Category Archives: propaganda

Aortic Stenosis: The latest heart attack scapegoat

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The media’s found yet another reason you might have a heart attack

By Kit Knightly

Source: Off-Guardian

In only our second article of this new year, This Year in the New Normal, OffG predicted that a major news story of 2022 would involve predicting and explaining heart problems that hadn’t actually happened yet.

Not even a month later, we’ve already been proven right.

Urgent warning as 300,000 Brits living with stealth disease that could kill within 5 years

That’s a Sun headline from three days ago.

The article is about a recent study, which apparently found that aortic valve stenosis is likely far more prevalent in the community than previously thought.

Aortic Stenosis (AS) is a disease affecting the valve of the heart which connects to the aorta, causing it to never open fully and making it more difficult for blood to flow.

Those with AS can suffer fatigue, chest pains, dizzy spells and even sudden death. Known complications include blood clots, which can lead to strokes or heart attacks.

According to the article…

the overall prevalence of severe aortic stenosis among the over 55s in the UK in 2019 could be almost 1.5 per cent – equal to around 300,000 at any one time.

Just under 200,000 (68 per cent) were symptomatic – meaning they had severe disease that would be eligible for surgery.

The remaining 90,000 (32 per cent) had a “silent” case of the condition and will probably not be diagnosed unless they are being screened for another problem.

Without timely treatment, up to 172,859 (59 per cent of the overall total) will die over the next five years to 2024, it’s estimated.

Are you following?

Let me sum it up for you in neat bullet points:

  • Aortic Stenosis is a potentially deadly disease affecting the heart.
  • A review has found that it is “under diagnosed”.
  • Around 100,000 people in the UK could have the disease and not even know it.
  • Many of them will likely die in the next five years.

Thus, any rise in heart attacks or other cardiac diseases is fully explained.

Any heart problems that do occur are totally unrelated to the experimental “vaccines” which are known to cause heart problems and blood clots, they want to be very clear on that.

Now, you could argue this is just a coincidence, a routinely hysterical public health scare story that just happened to land in the middle of the pandemic.

Obviously, we can’t prove that’s not the case, but there is plenty of evidence arguing against it.

For one thing, it is not as if aortic stenosis is a regularly recurring public health talking point, like breast cancer or diabetes. A brief google news search shows that, prior to Covid times, there was scant mention of the condition in the media for the past ten years. Only a handful of articles about celebrities having the condition or academic papers about new treatments.

It’s not a disease that has ever, as far as we can see, been thrust to the forefront of the public consciousness…until now.

It should also not be forgotten that this is not the first time an explanation for future heart attacks has been proferred. We have been hip-deep in pre-emptive explanations of cardiac arrest for weeks.

Remember “post pandemic stress disorder”? It’s a (completely made-up) nervous condition that some doctors predicted would increase the number of heart problems in the UK by 300,000 this year.

Interestingly, that’s 300,000 again. Both scares predicting the same exact number of cases is a funny little coincidence.

There are further examples, earlier this week it was reported that people who have had Covid are more likely to suffer heart attacks and strokes.

Research papers claim “long covid” can lead to blood clots, heart inflammation and strokes (all acknowledge side effects of the “vaccines”).

It’s not just predictive anymore either, Scotland is in a rush to explain its sharp rise in heart attacks and strokes.

One such story might be a coincidence…but four or five?

The media just keeps coming up with more and more reasons we may see a lot of heart attacks in the near future.

Interesting that.

DHS Suggests Those Who Spread ‘Misleading Narratives’ That ‘Undermine Trust in US Gov’t’ are Terrorists

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By Matt Agorist

Source: The Free Thought Project

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Monday issued a bulletin warning of a heightened terrorism alert in the United States. One of the “key factors” for the heightened threat, which the DHS considers terrorism, is “the proliferation of false or misleading narratives, which sow discord or undermine public trust in U.S. government institutions.”

Naturally, this has many folks concerned, especially considering the examples cited in the bulletin which include “false or misleading narratives” about “unsubstantiated widespread election fraud and COVID-19.”

While parts of the memo cite calls for violence and attacks by foreign terrorist organizations — which are actual terror threats — as cause for concern, the idea that the government’s definition of misinformation could potentially earn you the label of “terrorist,” is shocking.

The bulletin is titled, “Summary of Terrorism Threat to the U.S. Homeland” and reads as follows (emphasis added):

The United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information (MDM) introduced and/or amplified by foreign and domestic threat actors. These threat actors seek to exacerbate societal friction to sow discord and undermine public trust in government institutions to encourage unrest, which could potentially inspire acts of violence. Mass casualty attacks and other acts of targeted violence conducted by lone offenders and small groups acting in furtherance of ideological beliefs and/or personal grievances pose an ongoing threat to the nation. While the conditions underlying the heightened threat landscape have not significantly changed over the last year, the convergence of the following factors has increased the volatility, unpredictability, and complexity of the threat environment: (1) the proliferation of false or misleading narratives, which sow discord or undermine public trust in U.S. government institutions; (2) continued calls for violence directed at U.S. critical infrastructure; soft targets and mass gatherings; faith-based institutions, such as churches, synagogues, and mosques; institutions of higher education; racial and religious minorities; government facilities and personnel, including law enforcement and the military; the media; and perceived ideological opponents; and (3) calls by foreign terrorist organizations for attacks on the United States based on recent events.

As stated above, reasons 2 and 3 are obvious threats of terror and make sense. However, given the government’s tendency to paint with a broad brush, undermining public trust could make millions of people terrorists, including the Free Thought Project.

It is the job of a true journalist to undermine trust in the government and given the shifting goal posts on what is defined as “misinformation” over just the last two years, literally anyone could find themselves subject to this definition. To hammer their point home, DHS specifically calls out misinformation on COVID-19.

Key factors contributing to the current heightened threat environment include:

  1. The proliferation of false or misleading narratives, which sow discord or undermine public trust in U.S. government institutions:
    • For example, there is widespread online proliferation of false or misleading narratives regarding unsubstantiated widespread election fraud and COVID-19.

Remember in 2020, when any talk of a potential lab leak theory was considered “misinformation”? By this definition, everyone who talked about the lab leak theory was a potential terrorist.

Doctors like Robert Malone and Peter McCullough, who challenge the vaccination mandate, are now, according to this bulletin, terrorists. Given the fact that the government is urging Spotify to censor Joe Rogan for “misinformation,” according to this bulletin, Rogan is also a terrorist. Their information and discussions on Covid-19 have certainly sown discord and undermined public trust — and rightfully so — but does this make them a terror threat?

