Mass Vaccination Triggers a Sharp Spike in Cases and Deaths

ORIGINAL LINK

Chart from Freedom Israel Twitter: https://twitter.com/FreedomIsrael_

Covid cases have risen sharply in nearly every country that has launched a mass vaccination campaign.(Please watch this short video before You Tube removes it)

Why is this happening?

Mass vaccination was supposed to reduce the threat of Covid but– in the short-term– it appears to make it much worse. Why? And why is Covid now “surging in 4 of 5 the most vaccinated countries”? According to Forbes magazine:

“Countries with the world’s highest vaccination rates—including four of the top five most vaccinated—are fighting to contain coronavirus outbreaks that are, on a per-capita basis, higher than the surge devastating India, a trend that has experts questioning the efficacy of some vaccines … and the wisdom of easing restrictions even with most of the population vaccinated.” (Covid Surges…Here’s why the US should Worry”, Forbes)

Worse than India? How can that be? And why have 8 “fully vaccinated” members of the New York Yankees tested positive for Covid? Here’s the story from the Associated Press:

“New York Yankees shortstop Gleyber Torres tested positive for Covid-19 despite being fully vaccinated and having previously contracted the coronavirus during the offseason. Torres is among eight so-called breakthrough positives among the Yankees — people who tested positive despite being fully vaccinated.” (NBC News)

And if that’s not confusing enough, check out what’s going on in Cambodia. Cambodia began its vaccination campaign in early February after having compiled zero fatalities. That’s right, the country had no Covid deaths until March, a few weeks after it started its vaccination program. And that’s when the deaths started piling up as you can see in the eye-popping chart below.

chart from Joel Smalley Twitter

So, let’s see if we can figure this out. There were zero fatalities before the launching of the vaccination campaign, but soon after the injections began, the fatalities started to mount. Do you think there might be a connection here? Do you think that, perhaps, the deaths are linked to the vaccines?

Of course, they are. And, that’s why the media is trying to sweep this story under the rug. It doesn’t fit with the “official narrative” about the vaccines, so they’ve decided to “vanish” the story altogether. “Poof” and it’s gone! And, actually, it’s worse than a cover-up because– shortly after Biden took office– the CDC changed its testing methodology making it harder to test positive. In other words, they rigged the system so it would look like fewer “fully vaccinated” people had contracted Covid after inoculation. Dr. Joseph Mercola explains what’s going on behind the scenes:

“Now, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has lowered the CT even further, in what appears to be a clear effort to hide COVID-19 breakthrough cases, meaning cases in which fully vaccinated individuals are being diagnosed with COVID-19.” (“CDC embarks on a new Covid Coverup”, Mercola. com)

It’s all a big shell game. They’re gaming the system to make it look like the vaccines are stopping infection when the evidence proves the opposite. And notice the deliberately-misleading moniker the media invented for the people who get Covid after being vaccinated. They call them “Breakthrough cases”.

“Breakthrough”? Really?

If cases surge in nearly every country that launches a mass vaccination campaign, then there’s nothing “breakthrough” about it. It’s the predictable result of a failed experiment. Here’s more from an article titled: “Covid rates post-vaccination around the world:

“… the government assumed that if ‘you vaccinate lots of people and the problem goes away’, but the questioners among us did not assume that. Especially having read the FDA Briefing Document for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine for example, many of us had questions after reading it; on Page 42, it states:

“Suspected COVID-19 cases that occurred within 7 days after any vaccination were 409 in the vaccination group vs 287 in the placebo group. It is possible that the imbalance in suspected COVID-19 cases occurring in the 7 days post-vaccination represents vaccine reactogenicity with symptoms that overlap with those of COVID-19. Overall though, these data do not raise a concern that protocol-specified reporting of suspected, but unconfirmed COVID-19 cases could have masked clinically significant adverse events that would not have otherwise been detected.” (“Covid rates post-vaccination around the world”, Inform Scotland)

WTF!?!

So, the FDA KNEW that vaccinated people were more likely to contract Covid than those in the placebo group, but they approved the vaccines anyway?!? Is that criminal negligence or just plain old stupidity?

Please. read the above paragraph again and decide whether you would have given these sketchy injections the “green light” or not? Here’s more from the same article:

“The following show data from around the world from some selected locations. It is, of course, vital to stress that correlation is not causation. And that there are countries where vaccine rollout does not precede or coincide with increased infections. However, I have been unable to find any nation where covid rates have begun to drop after vaccination started, or where a drop coincided with vaccination starting. In Indonesia, for example, the covid rate was falling when vaccination started and seems to have been unaffected in its trajectory by the vaccine being rolled out. The reader can look up these charts for him/herself on the website. Have a look at these and see what you make of them.” (“Covid rates post-vaccination around the world”, Inform Scotland)

Okay, so the author is trying to put the most charitable spin on vaccine performance as possible. He says, “correlation is not causation”, which means, ‘Don’t trust your eyes when you look at the charts’ because– if you do– you’ll draw the obvious conclusion that the vaccines greatly increase your chances of getting Covid in the few weeks afterwards.’ The charts will also convince you that Fauci, Biden and the media have been lying through their teeth about the effectiveness of the vaccines. (Please, check out the charts in the article and judge for yourself.) Here’s more:

“What is very clear looking at data worldwide, is that vaccinations are certainly not associated with a reliable fall in covid cases in any predictable timeframe. This, alongside the observations in the trial, surely must be addressed. What is happening here? Is it just that vaccinations are coincidentally being rolled out at the same time as outbreaks are due? In very many places? Or is the vaccine not working immediately? If not, why not? … Or is the vaccine making people more susceptible to infection? If this is the case … is this a temporary effect? What causes it? … How long does it take for any increased susceptibility to diminish?”…We are told that everyone must be vaccinated (but) How can free informed consent be given under these conditions?” (“Covid-rates Post Vaccination around the World”, Inform Scotland)

These are all good questions, unfortunately, Dr. Fauci and Co. don’t plan to answer any of them. Instead, their allies in the media are doing everything they can to disappear the story and deflect attention to the elusive ‘variants’, which is the diversion du jour. Am I being too harsh?

Maybe, but maybe not harsh enough. Take a look at this clip from a piece at Conservative Woman titled “Every reason to doubt the vaccine makers’ reassurances”:

“I have reported previously on an astonishing spike in deaths that occurred alongside an intensive vaccination campaign in Gibraltar, where the small community consequently developed the highest Covid death rate in the world. We also know that thousands of deaths have been seen in the US, EU and UK in the wake of Covid vaccinations, often immediately after the jab has been administered.

The manufacturers, leading medical journals and most governments insist these deaths are unrelated to the vaccine. In many instances, the deaths and serious illness have been attributed to coincidental infection with the virus. But evidence is mounting that for some, especially the weak and elderly, the vaccine itself is creating or worsening the very illness against which it is supposed to be protective….

“…a worrying phenomenon which appears consistently in Covid vaccine studies is a spike in purported ‘infections’ which occurs precisely during that three-week period, and usually immediately following the jab...The researchers raise the possibility that the jab may trigger ‘symptoms likened to Covid-19 symptoms including fever’ in those recently exposed to the virus... He suggests the mechanism may be a depression in immunity caused by a loss of white blood cells post-jab, observed in both the Pfizer and AstraZeneca trials, making the vaccinees more vulnerable to the virus in the short term.” (“Every reason to doubt the vaccine makers’ reassurances“, Conservative Woman)

So, it could be, that something in the vaccine itself is killing people. That is one distinct possibility. Sure, the drug companies and public health officials dismiss the idea with a wave of the hand, but medical professionals and scientists think the danger is significant enough to demand that the mass-vaccination program be temporarily terminated.

Some readers will recall that the Salk Institute recently released a study which showed that SARS-CoV-2’s “distinctive ‘spike’ protein”.. “damages cells, confirming COVID-19 as a primarily vascular disease.” Here’s an excerpt from the article dated April 30, 2021:

“In the new study, the researchers created a “pseudovirus” that was surrounded by SARS-CoV-2 classic crown of spike proteins, but did not contain any actual virus. Exposure to this pseudovirus resulted in damage to the lungs and arteries of an animal model—proving that the spike protein alone was enough to cause disease. Tissue samples showed inflammation in endothelial cells lining the pulmonary artery walls. (Note– “Vascular endothelial cells line the entire circulatory system, from the heart to the smallest capillaries.”)

The team then replicated this process in the lab, exposing healthy endothelial cells (which line arteries) to the spike protein. They showed that the spike protein damaged the cells by binding ACE2. This binding disrupted ACE2’s molecular signaling to mitochondria (organelles that generate energy for cells), causing the mitochondria to become damaged and fragmented.

