development of their COVID-19 vaccine.
As noted Public Citizen, Pfizer is being allowed to profit from this self-inflicted global disaster in unprecedented ways. In many instances, a nation’s laws will not apply to Pfizer.
These secret contracts grant Pfizer total control over its product and ensures full payment, regardless of whether the shots are needed or usable, while simultaneously eliminating all liability. In short, Pfizer wins, no matter what the outcome of the vaccination campaign might be.
At the same time, Pfizer is also controlling media through its advertising dollars. As you’ve probably realized by now, media companies in most instances will not report on anything that might jeopardize the profits of its advertisers.
As illustrated in the short video above, it couldn’t be more obvious that Pfizer is bankrolling the media, which in turn will refuse to bite the hand that feeds it. You can see the wide spectrum of media programming being sponsored by Pfizer, including “Nightline,” “Making a Difference,” “CNN Tonight,” “Early Start,” “Erin Burnett Out Front,” “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” “CBS Sports,” “Meet the Press,” “CBS This Morning” and “60 Minutes.”
The terms of these contracts are all the more disturbing when you consider how dangerous the Pfizer shot is turning out to be. No wonder the company refused to accept any liability.
As shown in the video above, Episode 3 in “The False Narrative Takedown Series”8 by Steve Kirsch, Pfizer’s own Phase 3 six-month trial9 showed the shots increased all-cause mortality. More people actually died in the treatment group than in the placebo group.
According to Pfizer’s own data, one COVID death per 20,000 fully vaccinated individuals is prevented. That means 10,000 lives are saved if 200 million are fully vaccinated.
But how many lives are lost from the shots? This is the other side of the equation that simply demands to be analyzed before any governmental authority can make a decision as to whether the mass vaccination campaign is of benefit or not.
Here, we find that Pfizer’s data10 show the shots are actually killing more than they save. To look at this information yourself, click on “Supplementary Material” on the right-hand side of the paper, then, beside Supplementary Appendix, click on supplements/261159 and scroll down to page 12, Table S4.
In the vaccine group, 15 died; in the placebo group 14 died. Two people died from COVID-19 in the placebo group, while only one died from COVID pneumonia in the vaccine group. That’s how you get a net false positive impact — one life is spared from COVID. However, the all-cause mortality was actually higher in the vaccine group (15, compared to 14).
So, while the shots saved one person from dying from COVID, they also killed one extra person. So, the net effect is nil. There’s no mortality benefit at all. Other investigations using different data strongly suggest the net effect is profoundly negative, and the shots are doing FAR more harm than good.
We Face Looming Vaccine-Induced Public Health Catastrophe
For this, Kirsch cites a paper11 by Dr. Bart Classen, published in the August 2021 issue of the journal Trends in Internal Medicine. Classen points out that Pfizer, Moderna and Janssen are all using a “dangerously misleading” clinical trial design. The problem is that they’re all using a surrogate endpoint for health, namely “severe infections with COVID-19.”
Disease specific primary endpoints are no longer used in many fields of medicine, for the fact that it can hide problems. If a person dies from the treatment or is severely injured by it, even if the treatment helped block the progression of the disease they’re being treated for, the end result is still a negative one.
For this reason, the appropriate endpoint that should be used is all-cause mortality and morbidity. When Classen reexamined the clinical trial data from all three manufacturers using all-cause severe morbidity as the endpoint, a disturbing picture emerged.
As explained by Classen in his paper, “US COVID-19 Vaccines Proven to Cause More Harm than Good Based on Pivotal Clinical Trial Data Analyzed Using the Proper Scientific Endpoint, ‘All Cause Severe Morbidity'”:12
“‘All-cause severe morbidity’ in the treatment group and control group was calculated by adding all severe events reported in the clinical trials. Severe events included both severe infections with COVID-19 and all other severe adverse events in the treatment arm and control arm respectively.
This analysis gives reduction in severe COVID-19 infections the same weight as adverse events of equivalent severity. Results prove that none of the vaccines provide a health benefit and all pivotal trials show a statistically significant increase in ‘all-cause severe morbidity’ in the vaccinated group compared to the placebo group.
The Moderna immunized group suffered 3,042 more severe events than the control group. The Pfizer data was grossly incomplete but data provided showed the vaccination group suffered 90 more severe events than the control group, when only including ‘unsolicited’ adverse events.
The Janssen immunized group suffered 264 more severe events than the control group. These findings contrast the manufacturers’ inappropriate surrogate endpoints:
Janssen claims that their vaccine prevents 6 cases of severe COVID-19 requiring medical attention out of 19,630 immunized; Pfizer claims their vaccine prevents 8 cases of severe COVID-19 out of 21,720 immunized; Moderna claims its vaccine prevents 30 cases of severe COVID-19 out of 15,210 immunized.
Based on this data it is all but a certainty that mass COVID-19 immunization is hurting the health of the population in general. Scientific principles dictate that the mass immunization with COVID-19 vaccines must be halted immediately because we face a looming vaccine induced public health catastrophe.”
To make the above numbers more clear and obvious, here are the prevention stats in percentages:
Pfizer 0.00036%
Moderna 0.00125%
Janssen 0.00030%
CDC Claims COVID Shots Lower All-Cause Mortality
Despite all of that, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now claims Americans “vaccinated” against COVID-19 have lower all-cause mortality rates.13 As reported by Forbes:14
“Partially and fully vaccinated people died from non-coronavirus causes at a lower rate than their unvaccinated peers, according to the study,15 which looked at millions of patients at seven U.S. health organizations from December to July.
All three vaccines approved by U.S. regulators were tied to lower non-COVID death rates, though the difference in mortality among people who took Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine was slightly smaller than for recipients of Pfizer or Moderna’s vaccines …
This result suggests the vaccines don’t increase a patient’s risk of death, which ‘reinforces the safety profile of currently approved COVID-19 vaccines,’ the study said.”
FDA Approves Jab for Young Children
FDA Voting Member:
"We're never gonna learn about how safe the vaccine is until we start giving it."
October 26, 2021, the FDA unanimously voted to grant emergency use approval of the COVID shots for children between the ages of 5 and 11.16 This despite acknowledging they have no idea what the long-term risk to children might be. As noted by one voting member, “We’re never going to learn about how safe the vaccine is until we start giving it.”17
All we have at present is two Pfizer trials, one in which 5- to 11-year-olds were followed for two months and another with just six weeks of follow-up. Both were too small to detect potential risks such as myocarditis. That won’t be studied until AFTER the shot is authorized for children. As reported by The Defender:18
“Experts raised concerns over the lack of safety and efficacy data presented by Pfizer for use of its COVID vaccine in younger children, and they pointed to increasing safety signals based on reports to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). They also questioned the need to vaccinate children — whose risk of dying from COVID is “almost nil” — at all.
According to Dr. Meryl Nass, member of the Children’s Health Defense Scientific Advisory Panel, Pfizer once again did not use all of the children who participated in the trial in their safety study.
‘Three thousand children received Pfizer’s COVID vaccine, but only 750 children were selectively included in the company’s safety analysis,’ Nass said.
‘Studies in the 5-11 age group are essentially the same as the 12-15 group — in other words, equally brief and unsatisfying, with inadequate safety data and efficacy data, with no strong support for why this type of immuno-bridging analysis is sufficient … All serious adverse events were considered unrelated to the vaccine’ …
Dr. Jessica Rose, viral immunologist and biologist, told the panel EUA of biological agents requires the existence of an emergency and the nonexistence of alternate treatment. ‘There is no emergency and COVID-19 is exceedingly treatable,’ Rose said.
In a peer-reviewed study19 co-authored by Rose, myocarditis rates were significantly higher in people 13 to 23 years old within eight weeks of the COVID vaccine rollout. In 12- to15-year-olds, Rose said, reported cases of myocarditis were 19 times higher than background rates …
Rose said tens of thousands of reports have been submitted to VAERS for children ages 0 to 18. Rose explained: ‘In this age group, 60 children have died — 23 of them were less than 2 years old. It is disturbing to note that ‘product administered to patient of inappropriate age’ was filed 5,510 times in this age group. Two children were inappropriately injected, presumably by a trained medical professional, and subsequently died.'”
During the meeting, Dr. Cody Meissner noted we don’t know whether the shot is safe for this age group, and the risk of COVID is extremely low. If the shot is authorized, mandates will likely follow, which would be “bad.”
Brownstone Institute is also objecting to the authorization. In an October 20, 2021, article,20 Paul Elias Alexander, Ph.D., a former assistant professor of evidence-based medicine and research methods, called the plan to vaccinate young children “absolutely reckless” and “dangerous based on lack of safety data and poor research methodology.”
Meanwhile, data show not a single child has died from COVID-19 who did not have a serious underlying health condition. Alexander reviews a lot of that data in his article.
Staggering Conflicts of Interest
When you look at the roster of the FDA’s committee members21 who reviewed and voted to authorize the Pfizer shot for children as young as 5, the unanimous “yes” vote becomes less of a mystery. As reported by National File,22 they have staggering conflicts of interest. Members include:
Gregg Sylvester — A former vice president of Pfizer Vaccines
Gregg Sylvester — A former vice president of Pfizer Vaccines
Archana Chatterjee — A recent Pfizer research grant recipient
Myron Levine — Mentor to Raphael Simon, senior director of vaccine research and development at Pfizer
James Hidreth — President of Meharry Medical College, which administers Pfizer vaccines
Geeta Swamy — Chair of the Independent Data Monitoring Committee for the Pfizer Group B Streptococcus Vaccine Program
Steven Pergam — Proudly photographed taking a Pfizer vaccine
Several people who are already on the record supporting coronavirus vaccines for children, including Ofer Levy, Jay Portnoy and Melinda Wharton
In addition to that, former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb is currently on Pfizer’s board of directors.
FDA Buries Data on Seriously Injured Children
With these shots now being pushed on young children, it’s more imperative than ever to understand how data are being massaged and manipulated to support the ongoing lunacy. Of particular concern is evidence that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is burying data on children who were seriously injured in the vaccine trials. As reported by Aaron Siri on Substack:23
“Pfizer’s clinical trial for children aged 12-15 included only 1,131 children who were vaccinated and at least one of those children suffered a devastating, life-altering injury which, despite incontrovertible proof and the cries of both the victim and her parents, has not been appropriately acknowledged by Pfizer or the FDA.
Putting aside that one serious injury in a small trial should alone raise blaring alarm bells, one must ask: what other serious adverse events have been hidden and ignored by regulators?”
Siri tells the story of 12-year-old Maddie de Garay, who along with her two brothers were enrolled by her parents in Pfizer’s clinical trial. That decision has changed the lives of the entire family, possibly forever. Within 24 hours of her second dose, Maddie suffered crippling pain and systemic injuries.
Maddie is now wheelchair-bound and requires a feeding tube. Pfizer’s principal investigator initially claimed Maddie’s injuries were unrelated to the shot and treated her as a mental patient. Eventually, her injury was listed as “functional abdominal pain” in Pfizer’s report to the FDA.
“For a virus that rarely harms children, the need to assure safety of the Covid-19 vaccine is high. A study with only 1,131 children is underpowered. It will not pick up anything but the most common adverse events.
If what Maddie suffered will occur in 1/1,000 children, that would result in 75,000 children in this country suffering this serious injury. If it happens 1/10,000 children, that is 7,500 suffering this serious injury.
It could be that the cure is worse than the disease. But that will only be known if there is a properly powered (a.k.a., sized) clinical trial with children,” Siri writes, adding that:
“International scientists have declared that ‘inadequately powered studies should themselves be considered a breach of ethical standards.’24 Without a clinical trial of sufficient size that reviews all potential adverse events, such as that experienced by Maddie, for a sufficient duration, this potentially catastrophic result will not be identified prior to authorization or licensure …
The real lesson is not that pharmaceutical companies, or the FDA should act better or do a better job. That just won’t always be the case. The real lesson is that civil and individual rights should never be contingent upon a medical procedure. Never.
Preserving those rights to choose whether to get a medical product, without any government coercion, is the final and ultimate safeguard.
Removing that right results in dangerous authoritarianism because just as the FDA will not admit to Maddie’s serious injury after having promoted this vaccine, politicians that mandate the vaccine will not want to later admit a mistake by repealing the mandate.”
FDA Sued to Access COVID Jab Trial Data
We’re now in a position where it’s near-impossible for many to refuse the COVID jab, and if injured, they cannot sue anyone for damages. Adding insult to injury, we don’t even have access to all the data governments are supposedly relying on to mandate these hazardous products.
To address this last point, an organization called Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency (PHMPT) is now suing25 the FDA after the agency refused to release the data on which it based its decision to approve Comirnaty.26
The FDA denied the PHMPT request for expedited processing of its Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on the basis that no “imminent threat to the life or physical safety of an individual” existed. Per the complaint:27
“… in an effort to ensure that the FDA acts in furtherance of its commitment to transparency, PHMPT seeks to obtain the data and information relied upon by the FDA to license the Pfizer Vaccine.
The importance of releasing to the public this information is also recognized under federal law which provides that: ‘After a license has been issued, the following data and information in the biological product file are immediately available for public disclosure unless extraordinary circumstances are shown: (1) All safety and effectiveness data and information. (2) A protocol for a test or study …'”
‘Just Say No’ to the COVID Shot
While U.S. authorities are doing their best to hide incriminating data and manipulating the rest to show some sort of benefit, common sense, medical facts and available data all point in the opposite direction. It’s crystal clear to me that children do not need the COVID shot, as their risk of serious COVID-19 infection and death is virtually nonexistent.
On the other hand, children are quite likely to be seriously injured by these injections. The reason you’re not getting the truth from the media is explained by Dr. Peter McCullough in the video above. In short, it’s a planned propaganda campaign — “the promotion of false information by the people in charge.”
According to McCullough, anyone under the age of 50 has a less than 1% chance of a bad outcome if they come down with COVID-19. “Why would you take the vaccine?” he asks. “My advice,” he says, “is just say no to this [shot], especially young people who are not at risk.”
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The European Union database of suspected drug reaction reports is EudraVigilance, and they are now reporting 28,103 fatalities, and 2,637,525 injuries, following COVID-19 injections.
A Health Impact News subscriber from Europe reminded us that this database maintained at EudraVigilance is only for countries in Europe who are part of the European Union (EU), which comprises 27 countries.
The total number of countries in Europe is much higher, almost twice as many, numbering around 50. (There are some differences of opinion as to which countries are technically part of Europe.)
So as high as these numbers are, they do NOT reflect all of Europe. The actual number in Europe who are reported dead or injured following COVID-19 shots would be much higher than what we are reporting here.
The EudraVigilance database reports that through October 19, 2021 there are 28,103 deaths and 2,637,525 injuries reported following injections of four experimental COVID-19 shots:
From the total of injuries recorded, almost half of them (1,249,109) are serious injuries.
“Seriousness provides information on the suspected undesirable effect; it can be classified as ‘serious’ if it corresponds to a medical occurrence that results in death, is life-threatening, requires inpatient hospitalisation, results in another medically important condition, or prolongation of existing hospitalisation, results in persistent or significant disability or incapacity, or is a congenital anomaly/birth defect.”
A Health Impact News subscriber in Europe ran the reports for each of the four COVID-19 shots we are including here. It is a lot of work to tabulate each reaction with injuries and fatalities, since there is no place on the EudraVigilance system we have found that tabulates all the results.
Since we have started publishing this, others from Europe have also calculated the numbers and confirmed the totals.*
Here is the summary data through October 19, 2021.
