The U.S. Army announced on July 21 that it has approved just 20 permanent religious exemptions for the COVID-19 vaccine amid thousands of requests.
Out of the 8,000 applications for a permanent religious exemption, a total of 1,465 have been reviewed by the Army. Just 20 have been approved—an approval rate of about 1.37 percent.
All those who had their applications approved were in the active Army. None from the Army National Guard or Army Reserve have received an exemption.
That leaves 6,535 applications for a permanent religious exemption yet to be reviewed by the service.
Meanwhile, the Army has reviewed 1,045 permanent medical exemptions for the COVID-19 vaccine, out of 1,100 requests. It has approved just 34 of the requests, which is an approval rate of about 3.25 percent.
“Army officials review each request on an individual basis to determine whether an exemption is appropriate,” the Army stated. “Medical requests are reviewed primarily by healthcare providers, while religious accommodation requests include interviews with the Soldier’s chaplain, recommendations from the chain of command, as well as a public health and a legal review.
“All Soldiers who refuse the order to be vaccinated without an approved or pending exemption request are subject to certain adverse administrative actions, including flags, bars to continued service, and official reprimands.
“Soldiers who continue to refuse the vaccination order without an approved or pending exemption may also be subject to additional adverse administrative action, including separation.”
Ninety-six percent of the active Army, 88 percent of the Army National Guard, and 90 percent of the Army Reserve are fully vaccinated, according to the military branch’s statistics.
Over 17,000 COVID-19 Vaccine Refusals
More than 17,000 Army troops have refused to take the COVID-19 vaccine, data indicated. Most of the refusals come from the Army National Guard, where more than 10,700 soldiers have refused to be vaccinated.
Out of 1,425 active Army members who refused the COVID-19 vaccine, 1,379 have been separated; no troops in the Army National Guard or Army Reserve have been separated.
Since July 1, under orders of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, members of the Army National Guard or Army Reserve who have refused the vaccine and don’t have a valid exemption “may not participate in federally funded drills, training, and other duty nor receive payment or retirement credit,” the Army said.
While the Army’s vaccine mandate continues to be in force, the U.S. Air Force has been temporarily blocked from enforcing its vaccine mandate after a federal district court in Ohio issued a temporary restraining order in mid-July. The order prevents Air Force authorities from disciplining any service members who are unvaccinated after having their religious exemption applications denied.
Plaintiffs in the case had contended that the class action suit would include more than 12,000 airmen.
According to data from the Air Force, as of July 11, more than 6,800 service members have been denied religious accommodation requests, while only 104 have been approved. Meanwhile, 834 members have been “administratively separated” by the branch.
Army Facing Personnel Shortfalls
The figures point to a low rate of permanent COVID-19 vaccine exemption approvals from the Army at a time when the service branch forecasts it will have significantly fewer troops than originally planned by the end of fiscal 2023.Members of the 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Battalion, 69th Armored Regiment deploy to Germany in Savannah, Ga., on March 2, 2022. (Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images)
Army Gen. Joseph Martin, vice chief of staff for the Army, told a House military personnel panel on July 19 that the projection for the estimated total number of troops in the force by the end of the 2022 fiscal year, on Sept. 30, is 466,400—a drop of 6,600 from the original target of 473,000.
He also said that the estimated number of troops for the end of 2023 fiscal year is 445,000 to 452,000, which is 24,000 to 31,000 troops less than the original target of 476,000.
“Right now, what we’re experiencing—the ‘why’ of what we think is going on right now—is we’ve got unprecedented challenges with both a post-COVID-19 environment and labor market, but also private competition with private companies that have changed their incentives over time,” Martin said.
He said the Army can manage to handle personnel shortfalls in the short term, but it could have an impact on readiness if it persists.
Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), a member of the House Judiciary and Armed Services committees, took to Twitter on July 19 to advocate for the end of the COVID-19 vaccine mandate in the military, noting the drastic projected reductions in strength for the Army.
“Army Reserve and Army National Guard reductions will be even worse. We must depoliticize the military and end the vaccine mandate,” he said on Twitter.
Johnson in late June accused the Biden administration of having destroyed the Army’s readiness “by creating an unnecessary recruiting and retention shortfall, and trying to make up the difference by lowering other crucial education and fitness standards.”
The COVID-19 vaccine mandate for all students 12 and older in Washington, D.C. violates federal law, a legal expert says.
“There is no FDA-approved COVID shot available and therefore, individuals have a right under the emergency use authorization to refuse these shots,” Matthew Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, told The Epoch Times.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted emergency authorization to the Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and Novavax COVID-19 vaccines.
Under the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, people who go to receive a product that has received emergency authorization must be informed that some benefits and risks “are unknown” and of “the option to accept or refuse administration of the product.”
“It is your choice to receive or not receive [the vaccine]. Should you decide not to receive it, it will not change your standard medical care,” FDA fact sheets provided to people getting a shot state.
Staver’s group may challenge the District of Columbia vaccine mandate.
Other interpretations of the law do exist. The U.S. Department of Justice, for instance, has said that the section “concerns only the provision of information to potential vaccine recipients and does not prohibit public or private entities from imposing vaccination requirements for a vaccine that is subject to an emergency use authorization.”
Mandate and Availability
Students in Washington aged 12 and older must already get a COVID-19 vaccine in order to be on school sports teams. The D.C. City Council passed a law in 2021 to extend the mandate to attending school at all.
“We need everyone to get vaccinated to stop the spread and protect vulnerable members of our community,” Councilwoman Janeese Lewis George, a Democrat, said during a hearing on the bill.
The law says that students must “receive a vaccination that is fully approved in the United States to prevent against COVID-19.” But it also states that an approved vaccine needs to be “available” to students for the law to take effect.
The FDA has approved Pfizer’s vaccine for children as young as 12. But vials produced after the approval are marked Comirnaty, which became the vaccine’s trade name. And a survey of vaccine providers in the city indicated there are no vials of Comirnaty available.
“Unfortunately we do not,” West End Pediatrics, one of the providers, told The Epoch Times in an email when asked if they were administering Comirnaty.
Four other providers could not confirm having Comirnaty vials, while nine others did not pick up the phone or respond to requests for comment.
Citing the city law, the district’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education said on July 19 that students aged 12 and older must get a COVID-19 vaccine to attend school in the fall, unless they are granted a medical or religious exemption.
The deadline is the start of the school year.
“We want to make sure that all of our students have everything they need for a healthy start to the school year,” State Superintendent of Education Christina Grant said in a statement. “This means making sure children see their primary medical provider for a well-child visit and receive all needed immunizations.”
The office noted that the FDA has approved Pfizer’s shot for the age group but did not mention whether the vials produced after FDA approval were available.
Fred Lewis, a spokesman for the agency, declined to answer questions.
“Please reach out to the DC Department of Health for this information. DC Health is better able to respond to questions on vaccine availability in the District,” Lewis told The Epoch Times in an email.
A spokesman for the department of health did not respond to inquiries.
Retired Lt. Col. Sandy Miarecki, who served over 20 years in the Air Force as a pilot, was given a notice of proposed removal from her position as an instructor at the U.S. Air Force Academy (USAFA) on July 14 for refusing COVID-19 vaccination and testing.
At the beginning of the school term, in January 2022, she was first suspended from teaching for the same reason.
Miarecki was vaccine injured in 1992 during her military service. She was not completely disabled from the injury, and she gave credit to her research on natural medicine, saying it allowed her to be functional.
When the COVID vaccines were mandated in the military, she thought the imposition would violate U.S. law as well as the Nuremberg Code.
“Before the [COVID vaccine] shots mandates came down, I warned my chain of command that they would be breaking federal law if they forced any EUA shots on anyone,” Miarecki told The Epoch Times, referring to the vaccines allowed under emergency use authorization.
Similar to Miarecki, USAFA civilian Olympic-calibre coach Dana Lyon believes that she was terminated due to rejecting COVID vaccination, according to The Gazette.
“When the mandates came down—illegally from SecDef, who has zero authority to mandate anything like this, per the USC—all subsequent people who forced the injections on people or lose their jobs or get kicked out of Academy were guilty of coercion under 21 US Code, Section 360bbb-3 and Nuremberg code,” Miarecki added.
The Nuremberg Code is a set of internationally accepted standards to which doctors have to conform when experimenting on humans. It was established by the war crime tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany, after World War II.
“Even to this day, neither Pfizer’s Comirnaty (the only FDA approved shots until Jan 2021) nor SpikeVax by Moderna (started in Jan 2021) have EVER been available in the US. Bottom line: all shots are still only EUA, and coercion to take them or lose your job or Academy appointment is a crime against humanity and punishable by death through international tribunals,” Miarecki said.
An F-22 Raptor in Alaska (Facebook/3rd Wing @JBER3WG – USAF)
She says that some of her students told her that they didn’t want the shots, and she told them about the regulations for religious and medical exemptions.
“Since their chain of command denied them due process and withheld this information, the students (and faculty, and civilians) asked me for help,” Miarecki said.
“I helped them write exemption letters and connected them with my legal team when they wanted to talk to a lawyer. That was the first problem, that I was ‘counseling and mentoring students on avoiding the mandates,’” she noted.
Miarecki, who was given the Airman’s Medal for heroism in 1992 for a river rescue, says that she personally knows “three civilian instructors flying under the radar because they will do the EUA testing, and four military instructors doing the same.”
Miarecki told The Epoch Times that she filed formal DoD/IG complaints in Jan 2022, and in March 2022 the IG (Inspector General) informed her that part of the complaint should be handled by the Office of Special Counsel (OSC), so she filed new complaints to the OSC but hasn’t heard back from them so far.
“I would guess that I will not receive a favorable outcome, which should arrive any day now,” she said.
Around the same time she was suspended, a federal district court in Ohio temporarily blocked the Biden administration from enforcing the COVID-19 vaccine mandate on thousands of U.S. Air Force service members who remain unvaccinated after having opposed the shot on religious grounds but have had their religious exemption applications denied.
The Air Force has been struggling with pilot shortages for years now.
Former Air Force Chief of Staff General David Goldfein testified before Congress in 2017 about a shortage of aviators, writing in 2016 that the situation was a “quiet crisis.”
A DoD report (pdf) from 2019 noted that by the end of FY 2018, the Air Force was “short 2,000 pilots out of a total inventory of 18,400.”
“I know of personally more than 700 pilots who are actively unvaccinated and have filed a religious accommodation or have filed for a medical exemption or something of the sort,” USAF pilot Lt. John Bowes told The Epoch Times on June 24.
About this, Miarecki said: “I can guarantee that 700 is a low number overall.”
“We’ll be holding our breath to hear if we get a preliminary injunction, but this fight is far from over. Most pilots are still grounded, including myself, and we’ll see how that changes with the coming news,” Bowes told The Epoch Times on July 19.
Lt. John Bowes. (Courtesy of John Bowes)
The Epoch Times reached out to USAF for comment.
Beth Brelje and Mimi Nguyen Ly contributed to this report.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is saying it has performed vaccine safety data mining and analyses since early 2021, a reversal from a recent letter.
The CDC said in an operating procedures document dated Jan. 29, 2021, that it “will perform” a type of data mining analysis of vaccine safety data called Proportional Reporting Ratio (PRR).
The public health agency also said it would conduct routine surveillance of the data, which is being logged into the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System.
The data mining and surveillance were aimed at detecting adverse events occurring at higher-than-expected rates.
The group had asked, in a Freedom of Information Act request, for all data generated in connection with the data mining, as well as copies of other data.
In response, CDC records officer Roger Andoh said that staff within the CDC’s Immunization and Safety Office “inform me that no PRRS were conducted by CDC.”
“Furthermore, data mining is outside of th[e] agency’s purview; staff suggest you inquire with the FDA,” or the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, he wrote.
The FDA was tasked with conducting a different method of data mining, according to the procedures document.
The CDC also failed to produce other information it said it would be producing, such as weekly tables of all reports of adverse events following COVID-19 vaccines.
Confusion
The reaction to the disclosure was swift. Joshua Guetzkow, a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem who has been applying his training in statistics to examine vaccine safety, said it showed the CDC “lied” about its efforts to monitor the safety database, known as VAERS.
“In their own document on their own website, they state unambiguously what their plans were to monitor VAERS for safety signals. They failed to do that,” Guetzkow, who has been working with Children’s Health Defense, told The Epoch Times via email.
“Another thing: in their FOIA response, they said that data mining is outside the CDC’s purview. Then why did they say they were going to do data mining with PRRs in the SOP briefing document?” he wondered.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who has been attempting to get answers from federal agencies throughout the pandemic, told CDC Director Rochelle Walensky in a letter that the disclosure “raises questions about whether CDC ever collected the information on vaccine safety it originally claimed it would” in the operating procedures document.
The request for information that triggered the CDC’s response was for data from Feb. 1, 2021, through Sept. 30, 2021.
Dr. John Su, of the CDC’s Immunization and Safety Office, heads the CDC’s VAERS team, which authored the operating procedures.
“CDC has been performing PRRs since Feb 2021, and continues to do so to date,” Su told The Epoch Times via email.
Hope That CDC Is ‘More Forthcoming’
In its response to the Freedom of Information Act request, the CDC “was unequivocal: the agency said it hasn’t done PRR and has no responsibility to do so,” Risa Evans, with Children’s Health Defense (CHD), told The Epoch Times in an email.
“Now the CDC states that it has in fact been conducting PRR since February 2021. CHD will certainly follow up with the CDC to obtain those records, and hopefully, the agency will be more forthcoming this time around in light of its legal obligations under FOIA and its stated commitment to ‘openness and accountability,’” she added.
The Epoch Times has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for all PRR analyses the CDC has conducted, as well as other information. The VAERS team told The Epoch Times that the information “will be provided to you,” though a date has not been given.
The FDA, meanwhile, says that it has conducted a different type of analysis, called Empirical Bayesian data mining.
“FDA does perform Empirical Bayesian data mining periodically on data from VAERS as part of its vaccine safety monitoring efforts,” a spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email.
Asked for the results, the spokesperson did not respond.
The Epoch Times has filed a FOIA request with the FDA for the results.
Guetzkow in 2021 performed his own analysis of data from VAERS. That analysis uncovered safety signals for a number of events, including severe allergic shock, Bell’s palsy, heart inflammation, and stroke. Some of the events have been confirmed to be connected, or described as likely connected, to one or more of the COVID-19 vaccines by the CDC and other U.S. authorities.
“CDC and FDA have been actively engaged in vaccine safety surveillance ever since COVID-19 vaccines have been in use. During the first month of their availability, data on anaphylaxis after [the Pfizer and Moderna] COVID-19 vaccines were published (including in highly visible journals, like the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), indicating an observed incidence comparable to data after other vaccines. VAERS detected what would become known as thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS) after Janssen’s vaccine, leading to a pause in the use of the vaccine mere weeks after its use was initiated. VAERS reviewed reports of myocarditis after mRNA COVID-19 vaccines during Summer 2021, providing a highly thorough characterization of such reports,” Martha Sharan, a spokeswoman for the CDC, told The Epoch Times in an email.
“These examples indicate that the vaccine safety surveillance systems in use by CDC and FDA identify potential vaccine safety concerns in a timely and effective manner.”
The first major peer-reviewed study of monkeypox infections has found that the virus is primarily being transmitted through the sexual activity of gay and bisexual men in the United States and around the world.
The Journal of New England Medicine on Thursday published a study that looked at monkeypox infection across 16 countries between April and June, when cases began to emerge in countries outside of Africa.
The study reported on 528 infections diagnosed between April 27 and June 24, of which 98 percent were in gay or bisexual men with a median age of 38. Of these cases, 95 percent of the infections were suspected to have been transmitted through sexual activity—41 percent also had HIV.
Disease experts and officials from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) don’t consider monkeypox a sexually transmitted infection but have always said it could be transmitted through intimate contact, such as sex. It can also be spread by close contact and even infected clothing and bedding.
Until this year, monkeypox virus infection in humans has been rare outside of Africa, where it is endemic but mostly spread from animals. But there are now more than 16,000 cases worldwide in countries that mostly have not historically had monkeypox, according to the CDC.
Most of the cases appear to be in North America and Western Europe, where some of the first cases were linked to major LGBT events in Spain and Belgium, considered ground zero for facilitating transmission of the virus.
The leading theory among disease experts is that the monkeypox virus was sexually transmitted at those events.
An uptick in recent U.S. cases suggests transmission occurred at the tail end of Pride Month in late June and early July, based on the study finding that incubation is between three and 20 days (usually seven days).
Former Trump Health Officials Blame CDC
CDC officials were hesitant to recommend canceling marquee U.S. LGBT events, similar to the super spreading events in Europe that occurred the month prior.
LGBT event organizers were also treading carefully in the spring, wanting to avoid stigmatizing the LGBT community. U.S. health officials opted instead to boost targeted messaging to warn gay and bisexual men, who were deemed most at risk.
But officials should have done more, says Dr. Paul Alexander, a former Trump administration health official and researcher.
“All this needed was leadership saying no skin to skin contact, no anal sex, no sex, none for a few weeks and we would have helped this high risk group, but no, it’s political games and now the low-risk general heterosexual population is at risk especially from bisexual males,” Alexander wrote in a blog post.
The blog post also included a Twitter thread by a gay U.S. man recounting in graphic detail his experience with contracting monkeypox during an orgy in Palm Springs.
Alexander expressed concern that bisexual men could facilitate the spreading of the monkeypox virus outside of the LGBT community to heterosexuals. In fact, the CDC has said they know of eight cases in women and two new cases in children—one a toddler and the other an infant, BBC News reported.
“Heterosexuals could spread this if one partner is infected and there is rough abrasive sex that involves tearing of tissue,” Alexander added.
“This is not about being ‘gay,’ the virus is transmitted in bodily fluids and infected pustules and lesions in the infected person, through any tears on the skin or tissue e.g. rectal micro lesions etc,” he continued. “If heterosexuals engage in anal sex and one is infected with monkeypox or another [sexually transmitted disease], the other will get infected if there is tissue tearing.”
Although monkeypox infection generally clears up within a couple of weeks without the need for medical treatment, it has hospitalized some who experience severe anorectal pain, severe sore throats, and acute kidney injury.
Dr. Anthony Fauci will receive a tax-paid annual federal retirement pension benefit of $414,667—more than the President’s $400,000 annual salary—if he leaves the civil service service in January 2025, as he has said he plans to do, according to the nonprofit government watchdog Open the Books (OTB).
While the specific details of an individual federal employee’s retirement benefit are exempt from public disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the formula used to determine the amount is public, as are key details, including annual salary and years of service.
The OTB figure was arrived at by the nonprofit’s auditors by using the known formula, salary data and number of years of service for Fauci, who is the long-time Director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the National Institutes for Health (NIH).
Fauci will have been a government employee for 59 years and be 85 years of age if he retires in January 2025. Under the present rules for federal compensation, his annual salary at retirement will be nearly $530,000, according to the OTB calculations.
He presently is paid $456,028 in annual salary compensation, making him the highest-paid employee on the federal payroll. His salary exceeds those of the president, the vice president, the heads of federal departments, senators and representatives, and the justices of the Supreme Court.
Fauci did not respond to The Epoch Times request for comment.
Adam Andrzjewski, OTB’s president, told The Epoch Times that “if it wasn’t already clear enough, Dr. Fauci’s profound impact on our public health policies, economy, and public schools is reflected by this enormous pension. At the end of the day, taxpayers helped fund this pension and guarantee all of it.”
The OTB chief added that the generosity of federal compensation overall is excessive, noting that “when debating the pay, perks, and pension benefits for federal employees, everything needs to be on the table. Today, the average federal bureaucrat makes six figures, receives 44 days of paid time off, and has a very lucrative retirement pension. It’s tough for the private sector to compete with this benefit package.”
The Chicago-based nonprofit is the nation’s largest private repository of information on government spending, including salary and pension benefit data. The foundation has filed thousands of FOIA requests and obtained data on more than $6 trillion in federal spending, the official checks of 49 of the 50 states, and the pay and pension information for 25 million government workers.
Her title is currently listed by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management as “Social Science” with a pay level of $238,970, according to data compiled by OTB. The current top pay rate for federal government executive-level officials is $226,300.
Grady’s compensation is at the center of a federal court complaint as a result of NIH officials’ refusal to disclose information sought via a FOIA request dated April 8 by OTB. The OTB lawsuit (pdf) was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
The OTB request sought “all employment contracts, modifications, and addendums” for Grady since assuming her present position, as well as “all confidentiality agreements/documents, conflicts of interest waivers or documents, ethics disclosures, and financial interest and/or economic interest disclosure documents.”
In addition, the FOIA request sought a copy of Grady’s current official job description. All federal employment positions are required by federal law and regulation to have an official position description that describes the specific duties and responsibilities for which the individual holding the position can be held accountable.
The OTB FOIA was acknowledged by NIH officials on April 28, which was the maximum of 20 days allowed by federal law for an agency to do so. Federal law also requires agencies to communicate a final determination on what documents, if any, they will provide in response to requests. But OTB told the court that the NIH had failed to do so by the May 26 deadline.
The NIH further failed to advise OTB of its potential administrative remedies, and has produced none of the requested documents or explained which, if any, of the FOIA’s eight permitted exemption categories apply that would allow for the documents to be withheld.
As a result, the complaint asked the court to order the NIH to conduct a thorough search for all of the requested documents, to produce all such documents that aren’t subject to being withheld by a certain date, or to explain why doing so isn’t possible, and to provide what is known as a Vaughn Index describing each withheld document and why it was withheld, and to pay Open the Books the legal costs of the litigation.
Fauci’s long-time boss, former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins left the agency in December 2021, and was then appointed in March 2022 as resident Joe Biden’s Chief Science Adviser. That appointment made Collins the highest-paid member of the most expensive White House staff ever.
Not all of Fauci’s income is received from federal taxpayers, however, as was first reported by The Epoch Times. He also received 23 secret royalty payments of undisclosed amounts between 2010 and 2020 from entities outside of the federal government that NIH refuses to identify. The 23 payments were part of an estimated $350 million in royalty payments received by more than 1,600 NIH officials, scientists and researchers, according to OTB.
Collins received 14 such payments, while Fauci’s top deputy at NIAID, Clifford Lane, received eight payments, according to OTB.
Dr. Lawrence Tabak, Collins’ successor as Acting NIH Director, admitted during a May congressional hearing that the $350 million in secret royalty payments has the appearance of a conflict of interest, but he claimed the agency has enough internal safeguards to prevent abuse..
Ruling against EPA sets precedent for a series of lawsuits against agency overreach
As the Biden administration reels from a string of recent legal defeats, political analysts hail the U.S. Supreme Court’s latest ruling, West Virginia v. EPA, as but one component of a new, broad-based approach that the courts are taking to halt a century-long effort by progressives to empower the administrative state and rule Americans by bureaucratic decree.
Dating back to President Woodrow Wilson 100 years ago, progressive presidents, including Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, have worked to transfer law-making authority from Congress to their executive agencies. Wilson, the father of modern-day progressives, believed the Constitution, with its separation of powers, was an outdated document and that professional bureaucrats were superior at decision-making, compared to the time-consuming and compromise-ridden process of passing laws through elected representatives.
Wilson wrote in the 1887 article “The Study of Administration” that “the many, the people, who are sovereign [under the Constitution] have no single ear which one can approach, and are selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn or foolish.”
“The greatest revolution since the Constitution in many ways has been this movement away from legislatures into agencies,” Matthew Spalding, Dean of Hillsdale College’s Graduate School of Government, told The Epoch Times. “The crisis here is the movement away from consent,” as Americans increasingly lose their right to have a voice in setting the laws and regulations that control their lives.
In 1984, for example, the Supreme Court handed down a decision that came to be known as the Chevron Doctrine, ruling that federal agencies had the authority to decide the scope of their power in situations where congressional authorization was ambiguous. Since this ruling, Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council, the courts have sided with federal agencies in cases where the authority of agencies was challenged.
Now, for the first time in a century, a series of rulings from federal courts have put up a roadblock to halt administrative encroachment. Two factors have brought about this change. First, the appointment by the Trump administration of 234 federal judges, including three Supreme Court justices. And second, the Biden administration’s unusually brazen attempts to push federal agencies well beyond their legal authority in order to impose a left-wing agenda on the United States without popular consent.
West Virginia Ruling
In the case of West Virginia v. EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) attempted to force America’s electric utilities to switch from fossil fuels to wind and solar. On June 30, the Supreme Court ruled that the Biden administration had no authority to do so.
“For years, unelected bureaucrats in the administrative state have been trying to destroy our fossil fuel industries by transforming the EPA into a communist-style central planning authority because they know they can’t get their radical environmental policies passed through Congress,” said West Virginia State Treasurer Riley Moore in an official statement, lauding the decision as “a victory for the rule of law.”
“Part of the problem is Congress writing these broad laws that leave a lot of room for interpretation by the agencies that are supposed to execute the laws,” William Shughart, senior fellow at the Independent Institute, told the Epoch Times. “That has led to this explosive growth in the administrative state. The West Virginia ruling applies the brakes to that growth.”
‘Major Questions Doctrine’
One of the key components of this Supreme Court ruling is the “major questions doctrine.” This is the concept that agencies, which are unelected by and unaccountable to the public, cannot make up rules on issues of major importance to Americans without clear authorization from elected representatives.
“The Supreme Court decision speaks to the legal flaws with trying to mark an entire industry for termination,” Jonathan Berry, a partner at Boyden Gray & Associates, told The Epoch Times. “What the Supreme Court is saying is that when you take on initiatives of major economic or political significance, those measures have to be authorized by a clear statement from Congress.”
“One of the most profound aspects of this ruling is its portability across regulatory regimes,” Berry said. In rendering its West Virginia decision, the Supreme Court looked at prior rulings, including those against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). “The common thread across those cases is the executive branch using an administrative agency to wade into policy areas beyond what Congress authorized,” Berry added.
In August 2021, the Supreme Court ruled that the CDC did not have legal authority to ban landlords from evicting non-paying tenants. In January of this year, the Court ruled that OSHA did not have authority to force employees of large companies to take the Covid-19 vaccine.
“What we’re seeing here is extremely significant,” Spalding said. “The way the Court works is they do these things in different cases here and there, but they’re putting a doctrine together that ultimately builds up to a larger case. The heart of the matter is the unconstitutionality of essentially shifting legislative authority outside of the legislative branch into these agencies.”
“There are already tons of lawsuits out there that have been winding their way through the legal system for years,” Bonner Cohen, senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research, told The Epoch Times. “Some of those lawsuits will eventually make it to the Supreme Court, but a lot of them may be dealt with at lower court level simply because people can now point to the precedent that was set in West Virginia v. EPA.”
Administrative Overreach
Last week, a Trump-appointed federal judge temporarily blocked orders by the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) that attempted to force states to, among other things, allow transgender children to compete in sports in schools according to their gender identity rather than their gender at birth. Twenty state attorneys general brought a suit against the DOE directive, arguing that the authority to decide such policies “properly belongs to Congress, the States, and the people.”
Two other areas where administrative overreach by the Biden administration will likely be challenged next are a directive from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regarding “green accounting” (that is, accounting that factors environmental costs in the financial results of operations) and gun control initiatives from the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF).
In a case that closely parallels West Virginia v. EPA, the SEC issued a directive that all listed companies must provide audited reports on the greenhouse gas emissions of their operations, as well as those of their suppliers and customers. In addition, companies must detail their strategies to reduce such emissions. Critics believe this will open companies up to a rash of environmental lawsuits and actions by activist asset managers like BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard. West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey was among the first state officials to threaten legal action in response.
The ATF has been attempting to expand the legal definition of which gun parts constitute a firearm in an effort to implement a Biden administration initiative, which failed to pass Congress, against unregistered homemade guns, thus turning a formerly legal practice into a felony. A lawsuit against this has already been filed by the Gun Owners of America. In addition, the ATF was found to be keeping records of “several hundred million” gun purchases, despite the fact that Congress explicitly outlawed a federal gun registry.
Loss of Public Trust
Such attempts to circumvent public consent by legislating through unelected federal agencies inevitably lead to a loss of public trust in government.
“If there’s no consent, no responsibility, no check-back system, then you really are undermining public confidence in that process,” Spalding said. Regarding the ATF and gun control measures, a June poll by NPR/Ipsos found that, while most gun owners said they would accept universal background checks, they “harbored a deep distrust of government.”
“The more that this administration steps over the line and claims for itself powers that the peoples’ representatives in Congress have not given it, the more we should expect a decline in trust and in legitimacy,” Berry said.
As the courts begin to push back against administrative overreach, however, the backlash from the political left has been escalating, including demands for “packing” the Supreme Court with more left-leaning judges, or even abolishing the Court altogether.
Following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, President Biden stated, “We cannot allow an out-of-control Supreme Court, working in conjunction with extremist elements of the Republican Party, to take away our freedoms and our personal autonomy.” A recent survey by Rasmussen and the Heartland Institute found that, in the wake of the EPA decision, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and the pro-Second Amendment Bruen decision (regarding concealed weapons), most Democrats and younger voters see the Court as a racist and sexist institution and want to pack it with progressive judges, remove it, or replace it.
“These findings clearly show that most Democrats and young Americans do not respect the sanctity of the Supreme Court when it issues decisions that run counter to their agenda,” Heartland Institute Research Fellow Chris Talgo told The Epoch Times. “As a former U.S. history and American government teacher, I can say without a doubt that our education system is not teaching the basics when it comes to civics. Most American students cannot name the three branches of government, let alone understand the role of separation of powers. This does not bode well for the future of freedom, seeing as how young voters are hostile to the very institutions that preserve our freedom.”
The Justice Department, for example, permitted weeks of intimidating protests outside the homes of conservative Supreme Court justices after the opinion to overturn Roe v. Wade was prematurely leaked prior to the formal ruling. Following the arrest in June of an armed man who was charged with attempted murder at the home of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) demanded that U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland “detail the steps the Department of Justice is taking to protect our Supreme Court Justices in the wake of an unprecedented harassment and intimidation campaign.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was criticized for taking weeks to bring a bill protecting Supreme Court justices and their families to a vote, even after the alleged assassination attempt against Justice Kavanaugh. When the bill was put to a vote, 27 Democrats voted against it.
Granting Power to Experts
Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, who disagreed with the majority in the West Virginia case, argued that the courts must defer to the EPA, which she deemed the “expert agency,” and allow the agency to interpret the scope of its own power. Critics of this approach, however, remain skeptical of granting too much power to experts and question whether administrators are in fact experts when it comes to issues like national energy policy or making personal medical decisions.
“These are career government employees,” Cohen said. “They are not experts.”
“Look at the experience the country had during the pandemic, where we had such experts as Dr. [Anthony] Fauci and Dr. [Deborah] Birx and others throughout the federal government who completely mishandled the public health response to COVID-19,” Cohen said. “If these are the experts, we need to free ourselves from experts, because they got it spectacularly wrong.”
“Anytime you encounter the word ‘emergency,’ anytime you encounter the word ‘crisis,’ be careful,” Cohen said. “It may in fact be a crisis because those things happen, but it may be nothing more than a pretext for a power grab.”
“The invocation of an emergency is not a justification for combining the powers of government into a single person,” Berry said. “That’s the definition of tyranny.”
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is helping fund the Chinese Communist Party’s Ministry of Science and Technology, assisting the brutal regime in its efforts to lure foreign scientists in to boost China’s scientific advancement, The National Pulse can reveal.
A recent, $100,000 grant from the Microsoft mogul’s foundation was sent to the Foreign Talent Research Center of China’s Ministry of Science and Technology in June, according to the organization’s website.
The purpose of the cash is listed as organizing a forum on “pandemic preparedness and response,” which would focus on “leveraging resources to improve global health and support disadvantaged populations who are disproportionately impacted by pandemic.” The forum is affiliated with the Zhongguancun Forum, a Beijing-based technology conference sponsored by the Chinese Communist Party that counts high-level officials – including President Xi Jinping – as speakers.
The Gates Foundation’s decision to fund the Foreign Talent Research Center of China’s Ministry of Science and Technology comes amidst controversy over the likelihood of international collaboration between U.S. and Chinese researchers in Wuhan leading to the genesis of COVID-19. Since the outbreak of the virus, the Chinese Communist Party has stonewalled investigations into the origins of the virus and planted Western researchers with compromising ties to China in senior investigative roles.
Beyond COVID-19, the Chinese Communist Party has also come under fire for weaponizing its science and technology programs to lure Western scientists away from their home countries in order to facilitate Chinese advancement and military build-up. This program – commonly known as the Thousand Talents Plan – has led to several Department of Justice (DOJ) indictments of American researchers who routinely fail to disclose their financial ties to the Chinese Communist Party despite receiving U.S. taxpayer funds.
The Ministry of Science and Technology’s Foreign Talent Research Center appears to engage in similar conduct, as it is responsible for “bring[ing] in foreign talent,” according to an outline of its missions.
The ministry “formulates and facilitates the implementation of plans for bringing in high-end foreign experts, develops mechanisms for pooling top-notch scientists and research teams from abroad, and provides services for foreign experts,” it continues.
The unearthed grant comes amidst the Gates Foundation pouring millions of dollars into China, including to universities with ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The antibodies triggered by COVID-19 vaccines are interfering with people’s immune systems as newer virus variants emerge, Dr. Harvey Risch said.
The two most widely-used vaccines in the United States, produced by Pfizer and Moderna, both work by sending messenger RNA into muscle cells, where they produce a piece of the spike protein from the virus that causes COVID-19. The spike protein triggers the production of antibodies, which are believed to help prevent infection by SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, and fight illness if one still gets infected.
But the vaccines are based on the spike protein from the original virus variant, which was displaced early in the pandemic. Since then, a series of newer strains have become dominant around the world, with the latest being BA.5.
“The vaccines only make a very narrow range of antibodies to the spike protein,” compared to the broader exposure experienced when one gets infected, Risch, an epidemiology professor at the Yale School of Public Health, told EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders.”
“The problem with that is, of course, that when the spike protein changes because of new strains of the virus, that the ability of the immune system to make antibodies that correlate to the new strains becomes reduced to the point where it may be almost ineffective over longer periods of time,” he added.
That leads to the antibodies being triggered by the vaccines not binding strongly enough to neutralize.
“What that means is they become interfering antibodies, instead of neutralizing antibodies,” Risch said. “And that’s the reason I believe that we’ve seen what’s called negative benefit—negative vaccine efficacy over longer time—over four to six to eight months after the last vaccine dose, that one sees the benefit of the vaccines turn negative.”
Worse Effectiveness Amid Spike Protein Changes
A number of recent studies haveindicated that people who were vaccinated are more likely to get infected with COVID-19 after a period of time, including Pfizer’s clinical trial in young children (pdf). Some real-world data also show higher rates of infection among the vaccinated. Other research indicates vaccines still provide some protection as time wears on after getting a shot, but the protection does wane considerably. The research all deals with the Omicron variant, which became dominant in late 2021, and its subvariants.
There were relatively few changes to the spike protein as the initial variants emerged, which meant that vaccines still provided a fairly good benefit, Risch said. But Omicron started off with more than 50 changes to the spike protein, and subvariants of Omicron such as BA.5 have added more.
He pointed to data reported by United Kingdom health authorities in March (pdf)—the officials stopped reporting the data after that—pegging people who had received both a primary vaccination series and a booster as having three times the rate of symptomatic infection as unvaccinated people.
“After the second dose of the mRNA vaccines, it looks like they provide a benefit against symptomatic infection for … most people for maybe 10 to 12 weeks,” Risch said.
“After the first booster, the third dose, that drops to six to eight weeks. After the fourth booster, it may be as short as four weeks before the efficacy wears off and begins to turn negative.”
While Dr. Anthony Fauci on Tuesday amended his Monday retirement announcement, Republicans who have criticized Fauci’s COVID-19 leadership were not changing their tune.
A Tuesday report from The Hill contradicted one from the day before concerning Fauci’s plans. Politico had reported that Fauci would retire by the end of resident Joe Biden’s term.
“I’m not going to retire. No, no, I’m not going to retire. I may step down from my current position at some time,” Fauci said. Fauci, 81, is currently the president’s chief medical adviser, as well as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
As Fauci told the story on Tuesday, he had been asked if he would keep working if former President Donald Trump wins the 2024 presidential election.
“I said a very innocent but true thing. I said whether it’s Donald Trump or it’s Joe Biden’s second term, I don’t intend to be in my current position in January of 2025,” Fauci said.
“What happens between now and then I have not decided, but the one thing I do know is that I have other things that I want to do in a professional way that I want to have the capability — while I still have the energy and the passion to do them,” he said.
Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has sparred with Fauci in Senate hearings, welcomed the change.
“Excellent – because I look forward to ascertaining Fauci’s involvement in the cover-up of the lab origins of COVID — Under Oath!” he tweeted.
Excellent – because I look forward to ascertaining Fauci’s involvement in the cover-up of the lab origins of COVID — Under Oath! https://t.co/LHmpE8QuWs
Other Republicans reacted to the possibility of Fauci stepping down by saying that the career bureaucrat does not deserve to happily slip off into the golden years of retirement.
“Whether Fauci retires or not, he still must be investigated and held responsible for his role in Covid-19,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia tweeted.
“Fauci thinks he’s just going to retire and move on with his life. Not on my watch,” Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert said. “He belongs in jail.”
Whether Fauci retires or not, he still must be investigated and held responsible for his role in Covid-19.
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) July 18, 2022
In an Op-Ed for The Wall Street Journal, James Freeman linked Fauci’s fading popularity with that of Biden.
“One shuttered the country and the other campaigned as a shut-in. Two Beltway lifers who promoted the disastrous lockdown policies of the Covid era seem to be on their way out of Washington. And even left-leaning media folk seem ready to see them depart,” he wrote.
New York governor Kathy Hochul’s administration funneled more than $600 million in no-bid COVID-19 contracts to a megadonor family that has contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Democrat’s campaign.
From December 2021 to March 2022, Hochul’s Department of Health paid $637 million in taxpayer funds to Digital Gadgets LLC for at-home COVID tests, the Albany Times Unionreported. That company—which is based in New Jersey and sells hoverboards and other electronics through television shopping network QVC—is led by Charlie Tebele, whose family has contributed nearly $300,000 to Hochul’s campaign. The purchases were made under Hochul’s November coronavirus state-of-emergency order, which suspended the state’s competitive bidding process for COVID-related spending.
The ordeal marks the latest example of how Democratic governors have used the pandemic to award their political allies. In April of 2020, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer (D.) awarded a contract for the state’s contact-tracing operation to a Democratic consultant who then retained one of Whitmer’s own campaign vendors, liberal data behemoth NGP VAN, to work on the project. After the Washington Free Beacon exposed that deal, Whitmer rescinded the contract and said her office had no role in awarding it. Internal emails, however, later showed that Whitmer’s office gave the “green light” to move forward with the plan.
Hochul is not the only New York Democrat to award a COVID contract to Digital Gadgets after taking campaign cash from the owner’s family. In the spring of 2020, then-New York City mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration awarded $119 million in no-bid coronavirus contracts to the company shortly after the Tebele family gave the Democrat’s presidential campaign roughly $30,000. Digital Gadgets, however, failed to provide the 2,000 ventilators and 200,000 “breathing kits” it promised to the city, causing the de Blasio administration to cancel a $91 million contract that was part of its deal with the megadonor family’s company.
Hochul took office in August 2021 after disgraced Democrat Andrew Cuomo resigned in the wake of sexual misconduct allegations. Hochul has leveraged her relationships with deep-pocketed megadonors such as the Tebeles to raise a record-breaking $34 million since becoming governor. She emerged from New York’s gubernatorial primary in June and will face Republican challenger Lee Zeldin in November.
Parents think school boards are ‘not putting students first,’ says candidate
More than two years after San Diego first instituted a COVID-19 mask mandate, city schools are reinstating masks for students. Any child who doesn’t want to wear a mask, board president Sharon Whitehurst-Payne told KUSI News, won’t be allowed back in school.
“They can opt not to return to the regular school, but to go to the school … via Zoom,” Whitehurst-Payne told the local news station, adding that students “really should wear the mask.”
The board has already ordered the nearly 25,000 students in San Diego’s summer school program to mask up. Whitehurst-Payne said students in the program uncomfortable with wearing masks should “just not return.”
Remote learning during the pandemic has severely harmed children’s education, a Harvard study found. K-12 students who attended school remotely lost 40 percent of their typical math curriculum learning. Almost half of all parents, including around 70 percent of Republicans and around 50 percent of independents, say masking hurts their children’s education. Clinical trials, meanwhile, have shown that masks have little effect on the spread of COVID-19.
The announcement comes only a few months after San Diego schools in April lifted their original mask mandate. Whitehurst-Payne attributed the new mandate to “high” levels of COVID-19 transmission, according to the CDC. The district will revisit the policy in two weeks.
The San Diego Unified School District is not alone in ushering in a third year of COVID-19 protocols. Public schools in other Democratic-run cities such as Washington, D.C., New York City, and Chicago are forcing unvaccinated students to quarantine at home after COVID-19 exposures, even if they test negative. The CDC in May said “a third of the U.S. population” should wear masks indoors.
San Diego’s mask mandate “exemplifies why many parents are stepping up to run,” Carlsbad school board candidate Sharon McKeeman told ABC 10 News. “They feel that school boards have not listened to families’ concerns during the pandemic and … [are] not putting students first.”
A new study published this month revealed that COVID-19mask mandates in schools have little to no effect.
“Our findings contribute to a growing body of literature which suggests school-based mask mandates have limited to no impact on the case rates of COVID-19 among K-12 students,” researchers at the University of Southern California and the University of California–Davis said in a preprint study published on Research Square.
Researchers evaluated two school districts in Fargo, North Dakota, in which one had a mask mandate and the other did not during the 2021–2022 academic year.
“We observed no significant difference between student case rates while the districts had differing masking policies nor while they had the same mask policies,” they noted, adding that the “impact of school-based mask mandates on COVID-19 transmission in children is not fully established” amid mandates nationwide.
A number of other studies have found no link between mask mandates and a drop in COVID-19 cases.
In one study published in May, researchers found that COVID-19 mask and vaccine rules implemented by Cornell University had limited impact against the transmission of Omicron in late 2021 and 2022.
“Cornell’s experience shows that traditional public health interventions were not a match for Omicron. While vaccination protected against severe illness, it was not sufficient to prevent rapid spread, even when combined with other public health measures including widespread surveillance testing,” the paper said.
And researchers in Spain found that mask mandates for children in Spain weren’t linked to a lower rate of COVID-19 cases or transmission.
In an evaluation of schoolchildren, kids aged 6 and older in Catalonia were required to wear masks once school reopened during the COVID-19 pandemic, the researchers said.
Researchers compared the incidence of COVID-19 in older children to younger children to try to determine whether the mandates had been effective in the aim of reducing transmission of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes COVID-19, in schools.
Their study identified a much lower case rate in preschool, where there were no mandates when compared to older groups who were required to wear masks. Five-year-olds, for instance, had an incidence of 3.1 percent, while 6-year-olds had an incidence of 3.5 percent.
Researchers in Toronto, Canada, and California replicated a 2021 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study of counties in Arizona, published in The Lancet in May, that expanded the number of data points and extended the time period. They discovered that cases quickly declined in the weeks after the CDC cut off its study and decreased more quickly in the counties that didn’t have mask mandates.
“School districts that choose to mandate masks are likely to be systematically different from those that do not in multiple, often unobserved, ways. We failed to establish a relationship between school masking and pediatric cases using the same methods but a larger, more nationally diverse population over a longer interval,” the researchers said.
“It was known long before COVID-19 that face masks don’t do anything,” Former Pfizer VP Michael Yeadon, a toxicologist and allergy research specialist, told The Epoch Times in May. “Many don’t know that blue medical masks aren’t filters. Your inspired and expired air moves in and out between the mask [and] your face. They are splashguards, that’s all.”
Internal research shows Pfizer’s executives have been announcing the next stage in the fight against the pandemic before government officials can even study the issue, annoying experts and scientists, and leaving the public questioning whom they can trust. Who’s really in charge?
STORY AT-A-GLANCE
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a real boon to Pfizer. Not only has it doubled Pfizer’s annual revenue, it has also given the drugmaker unique weight in determining U.S. health policy — something that concerns even staunch vaccine-pushers like Dr. Paul Offit
Pfizer’s revenue in 2021 was $81.3 billion — approximately double that of 2020 — and the COVID shot accounted for $36.78 billion of that
Pfizer’s COVID jab dominates 70% of the U.S. and European markets, and Paxlovid, its COVID drug, has become a standard treatment choice in hospitals. This despite findings showing the shot doesn’t prevent infection or transmission, and that Paxlovid causes severe rebound and supercharges mutations
The U.S. had thrown away 82.2 million expired COVID jab doses as of mid-May 2022, yet the Biden administration ordered another 105 million doses at the end of June 2022 for a fall booster campaign that will cost taxpayers $3.2 billion
Pfizer’s contracts are almost exclusively slanted in Pfizer’s favor. They’re guaranteed payment while having no financial liability for injuries and deaths, and it appears this indemnification applies even if they were to be found guilty of fraud
According to Kaiser Health News (KHN),1 the COVID-19 pandemic has been a real boon to Pfizer. Not only has it yielded “outsize benefits” in terms of profits, but it has also “given the drugmaker unusual weight in determining U.S. health policy.”
“Based on internal research, the company’s executives have frequently announced the next stage in the fight against the pandemic before government officials have had time to study the issue, annoying many experts in the medical field and leaving some patients unsure whom to trust,” KHN reporter Arthur Allen writes, adding:2
“When last year Bourla suggested that a booster shot would soon be needed, U.S. public health officials later followed, giving the impression that Pfizer was calling the tune.
Some public health experts and scientists worry these decisions were hasty, noting, for example, that although boosters with the mRNA shots produced by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech improve antibody protection initially, it generally doesn’t last.
Since January, Bourla has been saying that U.S. adults will probably all need annual booster shots, and senior FDA officials have indicated since April that they agree … The company’s power worries some vaccinologists, who see its growing influence in a realm of medical decision-making traditionally led by independent experts …
When resident Biden in September 2021 offered boosters to Americans — not long after [Pfizer CEO Albert] Bourla had recommended them — Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia … wondered, ‘Where’s the evidence you are at risk of serious disease when confronted with COVID if you are vaccinated and under 50?’
Policies on booster recommendations for different groups are complex and shifting, Offit said, but the CDC, rather than Bourla and Pfizer, should be making them. ‘We’re being pushed along,’ he said. ‘The pharmaceutical companies are acting like public health agencies.’”
The fact that a vaccine-pusher like Offit — infamous for claiming a baby can safely tolerate 10,000 vaccines at once3 — is questioning and pushing back against Pfizer’s influence over health policy reveals just how brazen, unethical and potentially dangerous that is.
Massive Profits Made From Useless Products
According to Allen, Pfizer’s revenue in 2021 was $81.3 billion4 — approximately double that of 2020 — and the COVID shot accounted for $36.78 billion5 of that. For comparison, Lipitor, Pfizer’s previous top selling statin, generates roughly $2 billion a year,6 while their strep vaccine, Prevnar 13 rakes in $6 billion a year.7
Its mRNA gene transfer injection against COVID now dominates 70% of the U.S. and European markets, and Paxlovid, Pfizer’s COVID drug, has become a standard treatment choice in hospitals. This, despite researchers finding Paxlovid (molnupiravir) causes severe rebound and supercharges mutations.
In a rational scenario, that finding would have put a stop to its use, but no. In an official health advisory8 to the public, issued May 24, 2022, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first warns that Paxlovid is associated with “recurrence of COVID-19 or ‘COVID-19 rebound,’” and then in the very next sentence stresses in bold print a narrative supporting its use and enriching Pfizer with instructions saying:
“Paxlovid continues to be recommended for early- stage treatment of mild to moderate COVID-19 among persons at high risk for progression to severe disease.”
Allen also notes that, during an investor call, a Pfizer official highlighted reports of Paxlovid’s failure, but spun it into “good news” for investors, as patients may require multiple courses!9 Obviously the objective has long ago shifted from helping humans to raping them for as much profit as possible.
Similarly, while Pfizer’s COVID jab clearly doesn’t prevent infection or spread, and Americans are rejecting the shots in growing numbers — 82.2 million doses had expired and were chucked in the trash as of mid-May 202210 — the U.S. government still went ahead and ordered another 105 million doses at the end of June 2022.
These are intended for a fall booster campaign, at a cost to taxpayers of $3.2 billion.11 The U.S. is actually paying about 50% more for each of these new jab boosters this time around — $30.47 per dose compared to $19.50 per dose paid for the first 100 million doses.
The U.S. government has also promised to purchase another 20 million courses of Paxlovid, at an eye-watering cost of $530 per five-day course. Basically, Pfizer is being financially rewarded for producing products that are useless at best and dangerous at worst, and we’re all paying for it. In case you’re curious, that is another $10.6 billion transferred from U.S. taxpayers to Pfizer.
Future Boosters Won’t Undergo Human Clinical Trials
After you likely thought it couldn’t ever get any worse, KHN also touches on, but doesn’t delve into, the fact that Pfizer suggested they skip human trials as they move forward with jabs that are reformulated for newer variants. If this strikes you as crazy, you’d be right. It’s sheer madness, but the U.S. Food and Drug Administration — a clearly captured agency — has already surreptitiously agreed to this egregious miscarriage of science.
How this wicked scheme, known as the “Future Framework,”12 was adopted by the FDA without formal vote is explained by Toby Rogers, Ph.D. — a political economist whose research focus is on regulatory capture and Big Pharma corruption13 — in the video above. He also explained it in a June 29, 2022, Substack article:14
“Yesterday [June 28], the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee approved a bivalent COVID-19 shot with the Wuhan strain and the Omicron variant … Wait, hold up, I thought the FDA was voting on the Future Framework yesterday?
The policy question was whether reformulated COVID-19 shots would be treated as new molecular entities (which they are) in which case they should be subject to formal review or whether reformulated shots would be treated as ‘biologically similar’ to existing Covid-19 shots and be allowed to skip clinical trials altogether.
Apparently the FDA did not have the votes to just pass this as a policy question. If you ask anyone whether reformulated mRNA represents a new molecular entity, well of course it is, so that would require formal regulatory review.
What the FDA did instead was to smuggle the policy question in disguised as a vote about reformulated ‘boosters’ for the fall.
In essence, the FDA just started doing the Future Framework (picking variants willy nilly, skipping clinical trials) and essentially dared the committee members to turn down a booster dose — knowing that all of the VRBPAC members are hand-picked because they’ve never met a vaccine they did not like.
So of course only two people on the committee had the courage to turn down a booster dose — even though it was based on this preposterous process (that was never formally adopted) where there was literally no data at all … By stealth, the FDA replaced a system based on evidence with a system based entirely on belief.”
Countries Held to Ransom
In 2021, secret details of Pfizer’s contracts came to light, showing they are essentially holding countries hostage to nonnegotiable demands for payment in full AND freedom from liability.15
In late February 2021, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported16 that Pfizer was demanding countries put up sovereign assets as collateral for expected vaccine injury lawsuits resulting from its COVID-19 jab.
Several countries, including Brazil, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic and Peru, agreed to this demand, putting up bank reserves, military bases and embassy buildings as collateral. 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.
Shockingly, these terms are binding even if those injuries are the result of negligent company practices, fraud or malice!
Government purchasers must acknowledge that the effectiveness and safety of the shots are completely unknown, all while indemnifying Pfizer against any and all financial liability.
In October that same year, Public Citizen published the secret contracts17,18 between Pfizer and Albania, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Dominican Republic, the European Commission, Peru, the U.S. and the U.K., further revealing the extent to which these countries handed power over to Pfizer. In almost all scenarios, Pfizer’s interests come first.
For example, government purchasers must acknowledge that the effectiveness and safety of the shots are completely unknown, all while indemnifying Pfizer against any and all financial liability. 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.
