Almost all of America’s leaders have gradually pulled back their COVID mandates, requirements, and closures—even in states like California, which had imposed the most stringent and longest-lasting restrictions on the public. At the same time, the media has been gradually acknowledging the ongoing release of studies that totally refute the purported reasons behind those restrictions. This overt reversal is falsely portrayed as “learned” or “new evidence.” Little acknowledgement of error is to be found. We have seen no public apology for promulgating false information, or for the vilification and delegitimization of policy experts and medical scientists like myself who spoke out correctly about data, standard knowledge about viral infections and pandemics, and fundamental biology.
The historical record is critical. We have seen a macabre Orwellian attempt to rewrite history and to blame the failure of widespread lockdowns on the lockdowns’ critics, alongside absurd denials of officials’ own incessant demands for them. In the Trump administration, Dr. Deborah Birxwas formally in charge of the medical side of the White House’s coronavirus task force during the pandemic’s first year. In that capacity, she authored all written federal policy recommendations to governors and states and personally advised each state’s public health officials during official visits, often with Vice President Mike Pence, who oversaw the entire task force. Upon the inauguration of President Joe Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci became chief medical advisor and ran the Biden pandemic response.
We must acknowledge the abject failure of the Birx-Fauci policies. They were enacted, but they failed to stop the dying, failed to stop the infection from spreading, and inflicted massive damage and destruction particularly on lower-income families and on America’s children.
More than 1 million American deaths have been attributed to that virus. Even after draconian measures, including school closures, stoppage of non-COVID medical care, business shutdowns, personal restrictions, and then the continuation of many restrictions and mandates in the presence of a vaccine, there was an undeniable failure—over two presidential administrations—to stop cases from rapidly escalating.
Numerous experts—including John Ioannidis, David Katz, and myself—called for targeted protection, a safer alternative to widespread lockdowns, in national media beginning in March of 2020. That proposal was rejected. History’s biggest public health policy failure came at the hands of those who recommended the lockdowns and those who implemented them, not those who advised otherwise.
WASHINGTON, DC – APRIL 09: White House coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx speaks as (L-R) National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia listen during the daily coronavirus briefing in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on April 09, 2020 in Washington, DC. U.S. unemployment claims have approached 17 million over the past three weeks amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Alex Wong/Getty Images
The tragicfailure of reckless, unprecedented lockdowns that were contrary to established pandemic science, and the added massive harms of those policies on children, the elderly, and lower-income families, are indisputable and well-documented in numerousstudies. This was the biggest, the most tragic, and the most unethical breakdown of public health leadership in modern history.
In a democracy, indeed in any ethical and free society, the truth is essential. The American people need to hear the truth—the facts, free from the political distortions, misrepresentations, and censorship. The first step is to clearly state the harsh truth in the starkest possible terms. Lies were told. Those lies harmed the public. Those lies were directly contrary to the evidence, to decades of knowledge on viral pandemics, and to long-established fundamental biology.
Here are the 10 biggest falsehoods—known for years to be false, not recently learned or proven to be so—promoted by America’s public health leaders, elected and unelected officials, and now-discredited academics:
1. SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has a far higher fatality rate than the flu by several orders of magnitude.
2. Everyone is at significant risk to die from this virus.
3. No one has any immunological protection, because this virus is completely new.
4. Asymptomatic people are major drivers of the spread.
5. Locking down—closing schools and businesses, confining people to their homes, stopping non-COVID medical care, and eliminating travel—will stop or eliminate the virus.
6. Masks will protect everyone and stop the spread.
7. The virus is known to be naturally occurring, and claiming it originated in a lab is a conspiracy theory.
8. Teachers are at especially high risk.
9. COVID vaccines stop the spread of the infection.
10. Immune protection only comes from a vaccine.
None of us are so naïve as to expect a direct apology from critics at my employer, Stanford University, or in government, academic public health, and the media. But to ensure that this never happens again, government leaders, power-driven officials, and influential academics and advisors often harboring conflicts of interest must be held accountable. Personally, I remain highly skeptical that any government investigation or commission can avoid politicization. Regardless of their intention, all such government-run inquiries will at least be perceived as politically motivated and their conclusions will be rejected outright by many. Those investigations must proceed, though, if only to seek the truth, to teach our children that truth matters, and to remember G.K. Chesterton’s critical lesson that “Right is right, even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong about it.”
Scott W. Atlas, MD is the Robert Wesson Senior Fellow in health policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Co-Director of the Global Liberty Institute, Founding Fellow of Hillsdale’s Academy for Science & Freedom, and author of A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America (Bombardier Press, 2022).
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
In his new book, “Cause Unknown: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 and 2022,” former BlackRock fund manager Edward Dowd details data showing the COVID shots are a crime against humanity.
Insurance industry research in 2016 concluded that group life policyholders die at one-third the rate of the general U.S. population, so they’re the healthiest among us. Group life policyholders are those employed with Fortune 500 companies, who tend to be younger and well-educated.
In 2020, the general U.S. population had higher excess mortality than group life holders, but in 2021, that flipped. Ages 25 through 64 of the group life policyholders suddenly experienced 40 percent excess mortality, compared to 32 percent in the general population. In short, a far healthier subset of the population suddenly died at a higher rate than the general population.
American disability statistics are equally revealing. In the five years before COVID, the monthly disability rate was between 29 million and 30 million. After the COVID jabs, the disability trend changed dramatically. As of September 2022, there were 33.2 million disabled Americans – an extra 3.2 million to 4.2 million – a three standard deviation rate of change since May 2021.
Since May 2021, the overall U.S. population has experienced an 11 percent increase in disabilities, while the employed – which is about 98 million out of a total population of about 320 million – experienced 26 percent increased rate of disability. So, something was introduced into the workforce that caused working age people to die.
(Mercola) – In this video, I interview repeat guest Edward (Ed) Dowd, a former analyst and fund manager with BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world. With more than $10 trillion in assets, BlackRock wields greater financial power than any country in the world with the exception of the U.S. and China.
Dowd has a knack for seeing trends, and was able to grow the assets he managed during his time at BlackRock from $2 billion to $14 billion. Ten years ago, he left BlackRock, moved to Maui, and became an entrepreneur. More recently, he’s come out as a whistleblower against the COVID shots and Big Pharma corruption.
In our last interview, we discussed the mathematical certainty of a financial collapse, and how COVID provided a convenient smoke screen to hide this reality.
Data reveal crimes against humanity
Dowd has now published a book, “Cause Unknown: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 and 2022,” in which he details the data showing the shots are a crime against humanity.
“When this product [the COVID shots] came to market, I was very suspicious because I know a lot about health care” Dowd says. “I was on Wall Street and I used to analyze health care stocks. I knew that normal vaccines took seven to 10 years to prove effectiveness and safety.”
He added:
This was an experimental vaccine, a non-traditional gene therapy that had never been tested on humans. I read the literature on the animal tests and they were an abomination. Then, this thing was approved in 28 days. They got rid of the control group. I knew it was Operation Warp Speed, so I was highly suspicious of this whole thing from the get-go.
Then in early 2021, I started hearing anecdotes that people were getting sick and/or injured, or died, from distant friends and relatives. I started reading about sudden athlete deaths, [and] suspected the vaccine right away. I didn’t have the data that I have now, but I said to myself, ‘You know, I’m going to look at insurance company results, funeral home results.’
That eventually led to excess mortality statistics… I’m known as ‘the excess mortality guy’ right now. What I’ve learned through my own personal experience is that Pharma is, on the whole, mostly fraudulent. Most drugs that have been approved by the FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] aren’t really all that safe and effective.
They have to recall so many drugs every year. The FDA has been wholly captured by the pharma industry. 70 to 75 percent of the drug approval pharma arm of the FDA comes from pharma fees, directly from the companies, so this has been corrupted for a long time.
It’s now exposed primarily because [the COVID shot] is [injuring and killing] such a large amount of people. It’s hard to hide this one… This fraud is unveiled and out there for people to see, but it’s only in the echo chamber. Mainstream media is still beholden to Big Pharma because of all the ad spend and the government policymakers… [who] want this to go away.
There’s a giant cover-up going on as far as I’m concerned. The data that I’m going to talk about today is there for the global health authorities to see. They see what I see, and at this point it’s negligence, malfeasance, a cover-up and a crime.
That’s why I’m here, because I don’t believe anybody has a right to tell me what to do with my body, and I can’t believe this actually happened. The numbers I’m going to reveal to you are now a national security concern.
Group life insurance statistics tell a curious story
Dowd’s concerns are based on a variety of statistics, including but not limited to government mortality and disability data, as well as data from private insurance companies, such as group life insurance data. As explained by Dowd, group life policies are policies given to large Fortune 500 corporations and mid-sized companies.
Basically, when you start to work at one of these companies, you sign onto a policy from day one that includes a health care plan and life insurance plan (death benefit), which is typically one or two times your annual salary. The only way you can get a claim on these policies is if you die while employed. If you quit or get fired, you don’t get this claim.
I don’t need to tell you that there’s a problem. You can see what’s happening with your own eyes. Over the past year or so, there has been a strangely large number of healthy, young people who are “dying suddenly.” These poor people are dropping like flies at an alarming rate. At first, stories of young, healthy people “dying suddenly” were peppered here and there, but now, there are so many of these stories, that I can’t keep up with them. And just imagine how many of these “sudden deaths” aren’t being talked about in the media.
Scary thought.
Well, it’s gotten so bad, that people are now taking notice and talking about the “Died Suddenly” phenomenon. And one of those people is a former BlackRock fund manager who has poured through the data and what he found, is startling.
Lifestite reported that in his new book, “Cause Unknown: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 and 2022,” former BlackRock fund manager Edward Dowd details data showing the COVID shots are a crime against humanity.
Insurance industry research in 2016 concluded that group life policyholders die at one-third the rate of the general U.S. population, so they’re the healthiest among us. Group life policyholders are those employed with Fortune 500 companies, who tend to be younger and well-educated.
In 2020, the general U.S. population had higher excess mortality than group life holders, but in 2021, that flipped. Ages 25 through 64 of the group life policyholders suddenly experienced 40 percent excess mortality, compared to 32 percent in the general population. In short, a far healthier subset of the population suddenly died at a higher rate than the general population. American disability statistics are equally revealing. In the five years before COVID, the monthly disability rate was between 29 million and 30 million. After the COVID jabs, the disability trend changed dramatically. As of September 2022, there were 33.2 million disabled Americans – an extra 3.2 million to 4.2 million – a three standard deviation rate of change since May 2021.
Since May 2021, the overall U.S. population has experienced an 11 percent increase in disabilities, while the employed – which is about 98 million out of a total population of about 320 million – experienced 26 percent increased rate of disability. So, something was introduced into the workforce that caused working age people to die.
Edward Dowd goes on to say:
This was an experimental vaccine, a non-traditional gene therapy that had never been tested on humans. I read the literature on the animal tests and they were an abomination. Then, this thing was approved in 28 days. They got rid of the control group. I knew it was Operation Warp Speed, so I was highly suspicious of this whole thing from the get-go.
Then in early 2021, I started hearing anecdotes that people were getting sick and/or injured, or died, from distant friends and relatives. I started reading about sudden athlete deaths, [and] suspected the vaccine right away. I didn’t have the data that I have now, but I said to myself, ‘You know, I’m going to look at insurance company results, funeral home results.’
That eventually led to excess mortality statistics… I’m known as ‘the excess mortality guy’ right now. What I’ve learned through my own personal experience is that Pharma is, on the whole, mostly fraudulent. Most drugs that have been approved by the FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] aren’t really all that safe and effective.
They have to recall so many drugs every year. The FDA has been wholly captured by the pharma industry. 70 to 75 percent of the drug approval pharma arm of the FDA comes from pharma fees, directly from the companies, so this has been corrupted for a long time.
It’s now exposed primarily because [the COVID shot] is [injuring and killing] such a large amount of people. It’s hard to hide this one… This fraud is unveiled and out there for people to see, but it’s only in the echo chamber. Mainstream media is still beholden to Big Pharma because of all the ad spend and the government policymakers… [who] want this to go away.
There’s a giant cover-up going on as far as I’m concerned. The data that I’m going to talk about today is there for the global health authorities to see. They see what I see, and at this point it’s negligence, malfeasance, a cover-up and a crime.
I really encourage you to read the entire piece over at Lifesite. Click here.
Bill Gates and Dr. Anthony Fauci created a formidable public-private partnership that wields incredible power over the American public, and global health and food policies.
Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates
Story at-a-glance:
Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci have created a formidable public-private partnership that wields incredible power over the American public, along with global health and food policies.
Gates also created Bill Gates Investments (BGI), which predominantly invests in multinational food, agriculture, pharmaceutical, energy, telecom and tech companies with global operations.
Gates strategically targets BMGF’s charitable gifts to give him control of the international health and agricultural agencies and the media, allowing him to dictate global health and food.
Fauci and Gates met in person, shaking hands in 2000 in an agreement to control and expand the global vaccine enterprise.
Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci have become household names in the U.S., their largely sterling reputations protected by a heavily biased press.
Less known is the deep partnership between the two — the culmination of which has created a formidable public-private partnership that wields incredible power over the American public, along with global health and food policies.
In 1913, Rockefeller created the Rockefeller Foundation, which is largely responsible for creating the Big Pharma-controlled medical paradigm that exists today.
The foundation imbued its philosophy, precepts and ideologies into the League of Nations Health Organization, which turned into the World Health Organization (WHO).
Inspired by Rockefeller’s business model, Bill & Melinda Gates donated $36 billion worth of Microsoft stock to the BMGF between 1994 and 2018. Gates also created a separate entity, Bill Gates Investments (BGI), which manages his personal wealth and his foundation’s corpus.
BGI predominantly invests in multinational food, agriculture, pharmaceutical, energy, telecom and tech companies with global operations. Federal tax laws require the BMGF to give away a portion of its foundation assets annually to qualify for tax exemption.
Gates strategically targets BMGF’s charitable gifts to give him control of the international health and agricultural agencies and the media, allowing him to dictate global health and food policies so as to increase profitability of the large multinationals in which he and his foundation hold large investment positions.
As was the case with Rockefeller, whose wealth only grew after his Standard Oil Company was forced to split into 34 different companies, Gates’ strategic gifts have only magnified his wealth. Gates’ personal net worth grew from $63 billion in 2000 to $129.6 billion in 2021, his wealth expanding by $23 billion during the 2020 lockdowns alone.
How Gates controls the WHO
How does a private citizen, not an elected official, gain so much control over a global health agency like WHO? When it was founded, WHO could decide how to distribute its contributions.
Now, 70% of its budget is tied to specific projects, countries or regions, which are dictated by the funders. As such, Gates’ priorities are the backbone of WHO, and it wasn’t a coincidence when he said of WHO, “Our priorities, are your priorities.”
These tax-deductible donations give Gates both leverage and control over international health policy, “which he largely directs to serve the profit interest of his pharma partners.”
Further, “Gate’s vaccine obsession has diverted WHO’s program contributions from poverty alleviation, nutrition and clean water to make vaccine uptake its preeminent public health metric.
And Gates is not afraid to throw his weight around,” according to Kennedy. “… The sheer magnitude of his foundation’s financial contributions has made Bill Gates an unofficial — albeit unelected — leader of the WHO.” Gates’ power has grown further due to his decades-long partnership with Fauci.
Fauci’s immense power
Alone, both Gates and Fauci wield immense power in their fields. Together, they’re a formidable, if unfortunately nefarious, force.
This is where Fauci’s power lies: in his capacity to fund, arm, pay, maintain and effectively deploy a large and sprawling standing army. The NIH alone controls an annual $37 billion budget distributed in over 50,000 grants supporting over 300,000 positions globally in medical research.
The thousands of doctors, hospital administrators, health officials and research virologists whose positions, careers and salaries depend on AIDS dollars flowing from Dr. Fauci, Gates and the Wellcome Trust (Great Britain’s version of the Gates Foundation) are the officers and soldiers in a mercenary army that functions to defend all vaccines and Dr. Fauci’s HIV/AIDS doxologies.
Along with Gates, Fauci had the power to influence funding of U.S. foreign aid to Africa for AIDS, prioritizing that for vaccines and drugs instead of nutrition, sanitation and economic development.
Yet, Fauci and his team, funded by Gates, have never created a vaccine for AIDS, despite squandering billions of dollars, and causing uncounted human carnage. In 2020, many of the Gates/Fauci HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) vaccine trials in Africa suddenly became COVID-19 vaccine trials.
