The Giant Virus in the Room: Corporate Vaccine Makers Need More Pandemics, to Grow

Posted on June 2, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Dady Chery

As drug makers prepare to make a killing on supposed vaccines against COVID-19, it is important, particularly for those who consider vaccines to be a wise investment today, or those whose retirement savings might get invested in such vaccines without their knowledge, to reflect on the fact that corporations are themselves viruses that can only make money for their investors by growing. The way they will grow is by making more vaccines for yet more pandemics. The new pandemics might come of their own accord, or they might get a little nudge.

A road map from those in the shadows

The public has lately been assaulted with relentless announcements about this or that supposed vaccine going into phase I or II clinical trial and the promise that vaccines — if we would only let enough different ones get developed sufficiently rapidly and without oversight — will free us from masks and social distancing. According to an American Enterprise Institute “road map” by people that include former FDA commissioners Scott Gottlieb and Mark McClellan, social distancing restrictions will only be lifted when tools to mitigate the risk of disease – including a vaccine — become available. There you have it. If you should ever want to stop cowering with a mask on your face, shake hands with a new acquaintance, dance with friends and strangers, blow a kiss or flirt more outrageously with somebody, you’ll need to get a vaccination license. The people who have mandated this aren’t even currently in government. They are private individuals who have retreated to think tanks from which to issue their decrees.

The global threat to health isn’t a coronavirus

The public health departments of cities, states, or countries have not been those to call for vaccines. Instead, global public health appears to have been hijacked by a supposed non-profit foundation called the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation (CEPI), with the Orwellian motto, “New vaccines for a safer world.” One might well ask: “safer for whom?” CEPI was hatched in a one-hour discussion on the sidelines of Davos 2016 between Bill Gates, Wellcome Trust Foundation Director Jeremy Farrar, the CEOs of six major vaccine manufacturers (Glaxo Smith Kline, Merck, Johnson & Johnson, Sanofi, Takeda, and Pfizer), the Prime Minister of Norway, and supposedly 15 other individuals.

Representatives of Germany, India, and Japan are supposed to have attended that meeting, although Prime Minister Angela Merkel had declined the invitation that year, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was not there, nor was any Japanese head of state. The goal of this cabal, in which elected heads of states are obviously subordinate to Bill Gates and Big Pharma, is not merely to make vaccines and lots of money, but also to deregulate vaccine manufacture on a global scale and control the world by controlling global public health. In this scenario, the United Nations’ WHO, which receives 75 percent of its funds from big pharmaceutical companies and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is merely the arm of CEPI that will tie vaccine adoption by developing countries to various kinds of Western aid. The WHO Director General, Tedros Adhanon, began to enjoy the Gates Foundation’s generosity when he was a Minister of Health in Ethiopia who embraced the foundation’s agenda. The WHO Assistant Director General, Bruce Aylward, who may be the real power in the organization, previously worked for Gates’ supposed polio eradication program. Make no mistake: CEPI intends to be to global health what the WTO is to global trade.

The agenda is military, and it is global

CEPI has already raised over $750 M: a sum that commands a lot of influence. It is well entwined with the militaries of various countries. For example CEPI’s CEO, Richard Hatchett, was the Director for Biodefense Policy on the White House Homeland Security Council in 2005-2006, Associate Director for Radiation Countermeasures Research and Emergency Preparedness at NIAID in 2005-2011; and Chief Medical Officer and Deputy Director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) in 2011-2016. BARDA is a division of the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response. Several CEPI-financed vaccine projects enjoy support from BARDA, the U.S. Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), or the U.S. Military HIV Research Program.

In January 2020, CEPI announced that it would finance three consortiums to develop vaccines against COVID-19. Its alliance with these consortiums, however, predates this announcement in several cases. For example, as far back as April 2018, CEPI provided $56 M to a company called Inovio to get vaccine candidates against the SARS-Cov-2 relative, MERS-CoV, to Phase II trials; Inovio’s main collaborator is the Chinese company, Beijing Advaccine Technology. In January 2019, CEPI provided $10.6 M to a consortium involving the University of Queensland and public/private sector partners in Australia, the US, and Asia to develop a new approach called “molecular clamp” for designing vaccines. In Dec 2019, CEPI gave $8.4 M to Imperial College London, UK, to test an RNA vaccine in animals and also get it to Phase II trials. The researchers at Imperial College boast about the fact that they began to test their vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 in animals in February 2020! Recall that the SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence only became known on January 10, 2020. In this context, it is also interesting that Imperial College is the home of the fear mongering and disgraced Neil Ferguson, with the too pretty and too married social merging mistress.

The FDA’s vaccine fast track

The road to FDA approval has been smoothed for CEPI’s partners and, unsurprisingly, they have been first to move their putative vaccines to clinical trials. As a rule, the FDA has put the projects of CEPI’s pet companies on a “fast-track” designation, which allows them to be green-lighted to the next phase before they have even completed the preceding one. Consider for example the biotechnology company, Moderna. It has received an undefined sum from CEPI, plus around $483 M from BARDA, as well as funds from DARPA. The appeal of this company to pencil and paper want-to-be-scientists, like Bill Gates and various military types, is that its approach, or “platform,” for vaccine manufacturing could potentially be used to make many other vaccines. But this approach is also potentially dangerous, because it involves the introduction of viral mRNA into cells, and this alone might start an adverse immune reaction. The viral mRNA is then supposed to direct production of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein on the surface of the vaccinated person’s cells for some undefined period of time. This kind of vaccine was not even tested in animals before Moderna was allowed to begin its phase I trial in mid-March with 45 healthy human volunteers. Even more extraordinary, six weeks later the company filed for permission to go on to a phase II trial with 600 volunteers. Its application was approved, even though the phase I trial requires months of follow up that are not yet done. The company’s stock has skyrocketed as it has made one promise after another of accelerated schedules and massive scale up of its vaccine production.

Inovio is on a similar trajectory. The phase I trials on its putative SARS-CoV-2 vaccine started on April 3. The company is injecting people with milligram amounts of DNA and then zapping them with a proprietary device, to get the DNA into their cells. It has not defined how the DNA carrying the spike protein information will be guided to the nucleus. If the DNA stays elsewhere in the cells, where it does not belong, it might be mistaken for a virus and start an adverse immune response. If it goes to the nucleus, it may integrate into the cells’ DNA in random places, potentially causing cancers.

The mainstream takes dictation

The mainstream media, which is as lazy as it is scientifically illiterate, has contented itself with the republication of gee-whiz, oh-wow press releases, and the publication of reports sometimes explicitly written by the vaccine manufacturers or their partner foundations. Such reports also appear, not as full-length peer-reviewed articles, but as short commentaries in the summary and editorial pages of serious science journals like Science and Nature. The association of those planted reports with prestigious journals gives them, not only a veneer of credibility but also an automatic amplification by popular science magazines. The reports have generally focused on the marvelous promise of the supposed vaccines and their inevitable manufacture in massive quantities. In fact, 18 years after the original SARS-CoV, which is the closest relative of the COVID-19 agent, no vaccine has successfully been developed against that virus, and many of these so-called new vaccine efforts are actually recycled failed SARS-CoV or MERS-CoV projects.

The real state of knowledge about the immune system

What the news media do not say, and probably could not say with any confidence, is that the mammalian immune system is still poorly understood. Had most media people attended a BIO101 class, there would be great skepticism in the news about the sudden proliferation of newfangled vaccines and the massive human experiment being organized to test them.

The following is a quote from a scholarly review published in Nature Immunology in December 2014:

“The only currently licensed and generally available vaccines against respiratory viruses are for influenza virus, and even these are suboptimal. The paucity of vaccines is due in part to the only limited understanding of immune responses that can provide protection against respiratory viral infection: in many cases, even fundamental correlates of protection have yet to be accurately defined, and the most appropriate antigens to which vaccines should be targeted remain unknown. Animal models are generally imperfect guides to human disease, and the populations at highest risk of severe infections (i.e., young children and elderly adults) are the most difficult to study. In addition, vaccines are often less effective in those with immature or senescent immune systems.”

The next quote is from a commentary on a peer-reviewed article published on May 13, 2020 in Nature 581: 316.

“This discovery elevates TASL to membership of an exclusive circle of… adaptor proteins… of which the other members are TRIF, MAVS, and STING. These four proteins together control the type I interferon response induced by nucleic-acid sensing, a picture that has now been completed with the discovery of TASL as the missing… adaptor of TLR7, TLR8 and TLR9 signaling.”

