“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,”
This phrase, misattributed to Voltaire, has largely come to dominate—and confuse—our understanding of the importance of free speech in a free society. That misunderstanding seems to be at the heart of the very lukewarm response elicited by the exposure of “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history” unearthed through discovery in Missouri v. Biden now before the Supreme Court.
The trouble with this framing of free speech is that it focuses on hateful speech, framing the imperative to defend the utterance of hateful speech as a form of polite, reciprocal tolerance, necessary for the smooth functioning of a liberal society. If ever there were a framing that caused one to miss the forest for the trees, this is it.
The primacy free speech enjoys here in the US has nothing whatever to do with some dewy-eyed ideal of tolerance. Rather, it owes its primacy to pragmatism. Freedom of speech is the best tool we have to ascertain the truth of any given matter. Like a sculptor transforming a shapeless piece of marble into a work of art, free and open debate chisels away at the falsehoods and misapprehensions in which the truth lays embedded. Restrict debate, and the gradual emergence of that truth will be delayed or deformed, with the result imperfect at times to the point of monstrosity.
The reason we must “defend to the death” the right to utter “intolerable speech,” is that failure to do so results in the swift and certain condemnation as “intolerable” all speech that diminishes the power or legitimacy of those in power. More succinctly, we must defend the pariah’s right to speak or everyone who crosses the regime, conveniently becomes a pariah. You either do as the ACLU did in 1978, defend the Nazi’s right to speak, or you have an explosion of government-designated “Nazis.” You may perhaps have noticed an exponential rise in the prevalence of “Nazis” and an ever-expanding panoply of -ists since our country’s commitment to free speech faltered? Yeah, me too.
No matter the political leanings or the content of the criticism, all those who have dared to critique the diktats of those in power for the last several years have been swiftly moved outside the pale, designated often times literal Nazis. It is this that explains the awesome scope of the censorship exposed in Missouri v. Biden, now before the Supreme Court.
We’re experiencing an information total war, resulting in blanket shutdown of any and all debate on each and every topic the government would prefer not to discuss. The cost to truth from this censorship carpet-bombing has been enormous. Lacking the refinement that comes from criticism and debate, the policies issuing from this informational hellscape are brutal and barbaric.
This information total war has been largely successful. Regime critics have been swiftly censored, defamed, and marginalized. The result is that most of the population continues to believe that the criticisms of government policies and actions over the past several years were levied by a bunch of cranks whose objections were largely based on gut level assumptions, political affiliation, or knee-jerk reactions. That many of those criticisms and warnings ended up being accurate is attributed to dumb luck. Thus, the public has little sympathy for the targets of government censorship, precisely because of the success of the censorship, and its complement, the propaganda generated to fill the vacuum left by the disappearance of truth. However, the public itself is harmed in myriad ways by this censorship, and not in any abstract fashion.
First and foremost, this censorship regime has harmed the public because the suppression of dissenting views resulted in the creation and deployment of a `whole` host of truly awful policies. Certain of its omniscience the government repeatedly censored, defamed and marginalized those who raised objections to its policies. Contrary to the propaganda narrative used to justify its censorship, the arguments against various strands of the government policies were based on sound reason, science, and data, the opponents often highly credentialed in the relevant field.
How many people know that one of the first critics of our maximalist approach to COVID was one of the most well-respected, frequently-cited scientists in the world, Stanford’s John Ioannidis? Or that his criticisms mirrored the guidance of the US’s actual extant pandemic plans?
How many people know that even from the very first, the opposition to masking was in fact based on its known futility, citing research from the CDC itself, published in May of 2020 (and recently vindicated by another systemic review by Cochrane)? Or that the most vocal opposition came from industrial hygienists (1, 2, 3) and others whose explicit job is to create specifications for safe work environments, including PPE?
How many people know that the opposition to the hysteria around hospital capacity was based on acknowledgement by hospital executives that 30 percent of COVID patients were in the hospital with COVID, versus for COVID? Or that this inflationary mis-characterization was incentivized by government payouts? Or that they were using HHS’s own data showing hospital capacity to have been no issue whatsoever in the US except in extremely localized areas and for extremely short periods—and hence easily remediable.
How many people know that the opposition to vaccine mandates, beyond being based on the obvious, and perfectly reasonable objection that there was no long-term data on their safety, was also based on published research showing no relationship between vaccination rates and disease transmission?
The answer to all of these questions is, far too few. The sole reason for this widespread ignorance is government censorship. We have censorship to thank for the creation and implementation of divisive, harmful, and unjust policies. Lockdowns, school closures, mask mandates, vaccine mandates, vaccine passports all find their origins in the truth-starved, debate-deprived offices of our behemoth bureaucracies. Their continuance well after their futility was demonstrated empirically, and the harms they would cause already beginning to manifest can likewise be attributed to the same benighted bedfellows.
In addition to being harmed by the content of these censorship-protected policies, the public was further harmed by the division they created. Because these policies were propped up by censoring dissent and defaming dissenters, the debate was no such thing. Instead, framing it in Manichean terms of good and evil, the censors cast large groups of the population as enemies of the people, effectively engaging in a government-executed hate crime targeting tens of millions of people.
This censorship-fueled division didn’t just tear the country apart, it cut straight through the center of families, yielding countless divorces, and many millions of families estranging loved ones–all due to government-promoted lies. The polarization that has so demoralized us was a feature, not a bug, of the policies implemented by our politicians and bureaucrats.
Through the pervasive action of this wide-ranging government censorship/propaganda effort, vast swathes of the American people have been and continue to be weaponized against their fellow Americans. The faith these people had in institutions has been perverted to serve the institutions, not the people. This credulity-weaponization encompasses not just Joe Schmoe on the street, but extends all the way to the Supreme Court, where in oral arguments last year, several justices made claims whose easily verifiable falseness would have made them blush, if they weren’t so wholly taken in by the censorship and propaganda operations of the broader US government.
By acting as the witting or unwitting dupes of this vast censorship/propaganda operation, the credibility of virtually every civic institution in the US has been eroded possibly to the point of no return. Those whose credibility can be salvaged will be decades in the doing. Unfortunately, many, if not most, of our institutions and their denizens remain the censor’s reliable handmaidens, now seeming to hope the censors might somehow hide the gushing efflux of their credibility.
Among the harms that have been visited upon the American people through this censorship operation, vaccine injuries must also be counted. Our government not only censored questions and concerns, it acted as the marketing department for the vaccine manufacturers. However, there was one very important difference—if the manufacturers had been doing their own marketing, each ad would have had the long list of potential side effects and counter-indications that is required of all other pharmaceuticals. These risks were simply not communicated, except at the time of injection in the form of a long list of contra-indicated conditions.
However, if at that time one were to realize that one had one of the contra-indicated conditions, in many parts of the country, one would still have had no choice but to get the shot. Doctors who granted medical exemptions were threatened by the state to such a degree as to make exemptions virtually inaccessible, regardless of a doctor’s medical judgement. Vaccine mandates made getting the shot a requirement for engagement in public life and countenanced no exceptions.
This coercion effectively nullified informed consent for the entire American public, and thus, any adverse reaction ought to be considered fair game for redress. But it is the young and those who had already had COVID who present a picture of unalloyed harm. For these groups, the vaccines provided no benefit—only risk. Thus, every single adverse event incurred in these groups must be viewed as direct, personal harms caused by a government-sponsored censorship operation. That this particular strain of censorship benefited private companies at the same time that it harmed the American people adds grievous injury to the ongoing insult.
It is particularly demoralizing to realize that the polarization deliberately fomented by our government seems likely to protect its perpetrators from accountability. Everywhere, we see polls and articles about how fatigued people are by politics. And yet we have no other recourse to address this vast “censorship leviathan.” It is now the go-to tool with which our government effects policy.
The only way to change it is to remove from power those people who support this censorship regime and to dismantle the regime’s complex apparatus. Ultimately, government censorship reduces our society to just two groups of people: the censors and the censored. While it remains in place, the ranks of the censored will be ever-expanding as the censors require ever more censorship to ensure people continue to disbelieve their lying eyes.
All research at a Fort Detrick laboratory that handles high-level disease-causing material, such as Ebola, is on hold indefinitely after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found the organization failed to meet biosafety standards.
No infectious pathogens, or disease-causing material, have been found outside authorized areas at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases
The reasons for the shut down is questionable:
According to the Code of Federal Regulations, which also lists required training, records and biosafety plans, Federal Select Agents Program registration can be suspended to protect public health and safety.It is not clear if this is why the USAMRIID registration was suspended
However, the reasons they shut down the lab ranged from workers not getting recertified to the wastewater decontamination system that failed to meet the required safety standards:
The suspension was due to multiple causes, including failure to follow local procedures and a lack of periodic recertification training for workers in the biocontainment laboratories, according to Vander Linden. The wastewater decontamination system also failed to meet standards set by the Federal Select Agent Program
Shortly after, on January 30th, 2020, the coronavirus pandemic was announced. I am not saying that Covid-19 began in Ft. Dietrick, but it is worth reexamining what really happened that compelled CDC officials to order the shutdown of the lab over employees not getting recertified or problems with managing the wastewater decontamination system.
On March 13th, 2020, The New York Times headlined with ‘China Spins Tale That the U.S. Army Started the Coronavirus Epidemic’ which was based on China’s “conspiracy theories”, and that it was the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) based in Fort Detrick, Maryland who released Covid-19, “After criticizing American officials for politicizing the pandemic, Chinese officials and news outlets have floated unfounded theories that the United States was the source of the virus.”
Chinese authorities were referring to an article published from The New York Times on August 5th, 2019 ‘Deadly Germ Research Is Shut Down at Army Lab Over Safety Concerns’that claimed why the US military lab was shut down and had cancelled all research concerning lethal microbes “Safety concerns at a prominent military germ lab have led the government to shut down research involving dangerous microbes like the Ebola virus.” The spokesperson from the US Army, Ms. Vander Linden declared that “Research is currently on hold.” However, The NY Times had some positive news I suppose, “But there has been no threat to public health, no injuries to employees and no leaks of dangerous material outside the laboratory” But no more information from that point on, “In the statement, the C.D.C. cited “national security reasons” as the rationale for not releasing information about its decision.” Very strange in my opinion.
Cui Bono: Russia Exposes Who Benefits from the US Military’s Bioweapons Program
However, Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, the Chief of Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Protection Troops of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation recently conducted an important briefing on the U.S. military biological activities and present danger it imposes to all of us. In fact, it is a warning to what the U.S. government is capable of and that is releasing another biological weapon, whether dangerous or not for its geopolitical agendas including the long-stated goals of depopulating the earth. As for the globalists, less people on the planet will be much easier to control. Release a bioweapon, discover a vaccine as the cure, and then scare or force people to take the so-called “vaccine” or what I like to call “experimental shots.” Besides the goals of depopulation, the political and corporate establishment and their Big Pharma cartels have created long-term patients from the injuries caused by the Covid-19 experimental shots which in their perspective, is good for business.
The next pandemic is the second phase of a long-term war against humanity as Kirillov laid out the US government’s stated goals which “are primarily aimed at studying potential agents of biological weapons — anthrax, tularemia, coronavirus, as well as pathogens of economically significant infections — pathogenic avian influenza and African swine fever” he continued“there is a clear trend: pathogens that fall within the Pentagon’s area of interest, such as COVID-19, avian influenza, African swine fever, subsequently become pandemic, and American pharmaceutical companies become the beneficiaries.”Kirillov also mentioned Event 201, an exercise conducted before the Covid-19 pandemic on October 18th, 2019, that “simulated the epidemic of a previously unknown coronavirus that, according to the scenario, was transmitted from bats to humans via a porcine organism, the intermediary virus carrier.” For Russian authorities “the development of the pandemic under this scenario, as well as the implementation of EcoHealth Alliance projects, raises questions about the possible intentional nature of COVID-19 and U.S. involvement in the incident.”
So, the US Military Creates a Problem, Big Pharma Creates the Solution
The question remains, was the US government behind the Covid-19 outbreak? It’s hard to say at this point, but one thing is for sure, Big Pharma executives from Pfizer, Moderna, Astra Zeneca and other biotech companies were licking their lips for the future profits that they were about to make on the vaccines they produced. The propaganda campaign to scare humanity into taking these so-called vaccines worked to an extent despite those who fell into the trap of getting the Covid-19 experimental shot. However, it was estimated that more than 2 billion people did not take the Covid-19 experimental shot, and that should give us hope to be more optimistic about any future virus currently being created by Western funded biolabs around the world including those in the Ukraine and elsewhere.
A platform created by the Center for Global Development and the United Nations Development Programme called Pandem-ic.com published an updated report on August 6, 2023, ‘Mapping our unvaccinated world’and said that “Globally, 2.2 billion people are completely unvaccinated. This is the global tally as of today based on the latest information available. It represents the total number of people who have yet to receive their first shot.” And Thank God! Make no mistake, this was and still is biological warfare and many people around the world fought back and resisted Western authorities and their institutions such as Big Pharma, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO).