As explained in Kennedy’s book, HIV provided Gates and Fauci a beachhead in Africa for their new brand of medical colonialism and a vehicle for the partners to build and maintain a powerful global network that came to include heads of state, health ministers, international health regulators, the WHO, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, key leaders from the financial industry and military officialswho served as command center of the burgeoning Biosecurity Apparatus.
Their foot soldiers were the army of frontline virologists, vaccinologists, clinicians and hospital administrators who relied on their largesse and acted as the community-based ideological commissars of this crusade.
Fauci ‘enthusiastic’ about Gates COVID partnership
April 1, 2020, Fauci spoke with Gates on the phone, according to emails released in 2021. Fauci referred to the phone call in an email to Emilio Emini, the director of the Gates Foundation’s tuberculosis and HIV program, stating, “As I had mentioned to Bill yesterday evening, I am enthusiastic about moving towards a collaborative and hopefully synergistic approach to COVID-19.”
The email was part of 3,000 emails obtained via a Freedom of Information Act public records request by the Informed Consent Action Network. Despite having no medical degree, Gates has been granted direct access to top government health officials, who regard him as a public health authority.
“The Gates Foundation has committed at least $1.75 billion toward the global effort to fight the pandemic — a sum that opened doors at the highest levels of government. Following Fauci’s phone call with Gates, the Gates Foundation executive Emini emailed him to follow up and ask ‘how we can coordinate and cross inform each other’s activities.’
“‘There’s an obvious need for coordination among the various primary funders or the focus we need to have given the state of the pandemic will become lost through uncoordinated activities,’ Emini wrote.”
Fauci also said he would facilitate a call between Emini and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), which provides funding for vaccine and drug development, promoting “the advanced development of medical countermeasures to protect Americans and respond to 21st century health security threats.” Daily Mail continued:
“The Gates Foundation’s partnership with BARDA resulted in at least one joint funding project. In June 2020, Evidation Health announced that BARDA and the Gates Foundation were financing an effort to ‘develop an early warning algorithm to detect symptoms of COVID-19.’
“It’s unclear whether the warning system was ever launched, and Evidation issued no further statements on the project after the initial announcement. Other emails released … make it clear that the Gates Foundation remained actively involved in the NIH’s pandemic response.”
The Fauci-Gates partnership led to $1 billion in increased funding to Gates’ global vaccine programs, even as the NIH budget itself experienced little growth.
Long before the April 2021 phone call, however, Kennedy’s book reveals that Fauci and Gates met in person, shaking hands in 2000 in an agreement to control and expand the global vaccine enterprise.
Why haven’t you heard about this before?
When you’re one of the richest people in the world, you can buy virtually anything you want — including control of the media so that it only prints favorable press. If you have enough money — and Gates certainly does — you can even get major media companies like ViacomCBS, which runs MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon and BET, among others, to insert your approved PSAs into their programming — and BMGF has.
Via more than 30,000 grants, Gates has contributed at least $319 million to the media, Alan MacLeod, a senior staff writer for MintPress News, revealed.
From press and journalism associations to journalistic training, Gates is an overarching keeper of the press, which makes true objective reporting pertaining to Gates himself — or his many initiatives — virtually impossible.
Speaking with MintPress News, Linsey McGoey, a professor of sociology at the University of Essex, U.K., explained that Gates’ philanthropy comes with a price:
“Philanthropy can and is being used deliberately to divert attention away from different forms of economic exploitation that underpin global inequality today.
“The new ‘philanthrocapitalism’ threatens democracy by increasing the power of the corporate sector at the expense of the public sector organizations, which increasingly face budget squeezes, in part by excessively remunerating for-profit organizations to deliver public services that could be delivered more cheaply without private sector involvement.”
It’s a sentiment Kennedy, who believes Fauci and Gates should be investigated for criminal wrongdoing, has echoed. In an interview, he stated that billionaires are in collusion with media, corporations and politicians in order to increase their tremendous wealth:
“The most important productive strategy or the big talk around the oligarchs and the intelligence agencies and the pharmaceutical companies who are trying to impoverish us and obliterate democracy, their strategy is to create fear and division.
“So orchestrate fear, divide Republicans from Democrats and blacks from whites and get a lot of infighting so nobody notices that they are making themselves billions and billions, while they impoverish the rest of us and execute the controlled demolition of American constitutional democracy.”
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Children’s Health Defense.
Never forget….Fauci turned the AIDS situation into a scare and then a crisis from which thousands of people died far too soon because Fauci was at the head of it all manufacturing fear and division. He should have been sent to prison or executed for his crimes against humanity 30-35 years ago. Incredible to see what happens when you don’t cut the head off a snake figuratively. The snake comes back to strike even harder. Fauci has been lying in the weeds for decades waiting for his moment to strike knowing full well that it WOULD come and having a clear idea of HOW it would come for 20+ years. Coronavirus is a term Fauci knew full well would be in the mainstream at some point in his miserable, useless life.
1/22/99 “GENETICALLY engineered biological weapons capable of targeting particular ethnic groups could become reality within 10 years, an expert panel warned yesterday.
Viruses and other micro-organisms tailored to detect the differences in the DNA of races could offer warmakers and terrorists of the future a new means to carry out “ethnic cleansing”, said the panel convened by the British Medical Association (BMA).”
Source : Dr Leonard Horowitz book, COVID COUP: The Rise of the Fourth Reich
Bad judgments and usurpations—the scam, not the germs—define this disaster’s dimensions. The COVID-19’s devastating effect on the U.S. body politic is analogous to what diseases do to persons whom age (senectus ipsa est morbus) and various debilities and corruptions had already placed on death’s slippery slope.
Outside of the few who have gained (and are still gaining) power and wealth from the panic, Americans are asking what it will take to end this outrage—not to modify it with any “new normal” decided by who knows whom, on who knows what authority. Since no one in authority is leading those who want to end it, Americans also wonder who may lead that cause. What follows suggests answers.
What history will record as the great COVID scam of 2020 is based on 1) a set of untruths and baseless assertions—often outright lies—about the novel coronavirus and its effects; 2) the production and maintenance of physical fear through a near-monopoly of communications to forestall challenges to the U.S.. ruling class, led by the Democratic Party, 3) defaulted opposition on the part of most Republicans, thus confirming their status as the ruling class’s junior partner. No default has been greater than that of America’s Christian churches—supposedly society’s guardians of truth.
Truth
Since obfuscation, pretense, and lies concerning the COVID-19 are the effective agents of the panic and of the seizure of arbitrary power, truth and clarity about it are the foundational requirements for escaping its effects. Here is a dose.
From early March 2020 on, the best-known authorities on epidemics—the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control—presented the COVID-19 respiratory disease to the Western world as a danger equivalent to the plague. But China’s experience, which its government obfuscated, had already shown that the COVID-19 virus is much less like the plague and more like the flu. All that has happened since followed from falsifying this basic truth.
Our “best and brightest,” at first having minimized fears of person-to person contagion during January and February, during which the disease spread from China to the West, then declared that the virus is unusually contagious, and posited—on zero factual basis—that it would kill up to one in twenty persons it infected—5% infection/fatality rate (IFR). Based on that imagined fatality rate, they adopted mathematical models from Britain and the University of Washington that predicted that up to two million Americans would die of it.
The U.S. Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) modeled the authoritative predictions on which the U.S. lockdowns were based. Its model also predicted COVID deaths for un-locked-down Sweden. On May 3 it wrote that, as of May 14, Sweden would suffer up to 2800 daily deaths. The actual number was below 40. Whether magnifying this falsehood was reckless or willful, it amounted to shouting “fire!” in a crowded theater. What justifies listening to, and paying, people who do that kind of science?
Establishing any infectious disease’s true lethality is characteristically straightforward: test a large sample of the population proportionately representative of location, age, sex, race, socioeconomic categories. Follow up with the subjects a month later to add up the rate of infections and learn the results thereof. Period. Today, we still lack this definitive,direct knowledge of COVID’s true lethality because bureaucrats have prevented widespread testing for the purpose of firmly establishing the one figure that matters most. That is because that figure’s absence allows them to continue fearmongering.
In May the Centers for Disease Control, by then discredited professionally (though not, alas, in the mass media), was forced to conclude that the lethality rate, far from being circa 5% was 0.26%. Double a typical flu. The CDC was able to keep the estimate that high only by factoring in an unrealistically low figure for asymptomatic infections—never mind inflated figures for deaths. But the U.S. government, instead of amending its recommendations in the face of reality, tried to hide reality by playing a shell game with the definition and number of COVID “cases.”
During March and April, the authorities had defined as “cases” people sick enough to be hospitalized, who also tested positive. Whoever divided the number of reported deaths (a number inflated by a CDC directive to count deaths due to other causes as being due to COVID) by the number of cases thus defined, was predictably scared and willing to heed “the best advice”—namely societal lockdowns—on how to stay safe. That turned out to be ruinous in and of itself. At the time, they defined the number of these “cases” as the “curve” which we were supposed to sacrifice so much to “flatten,” lest the wave of hospitalizations overwhelm our health care system. Because their premises were wrong, that wave never came.
Instead, in May, as various non-official surveys were published showing that the majority of those who tested positive for COVID either barely knew that they had been infected or had not known at all, these very authorities doubled down their dishonesty. They began labeling mere infections as “cases.” They divorced reporting of these “cases” from reporting of the number of deaths, and warned the inattentive public about “spiking COVID cases” as if infection carried a serious risk. They also promoted widespread testing of wholly asymptomatic persons for current and past infections, the results of which tests were sure to produce a surging number of new “cases” thus defined.
And they toyed with reporting deaths by attributing to COVID any that “involved” or looked as if they might have involved it. They then included pneumonia, influenza, and COVID into the category PIC. That is how the death figure came to exceed 100,000. But if the CDC had used the same criterion that it did with the SARS virus, namely “severe acute respiratory distress syndrome,” the figure by the end of June would have been some 16,000.
Such naked ploys could succeed only because the media colluded in them. TheNew York Times’ May 27 lead story ominously blared: “California is the fourth state with more than 100,000 known cases.” Meanwhile, the number of deaths attributed to COVID continued dropping from ever-lower bases. By the July 1, even using the CDC’s inflated figures for COVID-responsible deaths, COVID-19’s Infection Fatality Rate for people under 70 was 0.04%. But rather than ask how clarion calls of danger comport with decreasing reports of deaths that may somehow be associated with it, the ruling class agitated to reverse returning to normal life. Be afraid, be very afraid. Heads the House wins, tails you lose.
Irrefutable if indirect indication that COVID is no plague also comes from comparison between the number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 during any given period with the number of deaths due to all causes for the same period—despite official inflation in the number of deaths attributed to the virus.
The Imperial College, London’s tally for Great Britain, broken down by age of death, shows that the chances of dying from COVID-19 infection roughly track the chances of death from all causes at any given age, except for the very young. For men, the chances of death co-incident with the virus don’t exceed 1%, or the average death rate, until age 70. For women, they don’t exceed the average death rate until close to age 90. In Spain, the death rate for infected persons over 90 years oldwas 10%.
The measure of “excess deaths” tells a similar story. During the six-week peak of the COVID event in 2020, deaths in the U.S. exceeded deaths during the same period in the previous year by 82,000. Considering that, concurrently, the 2020 flu season was one of the worst on record (typically the flu is responsible for some 50,000 deaths during the season) and given the CDC-mandated conflation of COVID numbers with others, the COVID-19 pandemic in and of itself did not amount to much—except in New York City, for reasons only partly known. By the week of June 20, 2020 the CDC was reporting ZERO excess deaths—meaning that the figure for weekly deaths was within the long-term normal curve for that time of the year.
Not incidentally, in 1957 some 116,000 Americans (out of a population two thirds of today’s size) died of the flu. Ten years later, the toll was 100,000 and in 2019 it was 61,000. By June 2020 the (inflated) toll from COVID-19 stood at 100,000.
In short, COVID-19 is not America’s plague. It did not shake America. The ruling class shook it. They have not done it ignorantly or by mistake. They have done it to extort the general public’s compliance with their agendas. Their claim to speak on behalf of “science” is an attempt to avoid being held accountable for the enormous harm they are doing. They continue doing it because they want to hang on to the power the panic has brought them.
BTW: Whenever you hear someone claiming to speak on science’s behalf, referring to authorities rather than to facts and logic, you may be sure that person is a fraud.
Falsehood
Falsehood extorted shutdowns, which caused deaths and ruined lives.
“Lockdowns” of the general population had to be based on the premise that everyone is, if not equally vulnerable, then equally responsible, and hence that everyone must stay cooped up to contribute to everyone else’s safety. But because every word of that is contrary to reality, false, a lie, applying the lockdowns’ force to society has caused needless deaths and suffering.
Prefatory to considering the lockdowns’ specific effects, we must be clear about what separation of infected or possibly infected persons from presumably un-infected ones can and cannot do. This has been known to whomever wished to know it since the Middle Ages, and repeated even in the humble 1956 study guide for the Boy Scout Public Health merit badge: protecting the un-infected from infection by limiting their contact with those who may be infected depends on knowing that the people to be protected really are un-infected.
Medieval Venetians, to make sure that no one coming from places infected by the plague would bring it into the city, prevented debarking from ships coming from such places for forty days (quarantine). By the same token, quickly finding the few infected among the many un-infected, and removing them even faster along with those with whom they had been in contact (known these days as contact tracing), is effective only to the extent of the bulk of the population’s near-virginity.
But, once an infectious disease has spread within a population, quarantines and associated measures are a waste at best. Personal hygiene and minimizing contact (what we now call social distancing) retain all their natural importance for reducing any given individual’s chances of infection to some extent—perhaps even delaying chances of exposure until the disease has run its course. But, once a contagion is rooted in a population, these measures make no difference to general public health. The disease running its course means, in part, that enough people have been infected and hence will have developed immunity, that they can no longer transmit it to others (herd immunity).
That is how human communities have lived with and through history’s countless epidemics. We have seen this once again in how COVID-19 affected Sweden and U.S. states (e.g. South Dakota and Arkansas) that never did shut down. When COVID-19 hit Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel said that, regardless of what anyone did, some 70% of Germans would eventually become infected. And that would be that.
Isolation makes the biggest of differences, however, to sub-categories of the population that may be especially vulnerable to the disease. The Bubonic Plague was an equal-opportunity killer, as was Smallpox. COVID-19, however, seems to discriminate a lot. Yes, all diseases are most noxious to those already most debilitated. But this one seems to have done so more than most.
In Italy, 99.1% of those who died with or of COVID-19 also suffered from other diseases. But this virus obviously has a special predilection for those with type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, compromised lungs, and most of all for the very old—to the point that a study by Germany’s Ministry of the Interior asked whether it made any sense to ascribe to any cause the deaths of persons whose bodies were in the process of shutting down anyhow. By contrast, COVID-19’s effect on ordinary healthy persons is considerably milder than those of ordinary respiratory diseases. What sense, then, could general isolation ever have made in the context of COVID-19?
It made some sense in the context of the U.S. ruling class’s (tragically wrong) assumptions/pretenses/convictions (take your pick) that the COVID-19 is so infectious as well as plague-like in its lethal danger to the general population, that a wave of desperately ill and dying patients would submerge American hospitals unless its natural course were slowed. Hence all medical decks had to be cleared of all other activities, emergency hospitals had to be constructed in the parks, and the Navy’s hospital ships had to be brought in.
As we have seen, there was never the slightest evidence that the COVID-19 virus could produce mass casualties. From the first, all evidence pointed in the opposite direction. Even in New York, where Governor Cuomo hyperventilated panic, the hospitals in the park and the Navy’s hospital ship were virtually empty.
But the ruling class’s attachment to its assumptions/pretenses/convictions overrode the obvious truth that the elderly and infirm should have special isolation from contact with persons possibly infected with the virus and that the rest of the population should go about its business.
The U.S. authorities, the “experts,” the ruling class, chose to do precisely the opposite.They “locked down” a general population that is at virtually no risk, thereby delaying the virus’s spread to people it could not harm and whose infection would build herd immunity. Keeping millions of people indoors also worsened their health. Keeping people from interacting and working normally wrecked economic and social life.
Worst of all, these authorities, these experts, transferred elderly persons known to be infected with the virus into nursing homes. In Michigan, the authorities even assigned to a nursing home an aide known to be infected with the virus. As a result, the as-yet fully uncounted deaths in these facilities, which house about 1.3 million people (about 0.39% of the population) come to about half of the total U.S. death toll. That is what happened, and it is perverse. It deserves punishment.