My translation: only this week, one of the four major players in the early human immune response was discovered! It is a newly characterized protein called TASL that becomes activated when an infected cell senses the presence of genetic material from a virus in a cellular compartment where it should not be. This helps to explain an important part of the immune response that until now has baffled scientists.

The early fight against an infection: a situation that can escalate

A reasonable analogy to a viral infection might be a Columbine-like threat, where a band of murderous fascists take over a high school. Let us say, for good measure, that this particular group wears a specific and recognizable kind of uniform and tattoo. The high school itself is automatically set up to detect the invasion and to call 911. Cells in the lung do the equivalent with proteins called Toll Like Receptors (TLR). These proteins sound the alarm when they recognize genetic material, like DNA or viral RNA, in compartments outside of the nucleus, where it is not supposed to be: a situation that indicates presence of a pathogen. In the cells, some of these compartments are called endosomes or endolysosomes. In our high school, the first responders would be the local police. In the lungs, which do contain their own local immune cells, this would be called the interferon or antiviral response. If this response is successful, as it often is in healthy people, nothing more needs to be done: end of story.

But suppose some of the fascists manage to evade the police and take over several other schools in the same area. The police might then call in SWAT teams with snipers, machine guns, and tear gas grenades; or even police units with bomb robots. The innate, or local, immune system has the equivalent of all of these. It involves SOS signals to the adaptor proteins noted in the above quotation, and the permission from each one for the next step in the escalation. The bomb robots in this case, would be analogous to an inflammation response that destroys not only the viruses but also much of the lung. Obviously, you would want to exhaust every option before using bomb robots in schools that have a few crazies and a lot of students. But suppose the crazies manage to block the police communication to the SWAT teams, then what do you do? Coronaviruses, including the agent of COVID-19, i.e. SARS-CoV-2, can achieve an analogous block of communication during exceptionally heavy initial infections, or infections of the elderly and people with other medical conditions like diabetes, respiratory problems, or cardiovascular disease. What I have just described, with a minimum of immunology jargon, is called the initial innate immune response. In this context, innate means local, i.e. in the lungs.

Vaccines are not the answer

The serum antibodies we all know about are produced as part of a later response, called the adaptive immune response. It happens in those who manage to keep intact and functional a sophisticated route of communication during the attack. The resulting counterattack is not only broad but also specifically tailored to neutralize the invading virus. Furthermore, we maintain a memory of the response. This would be the equivalent of an FBI database with detailed descriptions of the crazies and their tattoos so that they might immediately be recognized, should they appear again in months to years. The only problem is: they can change uniforms and tattoos. All vaccines are based on inducing this later response, which is supposed to prime an individual to resist an attack. But vaccines, however sophisticated the supposed approach or platform, are almost always designed to recognize only a single feature of the invading pathogen. As if one learns to recognize a tattoo on a fascist and nothing more. But suppose the tattoo is removed or changed? In the case of SARS-CoV-2, the target is the spike protein, or sometimes a piece of it. It so happens that the spike protein is also the most variable part of the virus.

Antibody-Dependent Enhancement of disease: A bon entendeur, salut!

A massive human experiment is underway to test potential vaccines. Nearly everything that can be put into a human will be injected into those volunteers who are more terrified of COVID-19 than the vaccine makers or the military. Their menu will include: the inactivated SARS-CoV-2; mutated, or attenuated, versions of SARS-CoV-2 (intra-nasally); SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein; pieces of the spike protein, large and small; harmless bacteria that have been redesigned to make the spike protein; harmless viruses that have been redesigned to make the spike protein; virus-like particles that can present the spike protein on their surface; circular DNA that codes for the spike protein; linear DNA that codes for the spike protein or part of it; mRNA that codes for the spike protein; modified mRNAs; and even an RNA that codes for the spike protein as well as another protein that will make more of the RNA and spike protein, ad infinitum. As a rule, the manufacturers have not even disclosed which exact version of the spike protein they plan to use for the vaccination attempts. Indeed, some companies have disclosed nothing but their intent to conduct clinical trials.

One possible result of attempted vaccinations against SARS-CoV-2 that should give anyone pause is an Antibody-Dependent Enhancement (ADE) of disease. In other words, it is possible that attempted vaccinations might prime a previously healthy person for a life-threatening inflammation response on the next encounter with a coronavirus. So far, the only company that reports even having checked for ADE is Sinovac Biotech, a Chinese company that is collaborating with a US partner on an inactivated SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. The phenomenon of ADE is well established as a possible outcome of attempted vaccination against viruses. A famous instance was a late 1960s vaccine trial in children using inactivated Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV), which resulted, not only in a failure to protect but also in 2 deaths, and a severe respiratory disease in 80 percent of the children that required hospitalization on their subsequent exposure to the virus. ADE has been observed in mice and other animals supposedly immunized against SARS-CoV with an inactivated virus. Recall that SARS-CoV is the closest relative of SARS-CoV-2. Therefore, compared to the supposedly vaccinated people, it is highly possible that the unvaccinated or never previously exposed individuals will fare better in a subsequent coronavirus outbreak.

Hydroxychloroquine bites back

The new adaptor protein, called TASL, described for the first time this week, was discovered to bind to another protein called Solute Carrier 15A4 (SLC15A4). SLC15A4 has long been known to be necessary for lupus and other autoimmune diseases. Now we know that the reason for this is probably because the TASL-SLC15A4 interaction is the path that leads to inflammation. Remember the robot-bomb option in the previous section? That’s the one! As it happens, the reason hydroxychoroquine (HC) has worked for decades against lupus disease is because HC is known to interfere with inflammation, but the details were unknown. SLC15A4 is also important for maintaining the acidity of the endosome, which HC is known to de-acidify to some degree. The antibiotic azithromycin has also been reported to reduce the acidity of endosomes, thus compounding this effect of HC. As a result, when the virus goes to the endosome to develop, it finds that this compartment is insufficiently acidic; it gets stuck there and is ultimately destroyed. So hydroxychloroquine, an inexpensive and long-used drug, counters coronavirus infections in two crucial and quite general ways: it damages the virus and also keeps the immune response from going dangerously overboard. Given the connection of SLC15A4 to lupus disease, it is astonishing that the authors of the new paper did not test HC’s effect on their system containing TASL. But much is open to revision when one wants to publish in Nature. That piece of the puzzle will surely materialize. But timing is everything, and it’s no wonder that the vaccine makers are in such a rush.

For the record

The biggest populations of human subjects for vaccine trials have in the past been brown and black children from countries like India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Mexico, and Haiti. The scale of the current project is so massive, however, that even the citizens of Western countries must be preyed upon. In this regard, it certainly helps to keep everyone terrified. The biggest market for vaccines used to be the US Army, but that may change. Besides, a cowed and sick general public should be far more manageable, as climate change events exacerbate stressors like displacement and hunger. The greater the number of epidemics and vaccine-associated diseases, the greater the boon will be for pharmaceutical companies, and the faster they will grow. I write for the record. Those of you who participate in this enterprise or invest in it can no longer say that you did not know what was being done. The rest of you on the sidelines can still change this dystopian future, but the window of opportunity is narrowing fast.

Editor’s Notes: Dr. Dady Chery is an Associate Professor of Biology, Co-Editor-In-Chief of News Junkie Post, and the author of We Have Dared to Be Free: Haiti’s Struggle Against Occupation.

May 1, 2020 COVID-19: Questionable Coronavirus Evolution in Biosafety Level 4 Labs
April 11, 2020 COVID-19: Killer of Black, Brown and Poor of US and Haiti
March 19, 2020 COVID-19: Diagnostics, Hydroxychloroquine, Plasma, Short and Long-Term Solutions
March 17, 2020 COVID-19: Background Science to Understand the Pandemic
August 28, 2014 Ebola: Zombie Apocalypse, Biological Warfare or Marketing Hype?
March 10, 2013 Humanitarian Imperialism: Charity for Power

What Did U.S. Intel Really Know About the ‘Chinese’ Virus?

Posted on May 14, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Pepe Escobar

Source: Information Clearing House

Hybrid War 2.0 on China, a bipartisan U.S. operation, is already reaching fever pitch. Its 24/7 full spectrum infowar arm blames China for everything coronavirus-related – doubling as a diversionist tactic against any informed criticism of woeful American unpreparedness.

Hysteria predictably reigns. And this is just the beginning.

A deluge of lawsuits is imminent – such as the one in the Southern District of Florida entered by Berman Law Group (linked to the Democrats) and Lucas-Compton (linked to the Republicans). In a nutshell: China has to shell out tons of cash. To the tune of at least $1.2 trillion, which happens to be – by surrealist irony – the amount of U.S. Treasury bills held by Beijing, all the way to $20 trillion, claimed by a lawsuit in Texas.