Obviously, it does not. The only people who would be threatened by healthy, science-based skepticism as espoused by doctors like these two, are tyrants who wish to control the narrative.

Given the extremely broad definition of what the government considers “misinformation,” this bulletin is one of the most worrisome documents to come from the feds in recent history. What’s more, the mere act of releasing such a document, actually “undermines public trust in U.S. government institutions” by threatening those who would dare question the status quo.

Make no mistake, this is a move to criminalize free speech by allowing the executive to declare anyone who disagrees with their dictates, a terrorist. With declarations like this, the government doesn’t need terrorist organizations to “sow discord” — they are doing it themselves.

Joe Rogan shows us the real purpose of cancel culture

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By Kit Knightly

Source: Off-Guardian

Joe Rogan has just been cancelled. Again. It’s not about covid “misinformation” this time.

No, now he’s a racist.

Some enterprising young mind combed through 13 years and hundreds of episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience, and cut together around twenty instances of Rogan using “the n-word”.

This video was shared by award-winning musician India Arie, and used to explain her pulling her music from Spotify’s platform in protest of Rogan’s continued presence there.

Rogan claims that these clips are all taken out of context in his recent apology video, and none were ever intended to be racist. This may well be true…we can’t check for ourselves, because Spotify removed all the episodes.

These important bits of context were, naturally, removed from the viral video. Besides, it has since been said that context doesn’t even matter.

And you know what, they’re right. The context doesn’t matter, perhaps the intention doesn’t even matter, what matters is “Why now?”

Some of these clips are over twelve years old, and yet there have never been any calls to boycott Spotify or cancel his show until just the last couple of days.

Were they not racist before? Or was everyone just OK with the racism? Could there be something else behind this?

…but why bother pausing the hate-fest to ask questions, right?

The only message that matters is – Joe Rogan is a racist now, and streaming giant Spotify have pulled over seventy episodes of his show from their platform as a result.

Of course the cyber-torches and internet-pitchforks coming for Joe Rogan is nothing new. Having preached the tenets of a healthy lifestyle, promoted alternate Covid treatments, and invited dissenting experts onto his show, Rogan has obviously been on the establishment’s hit list for a while.

This reached a peak in January when ageing rock royalty Neil Young gave Spotify an ultimatum: Remove Joe Rogan’s “misinformation”, or take my music down.

Despite adding a weasely disclaimer to the beginning of the podcast’s episodes, Spotify essentially sided with Rogan, probably because they couldn’t be seen to bow to that kind of pressure, and because they figured most people had forgotten Neil Young was still alive.

In short, and despite other musicians like Joni Mitchell adding their voices to Young’s, the gambit failed and Rogan remained on the air.

Then, just last week, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki added fuel to the fire by announcing the President would like to see “more done” by tech companies to “limit the amount of misinformation” on their platforms.

Within days of that press conference, the viral video compilation of racial slurs had appeared, and Rogan is now a racist as well as an “anti-vax covidiot” or whatever they are calling us these days.

He’s also an object lesson in the entire purpose of cancel culture, and extreme identity politics in general.

I don’t know how many of our readers are gamers, or remember Half Life 2, but go with me here…

Around two-thirds of the way through the game you encounter giant insect-like aliens called Ant Lions, and soon afterwards get a special attack: The ability to “paint” enemies with pheromones which cause an unending swarm of Ant Lions to attack them.

Of course, the giant insects don’t know WHY they are attacking your enemies, they don’t sympathise with your aims and are not capable of understanding your plans, all they know is the chemical signals driving them to fits of rage.

You probably don’t need me to explain the metaphor.

This is the purpose of rampant, hysterical identity politics. You can paint your enemies as a target and watch the mindless swarm do its work.

As much as “cancel culture” is portrayed as a totally organic process, without any top-down control, this is simply not the case.

It is almost NEVER organic, and seemingly ALWAYS contrived.

If you need to be persuaded of that, simply look at who is immune to it.

Both Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau have got enough racist (or at least racist-seeming) scandals to get them cancelled if the process really was anything but a covert tool of maintaining the status quo. And yet still they stand.

To show how selective it is, we have examples of the same exact behaviour eliciting complete opposite responses depending on the person involved.

When Gina Carano compared the hatred of the unmasked and unvaccinated to the way Jews were treated in Nazi Germany, she lost her job and her agent.

When Margaret Hodge made similar comments about Corbyn’s Labour party, there was no rebuke at all.

It seems only people outside the establishment, or promoting the ‘wrong’ opinions, are ever in real danger of falling victim to ‘organic’ cancellation.

Indeed, one can be a totally white-bread member of the entertainment industry for years and be safe in the knowledge your racism/homophobia/misogyny etc will never really come to light, but step out of line on the wrong subject at the wrong time, and you will suddenly find yourself facing a tidal wave of past “sins” about to wash over you.

Look at Donald Trump, an insider to the bone when he was just a billionaire reality TV host, but then he ran against Hillary and became “literally Hitler” overnight.

Rogan is a perfect examplar of this phenomenon. Spend ten years going on about legalising weed, taking DMT and talking about martial arts and you can say “the n-word” as much as you want and nobody notices or cares. But the minute you even mildly interrogate an important media narrative, then the mob ‘organically’ remembers you were a racist the whole time.

The evidence of contrivance is obvious. Simply ask yourself: where did this video compilation of racial slurs actually come from? Who made it?

Rogan’s uses of “the n-word” are not new. They are all several years old and from 23 separate episodes, all multiple hours long. And there are almost 1800 episodes of the show to plough through if you decide to go searching. So making this video is at least two days’ work of simply watching the episodes – and that’s assuming you know where to start looking.

And that’s before editing or trying to make it “go viral”.

Was all this done on a whim by some bored pro-vaxxer?

Does that sound likely?

Far more likely is that it was created and deployed to discredit Rogan’s COVID-questioning without having to engage with the Covid sceptic evidence or arguments.

It’s even possible the video may even have already existed before the current controversy. After all, why create this climate of stifling sensitivity if you don’t have the tools to use it?

Perhaps most authors, actors, comedians etc. have a “tape” in the vault somewhere. A database of racism, homophobia or transphobia just waiting to be released when needed. A collection of neo-kompromat that works best as a deterrent, but is always ready to be loosed if needed.

Those people who do step too far out of their box are taken down, and act as an example to others. Ensuring everyone on the public stage is singing from the same hymn sheet.

Because that, it seems, is what cancel culture is for.