Even if Pfizer eventually is convicted of fraud in the U.S. and loses all its liability protection from the COVID jabs because of it, that judgment would not impact these foreign contracts. These countries sold their souls to Pfizer and have absolutely no recourse but to pay even if the shots kill everyone.
The contracts for at least four countries also secure Pfizer’s intellectual property rights even if the company is found to have stolen intellectual property rights of others. In such case, the government purchaser becomes the liable party. As explained by Public Citizen:19
“For example, if another vaccine maker sued Pfizer for patent infringement in Colombia, the contract requires the Colombian government to foot the bill. 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.”
Equally shocking 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-19.20 Is it any wonder, then, that governments around the world have suppressed the use of safe and effective outpatient 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 and their emergency use authorization would disappear, yet governments are on the hook for hundreds of millions of doses.
Pfizer Has ‘Habitual Offender’ Track Record
The fact that Pfizer has behaved like a criminal who works out a cover story for a planned murder before committing it is not surprising, considering its history. Pfizer, has been sued in multiple venues over unethical behavior, including unethical drug testing and illegal marketing practices.21
In his 2010 paper,22 “Tough on Crime? Pfizer and the CIHR,” Robert G. Evans, Ph.D., Emeritus Professor at Vancouver School of Economics, described Pfizer as “a ‘habitual offender,’ persistently engaging in illegal and corrupt marketing practices, bribing physicians and suppressing adverse trial results.”
Between 2002 and 2010 alone, Pfizer and its subsidiaries were fined $3 billion in criminal convictions, civil penalties and jury awards. They are recurrent criminal felons. None of these convictions has deterred their nefarious behavior.
In 2011, Pfizer agreed to pay another $14.5 million to settle federal charges of illegal marketing,23 and in 2014 they settled federal charges relating to improper marketing of the kidney transplant drug Rapamune to the tune of $35 million,24 as well as $75 million to settle charges relating to its testing of a new broad spectrum antibiotic on critically ill Nigerian children.
As reported by the Independent25 at the time, Pfizer sent a team of doctors into Nigeria in the midst of a meningitis epidemic. For two weeks, the team set up right next to a medical station run by Doctors Without Borders and began dispensing the experimental drug, Trovan. Of the 200 children picked, half got the experimental drug and the other half the already licensed antibiotic Rocephin.
Eleven of the children treated by the Pfizer team died, and many others suffered side effects such as brain damage and organ failure. Pfizer denied wrongdoing. According to the company, only five of the children given Trovan died, compared to six who received Rocephin, so their drug was not to blame.
The problem was they never told the parents that their children were being given an experimental drug. What’s more, while Pfizer produced a permission letter from a Nigerian ethics committee, the letter turned out to have been backdated. The ethics committee itself wasn’t set up until a year after the trial had already taken place. Pfizer’s rap sheet also includes bribery, environmental violations, labor and worker safety violations and more.26
Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing
Now, despite Pfizer being one of the least ethical drug companies, we’re told to trust them with our very lives, and the lives of our precious children. They’re going to put out booster shots this fall that have undergone absolutely no testing whatsoever, and we’re to simply throw caution to the wind because Pfizer — which has no liability whatsoever — says so.
In 2014, Pfizer faced a surge of lawsuits that accused it of hiding known side effects of its anticholesterol drug Lipitor.27 They got off scot-free that time, as a federal judge dismissed thousands of cases alleging the drug caused Type 2 diabetes.28,29 But at least they had liability and could be sued.
When it comes to the COVID jabs, injured patients and family members of those killed by it won’t even have the ability to sue for damages, as governments around the world have indemnified them completely, and it looks as though they might not even be liable even if they’re found guilty of fraud. But we will have to see what the courts rule on that one. Still, that any nation would agree to a contract like that is just mindboggling.
It’s hard to tell who’s more deserving of punishment — Pfizer or the equally captured federal agencies, the FDA and the CDC, that go along with them and do nothing to protect the lives of the youngest members of our society. Clearly, it’s up to us to protect ourselves and our loved ones, because wolves in sheep’s clothing are ruling the roost — they’re making all the decisions, and captured agencies are simply doing their bidding.
Via this genetic engineering experiment, they’ve literally injected ‘seeds of demise’ into everyday people like a cockroach spray. Based on a 2011 estimate, he believes an extra 700 million will be killed from this bioweapon – and they’ve known about the risks since 2005.
STORY AT-A-GLANCE
David Martin, Ph.D., presents evidence that COVID-19 injections are not vaccines, but bioweapons that are being used as a form of genocide across the global population
The spike protein that the COVID-19 shots manufacture is a known biologic agent of concern
Martin believes the number that may die may have been revealed back in 2011, when the World Health Organization announced their “decade of vaccination”
The objective for the decade of vaccination was a population reduction of 15% globally, which would be about 700 million people dead; in the U.S., this may amount to between 75 million and 100 million people dying from COVID-19 shots
When asked what timeframe these people may die in, Martin suggested “there’s a lot of economic reasons why people hope that it’s between now and 2028”
The projected illiquidity of the Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid programs by 2028 suggests the “fewer people who are recipients of these programs, the better;” Martin believes this may be why people 65 and over were targeted with COVID-19 shots first
In this revealing interview with Greg Hunter of USAWatchdog.com, David Martin, Ph.D., presents evidence that COVID-19 injections are not vaccines but bioweapons that are being used as a form of genocide across the global population.1
In March 2022, Martin filed a federal lawsuit against resident Biden, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services alleging that COVID-19 shots turn the body into a biological weapons factory, manufacturing spike protein. Not only is the term “vaccination” misleading when referring to COVID-19 shots, it’s inaccurate since they are actually a form of gene therapy.2
“And we are not only not going to be sued for, you know, any libel or misinformation, we are actually holding people criminally accountable for their domestic terrorism, their crimes against humanity and the story of the coronavirus weaponization that goes back to 1998,” Martin says.3
SARS-CoV-2 Has Been in the Works for Decades
Martin has been in the business of tracking patent applications and approvals since 1998. His company, M-Cam International Innovation Risk Management, is the world’s largest underwriter of intangible assets used in finance in 168 countries. M-Cam has also monitored biological and chemical weapons treaty violations on behalf of the U.S. government, following the anthrax scare in September 2001.4
According to Martin, there are more than 4,000 patents relating to the SARS coronavirus. His company has also done a comprehensive review of the financing of research involving the manipulation of coronaviruses that gave rise to SARS as a subclade of the beta coronavirus family.
Much of the research was funded by the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) under the direction of Dr. Anthony Fauci.5 Martin explained:6
“I think it’s important for your listeners and viewers to remember that it was 1999 when Anthony Fauci and Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill decided to start weaponizing coronavirus they patented in 2002 — and you heard that date correctly, that’s a year before the SARS outbreak in China.
You know, they knew it was a bioweapon since 2005. They knew it was effective at harming populations, intimidating and coercing populations”
COVID-19 Shots Are an ‘Act of Bioterrorism’
According to Martin, the spike protein that the COVID-19 shots manufacture is a computer simulation of a chimera of the spike protein of coronavirus. “It is, in fact, not a coronavirus vaccine. It is a spike protein instruction to make the human body produce a toxin, and that toxin has been scheduled as a known biologic agent of concern with respect to biological weapons for the last now decade and a half,” he said.7
Rather than being a public health measure as they were widely campaigned to be, COVID-19 shots are an act of bioweapons and bioterrorism. Martin shared that in 2015, Dr. Peter Daszak, head of the EcoHealth Alliance that funneled research dollars from the NIAID to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for coronavirus research, stated:8
“We need to increase public understanding of the need for medical countermeasures such as a pan-coronavirus vaccine. A key driver is the media and the economics will follow the hype. We need to use that hype to our advantage, to get to the real issues. Investors will respond if they see profit at the end of the process.”
Daszak, who Martin refers to as “the money launderer in chief,” “actually stated that this entire exercise was a campaign of domestic terror to get the public to accept the universal vaccine platform using a known biological weapon. And that is their own words, not my interpretation,” Martin said.9
Martin: 100 Million May Die Due to COVID Shots
Both Pfizer and Moderna’s COVID-19 shots contain nucleic acid sequences that are not part of nature and have not been previously introduced to the human body. This amounts to a genetic engineering experiment that did not go through animal studies or clinical trials.
However, already people are dying from the shots and, Martin states, “many more will” due to issues such as blood clots, damage to the cardiovascular system and problems with liver, kidney and pulmonary function.10
An onslaught of reproductive and cancer cases related to the shots are also anticipated. “The fact of the matter is an enormous number of people who are injected are already carrying the seeds of their own demise,” Martin said.11 As for how many may die, Martin believes the numbers may have been revealed back in 2011, when the World Health Organization announced their “decade of vaccination”:12
“Based on their own 2011 estimate, and … this is a chilling estimate, but we just have to put it out there … When the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Chinese CDC, the Jeremy Farrar Wellcome Trust and others published The Decade of Vaccination for the World Health Organization back in 2011 their stated objective was a population reduction of 15% of the world’s population.
Put that in perspective, that’s about 700 million people dead … and that would put the U.S. participation in that certainly as a pro rata of injected population somewhere between 75 and 100 million people.”
When asked what timeframe these people may die in, Martin suggested “there’s a lot of economic reasons why people hope that it’s between now and 2028.”13 This is because of “a tiny little glitch on the horizon” — the projected illiquidity of the Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid programs by 2028.
“So the fewer people who are recipients of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the better,” Martin said. “Not surprisingly, it’s probably one of the motivations that led to the recommendation that people over the age of 65 were the first ones getting injected.”14 Other populations at risk are caregivers, including health care providers, and others in the workforce who were forced to be injected, such as pilots.
“Why is it that we’re suddenly having 700 flights a day being canceled because, allegedly, airlines don’t have pilots? … the dirty secret … is there a lot of pilots who are having microvascular problems and clotting problems, and that keeps them out of the cockpit, which is a good place to not have them if they’re going to throw a clot for a stroke or a heart attack,” Martin said.
“But the problem is we’re going to start seeing that exact same phenomenon in the health care industry and at a much larger scale, which means we now have, in addition to the problem of the actual morbidity and mortality, meaning people getting sick and people dying.
We actually have that targeting the health care industry writ large, which means we are going to have doctors and nurses who are going to be among the sick and the dead. And that means that the sick and the dying also do not get care.”15
Why COVID Shots May Change Your DNA
It’s been stressed by the media and public health officials that COVID-19 shots do not alter DNA. However, Martin brings attention to a little-known grant from the National Science Foundation, known as Darwinian chemical systems,16 which involved research to incorporate mRNA into targeted genomes. According to Martin:17
“Moderna was started … on the back of a 10-year National Science Foundation grant. And that grant was called Darwinian chemical systems … the project that gave rise to the Moderna company itself was a project where they were specifically figuring out how to get mRNA to write itself into the genome of whatever target they were going after.
That could be a single-celled organism, it could be a multi-celled organism or it could be a human. And the fact of the matter is Moderna was started on the back of having proven that mRNA can be transfected and write itself into the human genome.”
It is completely unknown what the short- or long-term effects of the spike protein analog that’s inside people who received COVID-19 injections will be. But with respect to alteration of the genome, Martin states that data show mRNA has the capacity to write into the DNA of humans, and “as such, the long-term effects are not going to merely be symptomatic. The long-term effects are going to be the human genome of injected individuals is going to be altered.”18
Fraud Removes Big Pharma’s Liability Shield
The 2001 anthrax attack, which came out of medical and defense research, led to the passage of the PREP Act, which removed liability for manufacturers of emergency medical countermeasures.
This means that as long as the U.S. is under a state of emergency, things like COVID-19 “vaccines” are allowed under emergency use authorization. And as long as the emergency use authorization is in effect, the makers of these experimental gene therapies are not financially liable for any harm that comes from their use.
That is, provided they’re “vaccines.” If these injections are NOT vaccines, then the liability shield falls away, because there is no liability shield for a medical emergency countermeasure that is gene therapy. Further, lawsuits that can prove the companies engaged in fraud will also negate the liability shield. Martin states:19
“One of the convenient things about the PREP Act is the immunity shield from liability actually is only as good as the absence of fraud. Because if there was fraud in the promulgation of the events, leading to an emergency use authorization, then all of the immunity shield gets wiped out.
So the reason why it is so important for conversations like the one we’re having to actually be promoted and be advanced is because the pharmaceutical companies — and this includes Pfizer and Moderna and J&J — know they are perpetuating a fraud. The great thing about this is when that fraud is established, 100% of the liability flows back to them.
… when a fraud was the basis for a fraud, then we actually have a number of other legal remedies that allow you to pierce that veil. So in the end, there’s no question … and it’s quite evident based on the current mortality and morbidity data that given the fact that when it comes to biological weapons and bioterror each count comes with $100 million penalty. That’s what the federal statute gives us.
The penalty for corporate domestic terrorism, when you have per count $100 million a pop liabilities — that is an existential threat that takes a company like Pfizer or takes a company like Moderna out of existence. And that is what we’re working for every day.”
If you’d like to follow the progress of the ongoing legal cases seeking to expose the truth — that a criminal organization is seeking to obtain control over the global population via the creation of patented bioweapons marketed as novel viruses and injections — you can find all the details at ProsecuteNow.io, a website compiled by Martin and colleagues.20
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Monday ended its COVID-19 program for cruise ships that reported cases of the virus, while saying that ships can handle their own testing and mitigation.
“CDC has worked closely with the cruise industry, state, territorial, and local health authorities, and federal and seaport partners to provide a safer and healthier environment for cruise passengers and crew,” the federal agency’s website said in an update on Monday. “Cruise ships have access to guidance and tools to manage their own COVID-19 mitigation programs.”
“While cruising poses some risk of COVID-19 transmission,” the agency said, the “CDC will continue to publish guidance to help cruise ships continue to provide a safer and healthier environment for crew, passengers, and communities going forward.” The agency did not post a date for the latest guidance, but an Epoch Times review of archived pages shows that the update was posted Monday.
Throughout the pandemic, the cruise industry worldwide has been gutted by lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and other government-imposed rules. Cruise industry groups have called on the CDC to end its program for months.
Health officials have often scrutinized cruise ships and warned that the vessels allow for widespread transmission of COVID-19, the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus. In early 2020, extensive media coverage was dedicated to an outbreak on the Diamond Princess ship in Japan, prompting health agencies worldwide to place curbs on cruises.
‘Important Step Forward’
In a statement Monday, Cruise Lines International Association spokeswoman Anne Madison told USA Today that it’s pleased the rules were dropped “in favor of a set of guidelines for public health operations on cruise ships
“We look forward to reviewing the details, which we understand will be posted on the CDC website in the coming days,” she told the news outlet. “This is an important step forward in the CDC aligning the guidelines for cruise with those it has established for other travel, hospitality, and entertainment sectors.”
The CDC used a so-called “Conditional Sailing Order” throughout the pandemic after having first issued a no-sail order in 2020. The CDC dropped the conditional order as well as its color-coded COVID-19 warning system earlier this year, which was also hailed by cruise industry groups.
As for mandatory vaccination rules on ships, severalfullyvaccinated cruises have faced respective COVID-19 outbreaks so far in 2022.
A “100 percent vaccinated” Princess Cruises vessel, for example, reported a COVID-19 outbreak before it docked in San Francisco, officials said in late March.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis fought against COVID-19 restrictions for cruise ships, including vaccine mandates. Last year, the Republican governor vowed that he would take legal measures to end the enforcement of CDC rules at ports in Florida, which are used by major cruise operators.
A top U.S. health agency is refusing to identify which employees are working on vaccine safety teams, drawing criticism from watchdog groups.
The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is a database in which people file reports of adverse events following vaccination. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) manages the database with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The Epoch Times sought the names of employees on three CDC teams charged with analyzing data from VAERS, including a team that looks at data pertaining to post-vaccination heart inflammation. The CDC denied the request in full.
The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requires agencies to comply with information requests but establishes exemptions that agencies can cite to withhold requested information. Roger Andoh, a CDC FOIA officer, cited an exemption that protects “personnel and medical files and similar files” if the disclosure of the files “would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”
“The information that has been withheld under Exemption 6 consists of employee names. We have determined that the individual(s) to whom this information pertains has a substantial privacy interest in withholding it,” Andoh wrote to The Epoch Times.
Calls for Transparency
Watchdog groups questioned the move.
“If Democrats and Republicans want the American people to trust government institutions, i.e. CDC, NIH [National Institutes of Health] and all the others, one would think members of Congress, agency bureaucrats, and the president’s administration would be motivated to start by offering transparency and eliminating the taxpayer’s justifiable questions and worries,” Adam Andrzejewski, CEO and founder of OpenTheBooks.com, told The Epoch Times in an email.
“Not having the ability to see into the bureaucracy is troubling and these agencies are rife with conflicts of interest. Denying transparency to the public is never the answer.”
Adam Andrzejewski, CEO and founder of the government watchdog organization OpenTheBooks.com, in Washington on March 22, 2022. (Courtesy of the Conservative Partnership Institute)
Michael Chamberlain, director of Protect the Public’s Trust, noted that Americans’ trust in the government, and health agencies in particular, has declined during the pandemic, according to surveys.
“Pulling the veil of secrecy over basic agency information only serves to make this situation worse,” he told The Epoch Times in an email.
The CDC’s FOIA office reviewed its decision after a request from The Epoch Times.
“I’ve taken a look at your case and we stand by the full denial of the requested information due to the potential for harassment and to protect the physical safety of the employees on these teams,” Bruno Viana, a deputy director who handles FOIA questions, told The Epoch Times in an email.
The Epoch Times has appealed the determination to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the parent agency of the CDC and the NIH.
VAERS Teams
The CDC describes VAERS as “the nation’s early warning system” for the detection of vaccine safety signals, or signs that specific side effects are linked to a vaccine. Health care workers are required to report serious adverse events following vaccination to the database, and other interested parties, such as relatives, can also file reports.
Health officials have repeatedly said that signals from the COVID-19 vaccines would be detected by VAERS and other systems like it, but one of the most prevalent serious side effects, heart inflammation, appears to have been first identified by the Pentagon, not the CDC. Even after the Pentagon discovered the issue, the CDC’s director said no signal was found, though the agency has since acknowledged the side effect.
Raw data from VAERS doesn’t alone constitute a safety signal, according to the CDC. The agency says experts must analyze the data to figure out if signals truly exist.
The three teams whose members the CDC is shielding are among those tasked with analyzing the data, including digging into medical records from reports. One focuses on post-vaccination blood clotting—a condition identified after Johnson & Johnson vaccination. Another looks at the post-vaccination heart inflammation, which has appeared in many more people—especially young males—than expected after receipt of the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines. A third analyzes an assortment of data.
The work of the teams has been cited by CDC officials during meetings about vaccines.
If the names of the team members were released, they could be used to file additional records requests, which could shed light on how the CDC is analyzing the VAERS data. For example, one could request emails sent between two team members during the time when the heart inflammation issues were first uncovered to see if they were aware of the issue before U.S. military doctors.
The names of all CDC employees are listed in the Department of Health and Human Services’ employee directory, but it isn’t clear from the directory which workers are on the VAERS teams.
Moderate Democrats will play a key role in the coming midterm election and very likely handle the U.S. House to the Republicans, analysts said.
The main reason for the rebelling moderates is President Joe Biden’s policies.
“This [moderate voting] base is becoming increasingly disenchanted with what seems to be the ongoing failures of the Biden administration on major party platforms such as rising inflation, gas prices, and a pretty weak economy,” Jamie Wright, a political pundit at The Wright Law Firm, told The Epoch Times.
Josh Wilson, a political consultant and ex-aide to former Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, shared the view that the state of the economy under Biden is a significant factor in the shift.
Besides this, Wilson also pointed out that the historical pattern of midterm elections for the party of the president will also contribute.
“Simply based on U.S. electoral history, where the president’s political party tends to suffer major losses during the first midterm of the presidential term, it is highly likely that Republicans will see major gains in the House of Representatives,” he said.
Progressive Movement Pushing Moderates Away
For over a decade, progressive activists have been pushing the political spectrum in the United States to the left in various ways, from woke textbooks in the education system to protests on the streets.
As a result, some moderate Democrats found themself isolated and being pushed out.
Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO who was a liberal, shared a meme on April 28 explaining how the progressive movement has made him closer to the conservative side. The meme shows the political left moving away from the centers since 2008 while the center and right remaining stationary. As a result, he falls into the area close to the conservative without even changing his political stance.
The meme was liked by over 1.5 million users after Musk shared it on his Twitter account.
Elon Musk attends The 2022 Met Gala Celebrating “In America: An Anthology of Fashion” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on May 2, 2022. (Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue)
Biden, who mainly posed as a moderate during his campaign, followed the progressive movement closely after he came to the White House and adopted policies from the woke agenda.
That deepened the discontent among moderates.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks at the Humanity Against Censorship rally in front of Meta headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. on May 19, 2022. (Mrs. Hao/The Epoch Times)
A major factor was the extreme lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccine mandates related to the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, also known as the novel coronavirus, outbreak.
“You just have one public official who’s never been elected … no scientific citation for any of these mandates, simply telling Americans: ‘do what you’re told,’” Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent Democrat, criticized the policies during an interview with The Epoch Times’ sister media NTD at the “Defeat the Mandates” rally in Washington on Jan. 23.
The mandates were “all designed to instill fear and confusion in Americans, and it’s just a catastrophic exercise in bad government and manipulation,” he added.
Biden’s Energy Policies and Soaring Gas Price
Another area that moderate Democrats feel upset about is the economic performance during Biden’s presidency, especially the rising inflation and gas prices.
According to CNBC’s All-America Survey, Biden’s economic approval rating dropped 5 points from April’s survey to 30 percent. His approval of the overall handling of the presidency dropped to 36 percent. Of the 800 people across the nation polled by CNBC, 51 percent believe Biden’s efforts to fight inflation are making no difference, and 30 percent think the measures are actually hurting.
Gas prices are displayed at an Exxon gas station in San Francisco, Calif., on July 05, 2022. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
The Biden administration has strictly adhered to its climate crisis agenda, rejecting boosting domestic energy production and insisting people should buy electric vehicles as an alternative option amid high gas prices.
However, electric vehicles are unaffordable for many families.
A Consumer Reports survey shows that 52 percent of people say they would not buy an electric vehicle because the costs of buying and maintaining them are too high.
How Moderate Democrats May Act in Midterms
Though the moderates are not as popular in the mainstream media or on some politicians’ priority agendas, they still make up the majority of Democrats, Wright said.
“There is a real power struggle between the moderates and the extreme left within the party. However, moderates still make up the majority,” she said.
She believes it’s important for the Democrat candidates to appeal to the moderate voting base to ensure they don’t leave the party over failed policies.
Wilson believes the moderates will act in two ways—either they won’t show up or vote Republican—and will cost the Democrat Party heavily.
“Democrat members of the Congress seem to be trending more to the left but Democrat voters are not. To be more specific, Democrats in D.C. seem to be putting social issues ahead of economic issues. [However,] most voters want the government to focus on things that impact them daily,” he said.
“It’s more likely that moderate Democrat voters will not vote in the midterm if [they are] extremely fed up, rather than cast a ballot for a Republican,” he said. “If the Republican candidate in those swing districts is also a moderate, they may be able to bring Democrat voters across the line.”
“By not showing up and voting for the Democrat, Democrat voters will absolutely be protesting the current situation and indirectly helping Republicans take control,” he added.
The situation is also likely to put moderate Democrat candidates in harm’s way because “they will be painted as extreme liberals during the campaigns” under the current political climate, Wilson stated.
Masooma Haq and Jack Phillips contributed to the report.
White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci revealed that after about five decades in the federal government, he’s planning on leaving his position by the end of resident Joe Biden’s current term.
“We’re in a pattern now. If somebody says, ‘You’ll leave when we don’t have COVID anymore,’ then I will be 105. I think we’re going to be living with this,” Fauci, 81, told Politico in an interview published on July 18 that he plans to retire by the end of Biden’s current term, which ends in January 2025.
Fauci has been the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he became a household name as the face of the federal government’s response, often generating criticism from Republicans and conservatives about his generally dire predictions about the pandemic.
Of his relationship with former President Donald Trump, Fauci said that “we developed an interesting relationship … two guys from New York, different in their opinions and their ideology, but still, two guys who grew up in the same environments of this city. I think that we are related to each other in that regard.”
And if Republicans win back either the House or Senate in 2022, Fauci noted that he will likely be investigated by GOP lawmakers. But he claimed that regarding those investigations, “I don’t make that a consideration in my career decision.”
In the Politico interview, Fauci continued to defend his public recommendations, including school closures, mask-wearing, vaccination regimes, and lockdowns.
“My telling somebody that it’s important to follow fundamental good public health practices … what are you going to investigate about that?” he asked.
Possible Investigations
However, Fauci has faced public questions from Republicans in Congress about his agency having given funding to third-party groups to carry out research in China. COVID-19, caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, emerged in Wuhan, China, and a significant number of U.S. intelligence officials last year released a report suggesting the virus may be linked to the top-level Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Last month, amid questions from Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), Fauci conceded that he isn’t able to halt federal funding from being doled out to researchers in China.
“The NIH [National Institutes of Health] is still funding research in China, at least $8 million since 2020,” Marshall said. “In the Intelligence Community’s 2022 Annual Threat Assessment, the Chinese Communist Party is presented as one of the top threats to the United States, along with Russia, Iran, Syria, and North Korea. To my knowledge, only China is receiving U.S. research dollars.”
Later, he asked Fauci, “When will you as director of NIAID stop funding research in China?”
Federal health agencies, Fauci said in response, “had very productive peer-reviewed highly regarded research projects with our Chinese colleagues that have led to some major advances in biomedical research.”
“We obviously need to be careful and make sure that when we do fund them we have the proper peer review and we go through all the established guidelines,” he said.
NIAID officials didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.
The first hospital in America to mandate a COVID-19 vaccine for all employees is now facing a staffing shortage from infections.
Houston’s Methodist Hospital has hundreds of employees out of work because they tested positive for the virus that causes COVID-19. At the same hospital in 2021, 153 staff members who refused to get vaccinated quit or were fired. Now Methodist leadership is trying to avert a crisis.
“What is worrisome is the climbing number of our employees who cannot work because they are home sick with COVID-19. Almost 400 employees tested positive last week,” Dr. Robert Phillips, the executive vice president and chief physician executive of Houston Methodist, wrote in an internal email on July 12 obtained by The Epoch Times.
“While most of these employees are getting COVID-19 from the community, it is vital that we don’t face a situation where too many employees are out sick and we find ourselves with a staffing shortage,” he added.
Houston Methodist, with a workforce of around 28,000, was the first hospital system in the country to mandate the COVID-19 vaccine for all of its employees. It also was the first system in the nation to mandate the vaccine for its private health care providers who are credentialed members of its medical staff. The hospital later required all its employees to get a vaccine booster by March 1.
Most employees got vaccinated and stayed, but the system is having trouble with staffing as the vaccines prove increasingly worse at protecting against infection as new variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, emerge.
“The spike in cases is happening all over the country and is likely attributed to the highly contagious and more vaccine-resistant omicron subvariant,” Phillips wrote. “BA.5 is now the most infectious variant so far and is thought to be four times more vaccine evasive than the last dominant variant.”
BA.5 is a subvariant of Omicron. It recently became the dominant strain in the United States, according to federal data.
Phillips nodded at how the vaccines provide little protection against infection, describing BA.5 as four times more “vaccine-evasive” than the last dominant strain, which was BA2.12.1.
While many employees are sick, Phillips said the spike is “not yet correlating with a large surge in hospitalizations” in Houston Methodist, with just 290 COVID-19 patients in the system as of July 12.
None of the patients are Methodist employees, according to Stefanie Asin, a spokeswoman for Houston Methodist Hospital. Asked how many of the hospitalized COVID patients are vaccinated, Asin said she didn’t know. Nearly half of the patients in the system in late 2021 were vaccinated.
Jennifer Bridges poses in Houston, Texas, on June 22, 2021. (Francois Picard/AFP via Getty Images)
Problem With Mandates
“The problem with vaccine mandates is that they are immunologically ignorant by ignoring the powerful effect of natural immunity,” Dr. Marty Makary, a Johns Hopkins surgeon and professor, told The Epoch Times. “Natural immunity has been formally studied in over 200 studies and has been found to be more effective than vaccinated immunity.”
Studies from scientists in Qatar, the United States, and other countries have found those who survived COVID-19 had superior protection than the vaccinated, though a smaller number of studies indicate the opposite.
Nurse Jennifer Bridges was fired by Methodist in June 2021 for refusing the vaccine. “This only proves our point that the vaccine doesn’t work. A true vaccine would prevent you from catching the virus. It’s time Methodist owns up to its mistakes,” Bridges told The Epoch Times after reviewing Phillips’ memo.
“That is absolutely a false premise,” Asin, the hospital’s spokeswoman responded. “The vaccines were never intended to stop you from getting it. The point of the vaccines is to keep you from severe illness and being hospitalized. The mandates and the vaccines are absolutely working.”
Bridges now works at a private COVID-19 clinic located in Houston called BreatheMD, which is owned by Dr. Mary Talley Bowden.
“I had COVID two years ago and have never gotten sick again—even though all I do is care for COVID patients,” she said.
Bridges and a number of other former Houston Methodist workers sued their employer over the refusal to recognize natural immunity and other aspects of the mandate, but the lawsuit was thrown out and the appeal was rejected.
But Makary, a member of the National Academy of Medicine, said the science shows the naturally immune should have been retained.
“When Methodist fired nurses who had natural immunity for not being vaccinated, they fired those least likely to spread the infection at the workplace,” he said. “Many nurses have circulating antibodies that neutralize the COVID virus, but they are not antibodies that Methodist hospital recognizes.”
Bridges said, “The patients are suffering in the hospitals, and the little staff they have are overworked due to these shortages. It’s sad that they would rather keep away very healthy, unvaccinated nurses with natural immunity when they need us so badly.”
“What does natural immunity actually mean?” Asin responded. “We required the vaccines for our employees to keep the patients safe.” She said they do not currently have staffing shortages.
Filled vials wait to be distributed ahead of a COVID-19 vaccine clinic in Houston, Texas, on May 13, 2021. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
Change in Tune
The vaccines were authorized by federal regulators to prevent symptomatic infection, and were touted by vaccine makers and numerous health officials as offering high protection.
As that protection has waned, authorities focus on the protection the vaccines provide against severe disease.
While Methodist Hospital now says the vaccines were intended to protect its employees from severe illness, that is not what its leaders said a year and a half ago, according to emails reviewed by The Epoch Times. In February 2021, the hospital emailed an offer of a $500 bonus to any hospital employee who got two shots of the vaccines. The email says, “The Hope Bonus is a reward for setting the right example and doing our part to stop the spread.”
Dr. Marc Boom, the president and CEO of Houston Methodist, emailed employees on April 15, 2021, telling them that the mandate was for preventing infection and spread to patients: “We’re seeing positive results as the number of employee infections has dropped inversely with the number of employees receiving the vaccine. It appears we’ve successfully created herd immunity at Houston Methodist.”
Herd immunity means the level of protection that comes from vaccines, prior infection, or both, is so high that the spread of a disease is no longer an issue.
“COVID vaccines were originally thought to reduce COVID transmission, but that understanding quickly changed, rendering policies for unvaccinated people obsolete,” Makary said. “If someone who does not have natural immunity chooses not to get vaccinated, they do so at their own individual risk, but they pose no public health threat now that population immunity is high.”
Bowden, Bridges’s new employer, lost her privileges with Houston Methodist after she announced that she would only treat unvaccinated patients who couldn’t get care elsewhere. The hospital said Bowden was spreading “misinformation.” Bowden was suspended, and then she resigned.
Bowden said the number of vaccinated employees who are out sick means Houston Methodist leaders owe an explanation “to those of us who were persecuted for questioning the mandates.”
“We have 400 employees out sick with COVID. They are out sick without severe illness. We stand by the effectiveness of the vaccine,” Asin responded.
Phillips told his employees to do their best to not get sick.
“Our patients need us to stay healthy, so I strongly encourage our employees to be as vigilant as possible,” he said, adding later, “please use good judgment in your personal lives as community spread … is high right now.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said it’s “astonishing” that mainstream media is not holding Dr. Anthony Fauci accountable for his remarks on Wednesday that COVID-19 vaccines don’t protect “overly well” against the CCP virus.
“One of the things that’s clear from the data [is] that … vaccines—because of the high degree of transmissibility of this virus—don’t protect overly well, as it were, against infection,” Fauci said.
“It’s astonishing that mainstream media allows [Fauci] to blindly make that statement without any effort to hold him accountable for the costly national policies and the lockdowns that were utterly built upon his initial assertion that the vaccines would prevent transmission and end the pandemic,” Kennedy told The Epoch Times.
The lockdowns initially were imposed to flatten the curve in two weeks. Kennedy asserts that they “were contrary to every previous advisory for pandemic countermeasures by the CDC and the WHO.”
He believes that “the house of cards should be falling” and that the media should be putting pressure on the NIH.
“The national media, which was fooled by all these lies, should be surrounding NIH with pitchforks and torches. And yet it’s like water on a duck,” he said.
Kennedy is the author of the best-selling book “The Real Anthony Fauci,” an encyclopedic work that encompasses Big Pharma’s meddling in public health and people’s liberties.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, responds to questions during a congressional hearing in Washington in a file image. (Greg Nash/Pool via Reuters)
He’s an attorney, environmental activist, and founder of Children’s Health Defense. He is the son of former U.S. Senator, Attorney General, and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, and the nephew of former Democrat President John F. Kennedy.
“If they don’t prevent transmission, then how does he justify the mandates? Particularly for children?”
The Epoch Times reached out to Fauci’s office for comment.
THE NEWS RAISES QUESTIONS ABOUT THE ENDORSEMENT OF BIRX BY NH-1 CANDIDATE MATT MOWERS.
Dr. Deborah Birx – who often appeared in front of COVID-19 task force briefings on behalf of the Trump administration – has admitted to doctoring data associated with the government’s response, as well as quietly altering the Centers for Disease Control advice without authorization, according to her own book.
Birx – who was brought into the White House task force following recommendations from Republican Party figures such as Matt Mowers (now running for Congress in New Hampshire’s 1st Congressional District) – writes in her underperforming book ‘Silent Invasion‘:
“I devised a work-around for the governor’s reports I was then writing. Instead of including those recommendations in the common bulleted list, I’d include them in the pandemic summary and state-specific recommendations in the governor’s reports, where they wouldn’t be so obvious. These weekly reports couldn’t go out on Monday without administration approval. Week by week Marc’s office began providing line-by-line edits. After the heavily edited documents were returned to me, I’d reinsert what they had objected to, but place it in those different locations. I’d also reorder and restructure the bullet points so the most salient—the points the administration objected to most—no longer fell at the start of the bullet points. I shared these strategies with the three members of the data team also writing these reports. Our Saturday and Sunday report-writing routine soon became: write, submit, revise, hide, resubmit. Fortunately, this strategic sleight-of-hand worked. That they never seemed to catch this subterfuge left me to conclude that, either they read the finished reports too quickly or they neglected to do the word search that would have revealed the language to which they objected.”
Birx’s appointment was welcomed by her former Chief of Staff in the State Department, Mowers, who tweeted:
I served as Chief of Staff to Ambassador Birx and I have the utmost confidence that she will ensure America is prepared to confront the Coronavirus outbreak. Her passion and commitment to ensuring our nation’s health and safety are second to none.
Indeed, press reports indicate that Birx’s ability to operate in such a manner was specifically due to Mowers’s influence:
Though Birx was not personally close to the President, she was able to develop a close relationship with this White House in part because Trump campaign official Matt Mowers served as her chief of staff for nearly two years, according to a source familiar with her situation.
Within weeks, however, Birx was thwarting the will of President Trump and his team, in order to prioritize the demands of pharmaceutical lobbyists and Chinese Communist Party sympathisers like Anthony Fauci. She further revealed:
This wasn’t the only bit of subterfuge I had to engage in. Immediately after the Atlas-influenced revised CDC testing guidance went up in late August, I contacted Bob Redfield. He confirmed my suspicions: he had disagreed with the guidance, but had felt pressured by HHS and the White House to post it. Also, many on his staff in Atlanta were still comfortable prioritizing symptomatic individuals. Even at this late point, eight months into the pandemic, many at both the White House and the CDC still refused to see that silent spread played a prominent role in viral spread and that it started with social gatherings, especially among the younger adults. We had to find a way around them. Recognizing the damage to public health the Scott Atlas–driven testing guidance could do and was doing with testing rates dropping across the country, Bob and I agreed to quietly rewrite the guidance and post it to the CDC website. We would not seek approval. Because we were both quite busy, it might take a week or two, but we were committed to subverting the dangerous message that limiting testing was the right thing to do.
As this was going on, Republican figures like Mowers were running cover for the scarfed bureaucrat:
Worse still, Birx claimed to offer little contrition over her outright insubordination, when challenged on the matter by then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows:
“On September 18, I was still on the road—in Arizona again, for a meeting with those conducting proactive testing at the University of Arizona—when Mark Meadows’s name and number flashed across my White House–issued smartphone.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing? You rewrote and posted the CDC testing stuff.”
“Yes, I did, but—” “There’s no ‘buts’ here. You went over my head.”
I explained why I had done it. We’d already seen the drop in testing numbers resulting from Scott Atlas’s dangerous guidelines. Those few pages we’d rewritten would change how states could test, and we’d prevent even more community spread going into the dangerous winter ahead. Mark Meadows took this in and then, biting off each of his words, said, “You went over everyone else on the task force’s heads. You went around the whole approval process. You do not make unilateral decisions. It’s that simple. Period. End of sentence. Understood? Don’t ever do this again.”
“Understood. I did what I needed to do.”
“Don’t do that again without talking with me first.”
The news will raise questions about the work of Birx and those around her in the White House, and whether or not she acted illegally during her employment. The developments could also cost Mowers – whose lead in the New Hampshire 1 Congressional race has narrowed in recent months.
His main opponent – former Trump admin official Karoline Leavitt – has experienced a bumper fundraising quarter as well as garnering endorsements from key Trump-world figures such as Steve Cortes:
The protection afforded by surviving COVID-19 was strong against the latest virus subvariants, including the one currently dominant in the United States, scientists in Qatar found.
People who were infected with Omicron, a variant of SARS-CoV-2, had 76.1 percent protection against symptomatic reinfection from BA.4 and BA.5 and 80 percent shielding from any reinfection, regardless of symptoms, according to the preprint study.
Omicron became the dominant virus strain in many countries in late 2021. Since then, a number of subvariants have taken hold. BA.5 is the strain currently dominant in the United States.
While protection from an Omicron infection provided robust shielding against reinfection, those who contracted a pre-Omicron strain had little protection, according to the Qatari scientists, who were led by Dr. Laith Abu-Raddad with Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar.
Pre-Omicron infection provided just 15.1 percent effectiveness against symptomatic BA.4 and BA.5 reinfection and just 28 percent infection against any reinfection.
The scientists analyzed data from national COVID-19 databases.
Infections before Omicron were those that occurred before Dec. 19, 2021, when the variant wave started in Qatar.
Protection ‘Strong’
“Protection of a previous infection against BA.4/BA.5 reinfection was modest when the previous infection involved a pre-Omicron variant, but strong when the previous infection involved the Omicron BA.1 or BA.2 subvariant,” the scientists wrote.
Natural immunity has long been found to be superior to the protection from COVID-19 vaccines, and the new study is no exception. Vaccines provide little protection against Omicron infection and perform worse against infection and severe illness from the BA.4 and BA. 5 subvariants, studieshave shown.
Natural immunity also waned against BA.4 and BA.5, highlighting how the subvariants are better at evading protection, the Qatari researchers found.
The group has been studying natural immunity for years and recently discovered that the protection from prior infection against severe disease showed no signs of waning, regardless of what strain infected the person.
Among the listed limitations for the new study was the young population of Qatar, where just 9 percent of residents are 50 years of age or older. That means the findings “may not be generalizable to other countries where elderly citizens constitute a larger proportion of the total population,” researchers wrote.
Some experts, including Abu-Raddad and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, continue recommending vaccination for people with natural immunity, pointing to studies that indicate one or more doses increase protection, but others say vaccination isn’t needed for people who survive COVID-19, since some research suggests the elevated protection is minimal and that the naturally immune are at higher risk of vaccine side effects.
The opening paragraph of Gen. Daniel Hokanson, chief of the National Guard Bureau, on their website reads:
“The National Guard is a lethal, cost-effective, dual-role operational force that provides strategic depth to the Army, Air Force, and Space Force, and responds to crises in our homeland. We are capable of operating in a complex global security environment, and continue to invest in modernization and readiness to prepare for the threats of the future. Today’s National Guard is an integral part of addressing the gravest challenges facing the Joint Force.”
Sort of… at least it should be.
Unfortunately, these days the Guard is being manipulated and often attacked on all sides as the proverbial political football.
First came the question of its use. Although the Guard was properly called into Minneapolis after the George Floyd rioting and into Portland after that benighted city’s post-election violence (maybe it should have been earlier), the question of why it was not present for the Jan. 6 events—however you want to define them—remains unanswered. From what we understand, then-President Donald Trump, under whose leadership they served, offered them to the Congressional leadership who, for whatever reason, were disinterested.
Yet worse, however, is what has happened now to the actual members of this volunteer army, the National Guard. (Yes, we should never forget that National Guardsmen, many of whom served previously, are all volunteers. What could be more patriotic than that?)
Those volunteers who did not dutifully—subserviently might be a better word—take the COVID-19 vaccines will be ejected from the National Guard.
“About 40,000 National Guard and 22,000 reserve soldiers will be blocked from service for rejecting the COVID vaccines, U.S. Army officials said on July 8.
“’Soldiers who refuse the vaccination order without an approved or pending exemption request are subject to adverse administrative actions, including flags, bars to service, and official reprimands,’ an Army spokesperson told Military.com.
“The deadline for the Defense Department’s vaccination mandate passed at midnight on June 30. The order cuts off pay and some of the military benefits to the 62,000 service members.”
I’m going to say right now that those 62,000 are most likely among the bravest of the National Guard because they have the courage to stand by their beliefs as few do.
Ironically, news of this despicable treatment of the very people to whom we owe our thanks arrived not long before the father of it all, Dr. Anthony Fauci, began to backpedal.
“White House COVID-19 adviser Anthony Fauci conceded Wednesday morning that COVID-19 vaccines don’t protect ‘overly well’ against the virus.
“Speaking during a Fox News interview, Fauci told host Neil Cavuto that ‘one of the things that’s clear from the data [is] that … vaccines—because of the high degree of transmissibility of this virus—don’t protect overly well, as it were, against infection.’”
So if they don’t protect “overly well” why are we kicking all those people out of the National Guard?
Few of those being ejected are anywhere near the supposed danger age of over 70 or so with the requisite co-morbidities. Most are reasonably physically fit, possibly quite fit. But they have to go. No “our bodies, ourselves” for them.
Fauci, in the Cavuto interview, suggested the vaccines indeed did work against severe reactions for older people because he had evidence. It turned out, however, that the evidence he provided was from a study with only one person—himself. He had taken an array of shots and boosters and, at 81, only got a self-described mild case of COVID.
I will counter that with another study of one person—myself. I’m only a few years younger than Fauci. I took the initial Pfizer shots way back in February 2021, abjured all boosters after that, almost never wore a mask except when forced on airplanes, and have been in many crowds, unmasked, in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Nashville and have never contracted COVID at all, at least as far as I know.
Does that prove anything? Of course not, but neither does what Fauci told Cavuto “as a scientist.” Not remotely.
I don’t know for sure what inspired Fauci’s backpedaling and his ludicrous cover, but I suspect there’s a world of potential lawsuits out there that could cause grave financial harm to Big Pharma and those like Fauci who work so closely with them. One of the reasons some say they recommend these dubious shots to children is to avoid these devastating suits. When the government makes vaccines mandatory for children, the companies that produce them are held harmless.
Following on the theme of volunteers, and since I live in the Volunteer State (Tennessee), I would be remiss in not noting that as of now our Republican governor, Bill Lee, has been on the wrong side of the National Guard story, doing nothing, despite many asking, for the ejected Guardsmen. (The Tennessee Star has been covering this closely.)
Also in Tennessee, 5th District Congressional candidate Kurt Winstead, a brigadier general in the National Guard himself, has been curiously silent on his beleaguered fellow Guardsmen.
This, although the policy endangers far more than just the National Guard—it seriously endangers the already endangered national security of our country. As Breitbart is reporting, it’s on the brink of engulfing our entire army:
“At least 260,000 American troops—or about 13 percent of the 2.1 million total force—are not fully vaccinated despite a Biden administration vaccine mandate for the military, and many of them could face discharge.
“According to the Department of Defense website, at least 268,858 service members as of July 13 are still not in compliance with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s August 2021 mandate for every member of the military to be fully vaccinated with two doses of a vaccine. That figure does not count the thousands who have not taken any doses.”
I guess Biden is planning on having Ukrainians do all our fighting for us. Sorry, folks, we just don’t have the troops.
After White House adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra issued warnings about a new COVID-19 subvariant, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said they are not providing key facts about the latest strain.
“How come the flu vaccine changes every year and they’re not willing to change this vaccine?” Paul told Fox News on Tuesday. “Now, you might have me with an argument. I’ll listen to you if you tell me, ‘We’ve got a new vaccine that actually has something to do with the current virus,’” he said.
It came after Fauci, who has given hundreds of media interviews since the start of the pandemic, told CNN this week that the Omicron subvariant BA.5 is concerning due to its high transmissibility. People infected in the first COVID-19 waves “really don’t have a lot of good protection” against the latest subvariant, Fauci also said at a White House briefing several days ago.
But Paul, himself a doctor, told Fox that Omicron “was about 90 percent less likely to put you in the hospital than the first variant,” saying that Americans should “discount” what both Fauci and Becerra are saying about the latest subvariant.
“So if no one’s telling you any information, how can you make any judgment other than the emotionalism and the sensationalism of the government?” he asked.
Fauci himself was infected with COVID-19 several weeks ago and confirmed he took Pfizer drug Paxlovid before his symptoms recurred, although he’s received two booster shots.
In a recent interview, Fauci conceded that most COVID-19 vaccines don’t protect “overly well” against the latest variant. However, he used that statement to claim that they are effective at limiting the most severe symptoms.
“At my age, being vaccinated and boosted, even though it didn’t protect me against infection, I feel confident that it made a major role in protecting me from progressing to severe disease,” said Fauci, who is 81 and has worked in various capacities in the federal government since the late 1960s.
In a recent interview with the Washington Post, Fauci suggested that Americans ages 5 to 50 should be allowed to get a second booster shot.
The federal government, he argued, “need[s] to allow people who are under 50 to get their second booster shot, since it may have been months since many of them got their first booster.”
“If I got my third shot [in 2021], it is very likely the immunity is waning,” Fauci proclaimed.
The Epoch Times has contacted the National Institutes of Health for comment.
A federal district court in Ohio has temporarily blocked the Biden administration from enforcing the COVID-19 vaccine mandate on thousands of U.S. Air Force service members who remain unvaccinated after having opposed the shot on religious grounds but have had their religious exemption applications denied.
U.S. District Court Judge Matthew McFarland, who was appointed by former President Donald Trump in late 2019, issued a temporary restraining order filed on Thursday preventing the Biden administration from taking any action for at least 14 days against any Air Force member who opted not to take the COVID-19 vaccine.
The judge’s ruling also grants the case “class status,” which means the temporary restraining order will grant relief to all members of the Air Force who submitted a religious accommodation request from the COVID-19 vaccine mandate from Sept. 1, 2021, to the present, and were confirmed via the Air Force Chaplains as having a sincerely held religious belief, but had their requests denied or not yet acted upon. Plaintiffs had contended that such a class would include over 12,000 airmen.
The action stems from a case filed in February 2022 challenging the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate. Plaintiffs comprise 18 active-duty members of the Air Force serving at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio; Hurlburt Field in Florida; Randolph Air Force Base in Texas; and Dobbins Air Reserve Base in Georgia, plus all similarly affected members.
“The court has already granted a preliminary injunction to our 18 original plaintiffs,” an attorney in the case, Tom Bruns of Siri & Glimstad law firm, told The Epoch Times. “The court has now granted a class certification—and that’s kind of the historic moment—Air Force-wide, service-wide, it covers every member of the Air Force. And now he’s saying, ‘Why shouldn’t I grant the preliminary injunction to all those folks?’”
McFarland wrote in his order (pdf) in granting the class status: “They face separation from the Air Force and other disciplinary measures. A single injunction would provide relief to the entire class. Indeed, the main purpose of a [lawsuit class] is to provide relief through a single injunction or declaratory judgment. Because Defendants have uniformly maintained a policy of overriding Airmen’s religious objections to the COVID-19 vaccine, they have acted ‘on grounds that apply generally to the class.’
“Moreover, the class definition requires that a Chaplain certify that the airman’s religious beliefs are sincerely held. Finally, a single injunction would provide the proposed class with the relief they seek from the harm they stand to suffer.”
McFarland gave Air Force officials until July 21 to file a response “identifying why this Court should not grant a class-wide preliminary injunction.” He also gave plaintiffs an opportunity to then file a response by July 25.
According to data from the Air Force, as of July 11, over 6,800 service members have been denied religious accommodation requests. Only 104 have had their applications approved. Meanwhile, 834 members have been “administratively separated” by the force. According to the figures, 97.1 percent of the Air Force has been fully vaccinated, and 0.1 percent has been partially vaccinated.
Nurse and Army veteran Renee Langone administers a Moderna COVID-19 vaccine to U.S. Air Force (active duty reservist) Dr. Pei-Chun McGregor at the West Roxbury VA Medical Center in Boston, Mass., on Dec. 23, 2020. (Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images)
Painful Consequences
McFarland’s order came in the nick of time for some airmen. Many have received notices in the last week, with a date of their final day, an airman at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska told The Epoch Times.
One client was in the middle of a board hearing determining his future with the service, Attorney Wendy Cox of Siri & Glimstad law firm, told The Epoch Times. Objecting to the COVID-19 shot put airmen at risk of job loss and disciplinary measures.
“One of the officers we were representing was facing $1,000 a month pay reduction for two months as well as an official letter of reprimand,” Cox said. “We’ve had people removed from positions of commands because of their alleged violation of this order to get a vaccination, of which they are unable to get because it violates their religious beliefs.”
“Some were stranded in foreign countries after refusing the shot, and missed weddings. There’s some pretty tragic stories about what has happened,” Cox said.
The Air Force officials told the court that they had every consequence still on the table for service members who refused to get the shot, and those consequences included everything up to court martial and two years incarceration at Leavenworth, the attorneys said.
“The proof in the case was very clear. The Air Force tried to pretend that they did individualized analysis of each service member’s religious objection, and, and that did occur in terms of the service member proving they had a sincerely held religious belief,” Bruns said. “But then the Air Force, in its affidavits, proved that when it came to accommodating that belief, they took the position we can’t grant religious exemptions, because we have to save these slots for administrative and medical exemptions. So their own proof was ‘We didn’t do the individualized analysis on the back end, because we weren’t granting any religious exemptions.’ And it was only once the lawsuits got filed, that they granted a few religious exemptions. And all of those folks were near the end of their career.”
The Air Force wanted the airmen’s cases heard individually, but in his decision allowing class status, McFarland noted how the Air Force did not consider each case individually when denying religious accommodation requests.
“Defendants appear to again argue that the court must individually analyze each airmen’s claims on the one hand, while systematically denying all religious accommodation requests despite the factual differences defendants claim the court should consider on the other,” McFarland wrote.
“The Court appreciates there may be minor factual differences between the members of the class, including roles, responsibilities, levels of proximity, likelihood of deployment or travel, and ability to telework, as well as different religious beliefs and reasons for objecting to the COVID-19 vaccine.
“However, these minor differences do not outweigh that defendants’ typical response when receiving a religious accommodation request is to deny it. The typicality of the putative class is reflected in the fact that defendants have indiscriminately denied almost all religious accommodation requests, and their use of form letters to deny the accommodation requests. Such facts suggest that defendants do not individually weigh each applicant’s belief or circumstances in issuing their response, further cementing the typicality of the class.”