The prosecution’s case, as Scott Ritter memorably reminded us, is straight out of Monty Python. It works exactly like this:

“If she weighs the same as a duck…

…she’s made of wood!”

“And therefore…”

“A witch!!!!!”

In Hybrid War 2.0 terms, the current CIA-style narrative translates as evil China never telling us, the civilized West, there was a terrible new virus around. If they did, we would have had time to prepare.

And yet they lied and cheated – by the way, trademark CIA traits, according to Mike “We Lie, We Cheat, We Steal” Pompeo himself. And they hid everything. And they censored the truth. So they wanted to infect us all. Now they have to pay for all the economic and financial damage we are suffering, and for all our dead people. It’s China’s fault.

All this sound and fury forces us to refocus back to late 2019 to check out what U.S. intel really knew then about what would later be identified as Sars-Cov-2.

“No such product exists”

The gold standard remains the ABC News report according to which intel collected in November 2019 by the National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), a subsidiary of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), was already warning about a new virulent contagion getting out of hand in Wuhan, based on “detailed analysis of intercepted communications and satellite imagery”.

An unnamed source told ABC, “analysts concluded it could be a cataclysmic event”, adding the intel was “briefed multiple times” to the DIA, the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, and even the White House.

No wonder the Pentagon was forced to issue the proverbial denial – in Pentagonese, via one Col. R. Shane Day, the director of the DIA’s NCMI: “In the interest of transparency during this current public health crisis, we can confirm that media reporting about the existence/release of a National Center for Medical Intelligence Coronavirus-related product/assessment in November of 2019 is not correct. No such NCMI product exists.”

Well, if such “product” existed, Pentagon head and former Raytheon lobbyist Mark Esper would be very much in the loop. He was duly questioned about it by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.

Question: “Did the Pentagon receive an intelligence assessment on COVID in China last November from the National Center for Medical Intelligence of DIA?”

Esper: “Oh, I can’t recall, George,” (…) “But, we have many people who watch this closely.”

Question: “This assessment was done in November, and it was briefed to the NSC in early December to assess the impact on military readiness, which, of course, would make it important to you, and the possible spread in the United States. So, you would have known if there was a brief to the National Security Council in December, wouldn’t you?”

Esper: “Yes (…) “I’m not aware of that.”

So “no such product exists” then? Is it a fake? Is it a Deep State/CIA concoction to trap Trump? Or are the usual suspects lying, trademark CIA style?

Let’s review some essential background. On November 12, a married couple from Inner Mongolia was admitted to a Beijing hospital, seeking treatment for pneumonic plague.

The Chinese CDC, on Weibo – the Chinese Twitter – told public opinion that the chances of this being a new plague were “extremely low.” The couple was quarantined.

Four days later, a third case of pneumonic plague was identified: a man also from Inner Mongolia, not related to the couple. Twenty-eight people who were in close contact with the man were quarantined. None had plague symptoms. Pneumonic plague has symptoms of respiratory failure similar to pneumonia.

Even though the CDC repeated, “there is no need to worry about the risk of infection”, of course there was plenty of skepticism. The CDC may have publicly confirmed on November 12 these cases of pneumonic plague. But then Li Jifeng, a doctor at Chaoyang Hospital where the trio from Inner Mongolia was receiving treatment, published, privately, on WeChat, that they were first transported to Beijing actually on November 3.

The key point of Li Jinfeng’s post – later removed by censors – was when she wrote, “I am very familiar with diagnosing and treating the majority of respiratory diseases (…) But this time, I kept on looking but could not figure out what pathogen caused the pneumonia. I only thought it was a rare condition and did not get much information other than the patients’ history.”

Even if that was the case, the key point is that the three Inner Mongolian cases seem to have been caused by a detectable bacteria. Covid-19 is caused by the Sars-Cov-2 virus, not a bacteria. The first Sars-Covid-2 case was only detected in Wuhan in mid to late December. And it was only last month that Chinese scientists were able to positively trace back the first real case of Sars-Cov-2 to November 17 – a few days after the Inner Mongolian trio.

Knowing exactly where to look

It’s out of the question that U.S. intel, in this case the NCMI, was unaware of these developments in China, considering CIA spying and the fact these discussions were in the open on Weibo and WeChat. So if the NCMI “product” is not a fake and really exists, it only found evidence, still in November, of some vague instances of pneumonic plague.

Thus the warning – to the DIA, the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and even the White House – was about that. It could not possibly have been about coronavirus.

The burning question is inevitable: how could the NCMI possibly know all about a viral pandemic, still in November, when Chinese doctors positively identified the first cases of a new type of pneumonia only on December 26?

Add to it the intriguing question of why the NCMI was so interested in this particular flu season in China in the first place – from plague cases treated in Beijing to the first signs of a “mysterious pneumonia outbreak” in Wuhan.

There may have been subtle hints of slightly increased activity at clinics in Wuhan in late November and early December. But at the time nobody – Chinese doctors, the government, not to mention U.S. intel – could have possibly known what was really happening.

China could not be “covering up” what was only identified as a new disease on December 30, duly communicated to the WHO. Then, on January 3, the head of the American CDC, Robert Redfield, called the top Chinese CDC official. Chinese doctors sequenced the virus. And only on January 8 it was determined this was Sars-Cov-2 – which provokes Covid-19.

This chain of events reopens, once again, a mighty Pandora’s box. We have the quite timely Event 201; the cozy relationship between the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the WHO, as well as the World Economic Forum and the Johns Hopkins galaxy in Baltimore, including the Bloomberg School of Public Health; the ID2020 digital ID/vaccine combo; Dark Winter – which simulated a smallpox bio-attack on the U.S., before the 2001 anthrax attack being blamed on Iraq; U.S. Senators dumping stocks after a CDC briefing; more than 1,300 CEOs abandoning their cushy perches in 2019, “forecasting” total market collapse; the Fed pouring helicopter money already in September 2019 – as part of QE4.

And then, validating the ABC News report, Israel steps in. Israeli intel confirms U.S. intel did in fact warn them in November about a potentially catastrophic pandemic in Wuhan (once again: how could they possibly know that on the second week of November, so early in the game?) And NATO allies were warned – in November – as well.

The bottom line is explosive: the Trump administration as well as the CDC had an advance warning of no less than four months – from November to March – to be properly prepared for Covid-19 hitting the U.S. And they did nothing. The whole “China is a witch!” case is debunked.

Moreover, the Israeli disclosure supports what’s nothing less than extraordinary: U.S. intel already knew about Sars-Cov-2 roughly one month before the first confirmed cases detected by doctors in a Wuhan hospital. Talk about divine intervention.

That could only have happened if U.S. intel knew, for sure, about a previous chain of events that would necessarily lead to the “mysterious outbreak” in Wuhan. And not only that: they knew exactly where to look. Not in Inner Mongolia, not in Beijing, not in Guangdong province.

It’s never enough to repeat the question in full: how could U.S. intel have known about a contagion one month before Chinese doctors detected an unknown virus?

Mike “We Lie, We Cheat, We Steal” Pompeo may have given away the game when he said, on the record, that Covid-19 was a “live exercise”. Adding to the ABC News and Israeli reports, the only possible, logical conclusion is that the Pentagon – and the CIA – knew ahead of time a pandemic would be inevitable.

That’s the smokin’ gun. And now the full weight of the United States government is covering all bases by proactively, and retroactively, blaming China.

Reactions to the Corona Virus Hint of a Wider Agenda

Posted on May 6, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By James O’Neill

Source: Land Destroyer

The western world has gone into a phase of unprecedented lockdown. Major airlines have ceased international operations. It is an open question is to whether or not they will be able to resume operations when and if the current draconian restrictions are lifted. In Australia, the Federal government has ceased to sit and the government has announced that this parliamentary closure will extend until at least August.

Quite why such a lockdown is necessary is unclear. No convincing explanation has been offered by the government and it is an extreme step that comparable nations in North America, the United Kingdom and all of Europe have found unnecessary. One of the most alarming consequences of this fundamental attack on the notion of Parliamentary accountability is that the decision was met with acceptance by the official Opposition and muted negative comment, if at all, by the major mainstream media.

Media coverage of the pandemic has been extraordinary. At least half of the nightly main television news bulletins have been devoted to coverage of the pandemic, although whether it actually adds to our degree of knowledge is at best debatable.

The statistics as to those affected, dying and recovery are presented each night like some grizzly football score. How accurate or complete those statistics are is a very open question. They are presented however as some form of immutable truth with nary a question as to their accuracy or reliability.