Doubly so because of the cruelty with which it was done. As known virus carriers and unscreened persons were moved in, as the contagion raged, the debilitated, powerless inmates were prohibited visits from their families. These, being nearly all uninfected, would have posed no danger. Had the families been allowed to visit, they might have become aware of what was happening. As it was, they were powerless to save these innocents who, without advocates, were effectively condemned. One New York nurse was fired for objecting. Triply perverse, because some of the officials responsible—e.g. Pennsylvania’s Secretary of health—knewwhat they were doing enough to pull their own relatives out of danger.
Others, e.g. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who sent 4,500 COVID-infected patients from hospitals to nursing homes and blew off his responsibility for over 5,000 deaths with the words “people die,” later deflected responsibility onto what legitimately may be deemed to be national policy. He cited guidance from the Centers for Disease Control: “’Nursing homes should admit any individuals from hospitals where COVID is present.” Both the lockdown for ordinary people andthe transfer of COVID carriers to nursing homes, said Cuomo, followed CDC recommendations. Cuomo did not resist the recommendation. He was occupied trying to score political points on Donald Trump.
In May Dr. Anthony Fauci, the federal COVID team’s most influential MD, explained the counterproductive national lockdown of healthy people on national television. Earlier, he had said lockdowns were needed to preclude the overcrowding of hospitals. That having proved to be his gross professional error as an epidemiologist, he now said that extending the lockdowns was necessary to prevent so many apparently healthy young people from eventually infecting the old and infirm.
But there is zero evidence that apparently healthy (i.e. asymptomatic though infected) people infect others with the COVID-19. The evidence is that only symptomatic people (ones with coughs and sniffles) do, and that not through casual contact. Moreover, if separating known spreaders had been Fauci’s intention all along, why had the CDC ordered known COVID carriers to be shifted to nursing homes? At the very least, the man who drove the COVID team did it in a reckless manner that killed people. He too had other things on his mind—political ones.
Similarly, Governors from New York to Michigan and Illinois, to California, Oregon, and Washington have ordered citizens to stay indoors—which always was and once again proved to be the ideal environment for the transmission of respiratory viruses. Illinois’s governor criminalized more than two people in any boat. Californians have been arrested for walking on the beach, and New York City’s mayor threatened to pull swimmers out of the sea. All in the name of Science. Online searches find no science that shows viruses thriving in fresh air and sunshine, never mind in salt water. The mayor of Los Angeles ordered residents to wear masks at all times outdoors, though there is no evidence that this virus transmits through casual proximity anywhere, but especially outdoors.
In July, Anthony Fauci said that masks are necessary. But in March the same Fauci had said they did more harm than good—equally without the slightest scientific proof. Surreally, the L.A. Health Department specified that persons should wash their hands after putting on unwashed face coverings, and refrain from touching their faces—except to put on the face coverings that were supposed to make their hands dirty to begin with! Science, anybody? Fauci also guided governors to permit people to congregate by the hundreds at Walmart and Costco, but to forbid them to do so in churches. This fount of Science also gave his imprimatur to sex among strangers but advised Christians to refrain from Communion. Too intimate. What level of partisan credulity does it take to believe any of that?
One may also ask what level of partisan credulity it takes to take seriously such personages as the governors of New York, Michigan, and California and the mayors of Chicago and Los Angeles, who personally flout the regulations they try to impose on others. Restrictions for thee but not for me!
The answer really does lie in the depth of political party/class solidarity. The governors and officials who imposed, maintain, and rationalize the lockdowns are all but one (Ohio’s) Democrats. Their counter-factual assumptions/pretenses/convictions, their misrepresentations, their falsehoods and outright lies, are all about their social class’s effort to secure their privileges against an increasingly recalcitrant general population.
Politics
We begin by focusing on how seamlessly the Western world’s ruling class has translated the COVID-19 event into yet another of its weapons in the fight it has been waging this century against voters’ growing disaffection. Support for the lockdowns has become as integral to the American Establishment Left, i.e., to the Democratic Party, as belief in abortion, global warming, open borders, and censorship of whatever they choose to call “hate speech.” To understand this, one must realize that the ruling class’s campaign regarding public health, global warming, race, the rights of women, homosexuals, micro-aggressions, the Palestinians, etc. etc. have far less to do with any of these matters than with seizing ever more power for itself.
Intersectionality
We note that the language, the attitudes, by which the ruling class have hyped COVID’s health challenge have been integrated into the identities of its constituency’s manifold components so as to add force to the longstanding demands of each. How readily—how naturally—activists for Black Lives Matter, Feminism, Global Warming, etc. have adopted support of all manner of socioeconomic restrictions on the pretend-basis of saving lives from the COVID as if it were their own cause, is yet another practical manifestation of the latter-day Left’s theory of “intersectionality.” As the activists of Black Lives Matter burn down buildings, they also wear masks supposedly to show their commitment to social responsibility for public health. Nor incidentally, they also tout their commitment to LGBTQ sexuality, for abortion, and against the nuclear family. The same may be noted about every component’s support of every other.
By the same token, every one of the ruling class’s constituencies, the disparity of their foci notwithstanding, has adopted as its own the demand that voting in American elections must henceforth be “from home,” with ballots collected or “harvested” by third parties. That would shift electoral power from those who vote to those who process and count the votes—i.e. to themselves. Hence it would set the entire ruling class free from the voters.
Each sub-constituency translates the accusation into its own idiom. In America, accusations of racism are the lowest (alas the most common) form of political pandering and intimidation. Securing over 90% of the black vote being the sine qua non of the Democrat Party’s electoral successes, no one was surprised when the New York Times, followed by the rest of the major media, noted that, the COVID-19 having struck African Americans proportionately harder than other races, proves American society treats them despicably and must submit to reform.
Yet at the Times, CNN, etc. they know that this is a lie and that, regardless of race, adverse outcomes of COVID-19 infections go along with obesity, type 2 diabetes, etc. And they know as well as anyone precisely to what extent African Americans exhibit these very conditions proportionately more than other races, and that these conditions have more to do with calories today than with slavery two centuries ago.
The COVID event has also made the face mask into a physical badge of tribal identity, common to all the sub-constituencies. Wearing the mask is now about publicly distinguishing the virtuous and deploring the deplorables. North Carolina’s Democrat Governor Roy Cooper said that “A face covering signifies strength and compassion for others” and “wearing one shows that you care about other people’s health.” On the same day, New York’s Andrew Cuomo put it this way: “Wearing a mask is now cool, I believe it’s cool…. Wearing a mask is officially cool.”
Anthony Fauci, who in March had told60 minutes “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” in May gave his scientific judgment that masks are “a symbol for people to see that that’s the kind of thing you should be doing,” while admitting that they are “not 100% effective.” He could hardly have done otherwise since the New England Journal of Medicine had said: “wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers [the wearer] little, if any, protection from infection,” and is irrelevant to others in casual contact. Such a symbol of intersectional identity has it become that, as rioters were burning Minneapolis, its Democrat mayor urged the rioters whom he let burn parts of his city to make sure they wore masks while doing so.
In sum, the lockdowns have been perpetuated and prolonged by people who care more about your compliance than your health.
Regime of Fear
They are about increasing the Democratic Party’s chances in the 2020 election.
The 2016 U.S. election confronted the U.S. ruling class with the possibility that the presidency’s enormous powers might be used to dismantle its network of prestige and privileges. The public is just beginning to understand the extent to which all manner of bureaucrats and allies used their powers to try defeating the challenge of 2016, and then instituted the socio-political equivalent of basketball’s “full court press,” treating anything and everything about the Trump administration as illegitimate, running official investigations not to gather information but as pretexts for feeding slander to their media associates. They tried to catch Trump in perjury traps. They toyed with the idea of leading him into statements that might be construed as bases for removal from office. But the U.S. economy boomed. Trump’s ratings rose. As 2020 dawned and Trump seemed a cinch for re-election, the Democratic Party et al. were grasping at straws for ways of getting at him.
By the time COVID came over the horizon, thought of using it had already crossed ruling class’s minds. No conspiracy was necessary or possible. The existing party sentiment and like-mindedness were enough to produce the unanimity and uniformity with which the ruling class has used the COVID-19 event to produce, stoke, and maintain fear, to energize its constituencies’ agendas in pursuit its power.
In January 2017 Dr. Anthony Fauci, speaking at Georgetown University, said he had no doubt that the Trump administration would face a “surprise outbreak” of “infectious diseases.” A few days earlier, The Atlanticpublished an article titled “How a Pandemic Might Play Out Under Trump,” which wished out loud that Trump’s handling of such an event would undermine his presidency. Yet earlier, NYU professor Arthur Caplan had published an article along the same lines: “The End of Civilization and the Real Donald Trump.” In short, weaponizing a public health event had crossed eager minds.
The prospect of locking down the country, ostensibly to save it from COVID-19, offered a near monopoly of communications. Trump’s rallies were shut down. Above all, churches were shut down, as well as the countless meetings of clubs, businesses, friends, etc. that are the lifeblood of what one might call the country class. Nor may people congregate as they wish for political purposes: the strictures that North Carolina’s Democrat governor put on the Republican National Convention made it impossible to hold it in that state.
Without face-to-face contact, television became the chief means by which communication took place—but it was one-way communication, whose programming and corporate advertising—immediately—began telling the people the joys of obedience: “we are all in this together,” “ Alone, together.”
It reeks of Orwell. The companies whose advertising pays for this are household names: Adidas, Amazon, Airbnb, American Express, Bank of America, BMW, Burger King, Citigroup, Coca Cola, DHL, Disney, eBay, General Motors, Goldman Sachs, Google, IBM, Mastercard, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Netflix, Nike, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Sony, Starbucks, Twitter, Verizon, Walmart, Warner Brothers and YouTube. The ruling class.
Driven by the politics of partisan identity, the ruling class used the COVID-19 event to collapse American life.
A glance is enough to reveal the perverse enormity of what it caused.
Because the lockdowns closed most restaurants and hotels, where about half of the nation’s calories were consumed, demand for food shifted in ways that made it impossible for distribution networks and processing plants to adjust seamlessly—especially as the government limited their operation and paid workers to call in sick. Millions of gallons of milk have been poured down drains, millions of chickens, billions of eggs and tens of thousands of hogs and cattle have been destroyed, acres of vegetables and tons of fruit disked under. Vineyards have been ripped out. This scrambled allocation and waste of food resulted in shortages. Prices in the markets rose. In some places, meat and eggs were rationed. Persons deprived of work have less money with which to pay these prices, and struggle to feed their families. This reduced countless self-supporting citizens to supplicants at food banks.
Who could produce surplus and scarcity simultaneously except sorcerers’ apprentices wielding government power? That’s expertise for you. By intentionally reducing the supply of food available to the population, the U.S. government joined the rare ranks of such as Stalin’s Soviet Union and Castro’s Cuba.
But no sane person had ever imagined the near-shutdown of a whole nation’s entire medical care except for one disease. The U.S. government did that, on the advice of its very best experts. Between mid-March to July hospitals stood nearly empty, having cleared the decks for the (ignorantly) expected COVID flood. Patients having been discouraged or forbidden to come in for other reasons, doctors and nurses were idled. Not a few were furloughed. Emergency rooms were closed to most of their customers—the poorer people who routinely get routine care there. Private clinics and practices—where most Americans get most medical care—practically shut down. Many will never reopen. Forget about dentistry. This has meant that most Americans have been left essentially without medical care for about a third of a year.
Tests missed, conditions not diagnosed, treatments forgone or delayed. Human bodies’ troubles not having taken a corresponding holiday, it is impossible to estimate how much suffering and death this lack of medical care has caused and will yet cause—all while the U.S. government was making it happen. Officials who claim to be smarter than we ordered it—for our own good, they claim.
More than forty million Americans have filed claims for unemployment assistance since the shutdowns began. To this number one must add the as-yet unknown tens of millions owners of small businesses which were forced to close or radically to reduce activity. Add to that the uncountable millions not directly affected—farmers, professionals—whose products and activities the shutdowns de-valued. Imagine the millions of careers wrecked, the shattering of dreams that had been realized by lifetimes of work, and you search for words to describe it: Catastrophe? Tragedy? Man-made, for sure.
The experts who made this happen stigmatized, tried to silence, and effectively criminalized dissent as dangerous to health and, of course, as racist. But there is zero evidence that all or any of the above measures increased anybody’s life expectancy, and plenty to the contrary. They wronged America. But why? and cui bono?
Power
All of the above served the ruling class’s overarching interest in its own power. Are there any categories of people who benefited from the shutdowns? Government gained. We know of no employee of federal, state or local government who was furloughed or had his or her pay reduced. On the contrary, all got additional power. The federal government created trillions of dollars, the distribution of which is enriching the usual suspects involved in administration. The teachers’ unions gained the power to extort concessions as a price for reopening schools. Among them, restrictions on or elimination of charter schools.
And as independent businesses were throttled, big ones grew. The biggest, Amazon, was the biggest winner. The news media, unrestricted and at the service of the powerful, themselves exercised unprecedented power. The social media platforms seconded the coup by censoring dissent from the “line” of their own most aggressive bureaucrats and officials. Try getting figures for COVID deaths and how they are counted from Google. YouTube deleted a video gone viral of two medical doctors who pointed out the truth about the COVID-19’s true lethality as dangerous disinformation, and Twitter appended a note to President Trump’s objection to voting by mail for facilitating fraud, accusing it of falsehood.
Prohibitions such as of playing in the park or swimming in the sea are mere devices to train the public to accept unlimited bureaucratic discretion. You may congregate at Costco, but not at church. Failure to obey regulations will land ordinary citizens in jail, while the jails release robbers and child molesters. You may not exceed limits on occupancy or fail to wear a mask. You may not even sing in church. But if you and friends loot and burn the neighborhood store, the police will just stand by. Yet all Democrat governors celebrated and some joined masses of “protests”—forget about masks and social distancing. They did this not for anybody’s health but to to secure another few percentage points of the black vote for their party and to leverage their seizure of power over police forces.
We are supposed to believe that all this is dictated by “Science.” In June, 1,200 “health experts” signed a letter approving the BLM protests because, it said, “white supremacy is a lethal public health issue.” But it cautioned that “this should not be confused with a permissive stance on…protests against stay-home orders.” In short, Coronavirus restrictions, like the rest of political correctness’s commandments, are pure political weaponry—nothing short of an inversion of the American people’s priorities, accomplished by nobody’s vote. Ruling class presumption. In short, we are living through a coup d’état.
Declaring emergencies to excuse taking “full powers” is the oldest of ploys. Does anybody remember the Reichstag fire? The prospect of similar things happening in America had been rising along with the ruling class and the administrative state. The authorities’ seizure of arbitrary power in the name of expertise is the deadliest strike at our way of life. Suspending law and rights, issuing arbitrary rules of behavior, has been mostly the doing of Democrat-controlled state and local government. But the lead came from the Democrat-controlled Federal bureaucracy, empowered by a president elected as a Republican, and with the silent complaisance of perhaps a majority of Republican politicians.
The ruling class’s gains of power and money have been at the country class’s expense, and have depended on suppressing truth.
An egregious example of forcible official lying is the ruling class’s political campaign against the drug Hydroxychloroquine. President Trump had pointed to the truth that this standard treatment for malaria for more than a half century is effective against the early and mid-stages of the COVID disease. This fact had been discovered accidentally and confirmed by studies and practices in France, Spain, India, and South Korea. In April, U.S. doctors started prescribing it widely, reported good results, and took it themselves prophylactically. The ruling class found this intolerable because it contradicted its narrative that nothing could prevent the sky from falling, but above all because its success might cast a favorable light on Trump. Hence it set about canceling truth about drugs from public consciousness and substituting its own narrative.
The ruling class machine began by labeling reports of the drug’s success as “anecdotal.” Then, the Veterans Administration gave the drug in small doses to some 380 elderly patients dying with/of the COVID. Every major media outlet touted their deaths as proof of its ineffectiveness and danger. On May 22, theLancet, arguably the most authoritative medical journal, published what it called an analysis of the world’s biggest medical data base showing, definitively it claimed, that Hydroxychloroquine is ineffective, counterproductive, and dangerous. The Yale School of Medicine officially concluded that the drug is bad stuff, despite a study to the contrary by its own professor of epidemiology, Harvey Risch. The great Anthony Fauci who, when pressed hard, had said that he would take the drug were he to be sick of the COVID, then backed the political narrative by quipping that, as of now there is no treatment for COVID illness. The U.S. food and Drug Administration stopped clinical trials, pharmacy boards refused orders from physicians and retailers, and hospitals around the country required their physicians to stop treating their patients with it.