Previous studies have shown a similar effect when cells were exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, but this is the first study to show that the damage occurs when cells are exposed to the spike protein on its own.” (“The novel coronavirus’ spike protein plays additional key role in illness”, Salk.edu)

The significance of this report cannot be overstated. The Salk researchers are confirming that the main damage from Covid is caused by the spike protein not the virus. And, if that’s the case, then why are we injecting people with vaccines that teach their cells to make spike proteins?

It makes no sense at all.

And how does this effect our understanding of the phenomenon that we’ve seen in countries around the world, that is, the sharp rise in cases following mass vaccination?

Allow me to offer a plausible, but as-yet unproven explanation:

The sharp rise in cases and deaths following mass vaccination is NOT related to Covid “the respiratory illness”, but Covid “the vascular disease”. The vascular component is mainly the result of spike proteins produced by cells in the lining of the blood vessels (Endothilium) that are activating platelets that cause blood clots and bleeding. The other main factor is autoimmune reaction in which the killer lymphocytes attack one’s own body triggering widespread inflammation (and potential organ failure.). In short, the post-injection fatalities are caused by the spike proteins produced by the vaccines and not by Covid. Once again, look at the chart of Cambodia. There were no deaths prior to vaccination. All the deaths came afterwards. That suggests that the fatalities are attributable to the vaccines.

One final thought: 118 million Americans have now been injected with a clot-generating spike protein. At present, no one seems to know of how long these potentially-lethal proteins remain trapped in the lining of the blood vessels or what damage they might eventually do. Keeping that in mind, wouldn’t this be a good time to exercise a bit of caution? Now that cases have dropped sharply across the country, why not ease up on the vaccinations until we have a better grasp of the long-term risks? That would be the sensible approach, right? Just postpone further injections until product safety can be assured.

If there was ever a time for caution, this is it.

Reprinted with permission from The Unz Review.

The post Mass Vaccination Triggers a Sharp Spike in Cases and Deaths appeared first on LewRockwell.

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Why Did the Twits Censor an Eminent Infectious Disease Expert for His Opinion on Covid ‘Vaccines’?

ORIGINAL LINK

Martin Kulldorff, one of the world’s preeminent and most cited infectious disease epidemiologists from Harvard University’s School of Medicine has experienced what many others in the field have experienced during this pandemic, censorship and ridicule. Kulldorff has been quite critical of the response to COVID by multiple governments, including the measures put in place to combat the spread of the virus. Sometimes it seems as if scientists and doctors who question these measures are actually in the majority, while the minority seem to get all of the attention and praise within the mainstream media. Who knows what these numbers actually look like.

Lockdown measures are a great example. A wealth of data has been published in peer-reviewed science and medical journals suggesting that not only have lockdowns been inadequate for stopping the spread of the virus, but they’ve also caused a great deal of damage in both the health and economic sector. Two renowned Swedish scientists, Professor Anna-Mia Ekström and Professor Stefan Swartling Peterson, have gone through the data from UNICEF and UNAIDS  and come to the conclusion that least as many people have died as a result of the restrictions to fight COVID as have died of COVID.

Internationally, the lockdowns have placed 130 million people on the brink of starvation. The lockdowns in developed countries have devastated the poor in poor countries. The World Economic Forum estimates that the lockdowns will cause an additional 150 million people to fall into extreme poverty, 125 times as many people as have died from COVID at the time of the estimate. These are a few of many examples.

“Lockdowns are the single worst public health mistake in the last 100 yrs. We will be counting the catastrophic health & psychological harms, imposed on nearly every poor person on the face of the earth, for a generation” —Dr Jay Bhattacharya, Stanford Professor of Medicine.

That being said, an argument can, and has also been been made for lockdowns halting or slowing the spread of the virus, and there are examples of that as well. You can read about that more here.

The point is that one side of the argument is censored, ridiculed, and ignored most of the time, while the other gets front and centre stage. Why?

In Canada, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario put out a note stating that physicians who are publicly contradicting public health orders and recommendations, and there are many of them, will be subjected to an investigation, especially if they are communicating “anti-vaccine, anti-masking and anti-lockdown statements.”

How is science and data that calls into question government public health recommendations “anti” anything? Why are these labels always used? Why are physicians and scientists being bullied into silence and subjected to extreme amounts of censorship on their social media platforms? Kulldorff has been one many victims of this treatment, while scientists who agree with and promote the “accepted narrative” seem to receive interview requests from mainstream media outlets all the time. This isn’t normal, and it’s served as a catalyst for more people to ask, what’s really going on here?

What Happened: Kulldorff’s tweet in March suggesting that not everyone needed to be vaccinated, particularly those who have previously been infected, was labelled ‘misleading’ by Twitter. Tweeters were rendered unable to interact with his tweet and were instructed that ‘health officials recommend a vaccine for most people’. Twitter did not provide any explanation, links, or reasoning as to why his tweet was “misleading.”

Kulldorff’s opinion is something that many experts in the field have suggested. For example, Dr. Sunetra Gupta, considered by many to be the world’s preeminent infectious disease expert explained that the way COVID vaccines are being promoted and the idea that everybody needs to be vaccinated is unscientific and suspicious.

Why? For one, there is a wealth of data showing that previous infection to COVID can provide protection, and possibly even greater and longer lasting protection than any vaccine can or ever will. Dr. Suneel Dhand, an internal medicine doctor with a hefty following on YouTube explains:

I’m not aware of any vaccine out there which will ever give you more immunity than if you’re naturally recovered from the illness itself…If you’ve naturally recovered from it, my understanding as a doctor level scientist is that those antibodies will always be better than a vaccine, and if you know any differently, please let me know. (source)

This statement was also recently echoed by Viral immunologist, Professor at the University of Guelph, and vaccine expert Dr. Bryan Bridle, who said in a recent interview that he would prefer natural immunity as opposed to the COVID vaccine and explains why.

An analysis of millions of coronavirus test results in Denmark found that people who had prior infection, were still protected 6 months after the initial infection.

Another study also found that individuals who recovered from the coronavirus developed “robust” levels of B cells and T cells (necessary for fighting off the virus) and “these cells may persist in the body for a very, very long time.”

Dr. Daniela Weiskopf, Dr. Alessandro Sette, and Dr. Shane Crotty from the La Jolla Institute for Immunology analyzed immune cells and antibodies from almost 200 people who had been exposed to SARS-CoV-2 and recovered.  The researchers found durable immune responses in the majority of people studied. Antibodies against the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, which the virus uses to get inside cells, were found in 98% of participants one month after symptom onset. As seen in previous studies, the number of antibodies ranged widely between individuals. But, promisingly, their levels remained fairly stable over time, declining only modestly at 6 to 8 months after infection.

Virus-specific B cells increased over time. People had more memory B cells six months after symptom onset than at one month afterwards. Although the number of these cells appeared to reach a plateau after a few months, levels didn’t decline over the period studied.

Levels of T cells for the virus also remained high after infection. Six months after symptom onset, 92% of participants had CD4+ T cells that recognized the virus. These cells help coordinate the immune response. About half the participants had CD8+ T cells, which kill cells that are infected by the virus.

A recent study published in Clinical Microbiology and Infection explains:

Presence of cross-reactive SARSCoV2 specific Tcells in never exposed patients suggests cellular immunity induced by other coronaviruses. Tcell responses against SARSC0V2 also detected in recovered Covid patients with no detectable antibodies…Cellular immunity is of paramount importance in containing SARSCoV2 infection…and could be maintained independently of antibody responses. Previously infected people develop much stronger Tcell responses against spike protein peptides in comparison to infection-native people after mRNA vaccine.

The next question becomes, how many people have been infected? According to a meta-analysis by Dr John Ioannidis [Professor of Medicine at Stanford University] of every seroprevalence study conducted to date of publication with a supporting scientific paper (74 estimates from 61 studies and 51 different localities around the world), the median infection survival rate from COVID-19 infection is 99.77 per cent. For COVID-19 patients under 70, the meta-analysis finds an infection survival rate of 99.95 per cent.

The CDC’s [Centres for Disease Control] and Prevention] best estimate of infection fatality rate for people ages 70 plus years is 5.4 per cent, meaning seniors have a 94.6 percent survivability rate. For children and people in their 20s/30s, it poses less risk of mortality than the flu. For people in their 60s and above, it is much more dangerous than the flu.

These estimates haven’t really changed, and they are based off of the scientific consensus that more people are infected than what we have the capacity to test for. Imagine testing the entire population, how many people would have an infection? Imagine testing for antibodies, how many people would have antibodies? Some infectious viruses, like the Human metapneumovirus (hMPV) which was first identified in 2001 in Dutch children with bronchiolitis are quite infectious, just like COVID. The hMPV virus is an RNA and has been shown to have worldwide circulation with nearly universal infection by age 5. These types of viruses, including common coronaviruses, are responsible for the death of millions of children worldwide every single year.