Total reactions for the mRNA vaccine Tozinameran (code BNT162b2, Comirnaty) from BioNTech/ Pfizer: 13,271 deaths and 1,168,872 injuries to 19/10/2021
31,537 Blood and lymphatic system disorders incl. 183 deaths
33,677 Cardiac disorders incl. 1,958 deaths
312 Congenital, familial and genetic disorders incl. 25 deaths
16,024 Ear and labyrinth disorders incl. 10 deaths
273,678 General disorders and administration site conditions incl. 1,376 deaths
908 Hepatobiliary disorders incl. 54 deaths
4,241 Immune system disorders incl. 26 deaths
29,229 Infections and infestations incl. 367 deaths
11,837 Injury poisoning and procedural complications incl. 166 deaths
22,810 Investigations incl. 137 deaths
12,087 Metabolism and nutrition disorders incl. 88 deaths
155,324 Musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders incl. 85 deaths
570 Neoplasms benign malignant and unspecified (incl cysts and polyps) incl. 20 deaths
215,104 Nervous system disorders incl. 900 deaths
490 Pregnancy puerperium and perinatal conditions incl. 11 deaths
177 Product issues incl. 1 death
19,380 Psychiatric disorders incl. 57 deaths
3,911 Renal and urinary disorders incl. 55 deaths
14,363 Reproductive system and breast disorders incl. 2 deaths
36,720 Respiratory thoracic and mediastinal disorders incl. 691 deaths
47,763 Skin and subcutaneous tissue disorders incl. 43 deaths
1,391 Social circumstances incl. 6 deaths
1,273 Surgical and medical procedures incl. 24 deaths
25,752 Vascular disorders incl. 423 deaths
Total reactions for the COVID-19 vaccine JANSSEN (AD26.COV2.S) from Johnson & Johnson: 1,522 deaths and 87,883 injuries to 19/10/2021
824 Blood and lymphatic system disorders incl. 35 deaths
1,512 Cardiac disorders incl. 141 deaths
31 Congenital, familial and genetic disorders
865 Ear and labyrinth disorders incl. 1 death
54 Endocrine disorders incl. 1 death
1,188 Eye disorders incl. 6 deaths
7,668 Gastrointestinal disorders incl. 66 deaths
22,981 General disorders and administration site conditions incl. 408 deaths
108 Hepatobiliary disorders incl. 9 deaths
364 Immune system disorders incl. 7 deaths
2,933 Infections and infestations incl. 107 deaths
816 Injury, poisoning and procedural complications incl. 16 deaths
4,359 Investigations incl. 90 deaths
531 Metabolism and nutrition disorders incl. 36 deaths
13,245 Musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders incl. 34 deaths
46 Neoplasms benign, malignant and unspecified (incl cysts and polyps) incl. 2 deaths
17,645 Nervous system disorders incl. 165 deaths
33 Pregnancy, puerperium and perinatal conditions incl. 1 death
22 Product issues
1,208 Psychiatric disorders incl. 13 deaths
345 Renal and urinary disorders incl. 17 deaths
1,544 Reproductive system and breast disorders incl. 6 deaths
3,133 Respiratory, thoracic and mediastinal disorders incl. 176 deaths
2,708 Skin and subcutaneous tissue disorders incl. 6 deaths
276 Social circumstances incl. 4 deaths
630 Surgical and medical procedures incl. 46 deaths
2,814 Vascular disorders incl. 129 deaths
*These totals are estimates based on reports submitted to EudraVigilance. Totals may be much higher based on percentage of adverse reactions that are reported. Some of these reports may also be reported to the individual country’s adverse reaction databases, such as the U.S. VAERS database and the UK Yellow Card system. The fatalities are grouped by symptoms, and some fatalities may have resulted from multiple symptoms.
European Members of Parliament Speak Out Against Mandatory COVID-19 Vaccines
Several members of the European Parliament spoke out in Brussels this past week against mandatory COVID-19 vaccines. You can read the full story and watch the full video here.
We have extracted German Member of European Parliament Christine Anderson’s comments in the video below. This is on our Rumble and Bitchute video channels.
I will not be reduced to a mere guinea pig by getting vaccinated with an experimental drug, and I will most assuredly not get vaccinated because my government tells me to and promises, in return, I will be granted freedom.
Let’s be clear about one thing: No one grants me freedom for I am a free person.
Those Who Have Paid the Price for Obeying Mandatory COVID-19 Shots
Here are a few stories of those who gave in to COVID-19 “vaccine” mandates, and paid a horrible price, including many who have died. Click here to read.
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Comments Off on 28,103 Deaths 2,637,525 Injuries Following COVID Shots in European Database of Adverse Reactions – European Members of Parliament Speak Out
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Where to even begin with the FDA’s preposterous risk-benefit analysis of Pfizer’s mRNA COVID-19 “vaccine” in children ages 5 to 11?
Let’s start with my bona fides. I have a year of undergraduate statistics at one of the best liberal arts colleges in America (Swarthmore). I have a year of graduate statistics at the masters program rated #1 for policy analysis (UC Berkeley). And I have a Ph.D. in political economy from one of the top universities in the world (University of Sydney). My research focus is on corruption in the pharmaceutical industry so I’ve read scientific studies in connection with vaccines nearly every day for 5 years. Earlier in my career I worked professionally tearing apart shoddy cost-benefit analyses prepared by corporations that were trying to get tax breaks, contracts, and other concessions from local government. Suffice it to say I’ve thought a lot about risk-benefit analysis and I’m better equipped than most to read one of these documents.
The FDA’s risk-benefit analysis in connection with Pfizer’s Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) application to inject children ages 5 to 11 with their COVID-19 vaccine is one of the shoddiest documents I’ve ever seen.
Let’s take it from the top:
COVID-19 rates in children ages 5 to 11 are so low that there were ZERO cases of severe COVID-19 and ZERO cases of death from COVID in either the treatment (n= 1,518) or control group (n= 750). So any claims you see in the press about the Pfizer vaccine being “90% effective” in children are meaningless because they are referring to mild cases from which children usually recover quickly (and then have robust broad spectrum immunity). So there is literally no emergency in this population for which one could apply for Emergency Use Authorization. Pfizer’s application should be dead on arrival if the FDA actually followed the science and their own rules. We will return to this topic below.
Pfizer’s clinical trial in kids was intentionally undersized to hide harms. This is a well known trick of the pharmaceutical industry. The FDA even called them out on it earlier this summer and asked Pfizer to expand the trial and Pfizer just ignored them because they can. (Pfizer fudged it by importing data from a different study but this other study only monitored adverse outcomes for 17 days so if anything the new data polluted rather than clarified outcomes). To put it simply, if the rate of particular adverse outcome in kids as a result of this shot is 1 in 5,000 and the trial only enrolls 1,518 in the treatment group then one is unlikely to spot this particular harm in the clinical trial. Voilà “Safe & Effective(TM)”.
Pfizer only enrolled “participants 5-11 years of age without evidence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection.” Does the Pfizer mRNA shot wipe out natural immunity and leave one worse-off than doing nothing as shown in this data from the British government? Pfizer has no idea because children with prior SARS-CoV-2 infection were excluded from this trial. This was by design. Toxic polluters have learned to not ask questions that they do not want the answers to, lest they wind up staring at their own smoking gun in a future court case.
“What the British are saying is they are now finding the vaccine interferes with your body’s innate ability after infection to produce antibodies against not just the spike protein but other pieces of the virus. Specifically, vaccinated people don’t seem to be producing antibodies to the nucleocapsid protein, the shell of the virus, which are a crucial part of the response in unvaccinated people. This means vaccinated people will be far more vulnerable to mutations in the spike protein EVEN AFTER THEY HAVE BEEN INFECTED AND RECOVERED ONCE (or more than once, probably). It also means the virus is likely to select for mutations that go in exactly that direction because those will essentially give it an enormous vulnerable population to infect. And it probably is still more evidence the vaccines may interfere with the development of robust long-term immunity post-infection.”
Did Pfizer LOSE CONTACT with 4.9% of their clinical trial participants? The FDA risk-benefit document states: “Among Cohort 1 participants, 95.1% had safety follow-up ≥2 months after Dose 2 at the time of the September 6, 2021 data cutoff.” So what happened with those 4.9% who did not have safety follow-up 2 months after Dose 2? Were they in the treatment or control group? We have no idea because Pfizer isn’t saying. Given the small size of the trial, failing to follow up with 4.9% of the participants potentially skews the results.
The follow up period was intentionally too short. This is another well-know trick of the pharmaceutical industry designed to hide harms. Cohort 1 appears to have been followed for 2 months, cohort 2 was only monitored for adverse events for 17 days. Many harms from vaccines including cancer and autoimmune disorders take much longer to show up. As the old saying goes, “you can have it quick or you can have it done right, but you cannot have both.” Pfizer chose quick.
The risk-benefit model created by the FDA only looks at one known harm from the Pfizer mRNA shot — myocarditis. But we know that the real world harms from the Pfizer mRNA shot go well beyond myocarditis and include anaphylaxis, Bell’s Palsy, heart attack, thrombocytopenia/ low platelet, permanent disability, shingles, and Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS) to name a few. Cancer, diabetes, endocrine disruption, and autoimmune disorders may show up later. But the FDA does not care about any of that because they have a vaccine to sell so they just ignore all of those factors in their model.
Pfizer intentionally wipes out the control group as soon as they can by vaccinating all of the kids who initially got the placebo. They claim that they are doing this for “ethical reasons”. But everyone knows that Pfizer’s true aim is to wipe out any comparison group so that there can be no long term safety studies. Wiping out the control group is a criminal act and yet Pfizer, Moderna, J&J, and AZ do this as standard practice with the blessing of the FDA/CDC.
Given all of the above, how on earth did the FDA claim any benefits at all from this shot? You should probably sit down for this part because it’s a doozy! Here’s the key sentence:
Vaccine effectiveness was inferred by immunobridging SARS-CoV-2 50% neutralizing antibody titers (NT50, SARS-CoV-2 mNG microneutralization assay).
Wait, what!? I’ll explain. There were ZERO cases of severe COVID-19 in the clinical trial of children ages 5 to 11. So Pfizer and the FDA just ignored all of the actual health outcomes (they had to, there is no emergency, so the application is moot). INSTEAD Pfizer switched to looking at antibodies in the blood. In general, antibodies are a poor predictor of immunity. And the antibodies in the blood of these 5 to 11 year old children tell us nothing because again, there were zero cases of severe COVID-19 in this study (none in the treatment group, none in the control group). So Pfizer had to get creative! What they came up with is “immuno-bridging”. Pfizer looked at the level of antibodies in the bloodwork of another study, this one involving people 16 to 25 years old, figured out the level of antibodies that seems to be protective in thatpopulation, then figured out how many kids ages 5 to 11 had similar levels of antibodies in their blood, and then came up with a number for how many cases, hospitalizations, ICU admissions, and deaths would be prevented by this shot in the 5 to 11 population in the future, based on the antibody levels and health outcomes from the 16 to 25 year old population. If your head hurts from that tortured logic, it should, because such chicanery is unprecedented in a risk-benefit analysis.
So when the FDA uses this tortured logic at the beginning of their briefing document, all of the calculations that stem from this will be flat out wrong. Not just wrong but preposterous and criminally wrong.
The whole ballgame comes down to Table 14 on page 34 of the FDA’s risk-benefit document. And there the red flags come fast and furious.
The FDA model only assesses the benefits of vaccine protection in a 6-month period after completion of two doses. Furthermore it assumes constant vaccine efficacy during that time period. This is problematic on several counts.
First, reducing mild cases in children is not a desired clinical outcome. As Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche points out, mass vaccination turns kids into shedders of more infectious variants.
“Under no circumstances should young and healthy people be vaccinated as it will only erode their protective innate immunity towards Coronaviruses (CoV) and other respiratory viruses. Their innate immunity normally/ naturally largely protects them and provides a kind of herd immunity in that it dilutes infectious CoV pressure at the level of the population, whereas mass vaccination turns them into shedders of more infectious variants. Children/ youngsters who get the disease mostly develop mild to moderate disease and as a result continue to contribute to herd immunity by developing broad and long-lived immunity. If you are vaccinated and get the disease, you may develop life-long immunity too but why would you take the risk of getting vaccinated, especially when you’re young and healthy? Firstly, there is the risk of potential side effects; secondarily, there is the ever increasing risk that your vaccinal antibodies will no longer be functional while still binding to the virus, thereby increasing the likelihood of ADE or even severe disease….”
Second, we know that vaccine efficacy in the month after the first dose is negative because it suppresses the immune system and it begins to wane after 4 months so all of the FDA’s estimates of vaccine efficacy are inflated.
Third, the harms of myocarditis from these shots will likely unfold over the course of years. Robert Malone, the inventor of mRNA technology notes that the FDA is admitting that children will be injected twice a year forever (hence the six month time frame in the FDA risk-benefit model). But the risks of “adverse events such as cardiomyopathy will be cumulative.” So any model that only looks at a six month time frame is hiding the true adverse event rate.
The FDA/Pfizer play fast and loose with their estimates of myocarditis. First they estimate “excess” (read: caused by the shot) myocarditis using data from the private “Optum health claim database” instead of the public VAERS system (p. 32). So it’s impossible for the public to verify their claims. Then, when it comes to estimating how many children with vaccine-induced myocarditis will be hospitalized and admitted to the ICU they use the Vaccine Safety Datalink (see page 33). Why switch to a different database for those estimates? Finally, there is no explanation for how they calculated “excess” myocarditis deaths, so they just put 0. Red flag, red flag, red flag.
The FDA estimates that there will be 106 extra myocarditis cases per 1 million double-jabbed children 5-11. There are 28,384,878 children ages 5 to 11 in the U.S. The Biden administration wants to inject Pfizer mRNA shots into all of them and has already purchased enough doses to do just that (even though only 1/3rd of parents want to jab their kids with this shot). So (if the Biden administration has its way) 106 excess myocarditis cases per 1 million x 28.38 million people would be 3,009 excess myocarditis cases post-vaccination if the Pfizer vaccine is approved.
And over the course of several years many of those children will die. Dr. Anthony Hinton (“Consultant Surgeon with 30 years experience in the NHS”) points out that myocarditis has a 20% fatality rate after 2 years and a 50% fatality rate after 5 years.
Viral myocarditis results in 2 in 10 people dead after 2 years and 5 in 10 after 5 years. It’s not mild. It’s dead heart muscle. https://t.co/ixRmk48rja
So the FDA has it exactly backwards — they want to prevent mild COVID in children which reduces herd immunity and they just flat out lie about the harms from myocarditis.
I’ve taken the liberty to correct the FDA’s Table 14 with actual real world data and extended it over 5 years. It looks like this:
A study by Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimated that VAERS only captured 1% of actual vaccine injuries. Steve Kirsch has done elaborate modeling that puts the Under-Reporting Factor of COVID-19 vaccine deaths at 41 (so multiply the above numbers by 41). And myocarditis is just one of a multitude of possible harms from COVID-19 vaccines. Dr. Jessica Rose recently calculated an Under-Reporting Factor of 31 for all severe adverse events following vaccination.
Conclusion
The Pfizer vaccine fails any honest risk-benefit assessment in connection with its use in children ages 5 to 11. The FDA’s risk-benefit analysis of Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine in children ages 5 to 11 is shoddy. It used tortured logic (that would be rejected by any proper academic journal) in order to reach a predetermined result that is not based in science. The FDA briefing document is a work of fiction and it must be withdrawn immediately. If the FDA continues with this grotesque charade it will cause irreparable harms to children and the FDA leadership will one day be prosecuted for crimes against humanity.
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Vaccines for 5-11 year olds are already being shipped ahead of the pending approval from Health Canada and the FDA in the United States. Children just 6 months old may soon be eligible as well, pointed out by a study published on October 7th of this year in the Journal Toxicology Reports.
“Given that the risk of contracting COVID-19 with serious outcomes is negligible in this population, proceeding with mass inoculation of children 12–15 years old based on the trials that were conducted cannot be justified on any cost-benefit ratio findings…Pfizer began enrolling children under 12 to evaluate the COVID-19 mRNA inoculant. Also, Comirnaty will be evaluated in a new clinical trial for children aged 6 months to 11 years. In the first phase, the study will enroll 144 people and will identify the required dose for 3 age groups (6 months – 2 years, 2–5 years and 5–11 years).”
The results are expected by the end of 2021, and with the fast rollout and approval of the vaccines made available to older age groups, a large majority of children in multiple countries, like the United States and Canada, will be “fully vaccinated” by the end of 2022. This brings up an important question.
Will “fully vaccinated” be a forever changing goal post due to the weaning protection that the vaccine provides?
It looks like that may be the case. Israel’s coronavirus czar, Dr. Salman Zarka, has expressed that Israeli citizens will need a 4th dose of a coronavirus vaccine to remain “fully vaccinated.”