It turns out, however, that the Lancet study’s database was part of a fly-by-night, strictly political operation, and that its details are literally incredible—e.g., the number of reported Hydroxy deaths for one Australian hospital exceeded the number of total deaths for the entire country. In short, the report was another professionally unsustainable hit job. The New York Timesreported that “More than 100 scientists and clinicians have questioned the authenticity” of the database as well as the study’s integrity. The Lancet withdrew it in shame.
But it was too late. Fauci and the medical establishment did not apologize. For the media and for headline-readers, the case was closed. The lie stood. Then, on July 1, Michigan’s Henry Ford health system published a peer-reviewed study that shows Hydroxychloroquine significantly cut death rates even in mid-to-late COVID cases. Again, the ruling class machine ignored the truth. Again: all mainstream news about the COVID affair is related to health only incidentally. Be very afraid.
Nor has the COVID affair to do with any emergency—except possibly the 2020 election. Democrat politicians and the stream of public service TV advertising have left no doubt that the ruling class’s objective is to establish “a new normal” by extending into the indefinite future the powers by which bureaucracies have eclipsed America’s laws and way of life.
But, as the Authorities toyed too openly with the truth, they impeached themselves and lost authority. Fewer and fewer believe what they hear from on high. As Russians under Communism learned, the truth is usually the opposite. Whenever the government reported bountiful harvests, they stocked up on potatoes.
Default, and Consequences
Fairness requires noting that, regardless of whatever America’s ruling Left has done, whatever its hopes, plans, or coordination, what actually happened to the United States of America consequent to COVID could not have happened had President Donald Trump, much of the Republican Party, and America’s religious establishment not concurred in its happening.
This is another way of saying that the ruling class rules by size and seduction, as well as by intimidation. It did not rush into imposing the shutdowns, or even into making too big a deal of COVID. Its parts and personages did not fully commit themselves until after they had convinced president Trump to give them the preclusion of opposition without which inflicting so much pain on so many would have exposed them to official and popular retribution.
President Donald Trump, having cut travel from China on January 31 and from Europe on March 12 had maintained his grip on public opinion while pointing to the evidence that that COVID is not catastrophic. He sustained accusations of xenophobia. But, as the virus took root in America, the opposition shifted to blaming him for doing nothing in the face of a plague. Countering that would have required standing on the truth, attacking the central falsehood that the COVID is a plague, and its purveyors as liars. Since the experts had been wrong again and again, this was doable.
But on March 15, Trump asked the country to shut down for fifteen days to slow the spread of the disease—to flatten the curve. Then, on March 31the New York Times crowed victoriously that the previous week, President Trump had been stampeded to abandon his goal of restoring normal life by Easter: “The numbers the health officials showed President Trump were overwhelming. With the peak of the coronavirus pandemic still weeks away, he was told, hundreds of thousands of Americans could face death if the country reopened too soon.” Also, poll questions that framed the choice just so had helped produce another set of numbers. Said the Times: he was told that “voters overwhelmingly preferred to keep containment measures in place over sending people back to work prematurely.” Trump let himself be scared into sheltering politically under what he supposed would be the protective professional wings of Dr. Anthony Fauci and the CDC.
Trump believed that Fauci would cooperate in a plan for reopening, and counted on the Democratic Party sharing credit for providing near a trillion dollars in relief to the people who the lockdowns were depriving of livelihood.
But, once Trump let go of the truth, he ceded control and entered a political blind alley. Trump was giving the de facto alliance between the Democratic Party, Fauci et al., the press, and a host of profiteers public credit even as they discredited him in every way possible. They had him where they wanted him. As the lockdowns throttled America, they used the political leverage to raise demands. They aimed at his political demise as well as at economic, social, and political transformation.
The guidelines for “Opening Up America Again” that Trump unveiled on April 17 resulted from that imbalance of political credit and leverage. Far from returning the country to what it had been, the “
The Guidelines “advise” (that means “mandate” for officials who so choose) opening only to a percentage of capacity, and with restrictions—e.g. no singing in church,—that counter their reason for being. But churches and small business cannot survive at less than at full capacity. Schools set up other than for maximum concentration on the stuff to be learned are counterproductive. In short, the guidelines give federal sanction to choking America’s “main street” sector.
The guidelines’ arguably most dangerous legacy may be their recommendation/requirement that governments certify persons’ safe status for work and public interaction by tracking and isolating persons infected with the virus—or said to be. This involves hiring hundreds of thousands of persons to enforce compliance with decreed regulations on personal behavior—effectively a “lifestyle police,” empowered at the very least to declare anyone the equivalent of “medically untouchable.”
The governors of Michigan and California (there is no dissent among Democratic Party officials) have already defined “racism” as a major health hazard. Is there any doubt that these police will be less concerned with health as ordinary people understand it than with enforcing their chiefs’ will on political opponents? Thus, without law or trial, anyone could be separated peremptorily from job, business, or family, pending redress in the courts—which most people cannot afford.
Were this practice adopted nationally, it really would be the centerpiece of a “new normal.” By May, New York’s mayor had already deputized hundreds of (arguably former) gang members and criminals, paying them to circulate among the general population to “encourage”—dare we say, intimidate?—citizens to follow the Mayor’s orders. He also offered rewards for reports on neighbors’ violations of those orders. This is the beginning of explicitly partisan policing more as in China than in the America in which we grew up. Not incidentally the World health Organization—an extension of China’s government, formally recommended that nations “observe active surveillance and tracing of their populations.” Presumably, when the next virus comes along, the ruling class’ arbitrary powers will ratchet up yet another notch.
Sadly Anthony Fauci, whose reputation could not withstand any sort of scrutiny, retains the capacity to mislead because no one with a major national audience has publicly scrutinized it.
All of this, one must keep in mind, is so because President Trump’s complaisance with the ruling class’s falsehoods about the virus precluded high-level affirmation of the truths that negate the COVID Coup lies and pretenses. That he gave that complaisance contre coeur is beside the point. When pressed, Trump stuck by the falsehoods, as he did on April 22, after Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, who had opposed the lockdowns, announced that he was lifting them in his state. Trump chastised him publicly in the strongest terms, prompting the media into an orgy of accusations that Kemp was turning Georgia into a death camp. As it happened, Georgia got healthy. But that did not matter.
The biggest and most significant default however, has been that of America’s Christian churches—all of them—from their hierarchs to their priests, pastors, and ministers. Their complaisance with the lockdowns set aside a truth far more important to human dignity than anything having to do with any physical ailment—the one truth that puts all human power in proper perspective, the truth on which our civilization itself rests: that no human power can manufacture true and false, right and wrong, any more than we can make ourselves, and that, therefore, we are obliged to “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s.”
Jewish congregations have been similarly craven.
The churches’ agreement to suspend public worship and the distribution of sacraments also contradicted their duty. Until 2020, Christian clergy felt obliged not just to offer public worship to whomever, but also to search out the sick, to offer sacraments to the dying, especially in places where victims of plagues lay between life and death—regardless of consequences. Because surrendering to secular dictates concerning how congregants should behave, even in church cannot be justified in Christian terms it would not have crossed previous generations of churchmen’s minds.
Had this generation of church leaders simply practiced their faith, even by merely keeping silent about the ruling class’s claims about the COVID-19 rather than ignorantly, submissively endorsing them, they would have preserved their intellectual and moral credit to help the general population to deal with the growing realization that they had been duped. Instead, they chose to be complicit with tinpot Caesars. Hence, as Americans face the bitter fact that we have been hurt worse than for nought, the churches have largely disqualified themselves as arbiters of truth.
Truth and clarity about what history will record as the 2020 COVID coup is the necessary condition for the American people to overcome its effects. Overcoming those effects must begin with discrediting those pretenses and the reputations of those who made them.
Who Will Lead Us?
Uncompromised leadership is in short supply because few prominent persons have resisted ruling-class pressure to join its COVID narrative. But so anxious are Americans for truth about what happened, what is happening; so substantively thin are the lies on which the scam has been based, and so abundant are the resources for establishing the truth; so hungry are Americans for examples of successes in countering the scam, that a few courageous leaders in key places may suffice.
The following outlines how the U.S. Senate can function as a truth commission concerning the COVID coup’s several aspects, and how state governors so inclined can provide practical leadership to motivate, guide, and legitimize life independent of our dysfunctional ruling class.
With regard to the latter, we note that the manner in which states and localities run by Democrats have managed the COVID event differs from that of places otherwise governed as if they were from regimes, countries, even civilizations, alien to one another. This is yet more evidence that American society has largely broken into incompatible pieces, and that avoidance of civil war may hinge on mutual tolerance of parting ways. More on that below.
Truth Commission
In the past, as the misbehavior of important persons confused and divided Americans, wise senators summoned to public hearings those involved in the controversies, put them under oath and hence possible penalty for perjury, and established the often-uncomfortable truth on which the country came together. In 1948 Senator Richard Nixon’s (R-CA) hearings showed beyond doubt how deeply Soviet intelligence had penetrated our government. Between 1951 and 1957, Senator Estes Kefauver (D-TN) exposed and hence dismantled the mafia’s control of the U.S. labor movement. In 1974 Senator Sam Ervin’s (D-NC) hearings left no doubt about President Nixon’s role in the Watergate coverup. Today, the COVID scam being based on lies and misrepresentations by countless important persons, rigorous public testimony under oath can expose them and those who spread them.
Because of jurisdictions and/or of particularly able chairmen, the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security and Oversight, on Health, Education and Labor, on Finance, and on the Judiciary, each can shine their particular lights on specific aspects of the problem.
Senator Ron Johnson’s (R-WI) Committee on Government Affairs, with oversight over the Centers For Disease Control, can set the record straight about how its relationship with China’s laboratories, with the World Health Organization and with the Chinese government itself has shaped how the U.S. government has dealt COVID. The CDC having grasped enormous powers over American life, the Committee can inquire about the level of expertise it has brought to its task. What, if anything, justifies its claim to scientific management? The Committee can also audit how the CDC’s expenditure of funds and efforts among a variety of political, non-health topics affected its readiness to deal with the recurrence of viruses from exotic places.
Its subcommittee on Oversight and Emergency Management, under Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), himself a physician, is well placed to expose who knew what about the COVID-19 virus, when they knew it, who told the public what, and on what basis. The public has noted with dismay the discrepancy and contradictions about COVID-19 from supposedly medical experts, most prominently by Dr. Anthony Fauci.
At different times, these experts told us that the virus posed very little danger, and that it was a mortal threat to us all, that masks were useless, and then essential. On the basis of their many statements, hundreds of millions of American lives were wrecked, and millions continue to languish under “guidelines” that make no sense on their face. Expert questioning under oath in front of the cameras can let the American people judge for themselves what sense they make. The experts will have to reveal what medical expertise might have led them to stigmatize young people relatively unaffected by the COVID for going to the beach while not objecting as greater numbers of higher-risk black Americans rioted in the streets.
The jurisdiction of Senator Charles Grassley’s Finance Committee (R-IA) includes unemployment compensation, social services, and Medicare/Medicaid. The COVID event having caused some forty million persons to file for unemployment, having placed unusual burdens on all manner of government services, and having roiled food markets in ways harmful to health as well as suggestive of possible price fixing, this Committee is well placed to unravel the causal threads between the strictures that governments have placed on the population and the troubles that ensued. Grassley, one of the Senate’s better investigators, can showcase categories and individuals hurt by the lockdowns and call governors to square the harm they caused with the benefits they claim they achieved. Who lost my job? Who destroyed my business? where do I go to rebuild what I lost? These are some of the questions that the committee can put to officials on the American people’s behalf. Grassley and ranking Democrat Ron Wyden (D-OR) can also bring to bear their staff’s expertise regarding nursing homes to probe how government policy brought about the holocaust that the COVID-19 wrought in them.
Parents all over America wonder about the basis on which the 2019-20 school year was cut in half and the bases on which the 20-21 year was compromised. Senator Rand Paul’s Subcommittee on Children and Families can put such questions authoritatively to the officials who made that call, confront the projected risks with reality, and weigh them against the results of lost education and social disruption.
Americans ask by what right governors and mayors essentially put people under house arrest without due process, and had them arrested for such activities as playing in the park or paddling in the sea; by what right they shut down religious services, etc. What else may government do in violation of the Bill of Rights? Under the U.S. Constitution, what limits are there on a citizen’s obligations and rights? These are some of the questions with which Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) can confront federal, state, and local officials summoned before Senate Judiciary’s Subcommittee on the Constitution. Cruz would also summon officials of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division and ask why they have not treated state and local officials’ denial of the free exercise of religion and of freedom of assembly as violations of the First Amendment. What is their understanding of civil rights?
The American people have an interest in knowing how the mentality of current officials is changing the practical meaning of the Constitution’s words. Cruz might well ask, government officials having changed the meaning of the basic bargain between people and government, what remains of the people’s obligation to obey the government?
ExemplaryLeadership
Publicly contrasting the thoughts, deeds, and consequences of the officials and professionals who made the COVID event such a tragedy with those of the officials and professionals who led in opposite directions would not be the least of the beneficent results from serious hearings. Most Americans don’t know, but should, that several U.S. States never did shut down, while others reduced activities far less than the likes of California and New York. Like Sweden’s government, these states’ officials never saw reason to believe that the COVID was the plague and believed that individual persons’ exercise of responsibility for themselves is the surest guarantee of safety for all.
But the differences in what happened in California and Florida, in New Jersey and South Dakota do not speak for themselves. That is why the public would benefit by seeing these states’ governors defending their widely different perspectives on the COVID, and their results.
Perspective
It should be clear that the COVID event in America is only tangentially about health. It is essentially a political campaign based on the pretense of health. Mere perusal of news from abroad is enough to see that this is true as well throughout the Western world. Throughout, the campaign by governments and associated elites has essentially smothered social and economic activity. Not least—and by no means incidentally—it has smothered the overt political opposition which had increasingly beleaguered said governments and elites throughout the Western world.
Through the previous decade, the various failures and inadequacies of these governments and elites, of “Davos Man,” had become the prime subject of public discourse. At the very least, the COVID campaign changed the subject to physical safety and economic survival. Davos Man tightened control by using the state’s coercive power more forcefully than in wartime, covering its class by claiming to speak for “science” in a manner that precludes counterargument.
In America as elsewhere, there was no doubt about which sectors of society were on what side, who were the campaign’s protagonists, winners, and losers. The governments, their bureaucracies, the major legacy political parties, the celebrities and the media, Davos Man, were on one side. On the other were middle class people and their “populist” representatives. As the northern hemisphere’s summertime was banishing the latest respiratory virus, Davos Man strove to make as many restrictions as possible part of a “new normal.”
In Europe as in America, the COVID affair was but the latest round in which the very same protagonists had faced off. There as here, the language and attitudes with which Davos Man denigrated its supposed inferiors in the COVID affair fit seamlessly into previous patterns of the larger, long-term struggle. Had there been any doubt that the COVID-19 virus was more an occasion than a cause, it vanished at the end of May as, on both sides of the Atlantic, Davos Man switched to berating ordinary people and their civilization and ginned up yet another campaign to beat back challenges to its power.
Steve Kirsch recently wrote an excellent article highlighting three “scientists” whose guideline recommendations were ultimately responsible for the deaths of nearly a million Americans.
To summarize: It shows that there are dozens of treatments for COVID-19 that have numerous peer reviewed studies demonstrating their efficacy. Despite those existing therapeutics and countless petitions for their usage, the committee responsible for developing the guidelines on what is an appropriate treatment for COVID-19 has only approved remdesivir, which is a toxic drug with no therapeutic value for treating COVID-19. As a result, a dangerous drug has been mandated, while many drugs that would save lives are prohibited in most medical systems.
Evidence based medicine is commonly thought to mean “the best evidence” dictates the standard of care. In reality, it typically means financial interests dictate the standard of care and “evidence” is just used as a smokescreen to justify profiteering. This table that I initially discovered from Kirsch’s article provides clear and unambiguous proof of that contention. See if you can figure out what the circled drugs (those which received an EUA) all have in common!