Revolution, Awakening, And Leaving Abusive Relationships All Happen In Unexpected Ways

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

People don’t generally leave abusive relationships in egoically satisfying, Hollywood-friendly ways.

I point this out because those of us who are watching the people’s abusive relationship with predatory power structures and hoping for revolutionary change often tend to envision the status quo ending in an epic way that will make for a good story and let us feel good about ourselves and how right we were. And that just isn’t how these things tend to go.

One of the most shameful things about being in an abusive relationship is how much longer you’ll let it go on for than an outside observer would expect. How much brutality you’ll put up with and the ways you’ll justify it to yourself.

The shame of this can be soul-crushing. A friend once said, “The worst part wasn’t when he raped me, it was having to make him breakfast afterward.” The shamefulness of the abuse and degradation you’ll put up with because of where you’re at in your mind is why people don’t discuss this aspect more, which is why the loved ones of people in those relationships often have such a hard time understanding it. People don’t talk about it, so many don’t understand how common it is.

Generally when someone leaves an abusive relationship it’s not really because they were hit one too many times. It’s not because it got worse than it used to be. Sometimes it will be because the abuser started to assault the victim’s child, but even that will often happen in ways that are a lot more complicated and shameful than the victim acknowledges when telling the story later on.

Generally when someone leaves an abusive relationship it happens for the same reason flowers bloom: because it was time. Something just shifts, and suddenly you’re seeing things you weren’t seeing before. You start noticing patterns, noticing manipulations, noticing the malice in the abuser’s face that you’d previously compartmentalized away from seeing.

And then when you leave the reality of it doesn’t often make for a great Hollywood movie or Hallmark TV special. It doesn’t fit well into egoically gratifying stories. A process just kind of plays itself out, some things happen in ways you probably didn’t anticipate, and then one day you’re not waking up next to the same person anymore. You might try to tell heroic stories about it, or others might do that on your behalf, but really it just kind of happened when the happening was ripe.

Spiritual enlightenment often happens in the same way. Zen Buddhism is full of stories of sudden awakenings where a monk meditates for thirty years while remaining locked in delusion and then suddenly experiences satori after slipping and falling or hearing a teacher say something unexpected or whatever.

It happens when it’s time. A good teacher might offer some spiritual practices to help “lay the groundwork” for awakening, but one person can take those practices and never awaken while another can awaken very quickly. It’s not like building a house or learning a new language where you set to work and do certain things in a certain way and then eventually you have what you set out to obtain. Awakening doesn’t work that way. It’s not the product of personal will. It happens when it happens.

A pot of water can sit there on the stove for minutes without looking like much is happening. When people look at our current environment of murderous exploitative status quo systems and deeply propagandized populations they’ll often despair because it’s very much the same: it doesn’t look like much is happening.

But then the water begins to boil. But then the battered wife escapes to safety. But then the spiritual aspirant sees beyond the veil of illusion. But then the people rise up.

Humans are storytelling creatures; that’s why it’s possible to gain such a tremendous amount of power over us by controlling our stories. We are storytelling creatures whose primate brains weren’t evolved for the purpose of giving us any absolute understanding of ultimate reality, whose senses only take in a tiny fraction of our surroundings, whose minds don’t process what’s happening in the ways science tells us things are actually happening.

What do you get when you have a storytelling animal with a very limited capacity to perceive life as it really is? You get a lot of things happening in ways that the creature did not expect, because none of their mental stories told them to anticipate it happening in that way. And then probably telling a bunch of stories about what happened which don’t truly reflect reality.

If and when humanity does wake up from its propaganda-induced coma and push for the changes needed for us to evade extinction and create a healthy world together, it will happen in ways we’re not expecting. It will happen in ways that aren’t pleasing to the ego. It will happen in ways that don’t allow us to stand up and say “Aha! You see? I was right all along!” It will happen in ways that don’t form a compelling narrative.

And how could it? If humanity is to survive into the distant future we’re going to have to transcend the egoic mental habits which led us into this mess. We’re going to have to transcend our unhealthy relationship with mental narrative which made us so easy to manipulate and propagandize. We’re going to have to transcend our self-destructive patterning, which will necessarily have to come from an unpatterned, and therefore unexpected direction.

It will happen when it happens, in a way we couldn’t possibly have predicted it would happen.

So don’t despair if it looks like things aren’t headed toward change. The boiling water, the escaped abuse victim, and the deeply enlightened mind all looked the same at one point.

Don’t despair, and don’t fear the unknown. The unknown is the only direction humanity’s salvation can possibly come from.

Flu/Covid Fake News Over the Real Thing

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By Stephen Lendman

Source: StephenLendman.com

Drowning in the former, much more of the latter is needed at the most perilous time in world history.

Things will keep worsening without mass rebellion against made-in-the-USA war against humanity with unparalleled draconian aims in mind.

Ruling US/Western regimes and their vassal state counterparts want countless millions and billions of unwanted people eliminated at home and abroad.

They want what remains of free and open societies eliminated worldwide.

They want what no one should tolerate anywhere.

Never before have so many people in so many places been assaulted by nonstop fake news over truth and full disclosure on any issues over a longer duration than on kill shots and all else flu/covid related.

For over two years, it’s been the most predominantly reported of all issues with Big Lies drowning out vital to know hard truths.

What should be explained is suppressed.

What’s reported by official sources and MSM is all fake news all the time — truth and full disclosure perhaps on the cusp of being banned.

According to fake news by the Pharma-controlled WHO, half of Europe could contract flu/covid before end of winter 2022 from what it dubiously called a “tidal wave sweeping across the” continent (sic).

Its Europe director Hans Kluge falsely claimed that “over seven million (flu/covid) cases (occurred) in the first week of 2022 (sic).”

Pushing health-destroying kill shots, including boosters, he defied science by falsely claiming that they’re remarkably effective at preventing severe illness and death (sic).

He lied claiming that in Denmark, unjabbed individuals hospitalized for flu/covid are sixfold higher than for their jabbed counterparts (sic).

He fear-mongered unacceptably about the more scariant than variant omicron — a made-in-the-West scam.

Like his counterparts throughout the US/West, he failed to explain that it’s virtually identical to other flu/covid strains.

That they’re all virtually alike.

That numbers of strains don’t matter.

That pre-2020, fear-mongering mass deception unacceptably created public hysteria about seasonal flu-now called covid.

That everything going on since early 2020 has nothing to do with protecting public health.

That it’s all about destroying it and what remains of free and open societies — along with letting Pharma cash in big on a bonanza of profits from kill shots.