Multiple vaccine doses is one of multiple reasons parents are hesitant to vaccinate their children. One main reason is because children have a 99.97chance of survival (according to multiple seroprevalence studies). They are more likely to die of multiple other causes than die from COVID, including the flu.
The majority of people succumbing to COVID have been those with comorbidities and other health issues. This was evident one year after the pandemic.
We found antibody-producing cells in people 11 months after first symptoms. These cells will live and produce antibodies for the rest of people’s lives. That’s strong evidence for long-lasting immunity. – Senior author
Ali Ellebedy, PhD, associate professor of pathology & immunology, of medicine and micro-biology.
This is one of many arguments parents are providing when it comes to vaccinating their children, alongside reported vaccine adverse reactions. The Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) has more than 17,000 deaths. Of these reported deaths, only 7,848 took place in the the United States, the rest are from around the world. VAERS also reports 26,199 permanent disabilities from COVID vaccines. Approximately 83,000 have been hospitalized and adverse reaction reports are nearing one million. According to the study in Toxicology Reports, “VAERS is underreporting actual deaths by about two orders of magnitude.”
Underreporting of adverse reactions to prescription drugs is extremely high, and we may be seeing the same thing with vaccine injuries. These authors hypothesize that underreporting of deaths as a result of the vaccine may have resulted in a number 1000 times less than what the actual number is. A Harvard Pilgrim study published in 2010 reported that less than 1 percent of vaccine injuries are probably reported.
There are also multiple social media posts of people sharing their vaccine injury that have been popping up. Some who believe they were injured by the vaccine have faced, in what some cases seem to be denial from doctors.
Stephanie De Garay has been documenting her daughter’s journey after she became severely ill shortly after taking the second dose of the COVID vaccine from Pfizer during the 12-15 years trails. Garay mentioned the denial she faced in a press conference during the summer, to the point where some doctors didn’t even consider the vaccine to be the cause of her injury.
A recent study out of the University of California showed that boys ages 12-15 have a greater risk of myocarditis is greater as a result of the vaccine than the risk of being hospitalized for COVID.
There have been multiple reports of death from myocarditis following COVID vaccination, including a 13-year-old Michigan boy who died June 16, three days after he received his second dose of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine. As of August 7th, there were 106 incidents of myocarditis/pericarditis in Ontario, Canada in people under the age of 25.
Sweden, Iceland, Denmark, Iceland and Finland have also paused the Moderna vaccine for people born after 1991 due to vaccine induced heart problems.
If infected with COVID-19, children ages 0-9 have on average a chance of 0.1% or 1/1000 of being hospitalized, and if they are hospitalized the chances of survival are very high. The American Academy of Pediatrics also confirmed that while the Delta variant is infecting more children, it is not causing increased disease severity. They also found that 0.1-1.9% of their child COVID-19 cases resulted in hospitalizations, and 0.00-0.03% of all child covid-19 case resulted in death.
A proper cost/benefit analysis has not been conducted. Lack of long term safety data is also a major issue, yet we are pushing these vaccines on children as if they’re completely safe.
As of May 28, 2021, there have been 259,308 confirmed cases of SARS-CoV-2 infections in Canadians 19 years and under. Of these, 0.48% were hospitalized, 0.06% were admitted to ICU, and 0.004% died . For children, seasonal influenza is associated with more severe illness than COVID-19.
Even the idea that children are a major source of transmission has been heavily debated, yet science calling into question whether or not children are ‘super spreaders’ has not been given much attention.
For these reasons and more, vaccination for children of any age seems quite questionable, let alone for 6 month old babies.
An opinion article published in the European Journal of Medical Ethics in early July 2021 explains why children should not be required or encouraged to take the COVID-19 vaccine at this time.
The perspective shared by these experts is completely in contrast to governing health authorities around the world, but they join a very large number of doctors and scientists who oppose government policy during COVID. No doubt many will have issues with pushing the vaccine on 6 month old children, especially if mandates for school make an appearance.
Vaccinating children would be a way of treating them as mere means to serve other people’s interests or some form of collective good. We already did this through indiscriminate lockdowns and other restrictions, such as school closure.
Using children as means or even mere means in this way is not necessarily wrong, but it can only be justified if the cost imposed is sufficiently small and the benefit sufficiently large.
Unfortunately, currently available COVID-19 vaccines do not meet either condition, given our current state of knowledge.
Not only would vaccinating children pose risks on them without any substantial direct benefit. Also, vaccinating children can only offer collective good if this reduces infection levels in the community. However, while COVID-19 vaccines almost certainly will provide long-term protection against severe disease and death, their infection blocking effects are incomplete and very likely to be transient. This means there is actually no collective benefit to trade off against individual harm to children.
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October 30, 2021 marks a pivotal moment in the course of Palestinian history. It’s been clear for thirty years now that strategy, not disastrous Oslo-like compromise, is what Palestinians must do, and that is exactly the call that rang out at Masar Badil, Conference of the Alternative Palestinian Path: Towards a new revolutionary commitment, in Madrid today.
The liberation goal of Masar Badil is derived from
the only possible and historical solution to the Arab-Zionist confrontation, which is the achievement of liberation and return and the exercise of our people’s right to self-determination on their entire national soil on the path of building a democratic, participatory human society, and building the institutions of this democratic Palestine, as a society and as a state. And that the democratic and fully sovereign state of Palestine is the only party capable of guaranteeing by law the building of the new society in Palestine on the foundations and values of social justice, freedom, equality and comprehensive rights for all its citizens without discrimination.
The Alternative Revolutionary Path movement is an integral part of the Palestinian national movement and the movement and struggle of the Arab peoples confronting imperialism, Zionism and reactionary forces and regimes. It is also a natural part of the international movement of struggle confronting the forces of racism, fascism and the forces of colonialism and exploitation in the world.
The Conference organizers and participants envisioned and voted on a future political and implementation program for the coming five to ten years, inviting “the Palestinian people, the Arab nation and all of the friends and supporters of Palestine and the liberation movements of the world [to rally around Masar Badil] through mobilization, joint action and common struggle.”
The priorities and tasks of the movement in the current stage were set as follows:
a) Defending the rights of the Palestinian people, and the struggle to empower our people to be the cornerstone and decision-maker of their national cause, as they are the supreme reference and their rights constitute the source of legitimacy.
This requires strengthening the comprehensive capabilities of our people through building social, economic, cultural and political bodies and institutions, frameworks and popular and trade union arms of various sectors, which the movement deems necessary according to each stage of struggle, and enables the Palestinian people to protect their rights and defend their interests by achieving their national liberation project on the basis of: the unity of the people, land and rights.
b) The movement is committed to defending the rights and interests of the Palestinian popular classes and works to strengthen the steadfastness of the Palestinian refugees and the marginalized and impoverished popular Palestinian gatherings in the homeland and the diaspora. It considers alignment with their rights and interests essential, daily and constant priorities in its program of struggle.
c) Building bridges of joint action between the homeland and the diaspora on the road to strengthening the unity of the Palestinian national movement as one unified liberation movement that includes various women’s, student, labor and youth organizations and mobilizations.
Other proposals discussed included the following issues: Popular Unity / National Unity, The Palestinian Prisoners’ Movement, Building an Arab front against colonialism and Zionism and its local tools, Resistance as specified in the 1968 PLO charter.
In a plan proposed for further development, resolutions were passed at the conference to transform the political vision of a liberated and democratic Palestine into material reality. Among them were the following:
On the student struggle: Organizing the first Palestinian Student Conference in Exile and Diaspora and inside Palestine
Beginning a series of local student meetings of Palestinian students in the shatat [Diaspora], to continue throughout 2022 (alongside Palestinian, Arab and international student activism), and convening the first Palestinian student conference under the slogan: “Towards reviving the Palestinian student movement and building its political, cultural and scientific institutions to strengthen the Palestinian struggle for return and liberation.”
Forming the Student Committee or Student Bureau of the Movement, which will develop a plan and announce it in early 2022.
Agriculture and Palestine — Agricultural committee: Launching an ongoing, long-term campaign for 10 years (the National Campaign for the Afforestation of Palestine) by supporting agricultural, youth and community-based cooperatives in occupied Palestine in co-ordination with 1948 organizations.
National and International Day of Palestinian Struggle: Considering May 15 each year the Day of Palestinian Struggle/The International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People and their inalienable rights) — [refocusing the Nakba narrative into a narrative of heroism, continued struggle and resistance, as opposed to victimhood]. The movement will restore this name and the organization of marches and central activities in May 2022 everywhere it is located. Dedicating a week of struggle with a focus on the right of return; agreement on all slogans will be made later.
Developing the Boycott Movement: Establishing a bureau and a committee to develop a long-term action plan to develop the boycott movement. This committee will submit its first report within 3 months after the conference.
Unconditional Support Campaign/Palestine Fund: Supporting the establishment of medical clinics in the Palestinian refugee camps in the diaspora. Supervising and fundraising for the national campaign for the afforestation of Palestine, from the river to the sea. Supporting fishers, farmers and workers in Palestine, especially in the Gaza Strip. Strengthening and supporting the role of students in the Palestinian refugee camps and providing scholarships for students. Supporting and establishing centers and cooperatives for women and youth in the refugee camps and throughout Palestinian communities in exile and diaspora.
Organizing writers, journalists and artists: Calling for the establishment of the National Assembly of writers, journalists and artists in exile and diaspora. Forming a special committee for this purpose (suggestion: the information department or the cultural department) to supervise this initiative.
Invite writers, journalists and artists in exile and diaspora to participate in the gathering.
Developing a focus on creative people and supporting young people entering journalism, creative writing and the arts.
Department of Labor Union Work: The movement shall establish a trade union committee or labor bureau, which will communicate with trade unions and labor organizations in the Arab world and internationally to mobilize support for Palestinian workers and the Palestinian labor union movement.
Organizing joint political, media and cultural campaigns with international trade unions.
Palestinian Medical Committee: The committee oversees the provision of support to medical institutions and the establishment of medical clinics by the movement.
The priority shall be for the Palestinian refugee camps in the shatat and in the Gaza Strip.
Supporting Palestinian students in the health and medical fields.
The committee is made up of health workers. (Doctors, nurses, other health workers)
Center for Studies, Research and Publishing: Establishing a special center for studies, publishing and research, in multiple languages. Publishing research and holding special workshops related to the Palestinian cause, the Arab world and liberation movements around the world.
Publishing Palestinian and Arab writers and creative work in the field of theater, novels and short stories.
Develop and support the Palestine International Center for Studies (Netherlands)
Establishment of Palestine Centers: sites for mass action, organization and provision of social services to impoverished and marginalized members of the community.
Samidoun until victory and liberation!
Upcoming Conference events:
Cultural Event will take place at the Auditorio Pilar Bardem in Rivas Vaciamadrid at 7 pm, Oct 30, 2021
On Sunday, 31 October (noon at Atocha), march to Sol — in central Madrid — for the March for Palestine!
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Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank.
She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: Masar Badil, Conference of the Alternative Palestinian Path: Towards a new revolutionary commitment, in Madrid, Oct. 30, 2021 (Source: Rima Najjar)
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Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people …
The General Assembly,
Proclaims this Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a common standard of achievement for all peoples …
— preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
A few days back, Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was angered by ambassadors from ten western countries — US, Germany, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway and Sweden — who called for the release of Osman Kavala. Originally, Erdogan declared, “These 10 ambassadors must be declared persona non grata at once.” Eventually, Erdoğan would backtrack.
Kavala, often described as a philanthropist in western media, was arrested on 1 November 2017 and charged with “attempting to overthrow the constitutional order” and “attempting to overthrow the government” in connection with the Gezi Park protests. Afterwards, Kavala was imprisoned in the maximum-security facility Silivri near Istanbul.
He was acquitted in February 2020, but soon after charged with involvement in the 15 June 2016 coup attempt. Kavala was also cleared of this accusation, but he was kept in jail on the charge of “political or military espionage.”
The incarceration of Kavala bears similarities with that of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange. However, a glaring difference stands out.
No western governments have spoken out for the human rights of Assange, including his native country, Australia.
However, the United Nations Human Rights Commission did have something to say. Its expert on torture, Nils Melzer, said,
The evidence is overwhelming and clear, Mr. Assange has been deliberately exposed, for a period of several years, to progressively severe forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, the cumulative effects of which can only be described as psychological torture.
But western governments have been unmoved by such damning news. One might well surmise a tacit condonation among them for torture when carried out by western countries.
Assange is a philanthropist! His sacrifice through WikiLeaks, to inform people of the machinations of their governments (and without error), has thoroughly demonstrated this. Among the files published by WikiLeaks was revealing the CIA hacking tools and extremely notoriously, for the United States and its military, the video Collateral Murder.
If you don’t understand German turn on the subtitles.
The British court, though, blocked his extradition to the US over concerns for Assange’s mental health and his risk of suicide. Nonetheless, the US appealed. Britain, for some inexplicable reason that defines logic and morality, returned a man who their judge deemed was at mental risk back to — what the UN torture expert said were conditions of “psychological torture” — the high-security Belmarsh Prison.
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Of course, justice and human rights must be for all. Kavala must receive justice. Assange must receive justice.
Currently, the US is awaiting a decision from Britain’s High Court on its appeal against the denial of Assange’s extradition by a lower court. The US is pressing ahead with the appeal despite the revelation subsequent to the lower court’s decision that the CIA informer, Sigurdur Thordarson, is a clinically diagnosed sociopath with a history of criminal activity who admitted to lying against Assange.
Human rights are for everyone. It is not just an obligation of governments to abide by their signature on the UNHDR; it is the duty of people of conscience to hold their governments to account, to do what they can to protect Julian Assange and any other wrongfully imprisoned or oppressed people.
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Kim Petersen is a former co-editor of the Dissident Voice newsletter. He can be emailed at: kimohp@gmail. com Twitter: @kimpetersen. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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A psychological, informational war is raging within the world’s medical community, a community dedicated to human well being, at least in theory. A central feature of the war is the undeniable fact that every aspect of mainstream print and electronic media has coalesced rigidly around a single official narrative regarding treatment of Covid-19. Inexpensive, readily available medicines, e.g. hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, were suddenly made unavailable, even outlawed, toward the day that a lucrative genetic modification system could be rushed to market and introduced into the bodies of the people of the world. The ruthlessness with which dissenting medical voices are being attacked is startling, as witness this CNN interview of Dr. Rashid Buttar. Scroll down to find a trashing of Dr. Christine Northrup, a former professor at Maine Medical Center and perhaps the most celebrated gynecologist in the U.S.
Buttar and Northrup are not fringe oddities. They are absolutely in accord with countless thousands of medical professionals, many of global distinction, e.g. Dr. Robert Malone, who developed the mRNA technology being used in Covid-19 injectables (erroneously referred to as “vaccines”);Dr. Michael Yeadon, former Vice President of Research with Pfizer; Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, Chair of the Health Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe; Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi, former head of the Institute of Medical Microbiology at the University of Mainz, Germany.
This October 2, 2021 address by Dr. Peter McCullough to the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons showcases the corruption and villainy behind the declared Covid-19 Pandemic that ever more people from all walks of life are now seeing as a carefully organized crime against humanity.
McCullough, a celebrated cardiologist and epidemiologist, a professor at Texas A&M Medical School and editor of two medical journals, substantiates criminal negligence at all levels of government to justify his stating that “Under no circumstances should a human being ever have taken one of these vaccines” and “We are in a free-fall of a lawless state”. Like the major medical figures mentioned above, he is pilloried in mainstream media. Watch his address from start to finish and you will be much, much the wiser.
At one point, McCullough begins to break down emotionally at the enormity of the crime he is describing.
Those present are obviously in accord, so why aren’t doctors in droves speaking out? The fact that even the most prominent are under attack sends a chilling message to less distinguished doctors. But in addition to that, as the medical industry has evolved, practitioners rely ever more on hospital access and privileges they need in order to practice, and politicized hospital administrators lay down regulations not to be questioned.
Guidelines misperceived as rock-hard rules descend from governmental entities, such as NIAID and the CDC, and from burgeoning schools of public health inundated with cash from pharmaceutical interests, their graduates now the preferred “medical experts” for state governments, hospital administrations and TV commentators.
A prime weapon of the pharmaceutical industry’s Covid-19 “vaccine initiative” is the network of doctors who have gravitated into organizational positions from which they can exert control on the rest of the medical community.