Because I expected the conflicts of interests of the committee that determined the COVID-19 treatment guidelines to follow the typical pattern, I did some digging and discovered a lovely web of corruption that entangled many of its members. The purpose of this article is to explain the typical pattern and illustrate how it was followed in this case. I am doing this because I believe the first step to moving beyond that pattern is to recognize its existence. For those of you who do not need the context, please skip ahead to the COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines section.
Introduction
There are two ways you can observe most organizational systems:
•As someone trapped inside the system observing their surroundings.
•As an outside observer who sees the entire system as a whole.
Since we typically do not explore or examine systems that are outside our everyday lives, we will typically experience the first type of observation. This occurs after life circumstances force us to become stuck in a system, which happened to many of us who were swept into the maelstrom of COVID-19.
Two of my central principles for understanding the architecture of modern society have been the relentless creation of hierarchal systems and the monopolization of resources that are essential for life.
In regard to the first principle, no matter where you look, a typical pattern is always followed: a hierarchy is established, significant investment is created to establish the importance of the hierarchy, and the top of the hierarchal pyramid is bought out (often through bribes) so that a small investment at the top can be leveraged to control an entire population.
In regard to the second, those with obscene fortunes seem to always find ways to monopolize resources essential for life and transform them from something each person can independently produce to something they must continually work to obtain. For example, it is extremely common after communist revolutions that the independent farmers in the nation will either be prohibited from farming or executed, allowing agriculture to be transitioned to a state-run enterprise. Once this happens, everyone is forced to work for the state or starve, which leads them to becoming obedient subjects that can be easily exploited for their labor.
In most cases when the monopolization of a life essential resource occurs, the new approach is hailed as a technological miracle and this is used to encourage people to let go of their traditional and self-sufficient approach. The new “miraculous” approach is initially deemed “superior” but before long turns out to be worse than the now abandoned initial approach.
The Green revolution is an excellent example of this (more and more fertilizers herbicides and pesticides are needed to produce the same agricultural input). For example, Bill Gates, under the guise of “charity,” has frequently made people in Africa abandon their traditional self-sufficient forms of agriculture and switch to modern chemical-intensive industrial agriculture. Before long, this spikes their price of food and farming supplies (which must be purchased from a multinational corporation like Monsanto). As we are now hitting an unprecedented global wave of fertilizer and food inflation, it is likely that millions who were coaxed into abandoning their traditional forms of agriculture will starve to death.
I have similar reservations about our current transition to green energy technologies. I know of numerous proven effective technologies that could lessen the environmental impact of our energy consumption. However, none of the technologies currently being evaluated meet this fundamental criteria. Instead, each one further centralizes control over this life essential resource, and in the future will likely be used to significantly limit unauthorized consumption of energy or transportation once our existing fossil fuel infrastructure is displaced. For example in light of recent political developments, concerns have begun to be raised over the switches existing in electric cars that can turn them off remotely.
Medical Inflation
Those two principles (rigid hierarchal organization and monopolization of a life essential resource) also happened with the medical industry and really kicked into gear when the Rockefellers (and to some extent Carnegie) bought the AMA and invested a great deal of money into standard medicine (often called “allopathic” or “biomedical” medicine). A variety of competing schools of medicine were removed from the United States, and the practice of medicine was monopolized (those curious to learn more can find more details in this freely available classic).
This proved to be an excellent investment and the effect of this monopolization is striking:
Numerous changes in society emerged to support this medical paradigm. Some of the most important were as follows:
•Society was conditioned to believe that they needed a doctor to be healthy, rather than health being viewed as something each individuals was empowered to seek for themselves. This effectively created an unlimited demand for medical services, and as the above graphs show, an ever-growing need for medical spending. Medical Nemesis by Ivan Illich was the earliest work I was able to locate detailing this change and its consequences.
•Things that genuinely improve public health (and thereby reduce medical expenses) are typically not allowed to emerge, while pointless initiatives that do not improve public health (water fluoridation or annual flu shots) are continually promoted. Likewise, basic health education is not taught to most people, and instead health behaviors developed by corporate interests constitute the majority of “health education” (industry funded nutrition textbooks for example are very common in college courses). In short, there are dozens of simple and obvious policy changes that many have independently identified which could rapidly improve public health and save a lot of money, but despite decades of campaigning to enact them, most have never been adopted.
•Hundreds (or possibly thousands) of highly effective medical treatments for common diseases have been kept off the market to preserve the market for expensive but ineffective treatments that often require lifelong purchasing. For example, prior to the legislative battle to legalize acupuncture, I remember cases where Chinese immigrants were raided at gunpoint for practicing acupuncture in their own community without a license. For those interested, I’ve spent decades tracking those “forgotten cures” down, and while I have found many that for one reason or another were oversold and didn’t really work, I also found many others that were highly effective.
•Every medical service or product is designed to encouraged the consumption of more medical services or products.
•A rigid hierarchy was created to support this monopoly.
Medical Hierarchies
The first hierarchy relates to the right to practice medicine. A large debate exists over whether or not a license should be required to practice medicine. The trade-off is that if no license is required, unqualified practitioners who might harm the public are allowed to practice, while if a license is required, the practice of medicine is monopolized (making medicine much more expensive) and medical practitioners are unable to provide life saving medicines they believe in.
I will now examine a few levels of this hierarchy:
•Medical boards have the power to pull the licenses (and hence careers) of any physician who does something “bad.” Unfortunately, since medical board members are directly appointed by governors, they often end up with crooked and corrupt members (one colleague who served on a midwestern medical board attested to this). Some of the reasons why medical boards exercise their authority are definitely valid, but many others are done to target physicians who step outside the line of what prevailing interests want done. This has happened for a long time. Here are a few examples:
1. After SB 276 was signed in 2019, writing vaccine exemptions was for all practical purposes outlawed in California and I heard of numerous cases where doctors wrote a single justified exemption and then had their license terminated. For this reason, doctors in California will not even write exemptions for patients who nearly died from their first COVID-19 vaccine (ie. from anaphylaxis or a heart attack).
2. The federation of state medical boards put out a statement that publicly promoting any type of COVID “misinformation” (ie. mask efficacy, early treatment options, vaccine safety concerns) could be used to take away a physician’s license.
3. Physicians have had their license suspended for using early treatment options that have FDA approval for other conditions.
The experiences of Robert Malone’s colleague Meryl J. Nass MD is a well known example of the above, but there are many others as well.
As you might imagine, it is quite easy for corporate interests to influence the composition of medical boards (as they are composed of individuals appointed by the governor). In the late 1990s the opioid manufacturers concocted the idea of having present levels of pain be the 5th vital sign and hence measured at every visit.
Since their opioids had “no addictive potential” once this epidemic of “unrecognized” pain emerged (since everyone was encouraged to say they were in pain) the manufacturers managed to lobby the medical boards into taking the position that failing to treat pain with an opioid as malpractice. Once that happened, to protect their licenses, any physicians who had hesitations providing opioids to patients started giving out opioids like candy and this created the current opioid epidemic which has been beyond devastating for many poorer regions of the USA. The problem is massive; hundreds of thousands of people have died from drug overdoses since COVID (which is a figure comparable to the death count from COVID).
•It is very difficult for physicians to work privately in independent practice (a variety of factors have been put in place to force this change over the last 10-20 years). Instead they are required to work at corporate, federal or state jobs where they are largely at the mercy of the institution they work for to follow its policies.
It is for this reason that as soon I was able to, I stopped working for an institution that controlled my practice of medicine.
During the pandemic, many physicians who had serious concerns about the existing approach towards COVID-19 attempted to do things differently, and were frequently shut down by their institution. This led to physicians being fired for not telling their patients the vaccine was “safe and effective” and others such as Paul Marik MD having to sue their hospital in order to be permitted to prescribe a treatment they felt could save the lives of their patients (where no effective treatment was currently available and the patients were frequently expected to die otherwise). Trump’s “Right to Try” law was meant to address this issue, but corporate management has largely superseded it.
•Everyone in medicine is taught to defer to the judgement of a doctor. Hence if you want to do some type of medical treatment and the doctor does not “approve” it, you can’t. In nursing textbooks, it is repeatedly hammered in to always defer to a doctor’s judgement. Nurses typically spend significantly more time with patients where they can see and in their hearts question the human cost of an enforced medical regimen. In contrast, physicians (the ones with authority over the patient), due to their time constraints, typically spend very little time with their patients and are much more detached and isolated from them. This results in bypassing the human connection that should be necessary in medical decision making being bypassed. This type of organizational structure has been used in numerous inhumane systems in the past.
Similarly, many individuals who have found their loved ones in the hospital have been told that unless the supervising doctor approves it, they cannot have any other type of therapy administered. Since many hospitals would not change their policy, numerous lawsuits have been filed to permit patients expected to die to receive ivermectin for example. To my knowledge, in each case where the lawsuit ordered ivermectin to be administered, the drug then saved the patient’s life.
To further illustrate this hierarchy, I know a few physicians with active medical licenses who were hospitalized for COVID-19. Each told me during their hospital stay their that care was continually mismanaged, they had to constantly be on the alert for a fatal medical error, and many of their reasonable requests were not approved by the doctor supervising their hospital care.
•Medical schools to a large extent select for individuals who do not challenge the system, and once in medical school, they rigidly target anyone who is not compliant and obedient to the existing hierarchy to ensure that they will not graduate.
The medical education process is extremely difficult (you have to work brutal hours which break a certain number of medical students and resident physicians each year, and suicide is quite common) and many aspects of the education could be equated to a form of hazing. These types of experiences are known to produce subservience to a system and have been utilized in many fields besides medicine throughout history.
Finally, there is a massive financial cost to become a doctor (most physicians now graduate with between $200,000 to $400,000 of debt at ~7% interest) which leaves many doctors who want to do things differently being completely unable to challenge this system.
The second hierarchy is “medical evidence.” When evidence based medicine was initially introduced, it was a very good and needed paradigm. Many horrific and harmful practices were in wide usage that evidence based medicine had relegated to the dustbins of history. However, medical evidence also follows a hierarchy which rejects foreign or competing ideas, and the upper levels of this hierarchy is bought out by pharmaceutical interests. Here are some examples:
•In order for a study to “matter,” it has to be published in a prestigious journal. The problem is that with the occasional exception of the British Medical Journal, none of the prestigious journals will ever publish studies which go against the existing narrative. “Controversial” studies that merit publication are continually rejected, while bad studies that support mainstream views are regularly published.
One of the better-known recent examples involved The Lancet publishing a study showing hydroxychloroquine was unsafe and ineffective, which was used to end trials of HCQ globally. This study used blatantly fake data and was eventually retracted after readers complained.
The Journal of the American Medical Association appears to be the most biased publication in this regard, and in most cases you can predict what an entire article will say on a topic before you even read it (ie. does the COVID vaccine have any possible harm associated with it…no). The one interesting exception I have seen to this was a recently published study debunking the use of ivermectin. Here the conclusion of the article argued against the use of ivermectin, while the actual data argued for it, raising the possibility the authors phrased the conclusion to say the opposite of their results so that JAMA would publish the study (it is very common for conclusions in journal articles to not be representative of their results).
•In order for a study to be published in most journals, it has to pass “peer review.” In most cases, peer review will hold ideas challenging the existing narrative to either a high standard or an impossible-to-meet standard. Conversely, if an idea agrees with existing narratives, it is held to a very low standard in order to be published. This is an extremely common issue and why much of the most useful research I come across is not published in peer reviewed journals.
•In order for a study to be conducted, it frequently needs approval from the FDA (or an equivalent) and in most settings needs approval from an Institutional Review Board (IRB). In general, it is very difficult to get approval from the FDA to conduct any type of study unless a lot of money is behind the endeavor (for example I was familiar with multiple teams who had safe and effective treatments for COVID with supporting data that nonetheless could not receive FDA approval to begin their human trials). Similarly, despite the fact that extremely unethical human experiments are often conducted under an IRB, IRBs typically will not approve “controversial” research, leading to it not being done.
As a result, I frequently hear of fascinating therapeutic discoveries made outside the normal research process through trial and error that greatly benefit those who receive them, but in most cases these approaches can never be published because no IRB is willing to evaluate them. An excellent 2016 article published by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (a group that has also continually advocated for COVID patients) summarizes how many actually useful medical discoveries are made in independent clinical practice, but the recent hierarchal shifts in medicine have made it so this process is becoming continually rarer and rarer.
The accepted practice of medicine is also a hierarchy largely dictated by “medical evidence.” The existing hierarchal structure here makes it so that contrary research that does end up being published nonetheless is prevented from challenging the status quo. I will review some key examples:
•Medical practice is largely determined by “guidelines” that each physician is expected to follow. In most cases if you follow existing guidelines (ie. don’t treat someone with COVID until they have respiratory failure, then put them on a ventilator and give them remdesivir), you get paid and cannot get in trouble. If you do not follow guidelines, it becomes possible for you to be sued for medical malpractice, health care systems will fire you, and medical boards may take your license.
To illustrate physician attachment to guidelines: Throughout the pandemic I have participated in an online forum that approximately 100,000 US healthcare workers use. As you would imagine, the general mentality there is very conventional. One of the more interesting things I noticed in the early days of the pandemic was health care providers desperately asking for and enthusiastically sharing COVID-19 treatment guidelines from various academic institutions, while at the same time aggressively shooting down independent suggestions or ideas raised by individual physicians.
Guidelines are supposed to be made by impartial committees of experts tasked with reviewing the existing evidence in order to determine the most appropriate guidelines. In reality, as pointed out in Steve Kirsch’s article, these committees are extremely biased, and selectively choose evidence supporting the prevailing narrative.
In most cases, the decision of these unelected guideline committees goes unchallenged and even though they should not be (as discussed later), they are in effect the law.
The only exception I know of occurred when the Lyme community sued the Infectious Disease Society of America (which has also published widely cited COVID treatment guidelines I and others strongly disagree with). The lawsuit challenged IDSA’s guidelines that argued against the use of antibiotics for chronic Lyme disease, which was frequently being used by insurers to deny payment for those treatments and as a basis for authorities to crack down on those treatments being administered in private practice.
•Many people can only afford medical care covered by their insurance. In most cases, insurance will only pay for treatments supported by guideline committees and forces providers to spend most of their time fulfilling requirements of the insurance companies rather than treating patients. As you would imagine, significant financial entanglements exist between hospital systems, pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies (for example they often share interlocking board members), which further incentivizes specific therapeutic approaches.
The insurance dynamic creates the unfortunate situation where many people who need help for a condition must depend on word of mouth to identify a physician outside the insurance system who they have to pay for out of pocket. Provided they find the right physician and can afford their care (each of which is often not the case), these individuals often are able to recover from their illness.
•Reciprocally, insurance companies will often pressure health care providers to perform certain services for each patient that “improve quality of care.” If you follow those suggestions (which frequently results in most of the visit being taken up to do so), you are paid more by the insurance companies. Since everyone in health care is tight on money, those incentives result in significant pressure being put on physicians from their administrators to follow those suggestions.
The problem is that many of these suggestions encourage doing things I do not believe help patients and often harm them. For example, one of the reasons doctors aggressively push vaccines to their patients is because insurance companies pay them significantly more for all visits if most of their patients (especially children) are vaccinated. Similarly, one of the reasons why hospitals have been so aggressive in forcing ventilation and remdesivir (to the point they will fight expensive lawsuits to continue doing so), is because Medicare, in accordance with the COVID treatment guidelines, pays them a lot more to manage (and then kill) their patients in this way.
•Federal, state and municipal law enforcement authorities will frequently target those who promote treatments that violate guidelines. In my own experience (and for many others), IV vitamin C has been extremely helpful in certain (but not all) COVID cases. There is also research showing a benefit in COVID from this therapy Nonetheless, the guidelines recommend against it and individuals who publicly promoted IV vitamin C (at a time when no treatment for COVID-19 was available) had their clinics raided and were criminally charged.
•The media will attack any controversial treatment by claiming there is no evidence for it, and simultaneously refuse to report any evidence that emerges in favor of it. Likewise, Big Tech aggressively censors anything that goes against the existing medical narrative. For example, early in the pandemic, a video was posted by a leading researcher who had conducted clinical trials on using IV vitamin C for COVID-19 presenting his data to the NIH. This video was removed by Youtube shortly afterwards for violating their COVID misinformation policy.
How the Hierarchy is Bought Out
As you might imagine, the hierarchy outlined before is immensely susceptible to bribery. As so much money is in health care, this is what always happens.