There is hope and optimism regarding the next ‘planned-demic’ because the people have awakened to the fact that there is a cult of death and destruction called the ‘globalists’ who want to depopulate our planet. But a new resistance will rise once again and face the same enemies of humanity.
The worldwide resistance against the Covid-19 lockdowns, vaccine mandates, facemasks, and social distancing at the height of the pandemic was and still is, inspiring for us all. Although they were many people who resisted the medical establishment worldwide, I want to mention several countries, resistance groups, organizations and the people who have resisted the lies and they all should be recognized for it.
Big Pharma’s Major Problem: The Global Resistance
Kirillov said that when the US military works with dangerous pathogens “American pharmaceutical companies become the beneficiaries” which is a factual statement. Whatever the US government and Big Pharma are planning behind closed doors, they will fail. It’s just like that old saying, “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me”. The good news is that there is no trust in Big Pharma around the world, especially in most African countries. On March 9th, 2021, Afrobarometer, a pan-African, nonpartisan survey research network published ‘Who wants COVID-19 vaccination? In 5 West African countries, hesitancy is high, trust low’ based on a survey on five countries in Africa where they conducted face to face interviews on their views about Covid-19 vaccines:
This dispatch is based on data collected during the period October 2020-January 2021 in five West African countries: Benin, Liberia, Niger, Senegal, and Togo. In each country, Afrobarometer conducted face-to-face interviews in the language of the respondent’s choice with a nationally representative sample of 1,200 adult citizens that yields country-level results with a margin of error of +/-3 percentage points at a 95% confidence level
Here are the most important findings to consider in the Survey:
*In the five surveyed countries in West Africa, most citizens – 92% on average – say they are “somewhat well informed” or “very well informed” about the COVID-19 pandemic and efforts to combat it
*Only three in 10 respondents (31%) say they trust their government “somewhat” or “a lot” to ensure that any vaccine is safe before it is offered to citizens. Mistrust is particularly high in Senegal (83%) and Liberia (78%)
* Six in 10 citizens (60%), on average, say they are unlikely to try to get vaccinated, including 44% who consider it “highly unlikely.” Senegalese (79%) and Liberians (66%) are most likely to express a reluctance to take the vaccine
*Vaccine hesitancy/resistance skyrockets alongside doubts about the government’s ability to ensure that vaccines are safe. Those who fully trust their government on this score are five to 10 times as likely to want the vaccine as those who don’t trust it
*Large majorities in Niger (89%), Liberia (86%), and Senegal (71%) believe that prayer is more effective than a vaccine in preventing coronavirus infection. Views are more divided in Benin (41%) and Togo (40%)
*Poor respondents express a greater reluctance to get vaccinated than their better off counterparts.
“Except in Liberia, citizens with more formal education are not significantly more likely to want the vaccine than their less educated counterparts“
“Vaccine hesitancy is significantly stronger in cities than in rural areas in Benin, Togo, and Niger“
In another report published on November 24th, 2022, this time by the BBC ‘The vaccine hesitancy in North Africa’s Covid ‘black hole’ reported on Morocco’s population and their high-rate of vaccinations as to those in the Western Sahara who were not, “according to one international survey published in 2019 before the pandemic began, 80% of Moroccans trusted vaccines to be safe, among the highest rates in the world.” However, in the Western Sahara, it is a different story:
But that high level of trust may be far lower among the 600,000 people living in Western Sahara – a non-self-governing territory that is administered by Morocco. When it comes to the Covid-19 pandemic, Western Sahara is a black hole: no information exists. The area is a blank spot on the World Health Organization’s global map of Covid-19 cases and vaccines because Morocco refuses to publish data about how many Sahrawis have been vaccinated in this politically sensitive region
In the Western Sahara, the BBC interviewed a truck driver by the name of Hanzali who knows people who bought a vaccine certificate to avoid taking the vaccine, “even the people who took the vaccine took it not because they wanted to but because they were told to or had to” Hanzali continued “I’m not against the vaccine – I’m against the people who try to force me to get the vaccine.” There were unvaccinated Sahrawis who do not trust their politicians, they were the ones that pushed these vaccines on the Sahrawis, “several unvaccinated Sahrawis told the BBC that their hesitancy stems from the fact that Morocco’s politicians – not its doctors – have been at the forefront of the country’s vaccination campaign.” An unnamed student of media and technology in Laayoune told BBC “In my opinion the government used ‘corona’ for political purposes” he continued “In Casablanca and Rabat, there were lots of protests against the government – and here too [in Laayoune]. It’s because it comes from the government that people don’t agree.” The highlight of the story is that the unnamed student still refuses the vaccine, “three years into the pandemic, he says he still refuses to take the vaccine. His view is shared by others the BBC spoke to in the region.”
Africa: The Continent of Resistance
In a article by World Bank Blogs written by several authors including Neia Prata Muloongo Simuzingili, Zelalem Yilma Debebe, Fedja Pivodic and Ernest Massiah titled ‘What is driving COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in Sub-Saharan Africa?’ on the reasons why so many Africans are rejecting Covid-19 vaccines:
In Africa, there are multiple drivers of vaccine hesitancy . Concerns about safety, side effects, and effectiveness are widespread—and observed among health workers in Zimbabwe, Ghana, South Africa, Kenya, Sudan, and Ethiopia. The Africa CDC survey noted that respondents viewed COVID-19 vaccines as less safe and effective than other vaccines, similar findings have been observed in Uganda, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Mozambique, Burkina Faso, Cameroon and South Africa. The suspension of AstraZeneca’s roll out in some European countries, the South African data on its effectiveness and the temporary suspension of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in the United States to evaluate reports of blood clotting, affected confidence in COVID-19 vaccination. Ultimately, AstraZeneca’s vaccine was refused by several African countries
So why Africans reject Big Pharma’s experimental shots? Authorities blame the internet and social media for the “conspiracy theories” that spreads medical misinformation:
Access to social media has facilitated the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories. In the Africa CDC study, people with high levels of hesitancy were more likely to use social media and be exposed to disinformation. Half of those surveyed in South Africa believed the virus was linked to 5G technology. In another South African study, approximately a third of those who would refuse the vaccine trusted social media as a primary source of information. A small study in Addis Ababa showed that hesitancy was 3.6 times higher among those who received their information from social media compared to those who relied on television and radio
The African people are awake to the fact that they don’t want to be guinea pigs in any form:
However, Tanzania has repeatedly struggled to counter misinformation and people’s reluctance to be vaccinated. To quell growing scepticism against COVID-19 vaccines, Tanzania’s Ministry of Health embarked on community mobilisation campaigns that included community influencers.
Community health workers, musicians and others have become part of the government-led communication strategy to share reliable information about the pandemic, dispel the tide of misinformation and boost the vaccine numbers
If the statistics are correct, with a population of 62 million, only half has been vaccinated, so over 30 million people did not. Many in Tanzania are not falling for the propaganda that Covid-19 experimental shots are safe and effective.
The legacy of John Magafuli will be that he opposed the dictates of Western institutions and Big Pharma. History will remember him as a hero for the Tanzanian people because since the Covid pandemic was announced, he warned the people about the dangers of Big Pharma and their Western institutions. John Magafuli will be remembered as a hero not only to the Tanzanian people and to continent of Africa, but to all of us around the world who oppose the globalist operators and their agenda of vaccinating the planet to either create a sick population that will benefit Big Pharma or just eliminate the “useless eaters” that are in their way of achieving their goals.
Forget Opposing an Illegal Occupation, the Palestinians are now Anti-Vaxx Conspiracy Theorists!
If any of us were Palestinian living in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, or other areas in and around Palestine, I would absolutely reject the Covid-19 vaccine for several reasons. First, would you take a vaccine from Western countries who have been supporting Israel unconditionally since 1948? How would you know if they are safe? Second, would you trust Western biotech corporations who produced a vaccine in under several months while most vaccines had acquired many years of studies and tests before they were approved?
Bottom line, Palestinians don’t want to be test subjects like the Israelis. “The CEO of Pfizer said he chose Israel to be the “one country” to demonstrate his company’s anti-COVID vaccine because he was “impressed, frankly, with the obsession of your prime minister” according to allisraelnews.com. “He called me 30 times. He would call me at 3 o’clock in the morning and he would ask me about the (coronavirus) variants, what data we have,” Bourla continued “and I would say, ‘Prime Minister, it’s 3 o’clock in the morning,’ and he would say, ‘No, no, don’t worry, just tell me.’ Or he would call me to ask about children, ‘I need to vaccinate the schools.’ Or about pregnant women.” Bourla said “he convinced me, frankly, that he would be on top of things” and that “we placed our bet with Israel and we are so happy because of the way that you executed the vaccination. And a year from the declaration of the pandemic by the WHO (World Health Organization) we were able today to issue a press release together with the Ministry of Health of your country about the results.” In a scientific report from 2022 based on the results from Big Pharma’s experimental shots on the 16–39-year-old population in Israel with factors associated between Covid-19 infection rates and those who received the Covid-19 vaccine are as follows:
Using a unique dataset from Israel National Emergency Medical Services (EMS) from 2019 to 2021, the study aims to evaluate the association between the volume of cardiac arrest and acute coronary syndrome EMS calls in the 16–39-year-old population with potential factors including COVID-19 infection and vaccination rates. An increase of over 25% was detected in both call types during January–May 2021
The report admits that there are legitimate concerns, “While not establishing causal relationships, the findings raise concerns regarding vaccine-induced undetected severe cardiovascular side-effects and underscore the already established causal relationship between vaccines and myocarditis, a frequent cause of unexpected cardiac arrest in young individuals.”
On July 23rd, 2021, Al Jazeera‘Reluctance and distrust define vaccine attitudes in Gaza’ reported on the mistrust of Covid-19 vaccines among Palestinians. “Suhair Zakkout, spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in the Gaza Strip, said its health sector has long faced major systemic issues” but concerns remain because a third of people in the Gaza Strip and West Bank refuse to get vaccinated with Covid-19 experimental shots:
The reluctance of people to get vaccinated, however, has raised concerns and prompted the ICRC – alongside the health ministry and the ministry of endowment and religious affairs – to launch a campaign aimed at increasing awareness about the positive effects of the shots
On June 15th, 2021, The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) found that “35% (37% in the West Bank and 32% in the Gaza Strip) say they and their families are not willing to take the vaccine when it becomes available to them.” One third of the Palestinian people will not take any Covid-19 experimental shot and that is a good thing.
Yemen’s Houthi Movement and the Resistance against Covid-19 Vaccines
Opinions on the coronavirus in Yemen are as divided as the country itself. While the south is awaiting the first vaccines, the north claims to have no need for immunization. What the two sides have in common is a health sector in shambles and a striking love for conspiracy theories
They say Yemen is divided between the Yemeni government in the south who are eagerly waiting for their first vaccines while the north which is controlled by the Houthi movement who has been fighting the Saudi coalition since March 26th, 2015, had declared, they don’t want them:
While countries across the world are racing to provide their citizens with the coronavirus vaccine, the Yemeni authorities remain confused and divided. The internationally recognized Yemeni government on the one hand is trying to gradually obtain the vaccine for free, while the Houthi movement (Ansar Allah) on the other hand categorically rejects the vaccine
Daraj mentioned the war and storage issues are some factors on why the Yemeni population has not been vaccinated, but residents who live in the north such as 31-year-old Ahmed Al-Washali who said that “We do not want vaccines, there is no corona in Yemen, we are fine” and that “It has not affected us. While other countries were imprisoned in their homes, and could not work, we lived normally and nothing happened.” Daraj reporters asked 52 people who live in Houthi territory about the Covid vaccine and here is the result:
Our team met with 53 people in areas under control of the Houthi movement, most of whom hold a university degree, are employed in the public or private sector and have an average age of 27 to 35.
We found that 42 out of 53 people refuse to receive the vaccine if it were available. Because they did not need it, most said, while 17 claimed the vaccine may be a “conspiracy” posing a threat to their health. Of the 9 people willing to receive the vaccine, 7 stipulated it should be free of charge. Two people said to have never heard about a vaccine against the virus
The results are inspiring to say the least. Western-backed organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) are not trusted at all:
Some people found the lack of a complete outbreak of the epidemic a reason to reject the vaccine and denounce the integrity of the WHO. A doctor in Taiz, who requested anonymity, said he supported the Great Barrington Declaration, a statement signed by thousands of scholars in the field of medicine and public health calling for an alternative approach to the Covid pandemic based on “focused protection” of those most at risk.