Kluge and his counterparts throughout the US West consistently leave unexplained that virtually all reported outbreaks based on PCR test results are false positives.

The test isn’t designed to detect illness. 

It’s been used to falsely diagnose healthy people as ill.

The vast majority of claimed flu/covid outbreaks are either among the jabbed or based on PCR false positive results.

The real number of cases is a tiny fraction of what’s officially reported.

Former Pfizer chief scientist for allergy and infectious diseases, Dr. Michael Yeadon, is an unsung, truth-telling global hero on flu/covid jabs.

They’re designed “to harm people,” not protect them, he explained.

Experimental, improperly tested, rushed to market mRNA technology used in Pfizer and Moderna kill shots are extremely hazardous.

All vaccines risk harm. None protect as falsely claimed.

Flu/covid jabs were designed to inflict maximum harm on maximum numbers of people.

“By choosing this design, the range of outcomes is probably 1,000 times worse than it would be for a conventional vaccine,” Yeadon stressed.

What’s going on is a state-sponsored, MSM proliferated conspiracy against public health.

There’s “clear evidence of fraud,” said Yeadon, adding:

“This is a conspiracy led by the central banking clique and their clients to take over the world.”

“Once they’ve done that, destroyed the economy…a great financial reset which will have us using our vax passes and digital ID, and central bank digital currency…you won’t like those, you really won’t.” 

“It’ll be the end of cash and any privacy for any transactions.”

Without vax passes, you’ll be treated like a pariah, ostracized from society, maybe involuntarily interned, criminalized.

The diabolical “setup is so perfect” for pursuing depopulation on a never before imagined scale, saud Yeadon.

“(C)urrent so-called ‘good’ (kill shot) batches could be batches with code to activate longterm adverse events” — killing jabbed individuals slowly. 

Inventor of mRNA technology Dr. Robert Malone called state-approved, MSM proliferated rubbish “full-on media warfare, information warfare, political warfare…like we’ve never seen before, and coordinated globally.”

“The other thing for me has been the personal journey of coming to terms with what the (diabolical) World Economic Forum really represents…”

“It is a full-on globalist totalitarian vision with money in control.”

It’s beyond totalitarian rule to full-blown tyranny with the worst of diabolical aims in mind.

They include elimination of billions of unwanted people, transforming societies to ruler/serf ones worldwide, and eliminating what remains of greatly eroded freedoms.

No one understands mRNA technology better than Malone, its inventor.

“(N)obody should (be mandated to be jabbed with what’s) experimental” and unsafe based on indisputable evidence.

What’s happening throughout the US/West, Australia, apartheid Israel and elsewhere is in flagrant breach of “the Nuremberg Code, the Helsinki Agreement, the Common Rule, the Belmont Report, etc.” 

It’s state-sponsored “lawless behavior” going on unchecked.

Malone never expected that his scientific invention would land him in the eye of the storm — because of how it’s being misused.

“(A)symmetric…guerrilla warfare” is ongoing is most parts of the world, he said.

What’s crucially needed is “a great awakening” to counter the most diabolically destructive scheme ever concocted by dark forces against humanity in world history.

Totalitarian Paranoia Run Amok: Pandemics, Lockdowns & Martial Law

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By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Totalitarian paranoia runs deep in American society, and it now inhabits the highest levels of government.”—Professor Henry Giroux

Once upon a time, there was a government so paranoid about its hold on power that it treated everyone and everything as a threat and a reason to expand its powers. Unfortunately, the citizens of this nation believed everything they were told by their government, and they suffered for it.

When terrorists attacked the country, and the government passed massive laws aimed at paving the way for a surveillance state, the people believed it was done merely to keep them safe. The few who disagreed were labeled traitors.

When the government waged costly preemptive wars on foreign countries, insisting it was necessary to protect the nation, the citizens believed it. And when the government brought the weapons and tactics of war home to use against the populace, claiming it was just a way to recycle old equipment, the people believed that too. The few who disagreed were labeled unpatriotic.

When the government spied on its own citizens, claiming they were looking for terrorists hiding among them, the people believed it. And when the government began tracking the citizenry’s movements, monitoring their spending, snooping on their social media, and surveying them about their habits—supposedly in an effort to make their lives more efficient—the people believed that, too. The few who disagreed were labeled paranoid.

When the government allowed private companies to take over the prison industry and agreed to keep the jails full, justifying it as a cost-saving measure, the people believed them. And when the government started arresting and jailing people for minor infractions, claiming the only way to keep communities safe was to be tough on crime, the people believed that too. The few who disagreed were labeled soft on crime.

When the government hired crisis actors to take part in disaster drills, never alerting the public to which “disasters” were staged, the people genuinely believed they were under attack. And when the government insisted it needed greater powers to prevent such attacks from happening again, the people believed that too. The few who disagreed were told to shut up or leave the country.

When the government started carrying out covert military drills around the country, insisting it was necessary to train the troops for foreign combat, most of the people believed them. The few who disagreed, fearing that perhaps all was not what it seemed, were shouted down as conspiracy theorists and quacks.

When government leaders locked down the nation, claiming it was the only way to prevent an unknown virus from sickening the populace, the people believed them and complied with the mandates and quarantines. The few who resisted or voiced skepticism about the government’s edicts were denounced as selfish and dangerous and silenced on social media.

When the government expanded its war on terrorism to include domestic terrorists, the people believed that only violent extremists would be targeted. Little did they know that anyone who criticizes the government can be considered an extremist.

By the time the government began using nationalized police and the military to routinely lockdown the nation, the citizenry had become so acclimated to such states of emergency that they barely even noticed the prison walls that had grown up around them.

Now every fable has a moral, and the moral of this story is to beware of anyone who urges you to ignore your better instincts and blindly trust that the government has your best interests at heart.

In other words, if it looks like trouble and it smells like trouble, you can bet there’s trouble afoot.

Unfortunately, the government has fully succeeded in recalibrating our general distaste for anything that smacks too overtly of tyranny.

After all, like the proverbial boiling frogs, the government has been gradually acclimating us to the specter of a police state for years now: Militarized police. Riot squads. Camouflage gear. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Surveillance cameras. Kevlar vests. Drones. Lethal weapons. Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Stun grenades. Arrests of journalists. Crowd control tactics. Intimidation tactics. Brutality.

This is how you prepare a populace to accept a police state willingly, even gratefully.