There are serious questions being asked as to the real origins of the current pandemic. We are constantly told by the mainstream media that it originated in China, and that “fact” is presented as something beyond question. The more we learn however, the less reliable that complacent assertion appears to be.

It is true that the first mainstream media reports of the virus came out of China’s Wuhan City, and urban agglomeration of some 12 million inhabitants. That reporting betrayed a number of assumptions that are difficult to sustain.

Where a virus is first reported does not automatically equate with where it began. One reason for this is that people being infected or dying are not necessarily correctly defined as to the cause of death or illness. This is particularly the case here with multiple instances of the illness were initially defined as the current illustration of the annual influenza epidemic which inflict and kill millions of people each year.

A second factor is that a virus can be imported into a country, either by accident or deliberately, by those acting for or on behalf of another nation. This is not idle speculation in the present case. There is now very good evidence that the virus was imported into the city of Wuhan at a time contemporaneous with the holding in that city of the quadrennial Military Games.

Representatives of more than 100 nations attended and participated in those games. The United States contingent was of particular interest for a number of reasons.

The first is that its soldier participants had their worst medal performance since the games were first held a half century ago, not winning a single gold medal and finishing well down the medal table.

The second factor was that the hotel where the United States military participants stayed was itself a hotbed of infection, recording more than 40 cases of employees and guests infected by the virus. This is a remarkable coincidence that challenges the laws of probability theory.

A third clue is the way the western media have reported the Chinese experience. They have given prominence to United States President Donald Trump’s description of the pandemic as the “Chinese virus”. We know from 100+ years of experience with the Spanish flu of 1919 how a false label can be used to define an entire country on a wholly false basis.

The record clearly shows that the Chinese government alerted the World Health Organisation as soon as they had established the reality of the virus they were dealing with. This was before most western countries had even acknowledged that there was a problem.

This suspicion has been reinforced in recent weeks by the reporting of western media of the actions of the Russian and Chinese government to provide assistance where it was asked for. The Italian government for example was refused assistance by its European Union “partners” and it was the Russians who flew in giant planes full of urgently needed medical supplies, taking a lengthy roundabout route because of obstructive flyover permission.

This assistance was greeted with a sneer by the western media who contrived to find some sort of Russian plot in a selfless humanitarian exercise. A similar result was seen in the media’s response to Chinese aid which was denounced as either medically inadequate or done with ulterior motives.

In neither case was that View shared by the governments involved, the medical staff of the overstretched and under resourced hospitals, or the citizens of those countries aided by the Russian and Chinese medical supplies.

The writer Dimitri Orlov, who recently returned to live in Russia after many years residence in the United States, had a cynical but arguably realistic view of the virus. On 8 April 2020 he had this comment to make on his Patreon:

“China has just taught the world a major masterclass in biowarfare defence. It doesn’t matter whether SARS-Covid-19 was concocted in a United States biowarfare laboratory or not. The point is, it could have been, because why else would the United States have bio- warfare laboratories scattered around the globe? And why were they collecting DNA samples from local populations except to target them using bioweapons? And so after some amount of uncertainty and vacillation China opted to treat the SARS-COV-19 outbreak as an act of war and won! Russia has followed suit, and although it is too early to declare victory it too is likely to score a win on the biowarfare front.”

I respectfully share Mr Orlov’s view. We also have the curiously unexplained events at the United States’ Fort Detrick biowarfare facility. In July 2019 the facility was forced to temporarily close, reopening at the end of the year. It is one of the literally hundreds of such United States facilities scattered around the globe.

What makes Fort Detrick of particular interest in the current context was that it was known to be working on a Covid-19 type biological weapon. That the United States had succeeded in developing such a weapon was publicly proclaimed by Johns Hopkins University in October 2019. The timing of this announcement, the problems at Fort Detrick and the outbreak of the coronavirus goes beyond mere coincidence.

The wall to wall media coverage of the outbreak in the western media nonetheless fails to raise these fundamental and clearly relevant points.

It is one of the grim ironies of the present pandemic that the United States may well turn out to be the principal victim, at least among western nations. Even there, some questions exist. We know from the published data thus far that 70% of the fatalities in the United States have been in the black population, that represent only 10% of the national population.

Television pictures showing mass graves being created in public parks will do little to assuage growing public concern that allegedly “the richest country in the world” cannot even properly treat or bury their own disadvantaged citizens.

The consequences of this pandemic are likely to be vastly greater than originally thought. The average citizen would do well to strap themselves in for what is going to be a very bumpy ride.

Question Everything

Posted on April 15, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Michael Krieger

Source: Liberty Blitzkrieg

Crises, like pandemics, don’t break things in and of themselves; they show you what’s already broken.

– Patrick Wyman

Big macro crises in any form are scary, massively disruptive, and in some cases, literally deadly. This is why governments and entrenched institutions always see such events as opportunities to further consolidate wealth and power.

The current global pandemic is no exception, as I detailed in last week’s piece: Power Grab. While it’s necessary to be aware of this reality — and to push back against it wherever possible — it’s equally important to recognize there’s a silver lining to all of this.

The paradigm we live under depends on us not thinking too hard about how power functions. It relies on us being so busy with the basics of survival, or distracted by superficial consumerism and endless entertainment, to contemplate how the system actually works. This method of social control has been wildly successful throughout my lifetime, but what’s interesting about moments of global crises is the mask is forced off for a period. In a desperate scramble to marshal all of the corporate-imperial state’s resources to save the interests of the oligarchy, we’re shown in full color who really matters and who doesn’t.

For every $1000 check that goes out another $1,000,000 check goes out.

The corporations get 1000X more than you.

You get 1/1000th what the corporations receive.

Business as usual, even in a “pandemic”.

— JohnnyB (@JohnnyBananas79) March 30, 2020

It's amazing how quickly all of Congress turns into socialists (for corporations) the minute billionaires start losing some money.

— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) March 27, 2020

You do not matter. The imperial state doesn’t care about you. Oligarchs don’t care about you. Mega corporations don’t care about you. This truth is cleverly hidden from much of the public during “normal” times when the machine is humming along as intended, but it’s far more in your face during a crisis period. It’s much harder to hide the truth when the world gets turned upside down.

Aside from the grotesque spectacle of the U.S. government funneling all of its resources toward propping up Wall Street and large corporations, this crisis has exposed the rot and disfunction in another meaningful way. Our health experts, ostensibly there to help the public navigate exactly this sort of event, have failed us in spectacular fashion.

https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/1233725785283932160

My government:
– Pretended it wasn’t real.
– Made tests that didn’t work.
– Didn’t allow local labs to make their own tests.
– Told the public masks don’t work.
– Gave trillions to Wall Street and an assortment of other predatory oligarchs.

How you doing? https://t.co/0iwe9YKELD

— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) March 27, 2020

This is what political actors masquerading as experts do in a crisis. They either give bad advice, or intentionally mislead the public to hide the fact the U.S. simply doesn’t have adequate mask supply and sent its manufacturing capacity overseas. Which brings up an important topic worthy of further discussion: the crucial distinction between experts and expertise.

An “expert” in our society is someone with expertise in a particular field who’s been propped up by either the media, government or both as an authoritative source to listen to on a particular topic. This individual’s elevated stature is artificially created by an external source that’s selected this particular person as someone you should listen to. It tends to be a political appointment. This person has been chosen, not only because he or she has expertise (many others also do), but due to other attributes that appeal to those who’ve decided to prop them up. Anyone who’s worked in corporate America knows full well that many of those promoted to middle management, or higher, often end up there not because they’re particularly skilled, but because they’re good at playing politics and know the right ass to kiss. The same is true in all large organizations, and government is no exception.

In the days before the internet and social media, the public might know that government/media experts were behaving dishonestly, but didn’t have realtime access to competitive nonpolitical voices with equal or superior expertise to the government experts. What many of us discovered during this pandemic is people with expertise engaging publicly on Twitter provided far better and more timely advice than the government/media experts. This makes perfect sense because these people tend to not be political actors, but rather humans attempting to share information in an honest and selfless manner. If we’ve learned anything in the 21st century, it’s that actual track records don’t matter when it comes to media and government positions. In fact, the more catastrophically wrong you are in the interests of oligarchy, the more likely you are to be promoted and elevated.

Fortunately, I entered this crisis with a well established distrust of mass media and government, and therefore knew better than to look toward their experts for any useful guidance. Rather, I sought out the opinions of various nonpolitical individuals with relevant expertise who helped me see things for how they were very early on. Others have not been as lucky, but will no doubt emerge from this crisis with a deep distrust of established institutions and individuals, and with very good reason.