Despite the low rate of illiteracy compared to other governorates, in Taiz too resistance to vaccination remained high. And here too it was not just limited to religious people but included holders of university degrees and secular people. For 49-year-old teacher Jamil, for example, corona was “just an illusion”
In the city of Aden, the results were similar:
Things were not too different in Aden, as fear for the vaccine prevailed. In a poll conducted by our team among 121 residents in the city of Aden, over 84% refused to have the vaccine. The main reason was a lack of confidence in the authorities responsible for importing the vaccine and a fear for the conditions in which the vaccine would be cooled and stored. Even some health workers feared the vaccine in terms of safety and potential side effects
The Houthi movement and the people who support them are clearly awake to the fact that Western nations and their Big Pharma corporations are promoting dangerous Covid-19 experimental shots. They see the dangers.
The Houthi movement knows that these Covid-19 experimental shots are used as another weapon of war, a bioweapon that can used to depopulate their society. At least we know that in the next manufactured pandemic, the Houthi movement will continue to resist Western countries and Big Pharma just like they been resisting the Western-backed Yemeni government led by Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi and a coalition of military forces led by Saudi Arabia since 2014.
Vaccine Hesitancy in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean
A Brazilian study on vaccine hesitancy by Cardenos De Saude Publica (CSP), English translation ‘Reports in Public Health’ called ‘COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in Latin America and Africa: a scoping review’said that several countries had a percentage of people who refused Covid-19 experimental shots for various reasons:
In the case of vaccination against COVID-19, studies conducted in African and Latin American countries showed that hesitancy was linked with religious beliefs, association between vaccination and surveillance of government authorities, lack of information about adverse events, vaccine safety and efficacy, and dissemination of fake news
Who were the main Latin American countries with high rates of hesitancy?
In Latin American countries, the highest vaccine hesitancy rate of 26.1% and the lowest 8.4% were reported in Brazil. In Ecuador, hesitancy ranged from 73% to 9%, depending on the vaccine efficacy. In Chile, 28% were hesitant and 23% refused the vaccine. Peru had 10.1% refusal and 19.5% hesitancy. In Venezuela, vaccine hesitancy was 28.75%
One point that the Brazilian study reflected on was the history of the Global North (Western Nations) which was the legacy of colonialism and the violence (military invasions, regime change and their depopulation schemes) which the people in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean remember from their histories with Western Imperial powers:
Underdeveloped countries were repeatedly used for tests with human beings, which today resulted in vaccine refusal due to the fear of being laboratory subjects. The power relationship between the Global North and the Global South, expressed in a past of coloniality and violence still alive in the memory of colonized countries, is reflected in the rejection of practices that supposedly come from the North. Then vaccines are seen by different groups as population control strategies in underdeveloped countries, as “western malevolence”, or as a method to extinguish undesirable groups
The people who refused Covid-19 vaccines in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean during the last pandemic will continue to resist Western nations and their Big Pharma scams because they know that there is an agenda in the next manufactured pandemic.
Vaccine Resistance in Western nations
Forbes magazine reported on March 8th, 2021, ‘Covid-19 Vaccine Hesitancy Is Worse In E.U. Than U.S.’claimed that the “but getting shots into the arms of European Union (E.U.) residents has proven to be much trickier. The U.S. is vaccinating at a faster pace than any member of the E.U., and three times the E.U. average” and that is in a way the good news. Polls suggest that the Europeans don’t trust Big Pharma as well since “only 36% of the surveyed Europeans strongly agree with the statement that vaccines are safe.” In fact, Europe has a history of resistance against Big Pharma’s AstraZeneca vaccine:
In Europe, even approved products that don’t necessarily have supply issues have faced stiff resistance. In France and Germany, for example, the approved AstraZeneca vaccine has an image problem, which means many are reluctant to take it, including healthcare workers on the front lines. Poor, inconsistent messaging has fueled the public’s confusion over the safety and efficacy of AstraZeneca’s vaccine. President Macron’s claim last month that the vaccine was “quasi-ineffective” for the elderly didn’t help matters. He has since reversed himself and is now pleading that people get vaccinated with whatever vaccine is available to them. But the damage was already done
The Europeans of both political movements, whether far-left or far-right, are usually anti-establishment so obviously, they don’t trust Big Pharma’s Covid-19 experimental shots as well:
Europe’s degree of Covid-19 vaccine aversion is perhaps surprising, but not if one views it in the context of fiercely anti-establishment politics on the far-left and far-right, and a particularly virulent anti-science sentiment that existed long before Covid-19 hit. To illustrate, the far-right Lega and leftist Five Star Movement in Italy have both incited fearmongering about vaccines. Likewise, far-right and far-left political leaders in France, such as Le Pen and Mélenchon, have stoked anti-vaccine attitudes
From Africa, the Middle East, Latin America to Europe and even in the United States where one-third of the population did not take the Covid-19 experimental shots for whatever reason, there will be another popular resistance against Big Pharma’s experimental shots and a possible future lockdown.
For the next manufactured pandemic, the globalists, and the Pentagon, including all their institutions including the elephant in the room, Big Pharma will face a resistance by people from all walks of life and they will fail because the 2 billion people around the world will continue to oppose Big Pharma’s Covid-19 experimental shots and that is something the globalists are not looking forward to.
The Washington Post defended campus researchers collaborating with federal agencies to censor Americans in an awkward, bumbling article last week, alleging that congressional staff demanding university documents were “harassing academics” who studied falsehoods spread by Trump. In reality, Congress is investigating campus employees who have little in common with traditional university scholars teaching Proust or studying the atmospheric chemistry of distant planets.
Just last year, one Stanford University researcher disclosed that he and other academics at Stanford and the University of Washington worked with an agency in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) “to fill the gap of the things the government could not do themselves,” admitting that academics served as a cutout for federal censoring of Americans. The DHS agency campus researchers collaborated with is called the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency or CISA.
In a recent investigation, Tablet magazine noted that in 2021 CISA began determining which ideas Americans were allowed to discuss and debate during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Documents I discovered at Twitter’s headquarters further tie these censorship efforts to another researcher—Brown University’s Claire Wardle.
Who is Claire Wardle?
Largely unknown to most Americans, Wardle is a central figure in the disinformation industry and helped organize many of today’s campus disinformation groups in 2015 with funding from Google. But searching through Twitter’s files, I uncovered a government document marked “for official use only” that finds Wardle had also been chosen to brief CISA’s advisory committee.
A spokesperson for CISA emailed yesterday that he would get back to me and explain how often Wardle had briefed the agency.
Wardle has no training or background in science, yet she has long sought to define herself as an expert on vaccines. In a 2019 Twitter email that I discovered, Wardle tried to involve the company’s executives in a Ted Talk event that would define “credible sources” and “quality information around vaccines.”
That next year, Wardle emailed Twitter executives a report she had written looking into what she deemed to be antivaccine conspiracies and narratives found on social media. Wardle sent the email days after Pfizer announced initial positive findings for their COVID vaccine—results which Wardle said forced her to hurry up the report’s release.
“The dominant vaccine narrative is designed to undermine confidence in institutions and scientific sources,” Wardle alleged, in her email to Twitter. Wardle claimed in her report that vaccine mandates are “one of the prominent anti-vaccination narratives”—a narrative which, oddly enough, proved to be accurate when US companies as well as state and federal agencies began mandating COVID vaccines.
Since Wardle published her vaccine findings, one of the report’s authors joined a secretive UK government agency that investigative journalists exposed in recent weeks for censoring British citizens. Meanwhile, one of the report’s contributing researchers now works for a global PR firm that an Australian investigation found was helping that country’s government to censor its own people.
Since 2021, a legal tussle has persisted between a single mother, Liyana Razali, and the Malaysian government. This is due to her statements concerning the safety of COVID-19 vaccines for 12-17 year-olds. The government outlawed Razali’s statement for fear that the public would develop negative perceptions of the vaccine, which could jeopardize the vaccination program. She was allegedly subjected to police harassment, media defamation, and a 30-day detention at Ulu Kinta Mental Hospital. TrialSite is following the controversial issue of vaccinating children against COVID-19, as well as the medical community’s perspective on this topic.
Razali made her speech on September 28, 2021, in front of the Ministry of Higher Education. She said, “Here I would like, on behalf of today’s parents who are present at the Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia … to express our solidarity with parents.” She went on to name three families whose children were experiencing side effects following COVID-19 vaccinations, or had passed away shortly after receiving the vaccines. She also referred to three other children who had died after being vaccinated: two students at Sekolah Menengah Kebangsaan Tasik Damai in Ipoh, and one teenager in Lahad Datu, Sabah.
As well as expressing solidarity, she called on listeners to report side effects through the proper channels. “Report it to the authorities,” she said. “Do not just post them on social media. Come forward, and send your information, and we will try to fight for your rights.”
Police Intervention and Possible Misinterpretation of Razali’s Speech in Mainstream Media
Five days later (October 3), Razali was called to the police station for questioning. They asked her, without having official paperwork, to appear at a magistrates court. When she was asked to appear at Ipoh Magistrates Court on November 30, 2021, they cancelled the court appointment.
Meanwhile, the news of the police looking for Razali was published in mainstream media, including her photograph and home address. The reports stated that she had made “false COVID vaccine claims,” and that her allegations that students had died after receiving the vaccine were untrue.
The police returned on May 20, 2022, with an arrest warrant from Putrajaya Magistrates Court. They took Razali to court, where she refused to enter a plea for lack of a verified criminal complaint against her. The deputy public prosecutor (DPP) proposed a 30-day observation in Ulu Kinta Mental Hospital, to which the magistrate agreed.
Lawyers’ attempts to get Razali out were rejected. The DPP took a long time in building a case against her, and the trial began on November 22, 2022.
Exception in Penal Code 505
Razali has been charged under Penal code 505 (b), which states, “Whoever makes, publishes, or circulates any statement, rumor, or report with intent to cause, or which is likely to cause, fear or alarm to the public, or to any section of the public whereby any person may be induced to commit an offense against the State or against the public tranquility.” This implies that the government is claiming that her words were intended to cause public distress, which might incite the public to rally against the state.
Razali’s lawyers petitioned the DPP to apply the exception to penal code 505 (b), which reads, “It does not amount to an offense within the meaning of this section, when the person making, publishing, or circulating any such statement, rumor, or report has reasonable grounds for believing that such statement, rumor, or report is true and makes, publishes or circulates it without any such intent as aforesaid.”
Based on this exception, if Razali had reasonable grounds to believe her statement was true at the time she said it, her actions were not against the law. Her representation was rejected without reason, and the case was motioned to continue.
The Appearance of Seven Witnesses in Razali’s Case
After Razali’s speech, over a period of almost one year, the DPP arranged for a range of people to testify against her. Seven of them have since appeared in court to testify and under cross-examination they have admitted that their previous statements had been influenced rather than being their own stand.
Two Ministry of Health (MOH) workers participating in the vaccine rollout claimed that they had been ordered to write their reports. Two MOH doctors and Ipoh school’s headmaster said that they had filed reports with the police out of fear of jeopardizing the vaccination program. Fathers of the two deceased Ipoh children had been summoned and instructed to testify that their children had died before vaccination.
The witnesses helped to shed some light on Razali’s case and how the public had perceived her speech, and the failure to stand their ground for fear of the government.
Doctors’ Testimonies
The doctors who have so far testified have claimed that the COVID-19 vaccine’s side effects were not severe and included allergies, Bell’s palsy, and myocarditis.
At least one witness for the government, a medical doctor, also said that when seeking consent from parents or guardians, there was no need to spend time on obtaining fully informed consent because it was all too complex for most people to understand, so there was no point wasting time like this. These witnesses also stated, however, that once consent had been given, patients must be responsible for any negative effects.
Effectiveness of COVID-19 Vaccines
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective at preventing severe illness, hospitalization, or death.
Several studies have further demonstrated the effectiveness of these vaccines. One such study is a Hong Kong population-based observational study conducted in 2022. Results from this study revealed that two doses of the CoronaVac or BNT162b2 vaccines offered protection against severe illness or death within 28 days of a positive SARS-CoV-2 test.
Another study previously reported by TrialSite on COVID-19 vaccines for teens 12-17 years old has been carried out and continues in various regions globally. Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna mRNA vaccines are indicated by the vaccine companies to be safe and effective at preventing severe infections for this age bracket.
Furthermore, in 2021, the Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety (GACVS) resolved that the benefits of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines far outweighed their risks.
The Risk of COVID-19 Vaccine Side Effects
There is data from around the world showing safety warning signals following the COVID-19 vaccine (including severe disability and death). However, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) there are only a few cases of very rare adverse severe events, namely myocarditis and pericarditis, that have been reported so far. These conditions were mainly observed in younger men aged 16-24 years and occurred after the second dose of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine. Generally, the conditions appeared within a few days after vaccination. The WHO indicates that these injuries were mild and responsive to conservative treatment.