Practitioners at odds with the authorized narrative are quickly charged with spreading “misinformation” and threatened with professional ruin should they continue to step out of line. Consider this September, 2021 joint statement from the American Boards of Family Medicine, Internal Medicine, and Pediatrics, all three insisting that evidence of safety and effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccines is “overwhelming”, whereas abundant evidence to the contrary remains carefully censored by mainstream media and social media platforms, as well as by the boards themselves. In three blunt paragraphs, the boards, which collectively represent a huge fraction of the America’s doctors, and which have the power to bestow or withhold board certification, threaten member physicians who “denigrate vaccination” with “disciplinary actions, including suspension or revocation of their medical license.”
This is monstrous! Bureaucratized doctors, many armed with public health degrees, placed in power positions in professional societies, are functioning as pharmaceutical henchmen, holding hostage practitioners otherwise inclined to speak out about the dangers of the mass injection project.
But open discussion and the airing of all views and interpretations of data is at the very heart of science regardless of area of specialization. Regarding the official storyline surrounding the Covid-19 Pandemic and the gene modification technology called a “vaccine”, dissenting doctors are literally, in the words of McCullough, being “hunted”. That very fact, in and of itself, should be more than just a hint for any thinking person that a medical crime of global extent is underway.
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Bill Willers is an Emeritus Professor of Biology at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh.
Featured image is from Alliance for Natural Health
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US Sixth Fleet and Naval Striking and Support Forces NATO staff begin operations in the Mediterranean and Black Seas. This was announced by the US Sixth Fleet.
In particular, the US Navy’s command ship USS Mount Whitney will participate in joint maneuvers in the Black Sea with the allies. During the underway, Mount Whitney and the embarked staffs will operate alongside NATO allies and partners in the Mediterranean and Black Seas, working together to ensure security and stability in the region.
…Training collectively also increases coordination with NATO allies and partners at the fleet level, and sets the stage for future operations and exercises.
[Ukrainian] Minister of Defense of Ukraine Andriy Taran and Minister of Defense of the United States Lloyd Austin discussed the implementation of a framework agreement on the strategic foundations of the defense partnership and security in the Black Sea.
The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Porter (DDG 78) entered the Black Sea on a routine patrol, Oct. 30, 2021.
U.S. Air Forces Europe-Air Forces Africa (USAFE-AFAFRICA) provided air support to Porter with a formation of F-15E Strike Eagle aircraft. Additional intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft also supported the mission, including U.S. Air Force units and a P-8A Poseidon from U.S. Naval Forces Europe (NAVEUR)’s Commander, Task Force 67.
Porter will operate alongside NATO allies and partners in the Mediterranean and Black Seas, working together…integrating with allied and partner surface and air forces. Maritime exercises and operations like this demonstrate the United States’ commitment to the Alliance and to the collective defense of Europe.
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The U.S. Navy routinely operates in the Black Sea to work with our NATO allies and partners, including Bulgaria, Georgia, Romania, Turkey, and Ukraine. The teamwork reinforces the U.S. and NATO’s commitment…in the Black Sea.
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“The power of alliances at sea is the ability to quickly bring together forces from many nations and aggregate naval power at the time and place of our choosing.” said Capt. Kyle Gantt, Commander, Task Force 65. “These operations in the Black Sea demonstrate the commitment to interoperability among NATO allies and partners.”
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Porter recently completed Fleet Operational Sea Training (FOST), Sept. 30, 2021, in Plymouth, England. FOST was a three-week training and NATO certifying event involving all facets of ship operations, including advanced warfighting tactics, firing weapons systems during gunnery exercises, and seamanship and maneuvering exercises. The warfighting environments progressed from single threat to multi-threat scenarios each week, including a weekly war scenario.
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Porter is one of four [soon to be six] U.S. Navy destroyers based in Rota, Spain, and assigned to Commander, Task Force 65 in support of NATO’s Integrated Air Missile Defense architecture. These Forward-Deployed Naval Forces-Europe ships have the flexibility to operate throughout the waters of Europe and Africa, from the Cape of Good Hope to the Arctic Circle, demonstrating their mastery of the maritime domain.
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Rick Rozoff, renowned author and geopolitical analyst, actively involved in opposing war, militarism and interventionism for over fifty years. He manages the Anti-Bellum and For peace, against war website
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
Featured image: USS Porter interceptor-missile destroyer. Photo: Sixth Fleet.
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In 1992, the original UN Convention on Biological Diversity was conducted in parallel with the Agenda 21 Conference under the name of the UN Conference on Economic Development (UNCED). Both were held in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, and were sponsored by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
Agenda 21 was called “the agenda for the 21st century” and was centered around Sustainable Development, a resource-based economic system closely resembling historic Technocracy.[1]
According to the International Institute for Sustainable Development:
Sustainable development has been defined in many ways, but the most frequently quoted definition is from Our Common Future, also known as the Brundtland Report:
“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”[2](emphasis added)
The book, Our Common Future, was published in 1987 and became the blueprint for the Rio conference just 5 years later. The author and head of the UN study known as the Brundtland Commission, was chaired by Trilateral Commission member Gro Harlem Brundtland. She was the Prime Minister of Norway and previously, the Minister of the Environment. It is no surprise that a Trilateral Commission member created this policy that has literally turned the world upside down. In fact, it was the Trilateral Commission in 1973 who originally declared that their members would create its self-declared “New International Economic Order”. (see Trilaterals Over Washington, Volumes I and II, Wood & Sutton)
The Rio conference proposed the question, what can be done to save the world from excessive development that causes pollution, global warming, loss of rain forests, etc. The answer was that more development was needed and by the same actors that were previously wrecking habitats and plundering nations. In other words, more development was needed to erase the effects of previous development. Brundtland convinced the UN that this somehow made sense, and it was subsequently adopted as “the agenda for the 21st century” in 1992.
Others saw through the smoke and mirrors. Two environmental researchers and authors noted in their book, The Earth Brokers: “free trade and its promoters came to be seen as the solution to the global ecological crisis.”[3]
They could not have been more blunt:
“We argue that UNCED has boosted precisely the type of industrial development that is destructive for the environment, the planet, and its inhabitants. We see how, as a result of UNCED, the rich will get richer, the poor poorer, while more and more of the planet is destroyed in the process.”[4]
In 2021, this result could not be more clearly seen: the rich are off the charts, the poor are in the gutters and the planet and its economic systems are in tatters.
How did we get here? Here is the first hint when they concluded:
“Neither Brundtland, nor the secretariat, nor the governments drafted plan to examine the pitfalls of free trade and industrial development. Instead, they wrote up a convention on how to ‘develop’ the use of biodiversity through patents and biotechnology.”[5](emphasis added)
For all else that UNCED purported to be, its true mission was capturing and using biodiversity for the sake of the biotechnology industry.
This fact has been largely overlooked until the Great (pandemic) Panic of 2020, when it became apparent that the global takeover was being orchestrated by elements of that very same biotechnology industry.
Agenda for the 21st century, indeed.
What Biodiversity really means
Once I learned what to look for, I saw it everywhere. Let’s start with Our Common Future (Brundtland, 1987):
“The diversity of species is necessary for the normal functioning of ecosystems and the biosphere as a whole. The genetic material in wild species contributes billions of dollars yearly to the world economy in the form of improved crop species, new drugs and medicines, and raw materials for industry.”[6] (emphasis added)
The specific development of biodiversity is seen in Chapter 6, Species and Ecosystems: Resources for Development:
“Species and their genetic materials promise to play an expanding role in development, and a powerful economic rationale is emerging to bolster the ethical, aesthetic, and scientific case for preserving them. The genetic variability and germplasm material of species make contributions to agriculture, medicine, and industry worth many billions of dollars per year… If nations can ensure the survival of species, the world can look forward to new and improved foods, new drugs and medicines, and new raw materials for industry.”[7]
Further on, Brundtland states:
“Vast stocks of biological diversity are in danger of disappearing just as science is leaning how to exploit genetic variability through the advances of genetic engineering… It would be grim irony indeed if just as new genetic engineering techniques begin to let us peer into life’s diversity and use genes more efficiently to better human conditions, we looked and found this treasure sadly depleted.”[8]
Conclusion #1: The word “biodiversity” is explained to mean “genetic resources”. Genes are something to be exploited and used more efficiently than they are used in their natural state.
Turning back to The Earth Brokers, the authors’ observations provide an eye-witness account of what they actually saw at the UNCED and Biodiversity Convention summit:
“The convention implicitly equates the diversity of life – animals and plants – to the diversity of genetic codes, for which read genetic resources. By doing so, diversity becomes something that modern science can manipulate. Finally, the convention promotes biotechnology as being ‘essential for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity.”[9]
If there is any doubt as to what the goal is, they conclude with this mind-blowing statement:
“The main stake raised by the Biodiversity Convention is the issue of ownership and control over biological diversity… the major concern was protecting the pharmaceutical and emerging biotechnology industries.”[10]
To reinforce the thought, the authors bluntly stated, “they wrote up a convention on how to ‘develop’ the use of biodiversity through patents and biotechnology.”[11]
Note carefully that ownership and control over genes was not a side issue or a minor stake: It was the MAIN STAKE!
Conclusion #2: Genetic resources means genetic material is to be owned, exploited and controlled through genetic engineering performed by the Biotech industry.
Conclusion #3: UNCED and Agenda 21 was largely a smokescreen to obscure the reality of Conclusion #2.
Despite the fact than the UNCED conference was expected to bridge the gaps between the North and South, it was apparent that it was totally dominated by the developed nations of the North. The Earth Brokers explained that all solutions were provided by “Western science, Western technology, Western information, Western training, Western money and Western institutions.”[12]
Conclusion #4: The third world was being set up to be plundered yet once again, in the name of Sustainable Development and Biodiversity. The prize is genetic engineering and ownership of the resulting genetically engineered products.
It Is Consistent Throughout UN Documents
In the same year as the UNCED conference in 1992, UNEP and IUCN published the Global Biodiversity Strategy as “Guidelines for Action to Save, Study, and Use Earth’s Biotic Wealth Sustainably and Equitably”.[13] The same themes were presented, but carefully so in order to get the third world’s participation. For all of the new anticipated revenue generated by the biotech companies, a royalty revenue stream was promised to the originating countries.
Under the subtitle, Promote recognition of the value of local knowledge and genetic resources and affirm local peoples’ rights, concerns over Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) are noted:
“Any collection agreements should reflect the concepts of just compensation and accountability, and codes of conduct should apply to genetic resource collectors, anthropologists, or other researchers studying local peoples or local resource management. In some cases, contracts may be needed to ensure the return of royalties or other benefits to local communities or individuals.”[14]
Elsewhere it stated: “Since biotechnology depends on biodiversity for its raw material, the value of genetic resources will grow with the industry.”[15] (emphasis added.)
Conclusion #5: Biodiversity is not about preserving species, but rather it is the source of raw materials for the biotech industry, for which it should pay royalties on commercial products back to the original points of collection.
Of course, just the opposite has happened. Monsanto, for instance, developed and patented genetically modified crop seed, and then proceeded to force the farmers to pay royalties for the use of the seeds, instead of the other way around. Headlines like “Monsanto Bullies Small Farmers”, “Argentine farmers will pay royalties to seed companies” and “How Monsanto wrote and broke laws to enter India” were common.
Indeed, publications like Global Biodiversity Strategy and the Global Biodiversity Assessment were only needed to get the signatures of 196 or so nations of the world to agree to a fantasy that would never happen. Once signed, the United Nations and its myriad of NGO actors would hold those nations to the treaties and agreements, regardless of the harm and pain being caused to those very same nations.
Game Change: The Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework
In the same way that Agenda 21 was updated by 2030 Agenda in 2015, the Global Biodiversity Convention is currently being refined by the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. Although it will culminate in 2022, working groups have been busy since 2020, creating the various elements that will go into the completed framework.
Because biotechnology and genetic science has progressed so rapidly over the last 25 years, the previous phrase “genetic resources” is now deemed to be unsuitable going forward, and it is being replaced with the phrase “digital sequence information on genetic resources”:
According to the National Human Genome Research Institute, the concept of “digital sequencing” is described as:
“Sequencing DNA means determining the order of the four chemical building blocks – called “bases” – that make up the DNA molecule. The sequence tells scientists the kind of genetic information that is carried in a particular DNA segment. For example, scientists can use sequence information to determine which stretches of DNA contain genes and which stretches carry regulatory instructions, turning genes on or off. In addition, and importantly, sequence data can highlight changes in a gene that may cause disease.
In the DNA double helix, the four chemical bases always bond with the same partner to form “base pairs.” Adenine (A) always pairs with thymine (T); cytosine (C) always pairs with guanine (G). This pairing is the basis for the mechanism by which DNA molecules are copied when cells divide, and the pairing also underlies the methods by which most DNA sequencing experiments are done. The human genome contains about 3 billion base pairs that spell out the instructions for making and maintaining a human being.” [16]
The principal is identical for all life forms on earth, all of which have DNA that can be sequenced and fed into a computer for storage, retrieval, and analysis. It also envisions synthetic biology where DNA is reengineered in ways that do not occur in nature, for the sake of “improvement” and “wellbeing” for the environment.
According to the Report of the Open-Ended Working Group on the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework on its Third Meeting (Aug.-Sept. 2021):
[The working group] “recognizes the intrinsic relation between genetic resources and digital sequence information on genetic resources, as well as the scope of bioinformatic tools in the design and creation of new digital sequence information on genetic resources elements that are created artificially; that digital sequence information on genetic resources are not genetic resources as defined in the Convention on Biological Diversity (1992); that access to and utilization of digital sequence information on genetic resources is useful for research relating to conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, food security, health and other important sectors, including commercial applications resulting in commercial products.”[17]
Interestingly, another item notes that “any approach to address digital sequence information on genetic resources should provide for the special status of pathogens of pandemic potential.”[18]
To say that this change of definition, approach and meanings are minor is rebutted by the fact that the phrase “digital sequence information on genetic resources” is used 167 times across the 167 pages of the document; that is, on average, one mention per page. Yes, it is a major doctrine and it is a sea change of opportunity for the biotech industry to meddle with all life systems on earth in order to make them more “sustainable.”
Conclusion #6: All species of life are to be digitally sequenced, placed into a database, recognized as a global common asset and made available for “licensing” by the biotech industry.
Conclusion
Mapping of the human genome took most of the 1990s. Mapping the human brain, which started in 2010, is virtually complete. Now, mapping all DNA on earth, including human DNA, is the next big Technocrat/Transhuman dream. The outcome will be genetic manipulation of any or all living creatures and the creation of synthetic DNA that does not currently exist in nature.
All of this is headed toward an overriding goal that has been misread by researchers and authors. It now takes on a frightening dimension:
“The post-2020 global biodiversity framework builds on the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020 and sets out an ambitious plan to implement broad-based action to bring about a transformation in society’s relationship with biodiversity and to ensure that, by 2050, the shared vision of living in harmony with nature is fulfilled.”[19]
How do we get there from here? The same paper discusses its “theory of change” that it supports with the figure below:
The keys to interpret this figure are contained in this paper.
It is never declared exactly who shares this so-called vision of “living in harmony with nature”, but it certainly isn’t anyone who grasps the facts presented in this paper. Hiding behind benevolent concepts such as eliminating poverty and providing education for all, is a cadre of genetic engineers intent on making life “sustainable” on planet earth by simply changing the structure and nature of life that consumes resources, including humanity itself.
The mad global dash to inject synthetic mRNA and synthetic DNA into the arms of every human on earth should make a little more sense to the reader. This is their shared vision to bridge the gap between humanity and nature to be “living in harmony” with it, to balance the scales of resources vs. consumption, to create new markets for new products, to bring to life the transhuman dream of modifying DNA to achieve life extension and ultimately, immortality.
This has happened right under our noses while everyone’s attention was focused on other issues. What we thought were the key issues of Agenda 21, the 2030 Agenda, Biodiversity Convention, etc., were indeed real issues, but they were not the main issue.
Indeed, the main issue is the takeover of all genetic material on earth.