You don’t scare them by making dramatic changes. Rather, you acclimate them slowly to their prison walls. Persuade the citizenry that their prison walls are merely intended to keep them safe and danger out. Desensitize them to violence, acclimate them to a military presence in their communities, and persuade them that only a militarized government can alter the seemingly hopeless trajectory of the nation.

It’s happening already.

The sight of police clad in body armor and gas masks, wielding semiautomatic rifles and escorting an armored vehicle through a crowded street, a scene likened to “a military patrol through a hostile city,” no longer causes alarm among the general populace.

We’ve allowed ourselves to be acclimated to the occasional lockdown of government buildings, military drills in small towns so that special operations forces can get “realistic military training” in “hostile” territory, and  Live Active Shooter Drill training exercises, carried out at schools, in shopping malls, and on public transit, which can and do fool law enforcement officials, students, teachers and bystanders into thinking it’s a real crisis.

Still, you can’t say we weren’t warned.

Back in 2008, an Army War College report revealed that “widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.” The 44-page report went on to warn that potential causes for such civil unrest could include another terrorist attack, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”

In 2009, reports by the Department of Homeland Security surfaced that called on the government to subject right-wing and left-wing activists and military veterans to full-fledged, pre-crime surveillance.

Meanwhile, the government has been amassing an arsenal of military weapons, including hollow point bullets, for use domestically and equipping and training their “troops” for war. Even government agencies with largely administrative functions such as the Food and Drug Administration, Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Smithsonian have been acquiring body armor, riot helmets and shields, cannon launchers and police firearms and ammunition. In fact, there are now at least 120,000 armed federal agents carrying such weapons who possess the power to arrest.

Rounding out this profit-driven campaign to turn American citizens into enemy combatants (and America into a battlefield) is a technology sector that has been colluding with the government to create a Big Brother that is all-knowing, all-seeing and inescapable. It’s not just the drones, fusion centers, license plate readers, stingray devices and the NSA that you have to worry about. You’re also being tracked by the black boxes in your cars, your cell phone, smart devices in your home, grocery loyalty cards, social media accounts, credit cards, streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, and e-book reader accounts.

And then there are the military drills that have been taking place on American soil in recent years.

In the latest “unconventional warfare exercise,” dubbed “Robin Sage,” special forces soldiers will battle seasoned “freedom fighters” in a “realistic” guerrilla war across two dozen North Carolina counties.

Robin Sage follows on the heels of other such military drills, including Jade Helm, which involved U.S. Army Special Operations Command, the Navy Seals, Air Force Special Operations, Marine Special Operations Command, Marine Expeditionary Units, the 82nd Airborne Division, and other interagency partners.

According to the government, these planned military exercises are supposed to test and practice unconventional warfare including, but not limited to, guerrilla warfare, subversion, sabotage, intelligence activities, and unconventional assisted recovery.

The training, known as Realistic Military Training (RMT) because it will be conducted outside of federal property, are carried out on both public and private land, with locations marked as “hostile territory,” permissive, uncertain (leaning friendly), or uncertain (leaning hostile).

This is psychological warfare at its most sophisticated.

Add these military exercises onto the list of other troubling developments that have taken place over the past 30 years or more, and suddenly, the overall picture seems that much more sinister: the expansion of the military industrial complex and its influence in Washington DC, the rampant surveillance, the corporate-funded elections and revolving door between lobbyists and elected officials, the militarized police, the loss of our freedoms, the injustice of the courts, the privatized prisons, the school lockdowns, the roadside strip searches, the military drills on domestic soil, the fusion centers and the simultaneous fusing of every branch of law enforcement (federal, state and local), the stockpiling of ammunition by various government agencies, the active shooter drills that are indistinguishable from actual crises, the economy flirting with near collapse, the growing social unrest, the socio-psychological experiments being carried out by government agencies, etc.

And then you have the government’s Machiavellian schemes for unleashing all manner of dangers on an unsuspecting populace, then demanding additional powers in order to protect “we the people” from the threats. Almost every national security threat that the government has claimed greater powers in order to fight—all the while undermining the liberties of the American citizenry—has been manufactured in one way or another by the government.

What we’ve seen play out before us is more than mere totalitarian paranoia run amok.

What has unfolded over the past few years has been a test to see how well “we the people” have assimilated the government’s lessons in compliance, fear and police state tactics; a test to see how quickly “we the people” will march in lockstep with the government’s dictates, no questions asked; and a test to see how little resistance “we the people” will offer up to the government’s power grabs when made in the name of national security.

Most critically of all, this has been a test to see whether the Constitution—and our commitment to the principles enshrined in the Bill of Rights—could survive a national crisis and true state of emergency.

We have failed the test abysmally.

We have also made it way too easy for a government that has been working hard to destabilize to lockdown the nation.

Mark my words, there’s trouble brewing.

Better yet, take a look at “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” a Pentagon training video created by the Army for U.S. Special Operations Command.

The training video is only five minutes long, but it says a lot about the government’s mindset, the way its views the citizenry, and the so-called “problems” that the government must be prepared to address in the near future through the use of martial law.

Even more troubling, however, is what this military video doesn’t say about the Constitution, about the rights of the citizenry, and about the dangers of locking down the nation and using the military to address political and social problems.

The training video anticipates that all hell will break loose by 2030—that’s barely eight short years away—but we’re already witnessing a breakdown of society on virtually every front.

The danger signs are screaming out a message

The government is anticipating trouble (read: civil unrest), which is code for anything that challenges the government’s authority, wealth and power.

According to the Pentagon training video created by the Army for U.S. Special Operations Command, the U.S. government is grooming its armed forces to solve future domestic political and social problems.

What they’re really talking about is martial law, packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security.

The chilling five-minute training video, obtained by The Intercept through a FOIA request and made available online, paints an ominous picture of the future—a future the military is preparing for—bedeviled by “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” a “growing mass of unemployed,” and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have nots.

And then comes the kicker. Three-and-a-half minutes into the Pentagon’s dystopian vision of “a world of Robert Kaplan-esque urban hellscapes—brutal and anarchic supercities filled with gangs of youth-gone-wild, a restive underclass, criminal syndicates, and bands of malicious hackers,” the ominous voice of the narrator speaks of a need to “drain the swamps.”

The government wants to use the military to drain the swamps of futuristic urban American cities of “noncombatants and engage the remaining adversaries in high intensity conflict within.” And who are these noncombatants, a military term that refers to civilians who are not engaged in fighting? They are, according to the Pentagon, “adversaries.” They are “threats.”

They are the “enemy.”