The survival rate numbers above are largely based off the idea that many more people than what we can test for are infected. If you look at the actual data and compare the number of deaths to the number of cases, you won’t get a survival rate of 99.95 percent. In an interview with Greek Reporter, Dr.Ioannidis estimated that about 150-300 million or more people have already been infected by COVID-19 around the world, far more than the 10 million documented cases, and this was in June of 2020, so just think about how many people have been infected today. 162,891,712 have been infected up to now, that number is most likely well over a billion based on the above reasoning.

Furthermore we must ask: how effective is the vaccine? We know how effective natural immunity is, that’s well documented as illustrated above.

Prior to the rollout of these vaccines, the vaccine manufacturers claimed to have observed a 95 percent success rate. Dr. Peter Doshi, an associate editor at the British Medical Journal, published a paper titled “Pfizer and Moderna’s “95% effective” vaccines—let’s be cautious and first see the full data.” Even today, there is still not enough data to tell how effective the vaccine is.

A paper recently published by Dr. Ronald B. Brown, School of Public Health and Health Systems, University of Waterloo, outlines how Pfizer and Moderna did not report absolute risk reduction numbers, and only reported relative risk reduction numbers.

Unreported absolute risk reduction measures of 0.7% and 1.1% for the Pfzier/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, respectively, are very much lower than the reported relative risk reduction measures. Reporting absolute risk reduction measures is essential to prevent outcome reporting bias in evaluation of COVID-19 vaccine efficacy.

Brown’s paper also cites Doshi’s paper which makes the same point,

“As was also noted in the BMJ Opinion, Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna reported the relative risk reduction of their vaccines, but the manufacturers did not report a corresponding absolute risk reduction, which appears to be less than 1%.”

Absolute risk reduction (ARR) – also called risk difference (RD) – is the most useful way of presenting research results to help your decision-making, so why wouldn’t it be reported? (source)

Omitting absolute risk reduction findings in public health and clinical reports of vaccine efficacy is an example of outcome reporting bias. which ignores unfavorable outcomes and misleads the public’s impression and scientific understanding of a treatment efficacy and benefits…Such examples of outcome reporting bias mislead and distort the public’s interpretation of COVID-19 mRNA vaccine efficacy and violate the ethical and legal obligations of informed consent.” – Brown

Fully vaccinated individuals are still testing positive for COVID.

How safe is the vaccine? Reports and examples of injuries and deaths seem to be quite prevalent on social media. For example, take a look at the post below. It’s from a woman named Heidi Neckelmann. The post is from her Facebook Page, it went quite viral and her Facebook Page was eventually deleted.

This story is true, it was actually receiving so much attention that mainstream media picked up on it. She was the wife of Dr. Gregory Michael from California, and she claimed that in her mind, her 56-year-old husband’s death was “100% linked” to the vaccine.  Now, at least one doctor has come forward publicly to say he also believes the vaccine caused Michael to develop acute idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP), the disorder that killed him. According to the New York Times:

“Dr. Jerry L. Spivak, an expert on blood disorders at Johns Hopkins University, who was not involved in Dr. Michael’s care, said that based on Ms. Neckelmann’s description, ‘I think it is a medical certainty that the vaccine was related.’“

This is one of what may be hundreds of examples that have been shared across social media, which would still make it an extremely rare event given the amount of people who have been vaccinated in the United States.

According to the most recent data from the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System, approximately 4000 people have died and more than 100,000 adverse reactions have been reported as a result of the vaccine. That being said, there is no way to determine or to verify wether any of these were actually a result of the vaccine, and therein lies the problem. Vaccine injury reporting systems are quite inadequate.

VAERS has come under fire multiple times, a critic familiar with VAERS’  bluntly condemned VAERS in The BMJ as “nothing more than window dressing, and a part of U.S. authorities’ systematic effort to reassure/deceive us about vaccine safety.”

So, we don’t really have a truly accurate number, when it comes to vaccine injuries in general, let alone the COVID vaccine.

An HHS pilot study conducted by the Federal Agency for Health Care Research estimates that only 1 percent of vaccine injuries are actually captured by VAERS, but who knows? The point is we don’t have an accurate and reliable reporting system.

Why This Is Important: Information like this is important because the rights and freedoms of people who do not wish to take the COVID vaccine may be subjected to unfair treatment compared to those who are vaccinated. Unvaccinated individuals may be unable to travel internationally, and if they do, they may be required to quarantine. They may also be banned from certain public buildings, restaurants, sporting events and more. We have yet to see how this will all roll out. In the U.S., the CDC is allowing vaccinated individuals to take off their masks both inside and outside, while vaccinated ones are instructed to continue wearing them. That said, this doesn’t apply to public indoor spaces yet.

Is all of this justified given the information shared above? We are talking about people who are not even sick.

The scientific evidence now strongly suggests that COVID-19 infected individuals who are asymptomatic are more than an order of magnitude less likely to spread the disease compared to symptomatic COVID-19 patients. A meta-analysis of 54 studies from around the world found that within households – where none of the safeguards that restaurants are required to apply are typically applied – symptomatic patients passed on the disease to household members in 18 percent of instances, while asymptomatic patients passed on the disease to household members in 0.7 per cent of instances. A separate, smaller meta-analysis similarly found that asymptomatic patients are much less likely to infect others than symptomatic patients.

Furthermore, outside spread among asymptomatic individuals is virtually 0 percent.

Why do we give governments the power to implement measures that, to a large portion of the population, simply don’t make sense. How can we truly say that we live in a democracy when the will of the people, and science, is ignored and censored? Are vaccine passports and requirements to access other “amenities” we were used to prior to the pandemic truly justified? Why are governments pushing to vaccinate everybody so hard, using methods of coercion like passports and other incentives, when this type of push doesn’t match up with the science?

The answer to this question warrants reflection, but I will offer a hypothesis. In 2021, there is clearly a small, but vocal minority of individuals opposed to nearly all vaccinations… In response, there is a group of individuals on the other extreme. To them, either one must embrace all vaccines for all indications for all ages, or one can be lumped with the other extreme. They favor universal child vaccination of SARS-CoV-2 via an EUA, even before they have the data for that claim. They were quick to embrace vaccination for pregnant woman prior to appropriate trials establishing safety. Suppressing critical thinking to extol vaccines is also wrong and may backfire, but I believe this explains why it occurs. It is, to some degree, a counter-movement against the anti-vaxxers, which can go too far….A small faction of people vigorously opposed to all vaccination have done damage … As a reaction, many confuse [vaccine] cheerleading with science. A true scientist does not take reflexive extremes. Sadly, there are few scientists left.” – Vinay Prasad, MD, MPH

Prasad is an associate professor at the University of California San Francisco, and has also been quite vocal about Facebook “fact-checkers”, calling it scam and that what they are doing is nothing short of scientific censorship.

There is data showing the vaccines are indeed working. Even scientists who support COVID vaccinations and their efficacy, like Kulldorff, have been speaking up against taking away rights and freedoms of those who are not vaccinated. For example, 22 renowned scientists published an article titled “The vaccine worked, we can safely lift lockdown.”

In the article, they explain,

It is time to recognize that, in our substantially vaccinated population, Covid-19 will take its place among the 30 or so respiratory viral diseases with which humans have historically co-existed. This has been explicitly accepted in a number of recent statements by the Chief Medical Officer. For most vaccinated and other low-risk people, Covid-19 is now a mild endemic infection, likely to recur in seasonal waves which renew immunity without significantly stressing the NHS.

Covid-19 no longer requires exceptional measures of control in everyday life, especially where there have been no evaluations and little credible evidence of benefit. Measures to reduce or discourage social interaction are extremely damaging to the mental health of citizens; to the education of children and young people; to people with disabilities; to new entrants to the workforce; and to the spontaneous personal connections from which innovation and enterprise emerge. The DfE recommendations on face covering and social distancing in schools should never have been extended beyond Easter and should cease no later than 17 May. Mandatory face coverings, physical distancing and mass community testing should cease no later than 21 June along with other controls and impositions. All consideration of immunity documentation should cease.

Kulldorff and Bhattacharya recently published a piece in the Wall Street Journal condemning the idea of vaccine passports, a measure that seems to be gaining traction in multiple countries.

The Takeaway: At the end of the day, what can we really do to combat governments that continue to implement measures that seem to benefit the few, the rich and the powerful, while leaving everybody else to suffer? When so many people disagree, is peaceful protesting and voicing our concerns enough? I would argue that this is something we need to continue to do, because at some point you can only push a large group of people who disagree with governments so far, especially if you continue to spark this feeling in the majority of people.

Governments cannot implement measures without justifying them in the eyes of a large group of people. Vaccines, and vaccine passports are justified in the eyes of the majority, which makes it easy for these measures to be implemented and justified. My question is, were people properly educated, or were they manipulated and coerced to support vaccine passports?