The Malaysian Ministry of Health (KKM) informed the media in January 2023 that over 94% of reported vaccine reactions to Pfizer-BioNTech’s Comirnaty had been mild, but that “a small number” amounting to 1,162 serious cases of effects such as anaphylaxis, acute facial paralysis, myocarditis, and intravenous thrombosis had been recorded. This followed more than one year of claims by KKM that there had been no serious post-vaccine injuries reported in Malaysia.
These figures are similar to those reported by the CDC for teen vaccine reactions, which found 91.6% of cases were nonserious, and only 8.4% were severe. Common side effects after vaccination include headaches, muscle or joint soreness, fever, nausea, and vomiting. The injected area may redden, swell, itch, or have some pain. Most people recover quickly from the side effects, including the rare myocarditis and pericarditis cases reported after vaccination, which are claimed to be not as severe as those caused by COVID-19 infection.
These claims have been contested by world-leading cardiologists, such as Dr. Peter McCullough in the U.S. and Dr. Aseem Malhotra from the UK, who cite research showing that identified myocarditis and pericarditis from the vaccines is more severe than COVID-19-induced cardiac effects. The CDC continues to investigate the long-term effects of myocarditis after COVID-19 vaccination.
In addition, results from randomized control trial data from Pfizer, released under a court order in the U.S., demonstrated that over 1228 deaths occurred after the administration of the Pfizer vaccine. Additionally, 42,086 individuals reported 158,893 adverse events within a 3-month period.
A study done in Thailand in mid-2022 showed that 3.5% of boys showed evidence of pericarditis or myocarditis after the second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.
Research from other countries, such as that done on 12th-grade South Korean students, has shown a low rate of serious adverse events and no vaccine-related deaths. Other studies that targeted Israeli adolescents 16-19 years old put the risk of myocarditis at 1.34 per 100,000 within twenty days after the first dose and 15.07 per 100,000 after the second dose. In the U.S., the rates were 12 cases per million people (12-39 years) who received the second dose of the mRNA vaccine.
However, in March 2023, the Israeli Ministry of Health covertly released a new study showing large numbers of deaths within 60 days of receiving an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.
In December 2021, health officials in Vietnam had to suspend the use of the Pfizer vaccine after the hospitalization of over 120 children following a group vaccination at school. Additionally, three children died from an overreaction to the vaccine in Bac Giang, a province near Hanoi, and Binh Phuoc, a province in the south.
The Case Continues
Despite the Malaysian Ministry of Health’s firm stance that the COVID-19 vaccines are perfectly safe, Razali is not the only person flagging potential adverse reactions. In the same week that Razali delivered her speech, a vaccination program in Malaysia’s Kajang prison resulted in 18 serious adverse events and two deaths in under 2,500 people. The prison director’s letter to the regulatory department and health office went viral after being leaked.
The health minister claimed that there were no deaths in Malaysia linked to the COVID-19 vaccine while confirming that 535 deaths reported as adverse events “were not directly linked to the vaccines” according to postmortem results. However, an autopsy of 40 people who died within two weeks of vaccination conducted at the University of Heidelberg in Germany showed that specific techniques and stains are required to detect the effect of the vaccine at a cellular level on postmortem. The head of the autopsy project, Peter Schirmacher, concluded that between 30 to 40% of the deaths his team examined had resulted from the vaccination, and might have been missed by regular postmortem protocols.
As with anyone accused of breaking the law, Razali deserves a fair hearing before a court of law to establish whether or not her public statements were in any way a violation of Penal code paragraph 505 (b), especially given the exception that is an integral part of that clause.
As research on COVID-19 vaccine administration to teens between 12-17 years continues, organizations urge parents or guardians to report serious cases for further assessment.
A falling tree makes more noise than a growing forest A Tibetan proverb Let’s hope the silently growing forest represents a mass-awakening. —-
From the looks and evidence – ever more visible to even the ignorant – we are living in a Death Cult – a Cabal-driven Death Cult, with a key objective to do away with – eliminate – a large segment, if not the majority of the world population.
Who is executing this Death Cult? And on behalf of whom? Three entities come to mind.
The World Economic Forum (WEF), is a Cologny (lush suburb of Geneva, Switzerland)-registered NGO; a never-voted-for “influencer” organization, that has amassed power and money in the hundreds of millions of dollars, like no other NGO around the word. Its founder and eternal Chairman, Klaus Schwab (84), is an engineer cum economist, with origins linked to the former Third Reich Nazi-leadership.By the way – the WEF is holding their annual Davos conference from 16-20 January 2023. The pathology of this outfit and of those elitist billionaires and corporate honchos attending, is reflected in this year even more dystopian agenda. Have a look at the official program https://www.weforum.org/events/world-economic-forum-annual-meeting-2023/about/meeting-overview?gclid=CjwKCAiA8OmdBhAgEiwAShr402rG_ShAgll-Pwx4MjDBTbmhgZDg29ii18ztf-yKlsvgQqdSrVerIBoCCvIQAvD_BwE
This is only the visible agenda. None of us, the commons, know what’s going on behind closed doors in special secretive sessions. We feed on leakages, and as Globalism is fading, they become ever more abundant.
The World Health Organization – WHO – goes as a specialized UN Agency – which in reality it isn’t. It was founded in 1948 by Rockefeller, a eugenist and obsessed globalist, who was (and still is) aiming at controlling the world population through health (and death), and who is hellbent to make the Mother Earth a better place through a One World Order. WHO was then “bought” into the UN system.
At that time, Rockefeller with Standard Oil, had also a monopoly on petrol. He decided that pharmaceuticals, up to the 1950’s, mostly based on plants and plant chemistry – could be made from petro-chemicals.
WHO, according to its bylaws, a disease-preventive health organization, became, thus, largely a curative pharma-based and pharma-pushing organization.
While the bulk of the budget from other UN agencies stems from member countries’ contribution, WHO is funded at least to two thirds or more by the private sector, mostly the pharma industry, as well as the Bill Gates Foundation.
A conflict of interest is more than evident. WHO should not be a UN agency.
WHO – against its scientific staff’s better knowledge, has declared Covid as a deadly pandemic, spreading fear, imposing lockdowns, face masks, social distancing – and more human-denigrating measures.
Eventually, WHO, strongly nudged by the WEF (and the powers behind the WEF), was coercing governments to “vaccinate” their populations with never-before tested genetically modifying mRNA injections, of which nobody but the producing pharma-industry knows the composition – contents that has turned out deadly for tens of millions of people – and mounting.
By the end of 2022, excess mortality in western countries amounts to between 15% and 25% – in some countries even higher.
All of the western used so-called vaccines are, in fact, bioweapons.
This horrendous Vaxx-fraud was also a multi-billion, if not trillion, bonanza for the pharmaceuticals.
The covid jabs also contain sterilization agents for both men and women, resulting already by now in drastically falling birth rates in western countries.
The term “Western Countries” means all of Europe and the worldwide Anglosaxonia. So far, all fits well within the Rockefeller, Gates, Soros et al – eugenist agenda.
WHO is truth censuring through social platforms – NewsGuard, an organization of “True Journalism”, tracking credibility of news and information websites and online misinformation, provides WHO regularly with lists of the most important “influencers” of “misinformation” in matters of health, alias conspiracy theorists; people who do not conform with the official narrative.
WHO forwards this list to the different Social Media Platforms, requesting them to block the accounts of the “perpetrators”, or to clandestinely hide or limit their social media inputs. This is called “shadow banning”.
WHO works closely with the International Fact Checking Network (IFCN) at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a non-profit journalism school and research organization in St. Petersburg, Florida. The IFCN has a databank with more than 10,000 “fact-checked false information”, most of them related to WHO dictates.
IFCN is mainly funded by the US State Department, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Soros Open Society Foundation, Google and Facebook. Coincidentally, the Gates Foundation and the US Government are also the biggest donors of WHO.
To top it all off, WHO is currently preparing a so-called Pandemic Treaty. Under this Treaty, if approved, WHO’s DG would have the power to declare worldwide pandemics as he, alias the ruling class, sees fit to control the masses.
Compulsory vaccinations could be military enforced. This would be an authority above each of the member countries’ National Constitution. So far trial votations have not succeeded, as several country blocks, for example, in Africa, do not agree.
But the beat goes on with coercing and potentially bribing of country delegates. A final vote should take place in the course of 2023. If approved, the lawless Pandemic Treaty rule should enter into effect at the beginning of 2024.
If so, this is a call on each WHO member to leave WHO.
NATO – the North Atlantic Treaty Organization – has long ceased being a defense alliance of North Atlantic countries. It has become a worldwide war machine with access and use of some 850 US military bases around the world.
NATO is not only a multi-billion-dollar income generator largely for the US Military Industrial Complex (MIC), but it is also an important US GDP engine, contributing an estimated 30% of the US GDP, counting all NATO-related and dependent industries and services.
NATO is the provoker, funder and main executer of the Ukraine-Russia war – the US – Russia proxy-war. Its expansionism has become a monster octopus, stretching its tentacles completely and all-controlling around Mother Earth.
Other than non-stop provoking Russia, NATO also fulfills a role in the Great Reset / UN Agenda 2030 eugenist agenda, as killing is one of its chief purposes.
NATO enters any territory where the “conventional” media lie-machine, and social engineering are failing or not completing their people-ordaining goals fast enough.
Russia, by far the largest and resources-richest country of our planet, was in the US hegemon’s cross-hairs for over a century. The 2014 Maidan Coup, engineered by EU / NATO, was a planned prelude to a war with Russia.
The without scruples NATO war machine would not shy from a hot WWIII – which could easily turn nuclear, all-destructive – and – all-killing.
Playing with Russian ethics, knowing that President Putin has no intention to annihilate a country that up to recently and for over 300 years in the past was an integral part of the Russian Empire, then the Soviet Union. Ukraine is inherently, and historically a part of Russia, even as an ally after it became independent in 1991.
Ukraine was forcefully and viciously detached from Russia by western aggression for greed and pathological grandeur.
Now western aggressions may backfire, as President Putin may soon have no other choice than to obliterate what’s left of Ukraine, to finally stop the war – and the senseless killing, the misery of the hapless and suffering population.
Be aware, NATO is ready for weaponized interference wherever a “human-conflict” cannot be resolved by the WEF / WHO oppressive tyrannical means.
——- We, the People, of the world have largely only little or no saying in how our world, our countries, even our communities are run. And this already for
In the last three years the common People’s exclusion form what is still sold as a democratic process, has reached a pinnacle. With the onset of a fake plandemic at the beginning of 2020 – the beginning of an agenda long ago planned – the UN Agenda 2030 – the beginning of the larger Agenda 21 (all of the 21st Century), officially decided at the UN Environment Conference in Rio in June 1992 – the so-called United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also known as the ‘Earth Summit‘.
The long-haul precursor to his was the 1968 Rockefeller founded Club of Rome’s book “Limits to Growth” (LTG) of 1972. The concepts and principles of this book, LTG, are the blueprint for what is currently – and probably at least for the coming ten to fifty years – being implemented.
LTG is the basis for the Great Reset, the 4th Industrial Revolution — and the UN Agenda 2030, also called WHO’s Decade of Vaccination. Following are the main life-curtailing threats we are facing today – listed not necessarily in order of priority. Remember, they are all inter-linked and inter-acting.
Population reduction, a massive genocide, through fake covid “vaxxes” – that are carefully engineered as gene-modifying mRNA killer-injections.
The US / EU / NATO provoked war between Russia and Ukraine; a US – Russia proxy-war, pumped up to the tune of about 155 billion dollars-worth of western weaponry and “budget-support” money in less than a year – more than Ukraine’s entire GDP for 2020 ($151 billion). Some US$112 billion from the US, the rest from Europe and other western countries.
Manipulated energy shortages, a proven combined manipulation of “sanctions” on Russia, and the worst western government sponsored terror sabotage act in recent history, the torpedoed Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany. Russian hydrocarbons, mostly gas, provided at least 40% of all of Europe’s energy uses.
Compromised banker’s engineered hyper-inflation, leading more rapidly to poverty; crisis after crisis caused demolition of the western economy, bankruptcies, unemployment, poverty, unaffordable food and / or housing, disease and death – genocidal death.
Worldwide network of 5G microwaves – and would you believe, and soon to come all-controlling, potentially deadly Sixth Generation – 6G, whose target date is coverage of the entire planet by 2030.
Digitization of money – may result in turn-on, turn-off money, expiring money, blocked or canceled money for misbehavior, potentially resulting in lack of sustenance for non-behaviors, no food, no energy, no housing – disease – death
Universal Basic Income – (UBI) – can be controlled and is slated to become “You own nothing but are happy” – Klaus Schwab’s glorious ending of the Great Reset, and finally
A WHO / pharma controlled worldwide tyrannical “health system” (sic), through a so-called Pandemic Treatywhich – if approved by the World Health Assembly – would overreach every UN / WHO member country’s Constitution, putting the Director General of WHO in charge of health (and death) issues worldwide, in each country. It might amount to compulsory vaccination, enforced by the military, for whatever WHO decides is or might be a worldwide threat to health. Even the common flu.