The vast majority of governmental and COVID-19 tracking websites employ third-party trackers on users without consent, according to a new study.
The revelation comes from a recent paper – “Measuring Web Cookies in Governmental Websites” – published by a cohort of European researchers funded by groups including the European Research Council (ERC), the European Union, and the Spanish government.
“A potential risk from e-governance is that since it represents a unique point of interaction for mandatory and indispensable services for all citizens, it can, unintentionally or not, become a single point of monitoring and tracking for the entire population of a country. A readily available way to achieve that is with the use of Web cookies,” cautions the paper.
The study analyzed three types of websites: official governmental websites of “G20” countries around the world; websites of international organizations such as the United Nations and popular websites used for COVID-19 tracking and information. It measured these sites’ use of “cookies” – personal data related to your browsing history that websites can retrieve at a later time.
“Web cookies have been exploited to collect information about users’ online activities and interests,” notes the paper.
“Our results show that, unfortunately, tracking is a serious concern, as in some countries up to 90% of these websites create cookies of third-party trackers without any consent from users,” explains a summary of the findings.
“Non-session cookies, that are created by trackers and can last for days or months, are widely present even in countries with strict user privacy laws. We also show that the above is a problem for official websites of international organizations and popular websites that inform the public about the COVID-19 pandemic,” it continues.
Researchers found that up to 90 percent of governmental websites for “G20” countries, which include 19 countries and the European Union comprising the world’s largest economies, added tracking cookies without user consent.
G20 WEBSITE COOKIE USE.
“More than 50% of cookies created on G20 government websites belong to third-parties and at least 10% (up to 90%) originate from known trackers. Most of these cookies have a life span of more than a day and many an expiration time of a year or more,” continued the study, which based its analysis on 5,500 governmental websites and over 118,000 URLs administrated by governments.
Around 95 percent of the international organizations analyzed in the paper created cookies without user consent, and roughly 60 percent used at least one third-party cookie. Third-party cookies are “known to be tracking users for data collection purposes,” explain researchers.
Similarly, 99 percent of COVID-19 information sites added at least one cookie without user consent.
“For example, the very popular website with global maps about the COVID-19 cases, maintained by Johns Hopkins University, add cookies from 7 trackers,” explains the paper.
“All the other Top 10 website are official national information websites in European countries that have three trackers or more. The American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is also in the Top 10, with cookies associated with three trackers,” it continues.
The findings come amidst concerns that governments in the West are seeking to emulate the Chinese Communist Party’s “social credit score” system, granting the regime the ability to dictate individuals’ spending habits and movements potentially based on their ideologies.
World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has a new message for governments around the world, bring back mandatory coronavirus rules to fight the “increasing trend of deaths.”
So far, Ghebreyesus’ pleas to mask up have been cast aside by exhausted governments and citizens who have abandoned strict COVID-19 restrictions.
While America’s aversion to big government makes us as a whole more resistant to Ghebreyesus’ claims that the pandemic is “nowhere near over,” officials in countries like the United Kingdom have said future lockdowns may be warranted if rising cases from new variants overwhelm the healthcare system.
Britain’s Sky News has more on Ghebreyesus’ call to reimpose COVID rules:
Among the variants and subvariants being tracked by the WHO is BA.2.75 – nicknamed the centaurus – which was first discovered in India in May.
Scientists say the variant may be able to spread rapidly and get around immunity from vaccines and previous infection.
Dr. Ghebreyesus outlined several “interlinked challenges” now facing the global response to coronavirus, including the Omicron sub-variants and reduced testing and sequencing.
He added: “There is a major disconnect in COVID-19 risk perception between scientific communities, political leaders and the general public.
Sky News’ reporting suggests there’s a possibility that cities like London could reimpose mandatory mask wearing. Are you worried that could happen in America, too? As always, tell us your thoughts in the comments below!
Resident Joe Biden is losing support from some of his biggest backers.
Bill Kristol, who founded and edited the neoconservative magazine The Weekly Standard, became a fierce critic of Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign and led the NeverTrump movement.
In 2018, Kristol co-founded The Bulwark, whose coverage is largely centered around criticism of Trump.
Two years later, he endorsed Biden in the Democratic primary, calling it a “simple choice,” and in the general election.
On Wednesday, however, Kristol argued that Biden should announce he won’t run for re-election.
He said on Twitter that a retirement announcement by Biden would bolster the Democrats’ chances in the 2022 midterm elections and lead to a Democratic victory in the 2024 presidential race.
Straightforward from here:
1. Biden announces not running again.
2. 2022 focus turns to R extremism, Ds do well in Nov.
3. Inflation subsides, Ukraine defeats Russia, Biden is successful 1-term president.
4. Younger moderate D defeats Trump or Trumpist in ’24.
As the president’s popularity drops further and further amid historic inflation and other crises, even liberals are increasingly giving him the cold shoulder.
A recent New York Times/Siena College poll indicated that 64 percent of Democratic voters want someone else than the incumbent as their nominee for president in 2024.
Biden snapped at a reporter who asked him about the poll at a White House event Tuesday.
“Read the polls, jack! You guys are all the same,” he said.
“What’s your message to Democrats who don’t want you to run again?”
At the now-defunct Weekly Standard, the neoconservative ideologue became a crucial proponent of President George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq.
The invasion has since become regarded as one of the worst foreign policy disasters in U.S. history.
Kristol reinvented himself by aligning with progressive Democrats as a Trump critic after the 2016 GOP primary, establishing himself as a mainstay on liberal cable channels such as CNN and MSNBC.
The Chinese Communist Party-run Wuhan University has reported a case of an individual contracting the virulent disease of cholera, media reports suggest.
Located in the same province as the Wuhan Institute of Virology – believed by many scientists and government intelligence officials to be the source of COVID-19 – Wuhan University is less than two miles from the controversial lab. The university has also received nearly three quarters of a million dollars from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
In November 2018, the vaccine advocate’s foundation sent $499,944 to the university to “establish international research networks and data sharing platforms as well as develop policy recommendations for improving the medical insurance system in China.” In January 2021, even after the Chinese Communist Party purposely hid data relevant to the origins of COVID-19, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation sent the university an additional $127,650 to fund research into broadening access to drugs for Tuberculosis.
The district’s health department claims to have collected samples, undertaken contact tracing, and closed certain venues for disinfection after a Wuhan University student was found to have the disease.
Chinese Communist Party health officials claim no further cases have been reported.
Cholera is a virulent disease that can be spread through contaminated food or water, typically resulting in acute diarrhea. The incident at Wuhan University is rare, as only one other case has been identified in China this year and five were detected throughout the entirety of last year.
The incident follows intense scrutiny of the Wuhan Institute of Virology for its role in the origins of COVID-19, as the lab manipulated bat coronavirus strains to become more lethal to humans. Resembling the hallmarks of gain-of-function research, which has previously been banned in the U.S. due to its risky nature, Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers have also hidden troves of data relevant to COVID-19.
A team of Harvard research scientists, publishing in the New England Journal of Medicine, have found that SARS-CoV-2 virus has mutated so much that the Pfizer mRNA vaccines developed against the original Wuhan strain now have little to no effect.
The study, “Neutralization Escape by SARS-CoV-2 Omicron Subvariants BA.2.12.1, BA.4, and BA.5,” evaluated neutralizing antibody titers of participants vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine, against multiple SARS-CoV-2 strains.
The scientists found that the titers dropped from 5,783 (against the WA1/2020 isolate, Wuhan strain) to 275 (against the BA.4 or BA.5 subvariant, omicron variants), by a factor of 21.
In other words, they found the mRNA vaccine to be essentially ineffective against Omicron variants currently in circulation.
SARS-CoV-2 Mutations
SARS-CoV-2 has been a quickly evolving virus since late 2019. Like all RNA viruses, it has a strand of RNA that is packaged in a delivery vehicle that allows it to attach itself to host cells and inject its RNA into the cells and hijack the cells to make more copies of its RNA.
A virus must interact with living cells in order to reproduce. Without this interaction, the virus itself is inert. It has no metabolism. It cannot move. It doesn’t eat. It cannot reproduce with other viruses. What this means is that a virus has none of the characteristics of living organisms. Because of this, some scientists want to classify viruses as part of life while others point out that viruses are not alive. At least not without hosts.
Life or not, all viruses must have genetic material RNA (ribonucleic acid) or DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). RNA or DNA make copies using templates of complementary strands of RNA or DNA. There is always a chance for errors to happen during this process. We call these “errors” mutations.
Often these errors make the DNA or RNA too imperfect to carry on functioning, so the mutation goes nowhere. But if the mutated version is viable, the result is a new, slightly changed version of the DNA or RNA.
A virus that does not kill its host but is able to keep using the host to replicate itself is able to continue replicating. There is an advantage to a virus developing a way to become chronic or endemic, rather than being rabidly lethal to the host.
By every indication, that is what is happening with SARS-CoV-2, the novel virus that likely originated in Wuhan, China, and quickly spread around the globe, using humans and other animals as its host.
Anti-Spike Antibodies
Many of the mutations to the SARS-CoV-2 RNA do not change any of the proteins the virus needs to survive and proliferate. These are called silent or synonymous mutations. Others, known to scientists as non-synonymous mutations, do change the amino acid composition of the proteins.
The amino acid sequence differences (about 3 percent) observed between SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins from the original Wuhan strain (GenBank # YP_009724390) and an Omicron isolate from Norway on January 3rd, 2022 (GenBank # UOU35996.1) are the results of two years of evolution of the virus on its spike protein.
(National Library of Medicine’s online Blast service)
Using the National Library of Medicine’s online Blast service, the authors compared the spike protein sequences from the Wuhan strain and an Omicron variant. The red lines highlight the mismatches.
Compared to other parts of the virus genome, the gene that codes for the spike protein evolve faster, as the spike protein is on the surface of the virus and is under much more selection pressure.
This poses a problem for the current vaccines and any future vaccines based on the spike protein. The fast-changing spike protein would likely make the existing vaccines and any new vaccines less effective. In other words, the virus has moved on, but the vaccines have not.
Existing vaccines based on the spike protein generate multiclonal antibodies against different epitopes of the spike protein. If an antibody reacts to an epitope that is not affected by the mutations that Omicron has, then this antibody would be effective against Omicron. Otherwise, it will not be effective.
When most, if not all antibodies that the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines developed based on the original Wuhan strain fails to react to the current SARS-CoV-2 variant, the vaccine becomes ineffective.
Vaccinated Have Negligible Antibodies Against Current Strain
In the new Harvard study, the scientists tested 27 participants who had been vaccinated with Pfizer’s messenger RNA vaccine (BNT162b2) and 27 participants who had been infected naturally with the original Wuhan strain.
Most of those who had had COVID already had also been vaccinated, so most, but not all, had hybrid immunity.
Those who had recovered from COVID had a strong immune response to the original virus, which is no longer circulating in the world.
But those who had been vaccinated just six months prior to the test had only 1 percent as many antibodies as those who had recovered from having the virus.
Participants who had been boosted just two weeks before the test and were at the peak of their immunity did have a strong response, though it was still half as strong as those with natural immunity. Evidently their vaccine-acquired immune response was not long lasting, either.
And these results were only for the original, outdated virus, which is no longer a danger.
Against the strain currently dominant in the United States, those who had been vaccinated, even at the peak of their protection two weeks after the booster, had a very scant antibody response to the current virus, about 7 percent as strong as their antibody response to the original 2020 virus.
Those who were vaccinated six months before, but not boosted, had negligible antibodies against the current virus.
Those with natural immunity after recovering from COVID had a substantial immune response to the current virus.
Though it was only 10 percent as strong as their response to the original 2020 virus, their immune systems still responded with three times as many antibodies as the boosted group’s peak response.
More importantly, compared to immunity acquired through the spike-protein-based vaccines, natural immunity from SARS-CoV-2 infections covers the whole spectrum of immunity, giving the body short-term antibody protection as well as memory B and T cells for long-term protection. In addition, the short-term antibodies cover not only the fast-changing spike protein (S), but also other viral proteins, such as nucleocapsid protein (N) and envelope protein (E), making natural immunity less vulnerable for immune escape.
The takeaway is that even for the brief period right after a booster, vaccination was not as effective as natural immunity. Six months later, it was essentially useless.
The good news is that almost everyone in the U.K. has SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. This suggests that almost everyone there has had a SARS-CoV-2 infection at some point, and so has some level of natural immunity.
This does not mean that COVID-19 is over. It does mean that nature has provided people in the U.K. with protection better than the current spike-protein-based vaccines.
We believe that the same is true in the United States and Canada.
Take the jab, if you want, and get the boosters. But don’t be fooled. They will not give you any more protection than what you already have.
Things have not been the same since June 2021 for 53-year-old Douglas Howey from Colorado.
Around a year after he received the second dose of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, the 6 foot 4 and a half inch paraplegic man who once weighed 262 pounds lost over 100 pounds after the sudden onset of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), an incurable and fatal disease that gradually kills a person’s motor neurons.
Douglas Howey before and after amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Douglas has lost more than 100 pounds between the two photos (Courtesy of Linda Howey/The Epoch Times)
Though he never told his doctors that he started developing symptoms a month after the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, his family thinks that his sudden sickness a month later and dramatic weight loss within weeks seemed like too much of a coincidence.
This suspicion was further confirmed after Linda Howey, Douglas’s mother, heard a podcast by Del Bigtree where Dr. Stephanie Seneff, a senior researcher from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, talked about her research on possible links between neurodegenerative diseases and the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.
Once patients are diagnosed with ALS, they are normally given a life expectancy of two to five years. The disease is mostly diagnosed in men, and often between the ages of 55 to 75.
Douglas is younger than this and his illness has progressed much faster than most. He has already entered the late stage of the disease and is experiencing breathing difficulties although he has only been sick for one year.
Linda recalled that Douglas’s fever began in June, around a month after he received his second Moderna COVID-19 vaccine dose on May 21, 2021. He experienced high fever and was bedridden for a month.
Douglas’s father passed away in 2011 after a 25-year battle with a brain degenerative disease called frontotemporal dementia (FTD) that has a genetic component.
Within the last week or so of life, Douglas’s father began to experience ALS symptoms. Though Douglas also has the FTD gene, he was not expecting any significant progression for the next 20 years.
However, after Douglas recovered from his month-long fever, he began to notice constant fatigue and weakness in his grip strength.
Within six weeks of falling ill, he lost 40 pounds and his weight only continued to decline as his appetite deteriorated.
Five months later, Douglas was too weak to handle silverware properly and needed to feed himself with both hands.
Douglas has been a paraplegic since he was hit by a truck in 2012. As a result of that accident, he developed strong upper arms that he used to hoist himself up from bed and to propel himself around in a manual wheelchair.
His ALS disease quickly spread to the motor neurons in his arms so that by January 2022, just seven months after he fell sick, Douglas required a bed hoister and an automatic wheelchair which he now has much difficulty using.
Gone are Douglas’s days of gardening, traveling, working full-time, and acting as an active advocate for people with disabilities. Caregivers that used to help around the house for only a few hours are now there around the clock every day taking care of him.
Douglas has also gradually developed a cough and has trouble speaking.
A test in February 2022 showed that he had lost much of his functional lung capacity and was only using 40 percent of his diaphragm. The once eloquent and talkative physics instructor was reduced to spelling out his words to enable basic communication.
The destruction of his motor neurons has caused him pain and crippled his sleep but he has not been able to verbalize it. Caregivers may jam his toe in the bed hoister or bruise his back on the machinery yet he could only text his mother Linda who would later tell the caregivers that he was in pain.
“His lack of ability to talk has caused a lot of pain and suffering. When he texts me the details later, I communicate to the caregiver the pain he was enduring when he could not speak at the time the pain or injury was happening. By then, the damage has happened,” Linda told The Epoch Times through an email.
Mundane things that he once did without much thought now needed much effort to instruct caregivers to do, such as wiping his eyes, adjusting his glasses, and moving his cap.
With much effort, Douglas spelled out to his mother that he even needed to tell the caregivers to clean out mucus in his nose.
Linda said that she had searched up the batch numbers of his Moderna injections on How Bad is My Batch, a website that has gathered data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). Each search will show the reported adverse events, deaths, and disabilities associated with the batches that have been reported to VAERS.
Douglas’s batch numbers were 001c21a and 25c21a, respectively associated with 779 and 523 reported adverse events, eight and five deaths, and 10 and eight disabilities. However, these numbers were far from the number of reported cases from the batches highest on the list.
According to Pfizer, each batch can consist of 1 to 3 million vaccine doses, though it is not certain if Moderna is the same.
Researchers’ Suspicions
Dr. Stephanie Seneff and many others have been suspicious of the actual safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines from the moment they started to be administered to the population.
Research into this novel technology made her very concerned that the vaccine could cause incurable prion diseases and prion-like diseases within the population in five to 10 years, or even further down the line.
“To have [almost] 100 percent success rate with [a] few months of testing, it just seems completely reckless to me,” she said on the call with The Epoch Times.
Dr. Stephanie Seneff, a senior research scientist at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (Courtesy of Stephanie Seneff)
In 2021, months after the rollout of the mRNA Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, Seneff published a peer-reviewed paper with Dr. Greg Nigh (pdf).
In the study, she and Nigh declared that a vaccine that produced the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus could be a health concern as the spike protein has a prion region that is able to interact with proteins on human cells.
Prions are common proteins that naturally exist in the human brain. However, in the case of prion diseases, the prion will come into contact with a misfolded (pathogenic) prion, and just like a set of dominoes, the single contact will cause all other normal prions to become pathogenic, slowly killing the individual.
Awful as it sounds, it generally is a slow kill, often taking decades after the first exposure for symptoms to appear.
Examples of prion diseases include Creutzfeldt Jakob disease (CJD), an incurable and fatal disease.
Recent studies also show neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and ALS have prion-like features with protein misfolding and clumping in the brain which kills neurons. Some studies also suggest these diseases may also be prion disease, though this has not been proven.
Seneff and her colleagues expressed concern that an mRNA or DNA (adenovirus AstraZeneca) vaccine may serve as a trigger to cause prion or prion-like diseases and that we may see a spike in such diseases in the coming years.
In their rigorously peer-reviewed study (pdf), Seneff and her colleagues speculated that the vaccine may cause prion misfolding, causing damage to the brain in the forms of CJD, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, ALS, and so on.
The mRNA and DNA vaccines carry instructions for making the spike protein into cells. Once cells receive these instructions, they start making spike protein. Cells then stick these spike proteins on their cellular surface, and when immune cells recognize the proteins as foreign, an immune response is triggered.
However, mistakes can occur during the process of translating RNA or DNA into protein.
Seneff speculated that errors could also happen for the spike protein, causing misfolding. If misfolding also happens in the prion region, it may be able to interact with human prions and trigger prion diseases such as CJD, or a prion-like disease.
However, compared to the current CJD, Parkinson’s, and the other neurodegenerative diseases, Seneff said that disease, if caused by the vaccine, would, most likely, progress faster.
Since the vaccine hijacks cellular processes to make more foreign proteins than in a natural infection, there would be greater opportunities for misfolding.
“We suggested that you might not see anything for a year or even five years or a decade…it would take a long time for the symptoms to appear,” Seneff said.
“We were predicting that we would see an increase in the rate of Parkinson’s [and other diseases], and that would happen in younger people in the coming years.
Soon after Seneff appeared on Fox News highlighting her concerns, her inbox was immediately flooded with emails from individuals who believe that they themselves or their loved ones were affected by prion disease or prion-like diseases because of the vaccine.
Some saw a worsening of already-present neurodegenerative symptoms; some developed a neurodegenerative disease just weeks or months after vaccination.
A New Variant of Prion and Prion-like Diseases?
The sudden influx of people contacting her suggested to Seneff that the vaccine may have accelerated the process even faster than she expected.
“It’s possibly a new variant [of brain-degenerating disease], because it is sufficiently different than anything we’ve seen before,” she said.
Neurodegenerative diseases such as CJD, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and ALS all take many years for symptoms to manifest.
Seneff’s understanding of prion and prion-like disease is that individuals need to first be exposed to a protein that triggers misfolding of the body’s prions, which then build up for years before showing any symptoms.
“There’s a certain point at which it starts just to show symptoms, but it takes a whole process beforehand,” she said.
“You can have evidence of misfolded amyloid beta (a protein involved in Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease) in the spleen … and even in the brain before you have any symptoms … it’s a slow disease, but … it’s a progressive disease.”
Other research studies are also suggesting a possible link between prion and prion-like diseases and the COVID-19 vaccine.
Seneff’s friend and Nobel laureate, the late Prof. Luc Montagnier, co-authored a preprint study on 26 patients that developed CJD and died after receiving the vaccine.
The majority of the cases occurred within 11.38 days after vaccination, with deaths occurring at around 4.76 months.
The authors were fairly confident that the cases were related to the vaccine. The study’s corresponding author Dr. Jean-Claude Perez said his friend Montagnier feared, during the initial release of the vaccine, that the “new form of CJD would affect the millions of adolescents or children vaccinated with COVID-19.”
“All this confirms the radically different nature of this new form of CJD, whereas the classic form requires several decades,” the researchers wrote.
Other studies on the worsening of Parkinson’s or similar diseases also surfaced with some researchers pondering the links between the two events.
The “hidden process is happening faster with people who are getting the vaccine such that they’ll get the Parkinson’s disease [and other related diseases] sooner than they would have gotten it without the vaccine,” Seneff said.
Why so Toxic?
Seneff told The Epoch Times that the mRNA technology in the majority of the COVID-19 vaccines may be why we are seeing greater instances of reported adverse effects than from all previous vaccines.
She said she was concerned the moment she heard the term “warp speed”—the operation between the department of health and vaccine manufacturers to accelerate the vaccine production process—and started studying mRNA technology.
Her immediate verdict was “I was not going to get it; there was no way I was gonna let anyone inject it into my arm,” she said.
Studies have shown that the spike protein on the COVID-19 virus is toxic, therefore the mRNA and DNA (AstraZeneca) vaccines that force a person’s cells to make more toxic proteins are very likely to cause damage, though many media platforms have stated that the spike proteins produced by the vaccines are harmless.
Seneff’s study mostly focused on the mRNA vaccines.
“The coronavirus is very good at adapting, which is why they never were able to develop a vaccine in the past,” she said. Seneff, therefore, could not understand how the technology suddenly became so skilled and was able to do something they could not do before.
Even Bill Gates, a major public figure behind the movement to vaccinate the globe for COVID-19 funded a report through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation stating that unprecedented vaccines like the mRNA vaccines would take 10 to 12 years to be fully tested before release.
Further, of all these unprecedented vaccines, only 2 percent would be able to pass through the clinical trials.
Bill Gates speaks onstage at the TIME100 Summit 2022 at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City, on June 7, 2022. (Jemal Countess/Getty Images for TIME)
Seneff’s second study highlighted that although existing vaccines confer immunity by mimicking the natural infection process, the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines do not mimic natural infection at all.
“The messenger RNA (mRNA) [in the vaccine] is extremely … not natural,” she said.
Compared to natural mRNA that quickly degrades in the cell, the mRNA from the COVID-19 vaccines have been shown to take over two months to degrade, even though the manufacturers promised that degradation would occur in a few days.
“They were so worried about the mRNA not lasting long enough that they way overdid it, I think,” Seneff said.
Unaltered mRNA injected into the body triggers immediate immune responses, particularly interferon release, that will degrade the mRNA before it can reach target cells to initiate the manufacture of spike proteins. Therefore, in order to evade these fundamental immune defenses, Moderna and Pfizer altered the mRNA’s uridine molecule (a basic component of mRNA) into 1-methylpseudouridine to “dramatically reduce innate immune activation against exogenous (outside sourced) mRNA.”
Natural infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus triggers innate immune responses such as the production of interferon. Altering the structure of the vaccine mRNA allows the synthetic mRNA to persist in the body as it bypasses these fundamental immune responses. It can be argued that the vaccine’s version of the spike protein is not the same as the native one.
Further, to make the mRNA more stable, Moderna and Pfizer changed the chemical bases that make up the strand of RNA. The original RNA strand in the virus is made up of 36 percent of guanine (G) and cytosine (C).
mRNA low in G and C bases are less stable and degradable; Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA vaccines had this percentage raised to 53 percent and 61 respectively.
Previous experiments showed that genes that had higher G and C content were more likely to be read and their information made into proteins. Having a high G content also increases the speed at which the gene is read, but faster reading also means more likelihood of errors, and a higher likelihood of misfolding.
This potentially means that not only will this instruction remain in the cell for longer for its information to be made into protein, cells will also preferentially express information from the vaccine mRNA.
“The increasing evidence [is] that the vaccines do little to control disease spread and that their effectiveness wanes over time,” Seneff’s study read. “SARS-CoV-2 modified spike protein mRNA vaccinations have biological impacts is without question.”
Papers Refused ‘As Soon as the Word Prion Is Mentioned’
It should be noted that many of Seneff’s studies are her own speculations that have not been proven although they have been rigorously peer-reviewed.
It has been difficult for her to develop a solid case, as very few studies examine the negative implications of COVID-19 vaccines. For Seneff and her colleagues, who write papers that tell an alternative story, it has been difficult to find a journal to publish their work.
Dr. Jean-Claude Perez, the co-author of Prof. Luc Montagnier’s study on 26 CJD cases, told The Epoch Times via email that it was very difficult to publish his previous study with Montagnier and Dr. Valère Lounnas in reputable neurology journals.
That study found that Omicron is the only COVID-19 variant that does not contain a prion region, and despite receiving consent from all participants in the study, reputable journals cited ethical constraints as a major barrier to publication.
The authors considered publishing their research in smaller journals, but then fewer people would read it.
The authors therefore chose to publish their work as a pre-print which has fewer constraints, and although findings published in this way are generally less trusted, a wider range of people can be reached.
“But even certain types of preprints that we will not mention refuse such articles as soon as the word prion is pronounced there, such was the case for our article,” Perez wrote.
Seneff also experienced rejection of her work on spike proteins; both she and Montagnier have had their expertise in the matter questioned by the media and other members of the scientific community.
Linda said that Douglas and she decided to go public with his story as they want to raise awareness about the possible dangers of the COVID-19 vaccines.
“Douglas, pretty much knows he’s gonna die from this … and that’s a terrible thing that happened to a 53-year-old man,” she said.
“If anybody could hear this story, because … the regular news media does not cover this at all.”
Seneff encourages other people affected to report the adverse event to VAERS and investigate and confirm if it may be linked to the COVID-19 vaccines.
Asked about a cure, Seneff says she doesn’t know of any cures but some of her friends have been using herbal medications to treat long COVID-19 symptoms seen in vaccine-injured patients to see if such treatments could be efficacious.
Dr. Robert Malone is warning of immune imprinting after Dr. Anthony Fauci signaled his backing for second COVID-19 vaccine boosters for all Americans aged 5 and older.
“I couldn’t design a vaccine if I wanted to, to be more likely to drive immune imprinting,” Malone, who helped invent the messenger RNA technology the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are built on, told The Epoch Times.
Immune imprinting refers to a phenomenon whereby initial exposure to a virus strain may prevent the body from producing enough neutralizing antibodies against a new viral strain.
The COVID-19 vaccines currently in circulation are based on the Wuhan strain of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus. Also known as SARS-CoV-2, the virus causes COVID-19.
A number of strains have emerged and become dominant since the Wuhan strain was prevalent, including the currently dominant Omicron variant.
Researchers with Imperial College London and the United Kingdom Health Security Agency found that people who received three doses of a COVID-19 vaccine and were infected with the Wuhan strain had a lower level of protection against later strains when compared to people who had not been infected. Other groups, including researchers with the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, have found the vaccines much less effective against Omicron subvariants than the Wuhan strain.
A number of studies have found negative effectiveness among vaccinated groups. That means those who get vaccinated are more likely to get infected.
In some areas, the vaccinated account for a majority of those infected or in hospitals or dying with COVID-19. In Louisiana, for example, 70 percent of the deaths recorded between June 23 and June 29 were among the vaccinated.
Second Booster Push
The vaccines were originally promoted as two-shot primary regimens (Pfizer and Moderna) or a one-shot immunization (Johnson & Johnson). They were said to have efficacy as high as 100 percent against symptomatic infection.
Due to waning effectiveness against the emerging variants, U.S. officials authorized booster doses. In March, because the effects of the boosters against infection didn’t last long, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) cleared and recommended second boosters for all adults over the age of 50.
Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and resident Joe Biden’s top medical adviser, is now saying Americans 5 to 50 should be allowed to get a second booster dose.
Fauci told the Washington Post that the United States “need[s] to allow people who are under 50 to get their second booster shot, since it may have been months since many of them got their first booster.”
“If I got my third shot [in 2021], it is very likely the immunity is waning,” he added.
Fauci has no authority over authorizing or recommending boosters, but has signaled major changes in U.S. vaccine policy in the past.
White House, FDA Respond
Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House’s COVID-19 response coordinator, told reporters on July 12 that “we have conversations all the time about what are possible things we could be doing to better protect the American people” but that the decision on second boosters will be made by the FDA and the CDC.
Fauci uttered a similar statement during the briefing.
“The FDA is evaluating the current situation, including the emerging epidemiology indicating increased hospitalization, and will be open to all potential options to address this, if necessary,” an FDA spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email.
Vaccine makers and the FDA are working together to develop variant-specific shots for the fall, which they say will offer better protection. But the updated shots aren’t yet on the market.
Many U.S. adults have received a primary series of a vaccine, including 91 percent of those 65 and older and 77 percent of those 18 and older. But booster doses have been a harder sell. Only 70 percent of elderly persons who got a primary series have received a first booster, along with just 51 percent of those 18 and older, according to CDC data. A second booster has only been administered to 28 percent of the population 50 and older.
Few of the COVID-19 vaccine mandates included a booster, and most of the mandates have been rescinded due to factors like plunging COVID-19 metrics and the waning effectiveness of the vaccines.
The new BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron subvariants—which have been edging out other strains in the United States and are thought to be more transmissible, but do not seem to cause more severe illness—are “more likely to lead to vaccine breakthrough infections,” researchers with Columbia University found.
‘Vaccine-driven Disease’
The COVID-19 metrics in the United States have been creeping up in recent weeks, with the weekly average of cases jumping by 75 percent since late March and hospitalizations with COVID-19 doubling since April.
Officials blame the BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron subvariants, which have been edging out other strains in the United States and are thought to be more transmissible, but do not seem to cause more severe illness.
People should get a booster as soon as they’re eligible, which is typically about five months after their last shot, Jha and CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said. “Don’t delay,” Jha said.
But Malone is among the scientists who are challenging the idea that the old vaccines are the solution.
“You got a major problem with the new Omicron, that’s the BA.5. The people that are getting infected chronically and hospitalized and dying are predominantly the vaccinated. It’s happening all over the world,” Malone said. “Now they’ve got a problem because they have driven this because of immune imprinting. This is increasingly becoming a vaccine-driven disease.”
Fauci, a major vaccine proponent, “has basically created a situation through the insistence on the hyper vaccination where he’s actually driving the disease in the United States,” he added.
Government officials disagree. Walensky said CDC data show that people who either have not received a vaccine or have not been boosted have less protection than those who have been boosted, including against infection, even as studies show the boost against infection quickly drops after the first and second booster.
Fauci said that people who were previously infected, or have natural immunity from surviving COVID-19, “don’t have a lot of protection” against the new subvariants.
Neither mentioned how natural immunity, according to a new study, remains stronger than the protection from vaccines even with boosters, particularly against severe disease.
The details in the stories of the families whose loved ones died in the hospital due to what they call “death protocols” are strikingly similar.
The patients were all scorned because of their unvaccinated status and were given a combination of sedatives and the antiviral drug remdesivir.
The patients were also kept isolated, malnourished, and ultimately put on a ventilator before dying.
After death, the families were left in confusion and with inconceivable stories that many don’t believe—stories of chilling administrative cruelty.
The FormerFedsGroup Freedom Foundation (FFFF) has gathered about 200 of these stories through its COVID-19 Humanity Betrayal Memory Project to build an online database of testimonies for the purpose of surveying accounts of treatment for the sick unvaccinated and prosecuting any cases involving alleged abuse.
“They are horror stories,” Carolyn Blakeman, media director and task force coordinator for FFFF, told The Epoch Times.
Many of these deaths in hospitals occurred in 2021 after COVID-19 vaccine mandates were announced by resident Joe Biden.
In some cases, people who didn’t want to take the experimental vaccine were being fired, while unvaccinated patients in hospitals were being treated much differently than the vaccinated.
The phrase “the pandemic of the unvaccinated” was used by public officials to place blame on those who chose not to take vaccines that later proved to not be as safe and effective as touted.
Reports from people such as Scott Schara in Wisconsin and Anne Quiner in Minnesota began to reveal patterns of behavior by hospital administrators that suggested medical discrimination and protocols that many, like Schara and Quiner, alleged led to the barbaric death of their loved ones.
To grasp how health officials, physicians, and citizens were falling in lockstep with what appeared to be a global trance, Dr. Robert Malone, a pioneer of mRNA technology, presented the idea that many have fallen into “mass formation psychosis.”
‘We Need Massive Investigations’
Brad Geyer, a former federal prosecutor for 21 years with the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, told The Epoch Times, “We found these testimonial accounts to be so overwhelming, unimpeachable, and compelling that it might be exactly what we need to break the spell.”
Dr. Peter McCullough, the renowned cardiologist who has spoken out against COVID-19 protocols, is the president of FFFF, a New Jersey-based nonprofit comprised of former federal agents, prosecutors, lawyers, medical professionals, researchers, and volunteers whose efforts are geared toward exposing what it has determined are fraudulent COVID-19 practices established by the medical establishment and Marxist ideologies infiltrating American institutions that have directed society into a “new normal” of unconstitutionality.
There are several goals of the project, one being to create a historical document on what has taken place for those who can’t get their voices heard in mainstream media outlets that have been corrupted by the “safe and effective” feedback loop, Geyer said.
Then, FFFF finds representation for the victims while building a larger, collective case for crimes against humanity investigations, Geyer said.
There is also the goal of putting pressure on elected officials to hold everyone involved accountable, Geyer said.
“What is the purpose of sedating patients with fifteen different drugs, including fentanyl, and withholding food and water while keeping them isolated from their families?” Geyer asked. “We need massive investigations.”
‘They Scare These People to Death Through Emotional and Psychological Abuse’
In each story, Blakeman said family members have told her that doctors presented the same case for a ventilator.
“If I’ve heard that once, I’ve heard it 200 times in the exact words: ‘We’re just going to put you on the vent for a couple of days to give your lungs a rest,’” Blakeman said. “It’s like they all got the same memo on what to tell their patients. It’s insane.”
There is also the “COVID Cocktail” that is set before every patient, Blakeman said, which is what she called a kidney-failing concoction of remdesivir, vancomycin, and dexamethasone.
Each report also includes vitriolic contempt from doctors for the unvaccinated patients, Blakeman said.
“They scare these people to death through emotional and psychological abuse,” Blakeman said. “We had a victim whose husband literally had to break her out, with cops chasing them down the hallway to their getaway car. They are treated worse than prisoners.”
The value of the interviews as historical documents will help future generations to remember and not repeat these atrocities, Geyer said.
“Imagine if we could have interviewed all of those in the concentration camps,” Geyer said. “That’s what we are doing here in trying to build a machine that unearths the full truth of what occurred while it can deprogram enough people to get engaged in our effort to ensure our government continues to honor and respect the full measure of rights associated with citizenship and protect our constitutional rights.”
Another goal is to set up a humanity restoration board of physicians who have been uncorrupted, such as Drs. McCullough and Malone, to administer an organization that would confer, recommend, and advocate for physicians and nurses who want to come forward to make full disclosures of what they’ve done in exchange for leniency and amnesty.
“If we could create a quasi-governmental entity of physicians and scientists to administer a whistleblower program that would initially be a trickle, it could eventually become a stream and then hopefully a river of testimonies from physicians and nurses who want to get off their consciences what they’ve done,” Geyer said.
Richard and Katrin Crum. (Courtesy of Richard and Katrin Crum)
‘Our Stories are Eerily the Same’
Among the people FFFF has interviewed are Katrin Crum, Aletha Chavez, and Ashley Wines, each of whom also spoke with The Epoch Times about their experiences.
“It’s been eight months since my husband was killed, and I say killed because that’s exactly what happened,” Crum said. “He did not die of COVID. He died from the federal COVID protocols that were dictated to every hospital in the country.”
Crum started the private Facebook group C19 Widows/Widowers that want JUSTICE, where she met Chavez and Wines.
The group now has 600 members.
“All of our stories are eerily the same, and there’s a reason for that,” Crum said.
Crum’s husband, 58-year-old Richard, was a principal in Washington state at a private school that served special needs students, Crum said.
“Over 20 of his former students attended his memorial and spoke about the positive impact he had on their lives,” Crum said.
After his death—a more detailed account of which can be found here on FFFF’s web page—Crum said she turned her grief and anger into activism and advocacy, pouring herself into research.
“When the pandemic started, the NIH (National Institutes of Health), the FDA (U.S. Food and Drug Administration) handed down protocols for hospitals to follow in treating COVID patients,” Crum said. “Never before in the history of our country did a three-letter agency dictate to the doctor what the standard of care for a patient was going to be.”
Neither the NIH nor the FDA responded to The Epoch Times’ request for comment.
Individual treatment had been left up to the physician and was an open discussion between the physician and the patient, Crum said.
“But now, all of that has been thrown out the window,” Crum said. “My 58-year-old husband in Washington received the exact same treatment as a 40-year-old woman in Florida who had none of the same health issues that my husband had.”
Richard was admitted on Oct. 21 and died in the hospital on Nov. 5, 2021, with Crum, who had been able to advocate her way into finally seeing him after 11 days, in the room with him as nurses attempted CPR.
“He had wrist restraints on, a sore on his face from the mask, and had lost 36 pounds in 14 days,” Crum said.
Before he died, one doctor had attempted to coerce Crum into agreeing to change his classification to “Do Not Resuscitate,” Crum said.
“I kept refusing, and finally, at the end of our conversation, she was so mad she told me, ‘Fine, if you won’t change him to DNR when your husband goes into cardiac arrest, I’ll refuse to give him chest compressions,’” Crum said.
Crum had a private autopsy and toxicology report that listed medical conditions that caused his death other than COVID: a 90 percent blockage in the main artery of his heart that went untreated throughout his 16-day stay at the hospital, and a lethal dose of fentanyl, she said.
The protocols make the patients like her husband sicker and lead to death, Crum said, while reaping high financial incentives from the federal government through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic (CARES) Act and the American Rescue Plan supplemental funding to hospitals.
The hospitals get reimbursed for admitting or having a patient test positive for COVID, which is why there are reports such as Crum’s in which staff will continue to test a patient even if they weren’t admitted with a positive test, Crum said.
In addition, Crum said hospitals get reimbursed for using remdesivir, putting a patient on a ventilator, and having a patient die with COVID on the death certificate.
‘A Perverse Agenda’
Tom Renz, an attorney with America’s Frontline Doctors and Make Americans Free Again—organizations that oppose unconstitutional federal health mandates, spoke with The Epoch Times in a previous article about the reimbursements.
Renz said hospitals get federal funding through the CARES Act, which gives a 20 percent increase in reimbursement to hospitals for inpatient stays resulting from COVID-19, Renz said.
“The laws are structured in a way that incentivizes hospitals to kill people,” Renz said. “The hospital makes more money if you die from COVID-19 than if you recover from it. Why don’t we incentivize hospitals for getting people cured of COVID?”
In a Texas Senate Committee on Health and Human Services in June, Texas state Sen. Bob Hall alluded to the stories like ones collected by the FFFF when he said, “Never before have we seen the government step between the patient and the doctor and usurp that doctor’s right to exercise their conscience, their training, and what they know that patient needed.”
Hall said it’s something “we need to get to the bottom of” so that it doesn’t become “the norm” because the treatment is not only not helping, but also causing harm.
“How many people walk into U.S. hospitals and don’t walk out again because of this perverse agenda?” Crum asked. “A very high number.”
Roberto and Aletha Chavez. (Courtesy of Aletha Chavez)
‘I Trusted Them’
Chavez’s more detailed account of her husband Roberto’s death in a hospital in California can be found on FFFF’s web page.
Roberto was a deputy sheriff for the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department who lifted weights and hiked every day.
“We were told he was the healthiest person there with COVID,” Chavez said. “He never took any medications, worked out every day, and had no co-morbidities.”
Roberto was aware of stories of neglect in nursing homes and hospitals throughout COVID, Chavez said.
“He didn’t want to be admitted, but we just thought that he would go in and get a breathing treatment and come home, so, I took him to the hospital,” Chavez said. “It’s my biggest regret after all I know now.”
Roberto was admitted overnight on Aug. 17, Chavez said.
From the beginning, he was isolated, treated with neglect and disrespect because of his unvaccinated status, and put through the same series of protocols that led to Richard’s death, Chavez said.
“He had told me he needed to use the bathroom but couldn’t get a nurse to help him,” Chavez said. “He asked me to call the nurses station at least five times since they would not respond to him.”
Chavez received a call at 4 a.m. from a nurse telling her that he had fallen out of bed, she said.
“I know my husband,” Chavez said. “He’s not just going to lay there. He’s going to get up and use the bathroom.”
The nurse told Chavez there were no injuries from the fall, but because he lost his oxygen mask, he had gone into respiratory failure, which then led to their petition to put him on ventilation, Chavez said, though it was never a treatment he wanted.
“We had been texting and talking on the phone every day, so I knew he had been fine,” Chavez said. “They told me if we don’t vent him he’ll die, so I was put on the spot. I agreed. When given that choice, what would you do? I trusted them.”
The next day his heart stopped twice, and on the third time, he could not be resuscitated, Chavez said, and he died on Aug. 26, 2021.
“That was the worst day of my life,” Chavez said.
At first, Chavez said she thought it was just neglect, then she paid an outside company of physicians and nurses to review Roberto’s medical records which showed what they referred to as many red flags and, among other issues, that Roberto had been saturated with cross-interaction drugs while kept on fentanyl.
“As I delved further into this, I found that my story is many, many other people’s stories,” Chavez said.
Phillip and Ashley Wines. (Courtesy of Ashley Wines)
‘They Told Us It Was His Fault’
Ashley Wines, a nursing student herself whose story in more detail can be found on FFFF’s webpage, lost her 32-year-old fiance Phillip Carron on Oct. 14, after he was admitted on September 23, 2021.
“Phil was a real estate agent here locally in Bellingham, Washington,” Wines said. “He actually just became sales manager and senior vice president for NW Premium Homes shortly before everything happened. We pretty much had our future set up for us.”
Like Crum and Chavez, she encountered rabid discrimination because of Phillip’s unvaccinated status, she said.
“When I tried to drop off some food, one nurse yelled at me, telling me that because he was unvaccinated, he was going to die and that he’s not going to be eating or drinking for the rest of the time he’s here,” Wines said.
Initially, Phillip was going to be kept for observation; however, after he denied vaccination, Wines said he was put on morphine overnight, which she said increases respiratory distress.
“The next morning, he’s getting sent to ICU and labeled ‘imminent death,’” Wines said. “A couple of days later they start giving him precedex, which is a strong sedative, and remdesivir.”
After one dose of remdesivir, Phillip went into complete liver failure, Wines said.
Wines’s questioning of the protocols eventually got her banned from calling the hospital, Wines said, and she could no longer speak with Phillip, so she relied on Phillips’s mother, Pam, as power of attorney.
While Phillip was on the ventilator for 15 days, Wines said he lost 86 pounds.
“I would say 75 percent of the nurses were just nasty,” Wines said. “Every single doctor was nasty. We had doctors laugh at us. They told us it was his fault because he was not vaccinated.”
Wines and Phillip’s mother, Pam, were with Phillip the day he died, but had left two hours earlier, Wines said.
“I worked in hospice; I know what end-of-life looks like,” Wines said. “There’s no way we would have left had I thought he was going to pass. I find it interesting that two hours after we left, he passed.”
These are just brief vignettes skimming the surface of Crum’s, Chavez’s, and Wines’s stories that can be found in more detail— in addition to the stories of others—on the FFFF’s COVID-19 Humanity Betrayal Memory Project’s webpage.
‘We Are Going to Get Justice’
“People don’t want to believe that this is happening,” Crum said. “But as more stories come out, you cannot deny it.”
There are hundreds of people willing to come forward to share stories like theirs, Crum said.
“This has got to stop,” Crum said. “I think whoever set this evil system in place thought we would just dissolve into a heap of grief.”
Though there are times when they may want to, Crum said, it’s now become bigger than that.
“We are going to fight. We want the protocols to stop, and we want to hold these people accountable,” Crum said. “We are going to get justice.”
Gubernatorial candidate Nikki Fried has promised to legalize marijuana
The Florida Democrat who promised to “legalize weed” if elected governor owns a stake in a marijuana dispensary worth thousands of dollars.
Florida commissioner of agriculture Nikki Fried holds more than $130,000 of stock in cannabis dispensary Harvest Health and Recreation Inc., according to her most recent financial disclosure. The dispensary was acquired in October 2021 by Trulieve, the nation’s most profitable medical marijuana company, which sells cannabis in 117 locations in Florida. Fried confirmed her stake in the cannabis dispensary during a June 2021 interview, shortly after launching her gubernatorial campaign. At the time, Fried denied that her dispensary holdings posed a conflict of interest, since her office did not “regulate [the] marijuana space.”
Fried, a former medical marijuana lobbyist, has fought to advance marijuana interests throughout her career. Fried’s pro-pot platform helped her win the agriculture commissioner’s seat in 2018. The following year, her office lobbied for a bill legalizing hemp, a cannabis plant stripped of the majority of its psychoactive component. Fried handed out nearly 800 hemp cultivation licenses, including at least one to a firm that counted her former fiancée as an investor.
Florida legalized medical marijuana in 2015. Fried, who holds a medical marijuana card herself, championed the cause. She continues to advocate for legal recreational marijuana for all adults. Florida lawmakers have attempted a variety of recreational marijuana legalization efforts, including a bill proposed by state house Democrats to legalize recreational marijuana, which died in March. The state Supreme Court in 2021 rejected two proposed ballot amendments to the state constitution aimed at expanding marijuana access.
Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R., Fla.) campaign spokeswoman Lindsey Curnutte said Fried is “pushing her own interests ahead of what’s best for the people of Florida.”
“This is a classic example of Democrat disingenuousness,” Curnutte told the Washington Free Beacon. “It has nothing to do with freedom or democracy, but rather it’s all personal and political.”
Fried is vying for the Democratic nomination against former Florida governor Charlie Crist (D.), who shares her stance on marijuana legalization. Fried is trailing Crist by a large margin, according to St. Pete Polls’s latest survey. Whichever candidate emerges from the Aug. 23 primary will face DeSantis in November. A Real Clear Politics average of polls suggests DeSantis would prevail over either Democratic challenger.
This is not the first time Fried’s business interests have gotten her in hot water. In 2021, the Florida Commission on Ethics reprimanded Fried for failing to disclose $400,000 in lobbying income.
Fried is set to release her Fiscal Year 2021 financial disclosures by Sept. 1. Her campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
The Florida Democratic Party’s annual leadership conference is sponsored by Big Pharma giant and COVID-19 vaccine pusher Pfizer, The National Pulse can reveal.
Taking place July 15th through 17th, the event and gala count Pfizer as one of its lead corporate sponsors in addition to Democratic campaign and lobby groups. ActBlue – the prominent payment processor for Democrats and Black Lives Matter – is also a sponsor, in addition to the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO).
The “Leadership Blue” event, hosted in Tampa, convenes Democratic candidates for office and Florida Democratic Party (FDP) officials from across the state for training seminars and meetings.
Pfizer’s sponsorship appears to pose yet another conflict of interest given the company’s role as a COVID-19 vaccine maker which still enjoys government protection against legal challenges over their MRNA therapies.
Furthermore, despite obscuring results from its pharmaceutical trials and studies suggesting natural immunity confers better protection than COVID-19 vaccination, the company has continued to receive approval on its vaccines and boosters from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Meanwhile, Floridian Democrats have criticized state Governor Ron DeSantis for failing to implement COVID-19 vaccine mandates for businesses and schools – a policy that directly affects Pfizer’s profits. The pharmaceutical giant has spent a record-breaking amount on lobbyists throughout COVID-19, strategically tapping former government employees with ties to Joe Biden, to push for authorization of its vaccine.
In 2019, the company spent $11,000,000 on lobbying efforts before increasing the total to $13,150,000 – the highest total since 2010.
In 2019, the company retained 77 lobbyists before the total grew to a team of 102 lobbyists in 2020. So far in 2021, Pfizer has declared 92 lobbyists.
Pfizer’s sponsorship also follows the event moving from its original location of Disney World to the Tampa JW Marriott due to pressure from LGBTQ activists over Disney’s initial refusal to condemn Governor DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
A Massachusetts pregnancy clinic was vandalized on July 7 by two people affiliated with Jane’s Revenge, a violent pro-abortion extremist group.
The Worcester clinic shared a surveillance video of the attack with The Epoch Times, with the footage showing two people dressed in black and their faces covered approaching the clinic. One of the people spray-painted the clinic’s front steps with the words “Jane’s Revenge.” The other person then pulled out a hammer and used it to damage the clinic’s door and windows.
Jane’s Revenge has taken credit for vandalizing and firebombing pro-life organizations, churches, and other pregnancy clinics. The group surfaced shortly after the leak of the draft Supreme Court opinion, which suggested that the nation’s top court may be prepared to overturn Roe v. Wade, the seminal opinion that largely legalized abortion nationwide.
The Supreme Court subsequently overturned Roe v. Wade.
Republicans have called for the Department of Justice to classify Jane’s Revenge as a terrorist group. The Department of Homeland Security described the group in a June memo as “a network of loosely affiliated suspected violent extremists.” The federal agency warned that there was a risk of violence from the group following the Supreme Court decision.
The attack took place the morning after state Attorney General Maura Healey’s office said in a lengthy statement that pregnancy clinics don’t provide abortions.
The July 6 statement also warned that pregnancy clinics engage in deceptive practices, don’t have to adhere to any code of ethics, and often provide inaccurate and misleading information about abortion and the medical and mental health effects of abortion.
Kelly Wilcox, executive director of the Clearwater Clinic, told The Epoch Times that the FBI was on site on July 8 investigating the attack along with local law enforcement.
She told The Epoch Times that she doesn’t understand the motive behind the attacks nor the comments made by Healey. She said her clinic, which opened in 2000, has always been transparent about not providing abortions.
For more than a decade, Clearway, which also owns a second clinic in Massachusetts, has been doing exit surveys for all clients, according to Wilcox.
“We have never had anyone claim we have deceived them,” she said. “So I have no idea where these allegations are coming from.”
The clinic provides post-abortion counseling and a host of other medical services, including pregnancy tests, ultrasounds, and STD testing. The clinics also offer other forms of help, including baby clothes and supplies to expecting mothers.
Wilcox said they don’t refer to themselves as crisis pregnancy centers (CPC), despite the use of the term by those opposed to them.
Thomas Glessner, president of the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates (NIFLA), which represents 1,600 pregnancy centers in the United States, told The Epoch Times that Planned Parenthood has long been “leveling a smear campaign against pregnancy centers.”
Planned Parenthood didn’t respond to calls from The Epoch Times.
In her statement, Healey, at times using all capital letters, said that “CPCs do NOT provide comprehensive reproductive healthcare.”
“CPCs are organizations that seek to prevent people from accessing abortion care,” she said.
Healey, a Democrat who’s running for governor, is also a well-known supporter of Planned Parenthood.
Last year, Planned Parenthood contributed $1,700 to her bid for reelection and ran a picture and a quote from Healey saying: “Planned Parenthood’s endorsement was a game-changer for my campaign.”