We’ve seen what propaganda can do it the past, are we any different today? Does equality really exist in a day and age where so many people are having their voice censored, and their rights, freedoms and privacy taken taken away?

Reprinted with permission from Collective Evolution.

The post Why Did the Twits Censor an Eminent Infectious Disease Expert for His Opinion on Covid ‘Vaccines’? appeared first on LewRockwell.

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Dr. Mercola's Attackers Sued for Role in 'Crime of the Century'

ORIGINAL LINK

In previous articles, I’ve discussed the central role false advertising played in the creation of the opioid crisis.¹

To recap, a single paragraph in a 1980 letter to the editor^2,3 (not a study) in The New England Journal of Medicine — which stated that narcotic addiction in patients with no history of addiction was very rare — became the basis of a drug marketing campaign that has since led to the death of hundreds of thousands of people, or four times the number of Americans killed in Vietnam.

Between September 2019 and September 2020 alone, opioid overdoses killed a staggering 87,000 Americans — a new record-high.⁴

Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, used this letter to the editor as the basis for its claim that opioid addiction affects fewer than 1% of patients treated with the drugs. In reality, opioids have a very high rate of addiction, have not been proven effective for long-term use⁵ and, in fact, fail to control moderate to severe pain any better than over-the-counter pain relievers.⁶

Various court cases have demonstrated how Purdue systematically misled doctors about OxyContin’s addictiveness to drive up sales, resulting in an avalanche of opioid addiction and subsequent deaths.⁷

Unethical to the core, Purdue also cashed in on the addiction trend it manufactured by secretly founding Rhodes Pharma to manufacture generic opioids,⁸ and getting into the business of creating overdose treatments.^9,10

Facing an estimated 2,600 lawsuits^11,12 relating to its role in the opioid epidemic, Purdue filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in September 2019,¹³ as a way to avoid litigation losses. Just over a year later they pleaded guilty to three federal criminal charges, including violating a federal anti-kickback law, conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government and violating the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act.^14,15

The company agreed to pay $8.3 billion in fines, forfeiture of past profits and civil liability payments to settle the charges,¹⁶ but short on cash — having transferred more than $10 billion of the company’s funds into family trusts and offshore accounts¹⁷ — the company was dissolved and its remaining assets used to erect a “public benefit company” owned and controlled by the U.S. government.¹⁸ Future earnings will supposedly be used to combat the opioid crisis.

Purdue’s PR Company Sued for Deceptive Marketing

While Purdue’s owners, the Sackler family, got off scot-free, states struggling with the exorbitant cost of opioid addiction aren’t ready to bury the hatchet just yet. Instead, some are going after the PR firm Purdue hired to run their deceptive marketing campaigns.

As it turns out, that PR firm is none other than Publicis, a partner of the World Economic Forum, which is leading the call for a Great Reset. As detailed in “The Web of Players Trying to Silence Truth,” Publicis appears to be coordinating the global effort to suppress information that runs counter to the technocratic narrative about COVID-19, its origin, prevention and treatment — suppression and censorship that has been repeatedly aimed at this website specifically.

At the beginning of May 2021, the Massachusetts attorney general filed a lawsuit¹⁹ against Publicis Health, accusing the Publicis subsidiary of helping Purdue create the deceptive marketing materials used to mislead doctors into prescribing OxyContin.^20,21,22,23 As reported by Yahoo! News:²⁴

“The lawsuit alleges that Publicis ‘engaged in myriad unfair and deceptive strategies that influenced OxyContin prescribing across the nation,’ a statement by Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey's office said. Those strategies were carried out through dozens of contracts between 2010 and 2019, worth more than $50 million …

Tactics included combatting doctors' ‘hesitancy’ to prescribe the medication, and persuading them to prescribe OxyContin over lower-dose, short-acting opioids, thus increasing the risk of addiction. Massachusetts is asking that Publicis Health pay ‘compensatory damages’ of an unspecified amount for having ‘created a public nuisance.’"

Publicis Knowingly Promoted Over-Prescription

Publicis Health argues that its work for Purdue was entirely lawful and limited to “implementing Purdue’s advertising plan and buying media space.” Publicis also claims the specific activities listed in the lawsuit fall outside the statute of limitations.

Some of those activities included placing illegal advertisements for OxyContin in the electronic medical records of patients, creating training materials for Purdue sales reps on how to combat doctor’s objections to the drugs, developing strategies to counter opioid guidelines issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and creating “patient stories” to “humanize” the OxyContin brand and counter negative press about addiction risks.^25,26

According to the lawsuit, one patient vignette featured a 40-year-old man who had his dose increased from 10 milligrams a day to 20 mg in just three weeks. It also claims Publicis was responsible for creating and sending thousands of deceptive emails to doctors, encouraging them to not only increase patients’ dosages but also to prescribe the drug to patients who were already on less dangerous pain meds.²⁷

By design, Publicis’s schemes worked to counter public health measures intended to reduce unnecessary opioid use, because more opioid use generated more profits for Publicis’s opioid clients.

Publicis also instructed Purdue to target doctors who were already writing out dangerously high numbers of prescriptions, even in the midst of a raging opioid epidemic,²⁸ all while agency executives gleefully discussed the record fees they’d collect from the Purdue account. A March 2016 email exchange reveals the Publicis subsidiary was expecting to make up to $12.28 million from Purdue that year alone.

Publicis Also Represented Addiction Center

According to the complaint:²⁹

“Publicis helped create a public nuisance of opioid use disorder, overdose, and death. By design, Publicis’s schemes worked to counter public health measures intended to reduce unnecessary opioid use, because more opioid use generated more profits for Publicis’s opioid clients.”

Like Purdue, Publicis also cashed in on the opioid addiction it helped create by pitching its services to organizations working to end addiction. As reported by Forbes,³⁰ the agency “won the account to work on drugfree.org after touting how it’s been ‘immersed in the evolving national opioid medication dialogue going on between pharma companies, the government and FDA, and the public via inside access as a trusted and informed consulting partner.’”

In an interview cited by Courthouse News, Amanda Pustilnik, a senior fellow on law and applied neuroscience at Harvard Law School who also teaches at the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior at Massachusetts General Hospital, noted that:³¹

“The story of the opioid epidemic is often misrepresented as a story of irresponsible patients and over-prescribing doctors. This prosecution gets at the heart of the matter.

Patients and doctors were not, on average, irresponsible. They acted under the influence of a concerted plan of misinformation and over-promotion orchestrated up and down the supply chain for these medications.”

Publicis Admits Role in Censorship Push

As mentioned earlier, Publicis appears to be playing an important role in the global censorship of information relating to COVID-19, and Publicis Health admitted its involvement in this agenda as recently as April 27, 2021. In a tweet,³² the agency announced its partnership with NewsGuard, “to fight the ‘infodemic’ of misinformation about COVID-19 and its vaccines.”

In short, Publicis Health is dedicated to suppressing any information that hurts its Big Pharma clients, which include Lilly, Abbot, Roche, Amgen, Genentech, Celgene, Gilead, Biogen, AstraZeneca, Sanofi, GlaxoSmithKline and Bayer, just to name a few.

Publicis is more than a partner with NewsGuard, however. NewsGuard actually received a large chunk of its startup capital from Publicis, as detailed in “New Thought Police NewsGuard Is Owned by Big Pharma.” NewsGuard, a self-proclaimed arbiter of truth, rates websites on criteria of “credibility” and “transparency,” ostensibly to guide viewers to the most reliable sources of news and information.

In reality, however, NewsGuard ends up acting as a gate keeper with a mission to barricade unpopular truth and differences of opinion behind closed gates. Its clearly biased ranking system easily dissuades people from perusing information from low-rated sites, mine included.

Extensive Propaganda Network Works Against the Public

As detailed in “The Web of Players Trying to Silence Truth” (hyperlinked above), Publicis is part of an enormous network that includes international drug companies, fact checkers and credibility raters like NewsGuard, Google and other search engines, Microsoft, antivirus software companies like Trend Micro, public libraries, schools, the banking industry, the U.S. State Department and Department of Defense, the World Health Organization and the World Economic Forum.

Mind you, this is not a comprehensive review of links. It’s merely a sampling of entities to give you an idea of the breadth of connections, which when taken together explain how certain views — such as information about COVID-19 and vaccines — can be so effectively erased.

To understand the power that PR companies such as Publicis wield, you also need to realize that PR has, by and large, replaced the free press. In decades past, pro-industry advertising stood in stark contrast to the free press, which would frequently expose problems with products and industries, thereby serving as a counterbalance to industry propaganda.

When a free press with honest reporting based on verifiable facts actually does its job, ineffective or toxic products are driven off the market. All of this changed in the late 20th century, when media outlets started relying on advertisers for the bulk of their revenues.