They are people who don’t support the government, people who live in fast-growing urban communities, people who may be less well-off economically than the government and corporate elite, people who engage in protests, people who are unemployed, people who engage in crime (in keeping with the government’s fast-growing, overly broad definition of what constitutes a crime).

In other words, in the eyes of the U.S. military, noncombatants are American citizens a.k.a. domestic extremists a.k.a. enemy combatants who must be identified, targeted, detained, contained and, if necessary, eliminated.

In the future imagined by the Pentagon, any walls and prisons that are built will be used to protect the societal elite—the haves—from the have-nots.

If you haven’t figured it out already, we the people are the have-nots.

Suddenly, the events of recent years begin to make sense: the invasive surveillance, the extremism reports, the civil unrest, the protests, the shootings, the bombings, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the fusion centers, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, the distribution of military equipment and weapons to local police forces, the government databases containing the names of dissidents and potential troublemakers.

The government is systematically locking down the nation and shifting us into martial law.

This is how you prepare a populace to accept a police state willingly, even gratefully.

As Nazi Field Marshal Hermann Goering remarked during the Nuremberg trials:

It is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.

It does indeed work the same in every country.

It’s time to wake up and stop being deceived by government propaganda.

Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law. I’m referring to the corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country and calling the shots in Washington DC, no matter who sits in the White House.

Be warned: in the future envisioned by the government, we will not be viewed as Republicans or Democrats. Rather, “we the people” will all be enemies of the state.

Ukraine and U.S. War Propaganda

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By Margaret Kimberley

Source: Black Agenda Report

The 2014 U.S. sponsored coup against the elected government of Ukraine must be the starting point for any discussion of the current crisis. That crisis has been manufactured by Joe Biden, who was the Obama administration point person in using Ukraine as a means of destabilizing Russia.

The corporate media always carry water for the state, and they are never more dangerous than when the nation is on a war footing. Right now the United States government is sending weapons to Ukraine. One wouldn’t know that because of constant references to “lethal aid.” The euphemisms and subterfuge are necessary for a very simple reason. Everyone except the Washington war party knows that provoking war with Russia is extremely dangerous.

Joe Biden is picking up where he left off, as Barack Obama’s Ukraine viceroy. He and his incompetent foreign policy team have spun a tale about a pending Russian attack on Ukraine. In reality, it is the U.S. that is ginning up war by provoking the Ukrainians to start a fight that they can’t win. In 2014 a U.S. backed coup put a far-right clique in power. The people of the Donbass region in the east, largely ethnic Russians, wanted no part of the new anti-Russian government and sought autonomy. The resulting war has killed some 30,000 people.

Now the Biden team who publicly insulted the Chinese government and withdrew from Afghanistan without even being able to secure a major airport, have moved on to opening the proverbial can of whoopass with the world’s other major nuclear power. They are using Ukraine in an ill-advised effort to instigate what could lead to disaster.

The 2014 coup against an elected Ukrainian president took place because the Russians were asleep at the wheel. They roused themselves quickly however and annexed the Crimea, yet another region of Ukraine with close connections to Russia. The U.S./NATO regime change effort came at a steep price for Ukraine. Thanks to Atlanticist meddling it is now the poorest country in Europe that won’t get the NATO and EU membership it was promised. It remains a pawn between two powerful countries.

The U.S. is pulling all the hybrid warfare schemes out of the tool box. For months they claimed that Russian troops were massed on the border, ready to invade. They have engaged in diplomacy but only to try and get their way. Russia has held firm on a guarantee of no further NATO encroachment and the removal of missiles from their border. The French and Germans are feckless and do what Washington wants. They should be pressuring Ukraine to live up to the Minsk II Agreement which requires talks with the breakaway Donbass region.

None of this information is conveyed to the American people who live in ignorance orchestrated by republicans, democrats, and their friends in corporate media. Republican senators who want to run for president outdo one another with nonsense about stopping the Nord Stream II gas pipeline that Germany, a U.S. ally, asked the Russians to build. Winter is coming, quite literally, and Europe needs Russia’s gas. But unless they stop following Uncle Sam’s bullying they will end up with nothing.

Now Washington is pulling the same ploy they attempted in Ethiopia. They have declared that the Russians are coming and have even announced an evacuation of embassy personnel families from the capital city of Kyiv. Vassal states Australia and the United Kingdom have followed suit, but a European Union official demurred , “We are not going to do the same thing because we don’t know any specific reasons.” The Ukrainian government, a de facto U.S. colony, wasn’t happy and called the evacuations “premature.”

If the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing, then one can only conclude that big lies are being told. The U.S. has been hoisted on its own petard and now has little more than dangerous bluster to get its own allies in line.

Biden himself is a part of this problem of his own making. In a recent press conference he  declared that Russia was on the verge of invading but then said a little invasion wouldn’t be so bad after all. It isn’t clear if he was speaking from his usual state of confusion or if he really meant what he said.

The Russians certainly mean what they say. As Secretary of State Antony Blinken rushes from Moscow to Berlin to London to Moscow, seemingly making things up as he goes along, the Russians dig in their heels and make clear that their days of being pushovers are in the past. The most committed puppet states like the U.K. go along with whatever Washington wants. They can be counted on to repeat an unsourced story of a Russian plan to overthrow the Ukrainian government or something else equally nonsensical. The people most likely to use a false flag event to justify going to war, instead claim that the other side will do so. The result is a situation that could go badly over the slightest provocation or even a perceived provocation.

The American people should just say no. The Biden administration is sorely mistaken if they think the public are in a mood for war with another nuclear power. They can call ammunition “lethal aid” if they want, but when the match is lit they can expect no support. Then again, the ginned-up conflict may be taking place for that very reason. Biden has failed in almost every respect and is facing electoral defeat for his party in November. Perhaps he thinks that he would be supported by people who have no faith in his ability or willingness to do anything on their behalf.

If hostilities are averted it will be because of forces outside of the U.S. Biden’s team of blood thirsty incompetents spent most of last year predicting a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. It isn’t clear if they grew bored or saw an easier opening in Ukraine.

No one should be fooled by these people. Russia and China are very close, “better than allies ,” as Xi Jinping said. Why shouldn’t they be? Both countries want to protect themselves from American aggression. People in this country had better hope for Russian and Chinese wisdom and experience. If the U.S. is allowed to do what it wants then the whole world is at risk. That statement is not hyperbole. The U.S. has withdrawn from decades old nuclear weapons agreements and now pushes the world toward the precipice.

The New York Times and Washington Post will play the role they did in 2003 when the U.S. invaded Iraq. They will repeat what spokespeople tell them to say and be a party to warfare. If ever there was a moment to break free from media disinformation this is it. They have nothing to offer except war propaganda and possibly war itself.