If approved in 2023, the Pandemic Treaty would become effective at the beginning of 2024.
This would be an absolutely lawless rule against the will of ALL PEOPLE OF THE WORLD.
If the Pandemic Treaty is approved – and even if it is not approved – this is a call on all nations to EXIT WHO,which has become a biased pharma-led eugenist-funded terror organization.
The world is faced with a multi-disaster scenario caused by ultra-rich neo-Nazi multi-billionaire elitists and the international data / IT and finance system that controls some 25 to 30 trillion-dollar equivalent of the world’s assets, maybe more – and can leverage every country of this planet to do their bidding.
These are the dark Cult Masters, acting from the shadows of supra-governments, like the US and the European Union, mainly via their well-funded executive, or implementing, instruments – WEF, WHO, NATO.
Indeed, in unison, all 193 UN member countries (194 WHO members) – their corrupted leaders and media blasted the same fear-imposing message – lockdown, obligatory people-demeaning face masks, social distancing, working from home – so you would lose personal contact with your friends and colleagues.
Today, all these above-mentioned Limits to Growth measures are wrapped in a constant and permanent fear campaign, to demoralize and subjugate people into submission. A fear campaign carried out by mainstream media, all owned by 13 media conglomerates who own 90% of the media worldwide.
These corrupt media moguls are paid billions of dollars to comply with the power-money psychopaths’ request, to spread the world with lies – with deadly lies. They are party to the mass-murderers, as they know what they are doing. Their management must face the laws of justice.
Just as a parenthesis, looking at what these US Treasury generated dollars really are: They are worthless, unbacked money – dollars that are simple debt for the US Treasury; debt that is never paid back.
Therefore, money dished out to corrupt organization is worthless for the “spender”- the creator of the money, the US of A, but they buy the world for the recipients.
We are living in the midst of a Cabal-directed Death Cult.
The majority of the people haven’t noticed yet.
But the awakening has begun.
Remember the Tibetan Proverb of the silently growing forest. And as trees connect with each other, so do humans by their spirituality – not transhumans, but humans what we still are.
And let us never an abject power-hungry non-elected criminal like Klaus Schwab, with his roots in the Third Reich, and his by nobody desired NGO, the World Economic Forum – WEF – dominate humanity.
May the forest grow to a critical mass – that can by its sheer solidarity, togetherness of thought and will power overcome the pathological objectives of the psychopaths wish for power and money dominance.
Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020) Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also is a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.
I have been working within the liberty movement for almost 17 years now. In that time I’ve been involved in numerous organizations that all generally fought the same battle, or the same war – The war against encroaching centralization and authoritarianism. Each group and each institution has had different ideas about how to go about solving the problem of incremental tyranny.
Some of them focused on politics, others on preparedness, and still others on convincing police and military to stand on the side of freedom. Some of them had focused goals, some of them were scattered. Some had decent leadership, while the leadership in others was lacking (or self sabotaging). None of them, however, had malicious intent. None of them sought power over others, only to prevent power from being abused.
In some cases the effort became confrontational because that was the only option, as with Bundy Ranch. Liberty activists vowed never to allow another Waco or another Ruby Ridge in which federal agents violate the due process of targeted citizens, or outright murder them. And we should continue to hold to that promise. As we have seen time and time again, agencies like the FBI, ATF, CIA, etc are corrupt beyond all reckoning and there comes a point where the only solution to deal with a bully is to punch him in the teeth.
The Jan 6th event is also something that has been highly misrepresented on both sides – Leftists argue that it was an “insurrection” worse than anything seen since the Civil War in the name of installing Trump as a dictator. Many conservatives argue that it was a “honey pot” or “false flag” which was completely controlled by feds and informants. Neither claim is accurate.
Yes, there were obviously feds present at the event and yes, Capitol Police let protesters into the building as video evidence proves. But, the vast majority of people that showed up to the capitol that day were not feds. They were normal Americans seeking to air their grievances, as is their constitutional right. It is a mistake to pigeonhole very single major event as nothing more than a false flag; it’s lazy and it ignores the greater reality that many millions of people in the US are unhappy with the declining state of our nation.
As for those that claim it was an insurrection, they don’t know what an insurrection is.
Inconveniencing the government for a couple hours is not an insurrection. Protesting at the Capitol Building is not an insurrection. A real insurrection would be led by armed groups that would not leave the capitol voluntarily, and many people on both sides would die during such an action. As it stands, not a single person was killed by a Jan. 6th protester. Not one. This is not something that can be honestly said for the BLM protests which caused dozens of deaths and billions of dollars in property damage across the country.
If it had been BLM that day marching into the Capitol Building, the media would have nothing but applause and positive things to say. But because it was a show of conservative strength, they call it an insurrection and they seek to imprison the people involved. The media response to BLM vs their response to Jan 6th tells us one thing – The establishment wants to destroy conservatives and elevate leftist movements.
This debate, however, ignores the bigger question: Why is half the country angry? Why does half the country mistrust the government to the point that a potential civil war seems like the only viable option?
The establishment controlled media and the Biden Administration would argue that it is our fault. We are “conspiracy theorists” suffering from delusions of rising totalitarianism. We supposedly misinterpret everything we see as something more nefarious than what it is. We are dangerous because we are willing to lash out over changes that serve the greater good but disadvantage us in some way. Or, we are “white supremacists” and the evolving demographics of the country are triggering our inherent toxic ideology.
None of these claims are true. All of them are easily debunked propaganda, but they represent a narrative that is repeated ad nauseam on every mainstream outlet, on every social media website and by every leftist politician. There is no conspiracy theory, there is only conspiracy reality.
Almost every single “conspiracy claim” made by liberty groups over the past two decades has turned out to be true. There is indeed an authoritarian agenda at the core of our government today, and it has been gestating for many years. We saw this agenda enacted right out in the open during the pandemic lockdowns. the federal government and some state governments sought to erase nearly every protection outlined in the Bill of Rights, including free speech.
Most recently, we have seen the exposure of the Twitter Files by Elon Musk, which contain hard evidence of collusion (direct communications) between government agencies and Big Tech companies to silence the 1st Amendment rights of American citizens.
Multiple agencies have been exposed this year in a conspiracy with the old Twitter management (and undoubtedly all other large social media platforms) to censor and ban targeted individuals or groups that discuss information that is contrary to the establishment narrative. Whether it is info on Jan 6th, or info on the covid pandemic or vaccines, or info on Hunter Biden’s laptop, the FBI, DHS, the DNC, etc were all engaging in a joint effort to erase dissent and hide the facts according to internal documents and communications with Twitter staff.
The FBI in particular has even been caught PAYING Twitter staff millions of dollars to process their requests (censor people). This is proven TREASON, a violation of several elements of the Bill of Rights, and the FBI should be eliminated for it. Not reprimanded, but eliminated.
The FBI’s response to being caught was predictable. They state:
“The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public. It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”
Translation: We are your “protectors”, therefore we can do whatever we want. Anyone that calls us out on our corrupt operations is crazy and a liar regardless of evidence. Discrediting the agency puts the public at risk. We are too big to fail.
The corporate media will come up with numerous spin devices to try to dilute the Twitter revelations, but they will fail. There is no way around it – The US government has been working with Big Tech companies to control free debate and silence citizens. The FBI has chosen a clear political side. They have gone to war against Americans that support constitutional liberty. This is illegal and if punishment is not dealt to the officials involved then eventually punishment will be enacted by members of the American public.
Conservative/libertarian rebellions usually do not happen without good reason. Conservatives prefer order rather than chaos. We prefer stability rather than crisis. We tend to want the system to work and serve the public as it is supposed to. It’s our strength as well as our weakness. Where others see a broken country, we see something that might be fixed.
We have no use for deconstructionists who see crisis and disaster as an opportunity.
That said, when it becomes clear that the system does not work, that it has been corrupted beyond redemption and that the establishment is openly instituting tyrannical policies, we aren’t going to stand by, we are going to act.
Some people claim this is “never” going to happen. Yet, tens of thousands of people showed up to face off with the feds at Bundy Ranch, half the states in the US stood against the covid mandates and thousands of people marched to the Capitol on Jan 6th. It’s only a matter of time.
I don’t think people realize how close we actually came to a kinetic civil war because of the covid mandates and the attempted vaccine passports. We were two seconds away from midnight. All I can say is, the moment someone tries to force me to take an untested Big Pharma product, I’ll put them six feet under. And, almost everyone I know feels the same way.
The big secret that’s not really secret is this: The establishment knows they are playing with fire. It’s why they backed off from the mandates. They know that their corrupt actions are fomenting civil unrest and that in some cases we have majority public support. They know that in the near future there is going to be a rebellion against them. They know this because they plan to continue chipping away at our freedoms until we snap; they just want to be able to control the outcome when we do.
The narratives we are hearing today about white supremacy, domestic terrorism, conspiracy theory and conservative rage are only about one thing: Gaslighting.
They poke and prod and stab at us, they attack us and degrade our freedoms subversively, and at the same time they paint us as the “insurrections”, the aggressors. They do this so that when we move to stop them from attacking us, the notion that we are the aggressors is already planted within the public consciousness.
This is 4th Generation warfare. It’s classic psy-ops. If you are the psychopath causing harm the best case scenario is to make your victims out to be the bad guys instead, so that when you get caught or your victims strike back you can claim to be a victim yourself.
Is this scheme going to work for establishment elites? No, not in the long term. No amount of gaslighting is going to save a psychopath when his victims come to pay him back. What the rest of the public thinks of you does not matter, only justice matters. That said, I want to reiterate the greater point here, which is that the actions of government agencies and the media suggest that the liberty movement is a legitimate threat to them.
We are far more prevalent than they care to admit. They want to paint us as fringe crazies and marginal bigots, while at the same time promoting the notion that we are capable of a national insurrection. They can’t have it both ways.
We are indeed a danger to them. Not to America, just to the despots that want to deconstruct it. What they don’t want the populace to know is that there is a very easy way to stop us – Simply stop committing treason and we will go away. Stop trying to erase our freedoms and we will back off quietly. Stop abusing governmental powers and you have nothing to fear from us.
Continue in these behaviors and policies, and yes, you should be afraid. Because once the reckoning begins, it will not stop until all elements of corruption are washed away.
There is a case to be made that the most important part of any propaganda campaign is the drive to ensure that certain voices, claims and arguments either never see the light of day or otherwise remain contained within “fringe” or “alternative” circles.
Since the start of the COVID event, authorities around the world have sought to implement quite extraordinary policies including the so-called “locking down” of entire populations, compulsory masking and coercion through, for example, the mandating of multiple ‘vaccine’ injections. Many of these policies fly in the face of long-established and well-evidenced public health approaches to dealing with respiratory viruses whilst the scientific cogency of these measures – including lockdowns, community masking and “vaccine” injections – is coming under increased scrutiny.
At the same time, the catastrophic consequences, the so-called “collateral damage” (a military euphemism for wartime civilian casualties), of these extreme policies for populations around the world is becoming well-established. Randomised controlled trials of the injections to date have not shown net overallbenefit, while accumulating evidence from passive reporting suggests they may be a cause of significant levels of harm. A central part of selling these extreme, and ultimately highly destructive, policies has involved the use of propaganda.
One of the problems with researching and writing about propaganda is that many people believe it to be alien to democratic states. However, as Edward Bernays, considered by many to be a key figure in the development of 20th century propaganda techniques, explained and promoted…
the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.
At least to an extent, this belief in propaganda rests upon an assumption or belief that people are ultimately selfish, egotistical, power-hungry and hedonistic beings who require guidance and incentive; it therefore follows that propaganda is required by powerful actors in order to provide a degree of structure, order and purpose to a given society. In contrast, if one assumes that humans are ultimately good and well-inclined towards each other and to the natural world, and that they are capable of great things if conditions permit, propaganda emerging from self-interested and powerful actors equates to a parasite within the human mind that seeks to lead humans away from their better instincts [1].
To this one might add the propensity of those with power to define themselves as the arbiters of truth and morality:
The moral attitudes of dominant and privileged groups are characterised by universal self-deception and hypocrisy. The unconscious and conscious identification of their special interests with general interests and universal values […]. […] the intelligence of privileged groups is usually applied to the task of inventing specious proofs for the theory that universal values spring from, and that general interests are served by, the special privileges which they hold.[2]
Whatever one’s position on the justifiability of propaganda, and although we usually call these techniques by different names today, employing euphemisms such as “public relations” or “strategic communication”, it is a fact that techniques of manipulation are part and parcel of contemporary liberal democracies.
PROMOTING THE NARRATIVE
In the case of the COVID-19 event, propaganda has been deployed across democracies on an unprecedented scale. In order to gain compliance with the unorthodox and intrusive measures adopted during the COVID-19 event many forms of “non-consensual persuasion” have been employed, ranging from manipulated messaging designed to increase “fear levels” through to coercion.