•When the Affordable Healthcare Act was passed in 2010, its goal was to make health care more affordable. In 2009, total USA healthcare costs were 2.6 trillion dollars. In 2020 it was 4.3 trillion dollars (compared to wages going from $40,711.61 to $55,628.60 per the SSA). As this data shows, Obamacare failed its stated objective. I believe the central problem with Obamacare was that the medical industry is the largest lobbyist in Congress. Because of this, they were able to craft Obamacare to benefit their industry and thereby remove each provision that would have achieved the stated goal of the Affordable Health Care Act, leaving us instead with a variety of highly problematic federal regulations.
•The pharmaceutical industry is the largest sponsor of the mainstream media. For this reason, they prevent stories critical of pharmaceutical products from being discussed and regularly air stories promoting pharmaceuticals. Likewise, they will relentlessly attack anything that opposes mainstream pharmaceutical positions (frequently “cancelling” it and labelling it unscientific and without evidence). During COVID-19 this trend has accelerated following the Biden administration dispensing 1 billion dollars to news outlets across the political spectrum in return for positive coverage of the vaccine. I do not know of any past precedent for this.
Many journalists have complained about their inability to criticize dangerous pharmaceutical products, and to my knowledge, Tucker Carlson is the only individual with a mainstream platform who has (occasionally) spoken out against the industry. In recent times Big Tech and Big Pharma (who during Obama’s presidency became the core sponsors of the Democrat Party) have financially merged with each other, and like the media Big Tech now has a similar commercial interest in protecting Big Pharma’s monopoly.
•Most medical journals are primarily funded by pharmaceutical companies. Because of this, there is a strong bias to publish questionable industry sponsored trials. Conversely, there is also a strong bias to not publish data supporting alternative therapies that challenge their sponsors (an early example of this this is explicitly detailed and can be found within the 2001 book Heart Frauds but I am sure many earlier ones exist). As many of you have noticed, this publication bias has gone into overdrive throughout COVID-19.
•”Large randomized double-blind studies” are typically considered to be the best form of evidence, and many individuals will reflexively dismiss a study unless it fulfills that criteria. The problem is that these types of studies are immensely expensive to conduct, and in most cases can only be done if a pharmaceutical company sponsors them.
As you might expect, numerous studies have shown that when pharmaceutical studies are compared to noncommercial studies, industry studies tend to greatly overestimate the benefits of a drug and understate its harms. This is due to them having a large number of (fraudulent) tricks to create the “scientific” outcome they want. One of the best known recent examples concerned an article in the BMJ discussing a whistleblower who provided proof widespread fraud occurred during Pfizer’s vaccine trials.
While a small benefit can be attributed to the placebo effect (hence suggesting the need for a “placebo controlled trial), in most cases, the bias that emerges from the inherent conflict of interest in a pharmaceutically sponsored trial greatly exceeds the placebo effect. This is extremely important to understand, but rarely understood.
Even in non-blinded studies where a large magnitude of benefit is found (which greatly exceeds any possible placebo effect) those results are typically ignored or dismissed in favor of corporate sponsored research. A sad reality with many scientific publications is that if you read the author conflict of interest disclosures (which intentionally omit key details) and see who sponsored the study of the study, you can typically predict most of what will be written within the publication.
•Most researchers and academic institutions are extremely short on money. Because of this, they are forced to accept pharmaceutical money for any type of research they want to do, and in most cases not ask questions that will upset their sponsors (and even when honest researchers exist, administrators directly concerned with institutional finances will keep them in line). To a lesser extent, they can also function through public grants, but as detailed in “The Real Anthony Fauci” the grant system has been compromised so only researchers who support the mainstream narratives (and have not opposed Anthony Fauci) can get grants. Many respected scientists I have learned a great deal from, believe the corruption of the grant system, which Fauci is largely responsible for, has prevented American science from developing innovative scientific discoveries that were frequently developed in the past.
•In many cases, guideline committees are composed of individuals who have a direct financial conflict of interest over the guidelines they are promoting. The Lyme disease lawsuit for instance was filed on this basis. Malcom Kendrick an English physician who has done an excellent job illustrating many of the scams conducted by the pharmaceutical industry provided one of the best examples for this concept in his book Doctoring Data.
Many physicians are of the opinion statins (which lower cholesterol) have minimal benefit in preventing heart disease and expose patients to frequent and significant adverse effects, but since statins were put on the market, guideline committees have continually lowered the acceptable blood levels of cholesterol, thereby significantly increasing the pool of people who could take statins (leading to the situation that on almost any medical board examination, the correct answer is almost always “give the patient a statin”).
Kendrick’s specific example was that on the guideline committee responsible for determining who needed to receive statins in the United States, every single person who was on the committee (except the chair who was legally barred from it) had a financial conflict of interest with statin manufacturers. As you might guess, one of the quality metrics that administrators have held meetings on and which I was forced to attend regarded not enough “eligible” patients at the clinic being prescribed statin therapy.
•One of Fauci’s major achievements was turning the NIH and NIAID into pharmaceutical production pipelines. This was largely accomplished by allowing federal officials who were involved with the discovery or development of a pharmaceutical that went to market receive royalties for the drug once it was approved that often vastly exceed their salary.
As a result, there is an inherent conflict of interest to push unsafe or ineffective pharmaceuticals through the regulatory process. This frequently happens, whereas non-commercial enterprises focused on public good can almost never receive approval for a medication. Many outside observers believed based on the existing data, remdesivir should not under any circumstances have received an FDA approval, yet it did, largely due to the FDA electing to waive all the required safeguards (such as needing to consult an outside advisory panel) put in place to prevent something like this from occurring.
One of the most interesting aspects of this scheme (detailed in the Real Anthony Fauci) was that Fauci developed a large network of principal investigators (PI’s are needed to run clinical trials) who hold significant sway in getting IRBs around the country to approve ethically questionable trials needed to get unsafe drugs to market. The Real Anthony Fauci also discusses the retaliation faced by honest regulators who raise objections to problems with those trials.
In short, pharmaceutical companies have always bribed regulators, but Fauci had the unique accomplishment of transforming this into being an integral part of the HSS where the regulators would often take it upon themselves to solicit those bribes.
•Lastly, physicians in everyday practice are remarkably susceptible to being bribed, and a cornerstone of the pharmaceutical industry is sending sales reps to convince physicians to prescribe their medications. A small number of physicians refuse to see reps under any circumstances as they feel it is immoral for their own financial self interest to influence their treatment of patients. Typically however, pharmaceutical reps are remarkably effective at accomplishing their goal of selling their chosen medication and many academic physicians who widely promote pharmaceutical products receive immense payouts for doing so.
Revisiting HIV
In my initial post on this substack, I stated I was able to predict much of what has happened with COVID three months before the pandemic started. This was because I have found whenever a formula is discovered which “works” it is typically reused over and over.
The story of HIV, for those interested was originally detailed in Peter Duesberg’s book Inventing the AIDS Virus, and then subsequently further discussed in The Real Anthony Fauci. Fauci’s conduct during this period appeared to have laid the blueprint for what was done with COVID.
At the start of the HIV, there was no cure and many members of the gay community suffered severe disease or died. As time moved forward, independent physicians working in the community discovered a variety of effective treatments for the AIDS patients, some of which were alternative therapies, but most of which utilized repurposed FDA approved drugs. Like the stories shared in those books, a few of my own friends worked in HIV hot spots during this time, and each found they were able to save the lives of their patients if they abandoned government recommendations and tried their own protocols.
Despite endless requests to study these approaches, Anthony Fauci blocked every single one from being studied or adopted into standard of care. In parallel, he pushed along research on a highly toxic drug, AZT. AZT had originally been intended to be used for chemotherapy, but was abandoned as it proved to be too toxic.
While AZT should have never been approved, Fauci was eventually able to manipulate one (terrible) study enough that alongside sufficient pressure being applied to the FDA, earn AZT an FDA approval. Once AZT entered the market, as was obvious from the existing clinical trial data, it significantly worsened the prognosis for AIDS patients, something both reported in each of those books and also reported to me by a few colleagues who observed it enter the market. Despite being responsible for killing many members of the gay community (who at the time protested against Fauci for being a mass murderer), Fauci was hailed a hero, became one of the most influential members of the US government, and made a lot of money in the process.
COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines
At the start of COVID-19, the WHO made the curious announcement that Remdesivir would be the standard of care for COVID-19, despite almost no evidence existing to support this decision. After finding out the drug was a nonspecific viral RNA polymerase inhibitor, I became worried it would likely be somewhat toxic to cells, as broad spectrum antivirals tend to overlap with chemotherapy drugs (AZT being one example).
My initial suspicion was that Remdesivir would also affect cellular RNA polymerases (the classic example you learn in medical school are poisonous wild mushrooms triggering organ failure through this mechanism). As I began hearing of reports of organ failure near the start of the pandemic from physicians in China, I prayed we would not see a repeat of AZT. Since that time, significant evidence against Remdesivir has been uncovered suggesting it should have never been brought to market and to some extent, like AZT, it appears Remdesivir has caused significant harm.
As I observed the trajectory COVID-19 was headed in, I formed the hypothesis that a new lucrative drug needed to be put onto the market which could be theoretically argued to treat COVID-19 (“remdesivir must work since it is a non-specific viral RNA polymerase inhibitor”) but in reality would not be effective and instead would worsen and prolong the pandemic. I suspected this strategy would be adopted since the profit from selling the drug could be channeled into keeping effective therapies off the market long enough for vaccines to enter the market. This sadly appears to be what exactly happened once the COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel of the NIH made remdesivir the standard of care for COVID-19.
Unhealthy Landscapes: Policy Recommendations on Land Use Change and Infectious Disease Emergence
The could possibly be the rabbit hole from Hell… Some of it seems like it could make sense but that’s how the work. I wonder what one would find if they dug deep – real deep and followed the money Trail on this subject???
Anthropogenic land use changes drive a range of infectious disease outbreaks and emergence events and modify the transmission of endemic infections. These drivers include agricultural encroachment, deforestation, road construction, dam building, irrigation, wetland modification, mining, the concentration or expansion of urban environments, coastal zone degradation, and other activities. These changes in turn cause a cascade of factors that exacerbate infectious disease emergence, such as forest fragmentation, disease introduction, pollution, poverty, and human migration. The Working Group on Land Use Change and Disease Emergence grew out of a special colloquium that convened international experts in infectious diseases, ecology, and environmental health to assess the current state of knowledge and to develop recommendations for addressing these environmental health challenges.
The group established a systems model approach and priority lists of infectious diseases affected by ecologic degradation. Policy-relevant levels of the model include:
specific health risk factors, landscape or habitat change, and institutional (economic and behavioral) levels.
a) to provide information to local communities about the links between environmental change and public health;
b) to facilitate fully interdisciplinary research from a variety of natural, social, and health sciences and train professionals who can conduct interdisciplinary research; and
c) to engage in science-based communication and assessment for policy making toward sustainable health and ecosystems.
Human-induced land use changes are the primary drivers of a range of infectious disease outbreaks and emergence events and also modifiers of the transmission of endemic infections (Patz et al. 2000).
These land use changes include:
deforestation
road construction
agricultural encroachment
dam building
irrigation
coastal zone degradation
wetland modification
mining
the concentration or expansion of urban environments
and other activities.
These changes in turn cause a cascade of factors that exacerbate infectious disease emergence, such as forest fragmentation, pathogen introduction, pollution, poverty, and human migration. These are important and complex issues that are understood only for a few diseases. For example, recent research has shown that forest fragmentation, urban sprawl, and biodiversity loss are linked to increased risk for Lyme disease in the northeastern United States (Schmidt and Ostfeld 2001). Expansion and changes in agricultural practices are intimately associated with the emergence of Nipah virus in Malaysia (Chua et al. 1999; Lam and Chua 2002), cryptosporidiosis in Europe and North America, and a range of food-borne illnesses globally (Rose et al. 2001). Road building is linked to the expansion of bushmeat consumption that may have played a key role in the early emergence of human immunodeficiency virus types 1 and 2 (Wolfe et al. 2000), and simian foamy virus has been found in bushmeat hunters (Wolfe et al. 2004).
In recognition of the complexity of land use change and the risks and benefits to human health that it entails, a special colloquium titled “Unhealthy Landscapes: How Land Use Change Affects Health” was convened at the 2002 biennial meeting of the International Society for Ecosystem Health (6–11 June 2002, Washington, DC) to address this issue. The invited experts worked to establish consensus on the current state of science and identify key knowledge gaps underlying this issue. This article condenses the working group’s report and presents a new research and policy agenda for understanding land use change and its effects on human health. Specifically, we discuss land-use drivers or human activities that exacerbate infectious diseases; the land–water interface, common to many infectious disease life cycles; and conclusions and recommendations for research and training from the working group.
Land-Use Drivers of Infectious Disease Emergence
The emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) resulting from land use change can be entirely new to a specific location or host species. This may occur either from “spillover” or cross-species transmission or simply by extension of geographic range into new or changed habitats. More than 75% of human diseases are zoonotic and have a link to wildlife and domestic animals (Taylor et al. 2001).
The working group developed an extensive list of processes by which land use affects human health (specifically, infectious disease occurrence) and of other factors that contribute to this relationship: agricultural development, urbanization, deforestation, population movement, increasing population, introduction of novel species/pathogens, water and air pollution, biodiversity loss, habit fragmentation, road building, macro and micro climate changes, hydrological alteration, decline in public health infrastructure, animal-intensive systems, eutrophication, military conflict, monocropping, and erosion (ranked from highest to lowest public health impact by meeting participants). The four mechanisms that were felt to have the greatest impact on public health were changes to the physical environment; movement of populations, pathogens, and trade; agriculture; and urbanization. War and civil unrest were also mentioned as a potentially acute and cross-cutting driver. Infectious disease agents with the strongest documented or suspected links to land use change are listed in Table 1.
Changes to the biophysical environment.
Deforestation.
Rates of deforestation have grown exponentially since the beginning of the 20th century. Driven by rapidly increasing human population numbers, large swaths of species-rich tropical and temperate forests, as well as prairies, grasslands, and wetlands, have been converted to species-poor agricultural and ranching areas. The global rate of tropical deforestation continues at staggering levels, with nearly 2–3% of forests lost globally each year. Parallel with this habitat destruction is an exponential growth in human–wildlife interaction and conflict. This has resulted in exposure to new pathogens for humans, livestock, and wildlife (Wolfe et al. 2000). Deforestation and the processes that lead to it have many consequences for ecosystems. Deforestation decreases the overall habitat available for wildlife species. It also modifies the structure of environments, for example, by fragmenting habitats into smaller patches separated by agricultural activities or human populations. Increased “edge effect” (from a patchwork of varied land uses) can further promote interaction among pathogens, vectors, and hosts. This edge effect has been well documented for Lyme disease (Glass et al. 1995). Similarly, increased activity in forest habitats (through behavior or occupation) appears to be a major risk factor for leishmaniasis (Weigle et al. 1993). Evidence is mounting that deforestation and ecosystem changes have implications for the distribution of many other microorganisms and the health of human, domestic animal, and wildlife populations.
One example of the effects of land use on human health is particularly noteworthy. Deforestation, with subsequent changes in land use and human settlement patterns, has coincided with an upsurge of malaria and/or its vectors in Africa (Coluzzi 1984, 1994; Coluzzi et al. 1979), in Asia (Bunnag et al. 1979), and in Latin America (Tadei et al. 1998). When tropical forests are cleared for human activities, they are typically converted into agricultural or grazing lands. This process is usually exacerbated by construction of roads, causing erosion and allowing previously inaccessible areas to become colonized by people (Kalliola and Flores Paitán 1998). Cleared lands and culverts that collect rainwater are in some areas far more suitable for larvae of malaria-transmitting anopheline mosquitoes than are intact forests (Charlwood and Alecrim 1989; Jones 1951; Marques 1987).
Another example of the effects of land use on human health involves deforestation and noninfectious disease: the contamination of rivers with mercury. Soil erosion after deforestation adds significant mercury loads, which are found naturally in rainforest soils, to rivers. This has led to fish in the Amazon becoming hazardous to eat (Fostier et al. 2000; Veiga et al. 1994).
Habitat fragmentation.