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Patrick Wood is a leading and critical expert on Sustainable Development, Green Economy, Agenda 21, 2030 Agenda and historic Technocracy. He is the author of Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation (2015) and co-author of Trilaterals Over Washington, Volumes I and II (1978-1980) with the late Antony C. Sutton.
Notes
[1] Wood, Patrick M. (2015). Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation, Coherent Publishing.
[3] Chatterjee and Finger (1994). The Earth Brokers: Power, Politics and World Development. Routledge. p. 40.
[4] Ibid. p. 3
[5] Ibid. p. 171.
[6] Brundtland, Khalid et al. (1987). Our Common Future, Oxford Press, p. 13.
[7] Ibid. p. 147.
[8] Ibid. p. 149-150.
[9] Op cit. p. 42.
[10] Op cit. p. 43.
[11] Op Cit. p. 171,
[12] Op cit. p. 50.
[13] UNEP, WRI, IUCN (1992). Global Biodiversity Strategy. United Nations, p. 1.
[14] Ibid., p. 94.
[15] Ibid., p. 43.
[16] NIH, National Human Genome Research Institute, https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/DNA-Sequencing-Fact-Sheet
[17] Annex V, Report of the Open-Ended Working Group on the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework on its Third Meeting (Aug.-Sept. 2021). https://www.cbd.int/doc/c/187e/84cd/fd4f6bc8f301770a2481b8c8/wg2020-03-05-en.pdf, p. 161.
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“They didn’t act like people and they didn’t act like actors. It’s hard to explain.” – J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, 1951
There’s a reason that Catcher in the Rye, published 70 years ago, has become such an iconic book, praised and condemned in equal measure. It is because it is about lying, phoniness, acting, Hollywood, theater, plagiarism, and at its core, a society of liars.
Actors in a masquerade willing to don masks and face other faces with the veiled glances of the defeated. It is about the massive social confusion that entered American life in an intense way following World War II, a world of propaganda and performance. Although the book seems to be directed at adolescents, it is for adults, and while annoying many of them with its adolescent lingo, it cuts to the heart of our current life-the-movie society. Adults have become kids, and Holden Caulfield knew that they would. Or were. Maybe he wanted it. We now live in a society of costumed children, asking to be tricked.
“If you want to know the truth,” Holden keeps repeating, knowing that most people don’t, since they prefer the Show.
It is also a fall book with echoes of falling leaves in a dying land. Football and war, Halloween and all souls drifting down in the crepuscular light of late October and the coming November remembrance of Veteran’s Day, once called Armistice Day, when the mad slow action film of WW I, the war to end all wars with millions dead in rat infested trenches, is commemorated, as if anything has changed and such memories are not secret celebrations of the heroic sacrifices the gullible make for their masters. War is a racket; the ultimate racket.
Liam Clancy reminds us of this truth regarding the “Great” War and all the others that have followed. Millions of deaths brought on by lying government bastards. Actors in the mass masquerade.
But it goes deeper than lying leaders. For lying is the leading cause of living death in the USA, and the pharmaceutical companies have no prescription for it. If they did, and if they cared, which they don’t, they would have manufactured such a drug long ago. It would have killed them of course, but since their business is profits not suicide, they don their masks of solicitude and bank the spoils, while producing poison to shoot people with.
The great English writer, D. H. Lawrence, warned us long ago to not let the living-dead eat us up. Yet we are still being devoured by a refusal that knows no name since it is not just them but us – victims and executioners, both in a mutual deadly game.
Death is a big hit, as everyone knows. It fascinates far more than does life. One glance at the mass media will confirm that. Fear, death, and disaster are the daily menu, interspersed with kitsch uplift. Propaganda feeds on it. Up down all around spin that wheel and rattle your brains.
But the ghosts of fall remind us to beware of this necrophilia. The dead return and wander among us, masked children wandering through the streets looking for handouts. Adults laughing those tight grim laughs. How cute!
Nietzsche said that “all things are entangled, ensnared, and enamored.” I find this especially true during the autumnal season, especially the Halloween weekend of ghosts, death, and masks. It is enchanting and disturbing if you give it thought. Its symbolism explains the Covid propaganda and panic more than a thousand factual articles. It explains the warfare state and adults’ refusal to defiantly oppose it. It explains the nihilistic underpinning of society and children’s fears and wishes to use a magic wand to change the world to one that celebrates life not death. That is the true treat that their unconscious playacting requests. But the candy the adults give them conceals the poison the adults can’t face. The poison that they have ingested.
I think of how all persons are, by definition, masked, the word person being derived from the Latin, persona, meaning mask. Another Latin word, larva, occurs to me, it too meaning mask, ghost, or evil spirit. The living masks light up for me as I think of ghosts, the dead, all the souls and spirits circulating through our days, swirling like dead leaves in the wind.
While etymology might seem arcane, I think it offers us a portal into our lives, not just personally, but politically and culturally as well. Word usage is at the heart of linguistic mind control, and we are in a world where the minders of the public’s mind have become adept at fashioning language to their devious ends. Orwell predicted this in Nineteen Eighty-Four with his explanation of Newsspeak:
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought – that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc – should be literally unthinkable, at least as far as thought is dependent on words.
A quick check of the latest dictionary updates will corroborate Orwell’s point about the future dictionary when Newspeak has been fully established, the meaning of words will be so changed that anything can mean anything, even its opposite.
Shakespeare, the ultimate wordsmith, was right, of course, to tell us that “all the world’s a stage,” though I would disagree with the bard that we are “merely” players. It does often seem that way, but seeming is the essence of the actor’s show and tell. But who are we behind the masks? Who is it uttering those words coming through the masks’ mouth holes (the per-sona: Latin, to sound through)?
Halloween. The children play at scaring and being scared. Death walks among them and they scream with glee. The play is on. The grim reaper walks up and down the street. Treats greet them. The costumes are ingenious; the masks, wild. It’s all great fun, the candy sweet. So what’s the trick? When does the performance end?
As Halloween ends, the saints come marching in followed by all the souls. The Days of the Dead. Spirits. Ghosts walk the streets. Dead leaves fall. The dead are everywhere, swirling through the air, drifting. We are surrounded by them. We are them. Until.
Until when? Perhaps not until we dead awaken and see through the charade of social life and realize the masked performers are not just the deadly politicians and celebrities, not only the professional actors and the corporate media performers, but us.
And while these days of the dead and children’s games can bring us to wonder whether we act like people or actors – “even if it’s hard to explain” – whether behind the double masks we realize we can be genuine actors if we go deep enough, the celebration of Veterans/Armistice/Remembrance Day a few days later should emphatically remind us of the Masters of War and the need to see through their masks, as Bob Dylan tells us. The evil performers who “play with my world like it’s your little toy” with their endless lies.
Norman O. Brown so well describes our stage set:
Ancestral voices prophesying war; ancestral spirits in the danse macabre or war dance; Valhalla, ghostly warriors who kill each other and are reborn to fight again. All warfare is ghostly, every army an exercitus feralis (army of ghosts), every soldier a living corpse.
It seems to me that Albert Camus was right, and that we should aspire to be neither victims nor executioners. To do so will take a serious reevaluation of the roles we play in the ongoing national tragedy of lie piled upon lie in aggressive wars around the world and in election farces that perpetuate them. The leading actors we elect are our responsibility.
We produce and maintain them. They are our mirror images; we are theirs. It is the dansemacabre, a last tango in the land of bad actors, our two-faced show. This masquerade ball that passes for political reality is infiltrated by the ghosts of all those victims we have murdered around the wide world. We may choose not to see them, but they are lurking in the shadowy corners. And they will haunt us until we make amends.
“Do you not know there comes a midnight hour when everyone has to throw off his mask?” warned Kierkegaard. “Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it?”
“Whenever I take up a newspaper,” Ibsen added, “I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sands of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.”
Yet the children and the eloquent voices of the genuine actors I have so liberally quoted here remind us of what is possible if we chase the light and stop the masquerade. That would be cause for a real holiday celebration.
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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Behind the Curtain.
Edward Curtin is a prominent author, researcher and sociologist based in Western Massachusetts. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons
He is the author of Seeking the Truth in a Country of Lies
“Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies is a dazzling journey into the heart of many issues — political, philosophical, and personal — that should concern us all. Ed Curtin has the touch of the poet and the eye of an eagle.” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
“Edward Curtin puts our propaganda-stuffed heads in a guillotine, then in a flash takes us on a redemptive walk in the woods — from inferno to paradiso. Walk with Ed and his friends — Daniel Berrigan, Albert Camus, George Orwell, and many others — through the darkest, most-firefly-filled woods on this earth.” James W. Douglass, author, JFK and the Unspeakable
“A powerful exposé of the CIA and our secret state… Curtin is a passionate long-time reform advocate; his stories will rouse your heart.” Oliver Stone, filmmaker, writer, and director
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While the US Navy continues to argue that US national security requires that its 80-year-old leaking 20 story underground jet fuel tanks remain open, I argue the opposite – that for US national security reasons the 200-million-gallon facility be closed down before a catastrophic leak destroys the potable water supply for 400,00 residents of Oahu.
Once the aquifer is contaminated by a predicted major fuel leak, it cannot be flushed out or be rehabilitated. US Navy officials have said that the water from a contaminated aquifer would have to be filtered either by a massive filtration system that does not yet exist or individual households would have to filter the water at home.
The Navy does not have a filtration system on the island of Oahu and citizens do not have sufficient bottled water or individual household filtration systems should there be a catastrophic leak of toxic jet fuel into our water supply. The state of Hawai’i that issues the permit for the underground fuel tank system to remain open is playing with our lives by allowing this ticking time bomb of the leaking tanks to continue.
Graphic by Sierra Club Hawai’i
Leaks occur regularly. At least 73 fuel leaks have been documented at the Red Hill facility, according to the Board of Water Supply. The Sierra Club estimates that more than 180,000 gallons of fuel have leaked since construction of the tanks during World War II.
Graphic by Sierra Club Hawai’i
The recent leaks include 27,000 gallons of fuel leaked from Tank 5 in 2014, and never recovered. In March 2020, a pipeline connected to Red Hill leaked an unknown amount of fuel into Pearl Harbor. Roughly 7,700 gallons of fuel was collected. The Navy confirmed it was an active leak in January 2021, but misled the public for months. In May 2021, approximately 1,000 gallons of jet fuel was released. The cause is still under investigation. In July 2021, a leak of 100 gallons that is suspected to be connected to the Red Hill facility was found at Kilo Pier on Pearl Harbor naval base.
At long last, on October 27, 2021, the State of Hawai’i Department of Health fined the US Navy $325,000 for its environmental violations at the Red Hill facility.
No doubt there have been other leaks that have occurred that no one knows about, or that the Navy knows about but is not making public. I say that as a 29-year US military veteran who retired as a Colonel.
Graphic from U.S. Marine Corps
We know that many military personnel and their families have been sickened from chemical leaks that the commanders of the bases knew about, but did nothing to resolve. In a major case on water supply pollution at military bases, the pollution at the US Marine Base at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina resulted in a Congressional act “Caring for Camp Lejeune Families Act of 2012”
that provided a presumptive service connection of exposure to contaminants in the water supply for Veterans, Reservists, and National Guard members who later developed one of the following eight diseases:
Adult leukemia
Aplastic anemia and other myelodysplastic syndromes
The 100,000+ military personnel and their families assigned military organizations on Oahu including the Indo-Pacific Command headquarters at Camp Smith-Aiea, the headquarters of the US Navy of the Pacific at Pearl Harbor, the headquarters of the US Air Force of the Pacific at Hickam Air Force Base, the headquarters of the US Army of the Pacific at Fort Shafter and the Coast Guard Regional headquarters at Sand Island should be very concerned that the military they work for is refusing to close down the jet fuel tanks that can jeopardized their lives, much less the 300,000 civilians in the Honolulu area who rely on the aquifer’s waters.
Two other military base underground fuel tank systems have been closed down and above ground fuel tanks installed at the Point Loma facility in San Diego, California and the Manchester facility in the state of Washington. Department of Defense funds were allocated for the construction of new above ground fuel tanks.
In the 2022 Department of Defense budget of $778 BILLION to which Congress added an extra $20 BILLION over what the military and administration had requested, surely the water supply and health of 400,000 residents of Oahu, including the military personnel who live in the aquifer area and staff the important military commands located on Oahu, are more important than the fuel for the aircraft, ships and other vehicles that are operated under these commands.
If military personnel are sick from the contaminated water supply, then the national security of our country is jeopardized by one of the military commands that has not made the safe storage of jet fuel a priority.
The Pentagon spent $8 trillion of our US tax dollars over the past ten years, which is the equivalent of over $1.5 million per minute. Within the 2022 $778 BILLION budget surely $5 BILLION can be found to close down the Red Hill jet fuel tanks and construct above ground tanks.
Above ground fuel tanks are not difficult to construct. There are already many above ground tanks on the island of Oahu.
Ironically, what seems to be most difficult is the will to finally admit that 80-year-old leaking fuel tanks must be closed down for the human security of 400,000 residents of our community. On October 29, 2021 over 200 persons participated in a virtual Red Hill Task Force meeting. The overwhelming majority of public comments made at the meeting were to close the Red Hill fuel tanks down.
The time has come for the Red Hill fuel tanks to be closed before catastrophe strikes and the water supply of 400,000 on a national defense strategic location, an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 2400 miles from the continent, is polluted forever.
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Ann Wright served 29 years in the US Army/Army Reserves and retired as a Colonel. As a reservist, she had assignments with the Indo-Pacific Command. She was a US diplomat for 16 years and served in US Embassies in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan and Mongolia. She resigned from the U.S. government in March 2003 in opposition to the U.S. war on Iraq. She is the co-author of Dissent: Voices of Conscience.
Featured image: US Navy photo of inside of one of the 20 massive jet fuel tanks inside Red Hill, Oahu, Hawai’i (Source: Antiwar.com)
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For years, Iyad Shallouf, a farmer who owns a piece of land near the Gaza seashore, used to fill tanks with freshwater for people’s use in his neighbourhood. Today he can barely buy his own water to irrigate the crops.
With the exacerbating water problem in Gaza, farmers, especially those in the western areas of the blockaded Strip, face the brunt of the water pollution crisis due to their lands’ proximity to the contaminated seawater.
Instead of using water wells for irrigation, they have to buy water several times a month in order to avoid damage to their crops.
“Here in the al-Mawassi area [adjacent to the sea], we endure a suffering that only God knows. Our crops get damaged by the contaminated saline water, so we now avoid using the regular ways of irrigation and instead buy water to irrigate the crops,” Shallouf, 45, from Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, told Middle East Eye.
“I already have a water well which would have saved me a lot of money if used for irrigation, but the elevated chlorine concentration and salinity levels have rendered the well useless. We cannot even use it for bathing because the water would damage our skin.”
Shallouf said he had tried to grow several types of crops in the past, but always ended up incurring huge losses due to the damage caused by poor quality water.
Deterioration of water quality
The long-term Israeli blockade has caused a “serious deterioration” of water quality in Gaza, making 97 percent of the water contaminated, according to the Geneva-based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.
The situation is compounded by an acute electricity crisis that stymies the operation of water wells and sewage treatment plants, leading to about 80 percent of Gaza’s untreated sewage to be discharged into the sea while 20 percent seeps into underground water, the NGO said.
It added that recent data shows about a quarter of the diseases spread in Gaza are caused by water pollution, and 12 percent of the deaths of young children and infants are linked to intestinal diseases related to contaminated water.
“A civilian population caged in a toxic slum from birth to death are forced to witness the slow poisoning of their children and loved ones by the water they drink and likely the soil in which they harvest, endlessly, with no change in sight,” Muhammed Shehada, the group’s chief of programmes and communications, said in an oral statement made at the 48th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) earlier this month.
As a result of the water pollution, farmers and landowners in most areas of the coastal enclave have to pay about two Israeli shekels (around $0.60) for each 1,000-litre-tank used for irrigation.
“We use huge amounts of water for the crops, the 1,000-litre tank is nothing. If we have to pay two shekels for every tank, the whole process sometimes becomes unworthy of the efforts,” Shallouf said.
Iyad Shallouf says he pays around 100 shekels ($31) per day to fill up the 80 cubic metre artificial water pond on his land, which is used for irrigation (Mohammed al-Hajjar/MEE)
Shallouf spends around $1,000 a month to buy water and to fill artificial water ponds in his land for irrigation. Sometimes, the high costs of water and fertilisers, combined with the shortage of fuel and electricity used to pump the water, lead to heavy losses for farmers.