Indeed, very early on it came to light that behavioural scientists were providing advice to the UK government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE). UKColumn reported that this group, named the “Scientific Pandemic Influenza group on Behaviour (SPI-B)”, was (re)convened on 13 February 2020. One document produced by this group identified “options for increasing adherence to social distancing measures” which include persuasion, incentivization and coercion.
In the section on “persuasion” it states that the…
perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging
The document also referred to using…
media to increase sense of personal threat.
Many of these “behavioural science” approaches to manipulation used in the UK context have been documented in Laura Dodsworth’s influential work State of Fear whilst Dr Gary Sidley has written about the remarkable reluctance of anyone in authority to accept responsibility for the deliberate manipulation of the public. Dr Colin Alexander has, for some time, been tracking the propaganda output across the UK public sphere.
More widely, and as described by Iain Davis, these approaches have been paralleled at the global level. In February 2020, according to Davis, the World Health Organisation (WHO) had established the Technical Advisory Group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health (TAG);
The group is chaired by Prof. Cass Sunstein and its members include behavioural change experts from the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Professor Susan Michie, from the UK, is also a TAG participant*.
One aspect of the COVID-19 event propaganda has been the aggressive promotion of official narratives; but just as important has been the suppression and censorship of those questioning authorities. Indeed, there is a case to be made that the most important part of any propaganda campaign is the drive to ensure that certain voices, claims and arguments either never see the light of day or otherwise remain contained within “fringe” or “alternative” circles.
Part of this process of suppressing arguments and opinion involves superficially well-meaning attempts to manage what has been increasingly labelled as “misinformation” and “disinformation”. Elizabeth Woodworth documents the emergence of the so-called Trusted News Initiative (TNI) prior to the 2020 COVID-19 event and which involved a coalition of mainstream/legacy media establishing a network that would serve to combat “misinformation” and “bias”. She quotes the then BBC Director-General Tony Hall:
“Last month I convened, behind closed doors, a Trusted News Summit at the BBC, which brought together global tech platforms and publishers. The goal was to arrive at a practical set of actions we can take together, right now, to tackle the rise of misinformation and bias … I’m determined that we use [the BBC’s] unique reach and trusted voice to lead the way – to create a global alliance for integrity in news. We’re ready to do even more to help promote freedom and democracy worldwide”
By 2020, according to Woodworth, the TNI had incorporated “Twitter, Microsoft, Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Reuters, and the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism” and, predictably, adopted the role of tackling “harmful coronavirus disinformation”.
In the UK at least, there has also been military involvement with the 77th Brigade operating as part of the COVID-19 communication strategy. 77th Brigade activities include information warfare and “supporting counter-adversarial information activity” which includes…
creating and disseminating digital and wider media content in support of designated tasks.
Tobias Ellwood, who is both a Member of Parliament and Chair of the House of Commons Defence Select Committee, is, remarkably, a reservist with 77th Brigade. In an answer to a written question in parliament it was confirmed that “members of the Army’s 77th Brigade” are…
currently supporting the UK government’s Rapid Response Unit in the Cabinet Office and are working to counter dis-information about COVID-19.
The Rapid Response Unit itself was established in 2018 in order to, according to its head Fiona Bartosch, counter “misinformation” and “disinformation”, and “reclaim a fact-based public debate”.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has also followed a similar tack cautioning the public about “misinformation” and “disinformation”. In a release titled “Let’s flatten the infodemic curve”, they advise people to refer to “factcheckers” and legacy media:
When in doubt, consult trusted fact-checking organizations, such as the International Fact-Checking Network and global news outlets focused on debunking misinformation, including the Associated Press and Reuters
The WHO describes in detail its involvement with social media and “big tech”:
“WHO has been working closely with more than 50 digital companies and social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitch, Snapchat, Pinterest, Google, Viber, WhatsApp and YouTube, to ensure that science-based health messages from the organization or other official sources appear first when people search for information related to COVID-19. WHO has also partnered with the Government of the United Kingdom on a digital campaign to raise awareness of misinformation around COVID-19 and encourage individuals to report false or misleading content online. In addition, WHO is creating tools to amplify public health messages – including its WHO Health Alert chatbot, available on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Viber – to provide the latest news and information on how individuals can protect themselves and others from COVID-19.”
AN INSTITUTIONALISED CULTURE OF CENSORSHIP AND SUPPRESSION OF “WRONG THINK”
These developments, along with others to be documented in due course via work at PANDA, would appear to have had major consequences in terms of suppression of debate. A preliminary examination of events over the last 2.5 years indicates this suppression has operated in at least three different ways:
direct censorship through removal of content and deplatforming;
sponsoring of hostile coverage designed to smear and intimidate anyone raising critical questions regarding the COVID-19 narrative;
coercive approaches involving threats to livelihood and employment.
I shall deal with each in turn.
• Censorship and deplatforming
Formal approaches to censorship via state-backed action were seen early on in the UK context with the regulatory body OFCOM issuing guidelines to broadcasters.
Dodsworth (p.31) reports that broadcasters were instructed to be alert to:
health claims related to the virus which may be harmful; medical advice which may be harmful: accuracy or material misleadingness in programmes in relation to the virus or public policy regarding it”(Dodsworth p. 31).
One possible manifestation of this policy was the remarkable instruction issued to Oxford professor Sunetra Gupta. On October 14, 2020, she appeared on BBC News to talk about the lockdowns imposed in the north of England. It is claimed that just before she went on air, one of the producers told her not to mention the Great Barrington Declaration, a document signed by eminent scientists setting out an alternative policy that would avoid lockdowns and other unorthodox measures.
Across social media, from almost day one of the COVID-19 event, tech giants (“big tech”) were willingly signing up to a strategy of censorship.
In April 2020 it was reported that YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki had declared that it would act to remove anything going “against World Health Organization” recommendations. Notable removals from YouTube included interviews with Dr John Ioannidis of Stanford University and British physician Professor Karol Sikora whilst US Senator Rand Paul’s speech questioning the efficacy of facemasks in August 2021 was removed by YouTube. Dr Robert Malone, inventor of part of the MRnA technology used in the COVID-19 injections, and who has become a notable critic of official policies and narratives, was also removed from Twitter.
A large part of the policing of debate across social media platforms has involved issuance of warnings that a given post violates “community standards” in some way and some, such as LinkedIn, state that content at variance with authorities can lead to censoring. As Dr David Thunder has documented, the exact wording of Linkedin’s policy on “misinformation” states: “Do not share content that directly contradicts guidance from leading global health organizations and public health authorities.“
Thunder notes:
What does this actually mean, in practice? It means that some select persons, just because they got nominated to a “public health authority” or a “leading global health organization,” are protected by Linkedin from any robust criticism from the public or from other scientists.
Furthermore, censorship and suppression of academic debate has been reported with respect to academic journals whereby articles and research running against the so-called scientific consensus appear to have been unfairly removed or blocked. For example Dr Peter McCullough reports unjustified censorship of a peer reviewed and published article relating to COVID-19 whilst, more broadly, undue suppression of legitimate research findings was reported by Dr Tess Lawrie with respect to Ivermectin trials. All of these are worrying indications that academic processes themselves have become subject to nefarious censorship and control.
The censorship continues unabated and it might even be intensifying. Whilst detailed and systematic research should be conducted in order to identify the scale and range of the censorship that has been occurring, it is reasonably clear now that, relative to pre-2020, the levels are unprecedented and represent a normalization, or routinization, of censorship.
• Character Assassination through Smearing
Suppression of debate is achieved not only through formal censorship, but also through indirect tactics whereby attempts are made to destroy the reputation of those challenging power. Although perhaps not widely appreciated, the tactic of character assassination appears to have become more prevalent in recent years and it appears to be an important feature of contemporary propaganda and our ‘democratic’ landscape.
Broadly speaking, smear campaigns are designed to avoid substantive rational debate and instead denigrate the person making the argument – ‘playing the man rather than the ball’ or ‘shooting the messenger’. A feature of smear campaigns is the use of identity politics sensibilities such as concern (legitimate) over racism and the deployment of pejorative and tendentious labels. For example, those questioning COVID-19 policies have sometimes been described as far right or fascist whilst pejorative use of the term “conspiracy theorist” is frequently employed to describe those questioning official narratives.
Smear campaigns can be justifiably seen as underhand and disreputable approaches to challenging dissenting voices and they frequently pass off without observers or even the victims being fully aware that they are being targeted: those ordering or enabling the smears have good reason to avoid being uncovered whilst those executing the smears, i.e. the journalists, will defend their hit pieces as legitimate critique.
In the case of the COVID-19 event, however, at least one high level smear campaign has been identified.
At the time of the release of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) during autumn 2020, the authors were only aware of a barrage of hostile media attention such as the above noted instruction by the BBC to Professor Sunetra Gupta to not mention the Declaration during an interview. But at least some of the hostile coverage was not simply a spontaneous reaction by journalists but had been initiated by high-level officials. When the GBD was published, leaked emails showed Anthony Fauci and National Institute of Health director Francis Collins discussing the need to swiftly shut it down. Collins wrote in an email that this…
proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists … seems to be getting a lot of attention … There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises.
Other prominent instances, unproven but which bear the hallmarks of a directed smear campaign, include repeated attacks on the popular US podcaster Joe Rogan. In the European sphere, Professor Bhakdi, an early and prominent critic of COVID-19 policies has been repeatedly accused of anti-semitism and is now being prosecuted by the German authorities for inciting hatred (*see Endnotes for alt. link -Ed.). None of the accusations made in these attacks appear to be reasonable. Rogan, for example, was chastised for promoting the use of Ivermectin with many journalists referring to it, misleadingly, as “horse dewormer”. The vast bulk of Bhakdi’s work and output concerns the COVID-19 policies and, relatively speaking, his references to any issue related to Judaism is at most vanishingly small.
A subtle and arguably more widespread form of smearing involves the routine labelling of information by social media companies as harmful; for example the independent UK-based outlet OffGuardianhas its tweets subject to a blanket warning suggesting their output might be ‘unsafe’ and contain…
violent or misleading content that could lead to real-world harm.
Such labelling is, arguably, defamatory.
• Coercion
Suppression of inconvenient opinions works through both the realm of information – censoring a person’s voice or ad hominem attacks – but also through action in the real, “material”, world via coercion. This could be the creation of conditions that deter people from speaking their mind by offering material incentives or, alternatively, threatening to deplete someone’s material circumstances. Put simply, the threat of loss of earnings.
In the case of the COVID-19 event the role of coercion can be seen through the threats to employment experienced by those challenging the narrative.
For example, Professor Julie Ponesse was forced from her position at Western University in Canada because of her refusal to receive the COVID-19 injection following the issuing of “vaccine” mandate there whilst a similar fate was suffered by Dr Aaron Kheriarty (Professor at University of California Irvine, School of Medicine and director of the Medical Ethics Program). Other academics have cited lack of institutional support with respect to their academic freedom, such as Professor Martin Kuldorff.
The coercive nature of mandates is particularly pernicious in that their implementation in universities forces ‘dissident’ academics to either go against their beliefs and opinions and comply or otherwise leave their posts. The disciplining effect is, of course, much more widely felt across the academy: the few who lose their posts serve as a warning to everyone else to reconsider their beliefs and actions. In particular, younger academics and those completing their PhDs will come to understand that compliance with the dominant narrative is the only realistic option if they are to realise their goal of an academic career.
The tactics of censorship, smearing and coercion are synergistic and help construct an environment in which self censorship becomes ubiquitous: Deplatforming of dissident scientists sends a clear warning as to the subject matter and issues that are off limits whilst examples of smearing highlight the potential unpleasant consequences of discussing such issues.
Coercion acts as a final hardstop for anyone entertaining the possibility of risking talking about censored issues and riding out the smears that will result: loss of job and income is simply too much to bear. Overall, the role of authorities in enabling censorship and coercion results in, broadly speaking, an institutionalised culture in which suppression of opinions and debate becomes the norm.
THE DANGERS TO DEMOCRACY AND RATIONAL DEBATE: ONLINE HARM LEGISLATION AND DIS/MISINFORMATION ‘FACT CHECKERS’
Clearly this situation has deleterious consequences for rational debate and democracy. John Stuart Mill explained that silencing the expression of an opinion robs us all of the opportunity to either hear an argument that might turn out to be true, or refine or reject an opinion that is faulty. There are very good reasons for this, as Mill notes:
First: the opinion which it is attempted to suppress by authority may possibly be true. Those who desire to suppress it, of course deny its truth; but they are not infallible. … All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.
And:
if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
Scientific and scholarly research demands such openness to questioning and critique and, behind concepts such as tenure, is the core grounding for the academy that scholars need to be allowed to present what might appear to be controversial and even offensive (to some) opinions.