As intended, journalists quickly came under the control of advertisers, who suddenly had the power to kill stories they didn’t like. Today, news organizations simply won’t run reports that might harm the bottom line of its advertisers and, not surprisingly, the drug industry is among the top-paying advertisers.

By further partnering with the “big guns” of media — such as the Paley Center for Media, which is composed of every major media in the world³³ — Publicis and its industry clients have been able to influence and control the press to virtually eliminate your ability to get the truth on many important issues, including COVID-19.

Seeing how Publicis represents most of the major pharmaceutical companies in the world and funded the creation of NewsGuard, it’s not far-fetched to assume Publicis might influence NewsGuard’s ratings of drug industry competitors, such as alternative health sites. Being a Google partner,^34,35 Publicis also has unprecedented ability to simply bury undesirable views that might hurt its clientele. 

NewsGuard’s health-related service, HealthGuard,³⁶ is also partnered with the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) — a progressive U.K.-based cancel-culture leader³⁷ with extensive ties to government and global think tanks that has labeled people questioning the COVID-19 vaccine as “threats to national security.”

The CCDH has also published a hit-list of 12 groups and individuals it wants Big Tech to bury, deplatform and ban for disseminating COVID-19 information that runs counter to status quo propaganda. Not surprisingly, Mercola.com is on that list, and a ramp-up of personal threats that cannot be defended against in a court of law recently forced me to delete many of the articles discussing alternative treatments for COVID-19 from my website.

The Crime of the Century

If you get the chance, I recommend watching Alex Gibney’s HBO documentary “The Crime of the Century,” which details how the opioid epidemic was manufactured. In a Wall Street Journal television review, John Anderson writes, in part:³⁸

“In Mr. Gibney’s two-part ‘Crime of the Century’ … the cinema is as exhilarating as the journalism is exhaustive. Still, the style remains in service to the story: how big pharma lied and bribed its way into billions of dollars while leaving death and devastation behind, through a seemingly conscience-free crusade to sell stronger and stronger opiates to more and more people.

It’s a success story, from the industry’s point of view. It’s also a story of villainy, with a catalog of villains — not just the Sackler family of Purdue Pharma, but their sales representatives; the U.S. congressmen to whom they made outsize donations … former prosecutors hired as lobbyists … and officials of the Justice Department and the Food and Drug Administration …

‘The business of criminal cartels and pharmaceutical companies are connected,’ Mr. Gibney says in voiceover — the very obvious example being the drift to heroin by addicts thwarted by the increased expense and reduced availability of opioids. The director then goes about establishing how and why that is so.

The default argument of Purdue Pharma and its defenders is that drug users, not drug makers, are responsible for addiction. But as the miniseries points out, the information that was fed to doctors and on which patients based the use of prescriptions — including the claim that delayed-action OxyContin wasn’t addictive — was simply untrue.”

Unethical Behavior Is Par for the Course

While Publicis is trying to downplay its role in what has been described as the crime of the century, the lawsuit against it will hopefully result in a reevaluation of marketing ethics. The agency, knowing full well there was an epidemic of opioid abuse underway, resulting in tens of thousands of premature deaths each year, took on the job of increasing Purdue’s profits by making that lethal trend worse.

Publicis claims they were just doing what advertising agencies do — they created promotional materials that boost client revenue. However, this argument circumvents any notion of ethics and concern about public health. They’re basically admitting that it’s all about making money, regardless of the cost.

So, even if their actions were within legal limits (which the Massachusetts case will eventually establish), their actions were immoral and clearly undermined public health.

They now want you to believe they are protecting public health by supporting COVID-19 censorship, but this too is working against the public good. How can you possibly make an educated decision about whether or not to participate in this gene therapy experiment if you’re not allowed to hear anything about the risks?

What Publicis calls “misinformation” is simply information that contradicts the propaganda being put out by the hands that feed it, i.e., the drug industry. History tells us companies driven by profit interest make poor truth tellers, as negative information will clearly have a detrimental impact on their bottom line. So, they lie and obfuscate. It’s that simple.

Public relations firms like Publicis are mere arms of these notoriously untruthful industries. They do their bidding because that’s what they’re paid to do. To think that Big Pharma and paid propagandists are looking out for anyone but themselves is dangerously naïve.

It is ironic doublespeak that Publicis claims to defend against misinformation that puts the public at risk, while being clearly guilty of crimes against humanity, having played a crucial role in one of the deadliest health care schemes involving lies and deceit.

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Why Edith Hamilton feared lazy minds more than atomic bombs

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“People hate being made to think,” the educator and classical scholar Edith Hamilton (1867-1963) once said. Laziness of mind is indeed easy to find, even more so today than in her time. It shows up in vapid social media posts, flippant political rhetoric, superficial media coverage, knee-jerk but sanctimonious opinions, and the widespread absence of critical thinking skills. It’s everywhere.

People who don’t think are vulnerable to those who do, especially to those who think constantly about how to use others for nefarious purposes. Dictators and demagogues strongly prefer compliant, sycophantic subjects over thoughtful, independent, free-spirited types.

Laziness of mind rarely if ever made an appearance in the long life and remarkable work of Edith Hamilton. She celebrated the mind. She thought it was shameful to let one go to waste. In her view, “Mind and spirit together make up that which separates us from the rest of the animal world, that which enables a man to know the truth, and that which enables him to die for the truth.”

In her last three decades, she put her own mind to reawakening popular interest in the great thinkers of the ancient past—and in that noble effort, this home-schooled prodigy indisputably succeeded.

Born in Dresden, Germany to American parents, she grew up in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. Her mother and father desired the best education for their five children. They quickly realized that it was not to be found in the public schools. Edith and her three sisters and one brother were all home-schooled, and each one went on to become an accomplished professional.

Alice, for instance, achieved prominence as an authority in industrial toxicology and was the first female appointed to a faculty post at Harvard University. Norah was a pioneer in Art Education for underprivileged children at Hull House in Chicago and in New York City. Margaret was an eminent educator and biochemist. Arthur was an author, professor of Spanish, and assistant dean for foreign students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Edith earned honorary doctorates from Yale, the University of Rochester, and the University of Pennsylvania. Whoever said home-schoolers are not properly educated or “socialized” never met the Hamiltons (or any of the many home-school families I’ve known).

Edith served for 26 years in various capacities, including head administrator, for the Bryn Mawr School, a college preparatory institution for girls in Baltimore, Maryland. After retiring in her mid 50s in 1922, she decided to start a new career as a writer, one that would allow her to explore a lifelong passion for ancient Greece.

Her first book, The Greek Way, appeared in 1930 when she was 62. Over the next three decades, she would earn a worldwide reputation as an authority on the ancients. The Greek Way was a huge success, as were her later books such as The Roman Way (1932), The Prophets of Israel (1936) and Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (1942). By 1957, nearly five million copies of Mythology alone had been sold.

She loved the ancient Greeks because like her, they loved the mind of the individual. “The Greeks were the first intellectualists,” she maintained. “In a world where the irrational had played the chief role, they came forward as the protagonists of the mind.” Elaborating on this point, she noted a remarkable feature of the ancient culture of Athens:

The fundamental fact about the Greek was that he had to use his mind. The ancient priest had said, “Thus far and no farther. We set the limits of thought.” The Greeks said, “All things are to be examined and called into question. There are no limits set on thought…To rejoice in life, to find the world beautiful and delightful to live in, was a mark of the Greek spirit which distinguished it from all that had gone before.

Because the ancient Greeks loved the mind and respected the individual, they created a civilization unlike any other at the time. The freedom they enjoyed stood out in a world of tyrants and tyranny. A few hundred miles to the south, the “great” civilization of Egypt was a very unhappy place by contrast. As Hamilton explained,

The Greeks were the first people in the world to play, and they played on a great scale. All over Greece there were games, all sorts of games; athletic contests of every description: races—horse-, boat-, foot-, torch-races; contests in music, where one side out-sung the other; in dancing—on greased skins sometimes to display a nice skill of foot and balance of body; games where men leaped in and out of flying chariots; games so many one grows weary with the list of them…If we had no other knowledge of what the Greeks were like, if nothing were left of Greek art and literature, the fact that they were in love with play and played magnificently would be proof enough of how they lived and how they looked at life. Wretched people, toiling people, do not play. Nothing like the Greek games is conceivable in Egypt or Mesopotamia. The life of the Egyptian lies spread out in the mural paintings down to the minutest detail. If fun and sport had played any real part they would be there in some form for us to see. But the Egyptian did not play.

At age 90, Edith was honored in Greece’s capital as an honorary Citizen of Athens. She described it in her acceptance speech as “the proudest moment of my life.” Receiving thunderous applause in the shadow of the Acropolis, she spoke without notes of the city she loved as well as any in America:

Athens is truly the mother of beauty and of thought [and] is also the mother of freedom. Freedom was a Greek discovery. The Greeks were the first free nation in the world…Greece rose to the very height not because she was big, she was very small; not because she was rich, she was very poor; not even because she was wonderfully gifted. She rose because there was in the Greeks the greatest spirit that moves in humanity, the spirit that makes men free.