We’ve just witnessed a catastrophic failure of the centralized state in America, and the blowback will resonate within the larger culture for years if not decades. Similar to how many people were shaken to their core during the financial crisis a decade ago, I think this pandemic event will lead to an even larger wave of people awakening to how completely rotten, pernicious and corrupt the whole system is. Once you see that reality in all its glory, you can’t unsee it.

Of course, recognizing how broken things are isn’t enough. We need to have a thoughtful conversation about what we have too much of versus what we need. If we’re going to change the world, we need a vision. I have some thoughts on the matter.

What we need more of:
– Small businesses
– Empowered individuals
– Decentraliation/localism
– Look inward, bottom up change.

What we need less of:
– Monopoly, dominant oligarchs
– A mass of indebted cubicle slaves
– Centralization/empire
– Searching for saviors, politicians

— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) March 18, 2020

Nothing is set in stone. The world as it is today is not some divine eternal paradigm beyond reproach. Humans shape the world through their choices, actions and mentality.

For additional thoughts on that and much more, check out my recent interview with Tales From the Crypt.

Toxic Agriculture and the Gates Foundation

Posted on April 14, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Colin Todhunter

Source: Dissident Voice

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was launched in 2000 and has $46.8 billion in assets (December 2018). It is the largest charitable foundation in the world and distributes more aid for global health than any government. One of the foundation’s stated goals is to globally enhance healthcare and reduce extreme poverty.

The Gates Foundation is a major funder of the CGIAR system (formerly the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research) — a global partnership whose stated aim is to strive for a food-secured future. Its research is aimed at reducing rural poverty, increasing food security, improving human health and nutrition and ensuring sustainable management of natural resources.

In 2016, the Gates Foundation was accused of dangerously and unaccountably distorting the direction of international development. The charges were laid out in a report by Global Justice Now: ‘Gated Development – Is the Gates Foundation always a force for good?‘ According to the report, the foundation’s strategy is based on deepening the role of multinational companies in the Global South.

On release of the report, Polly Jones, the head of campaigns and policy at Global Justice Now, said:

The Gates Foundation has rapidly become the most influential actor in the world of global health and agricultural policies, but there’s no oversight or accountability in how that influence is managed.

She added that this concentration of power and influence is even more problematic when you consider that the philanthropic vision of the Gates Foundation seems to be largely based on the values of ‘corporate America’:

The foundation is relentlessly promoting big business-based initiatives such as industrial agriculture, private health care and education. But these are all potentially exacerbating the problems of poverty and lack of access to basic resources that the foundation is supposed to be alleviating.

The report’s author, Mark Curtis, outlines the foundation’s promotion of industrial agriculture across Africa, which would undermine existing sustainable, small-scale farming that is providing the vast majority of food across the continent.

Curtis describes how the foundation is working with US agri-commodity trader Cargill in an $8 million project to “develop the soya value chain” in southern Africa. Cargill is the biggest global player in the production of and trade in soya with heavy investments in South America where GM soya monocrops (and associated agrochemicals) have displaced rural populations and caused health problems and environmental damage.

According to Curtis, the Gates-funded project will likely enable Cargill to capture a hitherto untapped African soya market and eventually introduce GM soya onto the continent. The Gates foundation is also supporting projects involving other chemical and seed corporations, including DuPont, Syngenta and Bayer. It is effectively promoting a model of industrial agriculture, the increasing use of agrochemicals and patented seeds, the privatisation of extension services and a very large focus on genetically modified crops.

What the Gates Foundation is doing is part of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) initiative, which is based on the premise that hunger and malnutrition in Africa are mainly the result of a lack of technology and functioning markets. Curtis says AGRA has been intervening directly in the formulation of African governments’ agricultural policies on issues like seeds and land, opening up African markets to US agribusiness.

More than 80% of Africa’s seed supply comes from millions of small-scale farmers recycling and exchanging seed from year to year. But AGRA is promoting the commercial production of seed and is thus supporting the introduction of commercial (chemical-dependent) seed systems, which risk enabling a few large companies to control seed research and development, production and distribution.

The report notes that over the past two decades a long and slow process of national seed law reviews, sponsored by USAID and the G8 along with Bill Gates and others, has opened the door to multinational corporations’ involvement in seed production, including the acquisition of every sizeable seed enterprise on the African continent.

Gates, pesticides and global health

The Gates Foundation is also very active in the area of health, which is ironic given its promotion of industrial agriculture and its reliance on health-damaging agrochemicals. This is something that has not been lost on environmentalist Dr Rosemary Mason.

Mason notes that the Gates Foundation is a heavy pusher of agrochemicals and patented seeds. She adds that the Gates Foundation is also reported to be collaborating in Bayer’s promotion of “new chemical approaches” and “biological crop protection” (i.e. encouraging agrochemical sales and GM crops) in the Global South.

After having read the recent ‘A Future for the World’s Children? A WHO-UNICEF-Lancet Commission’, Mason noticed that pesticides were conspicuous by their absence and therefore decided to write to Professor Anthony Costello, director of the UCL Institute for Global Health, who is the lead author of the report.

In her open 19-page letter, ‘Why Don’t Pesticides Feature in the WHO-UNICEF-Lancet Commission?’, she notes in the Costello-led report that there is much talk about greater regulation of marketing of tobacco, alcohol, formula milk and sugar-sweetened beverages but no mention of pesticides.

But perhaps this should come as little surprise: some 42 authors’ names are attached to the report and Mason says that in one way or another via the organisations they belong to, many (if not most) have received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Gates Foundation is a prominent funder of the World Health Organization and UNICEF. Gates has been the largest or second largest contributor to the WHO’s budget in recent years. His foundation provided 11% of the WHO’s entire budget in 2015, which is 14 times greater than the UK government’s contribution.

Perhaps this sheds some light on to why a major report on child health would omit the effects of pesticides. Mason implies this is a serious omission given what the UN expert on toxics Baskut Tuncak said in a November 2017 article in the Guardian:

Our children are growing up exposed to a toxic cocktail of weedkillers, insecticides, and fungicides. It’s on their food and in their water, and it’s even doused over their parks and playgrounds. Many governments insist that our standards of protection from these pesticides are strong enough. But as a scientist and a lawyer who specialises in chemicals and their potential impact on people’s fundamental rights, I beg to differ. Last month it was revealed that in recommending that glyphosate – the world’s most widely-used pesticide – was safe, the EU’s food safety watchdog copied and pasted pages of a report directly from Monsanto, the pesticide’s manufacturer. Revelations like these are simply shocking.

Mason notes that in February 2020, Tuncak rejected the idea that the risks posed by highly hazardous pesticides could be managed safely. He told Unearthed (GreenPeace UK’s journalism website) that there is nothing sustainable about the widespread use of highly hazardous pesticides for agriculture. Whether they poison workers, extinguish biodiversity, persist in the environment or accumulate in a mother’s breast milk, Tuncak argued that these are unsustainable, cannot be used safely and should have been phased out of use long ago.

In his 2017 article, he stated:

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most ratified international human rights treaty in the world (only the US is not a party), makes it clear that states have an explicit obligation to protect children from exposure to toxic chemicals, from contaminated food and polluted water, and to ensure that every child can realise their right to the highest attainable standard of health. These and many other rights of the child are abused by the current pesticide regime. These chemicals are everywhere and they are invisible.

Tuncak added that paediatricians have referred to childhood exposure to pesticides as creating a “silent pandemic” of disease and disability. He noted that exposure in pregnancy and childhood is linked to birth defects, diabetes, and cancer and stated that children are particularly vulnerable to these toxic chemicals: increasing evidence shows that even at ‘low’ doses of childhood exposure, irreversible health impacts can result.

He concluded that the overwhelming reliance of regulators on industry-funded studies, the exclusion of independent science from assessments and the confidentiality of studies relied upon by authorities must change.

However, it seems that the profits of agrochemical manufacturers trump the rights of children and the public at large: a joint investigation by Unearthed and the NGO Public Eye has found the world’s five biggest pesticide manufacturers are making more than a third of their income from leading products, chemicals that pose serious hazards to human health and the environment.

Mason refers to an analysis of a huge database of 2018’s top-selling ‘crop protection products’ which revealed the world’s leading agrochemical companies made more than 35% of their sales from pesticides classed as “highly hazardous” to people, animals or ecosystems. The investigation identified billions of dollars of income for agrochemical giants BASF, Bayer, Corteva, FMC and Syngenta from chemicals found by regulatory authorities to pose health hazards like cancer or reproductive failure.