She was also a guest speaker at Planned Parenthood’s “Sexual Health Lobby Day” held at the statehouse in June.
Healey’s office condemned the attack in a statement to The Epoch Times.
“Our office will continue to focus on ensuring that patients seeking abortion care are safe and well-informed about their options,” a spokesman for Healey’s office said in the written statement.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) also criticized pregnancy centers prior to the Clearwater attack. In a July 3 Twitter post, Warren said that in Massachusetts, “so-called crisis pregnancy centers outnumber legitimate abortion care providers 3 to 1.”
“We need to crack down on the deceptive practices these centers use to prevent people from getting abortion care, and I’ve got a bill to do just that,” she said.
Warren entitled the legislation the Stop Anti-Abortion Disinformation Act, which she’s co-sponsoring with Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.)
They defined the legislation as a measure “to combat false advertising by crisis pregnancy centers.”
The measure, which was just recently introduced, has already won the backing of Planned Parenthood and other abortion groups.
Newly obtained emails confirm that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) changed its definition for both “vaccine” and “vaccinated” because people were pointing out that definitions didn’t seem to apply to the COVID-19 vaccines.
“The definition of vaccine we have posted is problematic and people are using it to claim the COVID-19 vaccine is not a vaccine based on our own definition,” Alycia Downs, a CDC official, wrote in an email on Aug. 25, 2021, to a colleague.
“Vaccine” was defined since at least 2011 by the CDC as a product that triggers immunity, while “vaccination” was described as an injection that prevents a disease, according to archived versions of the page. However, a flood of inquiries on the definitions was triggered by the fact that the COVID-19 vaccines have been increasingly ineffective against infection by the virus that causes COVID-19, the emails show.
“Our question is how is the CDC and the rest of the world allowed to call the shot a vaccination when it doesn’t even meet your own definition,” one person wrote to the CDC.
“Right-wing covid-19 pandemic deniers are using your ‘vaccine’ definition to argue that mRNA vaccines are not vaccines,” another said.
The Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines are both built on messenger RNA technology. They are two of the three COVID-19 vaccines available in the United States.
Downs and colleagues Allison Michelle Fisher, Cynthia Jorgensen, Valerie Morelli, and Andrew (no last name given) worked on changing the definitions for “vaccine” and “vaccination,” according to the emails.
The changes were pushed through on Aug. 31, 2021, and Sept. 1, 2021, respectively.
Changing Definitions
“Vaccine” is now defined as “a preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases. Vaccines are usually administered through needle injections, but some can be administered by mouth or sprayed into the nose.”
The previous definition was “a product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease. Vaccines are usually administered through needle injections, but can also be administered by mouth or sprayed into the nose.”
“Vaccination” was changed to “the act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce protection from a specific disease” from “the act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease.”
Attorney Travis Miller obtained some of the missives in 2021 and published screenshots of them. At the time, the CDC didn’t dispute their authenticity. The Epoch Times has obtained the emails, and additional messages concerning the changes, and has published all 67 pages of them.
The batch of emails, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, also shows that Andrew, a CDC employee on the agency’s Vaccine Task Force, boosted a Washington Post article that downplayed criticism of the change.
“I’ve only seen a couple of inquiries about the change to this page. I think the WaPo article explains the problem well—that people are misinterpreting ‘immunity’ to mean 100% protection,” Andrew wrote.
“Thank you, Andrew! I really appreciate your response,” Downs replied.
A CDC spokesperson has told The Epoch Times that the “slight changes in wording” haven’t altered “the overall definition,” of “vaccine,” adding, “the previous definition at Immunization Basics | CDC could be interpreted to mean that vaccines were 100% effective, which has never been the case for any vaccine, so the current definition is more transparent, and also describes the ways in which vaccines can be administered.”
Some other portions of the CDC website still say COVID-19 vaccines confer immunity. One page, for instance, says that “getting a COVID-19 vaccination is a safer and more dependable way to build immunity to COVID-19 than getting sick with COVID-19.”
Americans’ confidence in major U.S. institutions—including government and the media—is in a state of collapse, falling to an average of just 27 percent across all categories, according to the latest national poll released by the Gallup Organization.
Only the military and small businesses still enjoy the confidence of a majority of Americans.
Although public belief in institutions has been weak for most of the past 15 years, the 27 percent average for all categories is the lowest recorded by Gallup.
The company began measuring confidence in institutions in 1973 and has done so each year since 1993.
The survey figures came after Gallup delivered sobering news on June 22. At that time the company said confidence in the overall direction of the country fell to 13 percent that month, down 3 percentage points from May and 11 points since March when the figure was 24 percent.
It also reported at that time that despite ongoing economic malaise, resident Joe Biden’s job approval rating held steady at 41 percent between May and June.
Gallup’s finding on the issue was called into question by the Civiqs Poll’s daily tracking survey of registered voters which found Biden’s approval rating has sunk to a new record low of just 30 percent, the New York Post reported July 9.
Only in two states, the Democratic strongholds of Vermont and Hawaii, are the president’s supporters more numerous than his detractors.
Gallup also reported on June 29 that although 96 percent of U.S. adults expressed pride in varying degrees about being American, that figure includes a record low of 38 percent who consider themselves “extremely proud” to be Americans, the lowest figure for that description since the company began tracking the issue in 2001.
Another 27 percent of Americans said they were “very proud,” while 22 percent said they were “moderately proud,” and 9 percent described themselves as “only a little proud.”
Four percent said they were “not at all” proud to be Americans.
In the new Gallup survey, Americans expressed less confidence in institutions than they did a year ago, with significant declines in 11 of the 16 examined—and no improvements for any of the institutions.
The biggest drops were regarding the presidency as an institution—as opposed to the job performance of the current president—and the Supreme Court.
Confidence in the presidency is now at 23 percent, which is 15 percentage points lower than 2021.
The Supreme Court came in at 25 percent, down 11 points since 2021. The survey was completed before the court rendered landmark rulings on gun rights and abortion, decisions that have proven controversial.
Confidence in Congress came in at just 7 percent, down from 12 percent a year ago.
The figures for the presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court were record Gallup lows.
Five other institutions’ ratings plunged to record lows.
The church and organized religion weighed in at 31 percent, down from 37 percent. Newspapers scored 16 percent, falling from 21 percent. The criminal justice system got 14 percent, after rating 20 percent. Big business came in at 14 percent, falling from 18 percent. The police garnered 45 percent after the 51 percent figure a year ago.
Large technology companies weighed in at 26 percent, down from 29 percent. Gallup has only been measuring confidence in the category for three years.
Small business and the military still enjoy the confidence of a majority of Americans, despite slipping support. Small business came in at 68 percent, down from 70 percent in 2021. The military had a confidence level of 64 percent, which is lower than the previous 69 percent figure.
Confidence in the medical system is at 38 percent, down from 44 percent. The figure for public schools is 28 percent, down from 32 percent. Banks scored 27 percent, a drop from 33 percent. Confidence in organized labor remained steady at 28 percent.
Confidence in television news is down to 11 percent from 16 percent in the 2021 survey.
The new annual survey was carried out by telephone in the first three weeks of June. The respondents were 1,015 adults in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
Decision to not get COVID-19 vaccine comes with consequences, but maybe not for the health care system
A large-scale international study of those unvaccinated against COVID-19 finds a pattern of discrimination—and a relatively low hospitalization rate.
While the study’s findings are limited by the nature of the selection process, in which unvaccinated people opted in to participate, the new study suggests that those who declined the vaccine may not be the burden to the health care system many have claimed them to be. The study is now available as a preprint (which means it hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed). It was uploaded to ResearchGate earlier this month.
The findings hold significant importance to policymakers. According to Our World in Data, 60 percent of the world is fully vaccinated against COVID-19. The 40 percent who aren’t vaccinated against the virus have been frequently blamed for the duration and severity of the COVID-19 pandemic, even as vaccination rates reached up to 90 percent in many jurisdictions.
With government agencies, news media, and social media algorithms ignoring or misrepresenting the contending science around COVID-19, the unvaccinated have faced often intense pressure to get vaccinated against COVID-19.
“What the survey aimed to do is gather insights about health outcomes, choices, and discrimination experienced by the marginalized subpopulation of people from diverse socio-economic backgrounds, ethnicities, and cultures who have elected to exercise their right of refusal of COVID-19 injections,” the study authors said.
In many places in the United States, those who declined the COVID-19 vaccines have been discriminated against, stigmatized, and marginalized from society. Nurses and health care workers were fired, Air Force cadets were denied commissions, and family members found themselves ostracized within some of their most intimate and important relationships.
The vilification of the unvaccinated has come with the censorship of both science and personal experience. Many doctors, nurses, scientists, and other health care professionals who speak out about the safety and necessity of these vaccines have been threatened with the loss of their medical licenses, deleted from social media, canceled from events with their peers, and fired from their jobs.
The Control Group
The study is based on data collected from the Control Group Cooperative (CGC), which was founded in July 2021 by a citizens group in the UK to represent and connect people who elected to not get the COVID-19 vaccines.
The goal of the CGC has been to analyze the long-term health outcomes and experiences of these individuals through self-reported surveys. According to their website, there are currently more than 300,000 unvaccinated participants from more than 175 countries participating in their long-term study.
The study was conducted by Robert Verkerk, founder of the Alliance for Natural Health International, an affiliate of the CGC. A team of international scientists contributed to the research. The study analyzes the data from the CGC survey from the first five months of its operation—from September 2021 through February.
The Cohort
The cohort analyzed by Verkerk consisted of 18,497 individuals out of the 297,618 people who had joined the CGC by the end of February.
A plurality of participants were from the continent of Europe (40 percent), followed by Oceania (27 percent), and North America (25 percent). Three percent of participants were from South America and Asia, while less than 1 percent were from Africa. Ages ranged anywhere from 1 to more than 90 years old, with most participants being middle-aged.
Motive for Refusal
Individuals participating in the study declined COVID-19 vaccination for various reasons. These included past vaccine injuries, preference for more natural remedies, lack of trust in pharmaceutical companies and government entities, and concerns about the validity of vaccine study results.
One-third of the individuals in the study self-reported that they received vaccinations as children. That figure may be low, as others may not have reported—or even remembered—their previous vaccinations.
While some had never been vaccinated, the cohort was mainly concerned about the safety, efficacy, and necessity of the COVID-19 vaccines, not all vaccines in general.
Discrimination Based on Vaccination
Between 20 and 50 percent of respondents, depending on where they lived, reported being personal targets of hate and discrimination. Many felt victimized for their vaccination status, especially those living in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and South America.
They reported that they faced discrimination in the workplace, from friends or family members, and from their respective state authorities, because of their “unvaccinated” status.
The prejudice experienced within the workplace by respondents resulted in heavy economic burdens for many. For example, 29 percent of respondents from Australia and New Zealand reported losing their jobs during the five months that the survey was administered.
These survey results dovetail with what unvaccinated individuals have been facing globally. Those who don’t succumb to peer pressure, advertising, or incentivizing are then threatened with an ultimatum: Get the vaccine or get fired.
That’s what happened to Destiny Carpenter, a former nurse at Colorado Canyons Hospital. Carpenter is among one of the hundreds of U.S. nurses who have been fired for refusing to get the vaccine, as Fox News reported in September 2021.
Carpenter was nominated for the Daisy Award for extraordinary nursing three times during her tenure at the hospital. This award is granted to the most deserving nurse for exuding compassionate care to their patients.
In February, FiercePharma reported that more than 15,500 health care workers in the United States had been fired or suspended or had chosen to resign from their hospital jobs over their decision to remain unvaccinated.
About 40 percent of respondents, regardless of age, reported that they experienced mild or moderate mental health issues during the duration of the survey, while approximately 20 percent reported experiencing severe mental health issues.
In an analysis of the mental health issues experienced by the cohort, the scientists noted that the mental health burden “may be associated more to the human response to the pandemic, rather than psychological, fear-based reactions to any threat posed by the SARS-CoV-2 virus itself.”
In other words, the respondents’ mental health problems appeared to mainly be a result of being stigmatized and marginalized from society.
A Pandemic of the Unvaccinated?
While the study gives insight into the experience of the unvaccinated, it always raises questions about assertions that this group is an undue burden on the health care system.
“Only 74 respondents out of the 5,196 (1.4 percent) who reported suspected or known SARS-CoV-2 infection also reported that they were hospitalized following infection. Therefore, outpatient or inpatient hospitalization was reported in just 0.4 percent of the full survey cohort. Of these, 15 were outpatient only, another 15 were hospitalized for less than 3 days, 26 were hospitalized between 3 and 7 days, 11 for between 7 and 14 days and only 10 for more than 14 days,” the study reads.
While the study is potentially prone to bias because of the selection pool for the survey, an infection-hospitalization ratio of 0.4 percent would certainly challenge many assertions about the burden of the unvaccinated.
“Infection-hospitalization ratio estimates ranged from 0.4 percent for those younger than 40 years to 9.2 percent for those older than 60 years.”
The study also found that hospitalization rates based on case counts overestimated the IHR by a factor of 10, “but this overestimation differed by demographic groups, especially age.”
Most of the CGC respondents who reported that they had caught COVID-19 had only mild symptoms and were sick for less than a week. Fatigue and coughing were the most common symptoms recorded.
Beyond the fact that they were unvaccinated, another unique trait of the CGC cohort may also be their propensity to try various therapeutics to treat their COVID-19 infections.
Against the Grain
Participants reported that they didn’t need a vaccine to lessen their symptoms: Most infections were mild to begin with, and many respondents said they turned to natural remedies when they did get sick.
A study published in June 2021 in the journal Inflammopharmacology by an international team of researchers from India, Italy, and the United States, shows that using natural remedies is a scientifically sound choice.
This study explored the immune-boosting properties of vitamins and minerals in combating COVID-19 infections. The scientists found that if administered at higher-than-recommended daily doses, many vitamins had the potential to reduce viral load and risk of hospitalization from COVID-19.
The decision to combat COVID-19 with non-pharmacological immune-enhancing interventions may also help explain why the hospitalization rates of the unvaccinated in the study were so low.
What About Ivermectin?
A portion of the participants reported that they also took ivermectin, an anti-parasitical that has been both promoted and hotly criticized as a treatment for COVID-19, as The Epoch Times has reported.
While ivermectin remains controversial, a meta-analysis published in June 2021 in the American Journal of Therapeutics states: “Moderate-certainty evidence finds that large reductions in COVID-19 deaths are possible using ivermectin. Using ivermectin early in the clinical course may reduce numbers progressing to severe disease. The apparent safety and low cost suggest that ivermectin is likely to have a significant impact on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic globally.”
The announcement has raised concerns that side effects from the vaccine aren’t being weighed against potential benefits.
As of June 12, the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) indicated that there have been 1,301,354 adverse events and 28,859 deaths from COVID-19 vaccines. A recent analysis of VAERS reports done by two journalists in Israel revealed that there were 58 serious adverse effects in babies prior to the rollout of the vaccine authorization for those aged 6 months and older. The reports failed to indicate if these infants and toddlers were involved in the Pfizer clinical trial or why they received vaccination.
Verkerk is deeply concerned about the CDC vaccine authorization for children younger than 5. He holds master’s and doctorate degrees from Imperial College London and is co-author of more than 60 peer-reviewed journal articles in the areas of health, agriculture, and environment. He’s also the co-chair of the World Council of Health’s Health & Humanity Committee. He told The Epoch Times via email that many parents want this vaccine for their children because, like every parent, they want what’s best for their child.
“However, they’ve been misled as to the known science on both the benefits and the risks,” he wrote. “There could be disastrous long-term consequences for some children if they are exposed to the spike protein via the vaccine before they are exposed to circulating coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2, which would otherwise result in broader-based, more robust, naturally-acquired immunity.”
For Verkerk, it’s about choice. We shouldn’t vilify those who rely on natural immunity or refuse the vaccines for religious, medical, or ethical reasons, he said.
“We have seen a dramatic erosion of the principles of medical ethics,” he wrote.
We need to respect autonomy (the right of competent adults to make individualized and informed decisions about their own medical care) and adhere to the principle of first doing no harm, as well as to the principles of beneficence and justice, according to Verkerk.
We spend a good deal of time on this Substack articulating the vast array of negative consequences of lockdowns on society. As I note in my upcoming book:
Many of those who joined Rational Ground and what we came to call Team Reality had similar experiences. Life isn’t always fair, and we adults are willing to bear with the challenges foisted on us, but when the government’s insane rules harm our children, watch out.
Below are links to some of the more prominent impacts we’ve cataloged against children from the egregious policies foisted on families during the pandemic. We’ll be discussing these and other items today at noon on our Rational Ground podcast.
This week a new study scanned the literature to determine what countries across the world are experiencing because of the pandemic and stringency measures. Here’s a thread on that:
Meta-study: “… anxiety, depression, [PTSD], and sleep disorders.” “… measures such as quarantine and isolation for infection prevention may have immediate and prolonged mental health impacts.”
Our illustrious overlords of health determined it was better for kids that they be banished from school and locked indoors eating takeout. The result? BMI rate of change for 2 to 19 year olds DOUBLED! COVID didn’t do this. OUR POLICIES DID.
A group of parents in Gainesville, FL, sent 6 face masks to a lab at the University of Florida, requesting an analysis of contaminants found on the masks after they had been worn. The resulting report found that five masks were contaminated with bacteria, parasites, and fungi, including three with dangerous pathogenic and pneumonia-causing bacteria.
Our friends at the Brownstone Institute have compiled a tremendous list of resources, analysis and commentary on this subject:
This article originally appeared in Rational Ground. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News. Republished with permission.
The protection against severe illness from so-called natural immunity remains superior to the protection bestowed by COVID-19vaccines, according to a new study.
People who survived COVID-19 infection and were not vaccinated had sky-high protection against severe or fatal COVID-19, researchers in Qatar found.
“Effectiveness of primary infection against severe, critical, or fatal COVID-19 reinfection was 97.3 percent … irrespective of the variant of primary infection or reinfection, and with no evidence for waning. Similar results were found in sub-group analyses for those ≥50 years of age,” Dr. Laith Abu-Raddad, with Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar, and colleagues said after studying long-term natural immunity in unvaccinated people.
That percentage is higher than the protection from COVID-19 vaccines, according to other studies and real-world data.
Swedish researchers, for instance, found in May that two doses of a vaccine were just 54 percent effective against the Omicron variant of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes COVID-19.
South African scientists, meanwhile, found the effectiveness of the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines peaked at 88 percent, and quickly dropped to 70 percent or lower.
The Qatar group found natural immunity for over 14 months after a person’s first infection “remains very strong, with no evidence for waning, irrespective of variant.”
Few researchers have studied natural immunity long-term among unvaccinated persons, in part because many of the people have eventually received a COVID-19 vaccine.
The vaccines, meanwhile, have waned against both infection and severe illness over time, triggering recommendations for booster doses, with some Americans even getting five doses within 10 months.
Natural Immunity Performs Poorly Against Reinfection
The vaccines were once said to provide close to 100 percent protection against symptomatic infection. They now provide under 50 percent protection against infection after a short period of time, even after booster doses, following the emergence of Omicron.
That strain and its subvariants are dominant in countries around the world, including the United States and Qatar.
Natural immunity was thought to providestrong protection against reinfection. But the Qatari researchers found it also provides poor protection against reinfection from Omicron.
Pre-Omicron infection against pre-Omicron reinfection was as high as 90.5 percent, and remained around 70 percent by the 16th month, according to the study. But pre-Omicron infection against Omicron reinfection was just 38 percent effective, although it was higher among people infected with the original Wuhan strain or with the Delta variant, and lower among those who got sick from the Alpha or Beta strains.
Modeling signaled a drop to zero percent protection by 18 months, but the shielding still appears to last longer than that of vaccines, researchers said.
“Vaccine immunity against Omicron subvariants lasts for <6 months but pre-Omicron natural immunity, assuming Gompertz decay, may last for just over a year,” they wrote.
Limitations of the study included differences in testing frequency among the cohorts studied, and depletion of groups who had a COVID-19 infection due to deaths.
The Biden administration is funding the distribution of crack pipes, according to a report from the Daily Caller, which indicates that so-called harm reduction facilities that received administration grants are in fact distributing the pipes.
The news comes after administration officials insisted taxpayer dollars would not be used for this purpose and described a WashingtonFree Beacon report on their harm reduction grant program as “misinformation.” The Callerreported Friday, however, that it received two smoking kits that contain crack pipes, condoms, and lubricant from the New York Harm Reduction Educators, which received $398,960 in May from the Department of Health and Human Services through its harm reduction grant program.
The Caller received its crack pipes “after spending about 10 minutes on paperwork with basic information,” according to the report. Not only were they given drug paraphernalia: The reporters were invited to smoke on the premises. One employee asked a reporter to use the crack pipe in a supervised room at the harm reduction center, saying the drug paraphernalia could not be used outside the facility because it was too close to a school.
When HHS announced the recipients of its $30 million harm reduction program in May, it included a note at the top of its grant webpage stating that “no federal funding is used directly or through subsequent reimbursement of grantees to purchase pipes in safer smoking kits.” The announcement came after the Free Beacon first reported in February that the HHS harm reduction program was set to fund the distribution of crack pipes. The White House denounced the story as “disinformation” and said smoking kits funded by its program would not include a crack pipe. The Free Beaconsubsequently obtained smoking kits in five East Coast cities that all contained crack pipes.
HHS, in a statement to the Caller, claimed the New York Harm Reduction Educators has yet to use the federal funds it received and that its purchases will have to be approved by the government.
The report comes as Congress moves to stop the Biden administration from funding crack pipe distribution. The House Appropriations Committee this month voted unanimously to include a provision in the HHS budget that prevents the agency from funding the drug paraphernalia.
“None of the funds made available by this Act should be used to purchase, procure, or distribute pipes or similar cylinder objects for smoking or inhaling any controlled substance in schedule 1 of the Controlled Substances Act,” the amendment states.
The amendment vote comes one week after the House passed a separate Democrat-sponsored bill that similarly banned the department from funding crack pipes through mental health and substance abuse programs.
The votes signal that resident Joe Biden’s congressional allies no longer believe White House claims that the administration never planned to fund crack pipes. Rep. John Moolenaar (R., Mich.), who sponsored the amendment in the HHS funding package, said he was pleased that Democrats have now joined Republicans to hold Biden accountable for his radical policies.
“While most of the media stopped following the crack pipes story and some outlets tried to suppress it, the Free Beacon deserves a lot of credit for continuing to shine a light on this issue,” Moolenaar told the Free Beacon. “Now even Democrats are recognizing this was an abuse of tax dollars.”
A second professor from Laval University in Quebec City has been suspended for questioning the need to vaccinate children against COVID-19.
Nicolas Derome, a professor of molecular biology, was suspended for the same reason and under similar circumstances as his colleague Patrick Provost, a professor of microbiology, infectious diseases, and immunology.
Derome and Provost both participated in activities organized by Réinfo COVID, which describes itself as a collective of nurses, physicians, scientists, and citizens seeking to generate debate about how the pandemic has been handled by the government.
Derome gave an online presentation organized by the collective in late November 2021, in which he said children were not at high risk for complications from COVID-19.
He said there had been “zero” serious cases among the 0 to 17 age bracket, with or without comorbidity, with his presentation slide indicating the data came from Quebec’s public health institute (INSPQ) and expert assessments.
A review of the INSPQ data for the first four waves, covering Feb. 23, 2020, to Dec. 4, 2021, reveals there were 73 ICU admissions for individuals between age 0 and 19. The data does not indicate if the admissions were “because of COVID” or “with COVID.”
These 73 ICU admissions represent an average of 1.6 percent of total ICU admissions across age groups during the four waves covered.
Derome also said children between 1 and 14 years old were 15 times more likely to die from a road accident than from COVID, and noted there had been no deaths for the 5 to 19 years olds.
“This information is very important to have in order to make a free and informed choice regarding this vaccination campaign for kids 5 to 11,” he said at the start of his presentation.
A current review of data for the first four waves shows one death occurred for the 10–19 age group during the third wave. A separate INSPQ chart reviewed on deaths and presence of comorbidities shows no deaths reported for the 19 and under category with the mention that percentages are not reported when the total number is less than 5.
Derome said, quoting published literature, that children have a better innate response to defend against COVID, which explains why they suffer less serious outcomes.
The professor also quoted from the U.N. children agency UNICEF, which said at the time that the World Health Organization (WHO) did not recommend COVID vaccines for children, due to lack of trials and little to no safety data for that age group.
Since then, the WHO has said that the Pfizer vaccine can be safely administered to children from 5 years of age and that both Pfizer and Moderna are licensed for use in children above 12.
The professor also raised the issue of the waning efficacy of vaccines—not only against infection, but hospitalizations—by quoting White House COVID adviser Anthony Fauci.
Derome gave his presentation when Quebec had just started its vaccination campaign for 5- to 11-year-olds.
Derome was contacted by The Epoch Times but was not available to comment.
Laval University said when contacted that it would not comment on the “personal situation of its employees.”
At the time Derome’s video was published, Laval spokesperson Andrée-Anne Stewart told Radio-Canada that his remarks “in no way reflect the stance of Laval University and its faculty of science and engineering regarding the health crisis.”
“Like all members of the teaching staff, professor Derome is held to all the rigour and scientific integrity required by this function,” Stewart said.
‘Sliding Into Dictatorship’
On Dec. 7, 2021, Derome’s colleague, Patrick Provost, said in a scientific panel organized by Réinfo COVID that, based on provincial data, there is more risk of hospitalization for children from the vaccines than from COVID-19 itself, in addition to not having a portrait of mid- to long-term side effects.
Provost was suspended for eight weeks without pay in mid-June for his comments. It’s likely that Derome received a similar penalty.
Réinfo COVID posted a letter on its website presumably from Provost asking, on behalf of Laval University, that the video of the panel he participated in be taken down, or else he could face further sanctions, including being fired.
The collective refused, citing the need for the public to be aware of the “utility, efficacy, risks, and ethics of vaccinating children.”
Réinfo said it would try to help the professors, noting: “If universities gag their professors, as do different professional orders, we’re sliding into dictatorship.”
The suspensions of Derome and Provost have added fuel to the debate about academic freedom in Quebec, which just last month adopted a law to protect it.
“Those situations at Laval University confirm that it was necessary to legislate on this issue and the law stipulates that every university must, within a year, write a policy and put in place a committee to monitor the implementation of the policy and review the complaints related to academic freedom in universities,” Higher Education Minister Danielle McCann said in a statement to The Epoch Times.
“The law also emphasizes that academic freedom must be practiced in conformity with norms of scientific rigour.”
The professors have the support of their union, which has filed a grievance, and of the larger union federation it’s affiliated to.
“Independently of what we can think of comments or statements made by a colleague, heads of the university have no legitimacy to intervene in the content of comments made by those colleagues,” says an email sent by the Laval teacher’s union (SPUL) to its members.
“The leadership of Laval University made a wrong call and hurts the principles guaranteeing the functioning of the University and academic freedom,” SPUL president Louis-Philippe Lampron said in a tweet.
The Epoch Times reached out to SPUL but didn’t hear back by publication time.
A provincial university professor’s labour union federation to which the SPUL is attached, the FQPPU, said the suspension of the two professors was even more “serious and surprising” since it occurred after the province passed the law on academic freedom.
“The conformity to the consensus of a scientific community is in itself not a sufficiently precise norm to justify a disciplinary sanction against a professor who exercises his academic freedom,” the FQPPU said in a statement.
It said it’s the duty of colleagues and other academics to refute or point out weaknesses in remarks or works presented.
“In an institution that respects academic freedom, it’s by refutation that professors and others participating in teaching and research must push back against comments which drift away from the knowledge validated by proven methods.”
Sixty-two thousand Army National Guard and Reserve soldiers are being deprived of pay and benefits, due to noncompliance with the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate.
The military service members who are not vaccinated, or do not have a pending or approved exemption, will no longer be allowed to drill or train, Army officials said last week. If noncompliance continues, officials say they will discharge them. The move to bar soldiers from service, pay, and benefits comes as the armed forces have struggled with recruitment. The Army cited “maintaining readiness” as the branch’s rationale for enforcing the vaccine mandate, according to a statement.
Army officials point out their “policy affords every Soldier the opportunity to request an exemption, such as for medical or religious concerns.” Previous reporting by the Washington Free Beacon, however, found that military leadership has granted few. In the Marine Corps, just three service members were granted religious exemptions. Congressional Republicans have pressured the Pentagon for more information about the armed forces vaccine mandate, but their calls have gone unanswered.
Republican leaders have attempted to ban the use of taxpayer funds to implement the Department of Defense’s vaccine mandate. “Hundreds of service members and their families have reached out to our offices about the direct impact of this mandate, their careers of service, and toll on their families,” a coalition of Republican House lawmakers led by Rep. Darrell Issa (Calif.) wrote in February.
Republican governors have pledged not to discharge guardsmen who refuse to get vaccinated. Options available to governors to maintain soldiers’ pay and benefits, however, appear limited. Governors can deploy soldiers on state active-duty orders, which would entitle them to pay, but not federal benefits. It is also unclear how conflicting orders from state and federal authorities would be handled in the National Guard’s chain of command.
A national legal rights organization has filed the first of what it says will be dozens of lawsuits against U.S. health care facilities that are denying patients organ transplants for not being vaccinated against COVID-19.
In the first complaint—which was filed against the University of Michigan’s transplant center—the Pacific Justice Institute (PJI) argues the hospitals are carrying out illegal and unconstitutional policies by requiring medical treatment against the will of a patient.
“Individuals in the United States have the inherent and fundamental Constitutional Right given by God, not any government board, to seek or to refuse medical treatment or any part of a course of medical treatment,” PJI states in its lawsuit it served on July 5 to the board of regents that oversees the University of Michigan.
According to Dave Peters, senior counsel for PJI, the California organisation will be filing a second lawsuit sometime this week against the Lehigh Valley Clinic in Pennsylvania.
Neither the University of Michigan nor Lehigh Valley Clinic responded to inquiries by The Epoch Times about the litigations.
In a written response to PJI’s notice of intent to sue the hospital dated May 26, the general counsel for the university Thomas Kent stated that “the complaint fails to allege the violation of any clearly established constitutional right.”
In addition to alleged constitutional violations, the lawsuits allege that the hospitals are also violating informed consent laws and the Hippocratic oath of doctors to do no harm to patients.
“They are electing to let patients die by refusing to provide them with life-saving medical care by forcing a medical care that has no established benefits,” said Peters, “if that’s not morally, ethically, and legally outrageous then I don’t know what is.”
Ross Barranco, one of the patients represented in the Michigan lawsuit, told The Epoch Times that he is opposed to the vaccine for reasons that include the fact he does not believe it safe.
Barranco, who needs a kidney transplant, said the government or hospitals have yet to produce any studies that show otherwise.
“They get compensation for giving you the shots and if you have any damages from the shot they get money for treating you for that—”It’s a win-win situation for the medical industry,” said Barranco.
In spite of his compromised health, Barranco is running for Oakland County Commissioner in Michigan’s 15th District to help he says, “restore people’s right to sovereignty in America.”
Other patients represented in the PJI lawsuits include 35-year-old Katie Shier who is in dire need of a heart transplant.
Shier has just seven percent of heart function remaining and is being kept alive by an implanted Ventricular Assist service.
She was placed on the candidate list for a heart transplant last June, but like Barranco and others—was removed in December after the University of Michigan adopted a policy that all transplant candidates must be vaccinated against COVID-19.
Vaccine or no transplant policies are not just restricted to the COVID jab.
Recently, as reported in an exclusive story by The Epoch Times, Vanderbilt’s Children Hospital denied performing a life-saving heart transplant on 6-month-old August Stoll because he was not up to date on the state’s recommended schedule of vaccines for children under the age of 12.
Deborah Catalano, senior litigation coordinator for Liberty Counsel, which has represented several veterans denied organ transplants for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine, told The Epoch Times that she now has an unvaccinated client who is being denied post-op care for a kidney transplant she had before the vaccine existed.
Hospitals have said they are following recommendations set by national transplant organizations, some of which have strong financial ties to makers of vaccines including the COVID-19 vaccine.
The American Society of Transplantation (AST) and United Network of Organ Sharing (UNOS), for example, list vaccine manufacturing giant Sanofi—which partnered with both Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson to produce the COVID-19 vaccine—among their corporate sponsors.
AST’s corporate sponsors also include vaccine giant Merck, CSL Behring, which partnered AstraZeneca to produce its COVID-19 vaccine; and Novartis, which like Sanofi, partnered with Pfizer to produce its COVID-19 vaccine.
UNOS receives 10 percent of its funding from the federal government, which heavily promotes the COVID-19 vaccine.
Peters told The Epoch Times that his organization is prepared to take the hospitals denying life-saving transplants over a patient’s vaccine status all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court if need be.
Legislative efforts are also underway in several states to ban the practice of hospitals refusing to perform organ transplants on patients that are not vaccinated.
In May, a mother filed a federal lawsuit against the DeVos Children’s Hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for requiring her 17-year-old daughter, who has stage three renal failure, to have the COVID-19 vaccine before performing a kidney transplant.
An undercover investigator has obtained hidden camera footage from an abortion clinic in Washington, D.C., that raises grave ethical concerns.
The candid video, taken by a 28-week-pregnant woman, reveals a nurse saying that the babies they abort do not receive digoxin — a lethal injection given to infants in utero during an abortion to ensure the baby is not born alive during the procedure. This increases the chances of a baby being born alive and possibly being illegally killed after birth.
The nurse also told the patient she may deliver the deceased child in her hotel room after the procedure; and furthermore that the doctor would not speak to her until she took Xanax, a mind-altering drug, prescribed by the clinic. This raises ethical concerns about how the clinic obtains proper consent. The patient has since filed a formal medical complaint.
“The undercover footage released today shows that the Washington Surgi-Clinic abortion facility is forcing mothers to take mind-altering medications before meeting with the abortionist and giving final consent. This is a likely violation of basic medical ethics, and so the patient has filed a complaint with the D.C. medical board,” said Lila Rose, president and founder of Live Action, in a June 23 press release. Live Action is a leading prolife organization in the United States.
Rose continued, “The footage also provides first-hand testimony that the Washington Surgi-Clinic may kill later-term babies without using a feticidal drug, increasing the chance that the babies would be born alive and then brutally and illegally killed. Whether or not this drug is used, this facility is ending innocent lives through violence. Tragically, this footage also shows the nurse relaying the reality that the patient may be left to deliver her dead child alone in her hotel room.”
The investigator is heard asking the nurse what to expect during the procedure.
Nurse: No. We don’t do the — a lot of people do the injection through the heart and all that. We don’t do that here.
Patient: Okay. I didn’t even know.
Nurse: Yeah. She’ll be alive when you go to sleep, but she will definitely have passed before he does anything.
Abortionist Cesare Santangelo, who runs the Surgi-Clinic, has been under scrutiny in recent months after prolife activists found five late-term aborted babies being disposed of as medical waste from the clinic. Some were deemed by medical experts to have likely been viable births.
Live Action shared the experts’ conclusions: An incision behind the neck of one baby girl, between 28–30 weeks’ gestation, indicated she was possibly killed via the federally banned D&X abortion procedure, more commonly known as partial-birth abortion. Her neck was cut and brain removed. An intact baby boy, who may have been nearly full-term, may have been the victim of infanticide. Another baby, found in her gestational sac, may have been born alive and left to die; while two other children, a boy and a girl, about 22 weeks and 28 weeks respectively, were found brutally dismembered, indicating D&E (dilation and evacuation) abortions.
Patient: This is the possibility of labor, basically?
Nurse: Yeah. Spontaneous abortion.
Patient: I’m sorry, that means …
Nurse: You may go into premature labor and deliver the fetus in your hotel.
Patient: Right. What do you tell me to do when that happens?
Nurse: That depends on what happens.
Patient: Do you guys come and like —
Nurse: He could come and help you take care of it. We could just tell you what to do with the remains. It just depends on what happens.
“This footage also shows the unethical and coerced administration of Xanax prior to seeing the abortionists,” Rose added. “Xanax is a substance that medical experts attest impairs a patient’s ability to give truly informed consent, particularly when a patient is not used to taking the drug.”
Patient: Does the Xanax effect, like —
Nurse: — The fetus?
Patient: No, not the fetus, just my clarity of thinking.
Nurse: It shouldn’t. I mean, you might be a little sleepy, but other than that …
Patient: I would really — I don’t mind if I have to stay longer, I would really rather talk to him first.
Nurse: Um …
Patient: Is that not usually how you guys do it?
Nurse: Yeah, that’s unfortunately — cause like I said, we have to make sure that’s in your system before you talk to the doctor. He’s not going to be able to speak with you until he is ready to do it.
The patient has now filed a medical complaint, calling on the D.C. medical board to investigate the apparent unethical activity, Live Action reported.
Experts reviewed the footage and shared their opinions, including Dr. Christina Francis OBGYN CEO-elect of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, who said: “Xanax is a substance that, in a patient who is not used to taking it, would most definitely impair her judgment and therefore her ability to give truly informed consent. There is no reason a medication like this should be routinely given to a patient prior to her meeting with a physician and going through the consent process. Often times patients are not allowed to drive or operate heavy machinery for up to 24 hours after even minor procedures due to sedating medications they have received that impair their competence to make complex decisions. Xanax is a clear sedative, especially in a patient naïve to that medication.”
Dr. C. Ben Mitchell, ethicist and former Graves Chair of Moral Philosophy at Union University, also studied the video.
“The footage I viewed indicates a likely ethical violation and could warrant further inquiry due to it demonstrating that patients were required to ingest Xanax before a full medical consultation could occur,” he said. “Being a physician entails profound ethical responsibilities and professional duties to the patient to inform, treat, and care. The physician himself or herself is ultimately responsible to ensure informed consent, in which the patient understands the diagnosis, treatment options, potential outcomes, and possible complications of a procedure or medication. That means being available to the patient to answer any questions the patient has about his or her care. Failure to do so is a dereliction of duty.”
Rose is now calling for the D.C. government, including the mayor, medical examiner, and chief of police, to investigate Santangelo and his facility.
“They are not only killing children through abortion, but they may be committing illegal infanticide, as well as other federal crimes such as partial-birth abortion,” she added. “We demand justice for these babies, and the closure of D.C.’s House of Horrors, the Washington Surgi-Clinic.”
Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, a Nobel prize-nominated physician who famously discovered and distributed an early treatment protocol for COVID, dubbed the “Zelenko Protocol,” passed away from cancer on June 30, 2022.
The next day, some Twitter users started taking note of the suspension of the account of the Zelenko Freedom Foundation, a group dedicated “to provide funding to social entities and social activities surrounding education, leadership development, health literacy, advocacy, public policy, social, health and community development,” according to their website.
“It is no secret that big tech abhors free speech and instead worships at the altar of Marxist collectivism and group-think. The Silicon Valley speech cartel has sunk to new lows when twitter suspended the Zelenko Freedom Foundation account less than 24 hours after the passing of Dr. Vladimir Zelenko,” co-chair of the Zelenko Freedom Foundation, Ann Vandersteel, told The Epoch Times.
She maintains that no one from Twitter reached out to verify who was managing the account.
“If they had bothered to do even the most basic of inquiries they would have learned that the account was run by the foundation, not by Dr. Zelenko. The account wasn’t established for some end around their ridiculous ban of Dr. Zelekno, the account was established to represent the interests of the Foundation, which is committed to investing in individuals and technologies that will save and extend the lives of people all across the globe,” she said.
Vandersteel thinks that the suspension of the foundation’s account was done for “no reason other than petty vindictiveness.”
“The question is, what does Elon Musk think? Does he believe in saving lives or does he want those lifesaving technologies silenced?”
Zelenko had been practicing in Monroe, New York, in 2020 during the outbreak of COVID-19, and is credited with having treated about 7,500 patients with his method.
Dr. Vladimir Zelenko. (Courtesy of the Zelenko Freedom Foundation)
Zelenko could not sit back and wait for politicians and health officials to agree on prescribed treatments, so he came up with the “Zelenko Protocol”—a combination of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), zinc, azithromycin, and other drugs, including steroids, and later informed then-President Donald Trump about it via a letter.
The other co-chair of the foundation, Kevin Jenkins, told The Epoch Times that the suspension reminded him of a Martin Luther King quote:
“All we say to America is ‘be true to what’s on paper.’ If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand some of these illegal injunctions. Maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privilege, because they haven’t committed themselves to that over there. But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of the press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right. And so, just as I say, we aren’t going to let dogs or water hoses turn us around; we aren’t going to let any injunction turn us around.”
“When Ann and I spoke with Dr. Zelenko, regarding the mission of this Foundation he said, ‘I want the truth to spread like a mantra!’” Jenkins said.
“Our team at the Zelenko Freedom Foundation will stay true to Dr. Zelenko and Dr. King! We will fight to the end to save humanity! Come join us Zfreedomfoundation.com. Dr. Zelenko’s dream will not be deferred!” he added.
A plan to mandate COVID-19 vaccine shots for hundreds of thousands of students in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) will remain on pause after a Los Angeles County judge ruled on July 5 that the district lacks the authority to do so.
In his ruling, Judge Mitchell Beckloff of the Superior Court of Los Angeles County sided with a parent, whose 12-year-old son attends a public magnet school in North Hollywood. The parent filed the complaint in October 2021, about a month after the LAUSD announced its vaccination mandate.
Under the district’s mandate, all eligible students aged 12 and above must show proof of COVID-19 vaccination, or get approved for exemptions by Jan. 10 in order to attend school in person. Those who don’t comply would be transferred into the district’s remote learning program, City of Angels, which offers a mixture of live instruction and self-study.
The suing parent, identified as G.F., argued that it is unfair and unlawful for the child, identified as D.F., to have to lose his hard-earned place at a competitive school just because he and his parent have chosen to not get vaccinated on the basis of personal beliefs.
According to G.F., his son had acquired natural immunity after recovering from COVID-19. He also said he worried that vaccinating the child would put the child’s health in jeopardy.
“Either I get him a vaccine that I fear could harm him, or I send him to a virtual school that I know from experience and LAUSD’s own data would prove academically vastly inferior,” the father said earlier this year in a sworn declaration, reported City News Service. “The idea of dumping him into an online school, free of a rigorous academic program and torn away from his like-minded classmates, breaks my heart.”
Beckloff, who wrote in March in a tentative opinion that he might dismiss the case, agreed with the father in his final ruling, acknowledging that if D.F. refuses to comply with the mandate, he will be forced to accept a very different education.
“The [mandate] is not merely about how education is delivered or who may be physically present on campus as the court previously viewed it. Instead, the [mandate] dictates which school the student may attend, and the curriculum he may continue to receive,” the judge wrote, reported the Los Angeles Times.
The judge also noted that the LAUSD mandate is in conflict with California’s public health law, which allows personal beliefs-based vaccination exemptions.
“Judge Beckloff’s ruling confirms that individual school districts do not have the authority to impose local vaccination requirements in excess of statewide requirements,” Arie Spangler, an attorney for G.F., said in a statement. “We are very pleased with the ruling, as it ensures that no child will be forced out of the classroom due to their COVID-19 vaccination status.”
The decision doesn’t have an immediate impact on LAUSD, since the mandate has already been placed on hold after California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced in April that the state would wait for the federal government to give full approval to the COVID-19 vaccine for young children. The Newsom administration and school district have both said they won’t pursue the pediatric vaccine mandate until at least the summer of 2023.
The Labor Department (DOL) “published an improper payment rate of 18.71 percent for the UI program, which resulted in an estimated $77.2 billion in reported gross improper payments,” the IG reported. The improper payment rate for the previous year was 9.17 percent, equal to about $37.8 billion.
“Additionally, DOL published an unknown payment rate of 0.21 percent, which resulted in estimated unknown payments of $865 million. These estimates were based on a statistical estimation approach that met a 95 percent confidence level, plus or minus 3 percent,” the report said.
The IG report was prompted by requirements of the Payment Integrity Information Act of 2019, which requires federal departments and agencies to establish and report to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) improper payment rates in government benefit programs, as well as annual targets for reducing those rates.
The 18.71 percent rate of improper UI payments in 2021 represents a significant increase for the program, which saw a steadily improving trend during the previous four years of President Donald Trump’s administration.
The rate at the end of the first year of Trump’s tenure was 12.11 percent. The rate increased to 12.63 percent the following year, but then plunged to 10.21 percent in 2019, and to 2020’s 9.17 percent, according to data provided by paymentaccuracy.gov.
Rep. Rick Allen (R-Ga.), a member of the House Education and Labor Committee, told The Epoch Times on July 6 that he’s co-sponsoring legislation to address examples of wasteful federal spending like that highlighted by the IG report.
“It’s unacceptable that criminals utilized a global health crisis to defraud the United States government’s unemployment programs. Even worse, the misguided Biden administration policies, which discouraged people from going back to work, incentivized scammers to steal more money from the American taxpayer,” he said.
“Congress must now fulfill its oversight duties and help hold these criminals accountable. I am a proud co-sponsor of [Texas Republican] Rep. Kevin Brady’s Chase COVID Unemployment Fraud Act, which would empower the states to recover the money lost to fraud.”
Brady is the top Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee that oversees unemployment insurance.
Other Republicans on the Ways and Means panel also blasted the improper payments and lauded the measure originally introduced by Brady.
Rep. Jackie Walorski (R-Ind.) told The Epoch Times that “it is painfully obvious that brazen criminals capitalized on pandemic relief programs and stole billions from hardworking American taxpayers,” and she urged Biden and congressional Democrats “to work with us to take this crisis seriously, expose fraud, and hold criminals accountable. We must send a clear signal that fraud will not be tolerated.”
Similarly, Rep. Drew Ferguson (R-Ga.) said, “House Democrats refused to hold a single Ways and Means oversight hearing to address the growing problem of unchecked improper payments,” adding that “it shouldn’t surprise folks that a new, big-government program that incentivizes folks to not return to work—and had zero oversight—is ripe for fraud.”
And Rep. Adrian Smith (R-Neb.) told The Epoch Times that “the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress have shown no interest in holding these fraudulent actors accountable. That is why I am an original co-sponsor of the Chase COVID Unemployment Fraud Act, a bill to protect taxpayers by clawing back funds and recovering these improper payments. This is a priority for me now, and it will certainly remain a priority when Republicans control the House.”
On the other side of Capitol Hill, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), the Senate’s most visible foe of waste, fraud, and abuse in the government, told The Epoch Times, “It’s no surprise that we are seeing a record level of fraud and abuse of taxpayer dollars being reported in the wake of wasteful and unsupervised government spending under the guise of COVID,” said Ernst. “The federal government needs to take every step possible to recover fraudulent payment and put safeguards in place to stop future abuses like this from happening again.”
The IG didn’t offer an analysis to account for the doubling of the improper payment rate in only the first year of resident Joe Biden’s administration, except to note that DOL included within the UI program expenditures made under the Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (FPUC) program and the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) program.
Both the FPUC and PEUC programs were included in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act of 2020, the $2.2 trillion emergency legislation approved by Congress and signed into law by Trump in March 2020.
The purpose of the CARES legislation was to provide a massive economic stimulus to offset the slowdown in the national economy that resulted from the emergency measures enacted by the government in response to the COVID-19 pandemic that has to date killed more than 1 million Americans.
Under the CARES Act, the FPUC and PEUC provided $600 per week in additional federally funded unemployment benefits through July 2020. The program was extended but with a reduced weekly benefit of $300, which expired on Sept. 6, 2021.
The IG report was prepared by KMPG LLP, under contract to the government.
In response to the report, DOL acknowledged that the inclusion of the CARES Act programs makes it difficult to measure improper payments. The department insisted that the figures it provided to OMB were accurate as presented, but could include an overestimate of the improper payments under the regular unemployment insurance program.
The department said it will revise its calculations in preparation for the next assessment and pledged to “take the IG’s concern, which we share, in this [revised] methodology to ensure transparent, accurate and cost-effective reporting of this expired program.”
Former New York Times journalist Alex Berenson has been allowed to return to Twitter, which banned him in 2021 for allegedly spreading COVID-19 misinformation.
Berenson and Twitter released similar statements on July 6.
“The parties have come to a mutually acceptable resolution. I have been reinstated. Twitter has acknowledged that my tweets should have not led to my suspension at that time,” Berenson said in a blog post on July 6, which he linked to in his first post on the platform since he was permanently suspended,” Berenson said in a blog post.
“The parties have come to a mutually acceptable resolution. Twitter has reinstated Mr. Berenson’s account. Upon further review, Twitter acknowledges Mr. Berenson’s Tweets should not have led to his account’s suspension at that time,” a Twitter spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email.
Vaccines
Minutes after Berenson posted for the first time following his reinstatement, he re-posted the words that triggered the ban.
“It doesn’t stop infection. Or transmission. Don’t think of it as a vaccine. Think of it—at best—as a therapeutic with a limited window of efficacy and terrible side effect profile that must be dosed IN ADVANCE OF ILLNESS. And we want to mandate it? Insanity,” he wrote.
Berenson was referring to the COVID-19 vaccines, which have proven increasingly unable to prevent infection from the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus. Also known as the SARS-CoV-2, the virus causes COVID-19.
Though the vaccines have been authorized and approved for prevention of the virus, they’re actually recommended primarily for helping prevent severe disease among those who contract the illness.
Twitter had initially claimed that Berenson’s post was “misleading,” even though the company acknowledged that “studies indicate a reduction in vaccine effectiveness against the Omicron variant” of the virus.
Studies show that the Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson shots—the only three available in the United States—provide little protection against Omicron, and that the protection quickly wanes.
Some studies indicate that the vaccinated are more likely to contract the virus after certain periods of time elapse following vaccination.
U.S. health authorities still recommend vaccination for virtually all Americans.
Lawsuit
Berenson sued Twitter after being banned, claiming the company breached its contract with him as a user.
A federal judge tossed all of the claims except for the breach of contract one. Berenson and Twitter recently announced they’d agreed on a settlement in principle.
The details of the settlement have not yet been entered into the court docket, with the parties saying they’re still negotiating.
According to court filings, Berenson was told by a senior Twitter executive that posts that sparked controversy would not lead to him being banned from the platform. But Twitter began taking action against him after Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top adviser to resident Joe Biden, said some of Berenson’s remarks were “horrifying,” first locking him out of his account and eventually enacting the ban.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup, a Clinton appointee, said in a recent ruling that Berenson “plausibly avers that Twitter’s conduct here modified its contract with plaintiff and then breached that contract by failing to abide by its own five-strike policy and its specific commitments set forth through its vice president.”
The lawyer representing whistleblower Brook Jackson said Pfizer is arguing the court should dismiss Jackson’s lawsuit alleging fraud in Pfizer’s COVID-19 clinical trials because the U.S. government knew about the wrongdoings but continued to do business with the vaccine maker.
A lawsuit filed by whistleblower Brook Jackson alleging Pfizer and two of its contractors manipulated data and committed other acts of fraud during Pfizer’s COVID-19 clinical trials is paused following a motion by the defendants to dismiss the case.
In an interview with The Defender, Jackson’s lawyer said Pfizer argued the lawsuit, which was filed under the False Claims Act, should be dismissed because the U.S. government knew of the wrongdoings in the clinical trials but continued to do business with the vaccine maker.
Under the False Claims Act, whistleblowers can be rewarded for confidentially disclosing fraud that results in a financial loss to the federal government.
However, a 2016 U.S. Supreme Court decision that expanded the scope of a legal principle known as “materiality” resulted in a series of federal court decisions in which fraud cases brought under the False Claims Act were dismissed.
As interpreted by the Supreme Court, if the government continued paying a contractor despite the contractor’s fraudulent activity, the fraud was not considered “material” to the contract.
Pfizer is a federal contractor because it signed multiple contracts with the U.S. government to provide COVID-19 vaccines and Paxlovid, a pill used to treat the virus.
“Pfizer claims they can get away with fraud as long as the government would write them a check despite knowing about the fraud,” attorney Robert Barnes said.