Of course, there are well argued and established limits to freedom of expression – incitement to violence for example – but we are not talking about the usual areas of debate and controversy that lie at the limits of permissible speech. Rather, we are talking about the right of people to raise questions and concerns about policies that directly affect them, such as lockdown, masking and ‘vaccinations’, and, moreover, the right of credentialed experts to raise such questions in the public sphere. That the censorship, smearing and coercion of such people has come to be tolerated is a clear indicator of how far our democracies have slipped into an authoritarian abyss.
And things are, potentially, about to become even worse with the pushing through of so-called ‘online harm bills’ including in the UK, Europe and Canada. In the UK, the proposed bill creates a category of legal but ‘harmful’ speech: as described by the pressure group Big Brother Watch:
Under the threat of penalties, the legislation will compel online intermediaries to censor swathes of online discussion including in matters of general discourse and public policy. Harmful content is defined entirely by the Secretary of State who is also granted a host of executive powers throughout the legislation.
We are concerned that the ‘legal but harmful’ category set out in the OSB is inadequately prescribed by law and risks disproportionately infringing on individuals’ right to freedom of expression and privacy. In particular, we are concerned about the wide definition of online harm as meaning “physical or psychological harm” (clause 187). This is an extremely low threshold, and encompasses innumerable kinds of harm, the extent of which in our view far exceeds the qualifications on Article 10 provided by the ECHR and HRA.
The real vice of the bill is that its provisions are not limited to material capable of being defined and identified. It creates a new category of speech which is legal but ‘harmful’. The range of material covered is almost infinite, the only limitation being that it must be liable to cause ‘harm’ to some people. Unfortunately, that is not much of a limitation. Harm is defined in the bill in circular language of stratospheric vagueness. It means any ‘physical or psychological harm’. As if that were not general enough, ‘harm’ also extends to anything that may increase the likelihood of someone acting in a way that is harmful to themselves, either because they have encountered it on the internet or because someone has told them about it.”
It is likely that such legislative developments will operate in tandem with so-called “fact checking” entities and algorithms that work to define and then exclude what is defined as “misinformation”, “disinformation”, and now “malinformation”.
The latter two are being defined now as, respectively, false information spread in order to mislead or cause harm and accurate information which is used out of context in order to harm or mislead. These terms are so nebulous that they will enable authorities to proscribe virtually any serious debate or criticism in the public sphere.
Here we see the continuing development and entrenchment of the mis/disinformation fact checking industry noted earlier. During the COVID-19 event the United Nations itself started working with the public relations entity Purpose to “combat the growing scourge of COVID-19 misinformation” which is described as a “virus spread by people”.
[t]hrough Verified, we are leveraging the UN brand, as well as popular brands that connect audiences online and offline: from Cartoon Network in Brazil to Flipkart in India.
UNESCO, similarly, is promoting education about so-called “conspiracy theories”. Remarkably, and in apparent contradiction to rhetoric regarding inclusiveness and community-driven decisionmaking, the WHO actually asks people to report on people spreading “misinformation”: As such, an un-elected international organization is actively advocating for the suppression of free speech in democratic societies.
Entities tasked with deciding what is true and what is false, as opposed to allowing ideas and arguments to be openly debated as Mill would suggest, are already creating the link between dis/misinformation and harm. For example, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a state-sponsored think tank, attacked the disparate groups questioning the COVID-19 response with a publication titled “Between Conspiracy and Extremism: A Long COVID Threat?” The institute tweeted:
Today we launch a new series of reports on the global anti-lockdown movement, beginning with this paper examining how COVID restrictions have brought together a broad church of activists in a conspiracy-extremist movement we call a ‘hybrid threat’
On the issue of coercive measures, the recent passing of a bill in California, that will enable doctors who spread ‘false information’ to be charged with ‘unprofessional conduct’ and have their licenses revoked, is a worrying sign of just how aggressive authorities are becoming.
The trajectory here is clear to discern and it entails the move to a world where the truth is defined by factcheckers and authorities, and legislation provides the underlying coercive framework to ensure any deviance is punished. This is entirely at odds with basic principles of open debate, objective scholarship and freedom of expression and is not compatible with democracy.
THE END OF DEMOCRACY?
There is nothing new about censorship, smearing and coercion in western democracies. For some time now, those questioning, for example, western foreign policy have been subjectedto such tactics whilst the broader 9/11 global war on terror spawned wide ranging examples of censorship, smearing and coercion in order to shore up official narratives and the belligerent wars that have been fought under its banner.
Indeed, in the realm of foreign policy and war, the prevalence of propaganda and associated drives to marginalise dissent are well known to researchers in these fields. And, today, in 2022, we are witnessing a preeminent example of coercion as we see the Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, facing the prospect of deportation to the US and the rest of his life in prison. His crime was to reveal accurate information about the 9/11 wars, especially those in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is little reason to doubt that authorities in the West are seeking to make a powerful example of Assange; a warning to the rest of us as to the price of questioning our governments when they commit illegal wars of aggression.
What is new with the COVID-19 event is a combination of the spread of these strategies of suppression and a sharp uptick in awareness amongst increasingly large swathes of the population as to the existence of propaganda in democracies. The spread can be seen in how it is now a large number of medical scientists who have been at the receiving end of drives to suppress debate, whereas before it was often just a handful of relatively unknown dissident social scientists researching foreign policy issues.
Regarding public awareness, attempting to censor high profile researchers from the medical sciences alerts more of the public as to what is going on.
And, of course, as we rapidly see the dissident scientists now being vindicated by the facts – lockdowns don’t work, the “vaccinations” can harm etc – more people become aware of the basic truth that the official COVID-19 response has been underpinned by ferocious propaganda campaigns designed to silence any experts speaking truth to power.
It is also apparently the case that trust in mainstream, or legacy, media continues a sharp decline whilst, presumably, increasing numbers of people seek out the new independent media platforms and go to organisations such as PANDA and HART for reliable information on COVID-19 related issues and more widely. [3]
And yet the broader trajectory for our public spheres looks ominous.
Further legislative measures to redefine free speech, networks of sponsored factcheckers defining what is and what is not, resources poured into censoring, smearing and coercing dissident voices all parallel what some analysts argue is a wider drive to restructure Western societies.
Ending any semblance of democracy may indeed be the goal, starting with the ending of freedom of expression. There are likely to be dark days ahead and it has never been so important for there to be a robust and uncompromising defence of freedom of expression.
Endnotes:
Thanks to Colin Alexander for comments on the justifiability of propaganda and to David Bell, Maryam Ebadi, Gary Sidley and David Thunder for other comments and feedback.
Niebuhr, R., (1932), Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics. New York: Charles Scriber’s Sons.
Among the more notorious advocates of authoritarian lockdown measures during the COVID‑19 pandemic has been Dr. Leana Wen, a medical doctor, former Baltimore health commissioner, contributing writer for the Washington Post, and CNN medical analyst.
She gained notoriety for explicitly advocating social punishment of unvaccinated people as a means of coercing them into getting vaccinated, even if they chose to remain unvaccinated because they had already acquired superior natural immunity. She based her position at the time on the false claim that the fCOVID‑19 vaccines would stop transmission of SARS‑CoV‑2, the coronavirus that causes the disease.
I discussed this in my article “The Official Ignorance of Natural Immunity to SARS‑CoV‑2”, which was the second installment of my multi-part series exposing how the “public health” and mainstream media establishments were systematically deceiving the public about natural immunity versus the effectiveness of vaccines to manufacture consent for the policy goal of achieving high vaccine uptake.
In that article, I documented how on March 12, 2021, Leana Wen declared on CNN that, for people who hadn’t been persuaded yet to accept vaccination, “we need to make it clear to them that the vaccine is the ticket back to pre-pandemic life.”
Dr. Wen expressed deep concern that, with states already having begun to drop lockdown measures and open society up, “the window to do that”—meaning to coerce people into getting vaccinated—“is really narrowing”. As she elucidated (emphasis added):
We have a very narrow window to tie reopening policy to vaccination status. Because otherwise if everything is reopened, then what’s the carrot going to be? How are we going to incentivize people to actually get the vaccine? So that’s why I think the CDC and the Biden administration needs to come out a lot bolder and say, “If you are vaccinated, you can do all these things. Here are all the freedoms that you have.” Because otherwise, people are going to go out and enjoy these freedoms anyway.
You can watch her advocate the systematic violation of individuals’ right to informed consent in the video embedded in this tweet of hers:
I’m very concerned that we won’t reach herd immunity in the US because of vaccine complacency—not anti-vax people but those who need to be incentivized & see what’s in it for them. We need to clearly message vaccination = ticket to pre-pandemic life. pic.twitter.com/9tXw9C3bP0
The premise of her argument that people should be coerced into getting vaccinated was the falsehood that the vaccines would prevent transmission. This misinformation was also propagated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
As I also document in that article, the message that the vaccines would prevent transmission was implicitly communicated to the public with the CDC’s declaration on March 8, 2021, that fully vaccinated people no longer needed to wear a mask or maintain social distancing in public or in private gatherings.
The message that natural immunity offered no protection against infection and transmission was also implicitly communicated by the CDC’s refusal to inform people who had already recovered from SARS‑CoV‑2 infection that they had acquired immunity and therefore were at far lower risk of becoming infected and transmitting the virus.
A New York Times headline celebrated the discrimination against unvaccinated people, including the naturally immune, with the headline “Let the Unmasked Gatherings Begin”! The article quoted CDC Director Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky telling the public that “a growing body of evidence” told us that fully vaccinated people could resume normal activities “at low risk to themselves”, saying nothing about people who’d already recovered from infection being able to do so.
Dr. Wen’s comment on March 12 advocating coerced vaccination was part of a criticism of the CDC’s policy update telling fully vaccinated people they no longer had to wear masks. Her concern was that unvaccinated people—including the naturally immune—would just act like they were vaccinated to be able to participate normally in society.
The CDC expanded its discrimination against other unvaccinated people on May 13, telling the public that once you’ve been fully vaccinated, “you can resume activities that you did prior to the pandemic.” The message to unvaccinated people with natural immunity, by contrast, was to “find a vaccine.”
In a Twitter post announcing the updated policy guidance, Walensky stated, “If you are fully vaccinated against #COVID19, you can now start doing things that you had stopped doing because of the pandemic. You can participate in indoor and outdoor activities – large or small – without wearing a mask or physically distancing.”
If you are fully vaccinated against #COVID19, you can now start doing things that you had stopped doing because of the pandemic. You can participate in indoor and outdoor activities – large or small – without wearing a mask or physically distancing. https://t.co/P6hzrFTbxwpic.twitter.com/AncZ6Wt5ci
— Mandy K. Cohen, MD, MPH (@CDCDirector) May 13, 2021
President Joseph R. Biden also took to Twitter to threaten, “The rule is now simple: get vaccinated or wear a mask until you do. The choice is yours.” That order went for naturally immune people, too.
The rule is now simple: get vaccinated or wear a mask until you do.
Neither the CDC nor Biden were extreme enough in their efforts to systematically violate the right of individuals to informed consent with policy measures to coerce people into getting vaccinated, in Dr. Wen’s view.
The extremity of Leana Wen’s authoritarian position extended to her views on the masking of children.
On Twitter on May 28, 2021, Wen advocated mandatory masking of unvaccinated children—including those with natural immunity—at summer camp.
BREAKING: New CDC guidance on summer camp guidance is out. 1) Most importantly, masking outdoors isn't required any more. 2) If everyone is vaccinated, no need for masks. 2) Masking indoors is "strongly encouraged"–which I think should be "required" if some are unvaccinated. https://t.co/MTZFax6GxR
The same day, she criticized the governor of Georgia for prohibiting schools from making mask use mandatory for children.
Georgia is PROHIBITING schools from requiring masks, even when unvaccinated remain at risk (and kids under 12 cannot yet be vaccinated). https://t.co/vKaza5gtth
On June 14, she made a display of her son Eli “practicing his mask-wearing” at home in anticipation of his first day of summer camp. (Note in the photo that the mask is not properly fitted, leaving large gaps at the side.)
Today is the first day of summer camp! Eli is practicing his mask-wearing (outdoors, masks aren't needed, but masks should still be required indoors for unvaccinated people around others not yet vaccinated.) pic.twitter.com/ujJSlzf8qT
On July 9, she praised the CDC for recommending mandatory masking of unvaccinated children. “I am really glad that they have said that masks are going to be required for unvaccinated children over the age of two”, she said, describing mandatory masking as “essential”.
My reaction to the CDC’s new guidelines on reopening schools: Glad they are requiring masks indoors for unvaccinated students & teachers and ramping up testing. However, this is another case where proof of vaccination is needed. Without it, mask mandates should stay in place. pic.twitter.com/xhoEEdur0D
But then, within four months since telling fully vaccinated people that they no longer needed to wear a mask, the CDC’s own data established that outbreaks could occur among fully vaccinated people. By the end of July 2021, it was already apparent that the emerging data were falsifying the repeatedly communicated message from the entire “public health” establishment that the vaccines would provide durable protection against infection and transmission.