To Edith Hamilton, the mind was each individual human being’s most unique and precious possession. She would be horrified by the notion of “the Borg” in the Star Trek fictional universe. It postulated a single “hive mind” to which humans would be subordinate and obedient. To her, the fact that we each have a mind of our own leads to one inescapable conclusion—namely, that to be fully human, we must be both free and responsible. She was a stalwart friend of the individual—his mind, his rights, and his freedom.

When she died at 95 in 1963, The New York Times published a glowing obituary. One quote in particular that the obituary author provided indicated that she was worried that the free societies of the 20th century were losing the Greek spirit of individualism.

“That frightens me much more than sputniks and atomic bombs,” she opined. “Greeks thought each human being different, and I take a lot of comfort in the fact that my fingerprints are different from anybody else’s.” I’m certain she would detest today’s groupthink, cancel culture and political-correctness as much as she would the fictional “Borg.”

Edith Hamilton wanted the world to rediscover the best of ancient Greece—the appreciation of the individual mind and the critical need for people to be as free as possible so they can put it to use. She was ancient Greece’s most popular 20th century cheerleader when she focused on its greatness; she was its most trenchant critic when she zeroed in on the reasons it declined and fell.

Allow me to close with a selection of additional insights from Edith Hamilton. They resonate with vital truths we need to re-learn today:

There is no worse enemy to a state than he who keeps the law in his own hands.    

Theories that go counter to the facts of human nature are foredoomed.    

A man without fear cannot be a slave.    

Fundamental to everything the [ancient] Greeks achieved was their conviction that good for humanity was possible only if men were free—body, mind, and spirit—and if each man limited his own freedom. A good state or work of art or piece of thinking was possible only through the self-mastery of the free individual, self-government…Liberty depends on self-restraint.    

In Greece, there was no dominating church or creed, but there was a dominating ideal, which everyone would want to pursue if he caught sight of it. Different men saw it differently. It was one thing to the artist, another to the warrior. Excellence is the nearest equivalent we have for the word they used for it, but it meant more than that. It was the utmost perfection possible; the very best and highest a man could attain to which when perceived always has a compelling authority. A man must strive to attain it.    

What the people wanted was a government which would provide a comfortable life for them, and with this as the foremost object ideas of freedom and self-reliance and service to the community were obscured to the point of disappearing. Athens was more and more looked on as a co-operative business, possessed of great wealth, in which all citizens had a right to share… Athens had reached the point of rejecting independence, and the freedom she now wanted was freedom from responsibility. There could be only one result…If men insisted on being free from the burden of a life that was self-dependent and also responsible for the common good, they would cease to be free at all. Responsibility was the price every man must pay for freedom. It was to be had on no other terms.    

When the world is storm-driven and bad things happen, then we need to know all the strong fortresses of the spirit which men have built through the ages.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

The post Why Edith Hamilton feared lazy minds more than atomic bombs appeared first on MercatorNet.

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A Primer For The Propagandized: Fear Is The Mind-Killer

The noose is dangling gently around our necks. Every day, they cinch it tighter. By the time we realize it’s strangling us, it will be too late.

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Propaganda and the Media – Deception on a Grand Scale – Part 2

ORIGINAL LINK

Submitted by Thaisleeze

Guest Post by Larry Romanoff

Much of the US media attention directed to China is unrelated to news in any sense, but is part of an extensive propaganda program designed to inflict serious discomfort on China’s government, using the political pressure of the media in attempts to force China to accommodate US and European political and commercial interests. This is often done in attempts to mitigate the punishment for corporate crimes (especially of corporate executives, who are virtually immune from criminal prosecution in the US), or to assist an American (or European) multinational in trashing other countries’ consumer and food safety laws. This is not limited to China; such a media barrage can occur against the best of friends, including Canada, Germany, France and the UK.

The important point here is that a media flood does not happen by accident. These circumstances are created by plan, with meetings, discussions, strategies arranged to create the most discomfort and political pressure, and will almost certainly involve the corporation, many members of the media, the US Commerce Department and, as often as not, the intelligence agencies.

These people are skilled at mounting a mass media campaign to present their colored version of events to the Court of Public Opinion, hoping to create sufficient domestic and foreign pressure to sway a foreign government’s position on political, social, and commercial issues. The intelligence agencies will do their part by paying heavily for domestic newspaper articles if they can arrange them, and by flooding a country’s social media (China in this case) with CIA sock puppets purporting to be native Chinese who side with the foreign company’s position against their own government. This is the primary reason Twitter and Facebook are banned in China.

Beijing’s Bite of the Apple

Briefly, the situation was that Apple was offering warranties outside the US that were much inferior to those at home, drawing flak from most governments in Europe and Asia. Chinese consumer law, like that of European nations, classified Apple’s ipad as a computer and demanded a 2-year warranty. Apple, being too greedy for its own good, refused, insisting that the ipad was a phone and providing only a one-year warranty. Hence, an enormous amount of media noise attacking China and its regulations and much else, in attempts to create sufficient unpleasantness that the government would back down and permit Apple to continue to plunder Chinese consumers at will. A second prime objective was to teach the Chinese to cast a fearful eye at “US interests” before embarking on any consumer protection laws more stringent than those in the US.

In real life, neither the NYT or WSJ could care less about China’s warranty regulations on computers, but when Apple, the darling of the US stock market, is having trouble plundering Chinese consumers to its heart’s content, the NYT and WSJ are always there to lend a helping hand. And you, dear reader, are taught to hate the Chinese for being unreasonable and ‘picking on’ Apple because they are dictatorial communists who hate your freedoms. As well, the propaganda masters widely claimed the Chinese government, envious of Apple’s success, wanted to cripple Apple to provide breathing space and support for China’s hoped-for “national champions”. (1) (2) (3) The entire series of US media reports about Apple in China were political and commercial propaganda designed to (a) insulate American firms from foreign laws, and (b) create sufficient public pressure to ensure a foreign government designed its domestic laws to please the Americans.

Alibaba – Almost as big as China   

In early 2021 we had a spate of articles about Alibaba’s unfortunate collision with Chinese financial authorities, resulting in the cancellation of the company’s imminent IPO and Jack Ma being rather strongly reined in (slapped down, actually). (4) The US media were unanimous in claiming China was severely restricting the activities of ‘technology companies’ (since Alibaba is widely seen as such), but it wasn’t Alibaba that was being harnessed. Jack Ma’s Ant Financial was being hugely expanded into an online under-the-radar banking institution hiding between the pages of an IT firm and thus bypassing all the country’s financial and banking regulations. This would be similar to EBay or Amazon suddenly opening the largest retail bank in the US, while flying the flag of a consumer goods market and subject to only those laws and regulations.

The media were filled with claims that China was “tightening the screws on the country’s tech champions” with “a regulatory crackdown on the internet sector”, but it was the financial industry, not the technological, that the authorities moved to regulate. News media like the NYT and WSJ would know this, and would have no reason to bury this information for their own purposes, which means that someone instructed them on how to frame the story as China curtailing tech firms.

The US financial vultures had been severely pressuring China to open up its financial sector, and the small flood of Alibaba articles was meant to put political pressure on China to not limit American ambitions to plunder China’s economy as they so freely did in the US. Again, neither the NYT nor WSJ could care less about either Alibaba or China’s financial sector, but when their friends want to move to China and are concerned about regulations that might cripple their greed, US media editors and columnists will answer the call. This means that Alibaba was irrelevant in everything you read about Alibaba; the media flood was a political warning to China to not extend their financial regulations to American predatory vulture firms.

But this is a game two can play. The Chinese media included this statement in one of their articles: “Chinese regulators summon internet finance firms, a demonstrative move for other players to investigate [their] own issues.” (5) A message was clearly also being sent in the other direction, at which point the US media flood quickly ceased.

US Trade Deficits    

Until recently, there was for two decades a huge amount of weekly media noise emanating from Washington about the US trade deficit with China which increased to many hundreds of billions of dollars per year, with no signs of moderating. The NYT and WSJ solemnly informed us this occurred because China was cheating on its currency exchange rate, that the RMB was grossly under-valued to make its exports competitive and foreign imports prohibitively expensive.

Thus, in addition to constant complaints about China’s US trade surplus, we were treated with non-stop media noise about the necessity of China revaluing its currency upward by “at least 25% to 40%.” That sounds reasonable until you discover the things they forgot to tell you.