The other two defendants in the case are Ventavia Research Group, which conducted vaccine trials on behalf of Pfizer, and ICON PLC, also a Pfizer contractor.
In an attempt to strengthen the False Claims Act’s anti-retaliation provisions and install new safeguards against industry-level blacklisting of whistleblowers seeking employment, Congress in July 2021 introduced the False Claims Amendments Act of 2021.
In December 2021, Pfizer hired a well-connected lobbyist, Hazen Marshall, and the law firm Williams & Jensen to lobby against the bill.
Pfizer previously was heavily fined in connection with the False Claims Act. As part of a 2009 settlement, the company paid $2.3 billion in fines — the largest healthcare fraud settlement in the history of the U.S. Department of Justice — stemming from allegations of illegal marketing of off-label products not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
“Pfizer, one of the most criminally fined drug companies in the world, wants to weaken the laws that hold them accountable,” Barnes told The Defender.
Congress has taken no action on the False Claims Amendments Act since November 2021, when the bill was added to the Senate’s legislative calendar.
Barnes said the outcome of Jackson’s case against Pfizer is significant not just for his client, but also for the American public.
“This case will determine if Big Pharma can rip off the American people using a dangerous drug that harms millions without any legal remedy because they claim the government was in on the scam.”
Jackson was a regional director for Ventavia for a brief period in 2020 but was fired after she notified the FDA about issues with Pfizer’s vaccine trials.
After she was fired, she gave The BMJ a cache of internal company documents, photos and recordings highlighting the alleged wrongdoing by Ventavia.
The documents she provided contained evidence of falsified data, blind trial failures and awareness on the part of at least one Ventavia executive that members of the company’s staff were “falsifying data.”
Jackson’s documents also provided evidence of administrators who had “no training” or medical certifications, or who provided “very little oversight” during the trials.
Jackson filed her complaint in August 2021, in the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Texas, Beaumont Division, alleging Pfizer, Ventavia and ICON “deliberately withheld crucial information from the United States that calls the safety and efficacy of their vaccine into question.”
According to the complaint, Jackson, who had more than 15 years of experience working with clinical trials, “repeatedly informed her superiors of poor laboratory management, patient safety concerns and data integrity issues” during the approximately two weeks she was employed by Ventavia.
“Brook [Jackson] brought a Qui Tam action and a retaliatory discharge case against Pfizer and others for fraud on the people concerning Pfizer’s false certifications to the U.S. Department of Defense about the safety and efficacy of their COVID-19 vaccine,” Barnes said.
A Qui Tam case refers to a provision under the False Claims Act that allows individuals and entities with evidence of fraud against federal programs or contracts to sue the wrongdoer on behalf of the U.S. government
“She was part of the clinical trials, witnessed extraordinary malfeasance, blew the whistle, and was quickly fired after she blew the whistle.”
Barnes said his legal team will in August file its opposition brief to Pfizer’s motion to dismiss, and the judge may rule on the motion to dismiss by fall 2022.
The National Institutes of Health canceled a nearly $2 million taxpayer-funded trial that would have force-fed puppies experimental drugs, after a Washington Free Beacon report.
NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which is helmed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, was slated to spend $1,836,453 in taxpayer dollars to test an experimental hay fever drug on mice, rats, and dogs, including puppies, according to funding documents obtained by the White Coat Waste Project, a government watchdog group, and provided to the Free Beacon in May. The most severe symptoms of hay fever, also known as seasonal allergies, are a runny nose and sneezing.
Following the Free Beacon report, Sen. Joni Ernst (R., Iowa) launched an investigation into NIAID’s project, describing the puppy tests as “invasive, painful, and potentially deadly procedures.” Fauci informed Ernst late last month that the puppy trials are now canceled, according to a copy of the June 22 letter sent to Ernst and obtained exclusively by the Free Beacon.
Ernst said the cancellation is a win for the taxpayers and should serve as a wake-up call to the NIH that Congress will not sit by while it abuses animals in the name of science. NIH’s animal tests have stoked anger from lawmakers and put the U.S. health agency under a microscope, particularly as questions linger about Fauci and the NIH’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. NIH’s funding for labs in Russia and China also have generated concerns about the agency’s priorities and led Congress to ban the practice last week.
A company called the Inimmune Corporation was tapped by NIAID to perform at least five separate experiments on dogs that were to include force-feeding them experimental drugs for several months. This included a proposal to purchase “six-month old puppies” to be used in the tests.
“Although the contract to Inimmune Corporation proposed the use of murine and canine preclinical animal models, after consultation with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the company elected to proceed using two rodent models only,” Fauci wrote to Ernst. “No experiments utilizing the canine model are being conducted under this contract.”
Fauci attempted to justify the trials, saying that 60 million people in the United States have seasonal allergies “and many patients do not achieve adequate relief with available medications, resulting in substantial social and economic burdens.”
Ernst, in comments to the Free Beacon, said “Fauci was barking up the wrong tree when he decided to use government dollars on dog testing.”
“These inhumane practices have no place in our government—much less on the taxpayer’s dime,” Ernst said. “Thankfully, after voicing our concerns and shining a light on these heinous tactics, taxpayers can rest easy knowing their hard-earned money is not going toward dog abuse.”
Fauci also defended NIAID’s decision to use animals such as puppies as test subjects.
“I want to assure you that NIH and NIAID take the welfare of animals in research very seriously,” Fauci wrote, noting that such experiments are governed by strict ethical guidelines. “NIH has established guidance, procedures, and protocols to ensure that … scientists maintain the highest possible standards for the humane care and use of animals in research.”
Fauci also noted in the letter that, unlike other NIAID-funded experiments, the seasonal allergy trials were not slated to allocate funding to any labs in China. This practice has become increasingly controversial in the wake of China’s efforts to lie and cover-up its role in starting the coronavirus pandemic.
Devin Murphy, public policy and communications manager for the White Coat Waste Project—which first unearthed these experiments and others involving lethal tests on beagle puppies—said NIH and NIAID are on notice.
“This is a decisive victory in the War on Waste, and sends a message to big-spending white coats across the federal government: taxpayers should not be forced to pay for wasteful, unnecessary, and cruel animal experiments,” Murphy told the Free Beacon. “Taxpayers and animal lovers in Iowa and across the nation are grateful for Sen. Ernst’s outstanding commitment to government transparency and the responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars.”
Senate candidate John Fetterman took $3,500 trip to Ocean City, N.J., in June 2020
Pennsylvania lieutenant governor John Fetterman (D.) took a taxpayer-funded security detail on a family vacation to the Jersey Shore while publicly advocating strict coronavirus lockdowns.
Pennsylvania state police spent $3,500 for overtime, food, and lodging during Fetterman’s trip to Ocean City, N.J., from June 24-27, 2020, according to records obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. Fetterman, the Democratic Senate nominee for Pennsylvania, made the trip amid a surge of cases in both New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Department of Health warned at the time against nonessential travel. New Jersey’s governor threatened to crack down on Jersey Shore revelers because of a spike in cases there two days before Fetterman’s junket.
Fetterman has aggressively pushed lockdowns, masking, and other measures to fight the pandemic. He vowed in March 2020 that he and his family would “stay at home, minimizing social interactions and trips to indoor public places.” He criticized “a small, tiny minority” of anti-lockdown protesters in May 2020, and said “renegade counties” in his state had caused COVID-19 outbreaks by violating his administration’s stay-at-home orders. He also said school closures, which have caused learning and behavioral setbacks for school kids, were “an absolute necessity” in the fight against the virus.
Fetterman campaign spokesman Joe Calvello acknowledged the vacation but said that Alleghany County, where Fetterman resides, “was not in lock down” at the time of the trip. He said Fetterman has never claimed reimbursement for travel expenses and that he cut spending on travel, food, conferences and office supplies during his first two years in office.
“John and his family do take modest summer vacations like many folks in PA,” Calvello told the Free Beacon.
A LendingTree study found that 88% of Pennsylvania residents canceled their vacations in 2020 because of the pandemic.
Fetterman’s security detail stayed during the 2020 trip at the Port-O-Call hotel, the “premier resort” where the Fettermans appear to have stayed during other vacations. While Fetterman did not post photos during the 2020 jaunt, as he did in other years, he was reportedly spotted maskless on the Ocean City boardwalk with his wife during the trip. Fetterman has been an avid supporter of universal-masking requirements during the pandemic. He urged people to “stay home,” “stay apart,” and mask up. He joins an extensive list of Democrats who haveviolated their own masking or social distancing policies.
State police spent $1,149 on security during Fetterman’s family vacation from July 5-8, 2021, according to state records. The Fettermans visited Ocean City again last month, as Fetterman was recovering from a near-fatal stroke that has kept him off the campaign trail since the middle of May.
The DMED, one of the best databases in the world, shows a disturbing trend with post-COVID jabs – dramatic increases in medical visits for malignancies, neurological and autoimmune diseases, and infertility. But after being exposed, DMED was shut down and its data spikes washed clean.
In the wake of the COVID jab rollout and additional boosters, a number of health conditions are on the rise, including cancer, most notably cancers of the uterus, endometrial cancers, and very aggressive blood and brain cancers
Cancer has been on the rise for decades, thanks to dietary factors, but the COVID jabs appear to dramatically accelerate the disease process. Many doctors report cancer patients with stable disease, and those who have been in remission for years, will suddenly and rapidly develop Stage 4 disease
A military whistleblower has come forward with data from the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) database showing dramatic increases in medical visits for cancers and other conditions, post-jab
For neurological side effects of the shot, four remedies that can be very helpful are fluvoxamine (an antidepressant that blocks cytokine production in neural tissues), pharmaceutical grade methylene blue (improves mitochondrial respiration and repair), near-infrared light (triggers production of melatonin in your mitochondria) and hyperbaric oxygen therapy (boosts mitochondrial function, decreases inflammation and much more)
The COVID jabs also downregulate toll-like receptors 7 and 8, which allows latent viruses such as herpes EBV4 — Epstein-Barr, aka, mononucleosis — to flourish that would otherwise have been kept in check
Dr. Ryan Cole, an anatomic clinical pathologist with a subspecialty in skin pathology and postgraduate Ph.D. training in immunology, has been on the frontlines exposing the fraudulent COVID narrative.
Since 2004, he’s been operating his own business, a pathology laboratory, which gives him rare freedom and flexibility to comment on what he’s seeing. Most others would lose their jobs for speaking out the way Cole has.
Truth Telling Is a Risky Business
That doesn’t mean he hasn’t paid a price for speaking out about and defending real science though. He’s triple board certified and has 12 state licenses, and because of his stance against COVID recommendations, some of the credentialing organizations have taken action against him.
“I’ve seen 500,000 patients diagnostically in my career through the microscope. So, I have a long track record of diagnostics. I have not had a patient care complaint against me in 26 years of being a physician,” he says. “I still don’t, and this is what’s fascinating.
Of those 12 licenses, four were under attack, three are still under attack — in Washington, Arizona and Minnesota — [yet there’s] not a single patient care complaint. All the attacks against me have been political complaints to boards of medicine, which is not legal for them to do. Not a single one of those complaints is from a patient.
And then — really the most egregious thing — was ex parte, without me being present, without even sending a certified letter, the College of American Pathologists removed my fellowship status, which is defamatory.
I went back and found their complaint and looked at what they did, and I actually have a wonderful defamation lawsuit against them, because everything they did was anti-scientific. So, they can either restore [my fellowship] now, or just pay me a big check down the road. One or the other.”
He’s also lost about half of his business, as two insurance companies canceled him for “unprofessional behavior,” i.e., for sharing and discussing the science of COVID, and one of his best friends, whom he’s worked with for 12 years, canceled their business relationship as he didn’t want Cole’s outspokenness to affect his business. “All because of the defamation by the media, so to tell the truth in this day and age is a dangerous thing,” he says.
Suspicions Arose Early On
From his Ph.D. work in immunology, Cole was very aware of SARS-CoV-1 and MERS, having studied both, so when the warp speed program to develop a pandemic SARS-CoV-2 vaccine was announced, he became immediately suspicious.
“I thought, wait a minute, you can’t vaccinate against corona viruses!” he says. “This family of viruses is not amenable to vaccination, based on mutation rates. So, my concern was very high, early on.”
Cole’s lab ramped up PCR testing, using a cycle threshold (CT) of 35, rather than the recommended 40 to 45, as he knew that high a CT would result in 98% false positives. On a side note, pathologists not only assess tissue samples and biopsies, they’re also in charge of testing. The head of every major clinical lab is a pathologist. They’re basically in charge of quality control.
“As pathologist, we’re constantly looking at patterns, be it under the microscope or be it in lab data. We’re looking at blood reports. We’re looking at what’s out of range on blood reports. We’re looking at microbiology. We’re looking at molecular biology. We’re looking at cultures. We’re looking at pap smears. We’re looking, across the board, at those clinical parameters in addition to tissue biopsies,” he explains.
“I have 70 employees, and if there’s a blood smear that looks unusual, they bring it to me. If there are parameters on a test that look widely out of range, they bring it to me. And I call and talk to the clinician — [I’m the] doctor to the doctor. We have a consultation practice with the clinicians so I can help them understand what’s happening with their patient, and then they can make clinical decisions going forward.”
Post-Jab Cancer Explosion
One of the apparent side effects of the COVID jab that Cole has been warning and talking about is cancer. He explains:
“Obviously, during COVID, we saw some parameters change in blood tests. There was a concern about clotting. We saw elevated clotting factors. We know that the early variants were pretty severe in terms of inducing clotting, which was a shame because the whole world should have been simply using anti-inflammatories, steroids and anti-clotting agents, and so many more people would’ve lived.
My colleague, Dr. [Shankara] Chetty in South Africa, was having phenomenal success with antihistamine steroids and anti-clotting agents. So anyway, that first year, we saw drops in white blood cell counts, we saw decreases in certain subsets of T-cells. But when the shots rolled out, things changed.
At first I noticed kind of an innocuous little bump that we see usually in children. It’s a little virus called molluscum contagiosum [that causes] a little white bump.
Usually, by the time you’re a tween or early teen, you’ve built immunity to that and you never get them again, or rarely get them again. But after the shots rolled out, all of a sudden, in 80-year-olds, 70-year-olds, 60-year-olds, 50-year-olds, I started seeing literally a 20-fold increase in this little innocuous viral bump. And I thought, ‘Uh oh, this means they’ve lost immune memory’ …
Those subsets of T-cells that keep viruses in check are very important for keeping cancer in check. And this is where immunology jumps into the picture. All of us have some atypical cells, and we have the ‘Marines’ of our immune system, our natural killer (NK) cells. They’re on the frontline circulating. We have about 30 billion T-cells circulating in our blood, many of which are killer cells and NK cells.
Our other innate cells are our macrophages, monocytes and dendritic cells. They’re on that frontline. They’re shaking hands with every cell in your body all day long saying, ‘Friend or foe? Friend or foe? Oh gosh, this one has some mutations, it’s now a foe.’ They’ll poke a little hole in it, throw in a little enzyme called a grandzyme — a ‘hand grenade’ — blow up that cell, and we’re good.
But what happened after these shots rolled out is that many of those cell subsets started decreasing in number. The first cancer I saw uptick was cancers of the uterus, endometrial cancers. Usually, I would see maybe two endometrial cancers a month. All of a sudden, a few months after the rollout of the shots, I was seeing two or three a week.
Another subspecialty area of focus for me is melanoma. And I started seeing melanomas, not only in younger patients, as the shots dropped down in age cohort, but they were thicker. The other fascinating thing was they’re more aggressive in terms of how many dividing cells was present in each tumor. I’m still seeing this.
Beyond that … I’ve been traveling the country and the world quite a bit … and wherever I go now, I have doctors and nurses approach me saying, ‘What you’re saying, we’ve been seeing.’
I was having a conversation with a chair of a large oncology department in Tallahassee, and he said, ‘I usually see an aggressive brain cancer in a young patient maybe every decade.’ After the boosters rolled out, he saw five astrocytomas, five aggressive brain cancers, in one month.
Then, I’m in Jacksonville the next day, having a conversation with a family doctor. He said, ‘Gosh, it’s strange, I usually see a kidney cancer in a young patient every decade or so. I’ve seen five in the last month.’
Then I was in the UK a couple weeks ago. I had a doctor from Ireland who’s been a practicing family doc, GP, for 36 years, and he said, ‘I have seen more cancer in my young patients ever since the shots rolled out, and the booster, than I have ever seen in my entire career.’
Same thing, a nurse that works emergency department in the UK, [said she’s seen] not only the heart inflammation in young children, but cancers in young patients and aggressive leukemias. So everywhere I go, I have doctors confirming my observations … I’ve had many of them approach me and say, ‘Hey look, I’m seeing what you’re saying, but I can’t say it because I’ll get fired.’”
Cancer Spike Is Being Covered Up
Aside from what Cole has seen in his own lab, a military whistleblower has also come forward with data from the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) database showing dramatic increases in medical visits for cancer, neurological diseases, infertility, autoimmune diseases and several other conditions, post-jab.1
The DMED is one of the best databases in the world, as the Department of Defense keeps very close tabs on what’s happening with our troops. This DMED data was presented during a hearing led by Sen. Ron Johnson. A week after that hearing, the DoD froze access to the DMED, and when it reopened a week later, the data were all changed to eliminate the data spikes.
“That’s what was really shocking,” Cole says. “I think this is basically fraud to the level of Watergate, in terms of [there being] somebody behind the scenes, and then the private company that actually manages that database … manipulated it.”
The DoD has tried to explain this suspicious activity claiming a “bug” in the system had resulted in underreporting of medical conditions in the five years prior to 2021. The number of cancers and other health problems were actually higher in 2015 through 2020 than initially indicated, they said.
However, how can a program error cause data corruption for five consecutive years and then self-correct, resulting in perfect numbers for 2021? And how did they not notice the error earlier? Again, this is one of the best-kept databases in the world. And how come this “bug” only affected conditions that also just so happen to be known and/or suspected side effects of the jab?
Future Prognostication
Clearly, cancer has been on the rise for decades, thanks to dietary factors, but the COVID jabs appear to dramatically accelerate the disease process. There are no published studies to help us foretell the future, but based on what Cole has found so far, how long does he think it’ll be before conditions like cancer spiral out of control?
“That’s a great question,” he says. “One of the important findings I’ve heard from many of these clinicians is that many of their patients who have been cancer-free for three, four, five years, their PET scan looks great, no detectable disease, and after that second or third shot, all of a sudden there’s Stage 4 disease. It’s like wildfire.
And this goes back to immune suppressive mechanisms, the damage that the persistent spike protein and the persistent modified RNA (mRNA) cause. So, aggressive cancers arising very quickly are one thing we’re seeing. Because it’s a dose-dependent poisoning curve — in terms of the more spike you have circulating, the worse your immune system seems to be doing — the No. 1 thing is, don’t get another shot.
Because it is causing that immune suppression that’s allowing those cancer mechanisms. Over time … I would say we’re going to see a consistent twofold to threefold increase in certain cancers, endometrial cancers, breast cancers, cancers of the prostate, cancers that are testicular or ovarian, neurologic cancers.
This spike protein has a propensity to cross the blood brain barrier and invade neural tissues. We know what it does to mitochondrial activity in terms of inhibiting it, blocking it, ruining cytochrome C oxidase systems, decreasing ATP.
Cancer is a hypoxic state. When you don’t have good cellular activity and cellular respiration and hypo-oxygenation, you end up with mechanisms that can induce more aggressive cancer. So, I think, at a minimum, [there’ll be a] two- to threefold [increase] … over the next year or two.
We can only hope that the immune system can normalize and we come up with enough interventions and treatments that will reverse some of this, what some people call spikeopathy, or the different diseases that are being caused by this persistent spike. ‘I don’t know’ is the honest answer, but that would be my projection based on I’ve seen.”
Excess Mortality Has Dramatically Increased
Abnormal blood clotting is another commonly reported side effect of the jabs. Post-mortem investigations have revealed thick, extremely long rubbery clots, including in the arteries, which is rare. The longest Cole has seen was about two feet. We’re also seeing a lot of micro-clotting, heart inflammation (myocarditis), strokes and heart attacks — all of which can have lethal consequences.
It’s highly concerning that we have regulatory agencies allowing the most dangerous medical product ever released on humanity to persist in the marketplace.
— Ryan Cole, dr
In early January 2022, OneAmerica, a national mutual life insurance company, announced2 the death rate of working-age Americans (18 to 64), in the third quarter of 2021, was 40% higher than prepandemic levels. And this excess mortality was not due to COVID infection. Many of those deaths were in fact cardiac deaths and strokes, which fits the injury profile of the COVID shots.
“After they came forward, additional insurance companies said, ‘We’re seeing anywhere from 30% to 50% increase in claims as well.’ They have no horse in the race. They’re just observing. And I say that as a pathologist too. Look, I don’t create disease. I don’t prevent disease. I’m a reporter at the scene of the crash.
My job is simply to report patterns, and then we can scientifically confirm those data patterns. And the all-cause death is increased in those who’ve gotten two, three shots. Again, it’s a dose-dependent curve. The more spike your body is making, the worse people tend to do over time.
Even Walgreens came out a couple weeks ago and showed their data. Individuals that got shots are getting COVID at higher rates. Even the mainstream media finally, last week — I think it was Good Morning America — said, ‘It’s looking like the boosters are a bad idea because it’s immune suppressing people.’
So, we’re finally making some progress and getting traction in the mainstream where at least the narrative is cracking. There’s a crack in the dam and it’s starting to leak. Hopefully it’ll rush forward and people will go, ‘Whoa, this was a bad idea. Let’s stop this chaos.’ But the FDA is trying to roll it out on [infants] of all things now … It’s really tragic.”
Why Was the Most Toxic Part of the Virus Chosen?
Considering autopsies have shown spike protein is still present at least four months after their last shot, it seems reasonable to assume that severe health problems can arise months or even years down the road. In fact, we still don’t know if the body ever stops producing spike protein once this genetically modified mRNA is injected.
“We know the spike is the inflammatory aspect of the virus, and our cells are made into spike toxin factories,” Cole says. “Studies out of the Salk Institute show that the spike is the cytotoxic aspect of [COVID-19], so we’re giving a shot that makes the toxic part of the virus, and it’s persisting.
That’s why I think we’re going to see this consistent elevation of different diseases related to the spike, be it cardiac, strokes, chronic clotting conditions, individuals dying from pulmonary emboli … It’s highly concerning that we have regulatory agencies allowing the most dangerous medical product ever released on humanity to persist in the marketplace.”
Strokes in young people and children are also on the rise. Media are now trying to convince you that this is “normal,” but it is anything but. Historically, children and teens do not die from strokes. This is a brand-new phenomenon, courtesy of the COVID jabs.
Microvascular clots (microvascular infarcts) are also a known contributing factor, in the long term, to early onset dementia. So, that’s yet another potential health avalanche in the making.
Four Helpful Remedies
I’ve quickly become a fan of pharmaceutical grade methylene blue, as it’s been shown to improve mitochondrial respiration and aid in mitochondrial repair. At 15 to 20 milligrams a day, it could potentially go a long way toward resolving some of the fatigue many suffer post-jab and post-COVID. It may also be helpful in acute strokes. The primary contraindication is if you have a G6PD deficiency (a hereditary genetic condition), in which case you should not use methylene blue at all.
Another important remedy is near-infrared light. It triggers production of melatonin in your mitochondria3 where you need it most. By mopping up reactive oxygen species, it too helps improve mitochondrial function and repair. Natural sunlight is 54.3% near-infrared radiation,4 so this treatment is available for free.
For neurological side effects of the shot, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressant called fluvoxamine may be helpful. Cole explains the mechanism behind it:
“[Fluvoxamine] upregulates a receptor called sigma-1, which blocks another receptor called inositol-requiring enzyme 1, which is a precursor for cytokines. So, fluvoxamine will block cytokine production in neural tissues. And that’s why [it works]. It’s not because of its antidepressant effects. It’s a cytokine precursor blocker. So, you actually are decreasing a cytokine storm in neural tissues.
This is why one uses fluvoxamine. There are other SSRIs, but this mechanism is very specific to fluvoxamine. It’s a tough to tolerate drug for some people. It makes some people anxious and agitated, but if you can tolerate it for two weeks, you can really turn down those inflammatory pathways in many patients. I’m not going to say everybody, but I’ve seen it work in many patients.”
A fourth treatment suggestion is hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT). This too can be phenomenally helpful for strokes, heart attacks, autoimmune diseases and neurodegenerative disorders. To learn more, see “Hyperbaric Therapy — A Vastly Underused Treatment Modality.”
IMPORTANT: COVID Shots Are Not Pharmaceutical Grade
Seneff also warned about potential unknowns arising from fragmented mRNA and impurities, as tests have shown these jabs really are NOT pharmaceutical grade, as you’d expect. Cole comments:
“These aren’t pure products, and I think this is a very important point. When Pfizer submitted vials to the European Medicines Agency to look at purity … they were in the 50% range … The TGA in Australia looked at it and said, ‘Look, these are only about 60% pure.’
This means you have a lot of fragmented sequences of mRNA that don’t have a stop or a start code on. They’re not coding for what you think they’re coding for. They’re coding for other tinier, shorter fragments. Are those mitogenic? Probably, but we don’t know. Can those reverse transcribe into our own DNA? Studies out of Sweden … show yes, they can …
And then, when they manufacture, they can’t spin and agitate these, so you get all these lipids that collect at the top of these big vats. So now you get some batches that are hyperconcentrated and some are hypoconcentrated. It appears about 5% of the batches are responsible for about 80% of the harms.”
Autoimmune Diseases of All Kinds Are To Be Expected
As explained by Cole in the interview, there’s a reason there’s never been a successful mRNA gene therapy product brought to market, despite 20 years of research effort. The persistence of synthetic mRNA with pseudouridine always caused too many problems in the animal trials to move into human trials. It caused autoimmune disease. It caused mutations. The manufacturers don’t even know if the nanolipid used to protect the mRNA is safe in humans.
“Based on the animal trials, we know there were problems and we can only predict that that’s going to happen in humanity. I want to be wrong, but from a basic immunology point of view, I don’t think I am,” Cole says.
“The nanolipid particles vary in size, interestingly. I’ve looked at some under the microscope. Some of them congeal and some of them stay tiny. But because of the fatty nature of them, they will carry their little mRNA and fractionated mRNA package to any cell in the body. And that’s the biggest concern. Now it has turned any cell in your body to a potential target [for your immune system].
An important paper came out in the European Journal of Immunology just about a month ago by Dr. Hagemann. There’s a condition called antibody dependent cellular cytotoxicity. What that means is that [the mRNA] sequence gets into your cell [and] that cell now becomes the spike factory.
That spike is on the surface of your cell. Now your NK cells that I talked about earlier say, ‘We better blow that cell up.’ So now, because there’s that spike on the surface, your immune system will destroy your own cells. This is another one of the detrimental effects.”
Pipeline Now Filled With Risky mRNA Shots
Making matters worse, even though the COVID shots have been shown to be a complete disaster, the drug industry is already working on dozens of different mRNA “vaccines,” thinking they now have carte blanche to put out whatever they want using this platform.
And the reason for this continued insanity is because our health and regulatory authorities are corrupted to the core. They are completely dishonest. They’re covering up the shocking harms, and unless something radically changes, they will allow dozens of equally dangerous mRNA gene transfer injections to be put out.
Reactivation of Latent Viruses
The COVID jabs also downregulate pattern receptors in your body called toll-like receptors. Specifically, toll-like receptors 7 and 8 are downregulated by the mRNA and pseudouridine in these shots. What does that do? It allows latent viruses to flourish that would otherwise have been kept in check.
“We’ve seen a big uptick in herpes family viruses, especially herpes EBV4, which is Epstein-Barr virus [aka] mononucleosis,” Cole says. So, for those with post-COVID or post-jab fatigue, long-COVID and those with MS-like symptoms, he recommends checking for Epstein-Barr.
About 80% of MS patients have high Epstein-Barr titers. “You will find that a lot of these individuals will have reactivated mono,” he says. For reactivated mono, methylene blue, HBOT and nebulized peroxide would all be indicated.
Fertility Under Attack
In the interview, Cole also reviews the potential impacts of the COVID jabs on the reproductive system. Menstrual dysregulation appears extremely common, as is the inability to become pregnant, despite trying for months, and spontaneous abortions are off the charts. The DMED database also showed a strong signal for fetal malformation before it was frozen and altered.
“What we’re doing to society and humanity with a previously never before used modality and product is causing horrendous harm to the human race, with no regard for science, with no regard for scientific integrity. It’s a machine gone amuck,” Cole says.
“There are darker forces behind it. A lot of people are making billions, but they’re killing people to do it. And it’s just so unethical what we’re experiencing societally. Yes, we’re causing infertility. Yes, we’re causing mutations in cancers. Yes, we’re causing heart attacks and strokes. Yes, we’re destroying the longevity of a younger generation. It is horrendous.
There’s no justification for any doctor who can look themselves in the mirror and say, ‘I feel comfortable giving this experimental product to my patients all day long.’ They need to reflect and realize they’ve lost their mind, [their] critical thinking skills.”
More Information
Sadly, almost everyone who’s credible and trustworthy has been censored and deplatformed at this point, so finding them can be a challenge. To follow Cole’s work, be sure to bookmark his website, RColeMD.com. You can also find him on the GlobalCovidSummit.org forum.
If you are vaccine injured, the Global COVID Summit has a blockchain-based forum where you can share your experience and it will never be taken down. You can’t be censored or deplatformed. Cole is available to answer questions in that forum.
They’re also starting up another website to compete with WebMD and similar pharma-run medical sites. It will eventually be available on DMED.com, which stands for “decentralized medicine.” This site is not yet live, but you can try it later. Cole will have a page there as well.
Other thought leaders worth tracking down and following include Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Pierre Kory, Dr. Paul Marik, Dr. Richard Urso, Dr. Paul Alexander, and Dr. Kirk A. Milhoan, a pediatric cardiologist, and his wife, Dr. Kim Milhoan, just to name a few.
“These have been wonderful leaders in this movement for truth and sharing science,” Cole says. “All of us are part of the Global COVID Summit. We are 17,000 doctors strong and it’s very important that people understand that.
I mean, that’s more doctors than they have at the CDC or the FDA or the NIH. This is a group of critical thinking people standing up for your health, your freedom and your right to your own bodily autonomy.
I think, going forward, as people are starting to wake up and part of this narrative is cracking, let’s come back together, let’s communicate, let’s be kind, let’s help each other get back to a more loving, peaceful, communicative society. I think if we can forgive — obviously, there are things we don’t want to forget, because we don’t want this to happen again — but try to forgive people and try to help people ‘come to’ again.
Just come back together in community. I think it’s important that we really try to circle the wagons again as humanity, and hopefully come back to our senses. That’s a hopeful message I would like to share.”
An Israeli study assessed the effectiveness of BNT162b2 COVID-19 vaccination (Pfizer) against the Omicron variant in children 5 to 11 years old using a large health care database and found the vaccine effectiveness (VE) to be 48 percent 7–21 days after dose 2 for symptomatic infection.
People with evidence of prior COVID infection by PCR, antigen, or serology test were excluded.
A U.S. study of a lesser scale found that VE in children declined from 60 percent to 28.9 percent from month 1 to month 2 after the second dose of Pfizer.
Cardiologist Sanjay Verma concluded that “therefore, if this Israeli study were to follow the children beyond 21 days, it is probable the VE would be lower than 48 percent.”
The authors of the study noted that assessment of “vaccine effectiveness against more severe outcomes such as hospitalization were not possible, because they were very rare in the study population.”
“In the US, American Academy of Pediatric data note a hospitalization rate of 0.7 percent in children based upon officially confirmed PCR+ infections. This study and this study previously found that 40 percent of pediatric COVID+ hospitalizations may have been over estimated when differentiating those hospitalized for COVID pneumonia versus those who were hospitalized for other causes but had incidental COVID+ testing during routine surveillance,” Verma noted.
“Therefore, the true hospitalization rate may actually be 0.42 percent of children infected with SARS-CoV2. CDC seroprevalence data report 75 percent of all children have already been infected (4.5 times more than officially confirmed PCR+ results). Perhaps the true SARS-Cov2 hospitalization rate for children then is as low as 0.09 percent. With such low incidence of COVID+ hospitalizations in pediatric population, most trials are not large enough to detect a statistically significant difference in COVID+ hospitalizations (or deaths) between vaccinated and unvaccinated children,” he concluded.
The study notes that 17 percent of the children were obese or overweight, while for the U.S. study, 35 percent of the children were so.
For the Israeli study, 43 percent of the population had received at least three doses of influenza vaccine in the past five years, while in the United States, an estimated 58 percent of children receive an annual flu vaccine, and some schools require the influenza vaccine.
The Israeli study also notes that “many of the children in our study cohort did not receive a second dose within the study follow-up period.”
“mRNA COVID-19 vaccinations do have a known risk of myocarditis and other rare severe adverse reactions. To better contextualize the risk-benefit analysis it would be helpful to know why the children did not receive the second dose,” Verma added.
“Statistics show the rate of COVID-19 associated hospitalization among children aged 5 to 11 is 0.0008 percent,” writes Dr. Joseph Mercola. “In real-world terms, that’s so close to zero you basically cannot lower it any further. Yet, despite such reassuring data, children in this age group are urged to get two to three doses of the COVID jab, even though side effects of the injection could harm them for life, or kill them.”
The flurry of rulings from the Supreme Court has everyone’s head spinning. The most significant among them, even if it doesn’t capture all the headlines, is West Virginia vs EPA. The majority opinion is impressive but the part I found truly wonderful is the concurring opinion by Neil Gorsuch. This is where we see things headed, toward a major and much-welcome curbing of the power of the administrative state.
Just to review what this thing is, it is the unelected bureaucracy that rules the country without oversight from voters or legislatures. For well over 100 years, most courts have given it a pass, just assuming that the “experts” in the bureaucracies are handling things just fine, faithfully interpreting legislation, and merely creating rules for easy compliance.
Generations have gone by as this 4th branch of government has grown in size, scope, and strength. For the most part, its baneful impositions have been felt by one business or one industry at a time. You have heard the stories. The car dealer complains of how the Department of Labor is making him crazy. The machine-parts manufacturer is going bonkers about letters from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The energy company can never satisfy the Environmental Protection Agency.
They are stories and we find them unfortunate but we’ve generally avoided thinking of these as systematic, all pervasive, and truly dangerous to the idea of freedom itself. However, there are some 432 of these agencies. The authors of the Declaration of Independence noted their existence back in the day when they accused the English king of having “erected a Multitude of new Offices, and sent hither Swarms of Officers to harass our People, and eat out their Substance.” They fought a revolution to end the tyranny but now we have a home-grown form, starting in 1883 with the Pendleton Act and continuing throughout the 20th century as each new administration creates its own bureaucracy.
The thing has taken on a power of its own. Strangely, the topic hardly comes up at all during elections, and this is for a reason. Politicians running for office like to advertise their power to make change. They might even believe it. In reality, elected officials have very little influence over the conduct of public life relative to the administrative state. As Trump found it, not even the president is a match for the deep state.
Here is what has happened since March 2020: the beast showed its face. Seemingly out of nowhere, these strange agencies and people for whom we never voted were ruling our lives. They restricted travel, forced us to cover our faces, closed our churches and schools, and forbid our businesses from operating unless they were big enough to afford a powerful lobbying arm in Washington. The whole scene was appalling. It caused many people—including some earnest judges—to take notice.
Once you see the problem, you cannot unsee it.
Consider the problem with inflation alone: it is largely the responsibility of the Federal Reserve, which is among the most terrifying of the deep-state agencies. This thing was founded in 1913 with the promise that it would end “wildcat banking” and contain the expansion of money and credit so that we would have a more stable economic environment to encourage growth.
Even now, people believe that the Fed is going to somehow fix recessions and inflations, even though a deeper analysis reveals that the Fed itself is the cause of both. The Fed cannot be both the problem and the solution, surely. This is becoming as obvious as the fact that the CDC cannot make a textbook pathogen go away with power and potions.
Let’s take a quick look at the supposed 2 percent inflation target of the Federal Reserve. It might seem to you that they have long ago blown past this such that it is entirely cosmetic. But the Fed has a little trick up its sleeve. It says it doesn’t follow conventional inflation indexes like the Consumer or Producer Price Index. It is fancier than that. It follows instead the index of Personal Consumption Expenditures. And sure enough when we look at the PCE, we find that the Fed is pretty good at its job!
All that changed recently when the PCE itself blew up. Now the Fed has been revealed to be utterly incompetent, in a way that is not different from the CDC, NIH, DOL, DOE, DOT, HHS, DHS, FTC, SEC, and all the rest of these glorified 3-letter agencies employing nearly 3 million people who cannot be fired or controlled. The unique feature of our times is that the expert class in government has been unmasked as fakes at best and unrelenting menaces as worst.
Here is where the Fed’s preferred measure of inflation stands today:
(FRED/Jeffrey A. Tucker)
So much for competence at the Fed! And yet, how exactly is this institution supposed to be controlled? We don’t vote for them. The Fed board is appointed by the president with Senate approval but this control is mostly mythical. The fancy economists run circles around the political actors with big words and fancy finance, so what can they do but approve?
The political class too often acts like absentee owners of a far-off land: they have little choice but to trust the hired landlords to do a good job. That’s the administrative machinery that has become the real power, not only implementing the policies but making and enforcing the rules too.
With COVID, this whole scam was revealed to absolutely everyone—not just to small businesses but to every single individual and family in the United States. The whole bureaucracy announced to us what they have always believed but rarely said: your life is not your own. Your job is to comply. And so this raises the fascinating question of what precisely are we going for here and what kind of society and government do we want? Surely this should be up to the people!
The Supreme Court in its most recent decision was dealing with a technical aspect of how regulations applied to a coal plant, but the implications of the decision are much larger. The EPA was determining policy, even making it, riffing wildly on legislation with the presumption that courts will always and everywhere defer to the agency over industry and even over the words of the legislation. The court said no: it was the EPA that had been operating illegally all along.
This decision is so startling because it shows a Supreme Court doing what it is supposed to do, serving as a legal check on the power ambitions of government itself. That’s what the framers intended. We’ve just begun, however. The Court needs to attack the whole machinery of the deep state at its very root, going after “Chevron deference” (1984), the Public Health Services Act (1944), the Federal Reserve Act (1913), and stretching all the way back to the Pendleton Act (1883). A nation ruled by a faceless deep state is not a representative democracy and it is not consistent with the U.S. Constitution.
When you consider the implications of this one decision, they are awesome. It doesn’t just apply to the EPA and its elaborate plans for changing the global climate through command and control. It also applies to every other agency, including the CDC and even the Federal Reserve itself. They all should be accountable to the people through their elected representatives. If we cannot get back to that system, we will lose everything.
Former White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx revealed that the federal government was relying on “hope” that COVID-19 vaccines would prevent infection when officials publicly stated that Americans who received the jab would become immune to the virus.
The admission came during a line of questioning by Rep. Jim Jordan, who inquired to the former Trump administration official: “When the government told us that the vaccinated couldn’t transmit it, was that a lie or is it a guess?”
“I think it was hope that the vaccine would work in that way,” she replied.
Dr. Birx’s comments follow a host of studies determining that the COVID-19 vaccine doesn’t confer protection as comprehensively as natural immunity. Data during the Omicron surge also showed that vaccinated people in Germany comprised the overwhelming majority of individuals contracting the variant.
“You were part of this effort when you were in the previous administration. And you’re saying in this administration that you can’t rule out the fact that our government was lying to us when they told us the vaccinated could not get the virus,” Rep. Jordan continued.
“I don’t know about their discussions that they had in the task force. So I can’t tell you that,” she began, adding “I can tell you as a family member who had individuals that were susceptible, of course, we got everybody vaccinated. But we still used layered protection during surges.”
Despite being vaccinated, Dr. Birx took additional precautions “because I knew potentially vaccine immunity would wane like natural immunity waned.”
“There was evidence that every four months, reinfection was occurring in South Africa.”
Revelations about the questionable efficacy of the vaccine come amidst the White House, Democratic governors, and left-wing companies attempting to mandate the jab for employees and customers. Users sharing data highlighting the weakness of the vaccine on social media platforms such as Facebook have also been hastily censored by left-wing “fact-checking” organizations.
The rate of hospitalization for COVID among children is so low, it’s basically zero. Then why is it so important to jab babies and toddlers two or three times, even though side effects of the injection could harm them for life – or kill them?
Statistics show the rate of COVID-19 associated hospitalization among children aged 5 to 11 is 0.0008%.1 In real-world terms, that’s so close to zero you basically cannot lower it any further. Yet, despite such reassuring data, children in this age group are urged to get two to three doses of the COVID jab, even though side effects of the injection could harm them for life, or kill them.
As noted by the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation in the video below, myocarditis — one of the recognized effects of the COVID jab — “has a mortality rate of 25% to 56% within three to 10 years, owing to progressive heart failure and sudden cardiac death.”
Sudden cardiac death is what the media and public health agencies are now glibly referring to as “sudden adult death syndrome” or SADS. The older and more appropriate description for SADS is “sudden arrhythmic death syndrome,” but they don’t even want to use the word “arrhythmic” anymore, as that tells you what the death is really caused by, and many are now aware that the jab can cause heart inflammation.
By avoiding the word “arrhythmic,” it’s easier for them to pretend as though people are dying for no apparent reason, and certainly not because of the COVID shots. Still, real-world facts tell us that SADS didn’t take off until after the shots were rolled out, and the vast majority of young healthy people who suddenly die for no apparent reason have been jabbed.2
Also, understand that if your child or you are injured by the shot, you cannot sue the drug company for damages and, so far, the U.S. government has rejected all but one of the claims filed with the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP).3 At the current pace of about 18 claims a month, it would take 38 years just to get through the current backlog, Reuters has noted.4 Basically, many may die before their case even gets through review.
COVID Jab Authorization Granted for Babies
As if the situation were not bad enough already, June 15, 2022, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory panel — the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) — unanimously approved (21-0) to grant Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to both Pfizer’s and Moderna’s COVID shots for infants and young children.5
Pfizer’s EUA is for a three-dose regimen (3-microgram shots) for children 6 months to 5 years old, while Moderna’s EUA is for a two-dose regimen (25-microgram shots) for children 6 months to 6 years.
In the video at the top of the page, Steve Kirsch, president of the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation, interviews reporter Toby Rogers, who endured the entire nine-hour day of the recent VRBPAC meeting.
The day before that meeting, June 14, Rogers published6 a written summary of Pfizer’s trial on young children, which he referred to as “an embarrassment.” “Any VRBPAC member who votes Aye on this junk science application should be removed from his/her job,” he wrote. Apparently, they all need to go.
In the interview, Rogers laments the fact that the VRBPAC members remain “locked in their information bubble” and won’t allow any conflicting data to influence their preconceived biases.
As noted by Rogers, they have a sacred duty to protect public health, and they’re being flippant about it. They’re ignoring data, they’re ignoring the pleas of the vaccine injured, they’re ignoring serious questions, they’re ignoring everything except the flimsiest bits and pieces upon which their narrative is built. Rogers called the experience “heartbreaking.”
VRBPAC Refuses to Answer Lawmakers’ Questions
The VRBPAC members aren’t even swayed by concerns from lawmakers. They simply ignore their questions too. As reported by The Defender:7
“The Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) ignored pleas from experts, the vaccine injured and a congressman representing 17 other lawmakers to halt authorization until questions about the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines for the nation’s youngest children could be properly addressed …
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) said there are many unanswered questions … ‘I’m deeply concerned that the push to vaccinate these children is nothing more than a dystopian experiment with unknown consequences,’ Gohmert told the committee. ‘Some of us have outlined these questions in a letter8 to VRBPAC but have not received any answers, and I pose some of them here.’ Gohmert said:
‘Number 1, why has the FDA refused to release the hundreds of thousands of pages of data from preapproval manufacturer studies, post-approval adverse events data and other post-approval manufacturer data?
Number 2, what is the cardiac risk factor in administrating these COVID vaccines to children?
Number 3, world-renowned immunologists have raised concerns about potential antibody-dependent enhancement, or ADE, resulting from COVID vaccines, and since ADE was a problem in prior unrelated respiratory vaccine trials, we need to know what studies, if any, the FDA has that it’s used regarding ADE from COVID vaccines in children 5 and under or any age group. Can the FDA affirm there’s no risk of ADE for vaccinated children?
Number 4, if widely approved among children 5 and under, how many lives, if any, does FDA estimate will be saved next year? Given the injuries reported in the FDA’s VAERS [Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System] system, how will FDA evaluate serious vaccine injuries versus serious COVID outcomes?
Number 5, is it possible the proposed COVID vaccines in young children could create increased risk in future novel COVID variants?
Number 6, why has the FDA recently lowered the efficacy bar for COVID vaccines for youngest children? This change significantly lowers the expected benefits from any COVID vaccination for young children and it’s of particular concern given that over 70% of that age cohort already is seropositive.’
Gohmert said these questions and 13 other questions posed by lawmakers are critical and deserve answers from the FDA and VRBPAC prior to any EUA with the ‘accompanied protection for liability for all harm done.’”
Trial Showed COVID Jab Increases Infection Risk in Babies
In the video above, you can see Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, with a forced grin on her face, claiming “rigorous scientific review” has proven the shots to be safe and effective in infants and young children.
The video also features excerpts from a video in which Dr. Clare Craig, a diagnostic pathologist and “lover of data,”9 reviews what this “rigorous scientific review” actually found and what the FDA and CDC aren’t telling you. To hear Craig’s full summary of how Pfizer twisted its clinical data for young children, check out the video below.
Craig points out that of the 4,526 children, aged 6 months to 4 years, who participated in Pfizer’s trial, 3,000 didn’t make it to the end of the trial. Why did two-thirds of the children drop out? Oftentimes, this happens when side effects are too severe for the participant to continue. Here, we don’t know why two-thirds of the participants were eliminated, and “on that basis alone, this trial should be deemed null and void,” Craig says. Moreover:
•Six of the children, aged 2 to 4 years, in the vaccinated group were diagnosed with “severe COVID,” compared to just one in the placebo group. So, what this actually shows is that the likelihood the shot is causing severe COVID is higher than the likelihood that it’s preventing it.
•The only child who required hospitalization for COVID was also in the “vaccinated” group.
•In the three weeks following the first dose, 34 of the children in the vaccinated group and 13 of the unvaccinated children were diagnosed with COVID. That means the children’s risk of developing symptoms of COVID within the first three weeks of the first dose actually increased by 30%. These data were ignored.
Between doses two and three, there was an eight-week gap, and the vaccinated arm again experienced higher rates of COVID. This too was ignored. After the third dose, incidence of COVID was again raised in the vaccine group, and this was ignored as well.
In the end, they only counted three cases of COVID in the vaccine arm and seven cases in the placebo group. They literally ignored 97% of all the COVID cases that occurred during the trial to conclude that the shots were “effective” in preventing COVID.
•While they claim the triple-dose regimen reduced COVID, 12 of the children actually caught COVID twice in the two-month follow-up, and 11 of them were vaccinated.
•The confidence interval for Pfizer’s jab is -370% at the lower end of the 95%, which suggests children who get the jab are nearly four times more likely of getting sick with COVID than their unvaccinated peers.10
Unscientific and Unethical Behavior
As reported by The Defender:11
“Combining all ages together, Pfizer said its three-dose regimen for children 6 months to 5 years old was 80% effective at preventing illness from the Omicron variant based on preliminary data from its clinical trial.
The 80% number was calculated 30 days after the third dose. As noted by committee members, the efficacy number is likely to go down after 30 days and post-approval monitoring was suggested.
Moderna said its two-shot vaccine was about 51% effective against infection from Omicron in children under 2, and about 37% among kids 2 to 5 years old, citing different efficacy numbers than what was reported by the company in March.
In a March 23 press release, Moderna said its vaccine in the 6-month to 2-year age group was only 43.7% effective. In the older age group, the company said its vaccine was 37.5% effective. A top official at Moderna has already said a booster will be necessary.”
As noted by the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation, vaccinating infants and children who have no need for the shots and don’t benefit from them, just to “protect” adults, violates medical ethics. And since those who are jabbed still readily transmit the virus, the children are actually put at risk for no reason at all.
It’s All About Securing Indemnification
🧐So I’m guessing everyone is wondering why the FDA voted unanimously to give not one — but THREE shots of the C@ViD 💉to the youngest of children when there’s N🚫 emergency.
It is IMPERATIVE they have this approval. R. obert K. ennedy Jr. tells us why: pic.twitter.com/denjlTchMF
So, how can we explain the irrational behavior of the FDA and CDC? Why don’t any of the data matter? Why doesn’t the science matter? Why don’t any of the red flags matter? And why are they handing out EUAs when the criteria for EUA are satisfied? Products must satisfy four criteria in order to get EUA:
There must be an emergency
A vaccine must be at least 30% to 50% effective
The known and potential benefits of the product must outweigh the known and potential risks of the product
There can be no adequate, approved and available alternative treatments (drugs or vaccines)
Unless all four criteria are met, EUA cannot be granted or maintained, yet here we are. COVID, by any reasonable measurement, is no longer an emergency, there are plenty of adequate alternative treatments, and the potential benefits in no way, shape or form outweigh the potential risks — especially not in infants and children under 5. That’s three out of four criteria that, clearly, are not met.
The short answer to the question, “Why are the CDC and FDA acting so irrationally?” is that both agencies are corrupt to the core and are no longer in the business of protecting public health. They are securing profits for the drug industry, and getting EUA for infants and young children is a crucial step toward securing permanent legal indemnity for the drugmakers.
They need this last remaining age group to be included under the EUA, because once the emergency is finally declared ‘over,’ the next phase of liability shielding requires that the shots receive approval by the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). Sam DOnce the vaccine is on the childhood vaccination schedule, the vaccine makers are permanently shielded from liability for injuries and deaths that occur in ANY age group, including adults.
As explained by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in the short video clip above, they need this last remaining age group to be included under the EUA, because once the emergency is finally declared “over,” the next phase of liability shielding requires that the shots receive approval by the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).
This is the group that decides which vaccines are to be added to the childhood vaccination schedule. Once the vaccine is on the childhood vaccination schedule, the vaccine makers are permanently shielded from liability for injuries and deaths that occur in ANY age group, including adults.
The only way to break that indemnity is by proving the vaccine maker knew about the safety issues and withheld that information. You can learn more about this indemnification process in “The Real Reason They Want to Give COVID Jabs to Kids.”
So, the end goal is permanent immunity against liability for injury and death from the COVID shots in all age groups, and to get there, they first need the EUA to cover all children. After that, the ACIP approval becomes more or less a matter of rubber stamping. This is why they’re playing Russian roulette with the health of infants and young children.
Murder Has No Statute of Limitation
That said, if fraud can be proven, all indemnity falls by the wayside, and there’s no statute of limitation when it comes to murder, which some insist is what’s happening here.
The video above features “To The Lifeboats” podcaster Sam Dodson’s comments to the FDA VRBPAC during its open public hearing session to approve the COVID jabs for children between the ages of 6 months and 5 years. In a rapid-fire manner, he reviews several data points that ought to have put a halt to these injections, but didn’t; several instances where the FDA knew harm was occurring from these shots, or would occur, and they did nothing.
Another public comment was submitted by an as-yet unidentified individual. The submitted comment was provided to and reposted on Coquin de Chien’s Substack. Here are some select pieces:12
“This comment is NOTICE of possible criminal liability to Lauren K. Roth and members of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee who owe duties of care, diligence, good faith, and loyalty in recommending ‘for’ or ‘against’ the EUA amendment for COVID-19 mRNA vaccine in children 6 months through 4 years of age.
Only two deaths are listed herein to establish knowledge. If the amendment is approved, it will have been done by committee members ‘knowing’ of felony crimes in context. Your investigation of these deaths should include death certificates, autopsy records, witness interviews, and immunization records.