This investigation is based on an analysis of a huge dataset of pesticide sales from the agribusiness intelligence company Phillips McDougall. This firm conducts detailed market research all over the world and sells databases and intelligence to pesticide companies. The data covers around 40% of the $57.6bn global market for agricultural pesticides in 2018. It focuses on 43 countries, which between them represent more than 90% of the global pesticide market by value.

While Bill Gates promotes a chemical-intensive model of agriculture that dovetails with the needs and value chains of agri-food conglomerates, Mason outlines the spiraling rates of disease in the UK and the US and lays the blame at the door of the agrochemical corporations that Gates has opted to get into bed with. She focuses on the impact of glyphosate-based herbicides as well as the cocktail of chemicals sprayed on crops.

Mason has discussed the health-related impacts of glyphosate in numerous previous reports and in her open letter to Costello again refers to peer-reviewed studies and official statistics which indicate that glyphosate affects the gut microbiome and is responsible for a global metabolic health crisis provoked by an obesity epidemic. Moreover, she presents evidence that glyphosate causes epigenetic changes in humans and animals – diseases skip a generation then appear.

However, the mainstream narrative is to blame individuals for their ailments and conditions which are said to result from ‘lifestyle choices’. Yet Monsanto’s German owner Bayer has confirmed that more than 42,700 people have filed suits against Monsanto alleging that exposure to Roundup herbicide caused them or their loved ones to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma and that Monsanto covered up the risks.

Mason says that each year there are steady increases in the numbers of new cancers and increases in deaths from the same cancers, with no treatments making any difference to the numbers; at the same time, she argues, these treatments maximise the bottom line of the drug companies while the impacts of agrochemicals remains conspicuously absent from the disease narrative.

She states that we are exposed to a lifetime’s exposure to thousands of synthetic chemicals that contaminate the blood and urine of nearly every person tested – “a global mass poisoning.”

Gates Foundation in perspective

As part of its hegemonic strategy, the Gates Foundation says it wants to ensure global food security and optimise health and nutrition.

However, Rosemary Mason alludes to the fact that the Gates Foundation seems happy to ignore the deleterious health impacts of agrochemicals while promoting the interests of the firms that produce them, but it facilitates many health programmes that help boost the bottom line of drug companies. Health and health programmes seem only to be defined with certain parameters which facilitate the selling of the products of the major pharmaceutical companies which the foundation partners with. Indeed, researcher Jacob Levich argues that the Gates Foundation not merely facilitates unethical low-cost clinical trials (with often devastating effects for participants) in the Global South but also assists in the creating new markets for the “dubious” products of pharmaceuticals corporations.

As for food security, the foundation would do better by supporting agroecological (agrochemical-free) approaches to agriculture, which various high-level UN reports have advocated for ensuring equitable global food security. But this would leave smallholder agriculture both intact and independent from Western agro-capital, something which runs counter to the underlying aims of the corporations that the foundation supports – dispossession and market dependency.

And these aims have been part of a decades-long strategy where we have seen the strengthening of an emerging global food regime based on agro-export mono-cropping linked to sovereign debt repayment and World Bank/IMF ‘structural adjustment’ directives. The outcomes have included a displacement of a food-producing peasantry, the consolidation of Western agri-food oligopolies and the transformation of many countries from food self-sufficiency into food deficit areas.

While Bill Gates is busy supporting the consolidation of Western agro-capital in Africa under the guise of ensuring ‘food security’, it is very convenient for him to ignore the fact that at the time of decolonisation in the 1960s Africa was not just self-sufficient in food but was actually a net food exporter with exports averaging 1.3 million tons a year between 1966-70. The continent now imports 25% of its food, with almost every country being a net food importer. More generally, developing countries produced a billion-dollar yearly surplus in the 1970s but by 2004 were importing US$ 11 billion a year.

The Gates Foundation promotes a (heavily subsidised and inefficient – certainly when the externalised health, social and environment costs are factored in) corporate-industrial farming system and the strengthening of a global neoliberal, fossil-fuel-dependent food regime that by its very nature fuels and thrives on, among other things, unjust trade policies, population displacement and land dispossession (something which the Gates Foundation once called for but euphemistically termed “land mobility”), commodity monocropping, soil and environmental degradation, illness, nutrient-deficient diets, a narrowing of the range of food crops, water shortages, pollution and the eradication of biodiversity.

At the same time, the foundation is helping powerful corporate interests to appropriate and commodify knowledge. For instance, since 2003, CGIAR (mentioned at the start of this article) and its 15 centres have received more than $720 million from the Gates Foundation. In a June 2016 article in The Asian Age, Vandana Shiva says the centres are accelerating the transfer of research and seeds to corporations, facilitating intellectual property piracy and seed monopolies created through IP laws and seed regulations.

Besides taking control of the seeds of farmers in CGIAR seed banks, Shiva adds that the Gates Foundation (along with the Rockefeller Foundation) is investing heavily in collecting seeds from across the world and storing them in a facility in Svalbard in the Arctic — the ‘doomsday vault’.

The foundation is also funding Diversity Seek (DivSeek), a global initiative to take patents on the seed collections through genomic mapping. Seven million crop accessions are in public seed banks.

Shiva says that DivSeek could allow five corporations to own this diversity and argues:

Today, biopiracy is carried out through the convergence of information technology and biotechnology. It is done by taking patents by ‘mapping’ genomes and genome sequences… DivSeek is a global project launched in 2015 to map the genetic data of the peasant diversity of seeds held in gene banks. It robs the peasants of their seeds and knowledge, it robs the seed of its integrity and diversity, its evolutionary history, its link to the soil and reduces it to ‘code’. It is an extractive project to ‘mine’ the data in the seed to ‘censor’ out the commons.

She notes that the peasants who evolved this diversity have no place in DivSeek — their knowledge is being mined and not recognised, honoured or conserved: an enclosure of the genetic commons.

This process is the very foundation of capitalism – appropriation of the commons (seeds, water, knowledge, land, etc.), which are then made artificially scarce and transformed into marketable commodities.

The Gates Foundation talks about health but facilitates the roll-out of a toxic form of agriculture whose agrochemicals cause immense damage. It talks of alleviating poverty and malnutrition and tackling food insecurity but it bolsters an inherently unjust global food regime which is responsible for perpetuating food insecurity, population displacement, land dispossession, privatisation of the commons and neoliberal policies that remove support from the vulnerable and marginalised, while providing lavish subsidies to corporations.

The Gates Foundation is part of the problem, not the solution. To more fully appreciate this, let us turn to a February 2020 article in the journal Globalizations. Its author, Ashok Kumbamu, argues that the ultimate aim of promoting new technologies – whether GM seeds, agrochemicals or commodified knowledge — on a colossal scale is to make agricultural inputs and outputs essential commodities, create dependency and bring all farming operations into the capitalist fold.

To properly understand Bill Gates’s ‘philanthropy’ is not to take stated goals and objectives at face value but to regard his ideology as an attempt to manufacture consent and prevent and marginalise more radical agrarian change that would challenge prevailing power structures and act as impediments to capitalist interests. The foundation’s activities must be located within the hegemonic and dispossessive strategies of imperialism: displacement of the peasantry and subjugating those who remain in agriculture to the needs of global distribution and supply chains dominated by the Western agri-food conglomerates whose interests the Gates Foundation facilitates and legitimises.

The full text of Rosemary Mason’s 19-page document (with relevant references) — ‘Why Don’t Pesticides Feature in the WHO-UNICEF-Lancet Commission?’ — can be accessed via the academia.edu website)

The Coronavirus Is Not the Plague: The Plague Is US

Posted on April 6, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

“Two categories of propaganda must be distinguished. The first strives to create a permanent disposition in its objects and constantly needs to be reinforced. Its goal is to make the masses ‘available,’ by working spells upon them and exercising a kind of fascination. The second category involves the creation of a sort of temporary impulsiveness in its objects. It operates by simple pressure and is often contradictory (since contradictory mass movement are sometimes necessary).” – Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

The French-Algerian writer Albert Camus’ great 1947 novel, The Plague, is a warning to us today, but a warning in disguise. When he died sixty years ago at the young age of forty-six, he had already written The Stranger, The Fall, and The Plague, and had won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The outward story of The Plague revolves around a malignant disease that breaks out in a town that is quarantined when the authorities issue a state of emergency. After first denying that they have a problem, the people gradually panic and feel painfully isolated. Death fear runs rampant, much like today with the coronavirus. The authorities declare martial law as they warn that the situation is dire, people must be careful of associating, especially in groups, and they better obey orders or very many will die. So the town is cordoned off.