Vaccines That Don’t Stop Transmission Can Create Conditions For More Virulent Variants To Spread

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By Arjun Walia

Source: The Pulse

Penn State biologist David Kennedy PhD, published a paper in PLOS BIOLOGY in 2015 titled, “Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens.” In it, he explains how the transmission of viruses and more severe strains by infected vaccinees could provide an opportunity for more virulent variants to spread.

The article described an experiment with a herpes virus that causes Marek disease in chickens. Vaccines against Marek disease are described as “leaky” because, although they protect chickens from getting sick, they don’t prevent them from becoming infected and transmitting the virus to unvaccinated chickens. That allows the most virulent strains that normally would die along with an infected chicken to survive and infect and kill unvaccinated chickens.

Vaccines that keep hosts alive, but still allow transmission could thus allow very virulent strains to circulate in a population…Our data show that anti-disease vaccines that do not prevent transmission can create conditions that promote the emergence of pathogen strains that cause more severe disease in unvaccinated hosts.

Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens

In other words, the vaccinated and unvaccinated can still spread the disease, and the vaccinated are protected from severe disease and symptoms. But what happens if vaccines don’t protect against severe disease and symptoms of these new variants? This means that conditions can be created that cause more severe disease in the vaccinated as well.

We’ve seen this with seasonal flu, where vaccines have to constantly be updated because of changes in the virus, and we’re currently witnessing it with COVID vaccines. COVID vaccines will most likely be tweaked as new variants continue to emerge, and shots may be encouraged once or twice a year. Who knows?

Many people have already received a third dose and in some countries, like Israel and Canada, a fourth dose is being offered to the elderly and immunocompromised patients. This is something people aren’t used to, so many jabs in such a short period of time, along with mandates as well.

We now know that COVID vaccines don’t stop the transmission of COVID, and that variants like Omicron and Delta are able to escape the protection that COVID vaccines provide. This is why the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advises that even after they’re fully vaccinated, people should continue to mask up and socially distance in public places in part because they could still unknowingly become infected and transmit COVID to people who have and haven’t yet received their shots.

But do COVID vaccines help reduce the transmission? And does that mean they aren’t considered “leaky” vaccines? We will get to this discussion later.

An argument can be made that COVID vaccines protect people from severe symptoms and chances of hospitalization, but how much protection can they really provide for most people under the age of 70 who have a very high chance of survival? Furthermore, we musn’t forget that COVID added to an already existing problem of hospital capacity issues. Is COVID the issue or is an inadequate healthcare system?

And why hasn’t the science behind natural immunity been included in health policy? According to CDC statistics, for example, 95 percent of people who have died with or from COVID have an average of four other causes (comorbidities) listed on their death certificate. Furthermore, it’s not entirely clear how many people are ending up in hospitals with COVID, or because of COVID.

There are multiple real world examples showing that COVID vaccines fail to prevent transmission, including exponential outbreaks in the most highly vaccinated populations on the planet. This is why of the top five counties that have the highest percentage of population fully vaccinated (99.9–84.3%), the CDC identifies four of them as “high” transmission counties. This fact comes from a paper published in the European Journal of Epidemiology titled, “Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States.”

Right now, COVID cases are surging in the five most vaccinated states.

According to a study published in October, infected vaccinated and unvaccinated people can also carry the same viral load. Viral load is a good proxy for infectiousness.

Another study was conducted with positive samples from asymptomatic testing at UC Davis for Healthy Yolo Together and at the Unidos en Salud walk-up testing site in the Mission District of San Francisco.

The researchers looked at 869 positive samples, 500 from Healthy Yolo Together and 369 from Unidos en Salud. All the Healthy Yolo Together samples were from people who were asymptomatic at the time of positive test result, and three-quarters were from unvaccinated individuals. The Unidos en Salud samples included both asymptomatic and symptomatic cases. Just over half (198) of the Unidos en Salud samples were unvaccinated.

A press release from UC Davis Explains,

When they analyzed the data, the researchers found wide variations in viral load within both vaccinated and unvaccinated groups, but not between them. There was no significant difference in viral load between vaccinated and unvaccinated, or between asymptomatic and symptomatic groups.

The idea that vaccines that are not successful in stopping the transmission of a virus can facilitate the emergence of variants has been written about by academics throughout and before this pandemic. This is evident by Kennedy’s 2015 paper cited above.

Saad O. Omais, a PhD candidate in Cellular and Molecular Biology at the American University of Beirut wrote a response to an article published by Karam Abassi, Editor in Chief of the British Medical Journal. In it he explains how COVID vaccines may not only allow the circulation of existing VOCs but can even facilitate the rise of new ones.

According to Eric T. Payne, MD, PMH, Pediatric Neurocritical Care & Epilepsy, Alberta Children’s Hospital Assistant Professor of Pediatrics & Neurology, the University of Calgary,

With widespread dissemination of COVID-19 vaccines during the pandemic, we are placing enormous evolutionary pressure on SARS-CoV-2 to continue mutating to evade our immune system, gain cell entry, replicate, and possibly cause illness. And, we are now using very “leaky” vaccines, making viral evasion from our antibodies that much easier. Only the fit will survive. Consider the reasonable analogy of antibiotic resistance – this is driven by the widespread and inappropriate use of antibiotics, not by people avoiding antibiotics.

RE: Mandatory mRNA vaccine mandate for Alberta physicians

In November, Dr. Günter Kampf, consultant hospital epidemiologist and Associate Professor for hygiene and environmental medicine at the University Medicine Greifswald, Germany published an article The Lancet explaining,

There is increasing evidence that vaccinated individuals continue to have a relevant role in transmission. In Massachusetts, USA, a total of 469 new COVID-19 cases were detected during various events in July, 2021, and 346 (74%) of these cases were in people who were fully or partly vaccinated, 274 (79%) of whom were symptomatic.

Cycle threshold values were similarly low between people who were fully vaccinated (median 22·8) and people who were unvaccinated, not fully vaccinated, or whose vaccination status was unknown (median 21·5), indicating a high viral load even among people who were fully vaccinated.2

In the USA, a total of 10 262 COVID-19 cases were reported in vaccinated people by April 30, 2021, of whom 2725 (26·6%) were asymptomatic, 995 (9·7%) were hospitalised, and 160 (1·6%) died.3 In Germany, 55·4% of symptomatic COVID-19 cases in patients aged 60 years or older were in fully vaccinated individuals,4 and this proportion is increasing each week.