Massachusetts Death Certificate 2022 SFN 5980 is a 7yo girl died January 18, 2022 listed as died from U071 ‘COVID-19,’ B49 ‘unspecified mycosis,’ J450 ‘predominantly allergic asthma,’ and R091 ‘pleurisy.’
VAERS_ID 2038120 is a 7yo girl in Massachusetts, who received her 2nd dose 1/13/2022 and was reported to VAERS 1/15/2022. PRIOR_VAX states, ‘Severe nausea and vomiting from 5 min post vaccination and for the next 8-10 hours.’
SYMPTOM_TEXT states, ‘Spiked a 103 fever, severe stomachache, has not had a bowel movement since the day before vaccination, which makes today 3 days without one. First vaccine caused severe nausea and vomiting from 5 minutes post injection and for the next 8-10 hours.’ This little girl suffered immeasurably 4 to 5 days as her intestines shut down due likely to impeded blood vessels servicing intestines.
Massachusetts Death Certificate 2021 SFN 56611 is a 48yo man died 11/16/2021 listed as died from U071 ‘COVID-19’ and E669 ‘OBESITY.’ SFN 56611 is known to have died less than 24 hours after inoculation.
In both cases, the Medical Examiners listed the cause of death as ‘COVID-19,’ when it was clearly not COVID-19. And in both cases, the Medical Examiners omitted listing causes Y590 ‘Viral vaccines’ and T881 ‘Other complications following immunization, not elsewhere classified,’ when these clearly were proximate and actual causes.
Death certificates from the state of Massachusetts are sent to the CDC, a federal entity. Thus, fraud on a state death certificate is a federal crime as it affects federal death records. Several federal felony crimes apply in this instance and are listed below.
If you dismiss this NOTICE and recommend the EUA amendment without first investigating these two deaths, you become liable for inchoate crimes and the felony crime of ‘misprision of felony.’ If a single person subsequently dies as a result of the amendment, all the elements will have been satisfied for you to face felony murder charges or involuntary manslaughter. Qualified immunity is not a valid defense …
There were found sixty likely C19 vaccine deaths in a 25-minute perusal of the 2021 and 2022 death certificates, which extrapolates to hundreds, probably thousands of C19 vaccine deaths in Massachusetts.
Refusal to investigate these fraudulent records is a crime that, because of the felony murder aspect, has no statute of limitations. Five, ten, or twenty years from now, if a federal prosecutor were to learn of this NOTICE, he or she would have significant evidence to bring charges for felony murder.
In summary, this NOTICE places you in a position requiring you to investigate these deaths prior to recommending the amendment. If you dismiss this NOTICE, you may be criminally liable for involuntary manslaughter, felony murder, and a list of federal crimes and inchoate crimes … Comment Tracking Number l4d-m52d-ge4m.”
Florida Bucks the Trend
My home state of Florida now stands out as the only U.S. state that is recommending AGAINST the COVID jab for 6-month-olds to 5-year-olds. Parents can still get their infants jabbed if they want, but the official state recommendation is not to do it, as there’s simply no scientific or logical rationale for doing so.
Florida also did not preorder any extra doses for this age group.13 In a June 18, 2022, Substack article, Dr. Robert Malone addressed the latest EUA authorization for infants and young children, and applauded Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ decision to buck the trend. It’s hard to believe he is the only governor in the U.S. who resisted this murderous threat to the children:14
“Have you looked at the VAERS data lately? The CDC apparently has not. In the USA alone, there have been 831,801 adverse events, of which 12,776 are life threatening. There have been 63,978 hospitalizations. There have been 13,293 deaths and 14,232 permanent disabilities from these vaccines.
True, these are ‘unverified’ — but previous research has shown that the VAERS system under-reported adverse events associated with vaccines, not over-reported … Then there are the international post-vaccine adverse event summaries.15
The CDC, under Freedom of Information Act Request (FOIA) has now admitted16 that even though they had promised to analyze the VAERS data before advising about these vaccines for children, they did not.
The VAERS data were NOT taken into consideration before the authorization of these genetic agents for babies and young children. Frankly, this is shocking. So shocking, it is hard for me to even write about it.
Now, approximately 430 children with other severe illnesses have died with COVID in the last 2.5 years (that would be 172 per year). Plus there have been 2,600 hospitalizations of children, most with underlying conditions — over that 2.5 year period. These numbers show that even before Omicron, in the case of children, COVID is less severe than flu …
Omicron in children is much less severe. We know this. The scientific evidence is clear. Yet the FDA goes back to data from the DELTA variant when discussing the effects of this virus … Governor DeSantis again has it right. It is time to stop. Parents must stop. The time is now to just say no.”
Last but not least, if you’re still unsure whether the COVID shot is the “right” choice for your child, please read through Dr. Byram Bridle’s “COVID-19 Vaccines and Children: A Scientist’s Guide for Parents,”17 published by the Canadian Covid Care Alliance. It goes through how the shots work, what the known side effects are, results from the clinical trial, the effects of the spike protein and much more.
The risk was 13 times higher with Pfizer vaccination
A French peer-reviewed study concluded that for both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, the risk of myocarditis skyrockets a week after vaccination.
The risk of myocarditis after mRNA vaccination was 8 times and 30 times greater than unvaccinated control groups for BNT162b2 (Pfizer-BioNTech) and mRNA-1273 (Moderna), respectively.
The largest association for myocarditis following the Moderna jab was 44 times higher risk for persons aged 18 to 24 years.
As for the Pfizer shot, in relation to the same age group, the risk was 13 times higher.
Infection with the Chinese Communist Party virus yielded, by comparison, a 9 times greater risk of the same condition.
Myocarditis refers to the inflammation of the heart muscle—a life-threatening condition. There are many established causes for this heart condition. The leading cause—according to modern science’s most recent discoveries—is viruses; but during the pandemic, COVID mRNA vaccines have earned a place as a top suspect for myocarditis.
The new study’s goal was to provide an assessment of association with vaccines across sex and age groups.
“Both SARS-CoV2 infection and COVID mRNA vaccines have been associated with myocarditis. Knowing the spike protein’s affinity to ACE2 receptors in the heart and spike protein’s injury to cardiomyocytes (cells of the heart), the association of myocarditis with SARS-CoV2 virus or spike protein-based mRNA vaccination was not entirely unexpected,” Dr. Sanjay Verma, a cardiologist, told The Epoch Times via email.
Verma also thinks the CDC’s analysis “erroneously suggests” that risk of myocarditis after SARS-CoV2 infection is greater than after mRNA COVID-19 vaccination.
“For the cases of myocarditis after SARS-CoV2, CDC uses officially confirmed PCR+ ‘cases,’ even though their own seroprevalence data demonstrates that far more people have been infected than officially conformed PCR+ ‘cases.’ For example, seroprevalence data as of Feb 21, 2022, reveals 75 percent (about 54 million) of all children have been infected compared to 12 million officially confirmed PCR+ ‘cases’ (i.e., the actual number of kids infected is 4.5 times greater than PCR+ ‘cases’). Therefore, calculating the risk of myocarditis after SARS-CoV2 infection, the rate noted by CDC would therefore need to be reduced by 4.5 times. Thus far, CDC has not adjusted its COVID-19 morbidity and mortality data accordingly,” said the cardiologist, who practices in Coachella Valley, California.
The study analyzed 1,612 cases of myocarditis and 1,613 cases of pericarditis in France from May 12, 2021, to Oct. 31, 2021, involving 32 million people aged 12 to 50 years who received 46 million doses of mRNA vaccines.
It is limited by using solely hospital discharge diagnoses. Therefore, it does not include those who may have died before being hospitalized or those whose symptoms were not severe enough to be hospitalized.
“There have been reports (pdf) of autopsy-proven myocarditis after vaccination and anecdotal evidence of patients being dismissed by ER and never being hospitalized. Adjusting for these excluded subsets may yield even higher risk than reported in this study. Follow-up of the patients in this study was limited to one month after discharge. However, a previous cardiac MRI study found about 75 percent of patients with vaccine-associated myocarditis can have persistent MRI abnormalities 3–8 months after initial diagnosis,” Verma said.
The authors of the study didn’t analyze the effect of booster vaccination since it is not yet recommended for young adults in France.
In the United States, however, booster injections are mandated by colleges and universities, employers, and even some state public health departments irrespective of age or prior infection.
“In a preprint follow-up to their peer-reviewed study of myocarditis after vaccination, analysis found continued incremental risk of myocarditis after booster vaccination. In fact, while many countries have refrained from recommending COVID vaccination in very young children because the risks do not justify the benefits, the U.S. stands alone in recommending it in the youngest of kids,” Verma said.
A research paper published on May 18 studied the pandemic control measures—which included vaccine and mask mandates, as well as isolation and contact tracing—of Cornell University, which was almost completely vaccinated, and found these policies were “not a match” for the Omicron variant and its rapid spread.
Sudden Adult Death Syndrome
Recently, a new term has been highlighted in media outlets: “sudden adult death syndrome,” or SADS.
Underlying factors for SADS include undiagnosed myocarditis, inflammatory conditions, and other conditions that cause irregularities in the electrical system of the heart, thereby triggering cardiac arrest.
Data compiled by the International Olympic Committee shows 1,101 sudden deaths in athletes under age 35 between 1966 and 2004, giving an average annual rate of 29, across all sports. Meanwhile, between March 2021 and March 2022 alone—a single year—at least 769 athletes have suffered cardiac arrest, collapsed, or have died on the field, worldwide.
Denmark’s Christian Eriksen is taken away on a stretcher after collapsing on the pitch during the Euro 2020 soccer championship group B match between Denmark and Finland at Parken Stadium in Copenhagen, on June 12, 2021. (Stuart Franklin/Pool via AP)
Among EU FIFA (soccer/football) athletes, sudden death increased by 420 percent in 2021. Historically, about five soccer players have died while playing the game each year. Between January and mid-November 2021, 21 FIFA players died from sudden death.
Joseph Mercola contributed to this report.
The Epoch Times reached out to the CDC for comment.
The National Academy for State Health Policy is run by former Democratic staffers and funded by liberal dark money
A health care group that presents itself as nonpartisan and has its fingerprints all over new proposals to extend Obamacare subsidies is closely linked to the Democratic Party and top liberal groups.
The National Academy for State Health Policy (NASHP), which bills itself as a “nonpartisan organization” committed to developing state “health policy innovations and solutions,” has emerged as an influential supporter of Democratic proposals to extend the health care subsidies, saying the issue should be a top priority for the Biden administration. But while Democrats point to the nonprofit as an impartial commentator on the issue, the group boasts significant ties to Democratic Party infrastructure—several of its employees have worked on Democratic campaigns, and it relies on millions in liberal dark money funding.
NASHP’s support comes at a crucial time for Democrats. The potential expiration of Obamacare subsidies this year has raised alarms among Democratic lawmakers, who believe a spike in health care premiums could be the next crisis to hurt Democratic candidates ahead of midterm elections. NASHP has worked to help Democrats on this cause, meeting with lawmakers in May to rally support behind legislation to extend the subsidies, which are temporarily funded by resident Joe Biden’s $2 trillion American Rescue Plan. One week later, a group of 26 Democrats sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) advocating for the extension plan and cited NASHP’s research, the Washington Examinerreported.
NASHP’s deep ties to the Democratic Party complicate its appearance as a nonpartisan source of support for the legislative proposal, which is expected to cost taxpayers billions of dollars. The group was led for much of the past four decades by Trish Riley, who was NASHP’s president from 1987 to 2002 and then returned in 2011 to lead its board of directors until she stepped down last year. In her eight years away from the group, Riley worked for Democratic Maine governor John Baldacci—she returned only after Maine elected a Republican as governor in 2010. Riley, who has been described in local media as a “veteran party activist,” is now chairwoman of a Maine Democratic Party committee. She has donated more than $50,000 to Democratic campaigns since 1992, according to Federal Election Commission records.
Several top NASHP employees have also worked for Democratic campaigns and offices, as well as liberal advocacy groups such as the Center for American Progress. Jill Rosenthal, a senior program director for NASHP, left the group last year to become the director of public health policy at the prominent liberal think tank, which has also advocated for a subsidy extension in recent months, warning that Obamacare enrollees “will view higher premiums as soon as this fall” unless Democrats take action.
The health care group’s extensive Democratic ties may have helped the group push its policy proposals within the Biden administration. NASHP, days after the 2020 presidential election, listed a set of priorities for the incoming administration, including the expansion of special enrollment periods for Obamacare. Biden then signed an executive order a week into his presidency indicating his administration would pursue the expansion.
NASHP denied partisan activity in a statement to the Washington Free Beacon.
“NASHP is not an advocacy organization,” the organization said. “NASHP provides a unique forum for the productive exchange of strategies across state government, including the executive and legislative branches.”
The organization is funded by and tied to liberal dark money groups. Arnold Ventures, which funds Democratic campaigns and liberal advocacy groups such as the New Venture Fund and the Center for American Progress, has donated nearly $8 million to NASHP since 2016. The billionaire-backed dark money group advocates gun control and climate change regulations.
NASHP, meanwhile, has paid $654,000 to Avenue Solutions—a lobbying firm that describes itself as an “all-female, all-Democratic firm.” The Sixteen Thirty Fund, a top dark money group used to boost Democrats, paid Avenue Solutions $40,000 this year to lobby on health care issues. One of the lobbying disclosures details a push to make Obamacare subsidies permanent. Other top Democratic Party financial backers represented by the Avenue Solutions lobbying shop include the American Federation of Teachers, the American Medical Association, and major pharmaceutical companies.
The Obamacare subsidy expansion in the American Rescue Plan provides government support for families with income up to 400 percent above the poverty level and increased federal deficits by an estimated $34.2 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. These subsidies are set to expire at the end of the year and an extension from Congress would likely be established through the budget reconciliation process. Politico reported in June that Democrats’ plans to extend these subsidies hinge on support from Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.), who has expressed hesitation due to concerns over the budget deficit.
THE LATEST GRIFT FROM THE ECOHEALTH CHIEF INVOLVES A NUMBER OF KREMLIN-LINKED RESEARCHERS.
Peter Daszak – a controversial U.S-based researcher whose collaborations on coronavirus research with a Chinese laboratory were funded by Anthony Fauci – isolated Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus strains in Russia using funds from the Russian government in a recently published research paper, The National Pulse can reveal.
Daszak, 49, appeared to play a critical role in the origins of COVID-19, as his organization, the ‘EcoHealth Alliance’, facilitated a “longtime” joint research effort with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is believed to be the source of the virus. Throughout the pandemic, Daszak also featured prominently in promoting the “natural origins” theory while simultaneously discrediting supporters of the “lab leak” theory, most notably in the role of the World Health Organization (WHO) COVID-19 investigator.
His latest study appears to be yet another controversy. Daszak, who is originally British, is listed as the sole U.S. researcher on the paper: “Identification and Genetic Characterization of MERS-Related Coronavirus Isolated from Nathusius’ Pipistrelle Near Zvenigorod (Moscow Region, Russia).”
DASZAK’S LATEST GRIFT.
The paper was published on June 10th 2022 and counted an additional 11 Russian researchers from Kremlin-run facilities including the Federal Service on Consumers’ Rights Protection and Human Well-Being Surveillance and Moscow State University.
The study was funded by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, the national science funding body of the Russian government, and the state-run Russian Science Foundation.
Researchers conducted “analyses of bat viromes,” which “have been used to identify novel viruses with potential to cause human infection.”
“We characterized the fecal virome of 26 samples collected from six bat species captured during 2015 in Moscow Region. Of these 13/26 (50%) samples were found to be coronavirus positive,” continued researchers.
“We sequenced and assembled the complete genome of a novel MERS-related Betacoronavirus from Pipistrellus nathusii, named MOW-BatCoV strain 15-22.”
The capture and sampling of bats were carried out by Moscow State University researchers in the summer of 2015.
Appearing to use similar tactics as researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Russian scientists and Daszak focused on the spike protein. The spike protein allows viruses to penetrate host cells and cause infection and is believed to have been manipulated by researchers in Wuhan to become more lethal to humans.
“To predict and analyze the interaction of MOW-BatCoV Spike glycoprotein with DPP4 receptors of the different mammalian species, the three-dimensional structures of these proteins were obtained by homologous modeling. The DPP4 proteins of two bats (Myotis brandtii and Pipistrellus kuhlii), the hedgehog (Erinaceus europaeus), domestic cat (Felix catus) and mouse (Mus musculus) were used for analysis,” explains the paper.
Analysis of the complete genomes the novel coronavirus discovered in the paper shows that it “falls into clade of human/camel’s MERS viruses together with a few bat viruses.”
Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) could hardly contain his amazement when Dr. Rahul Gupta, resident Joe Biden’s national drug control policy director, claimed that “protecting the border” with Mexico was among the administration’s top priorities.
Gupta’s claim came during his opening statement on June 27 before a lengthy digital hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, the focus of which was to be on how the president was dealing with the explosion of drug overdoses that killed more than 107,000 Americans last year.
“Did you say that? Am I right, did you say he is doing a great job of protecting the border?” the incredulous Norman asked the hearing’s sole witness.
Gupta responded: “We believe strongly that it is an important part of every nation to be able to secure and protect its border. There are a number of things that are going on in this area of counter-narcotics that I think are important to note.
“As I visit the border, I speak to the women and men on the border.”
But Gupta was interrupted by Norman, who asked him if Biden “is taking the steps to close the border. Is that what I understand you to mean?”
Gupta replied, “The president is certainly taking the steps to ensure that our border remains secured—”
Norman interrupted, murmuring “Oh, my Lord,” and said, “Okay, doctor, this is two different universes. … I mean this is a mischaracterization, at best, for you to say that of this administration. … We don’t want words, we don’t want hearings, we want actions.”
The exchange between Norman and Gupta came early in the hearing, and it typified much of what was heard throughout the balance of cross-examination by committee members, including all of the Republicans and at least one Democrat.
Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) set the tone of the proceeding in his opening statement by pointing to Biden’s open border policies as the chief culprit in the overdose epidemic.
“Fentanyl is being smuggled across the southwest border at unprecedented rates. U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized over 11,000 pounds of fentanyl in Fiscal Year 2021. That is more fentanyl seized in one fiscal year than fiscal years 2020 and 2019 combined,” Comer said. Comer is the top Republican on the oversight panel.
“The standard fatal overdose of fentanyl is 2 milligrams; 11,000 pounds of fentanyl is more than 5 billion milligrams. That means we seized about 2.5 billion lethal doses of fentanyl in one fiscal year. That does not include all the fentanyl that we know has been smuggled across our borders undetected.
“Cartels are overwhelming Border Patrol agents and providing a steady supply for dealers and users alike. So a primary question is ‘What is resident Biden going to do to secure the border and cut off the free flow of illicit drugs into our country?’”
Gupta told the committee in his opening remarks that Biden’s national drug control strategy, which was made public in April, “was released in a time of unprecedented challenges. For far too many years, the overdose crisis has been unraveling the social fabric of the nation and destroying American lives and livelihoods.”
The Biden strategy, according to Gupta, emphasizes getting treatment services and health care to as many victims of drug addiction as possible, while minimizing correctional penalties whenever possible.
The strategy also includes efforts to reduce the drug-trafficking profits of the drug cartels in the United States by blocking their ability to move cash, weapons, and people around internationally and within the United States.
Stopping drugs such as fentanyl at the border received only cursory attention in the White House statement on the drug control policy, focusing on border ports of entry despite the fact most of the narcotics enter the country across unsecured portions of the nearly 2,000-mile border with Mexico.
While Democrats on the panel praised the policy for emphasizing treatment, Republicans repeatedly turned the hearing’s focus on the unprecedented surge of narcotics, especially fentanyl, crossing the border that began shortly after Biden took office.
Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) challenged Gupta to join him on a surreptitious visit to the border in his state after pointing to testimony given earlier in the year that CBP agents manage to stop only about 5 percent of all the illicit drug traffic coming across the border.
“I would love for you to come with me, just you and me, incognito. … Just you and me, come on down to the border and I will take you to places where you can watch what is happening, you can watch our men and women of CBP overrun, so there are literally hundreds of miles unprotected, which is where the drugs are coming in,” Biggs told Gupta.
Spokesmen for Biggs and Gupta couldn’t be reached to determine if he plans to accept the congressman’s invitation.
When Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) asked Gupta if he considers it more important for CBP agents to focus on processing people crossing the border illegally or stopping illicit drug smuggling, the White House official said he believes it is important to do both.
Donalds pointed out to Gupta that “when a border agent is at the Southern border and a group of people come out of the brush crossing our border illegally, the border agent, which usually just himself or herself, has to actually stop controlling the section they are responsible for and they have to go through the process of intaking everybody that approached them.”
Gupta declined to respond to Donalds’s question except to say, “I hope we can do both.”
Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) told Gupta, “It seems we have gone from one policy of trying to get people clean and sober to helping them go from one drug to another drug.” Lynch was referring to the drug Suboxone, which is used in addiction treatment to minimize the negative effects of withdrawal from narcotics.
“We’ve taken the lid off and allow doctors to have hundreds of patients and just give them Suboxone and not really deliver any behavioral help services that would get at the underlying addictive activity,” Lynch said.
Lynch said he has observed patients who had just received Suboxone from a treatment clinic go out on the street and trade it for narcotics.
“I’m just questioning this whole policy, we seem to be moving away from getting people straight, getting them clean, getting them sober, getting them back into their lives, and instead, we’re getting them on different drugs and I just don’t see a good result from that policy,” Lynch said. “It’s not working where I am, it’s not working in the 8th Congressional District of Massachusetts.”
Committee Chairman Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) concluded the hearing by saying, “Today’s hearing makes clear that we cannot reduce the prevalence of drugs in our communities through interdiction and law enforcement alone. Nor is it possible through public health measures alone. Instead, we need to address both supply and demand.”
Gretchen Whitmer says the state has added 25,000 auto jobs since she took office. It has actually lost thousands.
Michigan Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer says she’s added 25,000 “good-paying auto jobs” during her tenure. The state has actually lost thousands of auto jobs on her watch, labor statistics show.
In a June 2 press release, Whitmer said she was “proud” to announce Michigan has “added nearly 25,000 auto jobs since I took office.” The Democrat roughly three weeks later repeated the claim, writing in a “mobility and electrification” fact sheet that she “is ensuring Michigan lives up to its legacy as the place that put the world on wheels by creating nearly 25,000 good-paying auto jobs.”
Bureau of Labor Statistics data, however, contradict that claim. Whitmer inherited 169,500 auto jobs when she became governor in January 2019, according to the agency. As of May 2022, that number is 166,700—a decrease of nearly 3,000 jobs.
Whitmer’s deceptive declaration shows how the Democrat is attempting to rebound on economic issues following her stringent stay-at-home orders, which shuttered local stores but deemed marijuana dispensaries, lottery ticket vendors, and big-box retailers “essential.” While Whitmer has touted leading the “best economic recovery in Michigan history,” a June WalletHub report ranked Michigan 46th in unemployment claim recovery.
Michigan Rising Action communications director Mary Drabik said Whitmer’s “gaslighting” on auto jobs is “not surprising.”
“When Gov. Whitmer’s claims are this far detached from reality, it becomes difficult to believe anything she says,” Drabik told the Washington Free Beacon. “But coming from the governor who claims her nursing-home policies saved lives and vacationed in Florida while telling Michiganders to avoid flying south, the gaslighting is not surprising.”
Whitmer’s office acknowledged that the governor’s claim stems from “the number of jobs announced since January 2019,” some of which are not yet actualized. Still, Whitmer communications director Bobby Leddy said the governor “is proud of her record of job creation, particularly in the auto industry, as we move to cement Michigan’s legacy of manufacturing.” Leddy did not address why Whitmer’s statistic does not account for jobs that have left the state since 2019.
This is far from the first time Whitmer has faced criticism for failing to deliver on a claim. In April 2020, the Democrat pledged to give back a portion of her salary for the duration of the coronavirus pandemic. But Whitmer ended the pledge just five months later in September, even as her indoor gathering restrictions and public face mask requirements lasted for 15 months.
Whitmer, who implemented a policy that required nursing homes to accept positive coronavirus patients who were discharged from hospitals, is up for reelection in November after a roller coaster of a first term. Whitmer’s national profile exploded during the beginning of the pandemic thanks to her harsh restrictions and public feud with then-president Donald Trump. Whitmer went on to ramp up those restrictions, which sparked large protests, particularly as the Democrat defied her own rules.
Whitmer’s potential Republican opponents include political commentator Tudor Dixon, chiropractor Garrett Soldano, and businessman Kevin Rinke. Republican voters will choose their nominee during Michigan’s August 2 primary.
There is no safety profile for the effects of vaccines on children
As the Biden administration rolls out vaccines for the nation’s youngest children (6 months to 5-year-olds), Dr. Jeffrey Barke, chief medical officer at the Convention of States, said there is absolutely no evidence supporting that these youngest children are at any serious risk of death from COVID-19 and should not get be broadly vaccinated.
“I think it’s important that we tell the truth first, and then let parents and adults make informed decisions about whether or not to get vaccinated,” Barke said during a recent interview with NTD’s Capitol Report. “And to recommend this product to 6-month-olds makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. So, to start with, there is no COVID emergency, especially as it relates to younger people. It simply doesn’t exist.”
Barke referenced the CDC’s own website, saying that according to the CDC’s data, just over 1,000 children have died since the beginning of the pandemic as of the interview. “While every death of course is tragic, the reality is every one of those deaths occurred in a child that had significant underlying comorbidities. Healthy children simply do not die from this illness,” said Barke.
Meanwhile, White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha made a contrary statement, saying that the infant vaccines “have been thoroughly tested. Millions of children above the age of 5 have gotten these vaccines. They’re exceedingly safe,” Jha told CBS News in a June 20 interview.
The CDC last Saturday signed off on giving both Moderna’s and Pfizer’s COVID-19 mRNA vaccines to infants and children between 6 months and 5 years old. It came after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory panel unanimously voted to authorize the use of the vaccines.
Jha also said while the majority of children likely have natural immunity, getting the vaccines will help keep children out of the hospital if they get it again.
The White House is echoing the FDA and CDC’s message to get young children vaccinated.
Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House’s COVID-19 response coordinator, speaks to reporters in Washington on June 2, 2022. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
“COVID has been quite common in children actually. We think maybe almost 70 percent of kids have ended up getting infected with COVID, [but it’s] still worth getting the vaccine. It really offers an extra level of protection, an extra layer of protection,” said Jha.
Barke disagreed with Jha and said there is a risk to young children from vaccines themselves because they have no long-term safety profiles.
“It’s ridiculous what’s going on here. And the part that makes me the saddest is the FDA and the CDC already have trust issues amongst the American public, and for them now to authorize and recommend that a 6-month-old receive a COVID-19 vaccine when they’re not at risk, and there have been no long-term safety studies with these products, is going to erode whatever little trust is left in these organizations,” said Barke.
He added that if a child has an adverse reaction to the vaccine, that child’s parents could not sue for damages because the authorization prevents the companies from being held liable.
“[The vaccine] is experimental by definition. A product that’s being used under emergency use [EU] authorization definitionally is investigational, and it makes no sense whatsoever. The EU authorization gives these vaccine companies blanket liability protection,” said Barke.
In addition, the virus has mutated since the vaccines were developed, so we don’t know if these vaccines protect against strains like Omicron, Barke said.
This way, there is no crime when a mother sells her fetus/infant for “parts.” [US Patriot]
SACRAMENTO—A proposed bill to bar criminal prosecution into the suspicious death of an unborn or newborn baby was passed by a state assembly committee on April 5.
Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland) introduced Assembly Bill (AB) 2223 to prevent pregnant women from being prosecuted for either terminating a pregnancy or losing their baby, she said during an April 5 Judiciary Committee meeting.
“AB 2223 is intended to protect against the criminalization of pregnancy outcomes, and people should not be subject to prosecution for any tragic situation that may happen during the pregnancy,” Wicks said.
The bill would prohibit holding a person—the mother or a health care provider—responsible for “miscarriage, stillbirth, or abortion, or perinatal death” of a baby based on “their actions or omissions” related to the pregnancy, according to the state legislative information website.
Although the bill doesn’t give a precise definition of “perinatal,” it commonly entails the time frame between 22 weeks of pregnancy and seven days after birth, according to the committee’s bill analysis.
Existing law requires a county coroner to investigate the death of an unborn or newborn baby—after 20 weeks into pregnancy—resulting from “suspected self-induced or criminal abortion,” according to the bill. Except for legal abortions, the coroner must record the conditions and causes of such death on a death certificate, which can be used to establish or support a criminal prosecution.
Under this proposed bill, the coroner would no longer be required to investigate such deaths, and it would be prohibited to use the coroner’s statement on a death certificate for prosecution in such cases.
Samantha Lee, an attorney at National Advocates for Pregnant Women, spoke in favor of Wick’s bill while telling a story about one of her clients who was held in jail for over a year from November 2019 to March 2021 after experiencing a pregnancy loss.
Lee’s client Chelsea Becker faced first-degree murder charges following the stillbirth death of her baby while she was addicted to methamphetamine.
Upon being arrested, Becker lost custody of her son, who was later adopted following the drop of her criminal charges in May 2021, Lee explained while reading Becker’s written statement urging lawmakers to vote in favor of the proposed bill.
“If the hospital had never involved law enforcement due to this stillbirth happening, I would still have custody of my son,” Lee read from Becker’s statement.
Meanwhile, hundreds of opponents appeared in person or called into the committee to express their concerns.
Susan Arnall, California attorney and vice president of Legal Affairs at Right to Life League—the first pro-life organization in the United States—warned lawmakers of the details of the bill that would allow intentional “murders” of infants to evade criminal investigation.
She said the bill would be “blocking the use of coroner’s investigation and findings into a baby’s death in any criminal or civil action and against any person, not just the mother, but anyone who was involved in any way,” she warns.
She went on to explain how the bill prohibits coroners from releasing information regarding “perinatal” deaths—the death of an infant before or after birth.
Americans United for Life warned about the lack of definition for “perinatal” that can “legalize child abandonment” immediately following the birth or shortly after.
“If a child is found in a dumpster can law enforcement investigate the child’s death? Probably not under AB 2223,” the organization wrote in a statement to the legislature.
While many begged lawmakers to not approve the bill, the vote to advance the proposed legislation prevailed.
AB 2223 was referred to the Health Committee for another hearing at a later date.
North Carolina’s largest hospital systems made billions of dollars in profits during the pandemic, while simultaneously taking $1.5 billion in taxpayer-funded COVID-19 relief funds, according to a report released Wednesday by the state treasurer’s office.
The report, titled, “North Carolina Hospital Systems Profit During COVID” was published by State Treasurer Dale Folwell who called on the hospital systems to “use their profits to lower costs for patients” or “return unnecessary, taxpayer-funded relief dollars.”
According to the report, Atrium Health, Cone Health, Duke Health, Novant Health, UNC Health, Vidant Health, and WakeMed made a combined $5.2 billion in net profits in 2021 and recorded $7.1 billion in growth in cash and financial investments from 2019 to 2021.
Six of those hospital systems enjoyed higher net profits than in the years before the pandemic, the report states.
That growth came as the seven hospital systems reportedly took $1.5 billion in taxpayer-funded COVID relief meant to help support hospitals who were struggling through the pandemic, as well as another $1.6 billion in Medicare Accelerated and Advance Payments from 2020–2021.
“These systems boasted huge reserves, but they still took the bulk of the relief funds meant for struggling hospitals—and then failed to dedicate more than a fraction of their windfall to increasing charity care for their suffering patients,” Folwell said in a press release unveiling the report.
‘Enough Cash on Hand’
The report analyzed the audited yearly financial statements of the state’s seven largest hospital systems as well as Medicare cost reports, and was conducted in collaboration with experts at the North Carolina State Health Plan and the National Academy of State Health Policy.
It was peer-reviewed by researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Among the seven hospital systems, Duke Health outpaced them all with a 41 percent net profit in 2021, according to the report. In 2019, Duke Health’s net profit margin was 11 percent.
Meanwhile, Atrium Health reportedly took the most amount of money in taxpayer relief dollars—$589 million in COVID relief and another $438 million in Medicare advance payments.
“Atrium Health then made a $1.7 billion net profit after its merger with Wake Forest Baptist Health in 2021,” according to the report.
Despite taking the massive government handouts, the report states that all seven of the hospital systems had huge amounts of resources compared to rural hospitals and independent physicians, while the majority had “enough cash on hand to operate for more than half a year without any incoming revenue, as well as billions of dollars in cash and financial investments.”
The report further found that despite their reported profits, the hospital systems shared little of it with disadvantaged patients, noting that a third of North Carolina hospitals spent less on charity care in 2020 during the peak of the pandemic.
Across 104 hospitals, charity care spending rose only $246.5 million from 2019 to 2020, while some hospitals increased billing of poor patients that were eligible for charity care.
Atrium Health sued hundreds of patients, according to the report.
‘Politically Motivated’
“While health care workers suffered on the front lines, hospital executives made billions on Wall Street,” said Folwell. “None of these nonprofit systems pay any property, income or sales taxes. Many failed to fully honor their charitable mission even when thousands of North Carolinians lost their businesses and their jobs during the pandemic.”
Folwell is urging the hospital systems to either return the taxpayer money or commit to reducing hospital price inflation. The Treasurer is also supporting the Medical Debt De-Weaponization Act which aims to bolster accountability, transparency and consumer protections on medical debt.
“We have a duty to hold hospital executives accountable for wrecking the financial health of thousands of patients and transferring wealth from citizens to them,” Folwell added.
In a statement Wednesday, the North Carolina Healthcare Association, which represents the state’s hospitals, called Folwell’s report “politically motivated” and said it “falsely demonizes health systems for applying for and using Provider Relief Funds (PRF) to respond to the COVID-19 crisis.”
“As with other politically motivated statements by the Treasurer, the report conveniently forgets the reality on the ground of what hospitals were facing … Cherry-picking financial data, and then spinning it, is not reflective of the many immense struggles and challenges facing the hospital field, including a workforce shortage criticism along with skyrocketing costs for supplies, equipment, drugs and labor, and near-historic levels of inflation,” the NCHA statement said.
Report Is ‘Charged And Misleading’
Charlotte-based Atrium Health also issued a statement saying it was being “attacked” by the report.
“It’s troubling that health systems like Atrium Health are being attacked while we are still caring for communities that are recovering from the pandemic,” Atrium, the city’s largest hospital system, said.
“The reality is the $719 million in provider relief funds we have received covers less than half of the adverse $1.55 billion financial impact we have incurred as a result of the pandemic.”
Duke Health said it had “a total community investment of $823 million, including $141 million in financial assistance to nearly 270,000 patients” while noting that COVID relief funds had helped it keep its 25,000 staff members employed during the pandemic.
UNC Health called the report “charged and misleading” and said it “paints a baseless picture of excess relief funds as ‘profit’ and seems to intentionally obscure the fact that advanced Medicare payments were not gifts—UNC Health has already paid the federal government back almost all of the $305 million it received from advance Medicare payments.”
The Epoch Times has contacted Cone Health, Novant Health, Vidant Health, and WakeMe for comment.
USAF pilot Lt. John Bowes dreamt of flying and protecting the country his entire life—since he was a child.
He is heartbroken now that he had to put his religious faith over his dream due to the COVID vaccine mandates within the U.S. military, but believes that God is helping him get through the tribulation and that he has a duty to speak up.
The 24-year-old was an F-16 student pilot but was taken out of training and prevented from flying since September of last year when he first submitted his religious accommodation.
“I exercised my constitutional and statutory right to receive a religious accommodation. And then I was, as a direct consequence of doing that, removed from training to fly the F-16. I personally believe that is religious discrimination,” Bowes told The Epoch Times.
He made clear that his views are not representative of the USAF.
“Now that my religious accommodation is denied, I have been formally removed from training. I’ve received a letter of reprimand, which is a disciplinary action that goes on my record as an officer. And I’ve been told that I’ll be processed for discharge here pretty soon,” he said.
Bowes says that nine months ago he filed an equal opportunity complaint with the Air Force Equal Opportunity office, but has not heard back from them so far.
“I’m absolutely heartbroken,” Bowes said, “it’s sad to see that my dream is at risk over something like the COVID vaccine, which doesn’t stop you from getting or spreading COVID.”
The Epoch Times reached out to the USAF for comment.
What’s more, cases of myocarditis—inflammation of the heart muscle—and pericarditis—inflammation of the lining outside the heart—have spiked dramatically since the COVID vaccines started being administered worldwide.
“My faith is what gets me through it because I know that God has called me to speak up about these mandates, and God has called me to stand up for the beliefs that I have—that he gave me, and I’m risking my dream and my career and my future and my financial stability, and my honor as an officer, which is being tainted by these disciplinary actions. All because of my oath to my faith, my oath to God which got me here in the first place, as well as my oath to the Constitution of the United States, which all officers take,” Bowes said.
“And so I’m not here to be rebellious. I’m not here to stick it to the man and so many service members aren’t here to do that, either. We’re simply doing what we swore to do. And standing up for our religious beliefs.”
Lt. John Bowes (Courtesy of John Bowes)
As the June 30 deadline nears for compliance with the U.S. military’s COVID-19vaccine mandate, U.S. Army officials publicly claim a very small percentage of its members are unvaccinated, reporting 96 percent or more of its members are fully vaccinated.
However, the Army’s vaccination rate could be far lower than 96 percent, an anonymous active-duty senior Army official told The Defender.
Sanctity of Life
As a Catholic, Bowes believes in the sanctity of human life and doesn’t want to use the COVID vaccines because aborted fetal cell lines are involved in either the production or the testing of these.
“That action, the use of that vaccine is not in line with my belief that all human life is sacred and ordained by God to exist on this earth. And the use of abortion, in order to accomplish the production of these vaccines, is just morally abhorrent to me,” Bowes said.
Disclosed CDC emails show that they have been producing and culturing human stem cell lines.
Bowes added that he knows “a lot of service members” whose primary argument in their religious accommodations is the sanctity of their genetic material and not wanting to be forced into having it altered.
According to official data from the Air Force, over 9,500 religious accommodations requests had been denied approval as of June 14.
This is despite Archbishop for the Military Service Timothy Broglio saying in October 2021 that: “The denial of religious accommodations, or punitive or adverse personnel actions taken against those who raise earnest, conscience-based objections, would be contrary to federal law and morally reprehensible.”
Bowes personally knows a few pilots who “developed myocarditis from the vaccine, and they don’t fly anymore.”
Pilot Shortage
The Air Force has been struggling with pilot shortages for years now.
Former Air Force Chief of Staff General David Goldfein testified before congress in 2017 about a shortage of aviators, writing in 2016 that the situation was a “quiet crisis.”
A DoD report (pdf) from 2019 noted that by the end of FY 2018, the Air Force was “short 2,000 pilots out of a total inventory of 18,400.”
“I know of personally more than 700 pilots who are actively unvaccinated and have filed a religious accommodation or have filed for a medical exemption or something of the sort,” Bowes said.
A letter from November 2021 (pdf) from DoD pilots submitting religious accommodation for vaccination to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees details the impacts based on an analysis of a group of 357 pilots that did not want to take the COVID vaccines.
Their estimated value was totaled at $7.8 billion tax dollars, 4,842 years of cumulative service, and 14 years of service on average.
Nineteen percent of them support the mission of nuclear deterrence, 69 percent are instructors, and nine percent are Air Force Weapons Instructors or Navy TOPGUN graduates.
“The implications of 700 pilots is pretty extreme,” Bowes said in an interview with LifeSite news.
Attorneys and doctors have also charged that the FAA is violating its own rule that pilots should not fly after having taken medications that have been approved for less than a year.
An advocacy group called Freedom Flyers is assisting pilots to come forward and speak out about their conditions.
“Many of these pilots are afraid to come forward because if they come forward they lose their flight physical, they lose their flight medical. So they’re continuing to fly. We have a lot of pilots that are flying with chest pain and neurological conditions, because if they come forward they lose their careers,” Josh Yoder, a spokesperson for Freedom Flyers told The Epoch Times.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed in late 2021 that a person died from blood clotting after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine that had been linked with an increased risk of blood clotting, but did not alert the public for two weeks, newly obtained emails show.
Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, a CDC official, told colleagues at the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Dec. 2, 2021, “We have confirmed a 9th TTS death following Janssen vaccination,” according to emails obtained by The Epoch Times through a Freedom of Information Act request.
TTS refers to thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, a condition that features low platelet levels combined with blood clots.
Officials had recommended a nationwide pause on the administration of the vaccine, produced by Johnson & Johnson (J&J) subsidiary Janssen, in April 2021 after six women experienced TTS after J&J vaccination and three died. But they lifted the pause after determining the vaccine remained safe and effective.
The condition was not discussed much in the ensuing months, despite the CDC laterreporting that five additional deaths occurred before Aug. 31, 2021. Shimabukuro gave a single update, in mid-October 2021, saying five total deaths had been reported.
That was until December 2021. Twelve days after Shimabukuro alerted colleagues of the ninth death, the FDA urged healthcare workers not to administer the vaccine to people with certain conditions because of the TTS risk. Two days after that, Dr. Isaac See, another CDC official, informed the public during a meeting that nine deaths had occurred post-vaccination.
It’s unclear when the CDC learned of the sixth, seventh, and eighth deaths.
The CDC takes reports made to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System and attempts to confirm the reports, including post-vaccination deaths. A higher number of post-vaccination TTS deaths have been reported to the system than the number the CDC has verified.
One day after Shimabukuro confirmed the ninth death, his message was forwarded by Dr. Amanda Cohn, another CDC official, to CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky.
“See below, information on a 9th completely tragic death from TTS,” Cohn wrote.
“Many thanks for letting us know … any tragic case,” Walensky responded.
The emails were partially redacted; one was fully redacted.
Four days after Shimabukuro’s email, CDC officials gave an update on post-vaccination TTS to the COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Technical Work Group, part of the agency’s vaccine advisory panel, in a closed-door meeting. The Epoch Times has asked for presentations and audio from the meeting.
It took 14 days to update the public. That happened during a virtual meeting of the advisory panel that anyone was free to tune into.
Asked about the delay in making the public aware of the deaths, the CDC provided a comment from the team that works on verifying deaths reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System.
“For all reports classified as serious (which includes deaths after vaccination), VAERS (within one business day of receiving the report) requests all available medical records, including death certificates and autopsy reports, for the reported patient. For some reports, including some potential reports of TTS, consultation with experts to determine if the report meets a standardized case definition is performed. Regarding verified reports of TTS where the patient died, these processes occurred during their usual timeframes,” the team said.
During the virtual meeting, advisers recommended the CDC say the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was not “preferred” because of its link to TTS. Walensky endorsed the recommendation.
The agency said it conducted an updated analysis of reports and identified 60 confirmed cases, including nine confirmed deaths. It said it was limiting the availability of the shot because the reported cases and deaths were “not appreciably lower than previously reported.”
A group of doctors is urging top government officials to quickly reverse recommendations that have left children in isolation for days and advice that virtually every child get a COVID-19 vaccine.
“We strongly urge you to revise the CDC’s COVID-19 guidelines with regards to testing, isolation, and vaccine recommendations for children to ensure that public health policies are not doing more harm than good,” the group, Urgency of Normal, wrote in a June 21 open letter to Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House’s COVID-19 response coordinator, and Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The CDC’s guidelines say that people, including children, who are exposed to COVID-19 should quarantine for at least five days, and encourage widespread COVID-19 testing.
The agency also recommends that all children 6 months of age or older get a COVID-19 vaccine, following the recent authorization of the Moderna and Pfizer shots for kids under 5.
The doctors noted that many European countries, U.S. states, and other areas have updated COVID-19 policies to greatly reduce periods of quarantine, COVID-19 testing frequency, and forced vaccination.
They’re asking U.S. officials to adapt to a “test-to-treat” approach, which would focus on recommending vaccination and treatments to those at the highest risk from COVID-19, which are primarily the elderly and others with serious underlying health conditions.
The CDC should also change its vaccine recommendations, which have led to vaccination mandates at colleges and even some lower-level schools, to state that children getting a vaccine should be discussed between the individual and their doctor.
“The emergency phase of COVID-19 is over. We call upon the CDC to update current guidelines to reflect the era of endemic management in which COVID-19 infections are treated similarly to other seasonal respiratory viruses, which do not require routine testing or isolation. It is time to join our peer countries in recognizing the importance of restoring equitable and maximal access to education, sports, and social connectedness for all children. Their health and well-being depend on it,” the group said.
The White House and the CDC did not return requests for comment.
Dr. Jeanne Noble, an associate professor of emergency medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and one of the doctors, told The Epoch Times in an email that the group has not yet heard back from the White House or the CDC.
“The timing of this letter is to push for normalization of children’s social and extracurricular activities over the summer, so that our highest need students can benefit from unfettered access to summer enrichment programs and that all kids enjoy summer camps and sports without exclusion based on testing and vaccination requirements,” Noble said.
“It is our hope that moving beyond pandemic policies over the summer will further pave the way for a full return to a normal school year in the fall, free of COVID-specific restrictions.”
The nation of Austria has suspended its controversial COVID-19 vaccine mandate, with government officials citing concerns about the policy infringing on individual freedoms.
Ministers for health and constitutional affairs announced the move on June 22nd, just six days before individuals who failed to comply with the policy would have begun receiving fines for their decision.
The measure was the most comprehensive mandate within the European Union, as it applied to all adults with virtually no exceptions. It had been in effect since February 5th, 2022, but enforcement formally began on March 15th, 2022z
“We will… suspend the vaccine mandate in accordance with the principle of proportionality,” constitutional affairs minister Karoline Edtstadler remarked during a news conference.
“Why? Because there are many convincing arguments at the moment that this infringement of fundamental rights is not justified.”
Edtstadler detailed how the Austrian government was acting on the recommendation of a panel of experts that must regularly review the public health and constitutional law aspects of the recently overturned mandate.
She and Health Minister Johannes Rauch, however, said the vaccine mandate could yet be reintroduced if necessary, with the next review due within three months.
Austria’s decision to scrap its COVID-19 vaccine mandate comes amidst controversy in the U.S. over resident Joe Biden’s efforts to force the jab on federal workers. Many private companies have issued similar ultimatums to employees, despite a host of recent studies demonstrating the harmful side effects of the vaccine.
Studies have show the COVID-19 vaccine affects male and female reproductive organs while other research suggests the efficacy of the jab is far weaker than natural immunity.
Despite the fact that more research into the effects of the COVID-19 vaccine needs to be done, pharmaceutical giants including Pfizer and Moderna have increased their lobbying efforts to record-breaking highs in terms of personnel hired and overall money spent.
Twitter has suspended a doctor for sharing the study that shows men who received Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine had lower levels of semen and a loss in motile sperm count.
Dr. Andrew Bostom, with the Brown University Center For Primary Care and Prevention, shared the peer-reviewed study on June 19.
Twitter informed Bostom that the missive violated its policy against “spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19, according to a message reviewed by The Epoch Times. It suspended Bostom’s account over the post.
“It seems to fit into the whole pattern of silencing open discussion,” Bostom told The Epoch Times.
Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.
Bostom’s post included a link to the Israeli study, which analyzed semen and sperm in men who received two doses, or a primary series, of Pfizer’s vaccine.
The study was published online ahead of publication in Andrology.
Researchers found that the men had lower levels of semen concentration and lower numbers of sperm after receiving a vaccine.
They alleged that the issues were resolved after 150 days, but figures from the paper actually suggested that was not the case. The authors wrote that the values “did not reach statistical significance.”
In his post, Bostom wrote that primary vaccination with Pfizer’s vaccine “temporarily impairs semen concentration and total motile count among semen donors, with apparant rebound by ~5mos, but no data on boostering effect.”
“Does boostering yield another decline?” he wondered.
“I kind of understood what they really showed, which is that some of the metrics, whether it was the counts or the motility, were still depressed,” Bostom told The Epoch Times. “And I used their terminology … I didn’t do anything to exaggerate their findings.”
The authors said they excluded men with boosters.
“I just pointed out that if this happens with the first series of vaccinations, maybe if they take these guys and have data on people that were semen donors and they had boosted them, when they followed them after the booster, you’d see another round of depression, and maybe it would be depressed—who knows—would it be depressed more? Would it be depressed, less? Would the effect last longer? We just don’t have any data on that,” Bostom said. “So that was the only other thing I put into my tweet—that we just don’t know what the effect of boosters is going to be. I don’t know why any of that was such a big deal.”
At least one other prominent figure has shared the study and not been affected.
Dr. Peter McCullough, a cardiologist, shared on Twitter a screenshot of The Epoch Times article along with an image from the study highlighting how men still had lower semen concentration and sperm counts when measured 150 days or more after getting the vaccine.
“Indiscriminate use instead of targeted, risk-stratified EUA rollout has led to a myriad of concerns. Never broadly apply a brand new experimental biologic agent on a large population without assessment of risk stratification,” McCullough wrote. “Over-used and now uninvited concerns in young men.”
Retired U.S. Army Major General Paul Vallely is vigorously sounding the alarm against a potential communist takeover of the country and is also very concerned about the mandatory COVID vaccination of all members of the military.
“The mandatory vaccines and boosters … under Department of Defense guidance and directives to the commands throughout the Armed Forces have caused a great deal of controversy. Number one: those that declined mandatory vaccination under the First Amendment religious rights,” Vallely told The Epoch Times.
He believes that there is no need to force COVID vaccines on them, as “these are the healthiest men and women we have in the country.”
“They can take [the vaccines] as an option, but we’ve got to stop this mandatory vaccination. It’s hurting the armed forces. And of course, our enemies see that—the Russians, the Chinese, the cartels. And then [there’s] the wokeism, the teaching of critical race theory. So there are a lot of things going on that are affecting the status and the readiness of our forces right now. I’m very worried about that.”
According to U.S. Army Public Affairs, 97 percent of the active army and 88 percent of the army reserve is completely vaccinated. It also states that 2,846 exemption requests have been refused and there have been 3,330 official reprimands, as of April 13. However, an anonymous whistleblower told The Defender that the actual vaccination rates may be significantly lower.
The Army had separated 669 soldiers “for refusing the lawful order to receive the COVID-19 vaccine,” as of May 19.
Vallely served for 31 years in the U.S. Army and retired in 1992 as the deputy commanding general for the U.S. Army Pacific in Honolulu, Hawaii. He has over 15 years of experience in special operations, psychological operations, and civil-military operations.
He graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and earned his commission in the Army in 1961, at the height of the Vietnam war.
After serving two combat tours in Vietnam, Vallely also served in several other overseas theaters in Europe and Pacific Rim countries. Vallely also served on U.S. security assistance missions and civilian–military relations tours all over the world.
Paul E. Vallely MG U.S. Army (Ret). (Courtesy of Paul E. Vallely)
Time Spent on CRT and Communist Ideology Could Be Used for Gun Training
“I think the Russians and the cartels and the Chinese, they’re letting us destroy ourselves from within. They don’t have to even do anything. It’s self-destruction within our own government. They see that, and of course, that makes us very, very vulnerable when we have critical race theory and ideology and what we call indoctrination, rather than putting forth the training and education that has to go on within our military,” Vallely said.
He believes that there “absolutely” is an agenda to transform the republic, that the country is being dismantled from within, and that a socialist takeover has already made substantial progress.
“When you take away to teach a critical race theory and communist ideology, you’re taking away from the time that could be used for learning how to shoot better, how to operate airplanes better, take care of airplanes through maintenance; and even within the medical corps of the armed forces, it has affected many the doctors and nurses. So it’s a terrible thing. They need to stop it right now. They need to stop enforcing the mandates,” he stated.
“This is terrible tyranny that’s going on.”
How to Stop a Communist Takeover
Despite the gloomy prospects, Vallely keeps a positive spirit and thinks that if the country is to be preserved, Americans need to awaken and act, starting at the local level—and quickly turn the tides before it’s too late.
“We have to have the sheriffs and the governors enforcing the 10th Amendment. We need to have that happen. I’m not sure that the elections are going to be fair in November.
“People have to stand up before we are led into a really bloody civil war. And that’s what it’s looking like.”