“Today, our decision as farmers to plant certain type of crops is completely linked to the availability of water. For example, you probably won’t see farmers growing cucumbers or strawberries in these areas, because these types of crops require large amounts of fresh water. So instead we grow green peppers and other crops that don’t require much water.”
In the area where Shallouf’s farm is located, vast areas of agricultural lands have been turned into residential areas because of the water shortage.
“Many farmers thought it was not worth it to continue growing crops that would eventually get damaged by contaminated water or by the lack of fresh water, so they just sold their lands or built residential homes and apartments on them instead.”
‘Unfit for human consumption’
The water crisis has been steadily worsening since the beginning of the Israeli blockade, and reached its peak in 2020.
In 2020, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimated that only 10 percent of the population of the blockaded enclave had direct access to clean and safe drinking water, while more than one million residents – around half of the population – lacked water and sanitation interventions.
Water with high saline levels in several areas across the Strip forces hundreds of thousands of households to buy water for drinking and bathing.
A Palestinian man checks the water tap in his home in Gaza’s al-Nuseirat refugee camp, where water supply is constantly interrupted, on 5 March 2019 (Mohammed al-Hajjar/MEE)
While the seawater has a salinity of roughly 30,000 parts per million (ppm), domestic water in some areas in Gaza reaches up to a third this number.
This is equivalent to 10 grams of salt per one litre of water, a level considered very high, according to Ahmed Safi, a Palestinian expert in water and environmental sciences.
“Much of the water in Gaza, including drinking water, is contaminated by nitrates, in addition to salt and high levels of chlorine, which causes residents multiple diseases. In some areas, you cannot even use the water for bathing,” he said.
“The main reason for the water crisis in Gaza is the overuse of groundwater caused by the population increase due to many factors, starting from the influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees during the Palestinian Nakba back in 1948.”
More than 2.1 million people live in the coastal enclave, covering a total area of 360 square kilometres, making the blockaded Strip one of the most densely populated areas on earth.
Around 70 percent of the population are refugees who were forced to leave their hometowns and villages in other parts of the occupied Palestinian territories upon the creation of Israel.
“The treatment of wastewater is another complicated problem. For years, sewage systems depended on pits in the ground that collected wastewater, eventually seeping into groundwater and contaminating it with nitrates. This system is still being used in some areas until now,” Safi added.
As a result, there has been a 13-14 percent increase in the number of kidney failure patients every year in the Strip, according to Dr Abdullah al-Qishawi, head of the dialysis department at Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital.
“We currently have 1,000 patients who come to the dialysis department three times a week. Of those cases, at least 20 percent are caused by water contamination,” he told MEE.
“Here in the dialysis department, you will notice that most patients come from areas adjacent to the borders, where the water crisis remains at its peak.”
Qishawi said that although there are no specialised studies in Gaza that address the relation between the rising number of kidney failure cases and water contamination in the Strip, doctors can assume that contaminated water is the cause for kidney problems.
“Kidney failure is usually caused by other diseases like diabetes, high blood pressure or renal calculi. However, a large number of people diagnosed with kidney failure in Gaza do not suffer any of these diseases, which is an indication that it is caused by the water that is unfit for human consumption,” he explained.
Power cuts
The electricity supply in Gaza remains highly dependent on the political situation. During tensions between Israeli and Palestinian armed groups, the Israeli authorities usually suspend fuel shipments and close the Kerem Shalom crossing at the junction of Gaza–Israel, forcing the Strip’s sole power plant to shut down.
In the best situation, residents of the Gaza Strip receive electricity in an eight-hour rotation – eight hours of electricity followed by eight hours of blackout.
During these long hours of power cuts, the functionality of the Strip’s infrastructure is severely affected, and generators that pump clean water from wells into homes would stop working, essentially cutting off water resources for a large portion of the local population.
“Our daily schedule depends on the availability of electricity and water. If we have electricity, that means that we have water to bathe, cook, wash the dishes, clean, and drink. If there is no electricity for several hours, our life simply stops,” Areej Muhammed, a 29-year-old mother from west of Gaza, told MEE.
“During the time when electricity and water are shut off, we just sit there waiting for it to come back. We reschedule all our tasks and daily routine according to the schedule of water and electricity,” she added.
A report of a field assessment of health conditions in the occupied Palestinian territory released by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in 2016 revealed that over one quarter of illnesses in the Gaza Strip are related to the pollution of water, which is also a primary cause of child morbidity.
In 2017, the European Union and Unicef funded a €10m seawater desalination plant in Gaza to improve access to drinking water for thousands of residents. But with the ongoing power crisis, the plant cannot work at full capacity.
However, due to fuel shortages, treatment plants that process wastewater work at a reduced capacity, forcing the water authority to dump contaminated and partially treated sewage water into the sea.
Devastated infrastructure
In the Israeli military’s successive attacks on the Gaza Strip since 2008, Israeli forces have targeted the water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) infrastructure multiple times, including areas containing water wells and pipelines, sanitation facilities, as well as municipality buildings operating sanitation and sewage services.
In its latest attack in May, Israel launched an 11-day-military operation on the Strip, directly targeting vital civilian infrastructure, and resulting in long-term damage.
A Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment conducted by the World Bank in the aftermath of the attack revealed that the Strip has incurred up to $380m in physical damage and $190m in economic losses, directly affecting the residents’ right to access safe water.
A child cycles near a water desalination plant run by the local water authority in al-Nuseirat refugee camp, on 15 March, 2019 (Mohammed al-Hajjar/MEE)
Before the attack in May, the average daily consumption of water in Gaza per capita was around 88 litres, which was between the WHO’s recommendation of 50-100 litres required per person per day to ensure that the most basic needs are met and few health concerns arise.
In the aftermath of the attack, Oxfam reported that 400,000 people in Gaza did not have access to a water supply as a result of the severe destruction in infrastructure.
Today, hundreds of thousands of Gaza residents have to buy water from private desalination plants.
“About two years ago, my youngest son suffered from severe diarrohea and abdominal pain, and it turned out it was due the consumption of domestic tap water. After that day, I started buying water from trucks,” Abu Sameh Omar, 40, a resident of central Gaza city, told MEE.
“We usually can afford (to buy) the minimum amount of drinking water each month. It is more expensive than the water we receive at home, but that option is undrinkable.”
“What I cannot afford is to allow my children to drink that water and fall ill.”
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Featured image: Palestinian children drink water from a public water tank in al-Nuseirat refugee camp in Gaza on 15 March, 2019 (Mohammed al-Hajjar/MEE)
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E-mails sent to millions of employees across Canada titled: ‘COMPULSORY VACCINATION POLICY AGAINST COVID-19’ emphasize that companies are promoting safety in the workplace in order to prevent the potential spread of the virus (today, while writing this text, 34,802 people or 0.09% of the total population are reported to be infected), which is why the decision to apply mandatory vaccination for all employees was enacted.
This decision enters into effect on November 1, 2021.
Every employee working from an office, attending meetings or in the field must be fully vaccinated, regardless of the nature of their employment, whether working from the office or remotely.
Furthermore, by no later than December 31, employees should provide proof and confirmation that they have been vaccinated or provide medical documentation or give some other reason based on the Human Rights Act that exempts them from the vaccination requirement. Along with a written request for ‘exemption’, they should also enclose a confirmation of a medical or religious reason based on the Human Rights Act. The request will be taken into account by the company’s management on an individual basis and may or may not be accepted. Also, all those who have not been fully vaccinated are urged to do so immediately. Companies are generous in giving a 3-hour paid leave if needed, in order to receive the vaccine.
However, there was not a single word in the e-mailed announcement about the Canadian Constitution and what it states about the adopted measures. Namely, on the basis of which law and article can a decision be made regarding the mandatory immunization of the entire population? In Canada, the flagship of Western democracy, this basic constitutional question is almost never posed or talked about.
On the other hand, on October 13, 2021 the French Senate rejected the bill mandating compulsory vaccination against the Coronavirus disease. The proposal submitted by the Socialists at the end of August was rejected by 262 votes, with only 64 senators voting to put the bill forward. Thereby, the Senate has failed to adopt the law which “which establishes a mandatory vaccination against COVID-19.”
As the Constitution is the highest law of a state, the Constitution of the Republic of Serbia (one of those small countries often called ‘backward’ and ‘uncivilized’ in the West) stipulates that the universal human right is the right to freedom. People make decisions by their own free will regarding issues that concern their well-being and health, while the Constitution of Serbia ‘incorporates’ the right of citizens to independently make decisions regarding these matters.
As a small number have trust in the justice of the Canadian system and the Human Rights Act (which mainly deals with the LGBT, LGBTQ, LGBTQA and LGBTQ2S populations), many Christian Orthodox believers have flocked to their churches seeking not only solace but also a written request of exemption from the mandatory vaccinations – based on religious reasons.
The church is a fortress and a beacon in this general planetary chaos, as it always has been in previous centuries.
However, the Greek and Serbian Orthodox Churches clergy in Canada quote to their parishioners, just like to the author of this text, the government guidance, with the request to remain anonymous.
“I am sorry, but a decree from the Diocese was sent and we have no authority to give any such confirmation.”
“The situation is completely muddled but we must endure to the end. Try not to get vaccinated. We pray to God to help us.”
“Most bishops and a number of priests have already been vaccinated. Only one Russian priest issues certificates of exemption, thus respecting the will of the faithful.”
If a believer seeks confirmation and refuses to be vaccinated, why does the church deny them this opportunity?
One priest acknowledged that the Synod of the Greek Orthodox Church held no view on this issue, but it permitted each priest to hold his own opinion. The religious body considers the vaccination policy a medical issue but it also has a political stance, which is why the Synod declines to issue ‘exemption’ certificates. In fact, unvaccinated residents can leave Canada until October 30, 2021 but they cannot return without a vaccination certificate. The same rule applies to domestic travel by plane, train, or boat between the many provinces and territories of Canada.
In any case, the only bright spot in these muddled times is the afore mentioned Russian priest who consented to provide an ‘exemption’ certificate but the question still remains whether the managements of various companies will accept it or not.
You see, it is raining… The weather is bad
When joining the protest rally that took place in Toronto (with a population of over 6 million) on Saturday, October 16, to rub shoulders with those fighting against the restrictive (new) Covid measures and standing for freedom and the right to have their opinion and their position and to preserve the dignity given to them by birth as human beings, we two Serbs (my friend and I) found ourselves among some hundred or so ‘Canadian’ protesters, several Chinese people, and one Australian. When we asked an ‘authentic’ Canadian woman why there were so few people at the protest, unlike in Australia or Europe, the answer was completely shocking: “You see, it’s raining… the weather’s bad.”
A Chinese man at the October 16, 2021 protests
Appeased by actual well-being (the rich) or fake comfort (the majority of the population is deep in debt), on this rainy day Canadians chose to watch TV or dine at a restaurant (restaurants restrict entrance to COVID-19 vaccine certificate holders).
The question arises: why was there no closing credits theme music at the protest for the end credits for democracy in this vast country!? After all, the foundation of democracy is the freedom of choice…
The overture for the October or July “Trail balloon”
In mid-July, some distressing news appeared on local portals: “Seneca College is the first Canadian university requiring all students and employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19.”
Considering that at that point in time, a mere 0.001% of the population were infected, according to official data, it was unclear why the Seneca College management had decided on this drastic measure.
In fact, this decision posed numerous questions that required answers from the Seneca College representatives, as well as those from the legal and medical professions, but also the international community, which kept its silence during the summer of 2021.
Other universities in Ontario, including Ryerson, Ontario Tech and Western University, stated then that they would require vaccinations for students living in dormitories but not for those living off-campus.
In Manitoba, university representatives assured concerned students, professors and staff that they would not make vaccinations compulsory. “We can’t demand anybody to get the vaccine. That’s not within our power or in the province’s power,” the president of Brandon University, David Docherty, told CBC News TV.
It is now completely clear that this decision by Seneca College was not just a ‘trial balloon’ but rather, an overture for the measures adopted on October 6, and that young people in this country, once a symbol of democracy, would not have a choice regarding vaccinations at any of Canada’s universities.
The bold representatives of the universities in the province of Manitoba spearheaded by Docherty have realized that “the province’s power” is not at all relevant but that rather, it has passed into the hands of the PM who autonomously makes decisions for the betterment of the nation.
At any rate, Prime Minister Trudeau, as soon as he announced the new COVID-19 measures, left for a vacation to the District of Tofino (British Columbia), which is known for its wild nature, ancient rainforests, and sandy beaches where visitors can surf all year round. As October remains remarkably warm, Canadians, while fearing for their jobs and freedom of movement, can conjure up their PM performing miraculous acrobatics on a surfboard. For, once they allow themselves to be deprived of their freedom of opinion and the right to choose, it is guaranteed that those who are to come after Trudeau will also be ‘surfing’ on the very same wave.
The dark (non)democratic autumn days are quickly passing by and heading towards camps for the unvaccinated. But in all honesty: the tradition of labour camps and reserves in Canada is rich and long.
There are some 3,100 reserves in Canada for the indigenous nations, according to a 2011 survey. The rights and freedoms of Canada’s First Nations are regulated by the Indian Act passed in 1876 by the Canadian Parliament, and the Canadian federal government has been given the exclusive authority to pass laws relating to “Indians and the land reserved for them.”
At the beginning of the First World War, thousands of immigrants were considered enemies of Canada just because they had arrived from the Austro-Hungarian Empire and they were confined in labour camps across the country. Thousands of Ukrainians, as well as Serbs, Hungarians, Germans, and Romanians were arrested and taken to camps where they subsisted in harsh conditions, starving and freezing, until 1919. The most famous camp that housed many Serbs was located in northern Ontario.
During the Second World War, there were about 40 camps in Canada intended for the accommodation of German soldiers captured in North Africa. One such camp in Manitoba, operating from October 1943 to October 1945, housed German prisoners of war who were engaged in numerous work projects.
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Marina Bulatović is a journalist and regular member of the Independent Journalists’Association of Serbia (NUNS) since 1998.
Featured image: There was a wide variety of badges for purchase at the protest/All images in this article are from the author
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The United States’ chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan has dented the credibility of the trans-Atlantic relationship and dealt a body blow to the NATO. These developments add to the already existing frustration in Washington that the European allies disfavour its confrontational Indo-Pacific Strategy. Europe regards China as an economic competitor and ‘systemic rival’, but prefers the path of engagement and dialogue.
While a break-up of the trans-Atlantic alliance is inconceivable, the centrifugal forces at play are unprecedented. The China-focused policy of the US is contributing to the unraveling of the Western alliance system. The Quad, which the Trump administration resuscitated to counter the challenges posed by China’s rise, has no European content.
The West Asian Quad (Quad-2), comprising the US, Israel, the UAE and India, which the Biden Administration unveiled two weeks ago, also follows the same format — the US networking with regional partners.
Both Quad-1 and Quad-2 have China in their crosshairs. Both are conceived as ‘coalitions of the willing’. Both formats have sea power as the dominant paradigm. Both are anchored on the control of the chokepoints in sea lanes — the Malacca Straits and the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait respectively. The Malacca Straits provide sea passage to the Indian Ocean from the South China Sea; the Bab el-Mandeb Strait connects the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Aden to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal.
Now, it is on the Yemeni island of Socotra, which overlooks the strategic Bab al-Mandab Strait, that the UAE and Israel have created an intelligence gathering base. The UAE has deployed hundreds of troops on the strategic island since May 2018, disregarding the protest by the Yemeni government. The base can provide critical security services to the US regarding the Chinese economic activity, especially its trade with Europe, and the movements of the Chinese Navy.
The island of Socotra is known as the “Jewel of the Gulf of Aden” and is the largest of the archipelago of the same name, which consists of four islands and two islets sitting at a strategic location in the Indian Ocean, off the Horn of Africa’s coast, in the Arabian Sea. Most exports of oil and natural gas from the Persian Gulf that transit the Suez Canal and the Suez-Mediterranean Pipeline pass through the Bab al-Mandeb Strait. read more
For years, the UAE has been seeking to annex the island, and the collapse of the Yemeni state due to years of instability has paved the way for this takeover.