This alters the composition of host species in an environment and can change the fundamental ecology of microorganisms. Because of the nature of food webs within ecosystems, organisms at higher trophic levels exist at a lower population density and are often quite sensitive to changes in food availability. The smaller patches left after fragmentation often do not have sufficient prey for top predators, resulting in local extinction of predator species and a subsequent increase in the density of their prey species. Logging and road building in Latin America have increased the incidence of cutaneous and visceral leishmaniasis (Desjeux 2001), which in some areas has resulted from an increase in the number of fox reservoirs and sandfly vectors that have adapted to the peridomestic environment (Patz et al. 2000). Foxes, however, are not very important reservoirs for leishmaniasis in Latin America (Courtenay et al. 2002), and a more important factor in the transmission cycle includes domestic dogs.
Ostfeld and Keesing (2000) have demonstrated that smaller fragments in North American forests have fewer small mammal predators. Results suggest that the probability that a tick will become infected depends on not only the density of white-footed mice but also the density of mice relative to that of other hosts in the community. Under this scenario, the density effect of white-footed mice, which are efficient reservoirs for Lyme disease, can be “diluted” by an increasing density of alternative hosts, which are less efficient at transmitting Lyme disease. These results suggest that increasing host diversity (species richness) may decrease the risk of disease through a “dilution effect” (Schmidt and Ostfeld 2001).
Extractive industries.
Gold mining is an extractive industry that damages local and regional environments and has adverse human health effects, because mercury is used to extract gold from riverbeds in the tropical forests. Not only does mercury accumulate in local fish populations, making them toxic to eat (Lebel et al. 1996, 1998), but mercury also suppresses the human immune system. Also, in gold-mining areas, more mosquito-breeding sites and increased malaria risk result from digging gem pits in the forest and from craters resulting from logging; broader disease spread occurs as populations disperse throughout the region (Silbergeld et al. 2002).
Movement of populations, pathogens, and trade.
The movement of humans, domestic animals, wildlife populations, and agricultural products through travel, trade, and translocations is a driver of infectious disease emergence globally. These sometimes inadvertent, sometimes deliberate movements of infectious disease and vectors (e.g., the introduction of smallpox and measles to the Americas by Spanish conquistadors) will continue to rise via continually expanding global travel and by development of Third World populations. Human introduction of pathogens, hosts, or materials into new areas has been termed “pathogen pollution” (Daszak et al. 2000).
Land use changes drive some of these introductions and migrations and also increase the vulnerability of habitats and populations to these introductions. Human migrations also drive land use changes that in turn drive infectious disease emergence. For example, in China’s Yunnan Province, an increase in livestock populations and migration has led to an increase in the incidence of schistosomiasis (Jiang et al. 1997). In Malaysia, a combination of deforestation, drought, and wildfires has led to alterations in the population movements and densities of flying foxes, large fruit bats known to be the reservoir for the newly emergent zoonosis Nipah virus (Chua et al. 1999). It is believed that the increased opportunity for contact between infected bats and pigs produced the outbreak of the disease in pigs, which then was transmitted to people in contact with infected pigs (Aziz et al. 2002).
Another example of human-induced animal movement on a much larger scale is the international pet trade. This movement of animals involves many countries and allows for the introduction of novel pathogens, such as monkeypox, with the potential to damage ecosystems and threaten human and animal health. Monkeypox was originally associated with bushmeat hunting of red colobus monkeys (Procolobus badius); after a localized epidemic emerged in humans, monkeypox persisted for four generations via human-to-human contact (Jezek et al. 1986).
Human movement also has significant implications for public health. Not only are travelers (tourists, businesspeople, and other workers) at risk of contracting communicable diseases when visiting tropical countries, but they also can act as vectors for delivering infectious diseases to another region or, in the case of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), potentially around the world. Refugees account for a significant number of human migrants, carrying diseases such as hepatitis B and tuberculosis and various parasites (Loutan et al. 1997). Because of their status, refugees become impoverished and are more exposed to a wide range of health risks. This is caused by the disruption of basic health services, inadequate food and medical care, and lack of clean water and sanitation (Toole and Waldman 1997). People who cross international boundaries, such as travelers, immigrants, and refugees, may be at increased risk of contracting infectious diseases, especially those who have no immunity because the disease agents are uncommon in their native countries. Immigrants may come from nations where diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria are endemic, and refugees may come from situations where crowding and malnutrition create ideal conditions for the spread of diseases such as cholera, shigellosis, malaria, and measles [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) 1998].
Zoonoses.
The importance of zoonotic diseases should be emphasized. Zoonotic pathogens are the most significant cause of EIDs affecting humans, both in the proportion of EIDs that they cause and in the impact that they have. Some 1,415 species of infectious organisms are known to be pathogenic to people, with 61% of them being zoonotic. Of the emerging pathogens, 75% are zoonotic, and zoonotic pathogens are twice as likely to be associated with emerging diseases than are nonzoonotic pathogens (Taylor et al. 2001). More important, zoonotic pathogens cause a series of EIDs with high case fatality rates and no reliable cure, vaccine, or therapy (e.g., Ebola virus disease, Nipah virus disease, and hantavirus pulmonary syndrome). Zoonotic pathogens also cause diseases that have some of the highest incidence rates globally [e.g., acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS)]. AIDS is a special case, because it is caused by a pathogen that jumped host from nonhuman primates and then evolved into a new virus. Thus, it is in origin a zoonotic organism (Hahn et al. 2000).
Because of the important role of zoonoses in current public health threats, wildlife and domestic animals play a key role in the process by providing a “zoonotic pool” from which previously unknown pathogens may emerge (Daszak et al. 2001). The influenza virus is an example, causing pandemics in humans after periodic exchange of genes among the viruses of wild and domestic birds, pigs, and humans. Fruit bats are involved in a high-profile group of EIDs that includes rabies and other lyssaviruses, Hendra virus and Menangle virus (Australia), and Nipah virus (Malaysia and Singapore), which has implications for further zoonotic disease emergence. A number of species are endemic to both remote oceanic islands and more populous suburban and rural human settlements; these may harbor enzootic and potentially zoonotic pathogens with an unknown potential for spillover (Daszak et al. 2000).
Thus, some of the current major infectious threats to human health are EIDs and reemerging infectious diseases, with a particular emphasis on zoonotic pathogens transferring hosts from wildlife and domestic animals. A common, defining theme for most EIDs (of humans, wildlife, domestic animals, and plants) is that they are driven to emerge by anthropogenic changes to the environment. Because threats to wildlife habitat are so extensive and pervading, many of the currently important human EIDs (e.g., AIDS, Nipah virus disease) are driven partly by human-induced changes to wildlife habitat such as encroachment and deforestation. This is essentially a process of natural selection in which anthropogenic environmental changes perturb the host–parasite dynamic equilibrium, leading to the expansion of those strains suited to the new environmental conditions and facilitating expansion of others into new host species (Daszak et al. 2001).
Agriculture.
Crop irrigation and breeding sites.
Agriculture occupies about half of the world’s land and uses more than two-thirds of the world’s fresh water (Horrigan et al. 2002). Agricultural development in many parts of the world has increased the need for crop irrigation, which reduces water availability for other uses and increases breeding sites for disease vectors. An increase in soil moisture associated with irrigation development in the southern Nile Delta after the construction of the Aswan High Dam has caused a rapid rise in the mosquito Culex pipiens and consequential increase in the arthropod-borne disease Bancroftian filariasis (Harb et al. 1993; Thompson et al. 1996). Onchocerciasis and trypanosomiasis are further examples of vector-borne parasitic diseases that may be triggered by changing land-use and water management patterns. In addition, large-scale use of pesticides has had deleterious effects on farm workers, including hormone disruption and immune suppression (Straube et al. 1999).
Food-borne diseases.
Once agricultural development has expanded and produced food sufficient to meet local need, the food products are exported to other nations, where they can pose a risk to human health. The increase in imported foods has resulted in a rise in food-borne illness in the United States. Strawberries from Mexico, raspberries from Guatemala, carrots from Peru, and coconut milk from Thailand have caused recent outbreaks. Food safety is an important factor in human health, because food-borne disease accounts for an estimated 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,200 deaths in the United States each year (CDC 2003). Other dangers include antibiotic-resistant organisms, such as Cyclospora, EscherichiacoliO157:H7, and other pathogenic E. coli strains associated with hemolytic uremic syndrome in children (Dols et al. 2001).
Secondary effects.
Agricultural secondary effects need to be minimized, such as the emerging microbial resistance from antibiotics in animal waste that is included in farm runoff and the introduction of microdams for irrigation in Ethiopia that resulted in a 7-fold increase in malaria (Ghebreyesus et al. 1999).
Urbanization.
On a global basis, the proportion of people living in urban centers will increase to an unprecedented 65% by the year 2030 (Population Reference Bureau 1998). The 2000 census shows that 80% of the U.S. population now lives in metropolitan areas, with 30% living in cities of 5 million or more. The environmental issues posed by such large population centers have profound impacts on public health beyond the city limits (Knowlton 2001).
Alterations of ecosystems and natural resources contribute to the emergence and spread of infectious disease agents. Human encroachment of wildlife habitat has broadened the interface between wildlife and humans, increasing opportunities for both the emergence of novel infectious diseases in wildlife and their transmission to people. Rabies is an example of a zoonotic disease carried by animals that has become habituated to urban environments. Bats colonize buildings, skunks and raccoons scavenge human refuse, and in many countries feral dogs in the streets are common and the major source of human infection (Singh et al. 2001).
Infectious diseases can also pass from people to wildlife. Nonhuman primates have acquired measles from ecotourists (Wallis and Lee 1999). Also, drug resistance in gram-negative enteric bacteria of wild baboons living with limited human contact is significantly less common than in baboons living with human contact near urban or semiurban human settlements (Rolland et al. 1985).
The Land–Water Interface
Another major driver of infectious disease emergence results from the land–water interface. Land use changes often involve water projects or coastal marine systems in which nutrients from agricultural runoff can cause algal blooms.
Currently the seventh Cholera pandemic is spreading across Asia, Africa, and South America. In 1992, a new serogroup (Vibrio cholerae O139) appeared and has been responsible for epidemics in Asia (Colwell 1996). The seasonality of cholera epidemics may be linked to the seasonality of plankton (algal blooms) and the marine food chain. Studies using remote-sensing data of chlorophyll-containing phytoplankton have shown a correlation between cholera cases and sea surface temperatures in the Bay of Bengal. Interannual variability in cholera incidence in Bangladesh is also linked to the El Niño southern oscillation and regional temperature anomalies (Lobitz et al. 2000), and cholera prevalence has been associated with progressively stronger El Niño events spanning a 70-year period (Rodo et al. 2002). This observation on cholera incidence may represent an early health indicator of global climate change (Patz 2002).
Infectious diseases in marine mammals and sea turtles could serve as sentinels for human disease risk. Sea turtles worldwide are affected by fibropapillomatosis, a disease probably caused by one or several viruses and characterized by multiple epithelial tumors. Field studies support the observation that prevalence of this disease is associated with heavily polluted coastal areas, areas of high human density, agricultural runoff, and/or biotoxin-producing algae (Aguirre and Lutz, in press). This represents the breakdown of the land–water interface, to the point that several pathogens typical of terrestrial ecosystems have become established in the oceans. Toxoplasmosis in the endangered sea otter (Enhydra lutris) represents an example of pathogen pollution. Massive mortalities in pinnipeds and cetaceans reaching epidemics of tens of thousands are caused by four morbilliviruses evolving from the canine distemper virus (Aguirre et al. 2002). Additionally, overfishing has myriad ramifications for marine ecosystems and sustainable protein food sources for human populations.
Cryptosporidium, a protozoan that completes its life cycle within the intestine of mammals, sheds high numbers of infectious oocysts that are dispersed in feces. A recent study found that 13% of finished treated water still contained Cryptosporidium oocysts, indicating some passage of microorganisms from source to treated drinking water (LeChevallier and Norton 1995). The protozoan is highly prevalent in ruminants and is readily transmitted to humans. Thus, management of livestock contamination of watersheds is an important public health issue.
One example of how overexploitation of a natural water resource led to infectious disease is that of Lake Malawi in Africa. Overfishing in the lake reduced the population of snail-eating fish to such a level that snail populations erupted. Subsequently, schistosomiasis incidence and prevalence markedly rose after this ecologic imbalance (Madsen et al. 2001).
Recommendations from the Working Group
Conceptual model: bringing land use into public health policy.
The recommendations stemming from the international colloquium are highly relevant to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA), a broad multiagency/foundation-sponsored scientific assessment of degraded ecosystem effects on human well-being. A conceptual framework of the MEA already provides an approach to optimize the contribution of ecosystems to human health (MEA 2003). This framework offers a mechanism to a) identify options that can better achieve human development and sustainable goals, b) better understand the trade-offs involved in environment-related decisions, and c) align response options at all scales, from the local to the global, where they can be most effective. This conceptual framework focuses on human well-being while also recognizing associated intrinsic values. Similar to the MEA, focus is particularly on the linkages between ecosystem services and human health. Workshop participants developed a conceptual model (Figure 1). Like the MEA, it assumes a dynamic interaction between humans and ecosystems that warrants a multiscale assessment (spatial and temporal).
By using this framework, policy makers may approach development and health at various levels. These levels include specific health risk factors, landscape or habitat change, and institutional (economic and behavioral) levels. For sound health policy, we must shift away from dealing primarily with specific risk factors and look “upstream” to underlying land-use determinants of infectious disease and ultimately the human behavior and established institutions that are detrimental to sustainable population health. The World Health Organization (WHO) has developed a similar DPSEEA (driving forces, pressures, state, exposure, effect, actions) model that in a similar way describes the interlinkage between human health and different driving forces and environmental change (WHO 1997).
As such understanding increases, it will become more feasible to plan how to prevent new infectious disease emergence. Yet, because these are rare events, accurate predictions will remain daunting. It is already evident that inserting humans into complex ecosystems can lead to a variety of EIDs, but health outcomes depend on the economic circumstances of the human population. In poor and tropical communities, land use change can lead to major shifts in infectious disease patterns. For these situations, many conventional public health interventions can prevent several infectious diseases at relatively low cost. In rich and temperate-climate communities, the infectious disease shifts tend to be more disease specific, for example, in the case of Lyme disease and habitat fragmentation.
Research on deforestation and infectious disease.
Considering the deforestation that usually accompanies agricultural development, new conservation-oriented agriculture should be pursued. As discussed above, water project development and modern livestock management present major health disease risks. However, often the secondary unintended consequences can also wreak havoc; for example, a leaking dam may present greater risks than the reservoir itself. A distressingly large number of development projects not only have adverse effects on human health but also fail to attain their primary economic purposes in a sustainable manner.
Habitat fragmentation, whether caused by forest destruction, desertification, or land-use conversion, affects human and wildlife health and ecosystem processes. There is already much research undertaken by landscape ecologists on the consequences of habitat fragmentation for wildlife, especially larger animals. It would be important to study the effects of landscape fragmentation on public health hazards. Such research could entail three components. The first component consists of gathering baseline data, including using historical data where possible and beginning monitoring programs where necessary. Key data include identifying and quantifying the relevant pathogen load of wildlife, livestock, and human communities in fragmented landscapes. The goals of this data collection are, first, to identify key infectious diseases, both chronic and emergent or reemergent and, second, to document the consequences of fragmentation on relative abundance of wildlife and subsequent pathogen load. For example, the loss of large predators in fragmented habitats in the northeastern United States has led to a superabundance of rodent vectors for Lyme disease.
The second component of the research program would involve health impact modeling, primarily in three areas: a) estimating changes in the relative abundance of organisms, including infectious disease vectors, pathogens, and hosts; b) projecting potential vector or transmission shifts (e.g., should the Nipah virus shift to pulmonary as well as neurologic expression in humans as in swine); and c) projecting the impact of infectious diseases in a region on different geographic scales.
The results of these analyses, if successful, could support the third component of research: development of decision-support tools. Improved decisions on land-use policy could be made from a better understanding of costs and benefits to health and environmental decision makers. In all probability, however, they will be very location specific. For example, to construct an irrigation scheme in India would likely invite a malaria epidemic, whereas the same activity in sub-Saharan Africa may have little effect on malaria transmission. It is worth mentioning that costs and benefits could depend on the time course over which they are assessed. For example, some land-use changes can lead to short-term increases in transmission followed by longer-term decreases (e.g., irrigation and malaria in Sri Lanka) or vice versa (e.g., deforestation and cutaneous leishmaniasis in Latin America).
Policies to reduce microbial traffic/pathogen pollution.