Vallely further asserted that there are “high-tech oligarchs” that, behind the scenes, want to “change the direction of this country, and they’re doing it. They’re dismantling this country. They don’t believe in our Constitution, for example they don’t care about the First Amendment or Second Amendment. They want to completely dominate the society culturally.”
“2022 is the awakening of America. We need to wake up to see what’s happening to our country and to our government—the demolishing of our Constitution, increased burglaries, crime, and deaths within our cities. We got to enforce the law. These are all things that are on the table that must be done to turn the country around. If not, we’ll be destroyed,” Vallely concluded.
Communist China is getting more totalitarian – even with foreign investment fund management firms operating on its soil. The Chinese regime is now requiring all foreign firms – including American ones – to set up an internal unit for surveillance and supervision by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Other Chinese national laws require all companies in the country, including foreign firms, to establish internal CCP organizations. However, those laws have been largely symbolic.
Until now.
Ignites Asia — an extension of Financial Times — first reported that in May, the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) implemented new changes to its industry rules governing publicly offered securities investment funds.
This week it reported that one of the provisions in the new CSRC rules requires that these companies establish a CCP organ within their companies.
According to a translation by Ignites Asia, the provision states:
Fund management companies shall, in accordance with the provisions of the Articles of Association of the Communist Party of China, establish party organizations, carry out party activities, and provide necessary conditions for the activities of party organizations.
State-owned fund management companies shall, in accordance with relevant regulations, integrate party leadership into all aspects of corporate governance, and include party building work requirements into the company’s articles of association, so as to implement the legal status of party organizations in the corporate governance structure.
Logan Wright – leader of China Markets Research for the Rhodium Group – told Ignites Asia that “It’s another small signal that China’s system is increasingly diverging from global business practices and norms, rather than converging with them over time.”
Wright added that the requirement for foreign businesses to accept a CCP unit within their structure will “add to the perceived political risks associated with deepening foreign investment in China.”
Coincidentally, the new rules specifically governing fund companies come as major U.S. and international investment firms are working to bring branches of their business to China.
A Shanghai-based lawyer who works with foreign business managers told Ignites Asia that this rule is the first explicit “party organization” requirement for the public fund industry. The lawyer, who declined to be named due to the political sensitivity of the matter, told Ignites Asia the new rule applies to foreign-Chinese joint ventures and the Chinese subsidiaries of wholly foreign-owned companies working in China. U.S. multinational firms like BlackRock, Fidelity, and Neuberger Berman are among these entities expanding into the Chinese market.
Maybe it’s time these huge American investment businesses stop ‘trading with the enemy’ and focus their powerful financial efforts elsewhere.
I’m writing this letter to you today because, quite frankly, David Daleiden cannot.
You may remember David as the undercover journalist who spent 30 months investigating and capturing video evidence of Planned Parenthood ‘s top leadership — medical directors, national program directors, even its Senior Director of Medical Services –¬ callously negotiating the harvesting and sale of aborted baby body parts.
And now, he’s been charged with nine bogus felonies.
Which is why I’m asking you to make an emergency donation to the DALEIDEN DEFENSE FUND right away.
You see, after David released the shocking videos of the illegal and disgusting actions of abortion executives, Kamala Harris, then California’s Attorney General, colluded with Planned Parenthood to file felony charges against David…
… Kamala Harris even ordered the California Department of Justice to raid David’s home and confiscate his unpublished videos.
I won’t sugarcoat it. If not cleared of these charges, David faces steep fines and years in state penitentiary and the consequences of being a convicted felon. While Kamala Harris — a bought-and-paid-for ally of the abortion industry — is sitting one heartbeat away from the presidency.
That’s the bad news.
But here’s the good news… David is fighting back.
In fact, he’s taking another opportunity to drag more of Planned Parenthood’s dark criminality into the spotlight with two new federal lawsuits.
That’s right. The Thomas More Society has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in California on behalf of David against former California Attorney General and now Vice¬President Kamala Harris for prosecuting David in bad faith, twisting and perverting California’s anti-eavesdropping law to persecute a citizen journalist because of his political views.
Then the Thomas More Society filed a defamation (libel) lawsuit in federal court in New York against Planned Parenthood, which said David created a “fake” and “false” “smear campaign” against Planned Parenthood.
In other words, the best defense is a good offense. The truth is we could no longer let David suffer such a trampling of his free speech and due process rights without a counterattack.
The timing couldn’t be more important.
This is a critical opportunity to put Kamala Harris, Planned Parenthood, and the rest of the abortion industry on trial for conspiring to silence David in order to cover-up their illegal activities.
That’s where your emergency donation to the DAVID DALEIDEN DEFENSE FUND comes in — by giving today you can stand with David in his hour of need.
The reality is. . .
You couldn’t be there when David entered the dark underbelly of the abortion industry — sitting across the table from abortionists haggling over the price of baby body parts with cold-blooded clarity… “I want a Lamborghini.”
You couldn’t be there as David saw with his own eyes the preborn children who had been killed with great precision and delicacy to preserve their organs for maximum profit.
You couldn’t be there when the videos were released and Kamala Harris and Planned Parenthood conspired to crush David with trumped up legal charges and an armed raid on his home in which they seized laptops, hard-drives, and recording equipment.
And you couldn’t be there with David (our criminal defense team was there) when he voluntarily appeared in both Texas and California for booking and processing — fingerprinted and photographed for a mugshot like a common criminal.
But, now, this is the reality… there is something you can do.
You can make an emergency donation to the DAVID DALEIDEN DEFENSE FUND to help vindicate this pro-life hero.
My name is Tom Brejcha.
I’m the president and chief counsel of the Thomas More Society — a not-for-profit law firm underwriting and helping to spearhead David’s criminal defense.
The Thomas More Society is proud to have defended many renowned pro-life and religious leaders in America’s pro-life movement such as Joe, Ann, and Eric Scheidler, the Pro-Life Action League, Shawn Carney and 40 Days for Life, Abby Johnson, the Susan B. Anthony List, David Bereit, Lila Rose and Live Action, Students for Life, Sidewalk Advocates for Life, Created Equal, former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline, the March for Life, and many more.
Because when dark forces like Planned Parenthood unleash their full might to legally, financially, and personally destroy our clients — we fight back.
I have to tell you, despite all that David is facing, his spirits remain high. Of course, I’ve never known anyone in this kind of position who didn’t feel an empty pit in his stomach.
But David’s not giving up. His willingness to fight back is a true profile in Pro-Life courage.
Now I’ll get right down to it…
We anticipate David’s legal defense will cost us more than $6 million. That’s right, SIX MILLION DOLLARS.
In addition to the criminal case and the new federal civil rights and defamation lawsuits, we’re currently representing David in THREE other cases. • The civil lawsuit filed by Planned Parenthood where we are appealing the jury’s verdict, along with the judge’s order permanently banning David from doing any more undercover journalism against Planned Parenthood. Recently, we posted a $700,000 appeal bond to keep Planned Parenthood’s nasty collection agents from harassing him with collection agents and even seizing his belongings. We’re fighting back, but we’ll need your help.
• The civil lawsuit brought by the National Abortion Federation and the “gag order” injunction that still prohibits David from releasing any more of his video evidence exposing Planned Parenthood’s illegal fetal tissue business. And now, in light of the Planned Parenthood civil lawsuit, NAF has moved for summary judgment – they want a ruling against David without a trial at all!
• And finally, the civil lawsuit filed by Planned Parenthood personnel in federal court in Seattle, where we just achieved a victory for a second time on appeal, but it appears we may need at least a third victory on appeal before this case ends.
That’s why David needs your financial support today.
And that’s why I’m praying you will donate $35 or more to the DAVID DALEIDEN DEFENSE FUND right away.
I won’t guess how much you’re able to send today. Whether it’s $35, $50, $75, $125, $250, $500, $1,000 or more…
… I will only say that time is of the essence.
So I do ask that you make your donation as soon as you can.
This truly is a “David versus Goliath” type of battle — with Kamala Harris, Planned Parenthood, and the radical left arrayed against our “David.”
It’s a grave injustice that David is the one being hit with felony charges and massive civil penalties while Planned Parenthood (so far, at least) has gone unpunished.
By clearing David of these charges… you and I can allow him to continue with his incredibly important lifesaving work. Remember, over 12 million people on YouTube alone watched the shocking footage he captured. Since that time, 26 states — over half the country –¬ have moved to strip Planned Parenthood of taxpayer funding.
It’s no wonder Planned Parenthood and their allies want to destroy David.
They’d love to see him rotting away in penitentiary rather than exposing their criminal and inhumane activities. You and I cannot let that happen.
So please don’t delay. Donate $35, $50, $100, or more to stand with David Daleiden today.
I’ve asked my staff to let me know as soon as we get it so I can let David know that you’re standing with him.
I know he’ll be deeply touched by your generous support.
May God Bless You,
Tom Brejcha President & Chief Counsel
P.S. Kamala Harris, Planned Parenthood, and their allies want to destroy David. They’d love to see him rotting away in penitentiary rather than exposing their criminal, ghoulish activities. You and I cannot let that happen. Can I count on you to support the official criminal defense of David Daleiden?
The Thomas More Society is a not-for-profit, national public interest law firm dedicated to restoring respect in law for life, family, and religious liberty.
World Health Organization (WHO) Director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus reportedly admitted to a senior European politician that the virus that causes COVID-19 most likely came out of a Wuhan lab. The Daily Mail reports that Tedros made the admission citing a catastrophic lab accident.
The disclosure comes on the heels of a WHO investigative report that was published earlier this month, concluding that the pandemic may have started at a Wuhan lab and that Chinese authorities have been blocking access to crucial data.
At the same time, Jeffrey Sachs, leader of the Lancet Commission on COVID-19, now says that he is convinced that the pandemic started in a lab and that SARS-CoV-2 was created with the aid of U.S. biotechnology.
Sachs made his stunning admission last week at a conference in Spain where he had been invited by former Spanish prime minister José Luís Zapatero.
The admissions from two of the world’s most prominent COVID-19 authorities, who also happen to be establishment stalwarts with a record of appeasing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is a significant development in the search for the origin of the pandemic.
Early in 2020, just as the pandemic was starting to unfold, Xiao Botao, a whistleblower from China, published an article claiming that the virus had come out of a Wuhan lab. The whistleblower’s paper was quickly removed from the internet and an all-hands-on-deck effort to scrub and censor the idea of a lab leak quickly ensued.
Two institutions played a key role in that scrubbing effort. The World Health Organization and esteemed British medical journal The Lancet.
White House Chief Medical Adviser on Covid-19 Dr. Anthony Fauci at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Md., on Feb. 11, 2021. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
WHO chief Tedros and his organization famously pushed CCP propaganda, including lavishly praising Xi Jinping and claiming that the virus did not transmit between humans. Tedros also spearheaded efforts to “combat the spread of rumors and misinformation.” In addition, two separate WHOinvestigations aggressively dismissed the lab leak theory.
For its part, the Lancet published a statement that maligned anyone who deigned to so much as contemplate that the virus might have come out of a lab.
That Lancet statement—which was published before most Americans even knew that there was a pandemic spreading around the globe—was signed by a number of notable leaders in the field of virology and set the tone for the corporate media’s coverage.
It also served as a warning to other scientists and science publications around the globe that lab-leak discussions were off-limits.
Most virological research in the Western world is funded through the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci—who was himself instrumental in shutting down any discussion of the lab leak theory—and Jeremy Farrar, the British pharmaceutical trust director who sits on billions of dollars’ worth of grant money and has long-standing ties to China’s CDC head, Gao Fu. Farrar co-authored the Lancet statement.
The Lancet’s editor, Richard Horton, is a recipient of the CCP’s Friendship Prize. Before the pandemic, he published a glowing tribute to Xi and the Chinese regime. Horton later went on Chinese state TV where he praised Chinese authorities, impugned Western governments, and asserted that claims that the pandemic might have started in a Wuhan lab were part of a “pandemic of disinformation.”
Horton also set up a commission to investigate “the nature, origin, and prevention of zoonotic diseases.” The focus on zoonosis—or a natural origin—meant that The Lancet had predetermined what the commission was supposed to conclude.
Sachs was appointed as head of the commission while Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance who helped Fauci funnel U.S. taxpayer money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was made a member of the group. It was Daszak’s enormous conflicts of interest, as well as the emergence of new evidence pointing to a lab leak, that led to the eventual disbanding of the Lancet Commission in September 2021.
An exterior view of building one of National Institutes of Health (NIH) inside Bethesda campus, in Bethesda, Md., on Nov. 21, 2020. NIH funds majority of biomedical research in United States. (grandbrothers/Shutterstock)
However, the group did not publicly dismiss the natural origin narrative until last week, when Sachs attended a conference in Madrid where he made his surprising admission:
“I chaired a Commission for the Lancet for two years on COVID. I’m pretty convinced it came out of U.S. lab biotechnology, not out of nature.”
Sachs’s statement is not only hugely significant because of his role as chairman of the Lancet Commission but also—and perhaps even more so—because of his admission that U.S. biotechnology was used to create SARS-CoV-2.
We have known for some time about the cooperation between the so-called godfather of gain-of-function experiments, Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina, and the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Shi Zhengli. In fact, it was the disclosure of that collaboration in a Jan. 31, 2020, article in Science magazine that led Fauci’s team to scramble to cover up the NIAID’s involvement with, and funding of, Shi’s lab.
Baric and Shi’s collaboration traces back to 2015 when they created a modified coronavirus that was not only uniquely able to latch on to human cells but also able to efficiently replicate in human lungs. While the virus they created was not SARS-CoV-2, the virus did have the attributes that we would later find in SARS-CoV-2.
Their collaboration proved that Shi had gained the technical know-how to do the kinds of experiments that might have resulted in COVID-19. Baric also sent transgenic mice with human lung receptors to Shi’s Wuhan lab. Humanized mice mimic human lung tissue and act as experimental stand-ins for humans. They are used to test whether newly created viruses can replicate and spread quickly among humans.
It is not a big leap to go from infected lab mice to infected lab workers. This is even more evident when one considers that the Wuhan lab conducted its coronavirus research under biosafety level two conditions, which even Baric acknowledged as dangerous, stating that there is much less oversight and that lab-acquired infections occur much more frequently at biosafety level two than at higher levels.
After the pandemic started, Chinese authorities directed their labs to shift coronavirus work to biosafety level three labs.
An aerial view shows the P4 laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan in China’s central Hubei Province on April 17, 2020. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)
But even that might not offer sufficient protection against a biosafety accident. Late last year, a lab worker in Taiwan contracted COVID-19 from handling infected lab animals in a biosafety level three lab.
To underscore how significant Sachs’s sudden shift is, he has also co-authored a paper in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, calling for an independent investigation of information held by U.S.-based institutions that would reveal the origin of the pandemic.
While it is correct that Chinese authorities have been concealing crucial data from the Wuhan lab, as well as data on early patients, many of the answers to the pandemic’s origins are held in the United States by organizations such as Fauci’s NIH and NIAID, by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, by Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, and by Baric’s lab, which provided the Wuhan lab with biotechnology.
Sachs’s observations further highlight the significance of the highly unusual furin cleavage site, the part of SARS-CoV-2 that makes it so virulent. It has been known since the start of the pandemic that SARS-CoV-2 is the only coronavirus of its kind that has a furin cleavage site. But Sachs now goes further, pointing out that the critical amino acid sequence of SARS-CoV-2’s furin cleavage site insertion happens to be identical to one that is present in the human body, strongly suggesting that it was deliberately inserted into a SARS-like virus.
Lastly, Sachs is also raising the issue of the 2018 partnership agreement between the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Daszak’s EcoHealth, and Baric that had the specific goal of inserting such furin cleavage sites into SARS-like viruses.
It has always strained credulity that a bat virus traversed all of China without leaving a trace only to suddenly erupt on the doorsteps of a lab that was known to have been creating COVID-like viruses. Sachs and Tedros appear to have come to the same conclusion.
The fact that the two institutions at the center of efforts to aggressively push the natural origin narrative have now changed course will give considerable momentum to finally get to the bottom of what really happened at the Wuhan lab. It also—very belatedly—vindicates Xiao Botao who, at great personal risk, tried to tell the world where the virus came from.
According to a new report that just came from the government watchdog agency responsible for overseeing the NIH, it turns out that nearly three-quarters of the scientists and researchers who accept NIH grant money—meaning, people who receive NIH tax-payer funding to conduct research—fail to properly report their ties to foreign countries and companies.
Specifically, the Department of Health and Human Services Inspector-General’s office found that approximately 69 percent of the people who receive NIH research grants don’t properly report all of their ties to foreign entities—specifically, the Chinese Communist Party.
Furthermore, this same lack of transparency also applies here at home. According to another report from Open the Books, it turns out that in a 10-year time span, government scientists—like Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Francis Collins, and so on—received somewhere between $350 million to $400 million in royalty payments.
But the disclosure documents are so redacted that we don’t know which company is paying how much money to which scientist and for which patent.
In a stirring and spot-on campaign email, Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis declares war on the Far Left calling it a “Radical Vigilante Woke Mob.”
While I’ve seen my share of them over the years and sent out a few myself, campaign fundraising emails are notorious for appealing to the hard-core base of both parties.
So, most of them are taken with a grain of salt by political observers.
However, the email I just received from the DeSantis re-election campaign really hit home. It accurately defined and summarized the aggressive domestic threat posed by the extreme Left to our nation’s very core:
Our country is currently facing a great threat. A new enemy has emerged from the shadows that seeks to destroy and intimidate their way to a transformed state, and country, that you and I would hardly recognize.
This enemy is the radical vigilante woke mob that will steamroll anything and anyone in their way. Their blatant attacks on the American way of life are clear and intensifying: stifling dissent, public shaming, rampant violence, and a perverted version of history.
A group that will, literally, tear down monuments and buildings but — perhaps in an even more sinister way — tear down the American spirit itself. They go after the family unit, parental rights, traditional moral values, the church, and fact-based education.
Over the past few years, we’ve watched horrified as this group has attempted to brainwash our children into thinking we live in an evil, racist, irredeemable country.
We listened to them deny science and data to exert political theater all the while trampling over personal liberties enshrined in the Constitution.
We saw them take to the streets for an entire summer like outlaws burning, looting, and destroying everything in sight while being told they were “mostly peaceful” and “passionate.”
DeSantis omitted the LGBTQ brainwashing of our young children and the collusion of major woke companies like Disney in doing so, but he has been at the forefront of battling both these evils in Florida.
The DeSantis campaign continues, noting something that impacted me directly on the huge social media platform LinkedIn: “We watched Big Tech moguls in Silicon Valley be the arbiters of truth – deciding who gets to speak and who gets silenced through the digital public square.”
And of course, the last piece of the massive leftist effort: “We listened to the legacy media muffle legitimately verifiable news stories that didn’t align with their preferred narrative, only to watch the truth trickle out months later at a more politically expedient time.”
Referring to himself as the “Governor of the Free State of Florida,” DeSantis then goes on to make his pitch for how he will fight this grave threat to America, at least in Florida, with “faith, with reason, and with freedom.”
And of course, he asks for our financial support.
In my view, this email accurately and effectively summarizes the threat we face from the extreme Left in America today. DeSantis is on the front lines of this battle in Florida, but he also seems to be preparing to take the fight nationally as well.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
The Democrat-controlled House is set to pass a bill Wednesday that bans the Biden administration from funding crack pipe distribution through mental health and substance abuse programs.
The Democrat-sponsored bill, which reauthorizes several mental health programs that were set to expire this year, includes a measure that ensures the federal funds are not used to “purchase, procure, or distribute pipes or cylindrical objects intended to be used to smoke or inhale illegal scheduled substances.” This language appears to cover crack pipes and meth pipes—drug paraphernalia the Biden administration was poised to fund through its $30 million harm reduction program, the Washington Free Beaconreportedearlier this year.
The bill, which passed unanimously out of committee, specifically bars the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration—the same agency that oversees the White House’s controversial harm reduction program—from using funds allocated for substance abuse and mental health programs to fund crack pipe distribution. It is scheduled to get a vote on the House floor on Wednesday afternoon.
It is unclear why Democrats believe it is necessary to ban funding for the drug paraphernalia, given resident Joe Biden’s denial that his administration ever had plans to fund crack pipe distribution. The White House said the agency would not fund “smoking kits” that contain crack pipes, so the measure may suggest the president’s congressional allies doubt the administration’s claims. Following the Free Beacon report, Republicans introduced several bills to ensure federal funds do not go toward crack pipes but were unable to advance legislation.
The New York Times reported that the “uproar” over crack pipes “derailed” the Biden administration’s drug policy. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration later listed a notice at the top of its harm reduction grant webpage that states, “No federal funding is used directly or through subsequent reimbursement of grantees to purchase pipes in safer smoking kits.”
Harm reduction organizations across the country aim to make drug use safer for abusers, rather than rehabilitating those abusers. Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R., N.D.), a member of the committee that passed the bill, said the provision distances Congress from the Biden administration’s radical approach to drug policy.
“Stopping the Biden administration from using taxpayer dollars to buy crack pipes is a win for those of us working on commonsense criminal justice reform,” Armstrong told the Free Beacon. “Handing them out did nothing to make our communities safer or help people struggling with addiction and mental health.”
Syringe exchange programs are supported by a majority of state governments, but smoking kits are a less common approach to harm reduction. Crack pipe distribution efforts are prominent in deep-blue cities such as San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Boston, and Baltimore.
Rep. Frank Pallone (D., N.J.), who as the head of the House Energy and Commerce Committee sponsored the bill, did not respond to a request for comment.
The Restoring Hope for Mental Health and Well-Being Act of 2022 will also reauthorize programs for mental disorder screenings, suicide prevention, and mental health awareness for children.
Facebook – a platform that routinely censors posts critical of COVID-19 vaccines – has hired several alumni from Pfizer’s marketing and internal audit teams to lead similar efforts at the social media platform, The National Pulse can reveal.
The hires appear to present a conflict of interest for the social media platform, which has come under fire for censoring and banning users who’ve posted about the side effects or questioned the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines.
Facebook’s Internal Audit Director, for example, was formerly a Senior Director at Pfizer. The employee – Tiffany Stokes – has held the influential position at Facebook since January 2020.
“Build and own strong relationships with critical business partners, provide project oversight of operational audits, manage internal audit plan and risk assessment,” she lists as part of her job description on her LinkedIn profile. “Leadership requires close collaboration with the Sales, Partnerships, Global Operations, International, HR, and Legal teams to assess and prioritize risks across an ever-changing high-tech business landscape,” she adds.
Prior to joining Facebook, Stokes worked at COVID-19 vaccine maker Pfizer for five years as the Senior Director of its finance and legal operations.
“Established and managed legal, budgeting, and forecasting processes to achieve the business’s financial goals as well as cost control commitments made to shareholders and the financial and investment community,” she summarized her position.
Prior to serving in this role, which she also notes required her to “adjust financial forecasts based on fluctuating costs, prioritization of legal matters, and impending legal issues,” she worked as the pharmaceutical giant’s Assistant Treasurer for the U.S. and Capital Markets, where she “directed” the company’s $8 billion investment portfolio.
The National Pulse can also reveal that a Facebook Vice President for Global Clients and Categories was formerly Pfizer’s Chief Marketing Officer for consumer healthcare in the U.S. The employee, Brian Groves, worked at Pfizer for a total of 14 years before joining Facebook as a Director of its Global Accounts.
Similarly, a former Director for Digital Marketing and Innovation at Pfizer joined Facebook as a Client Partner for its Global Marketing Solutions branch in 2018.
In addition to Facebook hiring Pfizer marketing team alumni, the platform also added Pfizer’s former Senior Public Affairs and Corporate Communications Project Manager as its own Corporate Communications Manager in 2019.
The unearthed personnel links between Pfizer and Facebook follow the social media platform deploying its third-party “fact-checkers” – who have deep ties to Democratic politics and the Chinese Communist Party – to brand COVID-19 studies and articles at odds with mainstream narrative as “disinformation.”
Australians are still suffering from the trauma of government health mandates.
In the wake of Australia’s “zero COVID” policy, which boasts 95 percent of all citizens over 16 vaccinated and some of the world’s strictest lockdowns, Scott Morrison’s government was swept out of power in May. Yet broken businesses and people’s wrecked health struggle to recover.
Some fear they may never recover.
Ask Liz Mann, who was vaccinated and says she hasn’t been the same since. Mann, 50, who works in agriculture and runs a farm in northern Victoria, wasn’t an anti-vaxxer — she had her yellow fever, Hep-A, and other shots — but decided to pass on the corona vaccine. She had COVID already, she reckons, having suffered prolonged flu-like symptoms in January 2020. So she’d have immunity. With her health history of chronic fatigue, a UK study found, she had a 27 percent chance of a “severe reaction” to Pfizer’s vaccine. On those accounts, she ought to’ve been exempt.
None of that mattered.
(Courtesy of Liz Mann)
Per Victoria’s mandate, to work, she’d have to roll up her sleeve. Delaying the inevitable, she tried working remotely from home for two weeks and took another two weeks off, but the mandates loomed. So, she caved, visited the drive-through clinic in Murchison, got the jab, and was told to park and wait 15 minutes in case of aftereffects before driving home.
Her reaction was instantaneous.
“I wound down the window feeling like I was going to black out, I honked the horn, turned around and looked at the doctor out my rear vision mirror,” she told The Epoch Times. “And then I just dropped the seat because I was about to black out.” Medical staff at the clinic checked her blood pressure and it was “160 over 100,” she said, adding that she’s “normally low blood pressure.” “I had trouble standing up at that point,” she recalled, and told how chest pains followed. “Within about three hours, it felt like I’d been kicked in the chest by a horse.”
Doctors at the clinic watched on, arms crossed over their chests, and made remarks as she lay outside. “‘Well, wonder what will happen when she has her second vaccine,’ and I said, ‘I’m not having it,’” Liz recalled. “And they had a bit of a laugh and said, ‘We’ll see about that.’ I was pretty disgusted actually.”
We contacted Murchison Medical Clinic for comment, but they were unable to respond before publishing.
(Illustrations – Boyloso/Shutterstock)
Mann’s condition showed little improvement in the days and weeks following. She remained lethargic, was bedridden for weeks on end, and was unable to perform daily tasks maintaining the farm. When a tree fell onto a fence and she had to use a chainsaw, the physical strain spurred chest pains, which extended to her face, and she had to call an ambulance. Within two weeks of the jab, other symptoms, including rashes, spontaneous bruising, and a black eye, appeared. On day 41, one side of her face drooped, and she experienced “stroke-like symptoms.”
Despite all this, Mann couldn’t get a medical exemption for her impending second jab — unlike what one would expect with side effects from other drugs like penicillin. Meanwhile, her job demanded it. She refused. They terminated her contract, but the letter they sent made no mention of vaccine stipulations.
The point was moot anyway; she couldn’t work. Her health bottomed out.
Mann did eventually get a medical exemption after eight weeks, but couldn’t work at the level she once did. Any physical activity, such as tending to her livestock, brought on pain in her chest and face, with some days being lost entirely to poor health.
Adding insult to injury, when Mann was granted a public records request, she saw her doctor had written that she had “psychological issues,” placing the blame on “anxiety.” She also found a discrepancy: Her doctors had put in a claim for two doses (was it a double?) while her immunization history showed none.
(Courtesy of Liz Mann)(Courtesy of Liz Mann)Liz Mann’s medical record request yielded doctors’ notes that she had “psychological issues.” (Courtesy of Liz Mann)
Yet Mann is lucky in some respects. With her situation, having multiple jobs and the ability to work remotely or outside Victoria, where restrictions are less strict, she can earn a living. Not everyone’s so lucky.
Nevertheless, if the election proves anything, it’s that while Australians who’ve suffered due to health mandates struggle to reclaim their lost health and livelihoods, their collective faith in the medical industry and government may be beyond repair.
“I don’t trust them anymore. I never want to see another GP in my whole life,” said Mann, adding that, even while awaiting her exemption, all the doctors wanted to do “was to put the next vaccine in [her].” It’s not exactly lucid what lies behind the curtain of absurdities. She posits it’s “very much about control.”
There were medical professionals who were forthcoming in varying degrees. Doctors admitted Mann’s adverse reactions were due to the vaccine, yet referrals to specialists were few and excuses many: “Chest pain is nothing to worry about.” A nurse did look her in the eye and prod her to speak up — even though many in society aren’t open to it.
She did just that.
“I’m not afraid to speak out. I have lost friends over this,” said Mann. “People don’t want to know about this, and it annoys me when you hear from mainstream media about stories of long COVID, but ‘vaccine side effects’ is a dirty [term] that nobody wants to hear.”
In hindsight, faced with that ultimatum again — the jab or no job — would Mann choose differently? “I would have said, ‘I don’t want the job,’ and walked away at that point and had my health,” she said. “I lost the job anyway, so it would have been the same as what happened. But I would have had my health.”
Having two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine has been linked with negative protection against symptomatic infection with the disease, scientists say, while a previous infection without vaccination offers around 50 percent immunity, according to a study analyzing the Omicron wave in Qatar.
The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine on June 15, examined the Omicron wave in Qatar that occurred from around December 2021 to February 2022, comparing vaccination rates and immunity among more than 100,000 Omicron infected and non-infected individuals.
The authors of the study found that those who had a prior infection but no vaccination had a 46.1 and 50 percent immunity against the two subvariants of the Omicron variant, even at an interval of more than 300 days since the previous infection.
However, individuals who received two doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine but had no previous infection, were found with negative immunity against both BA.1 and BA.2 Omicron subvariants, indicating an increased risk of contracting COVID-19 than an average person.
Over six months after getting two doses of the Pfizer vaccine, immunity against any Omicron infection dropped to -3.4 percent.
But for two doses of the Moderna vaccine, immunity against any Omicron infection dropped to -10.3 percent after more than six months since the last injection.
Though the authors reported that three doses of the Pfizer vaccine increased immunity to over 50 percent, this was measured just over 40 days after the third vaccination, which is a very short interval. In comparison, natural immunity persisted at around 50 percent when measured over 300 days after the previous infection, while immunity levels fell to negative figures 270 days after the second dose of vaccine.
These figures indicate a risk of waning immunity for the third vaccine dose as time progresses.
The findings are supported by another recent study from Israel that also found natural immunity waned significantly more slowly compared to artificial, or vaccinated, immunity.
The study found that both natural and artificial immunity waned over time.
Individuals that were previously infected but not vaccinated had half the risks of reinfection as compared to those that were vaccinated with two doses but not infected.
“Natural immunity wins again,” Dr. Martin Adel Makary, a public policy researcher at Johns Hopkins University, wrote on Twitter, referring to the Israeli study.
“Among persons who had been previously infected with SARS-CoV-2, protection against reinfection decreased as the time increased,” the authors concluded, “however, this protection was higher” than protection conferred in the same time interval through two doses of the vaccine.
Columnist Naomi Wolf, author of “The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and the War Against the Human,” asserts that after two years of pandemic policies, people in free societies are behaving more like those in authoritarian societies.
Wolf maintains that America is now less free, and becoming almost unrecognizable.
“A handful of bad actors” including the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Big Tech, and the World Economic Forum (WEF) used the pandemic to “exploit the crisis in such a way as to reengineer our free democratic open societies, especially in the West, especially in the United States, into a post-free society, a post-humane society,” said Wolf during a recent interview on EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders.”
The Biden administration in April extended the 2-year-old coronavirus public health emergency for another 90 days.
Wolf said, based on history, the ongoing lockdowns and extension of the public health emergency indicate society is in the last phase of a tyrannical takeover, because with emergency powers, laws protecting liberty can be suspended.
According to Wolf, there are 10 steps every tyrannical government has followed. We are now at step 10, said Wolf. Some of the other steps include demonizing whistleblowers and critics, calling dissent “treason,” “espionage,” or “subversion,” and controlling the media narrative.
During the last two years of lockdowns and mandates, Big Tech and the elites have profited while the average Americans have seen the American Dream slowly “closing” on them, she said.
“And so often, when a democracy is dying, or a regime is turning the screws on freedoms to create an established new form of tyranny, it happens intentionally in a very incremental way,” said Wolf. “And you really see this from 1930 to 1933 in Germany.”
She said humanity is witnessing the formation of a two-tier society of the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated, in which people who would never discriminate against others based on categories of race and sex are now discriminating against the unvaccinated.
“Suddenly, they’re happily embracing a discrimination society in which some people are cast as clean and valuable members of society and other people are ostracized and marginalized and ‘othered’ and described as sort of dirty and causing infection to others,” said Wolf.
She argues that big tech companies had an active role in creating these perceptions and in “shaping legislation and certainly in presenting the drama of COVID and lockdowns to us, and then the vaccine rollout, in such a way as to change human behavior and to change human society,” said Wolf.
Wolf cited the emails between Dr. Anthony Fauci and Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussing Facebook’s role in getting the right public health “messages out” during the lockdowns.
Mark Zuckerberg (L) and Dr. Anthony Fauci. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images; Greg Nash/Getty Images)
People had no choice but to rely on tech platforms while they were locked down, and Big Tech used that to manipulate the public, said Wolf.
“What I do trace in the book is how there was a vast profit that tech companies made by suppressing human assembly, by helping to message that it was unsafe or unlawful to gather in person,” she said. “And when you understand that big tech companies are competing with human beings gathering in human spaces, you understand why there was a vested interest in suppressing human assembly.”
Wolf thinks big tech companies will not stop at just harvesting data on the computer, but that they want to dominate peoples’ bodily autonomy with vaccine passports.
“What these companies want more than anything is to leave the parameters of your computer and to colonize other currently non-colonized spaces, notably the human body,” said Wolf.
This would give these companies and governments the ability to switch off peoples’ access to commerce, travel, and other goods and services if they did not comply with a particular mandate, Wolf added.
Some forms of digital tracking and surveilling are already here in the United States, she said.
“You’re now expected to swipe these QR codes just to see the menu, or just to get in. And the QR code uploads your data to a central database,” she said, adding that she’s seen the software “that maps the relationships of everyone sitting at that table, and then builds databases and networks of relationships.”
This illustration photo shows a person looking at the app for the New York State Excelsior Pass, which provides digital proof of a Covid-19 vaccination, in Los Angeles on April 6, 2021 (Chris Delmas/AFP via Getty Images)
Wolf said that on a scale of one to 10 on the Chinese social credit system, the United States is currently at a three.
“There’s a change that’s happened in American cities in the last two years,” she said.
Because most people around the world, particularly in U.S. cities, use digital apps to travel, do banking, and shop, a digital social credit system similar to China’s is imminent, she said.
Our data is being harvested and used by the “global technocratic elite” to control human behavior, said Wolf.
“We’ve assumed that the worst it can be is data are harvested from us with everything that we choose to do using our free will as human beings,” said Wolf.
“But what I’ve seen is that digital technology has its own logic, and it isn’t restricted by what human beings want to do. So once digital platforms and their oligarchical masters can figure out how to change people’s behavior to suit technology, there’s nothing, moral or ethical, that will keep them from changing people’s behavior to suit their technology, and to suit their business plans,” she added.
The pandemic has revealed how this type of digital control is playing out, because humans, before the prevalence of digital technology, did not choose to “socially distance” to fight pandemics, said Wolf.
“The dream of our digital overlords is for technology to tell humans what to do, and that’s exactly where we’re at,” said Wolf.
While some people might label her a conspiracy theorist, her opinions are based on a long career as a journalist, political consultant, and now tech CEO, Wolf said. Furthermore, she has witnessed firsthand the powerful elites making historical decisions under the radar, she said.
Wolf was well acquainted with this group of powerful people until recently when she was ejected from their circles for writing oppositional pieces on lockdowns.
“But it’s really true that the global technocratic elite have more in common with each other than they do with their fellow Germans or Americans or Russians or Chinese, and they now are able to align above the level of nation-states,” she said.
The panel ‘Leaders for Europe’s Digital Decade’ at the 2022 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, on May 25, 2022. The yearly meeting takes place from May 22 to 26 with heads of governments and economic leaders. (Eric Lalmand/AFP via Getty Images)
For example, one of the WEF’s goals is to make nation-level decision-making less and less important, and the World Health Organization’s goal is to make public health decisions on a global scale, bypassing countries’ own authorities via the pandemic treaty, said Wolf.
“These technocratic elites really do believe that they can order the world better than you and I and that they have the right to,” she said. “That’s really scary.”
Little by little, humanity’s tolerance for cruelty and authoritarianism has grown.
“The war wasn’t just on us as a political entity, the war was on American culture, and is on American culture,” she said. “And they’ve succeeded largely, unless we wake up, because we were a kind, decent, inclusive culture that respected other people’s boundaries and freedoms. … And now a CCP-style cruelty is something that we tolerate.”
What people believe is largely determined by the news they consume, said Wolf, and many people only watch news outlets that give a skewed picture of pandemic treatments and policies, largely funded by wealthy people like Bill Gates.
“I do trace in ‘The Bodies of Others’ how millions of dollars flowed and are flowing from entities like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to the BBC and the Guardian and NPR and other formerly very credible, objective news outlets.”
Because most people get slanted news coverage, the country is more divided and many people on the left refuse to consider any other narrative or look at primary source documents, because they believe only government sources are giving them “scientific” information, said Wolf.
This skewed messaging has been able to convince people that the mandates and lockdowns are more American and important than liberty or critical thinking.
Wolf said the most brilliant aspect of the pandemic messaging was that it was framed altruistically.
“You know, ‘You’ve got to exclude those people for the good of the community,’ or ‘You’ve got to mask yourself and your child to save your child,’” said Wolf. “This really brilliantly upended American culture because it cast freedom as selfish.”
Now that those in power have effectively conditioned people to be fearful and submissive, they can keep reinstituting emergency powers, she argued.
“That’s what emergency law means,” she said. “They can do whatever they want, basically. It’s a weaponization of boards of health, it’s a weaponization of the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and the [Department of Health and Human Services].”
Wolf said although the situation is dire, people can do something to push back against this tyranny by being informed about what is really going on in the country, assembling in groups, and getting involved politically on the local level.
As it stands now, “I will say that each side is being fed narratives and stereotypes about the other that would persuade each side that the other is absolutely insane and dangerous, dangerously insane,” said Wolf.
“I get that conservatives think, ‘liberals don’t know what a woman is.’ That is not actually literally true, and liberals think ‘conservatives all want to torch our democratic processes, storm the Capitol, and are misogynist, racist thugs who are trigger happy,” said Wolf.
The last two years have conditioned people to fear each other and so the conversations that would have normally occurred when people gathered are not happening and keeping the country divided, said Wolf. She said she will gladly talk to people on the right.
Communist Party cadres hang a placard on the neck of a Chinese man during the Cultural Revolution in 1966. The words on the placard state the man’s name and accuse him of being a member of the “black class.” (Public Domain)
“People I love think I’m doing something wrong in even talking to conservatives and libertarians. That’s very dangerous. The left, especially, has decided that you’re morally complicit if you have a conversation across the aisle,” Wolf said. “That is censorship, that is cancel culture, that’s un-American, that is an importation from Communism.”
She urges people to remember what makes America unique and a beacon to other nations: to remember we are the great experiment where neighbors talked to each other, listened, and didn’t “rat” each other out if they did not agree with each other, Wolf said.
Congressional Democrats wrote to Google’s parent company on Friday to pressure the search engine to suppress results that offer alternatives to abortion.
Sen. Mark Warner (D., Va.), Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D., Mich.), and 19 other lawmakers wrote urging Google to “limit the appearance” or add “user friendly disclaimers” of pro-life clinics in search results. The Democrats said they want to “ensure women seeking health care services are directed to the basic information they request.”
Animosity toward pro-life pregnancy centers and offices has increased since a draft opinion of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision was leaked in May, showing a plan to overturn the original 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling. Dozens of crisis pregnancy centers have been vandalized since the leak. Many of these attacks have not been federally investigated, as the Justice Department official responsible has refused to intervene.
The Democrats’ letter cites a report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit that has advocated for big tech censorship in the United Kingdom. Lobbyists who have worked for CCDH have also lobbied for Microsoft and green energy companies. The study logged Google search results for “abortion clinic near me” and “abortion pill” in states with abortion trigger laws.
Researchers recorded search results that qualify as “anti-abortion fake clinics.” Planned Parenthood defines “fake clinics” as “clinics or mobile vans that look like real health centers, but they have a shady, harmful agenda: to scare, shame, or pressure you out of getting an abortion … their goal is to spread misinformation and propaganda.”
The research found that 11 percent of search results and 37 percent of Google Maps results led to so-called fake clinics which, according to Planned Parenthood, may offer “free pregnancy tests, abortion counseling, pre-abortion screenings, abortion education, post-abortion care, or after-abortion help.”
The lawmakers said CCDH’s findings “undermines the integrity of Google’s search results,” adding, “if Google must continue showing these misleading results in search results and Google Maps, the results should, at the very least, be appropriately labeled.”
Florida governor Ron DeSantis (R.) said the White House and media outlets lied about Florida’s health policies when they claimed he “reversed course” by permitting health care providers to order COVID-19 vaccines for children under the age of five.
“Not surprised the White House would lie, definitely not surprised that legacy media would amplify the lie because that’s what they do,” DeSantis said during a Monday news conference.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Friday said that after “repeated failures” to order vaccines, DeSantis “reversed course” and decided to allow health care providers to order the shots for children between six months old and five. But Florida surgeon general Dr. Joseph Ladapo said the state has always allowed providers to place orders for vaccines. DeSantis said Thursday that Florida discourages COVID vaccination for young children and would not place orders for the vaccine to be distributed to them, but the state would not block providers from acquiring it themselves.
“Doctors can get it. Hospitals can get it. But there’s not going to be any state programs that are going to be trying to get COVID jabs to infants and toddlers and newborns,” DeSantis said. “That’s not where we’re going to be utilizing our resources.”
Florida is the only state in the country that did not place advance orders for the pediatric vaccines, a position media outlets including Forbes, CBS News, and McClatchy DC claimed DeSantis reversed after Jean-Pierre’s comments on Friday. DeSantis’s approach to infant vaccination mirrors that of Scandinavian countries including Sweden, which decided not to recommend vaccinating children under 11 due to the “low risk for serious disease for kids,” and Denmark and Norway, which do not offer vaccines to children under five.
The Food and Drug Administration approved Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna’s vaccines for children five and younger on Friday, but only 18 percent of parents are eager for their child under five to receive the vaccine, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll showed. Less than a third of children ages 5-11 have received the vaccine since it became available to them in November.
A White House official made a false claim on June 20 about COVID-19 vaccines while encouraging parents to get their young children vaccinated.
Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House’s COVID-19 response coordinator, said that “there have not been any serious side effects of these vaccines.”
Contrary to Jha’s claim, severe allergic reactions, blood clotting, heart inflammation, and paralysis are among the serious side effects linked to the three COVID-19 vaccines that are available in the United States.
“There is a well-documented risk of myocarditis from the COVID vaccine, especially in young men and adolescent boys, and an elevated risk of clotting in young women with the Moderna vaccine,” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, told The Epoch Times in an email.
“It’s not right for government scientific advisers to downplay documented risks of the vaccine because it ultimately undermines confidence in public health.”
White House officials didn’t return a request for comment.
Jha, who recently took a post with the Biden administration and is on a break from being dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, was on a media tour on June 20 promoting COVID-19 vaccination for children younger than 5.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines for young children last week, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended that virtually every child who’s now eligible get one of the vaccines.
Jha said the steps happened because the data on the vaccines were “quite compellingly clear” and that the vaccines were both safe and effective, even though major questions have arisen about their safety and efficacy.
“It’s really reassuring to know that for young kids, these vaccines are exceedingly safe,” Jha said.
Children in Moderna’s trial were more likely to suffer a severe adverse event after vaccination than after getting a placebo, while more vaccinated volunteers in Pfizer’s trial experienced severe COVID-19 cases when compared to the placebo group.
“The phrase ‘safe and effective’ has become meaningless and can no longer be trusted. It has been hijacked by commercial interests. A more accurate phrase would be ‘buyer beware,’” Kim Witczak, a drug safety advocate who started a group called Woody Matters, told The Epoch Times in a recent email after reviewing the data from the trials.
Jha also said the vaccines “are doing an extraordinary job at keeping kids out of the hospital.” While that appears to have been the case earlier in the COVID-19 pandemic, it may not be now, according to data presented during meetings with the government’s vaccine advisory panels last week.
For example, effectiveness against hospitalization was just 22 percent after 60 days among 12- to 15-year-olds who received Pfizer’s vaccine, according to data from the CDC’s VISION network.
Other studies indicate higher effectiveness, but it’s unclear whether the vaccines are doing an “extraordinary job.” There’s also no clinical evidence that the vaccines will shield against severe COVID-19 cases in young children.
Jha was speaking on CBS and ABC.
All of the experts who advise the government voted in support of the vaccines. But some said parents should know key details, including how the safety and efficacy data were based on small numbers of children.
“I think it’s the right decision today to make these vaccines available for this age group, but I also think it’s important that people understand it’s a small number of children who have received these vaccines, and the safety is not as well established as it is in adolescents and adults,” Dr. Cody Meissner, who advises the FDA on vaccines, said during one of the meetings. “So it’s important to continue to follow the safety profile of these vaccines. I don’t think they should be required for any specific situation.”
On the other hand, others said they think parents should get their children vaccinated, regardless of the child’s health.
“My personal hope [is] that every child in the U.S. seeks and gets vaccinated in the near future,” said Dr. Michael Nelson, another adviser.
Fox Business host Larry Kudlow didn’t hold back on a recent segment of his show and told his audience the full extent of the Biden Administration’s failing economic policies.
In part of the segment, Kudlow gives an insight into the latest Fox News poll numbers which show waning confidence in the President’s ability to lead an economic recovery.
He also refuted a common talking point the left often uses about wealthy individuals and major corporations not paying their fair share of taxes.
Notably, Kudlow actually agreed on a few observations recently made by resident Biden about issues plaguing the nation – before highlighting the fact that Biden’s own policies have led to the problems he wants to solve.
AFTER YEARS OF HIDING IT, THE WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION IS APPARENTLY ADMITTING THE TRUTH BEHIND CLOSED DOORS.
The director of the World Health Organization privately believes the COVID-19 pandemic resulted from a leak from a Chinese laboratory, according to a new report which undermines the publicly stated position of the global health chief.
Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus – the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) – had previously stressed how unlikely the long-derided “lab leak” theory was, despite evidence to the contrary. Now, according to a report from the Daily Mail, Dr. Tedros “confided to a senior European politician that the most likely explanation was a catastrophic accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.”
The quiet admission in support of the “lab leak” theory is especially at odds with the public position of his WHO, whose affiliated scientists have often branded the hypothesis as a “conspiracy theory” and sought to silence the voices of those who claims otherwise.
BOMBSHELL REPORT BY THE MAIL.
The admission also follows the WHO launching a COVID-19 origins investigation that ultimately discredited the “lab leak” theory in favor of a “natural origins” theory. At the time, The National Pulse exclusively revealed that several researchers included on the team retained compromising links to the Chinese Communist Party, most notably EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak. Advisors to the Chinese Communist Party also served on the team.
Daszak and his partners conducted research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology using funds from National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci. Using this million-dollar grant, the lab has worked on isolating bat coronavirus strains capable of “direct human infection” and is under the control of the Chinese Communist Party.
The lab also appears to have engaged in gain-of-function research, which manipulates pathogens to become more lethal and transmissible to humans. The lab has done similar research on other viruses including influenza and monkeypox.
The WHO sponsored a second COVID-19 origins investigation following its botched first attempt, leading Dr. Tedros to publicly admit that “we do not yet have the answers as to where it came from or how it entered the human population” this month.
Tedros himself has ties to the Chinese Communist Party, helping the regime expand its financial and political control over his home country of Ethiopia while serving in government.
Former U.S. President Donald J. Trump attempted to shift away from relying on Tedros, the World Health Organization, and even Anthony Fauci. He was widely ridiculed and maligned at the time, despite the mounting evidence that most of the above actors are now either totally discredited, or have rowed back from their original COVID-19 claims.
Four key House Republicans are questioning a $500 million earmark sought by resident Joe Biden for an international group headquartered in Oslo, Norway, and led in the United States by political appointees of former President Barack Obama.
The $500 million would go to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovation (CEPI), a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), which was formed in 2017 by the governments of Norway and India, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome, and the World Economic Forum (WEF), according to the group’s website.
The website claims that “CEPI’s early coronavirus investments combined with its global focus, multi-sectoral partnerships, and ability to move quickly resulted in 20+ vaccines against COVID-19 and its variants.” The website also quotes Microsoft founder Bill Gates as crediting CEPI with helping “develop COVID-19 vaccines in less than a year.”
It’s not clear how CEPI can claim credit for vaccines that were prompted and overseen by the Operation Warp Speed program initiated at the outset of the virus in the United States by then-President Donald Trump in 2020.
Shortly after leaving the Obama administration, Dawn O’Connell, former Counsel at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under Obama, became CEPI’s Washington, D.C. Executive Director, according to the House GOPers in a June 16 letter. O’Connell is now back at HHS as Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR), a position in which she could be helpful to CEPI.
The signers are Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.), the Ranking Member of the House Administration Committee, Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.), the Ranking Member of the House Budget Committee, Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-Pa.), and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), the Ranking Member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
All four of the GOP signers could become chairs of their respective committees if Republicans retake the House majority in the November congressional elections. Their letter was addressed to HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Shalanda Young, and Samantha Power, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Acting Administrator.
“President Biden’s FY23 budget calls for a specific allocation to CEPI through no evident bidding process. In addition to the creation of a $4.5 billion Global Health Security and Pandemic Preparedness Fund to contract with international health organizations, the budget request includes a separate $500 million line item for CEPI,” the GOP letter signers wrote.
“This $500 million request for CEPI is significantly larger than the federal government’s previous five-year distribution of $20 million, making the United States the single largest contributor to CEPI,” the letter continued.
“The lack of transparency and justification for this funding increase raises concerns. Furthermore, CEPI’s close ties to the Obama-Biden and Biden-Harris Administrations, suggest a revolving door of politically-connected personnel where Administration friends are rewarded with federal dollars,” the letter said.
In addition to moving from HHS to CEPI and then back to HHS, O’Connell, during her four years running the NGO’s Washington office, “lobbied the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in ‘support of appropriations from USAID to CEPI… [and an] Unsolicited Proposal Concept Note… for possible cooperative agreement funding relationship,’” according to the letter, citing federal lobbying records.
The letter further notes that O’Connell has never registered as a foreign lobbyist and that “CEPI’s current Director of the U.S. office is Dr. Nicole Lurie, who served as ASPR under the Obama Administration.”
A spokesman for CEPI did not respond to The Epoch Times’ request for comment. A spokesman for O’Connell did not reply after asking The Epoch Times for written questions and being given these queries:
Why did she not register as a foreign agent during her tenure in CEPI’s Washington, D.C. office as required by the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) statute, given her employment and lobbying activities targeting USAID?
Has she recused herself as ASPR from any decision-making process, both formally and informally, at HHS that potentially could result in federal dollars or other resources being directed to CEPI?
With whom at OMB or elsewhere in the White House has she discussed the proposed $500 million grant to CEPI prior to today?
The four GOP letter signers want to know how the Biden administration can justify a 2,400 percent increase in funding from the federal government’s current $20 million annual contribution to CEPI.
The signers also want to know if any other NGOs were invited to be considered as alternative grant recipients and which federal agencies, offices and individuals were consulted about CEPI during development of the $500 million grant proposal.
In addition, the signers want to know why has “no lobbyist for CEPI ever registered under [FARA], given the primary beneficiaries of such a large infusion of taxpayer dollars will be the foreign governments funding the group’s operations?”
On its website, CEPI describes the CCP Virus that is also known as the COVID-19 as the main reason for its formation for the development and implementation of the NGO’s proposal of a plan it claims can eliminate the prospect of any similar pandemics in the future.
“As COVID-19 has so amply demonstrated, emerging infectious diseases represent an existential threat to our way of life. It was not the first and, unless we take dramatic action, will not be the last pandemic of the 21st century,” according to the CEPI website.