In Münster, Germany, new cases of COVID-19 occurred in at least 85 (22%) of 380 people who were fully vaccinated or who had recovered from COVID-19 and who attended a nightclub.5 People who are vaccinated have a lower risk of severe disease but are still a relevant part of the pandemic.

It is therefore wrong and dangerous to speak of a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Historically, both the USA and Germany have engendered negative experiences by stigmatising parts of the population for their skin colour or religion. I call on high-level officials and scientists to stop the inappropriate stigmatisation of unvaccinated people, who include our patients, colleagues, and other fellow citizens, and to put extra effort into bringing society together.

COVID-19: stigmatising the unvaccinated is not justified

Fact Checkers and The World Health Organization Weigh In

The discussion of the possibility of vaccines creating conditions for new variants to emerge more easily started several months ago, and was quickly shut down by third party Facebook fact-checkers and the World Health Organization. Yes, COVID vaccines don’t completely stop the transmission of the virus, but arguments can be made that they at least help in reducing the transmission. But, is that enough to stop what Kennedy is talking about in his paper? Does this still mean that these vaccines are “leaky”?

For example, in May 2021 Euronews reported the following,

The World Health Organization (WHO) has rejected claims that COVID-19 vaccines are causing new variants of the virus. Reports have circulated online in France saying that vaccinated people are “more likely” to infect others with “super-strains” of the coronavirus. But the WHO and other immunologists have said that these claims are unfounded and have no scientific basis. “There is no evidence of this,” a WHO spokesperson Euronews. “Vaccination is part of the solution for suppressing transmission along with existing public health measures.”

An article published in Nature in February 2021 makes a case for COVID vaccines and their ability to reduce transmission, but also explains how this may not be the case. It does present some evidence showing that viral load is less in vaccinated individuals, but the studies cited are small compared to the ones mentioned earlier in the article.

And given the fact that we are now in 2022, there is much more data available showing cases in highly vaccinated populations and people as emphasized earlier. Breakthrough infections are happening all over the world among the vaccinated, this is no secret. Case counts are high in vaccinated people, but this is to be expected given the fact that in most regions, the majority of people are vaccinated.

But an article published by Harvard Health explains that people who are vaccinated for SARS-CoV-2 but get breakthrough infections may be less likely to spread the virus because they shed it for a shorter period than unvaccinated people who are infected, according a new study led by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. If this is true, it would reduce transmission rate but is this reduction significant? And again, it may contribute to reducing transmission, but it doesn’t stop it. Given the outbreaks in highly vaccinated populations, transmission reduction doesn’t seem to be significant.

A recent paper was published emphasizing the number of unvaccinated people that need to be excluded from a setting to prevent one COVID transmission is extremely high and negligible. The study didn’t even take into account the immunity that’s already been built up in a large amount of the population.

The authors explain,

While SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are beneficial, the high NNEs suggest that excluding unvaccinated people has negligible benefits for reducing SARS-CoV-2 transmissions in many jurisdictions across the globe. This is because unvaccinated people are likely not at significant risk – in absolute terms – of transmitting SARS-CoV-2 to others in most types of settings (as of mid-to-end November 2021). This is why so many unvaccinated people likely need to be excluded to prevent one transmission event.

Evaluating the number of unvaccinated people needed to exclude to prevent SARS-CoV-2 transmissions

This topic really got the attention of Facebook fact checkers on March 6, 2021, when Geert Vanden Bossche, an independent consultant who previously worked in vaccine development, published an open letter to the World Health Organization on Twitter. In it, Vanden Bossche claimed that COVID-19 vaccines “should not be used amid an epidemic” and called for a halt to mass vaccination campaigns. Vanden Bossche claimed that global COVID-19 vaccination campaigns would accelerate the emergence of dangerous variants, which will escape vaccine-induced immunity and cause severe disease

Fact checker Health Feedback responded, stating that,

Vanden Bossche’s claim is based on two assumptions. The first is that COVID-19 vaccines “don’t prevent infection, they protect against disease”. The second is that vaccination doesn’t reduce transmission. These assumptions are unsupported.

COVID-19 vaccines are critical for controlling the pandemic; vaccines still offer partial protection against new variants of the virus

When claims made are marked as false by fact checkers like Health Feedback, and others, the claims are completely censored on social media platforms. Any outlets that share them are punished with reduced page distribution. Fact-checkers have a tremendous amount of power to limit the spread of information, be it factual, false, or even opinion based, and they’ve been criticized for being incorrect multiple times.

For example, the editor-in-chief of The British Medical Journal (BMJ), Fiona Godlee, alongside Kamran Abbasi, an executive editor of the BMJ who succeeded Godlee on January 1st 2022, published a piece in the journal criticizing Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook fact checkers, calling them incompetent. The piece was published on Nov 2, 2021.

In it, Godlee and Abbasi criticize Facebook for putting a “fake news” label on an article published in the BMJ by award winning investigative journalist Paul Thacker regarding fraud and the manipulation of data during Pfizer’s COVID vaccine clinical trials.

Here are three examples where it’s happened to us where fact checkers were forced to retract their ratings, but it’s happened many more times than this and the labels are often not removed unless you bend to the will of the fact checker.

The point is, how trustworthy are fact checkers?

Data To Support Whatever You Want To Believe

At the end of the day, although I believe it’s clear that COVID vaccines do not stop transmission or help reduce transmission in a significant manner, data and science can be used to oppose this belief. If you dive deep into the science, sometimes it’s hard to know what to believe. These days, data can be shared to confirm what you want to believe.

What doesn’t sit well, however, is that discussions that oppose what’s often presented by government health authorities is never really acknowledged within the mainstream. For example, like the idea that vaccines do not stop the transmission of the virus, and that breakthrough infections are rare. Why are we seeing so much censorship of evidence and opinion from experts in the field?

Yes, breakthrough COVID-19 cases happen in people who are fully vaccinated, and they are happening more frequently now that the Omicron variant is circulating widely and immunity from may vaccines may be waning.

Kennedy makes it clear that “imperfect vaccination” that does not stop transmission “can enhance the transmission of highly virulent pathogens.” Even if COVID vaccines do help slow down the transmission of COVID, which many would argue they clearly don’t, does this mean COVID vaccines would be considered “imperfect” by Kennedy’s definition? And does this mean that mass vaccinations are facilitating the development of more variants, for which more vaccines will be created that don’t stop transmission, thus creating the neverending development of COVID vaccines? Big pharma would certainly like that.