In today’s interconnected world, it becomes very important to invest in the worldwide control of infectious diseases in developing countries, for example. It is also necessary to control transport to stem the flow from one place to the next.
Improved monitoring of trade is warranted in order to target infectious disease introductions. In the attempt to prevent the invasion of a pathogen (and drug-resistant organisms) into the vulnerable areas subject to land use changes, we need to pay greater attention to controls at the sources. We need to document and map these trades and investigate the vectors, the infectious diseases they harbor, and the populations they threaten. Risk assessment should guide surveillance and the development of test kits, targeting point-of-origin intervention to preempt these processes. Assessments must further include nonmarket costs (usually to the detriment of the environment and long-term sustainable health). We should communicate to both the exporters and consumers the need to make their trades clean, economically viable, and certified “clean and green” by an independent scientific agency at the source and/or destination. Additionally, strategies for screening travelers for pathogens that may be introduced to a region should be improved.
Centers of Excellence in Ecology and Health Research and Training.
One approach to developing the issues to which this article draws attention is the creation of a system of regional- or subregional-based interdisciplinary Centers of Excellence in Ecology and Health Research and Training. Based at regional universities and/or research institutes but with very close links to the surrounding communities, these centers would have the following objectives:
Providing information based on good science to local communities about the links between environmental change and public health, including the factors that contribute to specific infectious disease outbreaks. The new research agenda must gather information on household and community perspectives about proposals for the use of their land. These perspectives are key to assessing the cost/benefit of a proposed project. Training local professionals in environmental, agricultural, and health science issues, with a particular focus on granting degrees in a new “trans”-discipline linking health and the environment, would be emphasized.
Acting as centers of integrated analysis of infectious disease emergence, incorporating perspectives and expertise from a variety of natural, social, and health sciences. Research activities would range from taxonomy of pathogens and vectors to identifying best practices for influencing changes in human behavior to reduce ecosystem and health risks.
Incorporating a “health impact assessment” as an important cross-sectorial decision-making tool in overall development planning (parallel to an environmental impact assessment), along with the need for doing more research.
Equipping professionals with the ability to recommend policy toward maintaining ecosystem function and promoting sustainable public health for future generations. For example, the link between forest fragmentation and Lyme disease risk could lead to preserving more intact tracts of forest habitat by planning “cluster” housing schemes.
Implementing research and policy programs.
In selecting areas for research and the placement of centers of excellence, it is important to choose geographically representative, highly diverse areas around the world. In addition, research projects should take place in regions or landscapes that have both well characterized and less characterized patterns of infectious disease emergence or transmission for comparison purposes. Local health and environment professionals, who are in the best position to understand local priorities, should make the choices within each region for initial research areas and sites.
Addressing trade-offs among environment, health, and development.
There are some inherent trade-offs when considering land-use change and health. They are ethical values, environmental versus health choices, and disparities in knowledge and economic class. Trade-offs are between short-term benefit and long-term damage. For example, draining swamps may reduce vector-borne disease hazards but also destroy the wetland ecosystem and its inherent services (e.g., water storage, water filtration, biologic productivity, and habitats for fish and wildlife). Research can help decision making by identifying and assessing trade-offs in different land-use-change scenarios. Balancing the diverse needs of people, livestock, wildlife, and the ecosystem will always be a prominent feature.
Conclusions
When considering issues of land use and infectious disease emergence, the public needs to be attentive to entire ecosystems rather than simply their local environs. Although we may not live within a certain environment, its health may indirectly affect our own. For example, intact forests support complex ecosystems and provide essential habitats for species that are specialized to those flora and that may be relevant to our health. If these complex relationships are disrupted, there may be unforeseen impacts on human health, as the above examples clearly demonstrate.
Encouraging initiatives.
Three new initiatives are rising to the challenges presented above. The first initiative, the Consortium for Conservation Medicine (CCM), was formed recently to address these health challenges at the interface of ecology, wildlife health, and public health (Figure 2). At its core, conservation medicine champions the integration of techniques and partnering of scientists from diverse disciplines, particularly veterinary medicine, conservation biology, and public health. Through the consortium, therefore, these experts work with educators, policy makers, and conservation program managers to devise approaches that improve the health of both species and humans simultaneously [more information is available from the CCM website (CCM 2004)].
The second initiative, the new international journal EcoHealth, focuses on the integration of knowledge at the intersection of ecologic and health sciences. The journal provides a gathering place for research and reviews that integrate the diverse knowledge of ecology, health, and sustainability, whether scientific, medical, local, or traditional. The journal will encourage development and innovation in methods and practice that link ecology and health, and it will ensure clear and concise presentation to facilitate practical and policy application [more information is available from the EcoHealth website (EcoHealth 2004)].
The third initiative, the MEA, is an international work program designed to meet the needs of decision makers and the public for scientific information concerning the consequences of ecosystem change for human health and well-being and for options in responding to those changes. This assessment was launched by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan in June 2001 and will help to meet the assessment needs of international environmental forums, such as the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Convention to Combat Desertification, the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, and the Convention on Migratory Species, as well as the needs of other users in the private sector and civil society [more information is available from the Millennium Assessment Working Groups website (Millennium Assessment Working Groups 2004)].
Challenges ahead.
As this working group of researchers continues to work on these topics, we face three challenges. First, strong trans-disciplinary research partnerships need to be forged to approach the research with the degree of creative thinking and comprehensiveness required by the nature of the problems. Second, if the work is to influence policy, the choice of questions and the research must be undertaken collaboratively with the local community and also through discussion with decision makers in government, industry, civil society, and other sectors. Third, investigators must consider how they can integrate their findings into the social, economic, and political dialogue on both the environment and health, globally and locally. As links between land use and health are elucidated, an informed public will more readily use such discoveries to better generate political will for effective change.
Figures and Tables
Figure 1 A systems model of land use change that affects public health. This model shows relationships between drivers of land use change and subsequent levels of environmental change and health consequences. Various levels of investigation and intervention are evident and range from specific risks factors and determinants of population vulnerability to larger institutional and economic activity.Figure 2 The main elements converging under the Consortium for Conservation Medicine. Conservation medicine combines conservation biology, wildlife veterinary medicine, and public health. Adapted from Tabor (2002).
Big Tech Censored Dozens of Doctors, More Than 800 Accounts for COVID-19 ‘Misinformation,’ Study Finds
Ailan Evans / @AilanHEvans / February 09, 2022
Twitter, Google, Google+, Gmail, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat are among the platforms arrayed on the screen of an Apple iPhone. Many of them have used their largely unregulated power to censor information they don’t approve of as “misinformation.” (Photo: Chesnot/Getty Images)
Major technology companies and social media platforms have removed, suppressed or flagged the accounts of more than 800 prominent individuals and organizations, including medical doctors, for COVID-19 “misinformation,” according to a new study from the Media Research Center.
The study focused on acts of censorship on major social media platforms and online services, including Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Ads, and TikTok.
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Instances of censorship included Facebook’s decision to flag the British Medical Journal with a “fact check” and “missing context” label, reducing the visibility of a post, for a study delving into data-integrity issues with a Pfizer vaccine clinical trial.
Facebook also deleted the page of the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter led by dozens of medical professionals, including Dr. Jay Battacharya, a Stanford epidemiologist, and Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a former employee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which advocated for less restrictive measures to address the dangers of COVID-19.
“Big Tech set up a system where you can’t disagree with ‘the science’ even though that’s the foundation of the scientific method,” Dan Gainor, MRC vice president of Free Speech America, told the Daily Caller National Foundation. “If doctors and academic journals can’t debate publicly, then it’s not science at all. It’s ‘religion.’”
Big Tech also scrubbed podcast host Joe Rogan’s interviews with scientists Dr. Peter McCullough and Dr. Robert Malone, the latter of whom was instrumental in pioneering mRNA technology. Twitter banned Malone from its platform permanently in late December over the virologist’s tweets questioning the efficacy and safety of the COVID-19 vaccine.
“We tallied 32 different doctors who were censored, including mRNA vaccine innovator Dr. Robert Malone,” Gainor said. “Censoring views of credentialed experts doesn’t ensure confidence in vaccines. It undermines faith in government COVID-19 strategies.“
In addition to medical doctors, the study examined instances in which members of Congress were censored by tech platforms.
These included an incident last August in which YouTube suspended Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., for posting a video arguing that “cloth masks” are not effective against the coronavirus, a view later echoed by many prominent medical commentators. Twitter also flagged a tweet from Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., in which he wrote “studies show those with natural immunity from a prior infection are much less likely to contract and spread COVID than those who only have vaccine-induced immunity.”
The study also examined Big Tech censorship of prominent media personalities, such as Rogan, Tucker Carlson, and Dan Bongino.
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Through its Young Global Leaders program, the World Economic Forum has been instrumental in shaping a world order that undermines all democratic principles. For several decades, this program has nurtured compliant leaders acting as WEF agents in governments around the world. The consequences are far-reaching and may turn out to be devastating for humanity.
“I have to say then I mention names like Mrs Merkel, even VladimirPutin and so on… they all have been Young Global Leaders of The World Economic Forum. But what we are really proud of now with the young generation like Prime Minister Trudeau, President of Argentina and so on, is that we penetrate the cabinets… It is true in Argentina and it is true in France now…” (Klaus Schwab)
In 1992, Klaus Schwab and World Economic Forum launched a program initially called Global Leaders of Tomorrow. In 2004, this program was turned into the Forum for Young Global Leaders (which I cover in my book The Global Coup D’Etat) – a 5-year program of indoctrination into WEFs principles and goals. The aim was – and is – to find suitable future leaders for the emerging global society. The program has since its inception has included politicians, business leaders, royalty, journalists, performers and other cultural influencers who have excelled in their fields but have not yet turned 40 years of age (originally 43 in order to include Angela Merkel). It has since grown into an extensive global network of dedicated leaders with enormous resources and influence, all working to implement the technocratic plans of the World Economic Forum in their respective nations and fields.
The network creates a force for worldwide influence through the combination of the individual skills and resources of its members.
As Klaus Schwab says in the introductory quote, it has become very successful. Already in the first year, 1992, a number of highly influential candidates were elected.
Among 200 selected were global profiles such as:
Angela Merkel
Tony Blair
Nicolas Sarkozy
Bono
Richard Branson (Virgin)
Jorma Ollila (Shell Oil), and
José Manuel Barroso (President of the European Commission 2004–2014).[1]
Bill Gates (Global Leader of Tomorrow 1992)
Justin Trudeau (Young Global Leader, unknown class)
More examples of influential Young Global Leaders [2]:
Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden
Crown Prince Haakon of Norway
Crown Prince Fredrik of Denmark
Prince Jaime de Bourbon de Parme, Netherlands
Princess Reema Bint Bandar Al-Saud, Ambassador for Saudi-Arabia in USA
Jacinda Arden, Prime Minister, New Zeeland
Alexander De Croo, Prime Minister, Belgium
Emmanuel Macron, President, France
Sanna Marin, Prime Minister, Finland
Carlos Alvarado Quesada, President, Costa Rica
Faisal Alibrahim, Minister of Economy and Planning, Saudi Arabia
Shauna Aminath, Minister of Environment, Climate Change and Technology, Maldives
Annalena Baerbock, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Leader of Alliance 90/Die Grünen, Germany
Kamissa Camara, Minister of the Digital Economy and Planning, Mali
Ugyen Dorji, Minister of Domestic Affairs, Bhutan
Chrystia Freeland, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, Canada
Martín Guzmán, Minister of Finance, Argentina
Muhammad Hammad Azhar, Minister of Energy, Pakistan
Paula Ingabire, Minister of Information and communications technology and Innovation, Rwanda
Ronald Lamola, Minister of Justice and Correctional Services, South Africa
Birgitta Ohlson, Minister for European Union Affairs 2010–2014, Sweden
Mona Sahlin, Party Leader of the Social Democrats 2007–2011, Sweden
Stav Shaffir, Leader of the Green Party, Israel
Vera Daves de Sousa, Minister of Finance, Angola
Leonardo Di Caprio, actor and Climate Activist
Mattias Klum, photographer and Environmentalist
Jack Ma, Founder of Alibaba
Larry Page, Founder of Google
Ricken Patel, Founder of Avaaz
David de Rothschild, adventurer and Environmentalist
Jimmy Wale, Founder of Wikipedia
Jacob Wallenberg, Chairman of Investor
Niklas Zennström, Founder of Skype
Mark Zuckerberg, Founder of Facebook
The purpose from the beginning has been to “identify and advance a future-oriented global agenda, focusing on issues at the intersection of the public and private sectors.” Public–Private Partnerships is one of the cornerstones of the World Economic Forum philosophy. That is, a merger between state and large companies (also known as corporativism) with the aim of solving global problems of in a more “effective” way. The choice of leaders clearly reflects this aspiration.
The Young Global Leaders group was initially instructed to identify the major challenges of the 21st century. These included peace, the environment, education, technology and health – areas which these upcoming leaders could exploit politically, economically, and culturally in the new millennium.
Partners for Global Leaders of Tomorrow in 2000 were large global companies such as:
The Coca Cola Company
Ernst & Young
Volkswagen, and
BP Amoco
These could contribute to the agenda by “playing an active role in developing and implementing the concept of the GLT project. The partners can therefore actively participate in the development of GLT programs; representatives of the partner companies as well as their guests are invited to GLT meetings ..
”Since the Global Leaders of Tomorrow was turned into Young Global Leaders 2004, partners such as:
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Google
JPMorganChase (with alumni from the program) have also participated as sponsors.
The ultimate consequence of both public–private partnerships and these target areas is the creation of a largely fascist social contract in which the individual has become subordinated to these powerful interests. Noble goals of creating a better world have also been kidnapped. This is especially evident in the context of the partnership between the WEF and the UN and the implementation of the global goals (Agenda 2030) through the application of the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
This means that the democratic principles and division of power of the 20th century have largely been completely undermined and instead replaced by a new global class that shapes our common future based on their own interests. This has led to a de facto privatisation of both national governments and international organisations, where lobbyists are no longer kept in the lobby but have moved into the seat of power, shaping policies directly affecting our lives. What this means has become particularly evident since the pandemic was declared in March 2020. In addition, leading multinational investment management corporations such as BlackRock, led by the World Economic Forum’s own Larry Fink, have constantly moved their positions forward.
German economist and journalist Ernst Wolff believes that many of the national leaders included in the Young Global Leader program have been selected for their willingness to carry out the tough agenda of lockdowns in recent years without asking any questions, and that their impending failure (as evidenced by in a growing dissatisfaction of the masses) will be used as an excuse to create a new form of Global Government where the old nation states become largely obsolete. A new global digital currency with Universal Basic Income (UBI) can then be gradually introduced to replace our doomed monetary system.[3] This conclusion partly coincides with my own. It is also supported by Paul Raskin‘s scenarios from The Great Transition Initiative on how a totalitarian “New Earth Order” is established, to be replaced in the long run by a global democratic government (Earth Federation) with a World Constitution.[4]
The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the catastrophic failure of an every-country-for-itself approach to public health, and national economic interests, rather than global needs, continue to dominate discussions of climate policy, paving the path toward climate chaos.
Under the tricameral World Parliament come the four main agencies of the Earth Federation government: the World Supreme Court system, the World Executive, the World Enforcement System, and the World Ombudsman.[5]Glen T. Martin, The Great Transition Requires the Earth Constitution
The vision is that a peaceful and harmonious world in balance is created through the establishment of a World Federation with a World Parliament, World Government and a World Court. These are ideas that have long circulated in Club of Rome and closely connected New Age circles. The question is how such a new global system of power would escape the fate of being kidnapped by the same interests that created our current corrupt and failing system? This is in view of those who support projects such as The Great Transition (initiated with start-up capital from Steven Rockefeller). What is happening is rather a method of taking us to their ultimate solution in the form of a global technocratic control system.
However, it is highly unlikely that this plan will succeed. Awareness is spreading like wildfire and the panic of the elite increases as their narrative crumbles and people become more and more immune to the propaganda. Hence all the inquisitors and “fact checkers” who diligently gatekeep the narrative and help steer public opinion in the “right” direction. They are surely to be trusted since, for example, David Roy Thomson, Chairman of the Thomson Reuters Corporation, is an alumni of Global Leaders of Tomorrow, class of 1993.
It is now time to take control of our own destinies and to avoid falling into new traps.
References
Thanks to investigative journalist Cory Morningstar for the clip that inspired this blog article. Follow her blog Wrong Kind of Green.
The Trailblazing Patriot 