“But unlike some of the other big threats that humanity faces, we have the tools to substantially reduce and even to eliminate the risk of future pandemics. A decade ago such an ambition would have seemed utopian; now, having compressed a decade of technology development into less than 12 months, it is well within our grasp—if we take action,” according to the site.
The site claims that “CEPI has secured financial support from Australia, Austria, Belgium, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Canada, Denmark, the European Commission, Ethiopia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Singapore, Switzerland, The Republic of Korea, United Kingdom, USAID, and Wellcome.”
“Severely flawed” is a cardiologist’s verdict on a peer-reviewed study funded by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) suggesting possible risks of developing myocarditis and pericarditis after getting a COVID-19 vaccine.
The recent FDA study published on June 11, 2022, used health insurance databases to identify myocarditis or pericarditis hospitalizations occurring in people aged 18 to 64 years, 1 to 7 days after a Pfizer or Moderna vaccine.
The authors found that though only 12 to 14 percent of the studied cohort were 18- to 25-year-olds, 33 to 42 percent of the myocarditis or pericarditis events occurred in people of this age group, suggesting that this age group may be linked with these vaccine adverse events.
“These results do not indicate a statistically significant risk difference between mRNA-1273 (the Moderna vaccine) and BNT162b2 (the Pfizer vaccine), but it should not be ruled out that a difference might exist,” the authors wrote in the study.
However, cardiologist Dr. Sanjay Verma told The Epoch Times that the study “using a 7-day limit for clinical endpoints” for myocarditis or pericarditis events after vaccination was “severely flawed.”
Explaining that spike proteins have been found in blood circulation even four months after injection, “there is no medical justification for a 7- or 21-day cutoff,” he said.
Verma pointed out further issues in the study, stating that it does not include 12- to 17-year-olds, “who are the highest risk cohort.”
The same CDC MMWR report also found that the 12- to 17-year-old cohort has “2 to 3 times increased incidence compared to the 18- to 29-year-old cohort,” the doctor explained.
After the second dose, males aged 12 to 17 years had an incidence of 22.0 to 35.9 myocarditis or pericarditis cases out of 100,000 as compared to males aged 18 to 29 years who had an incidence of 6.5 to 15 cases out of 100,000, demonstrating that teens have a higher risk than adults.
Verma also added that “the study does not account for those who may have died before hospitalization,” who would not be “included in insurance claims database.”
Nonetheless, the cardiologist noted a “tremendous improvement” in the study for using health insurance databases as compared to prior FDA studies that exclusively relied on the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which would most likely result in a lower incidence of cases.
“Overall, the findings of the study are interesting, but the above limitations likely yield significant underestimation of the true risk of myocarditis or pericarditis after COVID vaccination.”
“Public safety and ethical post market pharmacovigilance warrants more robust active longitudinal follow-up to ensure informed consent and appropriate risk stratification counseling,” Verma concluded.
While many have bought into the simplistic idea that availability of firearms is the cause of mass shootings, a number of experts have pointed out some uncomfortable truths. The ‘elephant in the room’ is being overlooked by our media, despite the fact it’s directly linked to the rise in mass shootings.
While many have bought into the simplistic idea that availability of firearms is the cause of mass shootings, a number of experts have pointed out a more uncomfortable truth, which is that mass shootings are far more likely the result of how we’ve been mistreating mental illness, depression and behavioral problems
Gun control legislation has shown that law-abiding Americans who own guns are not the problem, because the more gun control laws that have been passed, the more mass shootings have occurred
97.8 percent of mass shootings occur in “gun-free zones,” as the perpetrators know legally armed citizens won’t be there to stop them
Depression per se rarely results in violence. Only after antidepressants became commonplace did mass shootings really take off, and many mass shooters have been shown to be on antidepressants
Antidepressants, especially selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), are well-known for their ability to cause suicidal and homicidal ideation and violence
While many have bought into the simplistic idea that availability of firearms is the cause of mass shootings, a number of experts have pointed out a more uncomfortable truth, which is that mass shootings are far more likely the result of how we’ve been mistreating mental illness, depression and behavioral problems.
An article written by Molly Carter, initially published on ammo.com at an unknown date1 and subsequently republished by The Libertarian Institute in May 2019,2 and psychreg.org in late January 2021,3 noted:
“According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), a mass murder occurs when at least four people are murdered, not including the shooter … during a single incident …
Seemingly every time a mass shooting occurs … the anti-gun media and politicians have a knee-jerk response — they blame the tragedy solely on the tool used, namely firearms, and focus all of their proposed ‘solutions’ on more laws, ignoring that the murderer already broke numerous laws when they committed their atrocity.
Facts matter when addressing such an emotionally charged topic, and more gun control legislation has shown that law-abiding Americans who own guns are NOT the problem. Consider the following: The more gun control laws that are passed, the more mass murders have occurred.
Whether or not this is correlation or causation is debatable. What is not debatable is that this sick phenomenon of mass murderers targeting ‘gun-free zones,’ where they know civilian carry isn’t available to law-abiding Americans, is happening.
According to the Crime Prevention Research Center,4 97.8 percent of public shootings occur in ‘gun-free zones’ – and ‘gun-free zones’ are the epitome of the core philosophical tenet of gun control, that laws are all the defense one needs against violence …
This debate leads them away from the elephant in the room and one of the real issues behind mass shootings — mental health and prescription drugs.
Ignoring what’s going on in the heads of these psychopaths not only allows mass shootings to continue, it leads to misguided gun control laws that violate the Second Amendment and negate the rights of law-abiding U.S. citizens.
As Jeff Snyder put it in The Washington Times: ‘But to ban guns because criminals use them is to tell the innocent and law-abiding that their rights and liberties depend not on their own conduct, but on the conduct of the guilty and the lawless, and that the law will permit them to have only such rights and liberties as the lawless will allow.’”
The Elephant in the Room: Antidepressants
Thoughts, emotions and a variety of environmental factors play into the manifestation of violence, but mental illness by itself cannot account for the massive rise in mass murder — unless you include antidepressants in the equation. Yet even when mental health does enter the mass shooter discussion, the issue of antidepressants, specifically, is rarely mentioned.
The fact is, depression per se rarely results in violence. Only after antidepressants became commonplace did mass shootings take off, and many mass shooters have been shown to be on antidepressants.
Prozac, released in 1987, was the first selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) to be approved for depression and anxiety. Only two years earlier, direct-to-consumer advertising had been legalized. In the mid-1990s, the Food and Drug Administration loosened regulations, direct-to-consumer ads for SSRIs exploded and, with it, prescriptions for SSRIs.
In 1989, just two years after Prozac came to market, Joseph Wesbecker shot 20 of his coworkers, killing nine. He had been on Prozac for one month, and the survivors of the drug-induced attack sued Eli Lilly, the maker of Prozac. Since then, antidepressant use and mass shootings have both risen, more or less in tandem.
In the two decades between 1988 and 2008, antidepressant use in the U.S. rose by 400 percent,5 and by 2010, 11 percent of the U.S. population over the age of 12 were on an antidepressant prescription.6
In 1982, pre-Prozac, there was one mass shooting in the U.S.7 In 1984, there were two incidents and in 1986 — the year Prozac was released — there was one. One to three mass shootings per year remained the norm up until 1999, when it jumped to five.
How can we possibly ignore the connection between rampant use of drugs known to directly cause violent behavior and the rise in mass shootings?
Another jump took place in 2012, when there were seven mass shootings. And while the annual count has gone up and down from year to year, there’s been a clear trend of an increased number of mass shootings post-2012. Over time, mass shootings have also gotten larger, with more people getting injured or killed per incident.
How can we possibly ignore the connection between rampant use of drugs known to directly cause violent behavior and the rise in mass shootings? Suicidal ideation, violence and homicidal ideation are all known side effects of these drugs. Sometimes, the drugs disrupt brain function so dramatically the perpetrator can’t even remember what they did.
For example, in 2001, a 16-year-old high schooler was prescribed Effexor, starting off at 40 milligrams and moving up to 300 mg over the course of three weeks. On the first day of taking a 300-mg dose, the boy woke up with a headache, decided to skip school and went back to bed.
Some time later, he got up, took a rifle to his high school and held 23 classmates hostage at gunpoint. He later claimed he had no recollection of anything that happened after he went back to bed that morning.9
In one review of 484 drugs in the FDA’s database, 31 were found to account for 78.8 percent of all cases of violence against others, and 11 of those drugs were antidepressants. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
The Risks Are Clear
The risks of psychiatric disturbances are so clear, ever since mid-October 2004, all antidepressants in the U.S. must include a black box warning that the drug can cause suicidal thoughts and behaviors, especially in those younger than 25, and that:10
“Anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, hostility (aggressiveness), impulsivity, akathisia (psychomotor restlessness), hypomania, and mania have been reported in adult and pediatric patients being treated with antidepressants for major depressive disorder as well as for other indications, both psychiatric and nonpsychiatric.”
SSRIs can also cause emotional blunting and detachment, such that patients report “not feeling” or “not caring” about anything or anyone, as well as psychosis and hallucinations. All of these side effects can contribute to someone acting out an unthinkable violent crime.
In one review11,12 of 484 drugs in the FDA’s database, 31 were found to account for 78.8 percent of all cases of violence against others, and 11 of those drugs were antidepressants.
The researchers concluded that violence against others was a “genuine and serious adverse drug event” and that of the drugs analyzed, SSRI antidepressants and the smoking cessation medication, varenicline (Chantix), had the strongest associations. The top-five most dangerous SSRIs were:13
Fluoxetine (Prozac), which increased aggressive behavior 10.9 times
Paroxetine (Paxil), which increased violent behavior 10.3 times
Fluvoxamine (Luvox), which increased violent behavior 8.4 times
Venlafaxine (Effexor), which increased violent behavior 8.3 times
Desvenlafaxine (Pristiq), which increased violent behavior 7.9 times
Depression Is Vastly Overdiagnosed
In her article, Carter also reviewed the clinical determinants for a diagnosis of clinical depression warranting medication. To qualify, you must experience five or more of the following symptoms, most of the day, every day, for two weeks or more, and the symptoms must be severe enough to interfere with normal everyday functioning:14
Sadness
Feeling hopeless
Feeling helpless
Feeling guilty
Fatigue
Loss of interest in hobbies
Restlessness
Abnormal sleep patterns, whether sleeping too much or not enough
Thoughts of death or suicide
Anxiety
Feeling worthless
Feeling ’empty’
Irritable
Lack of energy
Slow talking and moving
Trouble concentrating
Abnormal weight changes, either eating too much or having no appetite
The reality is that a majority of patients who receive a depression diagnosis and subsequent prescription for an antidepressant do not, in fact, qualify. In one study,15 only 38.4 percent actually met the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) criteria, and among older adults, that ratio was even lower. Only 14.3 percent of those aged 65 and older met the diagnostic criteria. According to the authors:16
“Participants who did not meet the 12-month MDE criteria reported less distress and impairment in role functioning and used fewer services. A majority of both groups, however, were prescribed and used psychiatric medications.
Conclusion: Depression overdiagnosis and overtreatment is common in community settings in the USA. There is a need for improved targeting of diagnosis and treatments of depression and other mental disorders in these settings.”
What Role Might War Games Play?
Aside from antidepressants, another factor that gets ignored is the influence of shooting simulations, i.e., violent video games. How does the military train soldiers for war? Through simulations. With the proliferation of video games involving indiscriminate violence, should we really be surprised when this “training” is then put into practice?
As reported by World Bank Blogs, young men who experience violence “often struggle to reintegrate peacefully into their communities” when hostilities end.17 While American youth typically have little experience with real-world war, simulated war games do occupy much of their time and may over time color their everyday perceptions of life. As noted by Centrical, some of the top benefits of simulations training include:18
Allowing you to practice genuine real-life scenarios and responses
Repetition of content, which boosts knowledge retention
Personalization and diversification, so you can learn from your mistakes and evaluate your performance, thereby achieving a deeper level of learning
In short, violent mass shooter games are the perfect training platform for future mass shooters. Whereas a teenager without such exposure might not be very successful at carrying out a mass shooting due to inexperience with weapons and tactics, one who has spent many hours, years even, training in simulations could have knowledge akin to that of military personnel.
Add antidepressant side effects such as emotional blunting and loss of impulse control, and you have a perfect prescription for a mass casualty event.
On top of that, we, as a nation, also demonstrate the “righteousness” of war by engaging in them without end.19 When was the last time the U.S. was not at war someplace? It’s been ongoing for decades.
Even now, the United States insists on inserting itself into the dispute between Russia and Ukraine, and diplomacy isn’t the chosen conflict resolution tool. Sending weapons to Ukraine and calling for more violence against Russians are. Sen. Lindsey Graham has even called for the assassination of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Showing just how serious such a suggestion is, the White House had to publicly disavow it, stating Graham’s comment “is not the position of the U.S. government.”20
Graham, meanwhile, does not appear to understand how his nonchalant call for murder might actually incite murder. In the wake of the Uvalde school shooting, he now wants to mobilize retired service members to enhance security at schools, and while that might be a good idea, how about also vowing never to call for the murder of political opponents? Don’t politicians understand that this could translate into some kid thinking it’s acceptable to murder THEIR perceived opponents?
As far as I can tell, mass shootings have far more to do with societal norms, dangerous medications, a lack of high-quality mental health services, and the normalization of violence through entertainment and in politics, than it does with gun laws per se.
There are likely many other factors as well, but these are clearly observable phenomena known to nurture violent behavior. I’m afraid Americans are in need of a far deeper and more introspective analysis of the problem than many are capable of at the moment. But those who can should try, and make an effort to affect much-needed change locally and in their own home.
‘China is the drug he just can’t quit’: GOP Senator slams NIAD head’s remarks
Dr. Anthony Fauci said he was unable to commit to stop federal funding from going to Chinese scientific research, despite the U.S. intelligence community assessing the regime as America’s top adversary.
Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), made the remarks while appearing virtually at the Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee hearing on June 16, during an exchange with Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas).
“The NIH is still funding research in China, at least $8 million since 2020. In the Intelligence Community’s 2022 Annual Threat Assessment, the Chinese Communist Party is presented as one of the top threats to the United States, along with Russia, Iran, Syria, and North Korea. To my knowledge, only China is receiving U.S. research dollars,” said the senator during the hearing. “When will you as director of NIAID stop funding research in China?”
Since 2020, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded a total of $8.3 million in grants to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and its division National Center for AIDS/STD Control and Prevention, along with five top public universities in mainland China and Hong Kong, according to the NIH website.
Although this amount doesn’t capture dollars later funneled to a Chinese institution through a U.S.-based organization, such as New York-based EcoHealth Alliance, which had partnered with the Wuhan Institute of Virology to perform coronavirus-related experiments that some experts said fit the definition of gain-of-function research, that is, experiments that increase the pathogenicity or transmissibility of a virus.
Fauci, in response to Marshall’s question, said that the U.S. federal agencies “had very productive peer-reviewed highly regarded research projects with our Chinese colleagues that have led to some major advances in biomedical research.”
“So I don’t think I’d be able to tell you that we are going to stop funding Chinese,” Fauci said.
“We obviously need to be careful and make sure that when we do fund them we have the proper peer review and we go through all the established guidelines,” he continued, adding that “grants that go to foreign countries, including China, have State Department clearance.”
“Dr. Fauci’s remarks prove that China is the drug he just can’t quit,” Marshall later told The Epoch Times about the NIAID head’s response.
Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) questions Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, at a Senate panel on June 16, 2022. (The Epoch Times via the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee)
“Dr. Fauci told the truth for once after years of repeated dishonesty that has eroded Americans’ trust in our public health institutions. In the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic, our government should know it’s dangerous and wrong to continue funding research projects supported by the Chinese Communist Party.”
The senator, at the hearing, followed up by asking Fauci if he agrees that the American public lacks records and studies from EcoHealth Alliance’s research.
Fauci’s answer was evasive.
“We have access to an extraordinary amount of information that has gone there,” he said, arguing that the publicly available information in the scientific journals is sufficient.
“Obviously none of us know everything that’s going on in China but if the question at hand is the rather small … peer-reviewed high-priority grant that was given from Eco[Health] to China in a sub-award we have a lot of good information that’s in the publishing.”
The NIH gave a total of $3.1 million grant to EcoHealth over the five years from 2014 to 2019. A fifth of that, $599,000, went to the Wuhan lab, in part for identifying and altering bat coronaviruses deemed likely to infect humans, documents obtained by The Intercept show.
Fauci earlier this week tested positive for COVID-19 and joined the Thursday Senate hearing remotely. His response to Marshall omitted reference EcoHealth’s lack of disclosure over some of its research activities, which would have prompted an NIH review over biosafety measures.
In this image from video, Dr. Anthony Fauci testifies to a Senate panel via remotelink on June 16, 2022. (The Epoch Times via the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee)
In one experiment at the Wuhan facility, funded by NIH via EcoHealth, mice infected with a modified version of the original bat coronavirus “became sicker than those infected” with the original version, an “unexpected result” that was not “something that the researchers set out to do,” Lawrence Tabak, the principal deputy director at the NIH, told lawmakers last October.
He said EcoHealth had violated grant terms by failing to promptly notify the NIH about the finding.
Fauci, at the Thursday hearing, also told Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) that he believes the outbreak of the virus “is very, very likely a jump in species from an animal host,” and less likely to be the result of a lab leak.
“I believe it’s essential to have cooperation and collaboration with the Chinese,” he said when Braun asked him whether he thinks Beijing will cooperate with him to “get to the thorough bottom of” COVID-19 origins.
An Obama-appointed federal judge in New York who owns between $50,000 and $100,000 worth of Pfizer stock has recused herself to avoid the possible appearance of bias or prejudice since she was overseeing a case of NYC teachers trying to get exemptions to the COVID vaccines.
Recusal, in legal terms, means that a judge excuses him or herself because of a potential conflict of interest.
Valerie Caproni is a United States District Court for the Southern District of New York who was overseeing two cases that could potentially have a conflict of interest.
“Plaintiffs argue that the Undersigned’s ownership of stock in Pfizer Inc. ‘constitutes a direct financial conflict of interest in the outcome of this case,’” reads the order granting recusal (pdf) of Caproni—the first judge—which was filed on June 11.
Att. Sujata Gibson, who represents one of the lawsuits, Kane et al. v. de Blasio, told The Epoch Times: “Federal law prohibits federal judges from taking part in a case in which they have any financial interest, no matter how small. Pfizer stocks have been impacted by court injunctions against COVID vaccine mandates, and ownership of this stock, therefore, constitutes a conflict of interest. We are glad that Judge Caproni is stepping down after improperly overseeing this case for eight months.”
The second appointed judge also stepped down for similar reasons.
On the morning of June 14, plaintiffs filed a motion to disqualify Judge Edgardo Ramos, who was initially assigned and has agreed to step down due to his investments in Pfizer and other COVID vaccine stocks.
According to a Wall Street Journal article, Edgardo Ramos and other 130 federal judges broke the law by overseeing court cases where they or their families owned stock in the company or companies involved.
According to the outlet, Ramos handled a lawsuit between TIG Insurance Co. and Exxon Mobil Corp. unit related to pollution allegations while owning up to $50,000 of Exxon stock.
A third judge, who also appeared to own Pfizer and J&J stocks, was asked to step down but denied the request.
“Application denied. The application is based on outdated information,” Judge Naomi Buchwald responded on June 14.
Gibson’s team requested updated financial disclosures.
“The court has now twice reassigned the case to other members of the judiciary with even worse financial conflicts of interest,” Gibson said. “We were alerted that the case was reassigned to the Hon. Naomi Reice Buchwald, who owned up to a quarter of a million dollars in Pfizer stock, and up to $100,000 in Johnson and Johnson stock as of 2020. We have three times now asked that the Court appoint a judge without financial conflicts of interest.”
Michael Kane speaks outside the Australian Consulate to protesters supporting people locked up in Australia for being unvaccinated, Manhattan, New York, on Dec 4, 2021 (Enrico Trigoso/The Epoch Times)
Children’s Health Defense, a non-profit organization founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is sponsoring the two cases in NYC, representing workers that were fired for rejecting the jabs.
On Nov. 13, 2021, some NYC teachers were granted a right to reapply for their religious exemptions, overturning Caproni’s original denial of relief.
Main plaintiff Michael Kane told The Epoch Times: “Judge Caproni presided over my case for more than 8 months knowing the entire time she had a conflict of interest in owning Pfizer stock. I can’t help but think of all the teachers and New Yorkers who are now on welfare, losing their homes, can barely feed their children, and wonder if it would have been different for them if only we had an impartial judge before us.”
In March, NYC Mayor Eric Adams granted vaccination exemption for the city’s athletes and performers and later denied accusations of being lobbied by economic groups to nullify the requirement.
“What our economic team has been doing is stating, ‘How do we turn around our economy?’” Adams said during an appearance on FOX5 in March.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams gives a speech at Kings Theatre, in the Flatbush neighborhood of the Brooklyn borough in New York on April 26, 2022. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
“That’s why we did the outside dining, that’s why we lifted the determination of must-have the vaccine inside the restaurants. We listen to people and stated we’re going to do this at the right time so that we can turn around our economy and make sure we don’t do it [in a way] that’s going to impact our health,” Adams said.
However, Adams admitted that ex-City Council Speaker Corey Johnson lobbied him on behalf of the Brooklyn Nets prior to granting exemptions to local athletes from New York’s vaccine mandates.
“Corey reached out, clearly stated he was speaking on behalf of the Nets when he reached out,” Adams said. “I received calls from people who were against and for—that happens in this city. I said, ‘Corey, like any other person, I’m going based on what my doctors stated.’”
In the public record of the contract, it shows that the lobbying is targeting three city officials: Eric Adams, Frank Carone, Adams’s counselor, and his chief legal adviser Brendan McGuire.
Screenshot of a table from the New York Office of The City Clerk. (Screenshot via The Epoch Times)
The Epoch Times reached out to Caproni’s office for comment.
A California doctor has been sentenced to two months in prison for being involved in the Jan. 6 breach of the Capitol and stepping inside the restricted premises along with her co-defendant John Strand.
Dr. Simone Melissa Gold was initially charged with entering a restricted building or grounds, violent entry, and disorderly conduct, and arrested on Jan. 18, 2021. She spent two days in custody. On March 3, 2022, she pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor charge of illegally entering the restricted building. Gold was sentenced June 16 to serve 60 days in jail, one year of supervised release, pay a $9,500 fine, and $500 restitution.
Gold is the founder of America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS), a nonprofit that has spoken out against the emergency use authorization of COVID-19 vaccines and promoted the use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine during the initial days of the pandemic.
While inside the building, Gold delivered a speech through a megaphone to a crowd gathered in Statuary Hall, where she stated her opposition to the COVID-19 vaccine mandates and government-imposed lockdowns.
Gold expressed regret for entry into the Capitol building in a Jan. 12 interview with The Washington Post. “During the same interview Strand stated that he was also inside the U.S. Capitol with Gold and was there to protect Gold,” according to an official statement.
“I was misguided. I should not have entered,” Gold said. “Everything I did on January 6, misguided or not, was consistent with my effort to do my best for people.” She sounded emotional when she told Cooper that she was “shocked” the prosecutors believed she was not remorseful and did not intend to take part “in a situation that was so destructive to our nation.”
Strand—the communication director at AFLDS and Gold’s boyfriend—has been charged along with Gold. He has pleaded not guilty and rejected an offer for a plea agreement. Strand’s trial is scheduled for July 18.
Regarding Gold’s sentencing, an AFLDS press release on Thursday said, “Like most January 6 defendants, she is a victim of selective prosecution—the defining feature of corrupted governments.”
The Epoch Times has reached out to AFLDS for comment.
However, district Judge Christopher Cooper, a Barack Obama appointee, said that AFLDS was “leaving people with the misimpression that this is a political prosecution or that it’s about free speech,” as he delivered the sentence.
“January 6 was about a lot of things, but it wasn’t about the First Amendment or COVID vaccinations … the only reason you are here is where and when and how you chose to express your view,” Cooper said.
Gold had raised over $400,000 for her and the organization’s legal issues. Cooper said that the funds were a “disservice to the true victims that day.”
Gold’s attorney Dickson Young asked for a sentence of community medical service, stating that his client did not commit or incite violence.
“The loss of our country’s freedoms,” said Gold in a tweet on Friday regarding the sentencing.
Over 800 people have been charged with federal crimes over the breach on Jan. 6, with 300 pleading guilty and nearly 200 sentenced.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on June 16 pressed Dr. Anthony Fauci on the royalty payments he’s received while working for the federal government.
Recently disclosed information showed that Fauci was one of hundreds of scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to receive royalty payments. Fauci got 23 payments between October 2009 and September 2014, but it is unclear how much money he made.
“Can you tell me that you have not received a royalty from any entity that you ever oversaw the distribution of money in research grants?” Paul asked Fauci. “Have you ever received a royalty payment from a company that you later oversaw money going to that company?”
“I don’t know, as a fact, but I doubt it,” Fauci responded.
“Why don’t you let us know? Why don’t you reveal how much you’ve gotten, and from what entities?” Paul said.
The Epoch Times has submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for all royalty payments that Fauci has received since becoming head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is part of the NIH, in 1984.
Open the Books received information in May showing that 1,675 NIH scientists received at least one payment during fiscal years 2010 to 2014, and that Fauci received 23 payments during that time.
In this image from video, Dr. Anthony Fauci testifies to a Senate panel via remote link. (The Epoch Times via the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee)
The amount of the payments is unclear “because of how these documents are redacted,” Open the Books said in a fact sheet.
The Associated Press previously found that Fauci received $45,000 between 1997 and 2004 in payments for interleukin-2, an experimental AIDS treatment. Fauci told the outlet at the time that he tried refusing the payments but was told that couldn’t happen, so he donated the money to charity. Fauci also said he tried reporting the payments on financial disclosures mandated for government employees but was told to remove them because they were considered federal compensation as opposed to outside income.
Adam Andrzejewski, founder and president of Open the Books, told The Epoch Times that every royalty payment “could be a conflict of interest” and urged the government to be transparent about the payments.
During Thursday’s hearing, Paul said his efforts to get the information have been stonewalled. “We asked them, the NIH, who got it and how much. They refused to tell us. They sent it redacted.”
Fauci defended the withholding of the information, telling Paul, “According to the regulations, people who have received royalties are not required to divulge them even on their financial statements, according to the Bayh–Dole Act.”
He then read off information he had brought up off-camera, which he said showed that from 2015 to 2020, the only royalties he received were for a monoclonal antibody he made.
“And during that period of time, my royalties range from $21 a year to $700 a year,” Fauci said. “The average per year was $191.46.”
Dr. Peter McCullough and co-author John Leake spoke to ‘American Thought Leaders’
During the research for their book, “The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex,” cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough and author John Leake discovered that the “system” was primed by global leaders to make vaccination the principal response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“This was absolutely telegraphed from the beginning,” McCullough said. “[In] 2010, Gates says it’s the decade of the vaccines. Later on, Gates announces at meetings that the return on investment of vaccines is 20-to-1 anything else that he’s done.
“It is clear the system is juiced for a vaccine,” McCullough said during a recent interview with EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program.
McCullough was referring to a 2010 post by Bill Gates on Twitter, in which the billionaire investor wrote: “Decade of Vaccines- a $10B, 10yr pledge for vaccine research, development & delivery.”
In 2019 Gates told CNBC’s Becky Quick on “Squawk Box” from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, “We feel there’s been over a 20-to-1 return” on his $10 billion investment into vaccine development.
In the interview with McCullough, Leake questioned why the COVID vaccines, which were developed hastily, were advertised as safe and touted as the only solution to the pandemic while effective alternative and off-label treatments were demonized.
“What we discovered in our research and what we map out in our book is that this was being planned for, well in advance,” Leake said.
He also criticized Gates for his obsession with vaccines.
Bill Gates attends a press conference on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, on May 25, 2022. (Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images)
“[Gates] seems to have sort of shifted his monopolistic spirit from the software business to the vaccine business,” said Leake.
Gates is also the founder and major contributing member of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovation (CEPI), which was launched at the World Economic Forum in 2017. In the organization’s business plan, it appears to be entirely focused on the development of vaccines, with no mention of other treatments for viral outbreaks, said McCullough.
CEPI says it brings together heads of government, private businesses, and philanthropists to “accelerate” the development of vaccines to prevent future “epidemics and pandemics” and to ensure that “all people in need” have access to these vaccines.
Moreover, one of Gates’ most recent efforts in the proliferation of vaccines is his book, “How to Prevent the Next Pandemic.” In the book, Gates makes the case for establishing a well-funded global organization that would be managed by the United Nations’ World Health Organization, whose job it would be to search for and respond to the world’s next pandemic, said McCullough.
The Epoch Times reached out to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for comment.
McCullough said that although vaccines generally do little to prevent illness from upper-respiratory infections, they were still pushed as the answer to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“There isn’t a single shot in the arm that does virtually anything for a respiratory illness,” McCullough said, adding that the COVID vaccines were introduced “with an implicit talking point, and the talking point is, ‘They are safe and they are effective, and you will take them.’ Period. No discussions after that. No official discussions on safety and efficacy, no guarantee for reevaluation, no monthly review of safety.”
The safety was just assumed, even after a Chinese scientific paper was published pointing out that there were major health problems from the vaccine for people with underlying health issues, said McCullough.
McCullough called this broad use of the vaccines a “biological catastrophe.”
Furthermore, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) tried to bury information about the vaccines’ safety and efficacy by sealing, for 55 years, the “Pfizer dossier,” which is about half a million pages of documents detailing the key findings in the development and implementation of the vaccines, said McCullough.
The organization Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency sued the FDA under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and demanded the dossier be made public.
In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman said the group’s FOIA request was “of paramount public importance,” and ordered that the FDA release 55,000 pages per month (pdf).
From these documents, “we learned there were 1,223 deaths within 90 days of the release of the Pfizer program, worldwide. The standard is typically 50 deaths for some widely used product, [and it’s] taken off the market,” said McCullough
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) records deaths on its Vaccine Adverse Events Recording System (VAERS).
In the United States, McCullough said there have been 13,000 deaths recorded after receiving the COVID vaccine.
“That is astounding,” he said. “We have never let a product run like this for this period of time without revisiting safety, without reporting safety, without even questioning safety, and death being the final outcome.”
The Epoch Times reached out Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson for comment on vaccine safety.
“What I think a lot of the public didn’t understand is this is a completely novel technology,” said Leake. “These are genetic transfer technologies. You’re actually injecting messenger RNA that codes for the production of the spike protein, so this is Star Trek stuff.”
McCullough said it’s a false claim that vaccines reduce hospitalization and death.
He said there have been no thorough randomized trials with the active drug and placebo to show a reduction in hospitalization and death.
“None of the vaccines have had clinical trials done versus placebo with that composite endpoint,” said McCullough. “What’s happened over time is a false narrative that’s developed from observational data.”
There have been many “biased analyses by investigators and doctors and those in the biopharmaceutical complex who are invested in trying to promote the vaccines,” said McCullough
This file photo shows a box of ivermectin tablets. (Carl D. Master/Shutterstock)
He added that the analyses are based on faulty and biased data, which does not keep track of vaccinated individuals who come into a hospital. Instead, all who come into the hospital with a COVID infection are counted as unvaccinated by default.
“I can tell you those who’ve taken the vaccine are much more likely to have gotten early treatment, which really is the driver for reducing hospitalization and death,” said McCullough. He added that Gates, Anderson Cooper, and Vice President Kamala Harris all are vaccinated but also took Paxlovid, an early treatment for COVID-19.
Leake said the same rigor and safety standards that were applied to early treatment for COVID are completely ignored with the new messenger RNA vaccines. “Suddenly, the methodology and the rigor of ascertaining safety and efficacy is just thrown out the window with the vaccine,” he said.
McCullough said the pandemic could have ended quickly if resources had been put into giving high-risk patients early treatments with hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, but instead these early treatments were maligned.
McCullough also brought up monoclonal antibodies, another safe and effective treatment that’s been throttled in favor of vaccines, he said.
Despite the fact that these early treatments work well, they are pulled off the shelf, but the vaccines, which are not proven to be either safe or effective, are pushed on the public as the solution for the pandemic, said McCullough.
Leake and McCullough described what they observed and documented as a “monolithic vaccine solution” for all public health problems.
“This is what these international foundations are: the Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust. The big money guys have put all of their money on vaccines,” said Leake.
Their book documents how other national institutions, like the National Institutes of Health, profit from these vaccines and from a relationship with wealthy philanthropists.
“They actually had a meeting at Bill Gates’ grand house near Seattle back in 2000. For 20 years, they’ve been working together,” said Leake.
There is a vaccine agenda, in which the powers that be want every person to keep getting vaccinated indefinitely, McCullough said.
“They have advanced it forward and there is at the same time an oblivion to safety, and it’s global,” said McCullough.
McCullough and Leake said they’d like to see all vaccine mandates lifted and all COVID-19 vaccines pulled off the shelves for a thorough safety and efficacy review.
“We have been burned,” McCullough said. “This has been, in a sense, the crime of our lifetime, if not of all time, of mass vaccination of the world in the middle of a highly prevalent and evolving pandemic.”
Dr. Reni Moon has spent her entire career as an advocate for vaccines. A pediatrician who is double board certified in pediatric hospital medicine and pediatrics, Moon said she has counseled thousands of families and always encouraged them to vaccinate.
“I’ve trusted my governmental agencies to do the studies that needed to be done and the rigorous testing to make sure that what we are injecting into our kids is not going to harm them,” she said.
Until now.
Instead of unquestionably following the CDC’s recommendations without double checking, Moon has been tracking safety data about the mRNA injections herself.
She is so concerned about the safety signals she is seeing in the pediatric population, that, she said, giving COVID-19 vaccines for children is “the most appalling thing I’ve heard in medicine. The lack of regard for safety is highly unethical. I personally put it into the arena of crimes against humanity.”
Children More Vulnerable
Children’s bodies and brains are more vulnerable than adults’ to environmental toxicants. (1)
Since children are smaller than adults, they are more heavily exposed to toxicants, in proportion to their body weight.
Given their unique vulnerabilities, the safety threshold to give children any medication, medical intervention, or medical recommendation must be high, higher than for adults.
Children are the future of humanity. Protecting children is the duty of society.
Mild For Kids
The SARS-CoV-2 virus has always been a threat mainly to the elderly and to adults who have underlying health issues, while younger and healthy people have generally have done well and children have hardly gotten sick at all.
“All of the kids I know here at my institution had comorbidities,” explained a retired Colorado-based medical doctor and professor of ophthalmology and pediatrics who has a master’s degree in epidemiologist who worked at the state’s largest children’s hospital, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution from his medical colleagues.
But Dr. Kirk Milhoan, M.D./Ph.D., a pediatric cardiologist who has had a long and successful career helping children with heart problems in both America and around the world, is speaking up.
Milhoan is the medical director of the non-profit For Hearts and Souls, which helps children with heart defects around the world. Based in Maui, he also works one week a month at the Texas Methodist Children’s Hospital in San Antonio.
Milhoan pointed out that the disease itself is mild for most children.
He cited a recent Turkish study that examined how many children were admitted for COVID versus for the flu. (3)
“They found that kids admitted for the flu went to the ICU at rates and ended up needing breathing machines more often than children admitted for COVID,” Milhoan pointed out.
Though he, like other medical doctors we spoke with, is concerned about putting his livelihood in jeopardy by telling the truth, Milhoan feels he has a moral obligation to speak publicly about the lack of safety, efficacy, and necessity of the COVID-19 vaccines for children.
He told us, given the damage these vaccines are causing, that it is unethical for doctors to stay silent.
Vaccinating Kids Does Not Slow the Spread
“Let’s be honest,” Milhoan said. “It’s not stopping anything. Omicron is blowing through the vaccinated more so than the unvaccinated. After five months, for children, the vaccine has negative efficacy. It’s going to do more harm than good. What we’re seeing is that with those who are vaccinated they are more likely to get the infection than if they had nothing at all.”
Despite a concerted effort to massage the data to fit an orthodox narrative, high vaccination rates have not correlated in lowering COVID-19 cases or severity.
According to Milhoan, vaccinating children actually has the opposite effect: It encourages more—not less—viral spread.
But, despite this, there has been a push in the United States, Canada, and countries around the world to vaccinate even the youngest children. Even if the vaccine is not necessary or won’t protect them, parents are being told to get it for their infants, toddlers, small children, tweens, and teens for the sake of others.
Meanwhile, the country is saturated with the virus, which is quickly becoming endemic, as we have written about before. Testing reveals that COVID is everywhere, and that the vast majority of Americans and Canadians have already been exposed to it.
Vaccination rates among adults are high. The virus continues to behave like other endemic coronaviruses, mutating over time and continuing to cause milder illness and reinfections as few, if any, people are immunologically naïve to it.
The real irony is that the government had to roll back its early claim that the vaccine would prevent the spread of the virus after that was shown to be completely untrue. Yet the vaccine for kids is still being pushed for the sake of slowing the viral spread.
COVID-19 Vaccines Hurt Kids
We have spoken with over twenty-five medical doctors practicing in different states. They told us that COVID-19 vaccines side effects on children are real and very serious.
Their clinical experience is backed up by a growing body of peer-reviewed articles in the scientific literature that show that the vaccines can cause myocarditis (heart inflammation) and pericarditis (inflammation of the tissue surrounding the heart) in all age categories, but particularly in young men. There is also evidence that the vaccines can cause clotting disorders, facial paralysis, tinnitus, and other serious side effects. (4) (5) (6)
But what about long-term side effects? Children have a longer shelf life than adults, so to speak. They have many more years of life ahead of them than we do, so early exposure to pollution or endocrine disruptors or unsafe vaccines can result in longer-term ill effects.
Milhoan wrote his doctoral thesis on cardiac inflammation. “The vaccine is dangerous for adolescent males. Absolutely without a doubt, you’re more likely to go to the hospital with a vaccine injury than from COVID,” he said. “For many kids it’s all risk and no benefit. What are we doing?”
The race to vaccinate children has not been driven by the need to protect them. It is being pushed on parents in pursuit of the goal to vaccinate everyone. Parents, bombarded with messages of fear, have been duped. Many are eagerly vaccinating their children in the hope of protecting them, without realizing that the cure is by and far more dangerous than the disease.
This Crime Against Children Must Be Stopped
We cannot assume something is safe for children without proof. We invoke the precautionary principle here—the idea that a new product (like the vaccines against COVID-19) cannot simply be assumed safe in the absence of definitive proof that they are causing harm. The precautionary principle is a modern restatement of the Hippocratic oath that all doctors must adhere to” I will keep them from harm and injustice.”
Following the precautionary principle, the burden of proof is on the manufacturers of the COVID-19 vaccines. These companies have an ethical obligation to prove they are safe. But in violation of this ethical principle, the vaccines were rushed to the public without adequate testing. Now that we have ample proof that they are causing harm to children, it is time to stop using them.
Just this week Milhoan treated a 14-year-old who was perfectly healthy until getting a second COVID-19 vaccine. Now this young adolescent has a major scar on the left ventricle of the heart. Scarring like this, Milhoan said, can cause sudden death now or in the future in these children.
“I was in the military. I’ve gotten every vaccine,” Milhoan said. “I’ve had my second dose of smallpox, the whole series of anthrax. I am a scientist and a physician. I have seen the benefit that vaccines have had for children. This one has no benefit and all risk.”
References
(1). Carroquino MJ, Posada M, Landrigan PJ. Environmental Toxicology: Children at Risk. Environmental Toxicology. 2012;239-291. Published 2012 Dec 4. doi:10.1007/978-1-4614-5764-0_11
(2). Ledford, H. (2021). Deaths from covid ‘incredibly rare’ among children. Nature, 595(7869), 639–639. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-01897-w
(3). Yılmaz K, Şen V, Aktar F, Onder C, Yılmaz ED, Yılmaz Z. Does Covid-19 in children have a milder course than Influenza? Int J Clin Pract. 2021 Sep;75(9):e14466. doi: 10.1111/ijcp.14466. Epub 2021 Jun 27. PMID: 34107134; PMCID: PMC8237020.
(4). Lee, Eun-Ju et al. “Thrombocytopenia following Pfizer and Moderna SARS-CoV-2 vaccination.” American journal of hematology vol. 96,5 (2021): 534-537. doi:10.1002/ajh.26132
(5). Wan EYF, Chui CSL, Lai FTT, Chan EWY, Li X, Yan VKC, Gao L, Yu Q, Lam ICH, Chun RKC, Cowling BJ, Fong WC, Lau AYL, Mok VCT, Chan FLF, Lee CK, Chan LST, Lo D, Lau KK, Hung IFN, Leung GM, Wong ICK. Bell’s palsy following vaccination with mRNA (BNT162b2) and inactivated (CoronaVac) SARS-CoV-2 vaccines: a case series and nested case-control study. Lancet Infect Dis. 2022 Jan;22(1):64-72. doi: 10.1016/S1473-3099(21)00451-5. Epub 2021 Aug 16. PMID: 34411532; PMCID: PMC8367195.
(6). “Vaccine Researcher Who Developed Tinnitus After COVID Calls for Further Study,” MedPage Today. https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/97592
Researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology isolated new strains of a virus that is “closely related” to Monkeypox in a recently published study.
The unearthed paper follows The National Pulse unearthing another study published by the controversial Chinese lab that detailed the assembly of new monkeypox virus strains in February 2022. The work came just months before the latest international outbreak of monkeypox cases which appear to have now reached the United States.
Eleven researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology authored the newly uncovered paper “Identification, Isolation, and Characterization of an Ectromelia Virus New Strain from an Experimental Mouse,” originally published on July 21st, 2020. It was later included in the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s scientific journal Virologica Sinica in 2021.
The study describes the “isolation” of a new strain of Ectromelia Virus (ECTV) – “ECTV-WH” – from an experimental mouse brain. The strain was flagged as potentially having “higher replication efficiency in vivo and higher transmitting efficiency to cause respiratory infection in mice.”
The Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers also warn that ECTV is highly similar to Monkeypox:
“ECTV is closely related to Variola virus, the causative agent of smallpox, and Monkeypox virus, the causative agent of a severe zoonosis. It is an attractive virus model for study of poxvirus pathogenesis, viral immune and inflammatory responses, and could be used for antiviral and vaccine tests.”
At the time of the study’s publication, the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s ECTV strain was “preserved in the National Virus Resource Center.” Additionally, researchers noted it “could be provided as an important virus resource for study on poxvirus.”
The study was supported by several Chinese Communist Party-run scientific groups including the Chinese Academy of Sciences and military-linked entities including the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
The unearthed study follows the Wuhan Institute of Virology conducting similar research into strains of bat coronaviruses that could infect humans while admitting its facilities lacked proper laboratory safety protocols.
“Who was the Tolstoy of the Zulus?” Saul Bellow is alleged to have quipped some time in the early ’90s. Deploying what in today’s meme-ified political culture would probably be described as a clap back, the sportswriter and essayist Ralph Wiley responded: “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus. Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.”
Bellow would later plead the defense of journalistic misunderstanding and misrepresentation. But let’s—for the sake of argument—stick to the oversimplified, if rather unfair, version of the story: Wiley schools grumpy old reactionary. Viewed from 2022, the interesting thing about the exchange is Wiley’s appeal to universalism. Today, such an approach to culture has become passé in fashionable left-wing circles. To be woke is to espouse the importance of “lived experience,” to indulge in the very “fencing off” that Wiley denounced, and to obsess over the differences, say, between the Zulus and the Russians, rather than claim that a book could transcend them. In other words, to the in crowd of elite progressives, sticking up for a great work of European literature and what it offers to whoever might pick it up—whether they happen to be in St Petersburg or Soweto—is more than a little “problematic.”
What happened? When did the tables turn? And why do those of us who still believe in that universalism suddenly find ourselves out of step with the ideas that seem to dominate public life? More broadly, why is the West beset by a sometimes paralyzing self-loathing? These are some of the questions Douglas Murray answers in The War on the West, a book he describes in its introduction as being “about what happens when one side in a cold war—the side of democracy, reason, rights, and universal principles—prematurely surrenders.”
In his previous works, Murray, a British author now based in America, has tackled questions of cultural and identity politics on both sides of the Atlantic as well as immigration and radical Islam in Europe. The War on the West is designed for readers who, though they may see a great deal of folly in the woke reckoning that has become increasingly hard to ignore in recent years, might see it as an unserious sideshow. Murray urges readers to avoid the temptation to dismiss debates about race, history, and identity as “fringe” or trivial “culture wars.” To do so, he argues, is to “misinterpret the aims of the participants or downplay the role it will have in the lives of future generations.” At stake, he argues, is whether the West will be crippled by self-hatred and kill the goose that lays the golden egg, or whether we appreciate the West’s intellectual and cultural inheritance and use its strengths to our advantage.
The aggressors in Murray’s war come from within, and the battleground is all around us: everywhere from the pre-school classroom to the art gallery. Murray details the woke assault on a series of overlapping fronts—race, religion, history, and culture—and is at his best when picking apart the inconsistencies, fallacies, and hypocrisies in the assailants’ arguments.
Whether its the feted Ibram X. Kendi’s tautological definition of racism or the embarrassing historical ignorance of many of those put forward to argue for a statue to be brought down or a building to be renamed, there is very little there when the woke warriors’ arguments are subjected to a light grilling. As Murray demonstrates, the aggressors are also far more parochial than they think they are. Western history is, in their view, indelibly stained by racism. The rest of the world? Less so. “If other countries do have any racism, it must be because the West exported the vice to them,” says Murray, paraphrasing the argument.
Often, the mindlessness of the cultural and historical vandalism is so self-evident that Murray need do little more than lay out his opponents’ views. One of the dreariest scenes in The War on the West is a discussion at Cambridge University’s Churchill College on the “Racial Consequences of Churchill.” The panel was historian-free, and the participating academics were liberated to make all manner of ridiculous claims, recounted by Murray: The British Empire was “far worse than the Nazis” argued one; another argued that victory over the Nazis wasn’t a big deal given that “all we really did was we shifted from an old version of white supremacy to a new version of white supremacy”; a third snarkily pointed out that, actually, Churchill was at home, not on the front lines, during the Second World War. (The great wartime leader was in his late 60s when he became prime minister and, as Murray points out, saw action on four continents as a young man.)
A panel discussion at a Cambridge college is, of course, a fairly low-stakes affair in the grand scheme of things, but it is illustrative of the offensively ahistorical arguments that are tolerated if they are in keeping with the vogue for wokeness. Elsewhere, a more serious and sustained attack on Churchill and his legacy is underway. Once a universally admired national hero, the great statesman now faces a reckoning. It is an illustrative example for the British author (and this British reviewer), for, as Murray puts it: “If what Churchill did in his life doesn’t count for anything, then it is hard to see how any human action counts for anything. If Churchill’s good points cannot outweigh any bad points, then no one can ever do enough good in their lives.”
But that, of course, is the point. The bold choice of target reveals the scale of the assailants’ ambitions: “Perhaps more than any other single figure, he has been seen as an example of a great man—and a great man produced by the West.” If Churchill can be toppled, “anything might be forced upon a people so subjected and demoralized.”
Many of these arguments will be familiar to readers, but the value of The War on the West is in the shocking effect of the full battle report. Murray successfully conveys just how comprehensive the attack on Western values, culture, and history really is. The effect is energizing: a warning against the complacent eye-roll that is so tempting when faced with the latest woke insanity.
Applying present-day standards to historical figures is a fruitless pursuit no matter the target, but, as Murray identifies, it is the unevenness with which these tests are applied that gives the game away. Karl Marx’s racism and anti-Semitism, for example, has not led to the kind of reassessment that great Western leaders have been subjected to.
The War on the West will leave those who recognize the threat it identifies hungry for more. Murray fights back against the iconoclasts with vigor. But if, as Murray correctly identifies, wokeness resembles a godless religion—filling a need for cosmic meaning and its dogma trotted out unquestioningly—then there will be limits to the success of such appeals to reason. Here, Murray risks falling into the same trap as the New Atheists, who sometimes appeared to think that an especially witty enough debate-hall zinger would be enough to bring thousands of years of monotheism tumbling to the ground.
But where The War on The West is most valuable is in explaining the importance of the clash in question. A culture that finds it hard to say anything nice about itself is not one with a bright future. Does that mean the West is perfect? Of course not. But, as we are discovering, self-loathing is not a foundation on which to build a healthy society.
The War on the West by Douglas Murray Broadside Books, 308 pp., $27.99
Oliver Wiseman is deputy editor of The Spectator World, the U.S. edition of the world’s oldest magazine.
A UK study by University College London has confirmed “small but significant” cases of the serious Guillain-Barre syndrome (GBS), a rare neurological disorder associated with the AstraZeneca vaccine for COVID-19.
The researchers speculate that “the majority or all” of the 121 UK cases of GBS (pdf) in March to April 2021 were associated with first doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine administered in January.
“A similar pattern is not seen with the other vaccines or following a second dose of any vaccine,” said lead author Prof. Michael Lunn on May 30.
The team observed that from January to October 2021, 996 GBS cases were recorded in the national database but with an unusual spike from March to April with about 140 cases per month rather than 100.
To identify whether any or all of these cases were linked to vaccination, the team linked dates of GBS onset to vaccination receipt for every individual and found that 198 GBS cases (20 percent of 966) occurred within six weeks of their first dose of COVID-19 vaccination in England; of these, 176 people had an AstraZeneca vaccination, 21 for Pfizer, and 1 for Moderna.
The researchers found no excess GBS cases associated with mRNA vaccines, but observed 5.8 excess cases of GBS per million doses of vaccine for AstraZeneca, equating to a total excess between January to July 2021 of around 98–140 cases, confirming the association between the vaccine and GBS.
GBS is a rare and serious neurological disorder that occurs when the immune system mistakenly attacks its own nerves, typically resulting in numbness, weakness, pain in the limbs, and sometimes even paralysis of breathing.
The disease is commonly associated with Campylobacter infections that prompt the body to attack its own nerves.
However, GBS cases were also observed in the 1976 following administration of the swine flu vaccine as well as modern influenza and yellow fever vaccines, though none of them had rates as high as AstraZeneca.
Whilst the majority of the vaccination-associated GBS patients had recovered from symptoms of weak limbs, weak deep tendon reflexes, and monophasic sleep, one patient in the study had recurring neuropathic symptoms well after the second dose.
The patient initially developed facial paralysis on both sides and a tingling sensation in their limbs after the first dose and improved with treatment. However, two weeks after receiving their second dose, they developed increasing weakness with pain, changes in their nerves, and only partial response to the treatment.
Researchers are currently still speculating the reasons behind rises in GBS cases following the vaccine.
“It may be that a non-specific immune activation in susceptible individuals occurs, but if that were the case similar risks might apply to all vaccine types,” said Lunn.
“It is therefore logical to suggest that the simian adenovirus vector, often used to develop vaccines, including AstraZeneca’s, may account for the increased risk.”
Studies in the United States have also confirmed increased cases of GBS after receiving adenovirus vector COVID-19 vaccines, with significant cases of the disease associated with the vaccine.
According to the CDC, 1 to 2 people out of 100,000 in the United States develops GBS, however, a 2022 U.S. study found the incidence in receivers of J&J’s adenovirus vaccines to be 32.4 per 100,000 people within 3 weeks following the vaccine; well above the background rate.
A spokeswoman for AstraZeneca told The Epoch Times that “vaccination of any kind is a known risk factor for GBS” and “the small number of GBS cases [following the AstraZeneca vaccine] appears similar to increases previously seen in other mass vaccination campaigns.”
She wrote that reports of GBS have been very rare following vaccination and that “current estimates show that globally the vaccine has helped prevent 50 million COVID-19 cases, five million hospitalizations, and to have saved more than one million lives.
“The Emergency Medical Associates and other international bodies including the WHO, have all stated that the benefits of vaccination continue to outweigh any potential risks.”