Before this happens and the first signs that something is amiss emerge, the citizens of the town of Oran, Algeria remain oblivious, for they “work hard, but solely with the object of getting rich.” Bored by their habits, heavily drugging themselves with drink, and watching many movies to distract themselves, they failed to grasp the significance of “the squelchy roundness of a still-warm body” of the plague-bearing rats that emerge from their underworld to die in their streets. “It was as if the earth on which our houses stood were being purged of their secret humors; thrusting up to the surface the abscesses and pus-clots that had been forming in its entrails.” To them the plague is “unthinkable,” an abstraction, until all their denials are swept aside as the truth emerges from the sewers and their neighbors and families die from the disease.

“Stupidity has a way of getting its way;” the narrator, Dr. Rieux tells us, “as we should see if we were not always so wrapped up in ourselves …. plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.”

The American people are wrapped up in themselves. Nor do they recognize the true rats. They are easily surprised; fooled would be a better word.

Camus uses a physical plague to disguise his real subject, which is the way people react when they are physically trapped by human rats who demand they obey orders and stay physically and mentally compliant as their freedom is taken from them.

The Plague is an allegorical depiction of the German occupation of France during World War II. Camus had lived through that experience as a member of the French Resistance. He was a writer and editor of the underground Resistance newspaper Combat, and with his artist’s touch he later made The Plague a revelatory read for today, especially for citizens of the United States, the greatest purveyor of the plague of violence in the world.

We are all infected with the soul-destroying evil that our leaders have loosed upon the world, a plague of killing that is now hidden behind the coronavirus fear that is being used to institute tight government controls that many will come to rue in the months ahead, just as happened after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Coronavirus is a perfect cover-story for the occupation of the public’s mind by a propaganda apparatus that has grown even more devious over the past 19 years.

Ask yourself: Where is the news about U.S. military operations in Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America, Asia, etc.? There is none in the corporate mainstream media, and little in the alternative media as well. Have those operations ceased? Of course not. It’s just that the news about them, little that it was, has disappeared.

Now it is all about us and the coronavirus panic. It is about how many of us might die. It is about stocking toilet paper. For the rich, it is about getting to their second or third houses where they can isolate themselves in splendor. As I write, 150 or so Americans are said to have died of Covid-19, and by the time you will read this the number will have climbed, but the number will be minuscule compared to the number of people in the U.S.A. and those numbers will be full of contradictions that few comprehend unless, rather than reacting in fear, they did some comprehensive research.

But arguments are quite useless in a time of panic when people are consumed with fear and just react.

For we live in plague time, and the plague lives in us. But to most Americans, Covid-19 is the plague, because the government and media have said it is. Like the inhabitants of Oran, the United States is “peopled with sleep walkers,” pseudo-innocents, who are “chiefly aware of what ruffled the normal tenor of their lives or affected their interests.” That their own government, no matter what political party is in power (both working for “deep-state,” elite interests led by the organized criminals of the CIA), is the disseminator of a world-wide plague of virulent violence, must be denied and divorced from consensus reality.

That these same forces would use the fear of disease to cow the population should be no surprise for those who have come to realize the truth of the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the anthrax attacks that followed, both of which were used to justify the endless “wars on terror” that have killed so many around the world. It is a shock for so many people who can’t countenance the thought that their own government could possibly be implicated in the death of thousands of U.S. citizens and the release of the deadly anthrax, which we know came from a U.S. lab and was carried out by a group of inside government perpetrators.

When it comes to the plague-stricken deaths visited on millions around the world for decades by the American government, this must be denied by diverting attention to partisan presidential politics, and now the coronavirus that engenders fear, loathing, and a child-like tendency to believe Big Brother. The true plague, the bedrock of a nation continually waging wars through various means – i.e. bombs and economic and medical sanctions, etc. – against the world, disappears from consciousness. As U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albrecht said to 60 Minutes Lesley Stahl in 1996 when Stahl asked her if the U.S. sanctions on Iraq that had resulted in the death of 500,000 Iraqi children were worth it: “We think the price is worth it.”

For “decent folks must be allowed to sleep at night,” says the character Tarrou sarcastically; he is a man who has lost his ability to “sleep well” since he witnessed a man’s execution where the “bullets make a hole into which you could thrust your fist.” He awakens to the realization that he “had an indirect hand in the deaths of thousands of people.” He loses any peace he had and vows to resist the plague in every way he can. “For many years I’ve been ashamed,” he says, “mortally ashamed, of having been, even with the best intentions, even at many removes, a murderer in my turn.”

The rats are dying in the streets. They are our rats, diseased by us. They have emerged from the underworld of a nation plagued by its denial. Unconscious evil bubbles up. We are an infected people. Worry and irritation – “these are not feelings with which to confront plague.” But we don’t seem ashamed of our complicity in our government’s crimes around the world. For decades we have elected leaders who have killed millions, while business went on as usual. The killing didn’t touch us. As Camus said, “We fornicated and read the papers.” He knew better. He warned us:

It’s a wearying business being plague-stricken. But it’s still more wearying to refuse to be it. That’s why everybody in the world looks so tired; everyone is more or less sick of plague. But that is why some of us, those who want to get the plague out of their systems, feel such desperate weariness.

Yet the fight against the plague must go on. Tarrou puts it thus:

All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, as far possible, not to join forces with the pestilences. That may sound simple to the point of childishness; I can’t judge if it’s simple, but I know it’s true. You see, I’d heard such quantities of arguments, which very nearly turned my head, and turned other people’s heads enough to make them approve of murder; and I’d come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language. So I resolved always to speak – and to act – quite clearly, as this was the only way of setting myself on the right track.

These days, I keep thinking of an incident that occurred when I was a young investigator of sexually transmitted diseases, working for the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare through the Public Health Service as an epidemiologist. My job was to track down sexually transmitted diseases by finding links of sexual contacts. One day I went to interview and take a blood sample from a poor woman who had been named as a sexual contact. I knocked on her door on the third or fourth floor of a walkup apartment building. She looked through the peep hole and asked who it was and I told her my name and what government agency I represented. I could tell she was very wary, but she opened the door. She stood there naked, a very heavy woman of perhaps 300 pounds. She nonchalantly welcomed me in and I followed her as she padded down the hall where she took a housecoat off a hook and put it on.

There is, as you know, an old tale by Hans Christian Anderson called “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Although the emperor parades around naked, the adults make believe he is clothed. Only a child sees the obvious. I was 23-years-old naïve young man at the time of this unforgettable incident, but it echoes in my mind as a reminder to myself that perhaps that woman was unconsciously teaching me a lesson in disguise. The year was 1967, and when I went out to get into my government car with federal license plates, a white man in a white shirt in a white car in a poor black neighborhood, a hail of bricks rained down toward me and the car from the roof opposite. I quickly jumped in and fled as the ghettos were exploding. Soon the National Guard would be called out to occupy them.

Intuition tells me that although the emperor has no clothes and a vast PSYOPS occupation is now underway, too many are too grown-up to see it.

It’s an old story continually updated. Like The Plague.

COVID-19 and the CIA’s Biological Warfare on Cuba

Posted on April 2, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

Maybe it was a plan that went horribly wrong, something they could no longer control. Was the Corona virus or COVID-19 spread intentionally? What if this virus was used against China as a weapon of choice to destabilize China’s economy and push back against China’s growing influence? We don’t know for sure, but it is possible. Investigations are ongoing. Nothing has not been confirmed. But what has been confirmed is what history has taught us given the facts on how the use of biological warfare for various purposes, against many peoples and nations has been happening for some time. One of the most well-known incidents of biological warfare occurred in 1763, the British Empire had planned and successfully managed to spread smallpox virus to the Native Americans during the Pontiac Rebellion in Pennsylvania. Chief Pontiac of the Ottowa launched an attack on Fort Detroit, a British military base. Other nations joined the rebellion including the Senecas, the Hurons, Delawares, and Miamis. As the war raged, an Indian delegation asked the British to surrender, but they refused, however, the British offered gifts including food, alcohol and material items that included two blankets and a handkerchief from people who had smallpox. Although the American Indians had experienced the disease in the past, the idea was to spread the disease among the Native American populations in an attempt to push back the rebellion or to defeat it once and for all. Another example of biological warfare was when Imperial Japan before and during World War II had a bio-weapons program that managed to drop numerous bombs on a number of Chinese cities from airplanes killing an estimated 580,000 Chinese people with bombs that were made of infected fleas, some even contained cholera and shigella during the Sino-Japanese war between the 1930′s and 1940′s.