That month, CDC researchers learned of a large outbreak in Massachusetts in which 74 percent of COVID‑19 cases were in fully vaccinated people. Furthermore, they observed that the amount of virus shed by vaccinated people was just as high as with the unvaccinated, implying equal contagiousness.
This finding prompted to CDC at the end of July to flip-flop and return to advising fully vaccinated people to start masking up once again.
Leana Wen took to the media to criticize the CDC again, this time for conveying what she felt was a confusing message by reversing its guidance. In a Washington Post article on July 29, Wen acknowledged the CDC’s “research showing that vaccinated people who become infected with the delta variant carry a similar amount of virus to those who are unvaccinated and infected”, which “suggests that vaccinated people could be carriers and therefore capable of spreading the coronavirus to family members”.
Her concern nevertheless remained “that the unvaccinated could be a danger” to her and her family. By her dizzying reasoning, it was only because of “unvaccinated” people that she, a fully vaccinated person, “could contract the coronavirus and bring it back to my vulnerable family members.”
On Twitter, she summarized her criticism by describing the CDC’s reversal as “confusing” and “muddled”, curiously arguing despite her acknowledgment of the data showing that fully vaccinated people were spreading the virus that indoor mask mandates were needed “not because the vaccinated are suddenly a problem, but because we don’t trust the unvaccinated to voluntarily do the right thing.”
She did not explain how it could logically be the case that only unvaccinated people posed that risk to her given that vaccination did not work to stop transmission.
While acknowledgment of cellular immunity, as distinct from the humoral immunity provided by antibodies, had been practically nonexistent in the public messaging of the “public health” establishment until then, suddenly, in August 2021, the CDC and other “authorities” appeared to discover that, even if someone’s antibody levels waned and failed to protect them against infection, they would still be protected against severe disease and death due to cellular immune responses!
Curiously, that never crossed their mind when the public message was that natural immunity must be weak and short-lived since antibodies were observed to rapidly wane from peak levels seen post-infection.
It also never crossed their minds to inform the public that this rapid decline is normal and expected after recovery from acute infection. As I cover in great detail in my series on the superiority of natural immunity, the claims of short-lived natural immunity, propagated by the CDC and others, were falsified by studies demonstrating natural immunity to be robust, broad, and durable, with the induction of immunological memory capable of rapidly churning out antibodies as necessary in the event of reexposure.
The public messaging shifted from telling everyone to get vaccinated as a selfless social duty to protect others by preventing the spread of the virus to telling everyone get vaccinated to protect themselves against severe disease.
On CNN on August, 2021, Walensky reassured that the data continued to indicate that being fully vaccinated was protective against severe illness and death from the then-predominant Delta variant of SARS‑CoV‑2. “But what they can’t do anymore”, Walensky said, “is prevent transmission.”
That was disingenuous. By saying “anymore”, she was implying that the loss of sterilizing immunity, meaning protection against infection and transmission (as distinct from protection against disease), was a function of the newly predominant Delta variant, but it was primarily a function of the vaccine and their inability to induce durable sterilizing immunity regardless of the variant.
Meanwhile, on major social media platforms, it remained prohibited to tell the truth. For example, Google continued its policy whereby YouTube videos saying that “that COVID-19 vaccines are not effective in preventing the spread of COVID-19” were subject to deletion and the users to deplatforming. (YouTube quietly dropped this and other prohibitions of truth-telling earlier this year.)
Leana Wen continued her advocacy of masking of children.
On August 10, she quoted a New York Times article saying, “If we send children to school without masks, we increased their risk of acquiring #covid19. Some could suffer illness or die. If we close schools, millions of children will suffer learning loss….” Her comment was, “Hence the solution: Keep schools open, with masking.”
"If we send children to school without masks, we increase their risk of acquiring #covid19. Some could suffer illness or die. If we close schools, millions of children will suffer learning loss…."
Six days later, she argued in favor of masking children in “all schools in this country”. On August 16, she argued on Twitter that “Masking in schools reduces #covid19 transmission” and suggested that parents whose children go to schools that “do not require masking” should organize to make mask-wearing “the norm”.
Masking in schools reduces #covid19 transmission. If schools do not require masking, parents should still mask kids—at least with a 3-ply surgical mask. Talk to other parents in the class to see if mask-wearing can be the norm. Insist on contact tracing & testing. @kaitlancollinspic.twitter.com/WI2fhBzeUU
On August 21, expressing agreement with a comment by former CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden, she said that it was “Exactly right” to equate being “anti-mask”—a euphemism inclusive of anyone opposed to mandatory masking of children—with being “anti-science” and “basically pro-virus and anti-child.”
"The politicians who are taking the side of anti-mask, anti-vaccine, anti-science are basically pro-virus and anti-child." @DrTomFrieden to @Acosta@CNN.
Fast forward to March 2020. By this time, Leana Wen had surrendered to the reality that the vaccines do not prevent transmission and that people needed to start getting back to living their lives normally anyway. On March 22, she said on Twitter, “For those who don’t agree that the vaccinated can return to pre-pandemic normal, I ask: What should we all do? Perpetual masking? Forever not dining out, avoiding large weddings & indoor gatherings, etc? Virtually everything has risk, and zero covid is not a viable strategy.”
For those who don’t agree that the vaccinated can return to pre-pandemic normal, I ask: What should we all do? Perpetual masking? Forever not dining out, avoiding large weddings & indoor gatherings, etc? Virtually everything has risk, and zero covid is not a viable strategy.
Now, recall that the CDC had been recommending that people wear cloth or surgical facemasks to protect themselves and others. The CDC had specifically told people not to wear an N95 mask in order to preserve them for health care workers. The CDC only stopped recommending the use of cloth masks in favor of surgical or N95 masks in January 2022.
Leana Wen bluntly alluded to the rationale for this change in a tweet on March 23, stating that “simple cloth masks are little more than facial decorations” and “have no place against extremely contagious variants”. People should “ideally” opt for an N95, instead, she suggested.
Yeah, you wear masks indoors until we're in the clear. It's… get this… a cheap piece of cloth, and it does a great job of keeping us safe.
This was not because “the science” on masks had “changed”. It was what many people were saying from the start. It was what many people on social media were banned for saying, just as many were banned for pointing out that the claims by “public health” officials that the vaccines would provide durable protection and stop transmission were unsupported by scientific evidence. To oppose the CDC’s recommendation for children in school to wear a cloth mask was “anti-science”, “pro-virus”, and “anti-child”, Wen had previously suggested.
Now she was admitting that simple cloth masks do practically nothing to protect the wearer or stop the wearer from spreading the virus to others. Her evolving position on mask use didn’t stop there. She also came around to acknowledging another truth that opponents of the policies she advocated were banned from saying on social media: that forcing children to wear masks can harm them.
On August 23, the Washington Post published an article by Wen under the headline: “I’m a doctor. Here’s why my kids won’t wear masks this school year.”
She stated, “It became clear that the goal I’d hoped for—containment of covid‑19—was not reachable. This coronavirus is here to stay.” Her “benefit-risk calculus” for her own children had changed. “I was willing to limit my children’s activities for a year or two but not for their entire childhood.”
That it was a mistake to singularly focus on avoiding COVID‑19 is precisely what many people censored on social media had been saying when speaking out in opposition to the policies that Leana Wen had previously advocated. It was the central message of The Great Barrington Declaration, whose scientifically credentialed authors experienced censorship for speaking out against the authoritarian lockdowns.
Wen listed a number of ostensible rationalizations for her change of view on the masking of her own children. It was the Omicron variant now, which was more contagious and caused milder illness. Most people, including most children, had already been infected with the coronavirus. Her children were now fully vaccinated.
She continued:
Now that they are full vaccinated, we do not plan to limit their activities, and—like most parents in their school—will not be masking them in the classroom.
I accept the risk that my kids will probably contract covid‑19 this school year, just as they could contract the flu, respiratory syncytial virus and other contagious diseases.
Then she disclosed another reason why she would no longer be forcing her own kids to wear a mask:
Masking has harmed our son’s language development, and limiting both kids’ extracurriculars and social interactions would negatively affect their childhood and hinder my and my husband’s ability to work.
While she had previously dismissed anyone who opposed the policies she advocated as not just “anti-mask” but “anti-science” and “anti-child”, she added: “To be clear, my family’s decision not to mask our kids should not be mislabeled as being antimask; we would never stigmatize other parents and caregivers for the difficult choices they must make.”
That, of course, was a bald-faced lie. She had in fact stigmatized other parents for the difficult choices they must make about what is in the best interests of their children’s health, calling them insulting names and advocating policies specifically to penalize them for making choices that were different from hers.
She closed by saying that her changed approach “reflects the evolution of the pandemic and the acknowledgment that avoiding covid-19 cannot be the singular metric of people’s overall health and well-being.”
That it was a mistake to singularly focus on avoiding COVID‑19 is precisely what many people censored on social media had been saying when speaking out in opposition to the policies that Leana Wen had previously advocated.
Yet here now we have this prominent advocate of mandatory masking of children in schools disclosing that her own child had been harmed from having to wear a mask all the time.
Both of my kids are starting school next week.
Now that they are fully vaccinated, we do not plan to limit their activities.
And — like most parents in their school — we will not be masking them in the classroom.
She disclosed additional details on Twitter. “In my case,” she shared on August 24, “I have the ‘before’ and ‘after’. After my son’s school went mask optional, there was a profound change in speech and social development after he (& nearly all of his class, including his teacher) took off masks.”
(Note that she observed this in reply to a comment criticizing that personal anecdotes do not establish causation, with the specific example cited of the belief of many parents that vaccination is what caused their child’s autism. Wen’s appropriate point about gaslighting equally applies to parents of autistic children who likewise saw the “before” and “after”.)
She added, “Yes, this is anecdote. But it feels like gaslighting when others are telling parents that we don’t know what’s causing problems for our kids, when we have seen it for ourselves. Recognizing that masks COULD have harm for SOME is all that a lot of parents are asking for.”
Thank you for sharing your story. In my case, I have the “before” and “after”. After my son’s school went mask optional, there was a profound change in speech and social development after he (& nearly all of his class, including his teacher) took off masks.
(Following up on the point about autism, note that then CDC Director Julie Gerberding admitted on CNN in 2008 that vaccination can cause encephalopathy manifesting as symptoms of autism. She was referring to the case of a girl named Hannah Poling, who had been developing normally but regressed into diagnosed autism after receiving nine vaccine doses at once at nineteen months of age. The long-time director of the CDC’s Immunization Safety Office, Dr. Frank DeStefano, acknowledged in an interview in 2018 that “it’s a possibility” that vaccines could cause autism in genetically susceptible individuals, but that the problem is it’s “hard to predict who those children might be”, and research designed to identify underlying cofactors that place certain children at greater risk of vaccine injury is “very difficult to do”.)
The same day, former US Surgeon General Jerome Adams took to Twitter to deny that masks can harm children. “I’m saying, after 2 years and millions masked, show me the data that says it delays speech. Because I can’t find it.”
So to be clear, 1) your response to my concern that black people are woefully under vaccinated, which undermines YOUR own argument that we needn’t concern ourselves with adults getting sick because they have access to vaccines, is that that is merely a distraction?!
Of course, it is easy to say that evidence does not exist that forcing masks on children causes harm when policymakers forced masks on children in the absence of studies to determine the benefits versus risks.
In response to Adams, Wen retorted, “Those data don’t exist yet. Neither do data that school mask mandates (especially w/cloth masks), in a time of omicron, saves lives. That’s why where the US has landed—allowing individual choice—is sensible. Allow parents to decide what’s best for their kids, masks on or not.”
And 2) Once again you’re using a well worn arguing tactic here- “but the toddlers!” Most kids aren’t toddlers, and I’m certainly not arguing for masking them. I’m saying, after 2 years and millions masked, show me the data that says it delays speech. Because I can’t find it.
Of course, that forcing children to wear masks could harm some of them was precisely what many people she had previously dismissed as “anti-child” were saying from the start. It is among the concerns that social media companies prohibited people from expressing, citing the policy recommendations that Leana Wen advocated as the basis for their censorship.
To cite YouTube again as an example, the Google-owned video platform had long prohibited “Claims that wearing a mask is dangerous or causes negative physical health effects.” This is among the prohibitions that YouTube has since dropped from its community guidelines.
It is an encouraging sign that an extremist like Dr. Wen can come around to the view that risk-benefit assessments need to be individualized and mask use voluntary, and it is good to see her confronting Jerome Adams for trying to gaslight parents into disbelieving their own experiences and empirical evidence. It is just sad that her son, by her own account, became harmed by the very intervention she had so fervently argued should be forced upon school children.
An apology from Wen to other parents of children harmed by the policies she advocated has not, to my knowledge, been forthcoming. Her son has my sympathies.
After the Crash 