An interesting sideshow here is the UAE’s diplomatic, military and economic competition with Saudi Arabia in Yemen. For the UAE, controlling Socotra means strengthening its commercial and military projection in the Indian Ocean, thus emphasising its rising inter-regional prestige.
On the other hand, Saudi Arabia’s interest lies in curbing the Emirati influence on the island thereby reaffirming Riyadh’s pre-eminence in Yemen as well as in the balance of power in the Gulf region.
Security analysts estimate that the spy base in Socotra will also be used to monitor Pakistan, especially Gwadar Port. Clearly, the Quad-2 impacts the power dynamic in the region. read more
The Israeli media has reported that Socotra Island is “attracting a lot of attention from the Israeli security services.” It is entirely conceivable that in reality, the base is an US-Israeli project. The US has been making efforts to derail the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor which connects Gwadar to Kashgar in Xinjiang.
The Israeli military intelligence website Debka File reported in May that the UAE is also building a new air base on a volcanic island off Yemen called Perim Island, which will give the “means of controlling oil tanker and commercial shipping through the Red Sea’s southern chokepoint and up to the Suez Canal.” read more
The well-known Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution, Bruce Riedel wrote in an analysis in May that Saudi Arabia and the UAE have “entrenched their hold on strategic parts” of Yemen and are “unlikely to give up their gains without significant international pressure.”
Riedel wrote that the Saudis occupied the province of al-Mahrah, Yemen’s second largest, which borders on Oman and has 20 bases and outposts in the province now. Al-Mahrah port gives Saudi Arabia direct access to the Indian Ocean. According to Riedel, Riyadh plans to build an oil pipeline from Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province through al-Mahrah to the sea which would ease Saudi dependence on the Straits of Hormuz for exporting oil.
On the other hand, the UAE’s focus is on Yemen’s strategic islands.Riedel wrote: “The United States should not be a party to the dismemberment of Yemen. It is not too early to quietly put down a marker that if a cease-fire is arranged in Yemen, the Saudis and Emiratis will need to evacuate al-Mahrah, Mayun, and Socotra, and return control to the Yemenis.” read more
Indeed, given such high stakes affecting the US’ Indo-Pacific strategy to contain China, it is improbable that Washington will ask the UAE, Israel and Saudi Arabia to leave Yemen alone.
Put simply, Quad-1 and Quad-2 are joined at the hips. Given the Quad-2’s agenda to monitor China and Pakistan, Washington has thoughtfully invited India to join. Of course, Israel and the UAE also have very friendly ties with India.
However, a few caveats must be added. First, it is one hundred percent certain that whatever UAE and Israel do in Yemen and the Arabian Sea will have an Iran angle to it. In fact, Iran is under no illusions on that score. The Tehran Times recently featured an interview with Yemen’s ambassador to Iran. According to the ambassador, it is an Anglo-American condominium that is at work in Yemen and it is only with US backing that the UAE and Saudi Arabia have pursued such an interventionist policy. read more
The conflict in Yemen has been one of the most brutal wars in the post-Cold War era. Why should India have Yemeni blood on its hands? Equally, Quad-2 has an anti-Iran dimension to it. India-Iran ties can never be the same gain if Delhi teams up with the US and Israel, UAE in Iran’s immediate neighbourhood.
Third, Quad-2 is a major step in boosting the US-Indian quasi-alliance. As the latest developments in Sudan show, a nasty geopolitical struggle is erupting for control of the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea. For Israel, the great game provides ideal setting to get embedded in Arab politics. But India needs to be circumspect.
It is not in India’s interests to needlessly annoy a host of countries in the region and from outside the region such as Turkey, Iran, Qatar, China, Pakistan — and even Russia. The bottomline is that the government must explain how India benefits out of this joyride in Quad-2.
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Featured image: A virtual meeting of the foreign ministers of India, Israel, UAE and the US took place on October 18, 2021
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Lawyer Dipali Ojha of the Indian Bar Association details the efforts she and her colleagues are making to push India’s courts to hold corrupt covid task force officials accountable for multiple acts of malfeasance, to stop the rollout of a newly developed DNA vaccine for children approved under an emergency use authorization [EUA], and to investigate the doctor who issued the EUA.
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Whether it was “a coup or not a coup” by definition, description or explanation, what happened October 25 was simply power shift or appropriately political power grab under gun point (unconstitutional change of government and state power) in Sudan. It has sparked several academic and non-academic discussions throughout the world. Chairman of the Sovereignty Council of Sudan Abdel Fattah Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, as first steps in an announcement publicly declared a state of emergency and suspended both the council and the government.
He, however, defended the state administrative forcible change over as a necessary step to prevent civil war. He further suspended a number of provisions of the constitutional declaration, which sets the frames of the interim period after toppling of President Omar al-Bashir, who had ruled the country for 30 years, and determines relations between the military and civilian authorities, but sternly promised that next political elections planned for July 2023.
Abdel Fattah al-Burhan sets the primary task to resolve the stalemate between political forces and the army, reshape the declaration towards the transition to the civilian government and political elections. “We are aiming to see through a transition to a civilian government. The mistrust between transitional parties occurred after the signing of the peace agreement in Juba,” Abdel Fattah al-Burhan said in his first public address to the nation.
Sudan, located in northeast Africa, has deepening economic crisis, so many social and political forces. While some are advocating for developing democracy, others have, under the circumstances, aligned with the military, which has accused the civilian governing parties of mismanagement and monopolizing power. Apparently, the Sovereign Council – established as a collective presidency body comprises both civilians and military leaders, but tensions between the civilian and military leaders have persisted since after toppling Omar al-Bashir.
Condemnation have routinely come from the United Nations, the African Union, Regional Organizations and individual external countries. Multiple international actors, including the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany, have made clear their support for Sudan’s civilian transition. Human Rights Watch, for instance, has seen the takeover risks precipitating a reversal of the small but important gains made over the course of the last two years under the now-dissolved transitional government.
Interesting and most importantly, there are two main issues to understand and take into consideration, here. The first the strategic location of Sudan and second who is the new Sudanese leader in relation to key global players in the North and Northeast Africa.
Sudan as Strategic Location
As noted by Dr. Mohamed Chtatou, Professor of Education Science at the University in Rabat, there are different economic, geopolitical and geostrategic challenges in the Mediterranean Sea, the location of Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Sudan.
At the crossroads of three continents, the Mediterranean is an area under tension, with important strategic issues: confrontation between Arabs and Europeans, rivalry between powers, colonization, control of the straits and the Suez Canal. It remains a space of confrontation between great powers, and distant powers (United States, Russia) continue looking to invest in it, and now includes newcomers like China.
He further argues that the region is one of the oldest maritime trade areas and thus subject to many challenges. The Mediterranean Sea junction of three continents and bordered by a great diversity of countries and cultures, is also in the age of globalization. He stresses the function of a maritime corridor, not only of interest to the Egypt of the canal but also some containerization hubs in the region.
Further tracking down from the Maghreb coastline to Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia, there are many competing interests within EU countries, notably between France and Germany, and in the Arab world. Nevertheless, from a strictly economic point of view, the Maghreb remains a strategic trade area for the EU since the majority of exports and imports from Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia go to or come from European countries. Likewise, in terms of energy, Algeria alone supplies around 15% of the EU’s natural gas needs. Along these, Sudan also presents itself for foreign naval base.
Who is Abdelrahman al-Burhan?
According to a report written by Oscar Rickett from Middle East Eye, General Abdel Fattah al-Burkhan is the Chairman of Sudan’s Transitional Sovereign Council (TSC) since April 2019, and is Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. He is described as a veteran soldier, and had long been one of Bashir’s reliable lieutenants – both literally and politically.
Born in 1960 into a Sufi family in a village north of Khartoum, Burhan studied in a Sudanese army college, then later in Jordan and at the Egyptian military academy in Cairo, where fellow alumni included future Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. He is married and has three children.
Burhan and Sisi are longstanding friends, though the Sudanese general has lifelong affiliations with the kinds of Islamist movements that Sisi has outlawed. Still, as Patrick Smith, editor of Africa Confidential, told Middle East Eye (MEE), the two military leaders are united by “the greater good of stopping democracy”.
His first international trip after becoming Sudan’s de facto head of state was to Egypt in May 2019. From there he went on to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia. Earlier in his working life, Burhan served briefly as Sudan’s defence attache in Beijing, but his military career under Bashir was defined by prominent roles played in South Sudan, Darfur and Yemen where, as head of the armed forces, he helped supply the Saudi-led coalition with Sudanese mercenaries.
Burhan’s time in Darfur is significant also because it brought him into contact with the warlord Mohamed Hamdan Dagolo, widely known as Hemeti. Hemeti became leader of the Janjaweed, the Arab militias that brought death and despair to Darfur, and which have since morphed into the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), with Hemeti still at the helm.
As head of the Sudanese Armed Forces and Rapid Support Forces respectively, Burhan and Hemeti are both allies and rivals. Hemeti serves as vice president of the transitional military council, but his family and the RSF benefit enormously from their control of gold mines in Darfur, as well as from the patronage of the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Sudan’s military has, in theory, a bigger budget, and is in control of a significant military industrial complex.
These various sources of power and wealth have come under threat from Sudan’s civilian-led government and it is thought that this is partly why Burhan and Hemeti have moved when they have. Burhan was due to step down as the military’s chair of the sovereign council this year, to be replaced by a civilian appointee.
Both he and Hemeti are said to be mindful of being held accountable for past actions in Darfur, and Burhan had been lobbying to dissolve the civilian-led council of ministers, according to Africa Confidential. Hemeti is a more charismatic, more cartoonish figure than the quietly spoken, methodical Burhan, and the RSF leader is more closely associated with the atrocities surrounding the transition to democracy – most notably, the massacre of more than 128 people in Khartoum in June 2019 – than the armed forces general.
Russia’s Relationship with Sudan
As the local Russian media, recopying or quoting from Vedomosti, Kommersant financial newspaper writes, “Under al-Bashir, Khartoum and Moscow launched talks on the establishment of a Russian naval facility in Sudan on the Red Sea.
A related agreement was signed with Sudan’s Sovereign Council after al-Bashir’s ouster, but it wasn’t ratified and in June 2021, the chief of staff of the Sudanese Armed Forces said that the African country planned to review the agreement’s conditions. Now, with the new political developments, the issue of a Russian naval facility in Sudan “has been put on the back burner” as there are no reliable politicians in Sudan, who would be willing to publicly discuss the topic with Russia.
“It’s Washington who is the key actor in the Sudanese drama. Much will depend on whether the United States will continue to unequivocally condemn the coup or soften its position. If Washington moves to bring sanctions back in order to support civilian activists, it will lead to a complete socio-economic disaster in Sudan,” Associate Professor at the Russian State University for the Humanities Sergei Seregichev told Kommersant.
According to him, any future developments in Sudan will play into Russia’s hands but it would be more beneficial for Moscow if the military remained in power in the country because the less influence the West has in Sudan the better.
What is more, many Russian academics and politicians share the above view from Associate Professor at the Russian State University for the Humanities Sergei Seregichev, that Abdel Fattah al-Burhan remains number one in Sudan. Despite everything including, at the same time, with high expectation to see the involvement of the people in the political process and developing a genuine democracy, Russia practically needs leaders who cooperates usefully and manipulatively to realize its strategic goals in the region.
Egypt’s General Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi and Sudan’s General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan are suitable for Russia. These two situations also compared well to Libya, Russia continuously advocates for all-inclusive political forces paradigm, but offer enormous support for Field Marshal Khalifa Belqasim Haftar. The obvious trends are that Russia follows that Gaddafi-era, Mubarak-era and Bashir-era military personalities to enforce or operationalize its military-technical cooperation – a very good sign for boosting geo-strategic influence in the part of Africa.
The UN and the African Union
The United Nations, the African Union, Regional Organizations and individual external countries raised dissatisfaction about the political developments, further condemned the undemocratic and forced change in Sudan. Of course, these were routinely reported in the media. UN Secretary General António Manuel de Oliveira Guterres, in an official statement posted on Twitter, said “there must be full respect for the constitutional charter to protect the hard-won political transition.”
The Chairperson of the African Union Commission, Moussa Faki Mahamat, has learned with deep dismay of the serious development of the current situation in Sudan. Faki Mahamat calls for the immediate resumption of consultations between civilians and military within the framework of the political declaration and the constitutional decree. He, however, reaffirms that dialogue and consensus be the only important path to save the country and its democratic transition, and further calls for the necessary strict respect of human rights. In the end, Sudan was suspended from the African Union.
Interestingly, Russia is among a few countries that have been extra mindful in its criticisms of the power swift in Sudan. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Russian Special Presidential Envoy for the Middle East Mikhail Bogdanov and Ministry’s Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, considered as “unacceptable” the foreign intervention in Sudan’s internal affairs.
On October 18, Sergey Lavrov issued a stern warning to external countries and specifically to the United States during a press conference with his Guinea-Bissau counterpart Suzi Carla Barbosa. He unreservedly reminded that Russia initially sought to preserve the territorial integrity and unity of Sudan, by all means necessary, but a number of actors, led by the United States decided that the Sudanese people should live in separate states.
“We believe that any interference in this country’s internal affairs must be stopped,” he said. “The Sudanese people must define their own fate; we expect that everyone who is trying to counter this principle now realize their responsibility not to allow another hotbed of destabilization on the long-suffering continent of Africa.”
The Minister underscored that
“Russia did a lot to make this ‘divorce’ peaceful, but interference has begun after it: the imposition of approaches to the building of democracy in its Western understanding, of shock reforms, which caused a reverse reaction. The social and economic state of the people and unemployment has worsened abruptly, and the traditional structure of the Sudanese society is currently under serious tension.”
On October 27, Bogdanov had a phone call with US Special Envoy for the Horn of Africa Jeffrey Feltman, after which the ministry issued an official statement.
“The sides discussed the recent development in the Republic of Sudan. The Russian side underscored the need for prompt stabilization of the situation, settlement of the existing intra-Sudanese controversies via an inclusive dialogue with involvement of all political forces in the interest of achieving a national accord. And further the resolution of urgent social and economic problems of Sudan,” the Ministry said in its statement, adding that the Russian side “emphasized the unacceptability of external intervention in the internal affairs of this country.”
On October 21, during her weekly briefing, Zakharova reiterated thus:
“I can only reaffirm our position. I would like to remind everyone that some external players, primarily the United States, decided that it would be better for the Sudanese if they suddenly lived in two different states. A campaign of foreign interference was launched, with attempts made to impose on the Sudanese the approaches and ways to build democracy that the West deemed appropriate. As the result, serious tensions have developed in the traditional structure of the Sudanese society.”
She believes that
“any interference in the internal affairs of Sudan, or any other country, should be stopped and that the Sudanese people must determine their own future themselves. It is our fundamental principle, which is based on international law and the UN Charter. We do hope that all those who are trying to reject this principle are aware of their responsibility for the future of the state and the people whose life they want to change according to their own pattern.”
Understanding Russia’s Special Interest in Sudan
While the creation of the two separate Sudanese states were determined through a referendum – the will of the Sudanese themselves, it is equally important to understand Russia’s frequent expression of sympathy and its special interest in Sudan. Russia has had “friendly relations” with Sudan, dating back from Omar al-Bashir, who had ruled the country for 30 years.
Before his overthrow, Omar al-Bashir made one more trip to Russia in November 2017, agreements were reached on Russia’s assistance in modernizing the Sudanese armed forces. Khartoum also said at the time it was interested in discussing the issue of using Red Sea bases with Moscow. That proposal drove Moscow into signing a document, after several discussions and negotiations, the possibility of constructing a naval base in the region, along the Red Sea and in the Indian Ocean.
According to the executive order, the published document says “an agreement between the Russian Federation and the Republic of Sudan on creating a facility of the Navy of the Russian Federation in the territory of the Republic of Sudan be adopted” and further authorizes “the Defense Ministry of Russia to sign the aforementioned agreement on behalf of the Russian Federation.” The document stipulates that a maximum of four warships may stay at the naval logistics base, including “naval ships with the nuclear propulsion system on condition of observing nuclear and environmental safety norms.”