In 1981, the CIA with help from U.S. military had launched an operation against Cuba by unleashing a strain of Dengue Fever also known as “hemorrhagic fever’ effecting more than 273,000 people killing 158 including 101 children. On September 6, 1981, The New York Times reported on Fidel Castro’s comments regarding the U.S. government in particularly, blaming the CIA for the outbreak when he said that ”we urge the United States Government to define its policy in this field, to say whether the C.I.A. will or will not be authorized again- or has already been authorized – to organize attacks against leaders of the revolution and to use plagues against our plants, our animals and our people.” The report said that the “epidemic of dengue fever that has made 340,000 people ill and has killed about 150″ but the State Department under-then President Ronald Reagan stated that “Mr. Castro’s charges of possible United States involvement in the epidemic were ”totally without foundation.” The State department quickly blamed the Castro’s revolution as a failure:

The Cuban Government has always tried to blame the United States for its failures and its internal problems,” the department said. ”The Cuban revolution is a failure, and it is obviously easier to blame external forces like the United States than to admit those failures

Dr, Ronald St. John, chief of communicable diseases for the Pan American Health Organization was interviewed by the New York Times said that “for the first time, so-called dengue-2 spread to Cuba.” Dr. St. John claimed that it is common in Southeast Asia and that it produces “the same symptoms as the other three” and that ”if you get a wave of dengue-1, dengue-3 or dengue-4 and then another wave of type 2, this is a bad combination.” Dengue-2 causes you too loose body fluids causing shocks that can lead to eventually death. Convenient for the CIA who saw it as an opportunity to cause panic on Cuba which is located in one of the most hot and humid regions in the world. However, The New York Times managed to downplay Cuba’s accusation’s by ending the story by blaming the spread of the disease on returning Cuban troops from Africa and other people from other parts of the Caribbean who might have brought Dengue fever into Cuba:

Some State Department officials believe the introduction of dengue-2 into Cuba is a result of the return to Cuba of troops who had been stationed in Angola or elsewhere in Africa, where the strain is found. But Dr. St. John said dengue-2 had been found in other parts of the Caribbean and might have been carried to Cuba from there or elsewhere overseas

Reports suggested that Cuba had a very small number of cases in 1944, and again in 1977. The 1981 outbreak was blamed on covert flyover operations conducted by the CIA with military owned airplanes, you know, the same airplanes that were most probably used against Nicaragua’s Sandinistas to transport weapons and other materials to the Contras around the same time. Since the 20th century, the U.S. has been the leader in developing various biological and chemical weapons through the U.S. Army’s Biological Warfare Laboratories based at Fort Detrick, Maryland since the late 1940′s, around the start of the Cold War. The U.S. biological warfare program that supposedly ended in 1969 developed a handful of biological weapons ready for use including anthrax, Q-fever and botulism and conducted research in hopes of weaponizing diseases including smallpox, Hantavirus, Lassa fever, yellow fever, typhus, dengue fever and the bird flu among them. An article from August 6, 2019 on Fort Detrick from the UK’s ‘The Independent’ titled ‘Research into deadly viruses and biological weapons at US army lab shut down over fears they could escape’ last August. Ironically, Secretary of State and Neocon Mike Pompeo called it the “Wuhan virus” since they blame China for the outbreak, but it seems that the U.S. had its own problems when it comes to their own labs who conduct research with the most deadly viruses:

America’s main biological warfare lab has been ordered to stop all research into the deadliest viruses and pathogens over fears contaminated waste could leak out of the facility. Fort Detrick, in Maryland, has been the epicentre of the US Army’s bioweapons research since the beginning of the Cold War. But last month the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – the government’s public health body – stripped the base of its license to handle highly restricted “select agents”, which includes Ebola, smallpox and anthrax

The story was basically about the CDC who inspected Fort Detrick and found problems with new procedures used to decontaminate waste water. The article says that Fort Detrick continued its research for defensive purposes to “protect the warfighter from biological threats” although the U.S. declared that it abandoned their biological weapons program since 1969:

Although the United States officially abandoned its biological weapons programme in 1969, Fort Detrick has continued defensive research into deadly pathogens on the list of “select agents”, including the Ebola virus, the organisms that cause the plague, and the highly toxic poison ricin. The army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, based at Fort Detrick, says its primary mission today is to “protect the warfighter from biological threats” but its scientists also investigate outbreaks of disease among civilians and other threats to public health. In recent years it has been involved in testing possible vaccines for Ebola, after several epidemics of the deadly virus in Africa

Sooner or later, the truth will come out. I believe that the U.S. government knows how COVID-19 began and where it was going. The U.S. government and major corporate arms manufacturers and the rest of the Military-Industrial Complex is no stranger to biological weapons adding to their arsenal of nuclear and chemical weapons at their disposal which makes them, much more dangerous. The truth about COVID-19 will eventually come out. In the meantime, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues, a war against Russia, China, Iran or Venezuela is in the works and a coming economic crisis with an election coming this November seems like 2020 will be the year of a perfect storm.

The Worst Virus Ever…Authority…

Posted on March 25, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Nantes Indymedia

Source: Anarchists Worldwide

About COVID-19, authoritarian delusions and the shitty world we live in…

The macabre death toll increases day by day, and in the imagination of each person takes place the sensation, at first vague then always a little stronger, of being more and more threatened by the Great Grim Reaper. For hundreds of millions of human beings, this imagining is certainly not new, that of death that can strike anyone, at any time. Just think of the damned of the earth sacrificed daily on the altar of power and profit: those who survive under State bombs, in the midst of endless wars over oil or mineral resources, those who coexist with invisible radioactivity caused by accidents or nuclear waste, those who cross the Sahel or the Mediterranean and are locked up in concentration camps for migrants, those who are reduced to pieces of flesh and bone by the misery and devastation caused by agro-industry and the extraction of raw materials…And even in the lands that we inhabit, in times not very long ago, we have known the terror of butcheries on an industrial scale, bombings, extermination camps…always created by the thirst for power and wealth of States and bosses, always faithfully set up by armies and police.

But no, today we are not talking about those desperate faces that we constantly try to keep away from our eyes and minds, nor about a history that is now past. Terror is beginning to spread in the cradle of the kingdom of commodities and social peace, and it is caused by a virus that can attack anyone – although of course, not everyone will have the same opportunities to cure themselves. And in a world where people are used to lying, where the use of figures and statistics are one of the main means of media manipulation, in a world where truth is constantly hidden, mutilated and transformed by the media, we can only try to put the pieces together, to formulate hypotheses, try to resist this mobilization of minds and ask the question: where are we going?

In China, and then in Italy, new repressive measures were imposed daily, until they reached the limit that no State had dared to cross yet: the ban on leaving one’s home and on moving around the country except for work reasons or absolute necessity. Not even during war would there have been consent to the acceptance of such far-reaching measures by the population. But this new totalitarianism has the face of Science and Medicine, of neutrality and common interest. Pharmaceutical, telecommunications and new technology will find the solution. In China, the use of geo-locating to report any movement and any case of infection, facial recognition and e-commerce are helping the State to ensure that every citizen is locked up in their own home. Today, the same states that have based their existence on confinement, war and massacre, including of their own population, impose their “protection” through prohibitions, borders and armed men. How long will this situation last? Two weeks, a month, a year? We know that the state of emergency declared after the attacks [translation note: originally imposed in 2015 following the Islamic State terrorist attacks in Paris] has been extended several times, until the emergency measures were definitively incorporated into French law. What will this new emergency lead us to?

A virus is a biological phenomenon, but the context in which it originates, its spread and its management are social issues. In the Amazon, Africa or Oceania, entire populations have been exterminated by viruses brought by settlers, while the settlers imposed their domination and way of life. In the rain forests, armies, merchants and missionaries pushed the people – who previously occupied the territory in a scattered way – to concentrate around schools, in villages or towns. This greatly facilitated the spread of devastating epidemics. Today, half the world’s population lives in cities, around the temples of Capital, and feeds on the products of agro-industry and intensive livestock farming. Any possibility of self-sufficiency has been eradicated by States and the market economy. And as long as the mega-machine of domination continues to function, human existence will be increasingly subjected to disasters that are not very “natural”, and to a management of them that will deprive us of any possibility of determining our lives.

Unless…in an increasingly dark and disturbing scenario, human beings decide to live as free beings, even if it is just for a few hours, days or years before the end – rather than shutting themselves up in a “natural” world, of fear and submission. As did the prisoners in 30 Italian prisons, faced with the ban on visiting rooms imposed because of Covid-19, by revolting against their jailers, demolishing and burning their cages and, in some cases, managing to escape.

NOW AND ALWAYS FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM!

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