The first is that the last US trade surplus was in 1975, the US having run annual trade deficits for 46 straight years with a list of countries that has increased to more than 100. (6) (7) (8) Do we suppose all those countries are cheating on their exchange rates? Of course not. The reason the US has a trade deficit is because the country has so de-industrialised itself that it no longer makes anything anyone wants to buy. China is irrelevant in this picture. If the US didn’t buy from China, it would have to buy from someone else, but the deficit would remain. And as to the currencies, China runs trade deficits with many other countries – whose currencies trade freely – which means the world’s exchange rates are also irrelevant to the problem.

Now we know something we didn’t know before, and now we can identify this economic ‘news’ as the propaganda that it is, and we can also ascertain its purpose: the crippling of China’s economy. I mentioned in Part 1 of this series the Plaza Accord that was forced onto Japan who, being a US colony, had no choice but to accept. In that case, the Yen was eventually revalued by around 300%, leaving Japan permanently crippled. And, as I stated, this was the plan for China, the immense, 2 decade-long media onslaught by the US was an attempt to force Chinese leaders to commit economic suicide. Happily, they refused.

It is important to understand that this prolonged situation was not a reflection of reality. It was not like me saying, “This is the 76th time I’ve had to speak to you about your cat digging in my rose bushes.” There was no ‘news’ here, no ‘event’, and the media noise was unrelated to trade or deficits or currency values; it was a long-term plan to create sufficient worldwide pressure to collapse China’s economy by forcing an unwarranted revaluation. It should be obvious that such a program, unremitting for 20 years, was not something that happened by chance. It was part of an overall strategy, as US-China Ambassador Jon Huntsman so frequently stated, to “bring China down”.

During those two decades, the editors and columnists of the major US media would have been in regular and frequent contact with the US FED, the Departments of Commerce and the Treasury, the Council of Economic Advisers, the OMB, the National Security Agency, and again the intelligence agencies, certainly the CIA and NSA. It would also have been necessary to conscript specific columnists – like Paul Krugman of the NYT – to carry the torch and take the lead in this propaganda war.

Indeed, the media function as the microphone of the US State Department, full partners in scripting propaganda campaigns to achieve foreign policy objectives.

This entire media flood was 100% political propaganda, geo-political at its root, geared to the destruction of one particular nation. You can imagine their almost savage determination in continuing this strategy for more than two decades before surrendering. And it had the beneficial side-effect of teaching people in all countries to “hate China for cheating”.

Criminals in Need of Protection

Few people are aware that all but one of the largest consumer frauds perpetrated in China during the past ten years, were by foreign firms, mostly American, the US media (and AmCham) in every case doing their best to protect the criminals from prosecution, relying on public propaganda to intimidate the Chinese authorities from doing their duty. It is almost comical that each time an American company is charged with a massive fraud in China, AmCham releases a report informing us that foreign firms suddenly feel “less welcome” in China, dutifully reported in detail by Bloomberg (9), while the WSJ whines that China’s “crackdown on monopoly pricing and corruption . . . unfairly targets foreign companies”. (10)

OSI

In one such case in 2014, the American OSI food-agricultural giant in China was exposed for repackaging expired and dirty meat on a massive scale extending for many years, complete with two sets of record books for deceiving the authorities. Company officials tried desperately to block the investigation, refusing entry to the plant by the Shanghai food and drug authority for a long enough time to destroy evidence. The authorities had to seize and destroy millions of kilograms of diseased and dirty meat, in a scandal that would eventually cover all of China.

The Shanghai FDA produced more than 5,000 crates of McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets, pork patties and beef steaks that were all expired and moldy. TV video showed employees mixing expired and fresh meat in new packaging, and saying that if their clients knew what they were doing, the firm would lose its contracts. This was not a small thing: Chinese health authorities assigned nearly 900 investigators to inspect the company’s many sites before all the evidence could be destroyed.

Of course, everyone was “shocked, shocked” at the news, the US media dutifully reporting that Sheldon Lavin, CEO of OSI Group, described the scandal as “unacceptable” and “terribly wrong”, and would ensure the “missteps” never happen again. The New York Times blamed the victims and suppliers, attributing the entire criminal plot to “weak links in China’s food chain”. (11) The NYT also stated OSI “was halting operations” and “would review all its China plants” – after the authorities had already shut them down and imprisoned the executives. And of course instead of condemning the (American) criminals for their crimes, the NYT spun the story into “Food safety in China faces big hurdles”. (12) There was also a protective layer of defiance in attempts to create political pressure to mitigate the damage, with statements that for the Shanghai government “to define [OSI products] as ‘questionable’ … is totally without factual, scientific or legal foundation.” Not really, but nice try.

Consumer Fraud? Just Do it! 

At the end of 2011, Nike admitted to a scheme of false advertising in China. At the time, a new Nike sport shoe had become the newest ‘must-have’ item for the kids. A prime feature in Nike’s advertising was that the shoe had two air cushions, to provide shock absorption. The shoe, which I believe was made in China, was priced in the US at 700 RMB ($125), while the price in China was 1,300 RMB (over $200). Nike heavily advertised the product in China as being the original; however the company made a much cheaper substandard version of the shoe to be sold in China. Chinese consumers picked up on the fraud very quickly and reported the matter to the authorities, China’s SAIC eventually levying a fine of nearly $1 million and instructing Nike to refund the full purchase price to all customers. Interestingly, Nike repeated this exact same fraud some years later, apparently learning nothing the first time.

I’m using a bit more space than this event would warrant because Nike had not only the backing of the US media but of an American lawyer named Stan Abrams (13) (14) who frequently appears on the criminal side of the consumer ledger in China to lend weight to the media propaganda narrative. Abrams defended Nike’s consumer fraud in China by perpetrating another of his own.

He began by stating: “There are two issues here: differential pricing and product quality/features.” No, Stan. “Differential pricing” is a hamburger at $2.40 in one location and $2.50 in another. And ‘product features’ are irrelevant since the issue was fraudulent advertising.

Abrams wrote that “consumers certainly have a right to complain . . . assuming that these air cushions are at all functional and mean anything. (I doubt it.)”. So if my Mercedes dealer assures me the car seats are leather but prove to be plastic, I shouldn’t complain since the leather isn’t functional and doesn’t mean anything anyway. I suppose the same would hold true when Abrams finds himself unable to consummate his marriage. He could simply tell his disappointed new bride that the missing feature “wasn’t functional anyway”, and wouldn’t have meant anything even if it had been.

Our too-clever-by-half lawyer continues, “Is it illegal to have a product overseas that has one air cushion and another one here that sells with only one? Absurd. Of course that’s not a legal issue. Companies are of course free to sell products in different markets that are not identical.” Abrams’ comments are strictly true, but irrelevant. The question is not different product features but the advertising of features that don’t exist. We call that consumer fraud. Abrams’ view of all this? “So we’ve got false advertising, potentially fraud, advertising law, consumer law violations, blah blah blah . . . Chinese consumers should be guaranteed the lowest global price for any consumer product? If a product feature is offered to a consumer anywhere in the world … the company [must] offer that feature in China as well? That sounds crazy, but maybe I’m missing something here.” Cheap attempts by a man holding the microphone, to make young Chinese ashamed that they dislike being cheated.

I have an important second reason for the length of this segment: the events that must have taken place prior to this fraud. A shoe factory is a large place, with production and assembly lines generally created for only one product design. Nike would have to create a new design and factory specifications as well as build a new assembly line to manufacture the substandard Chinese version of this shoe. But Nike’s Marketing Department would not quietly design and manufacture a substandard version of a popular product and plan to fraudulently misrepresent it without the knowledge and acquiescence of the CEO, because of the potentially serious legal repercussions to the company, and the obvious threat to their employment. And that means the top management of Nike, very likely including the Board of Directors, shared the prior decision to make a substandard copy of a product and fraudulently flog it to the Chinese as an original, on the assumption that customers would either be too unsophisticated to know what they bought, or be too meek to complain. And that constitutes executive fraud at the highest level.

In case you’re still tempted to think this might have been the first time such a thing has occurred with Nike, here is a quote from Charlie Denson, President of the Nike brand, in a conference call with financial analysts:

“The [Chinese] consumer is becoming more discerning and sophisticated … creating short-time challenges for retailers. It’s a natural evolution we’ve seen in many markets, so we’re not surprised.” (15)

The US media were in full support of Nike, the WSJ telling us only 300 pairs of these shoes were sold “with an inaccurate product description” (16), so really a tempest in a teapot for so large a fine of 5 million RMB and compulsory refunds.

GSK     

Not too long ago the pharma company GSK was involved in one of the largest frauds China has ever experienced, with bribery, payoffs, false accounting, involving at least half a billion dollars. (17) (18) Upon discovery, Mark Reilly, the company’s China President, was on the next plane out of the country “on a previously-planned business trip” to England, “to help with the investigation from that end”.