That document submitted by Russia’s Defense Ministry, approved by the Foreign Ministry, the Supreme Court, the Prosecutor General’s Office, the Investigative Committee of Russia and the Russian Cabinet. As the document says, the Russian Navy’s logistics facility in Sudan “meets the goals of maintaining peace and stability in the region, is defensive and is not aimed against other countries.”
Foreign Minister of Sudan Mariam Al-Sadiq Al-Mahdi following talks in Moscow on July 12, this year, together with Lavrov, agreed to the ratification of the document by both the State Duma of the Russian Federation and Parliament of Sudan. On July 1, President of Russia Vladimir Putin submitted an agreement on building a Russian naval station in Sudan for ratification by the State Duma. Earlier, Sudan announced its decision to revise the 25-year agreement that was first brokered by its ousted leader Omar al-Bashir during a meeting with Vladimir Putin in 2017 to establish a Russian naval base in Port Sudan, on Sudan’s Red Sea coast.
After the 2017 meeting, the project did not take up immediately though. But signifies that Russia will make one huge stride by establishing a naval facility in Sudan. It distinctively marks its maritime security presence in the Mediterranean and the Red Sea region. Sharing a northern border with Egypt, Sudan is located on the same strategic coastline along the Red Sea. Russia needs both Sudan (Northeast Africa) and Egypt (conduit to Maghreb) to have unshakeable influence in the region.
During the first Russia-Africa summit held in Sochi, President Vladimir Putin held business discussions with Chairman of the Sovereignty Council of Sudan Abdel Fattah Abdelrahman al-Burhan. Putin noted that “Sudan is certainly one of our long-standing reliable partners” referring to days of Omar Al-Bashir.
With the internal political processes are taking place there, Putin said “the signing of the constitutional declaration, the formation of the Sovereignty Council and the establishment of a transitional government to be the first steps aimed at getting the country on the path of sustainable development. Many tasks still lie ahead. We intend to continue rendering all necessary aid and support for the normalization of the situation.”
Abdel Fattah Burhan replied:
“Our relations have a long history: 60 years ago they began to develop, and you have always supported Sudan, always stood by Sudan, and we always know that Russia stands together with countries that fight for their rights, for justice. We would like to tell you that the changes in Sudan are positive. They are happening in a successful and positive way. Today armed forces and coalition forces play an important role in these events, and they want to build the future of Sudan.”
“As you have already mentioned in your speech, our relations are developing, and these bilateral relations are based on several agreements. We hope that we will sign new documents and cooperation agreements, and you will help us, in particular, to build up our armed forces,” the Sudanese leader said, and concluded “We have much common ground, such as, investment cooperation. We also cooperate at international forums, and share common positions on many international problems.”
African Leaders and Sustainable Development Goals
In this 21st Century, Africa need development especially building its most needed infrastructure, modernizing agriculture (large-scale food-production) and adding value to products (industrialization). Thus, foreign partners and potential external investors have to logically realize these, but it’s for African leaders to know that muscle-flexing (militarized or weaponized) approach is simply incorrect to addressing today’s Sustainable Development Goals.
In addition, rhetoric are not only ineffective in terms of conflict resolution but also may, in fact, be aggravating tensions and violence. Instead, African leaders require comprehensive development-oriented policies combined with good governance, these are the best solution, at least, to minimizing social conflicts and economic disparities, ultimately ensure that long-term peace and harmony on the continent.
Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations, Amina Mohammed, on October 28 meeting with diplomats emphasized the “vital importance” of peace and security in Africa, and highlighted how all African Union members, and other regional and sub-regional groups, can make lives more secure across the continent. She deployed African leaders’ largely ad hoc approach to the continent’s development issues, most often relegated to the background.
She explicitly pointed to a military coup d’état in Sudan, to continuing conflict in northern Ethiopia’s Tigray region, and persistent threats of terrorism and violent extremism. In her observation, there has been “a rise in seizures of power by force” and “a proliferation of militias” across Africa.
She said that despite these “worrisome developments” happening there in Africa, Africans have continue working relentlessly for a prosperous, sustainable and peaceful continent, based on the universal principles of human rights, as witnessed through growing cooperation between the United Nations, African Union and sub-regional organizations on sustainable development, elections and peace processes.
As always trumpeted, the global perception is that Africa remains as one of the world’s least developed regions, and deep-seated poverty despite its resources. In conclusion, and for this argument on conflict resolution must be seen inextricably incorporated into pursuing development goals, there is one simple surest way for an African Solution to African Problems: for Africa leaders necessarily resolve to “focus on sustainable development” and be abreast with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the AU’s Agenda 2063.
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Kester Kenn Klomegah, who worked previously with Inter Press Service (IPS), is now a frequent and passionate contributor to Global Research. As a versatile researcher, he believes that everyone deserves equal access to quality and trustworthy media reports.
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Comments Off on Whistleblower Emergency (ER) Doctor Talks About Spike in Strokes after Vaccine Rollout and Increased D-Dimer Levels Indicating New Blood Clots
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Too few among today’s citizens have come to the realization that the very same tactics used to spread fear of global warming and the demonization of a CO2 as the causal agency for climate change, is identical in principle to those techniques used to spread hysteria over a new pandemic. In both cases, the same sleight of hand was deployed by the same imperial interests designed to persuade humanity that our survival is threatened by a non-existent danger, while our salvation is found in a poison.
In this presentation delivered to the 76th Stiftung Corona Ausschuss, Canadian Patriot Review’s Matthew Ehret lays out the fallacy of statistical thinking, the fraud of computer models, manipulated data sets and false consensuses used to get seemingly educated people to turn off their own powers of thinking. Not only is the history of the Anglo American promotion of eugenics (pre and post WWII) featured in this lecture, but we also shed light on the causes of today’s manufactured energy crisis, the ugly agenda behind the Great Reset and also debunk the belief that CO2 has any causal connection to climate change.
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Once upon a time there was an organization called North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO for short. It was founded in 1949, and today consists of a group of 30 countries from Europe and North America. NATO supposedly exists to protect the people and territories of its members. Of the 30 member countries, 28 are in Europe and only two, the US and Canada, are in the Americas.
As part of NATO’s “Open Door Policy”, meaning that any country in the Euro-Atlantic area is free to join NATO if it is prepared to meet the standards and obligations of membership, contributes to the security of the Alliance, and shares NATO’s values of democracy, reform, and the rule of law. That’s part of what the NATO rules say.
Since 1949, NATO’s membership has grown from 12 to 30 countries. In 2020 NATO welcomed North Macedonia as the 30th member of the NATO Alliance.
NATO was created by the US Pentagon in close collaboration with the CIA, after WWII, under the pretext of providing “collective security against the threat posed by the Soviet Union.” So, NATO laid the groundwork for cheating the world into believing that the Soviet Union, just having lost some 30 million people in WWII and with a destroyed infrastructure – would be a threat to Europe. But big wonder, the deceit-media propaganda worked, as it does today with Covid, and as it does most of the times, currently painting another hot war on the wall.
Fearmongering is part of the strategy. For everything. Keep people in fear and they are vulnerable for any kind of manipulation. This is an old axiom, going back even farther than the Roman Empire. And it still works. People haven’t caught on to it – yet.
When that will happen – namely that people see behind this farce, behind the Bluff, the world will change. We will suddenly – or gradually, but ever faster – realize, the power is with us, the people.
Well-off people, especially in the US and Europe, living in the cocoon of a “comfort zone” believe anything they are told by the authorities, and by extension – by the bought media. These people obey the authorities, because after all, why thinking for themselves, if you pay a government that is supposed to do the thinking for you – right? The better off they are, the better they may be enslaved – and what’s worse, they become adamant and stubborn and righteous. They behave exactly as the “authorities” want them to behave to transform society into a tyranny, still under the pretext – “we are a democracy.” And yes, as long as we go along, we are doomed.
NATO should have taught us a good lesson. But if it had not been for Russia and China, we would still be crawling on our knees to please NATO, not even noticing that NATO is an empty shell, has no power and all they have left is some pompous people on top and in the middle, who would love to continue just for a bit longer keeping control over Europe and – well, they would like to believe – over the rest of the world.
One of the founding principles of NATO is Article 5 of its charter, which states that an armed attack on one member nation would be considered as an attack on all; insinuating a threat that NATO could start a WW if a country aggressed and provoked enough by NATO – say, the Soviet Union, now Russia, and / or China, would retaliate against NATO’s constant aggressions and provocations.
That was NATO then, and that’s what NATO would like to be today, and what they still pretend to be. But pretending is just about all they are able to muster at this point. Pretending is just another word for nothing left to lose (quote from Janis Joplin’s Bobby McG, “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose”). That’s NATO at its worst.
For some strange reason, until very recently, Russia has remained in an observer status associated with NATO, actually it’s hard to believe, associated with the arch-enemy number one? – The only and maybe THE explanation could be that by preserving this observer status they thought they were also some kind of an insider — but, that was an illusion from day one onwards.
Although there has never been a written record found to attest that NATO promised Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s Foreign Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, in 1990, not to move an inch beyond Berlin, Moscow believed the Genscher promise and that of other senior West German officials, in order to agree to the German unification. Today NATO supporters, even in German, say the only way a unified Germany could come about, was a “Germany unified in NATO”. It was a sheer lie, as none of NATO’s rules can legally negate a member country’s sovereignty. But the lie was swallowed and became the precedent-setting expansion of NATO.
That was then. Now is Now – 30 years later. NATO has expanded all the way to the doorsteps of Moscow. They would love to make Ukraine a NATO member, to move even closer to Moscow. One of the reasons for the “western fabricated” conflict with and in Belarus, is that toppling Lukashenko, would give the west an opportunity to put in a pro-western dictator, who eventually would open Belarus’s doors for NATO. The west is arrogantly and unrealistically dreaming. Mr. Putin and the Kremlin as whole will, of course, never allow such a move. But megalomania doesn’t see any limits.
In a related note, to better understand the whereabouts and purpose of NATO, faced with increasing pressure to dissolve the five member UN Security Council, President Putin warned on October 21, 2021: “If we remove the veto right of the permanent members, the UN would die the very same day – it would turn into the League of Nations. It would simply become a discussion platform”.
It may well be that the UN Security Council with five veto votes – as fragile as it may be – may fall apart, in which case the “geniuses” behind NATO may have thought, NATO may take over the role of the UN Security Council, all in the interest of the dying western empire.
NATO was created in 1949, just after WWII, very much with the League of Nations in mind. Created in 1919, just after WWI, the League of Nations was an imperial hoax, pretending and selling its world peace interests to a WWI beaten-down world as the last and greatest hope for “lasting peace”. By now we know the real history.
Fast forward. As RT aptly analyses on 25 October 2021,
“NATO’s bullish new plan to fight Russia on the seas, the skies and in space could backfire, igniting a catastrophic nuclear conflict. NATO’s new strategy to fight Russia across the width of Europe – from Baltic to Black Sea – has been approved. Unsurprisingly, the details are secret, but bloc officials have confirmed it includes nuclear, cyber and space warfare.”
“As you would expect, NATO insists that this cross-continental strategy will serve only defensive purposes and the US-led group has also emphasized that it does not believe that Russian attacks are imminent. In other words, NATO presents this initiative as an act of due diligence: Preparing for the worst imaginable scenario, while helping to avoid it ever becoming a reality by deterrence, as German Minister of Defense Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer has duly underlined.”
In other words, despite everything that was said and promised during Germany’s recent election campaign, to keep an open door to improve relations with Russia, is out of the window with the German Defense Minister’s statement. The “deterrence” argument is a sheer aggression towards Russia. It surely pleases NATO and much of the west’s neoliberal leadership, but certainly not a vast majority of Germans, and European citizens, who are eager to improve relations with a peaceful neighbor.
Yes, Russia is a peaceful neighbor.
Russia has never aggressed anybody – other than in self-defense, i.e., beating Nazi-Germany back to Berlin in WWII. Aggression is not in Russia’s nature. This contradicts all of western mainstream media lies. But like with other lies and hoaxes, the well-being living standards of Europeans bars them from seeing the light, from even wanting to see the truth. That’s sad. As when they will see the truth, because it crushes in on them, on us Europeans, it might be too late.
Of course, Moscow sees things differently – and rightly so. For the Kremlin expansion of NATO eastward has been an issue since the early 1990s, since the broken promise by German Foreign Minister Genscher – “NATO will not expand an inch towards the east”. As President Putin indicated on many occasions, there will be no expansion of NATO into Ukraine, nor into Belarus – or else. And the “else” is important, as NATO well knows.
Russia’s defense system is exponentally more efficient and more powerful and faster than that of the west. Therefore, continuing on this abysmal note, as NATO does, is not more than a bluff, and of course, an attempt to keep the west believing that NATO still has teeth, when in fact NATO is an empty shell; an empty over-stretched shell, with members, whose population would by a vast majority want to exit NATO – for whom NATO has no purpose anymore. It’s a sheer threat to peace. As the people and that’s what eventually counts – are not afraid of Russia or China.
It’s the fear-machine spreading false information – the western amply paid and ”subsidized” media – that make believe the danger is in the east. In fact, they keep building and maintaining a Manichean wall and view throughout the west. The Manichean philosophy is an old religion that breaks everything down into good or evil. It also means “duality,” so if your thinking is Manichean, you see things in black and white. And that’s precisely what the west is doing. It’s a reborn philosophy out of Washington. Massive cold war propaganda spread during the four decades after WWII throughout Europe, and by extension parts of Asia and Latin America.
NATO is spread so thinly around the globe – take the many direct or loaned military bases in the South China Sea, and surrounding China and Russia on land – some 3,000 bases – how could they be effective against the latest state of the art weaponry of Russia and China. None of the two countries are boasting with “deterrents”. They don’t need to.
They know and the west, especially Europe, should wake up to the idea – the hard reality – that the future is where the sun rises – in the East.
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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he has worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020)
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He is also a non-resident Sr. Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.
It seems that natural catastrophies have started to surround us everywhere – from the animal world next to us as well as from the sky above us. Is “nature” the enemy that has to be combatted today, be it by vaccinating humanity against the coronavirus that allegedly jumped out of the wilderness attacking us, be it by tearing down industrial production and consumption in order to avoid the alleged greenhouse gas CO2 emissions, being officially identified as the sole culprit of a so-called global warming? Or be it by applying methods of an alleged civil “geoengineering” against an ongoing climate change that seems to threaten the world?
One of the biggest and most costly construction projects on Samos in recent years is now open. I cycled around the completed site this past week. It is awesome in its scale (over 6 hectares) and is a dramatic addition to the island’s infrastructure.
People around the globe are protesting the loss of liberty, illegal mandates and tyrannical government overreach. Over the last eighteen months we’ve witnessed a removal of the liberties we hold dear. Every man, woman and childs’ basic human rights are under attack and we believe the power is with the people.
There is zero tolerance for electively taking a drug or a new vaccine and then dying! There’s zero tolerance for that. People don’t weigh it out and say, Oh well, I’ll take my chances and die!
According to The Guardian, the world nations, bound by treaty in the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), agree to “avoid dangerous climate change” by reducing greenhouse gas emissions established as the principal component of our distorted weather conditions.
According to the researchers and collaborators from the Australian University of Queensland and the University of Washington, the psychological interactions of lockdowns, warnings, “social distancing” and ever new “variants” led to a drastic increase in depression, anxiety disorders and permanent worry.
During the pandemic many deaths have occurred, approaching 2 million Americans. Ponder this: Have large numbers of excess deaths over pre-pandemic years resulted from something other than COVID infections?
On the latest episode of “Doctors and Scientists,” host Brian Hooker interviewed Jessica Rose, Ph.D., a computational biologist and Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) analyst. Rose discussed the problematic flaws in the VAERS system.
The central question raised in this study is the following: is there reliable evidence that SARS-CoV-2 has been isolated from an “unadulterated sample taken from a diseased patient”?
I write to you with very grave concerns around these Covid vaccinations and Covid generally, over the last 20 months I have seen a series of very disturbing patterns and patterns in death rates and circumstance’s surrounding Covid.
The E-book includes analysis of curative and preventive drugs as well as a review of Big Pharma’s Covid-19 “messenger” mRNA vaccine which is an “unapproved” and “experimental” drug affecting the human genome.