The UK media obediently flogged the propaganda narrative that it wasn’t the company’s fault, that GSK was itself “the victim” of fraud committed by its Chinese staff, including apparently bribing doctors with sexual favors and with half a billion dollars of the company’s cash that for years nobody noticed was missing. (19)

There have been many of these foreign frauds in China and in each case the propaganda machine worked overtime to condemn the Chinese authorities for stamping them out. In one huge case involving the foreign auto industry in a massive price-fixing collusion, the media informed us the foreign firms were “a casualty of a renewed state media assault on foreign automotive brands”. Or foreign baby milk companies or foreign foods or mobile phones. In every case we saw a small flood of US propaganda denouncing the Chinese government of launching “an assault” on foreign firms, neglecting entirely the criminality involved, and with the same purpose of pressuring the Chinese government to deal gently with American criminal corporations.

We have seen media floods in defense of a long list of corporations whose criminal enterprises have been exposed. All are propaganda designed to pressure foreign governments to treat American (and some European) companies gently, even in the face of massive and serious criminal activity. There are two others I would like to bring to your attention, one involving Coca-Cola and espionage, the other the illegal compilation of data concerning China’s oil production. Both are of immense importance and are covered in a previous article. (20) Both were exposed to major media propaganda floods and even consular intervention in attempts to mitigate the fallout.

It is important to keep in mind that ‘the media’ is not some amorphous, inanimate object but a group of real people with names, who plan, script and conduct these propaganda campaigns. I have had encounters with some of these ‘reporters’ and ‘columnists’. Many of them qualify as gangsters, acting as front men for a criminal enterprise, using their public power to shield and defend those who should be imprisoned and trashing anyone who stands in their way.

Project Censored?

In contrast to hearing much media noise on a topic, we sometimes have only a deafening silence which is equally a guarantee of propaganda, this time in the form of censorship. When the entire Western media unanimously have no comment on an important current topic, we can be certain that much has happened behind the scenes to ensure this result.

Bottling Coke and Spilling Blood

Some years ago, Latin America was almost up in arms about the fact that virtually every union leader attempting to unionise a Coca-Cola bottling plant was suddenly found dead, the evidence  substantiating the thesis that these were gangland hits organised by the bottlers. Coca-Cola disclaimed responsibility on the basis that many of the bottling plants were locally-owned. The claims were entirely suppressed and the disclaimer received only a few brief mentions in the US and none anywhere else that I could discover. (21)

In similar fashion, and more recently, the Mexican news media ran an excited flurry of stories that Coca-Cola employees had voted to form a national union and that the next day all were forced to resign, apparently many at gunpoint. They would be re-hired later, but no union. I returned to those sites the next day to learn more, but was surprised to discover that the entire Mexican media landscape had been scrubbed clean. All prior links were dead, no news medium (in Mexico or indeed in any Western country) contained any reference to this event, Facebook and Twitter no longer had any posts referring to it, and Google suddenly had no idea it had ever happened.

You might care to pause for a moment to think of all the persons who would have to be involved to accomplish such a result. You might also contemplate that the Coca-Cola Company hasn’t the leverage to do this, and ask yourself who took the lead in this effort and what was the source of their power to ensure 100% compliance of so many media outlets in so many nations. And so quickly.

Vaccinations against Pregnancy

In this same category, a vaccination program was initiated some years ago under the auspices of the WHO that sterilised about 150 million women in developing countries – without their knowledge and against their will. Briefly, a tetanus vaccine was created which also contained the female hormone hCG which is essential in implanting a fertilised egg into the uterus wall; the absence of this hormone will inevitably result in miscarriages or spontaneous abortions. These vaccinations were carried out in many nations in the guise of protection against tetanus, but the recipients were limited solely to females of child-bearing age, and immediately resulted in voluminous reports of spontaneous abortions since many vaccinated females were already pregnant. Testing of the vaccines proved the presence of hCG. The WHO attempted many denials and defenses but were moved to silence by the overwhelming evidence. This is not conspiracy theory but heavily-documented fact. I researched the matter thoroughly and in fact the WHO’s own website had a list of scientific papers that documented extensively how they spent 20 years and more than $400 million dollars to develop an “anti-fertility” vaccine containing hCG and using tetanus toxoid as the carrier. I wrote a detailed article on this, with substantial documentation (22). I recommend you read it; it will change the way you look at many things.

In terms of media propaganda, of the negative side of censorship, not one of the many hundreds of major Western news media made any reference to this despicably tragic program. You might again ask yourself how many individuals in which places must have been involved to ensure such a complete blanket of silence, and what is the source of their power to do this.

In a nearly identical circumstance, two prominent European medical experts recently swore that at least some current COVID-19 vaccines contain a female hormone with a function similar to hCG and that the vaccines have the potential to function as an abortifacient. (23) (24) I have not researched this one thoroughly and cannot testify to the validity, but I can offer the following:

Dr. Mike Yeadon was a 17-year veteran at Pfizer’s R&D unit in Sandwich, England, and was the Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) of the entire group and in charge of the company’s respiratory research program. In the autumn of 2010, Pfizer lost interest in, and decided to terminate, their Allergy and Respiratory Diseases programs, eliminating the entire unit. However, Pfizer agreed to finance Yeadon in the formation of a new company to continue this same research, turning over to Yeadon all the assets of this research group not for cash but for equity, Yeadon then raising private capital to finance the continued operation of the new company named Ziarco. It was so successful that Novartis eventually acquired 100% of the stakes less than 10 years later for what was reported to be more than $1 billion.

Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg is a German physician, pulmonary specialist, and epidemiologist. “Both Dr. Yeadon and Dr. Wodarg stated categorically that Pfizer’s vaccine contains a spike protein called syncytin-1, which is vital for the formation of the placenta in pregnant women, and were so concerned about its sterilisation effects that they filed an application with the EMA, the European Medicine Agency, for the immediate suspension of all SARS CoV 2 vaccine studies, in particular the BioNtech/Pfizer variants.”

It would seem unusual that two internationally-respected epidemiologists would claim a non-existent spike protein and pursue their ignorance to the point of requesting an international body to immediately cease vaccine research due to this totally imaginary problem.

I have to state it would appear as a deranged conspiracy theory to suggest that the powers wanting us vaccinated would also want us sterilised, and would do so in what could only be a monstrous conspiracy contrived by Satan and executed by his lieutenants. But these same people created similar vaccines used by the WHO for the same purpose, a program too well-documented to be denied. If they would do it once, why wouldn’t they do it again? I have no answer for you. You decide. But the salient point here is that neither of these two cases rated even a mention anywhere in the Western mainstream media – at least none that I could find.

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Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into more than 30 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’.

His full archive can be seen at https://www.moonofshanghai.com/  and http://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/

He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com

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Notes

(1) https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2017/05/15/chinas-national-champions-state-support-makes-chinese-companies-dominant/

(2) https://www.state.gov/reports/2019-investment-climate-statements/china/

(3) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41291-019-00084-0

(4) https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/10/tech/alibaba-china-record-fine/index.html

(5) https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202104/1222504.shtml

(6) https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/usa-has-run-annual-trade-deficits-41-straight-years

(7) https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/us-trade-deficit-by-country

(8) https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-the-us-balance-of-trade-1147456

(9) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-30/most-foreign-companies-feel-less-welcome-in-china-amcham-says

(10) https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-firms-feel-less-welcome-in-china-1409624607

(11) https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/01/business/international/weak-links-in-chinas-food-chain.html

(12) https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/24/business/international/food-safety-in-china-still-faces-big-hurdles.html

(13) https://blog.hiddenharmonies.org/2012/02/29/stan-abrams-of-china-hearsay-a-case-of-pathological-bia/

(14) https://www.chinamoneynetwork.com/2011/11/13/stan-abrams-progress-seen-on-chinas-anti-monopoly-law

(15) https://news.yahoo.com/news/nikes-profit-decline-china-stunning-004732723.html

(16) https://www.wsj.com/articles/nike-target-of-complaints-in-chinas-annual-consumers-forum-1489600425

(17) https://www.bbc.com/news/business-29274822

(18) https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/may/28/serious-fraud-office-investigates-glaxosmithkline

(19) https://uk.news.yahoo.com/gsk-victim-china-graft-130312678.html

(20) If You Do It, It’s Spying. If I Do It, It’s Research

https://www.moonofshanghai.com/2020/08/blog-post_45.html

(21) http://www.killercoke.org/downloads/spilling-blood-11_11_03.pdf

(22) A Cautionary Tale About the WHO – May 10, 2020

https://www.moonofshanghai.com/2020/05/a-cautionary-tale-about-who.html

(23) https://mattbell.org/mrna-vaccine-blocks-protein-that-helps-formation-of-human-placenta

(24) https://fromthetrenchesworldreport.com/head-of-pfizer-research-covid-vaccine-is-female-sterilization/277390

The original source of this article is The Saker Blog

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