Julian Assange Yanis Varoufakis 26908 Views March 24, 2020
Last night, immediately after our first DiEM25 TV event, my phone rang. It was Julian. From prison. It was not that first time that he honoured me deeply by using the few phone calls prison allows him to make to call me. Like every other such occasion, when I unexpectedly recognise his voice a torrent of emotions comes flooding in. Guilt, primarily, at the thought that, the moment the line is disconnected, he will remain there – in the exceedingly dark place to which he has been confined because of a decision he made long ago to help the rest of us grasp what the powers-that-be have been doing on our behalf without our knowledge or consent.
Julian wanted to talk about the effects of Covid-19 on the world we live in and, of course, on his case. He remarked that Jeremy Corbyn’s election manifesto, that the establishment had lambasted for being too radical, now seems unreasonable moderate. We laughed at the audacity of those who were telling the people of Britain that it was irresponsible to spend a few tens billions on providing proper funding to the NHS and social care for all, on turning broadband into a public utility, and on taking the railways into public ownership to make them work properly – the very same people who, now that big business and capitalism more generally, are in serious trouble seem to have discovered the money tree, announcing trillions to be pumped into the economy. Julian did not know (how could he, when the prison authorities deny him access to newspapers, the internet, even to BBC Radio 4?) that Boris Johnson had, earlier yesterday, announced the temporary nationalisation of the railways – seeing that privateers can never provide a decent service in the midst of a national emergency.
After a few minutes during which we allowed ourselves to bask in the neoliberals’ Waterloo, in the hands of some RNA that the system could simply not cope with without abandoning all its certainties, we discussed what this means for the future. Julian said, quite correctly, that this new phase of the crisis is, at the very least, making it clear to us that anything goes – that everything is now possible. To which I added that anything ranges from the best to the worst possible developments. Whether the epidemic helps deliver the good or the most evil society will depend, of course, on us – on whether progressives manage to band together. For if we do not, just like in 2008 we did not, the bankers, the spivs, the oligarchs and the neofascists will prove, again, that they are the ones who know how not to let a good crisis go to waste.
Will we succeed? Julian had a hopeful comment on this: At the very least, transnational organisations like Wikileaks and DiEM25 had honed the digital tools for online debates and campaigns well before Covid-19 came on the scene. In some measure, we are better prepared than others.
Then we talked about his case. His prison conditions are deteriorating. Now that visits have stopped, his isolation is getting worse. His lawyers are about to petition the court for bail. If any prisoner’s health at Belmarsh High Security prison is in jeopardy from Covid-19 infection, it is Julian’s. Will the court grant him bail? Unlikely. Will the new crisis change the odds of his extradition? We agreed that the answer to the last question is: probably, but only a little – now that the national security complex in the US and in the UK have things to worry about that did not feature a few weeks ago.
Our conversation lasted ten minutes and one second. Then the prison warden cut the line. The one man who knows the perils and pains of isolation better than all of us, had emerged from it to give me, us, a ten-minute lesson in how not to lose it while in confinement.
Make no mistake dear reader: Julian is struggling to keep his faculties, not to lose his mind. For hours every day in solitary he fights the darkness and the despair. When he sounds lucid, funny even, on the phone it is so because he has worked for 20 hours in anticipation of the moment when he will have to communicate his side of the story, his thoughts, to the outside world. No one should have to live that way.
And so it is that, now that we are all in some state of isolation, Julian’s plight – as well as insights – must give us pause, and cause, to discover in ourselves the power, and the solidarity, necessary to ensure that this crisis is not wasted – that the inane and corrupt powers-that-be do not end up, once again, the beneficiaries. _________________ www.lawyerscommitteefor9-11inquiry.org www.rethink911.org www.patriotsquestion911.com www.actorsandartistsfor911truth.org www.mediafor911truth.org www.pilotsfor911truth.org www.mp911truth.org www.ae911truth.org www.rl911truth.org www.stj911.org www.v911t.org www.thisweek.org.uk www.abolishwar.org.uk www.elementary.org.uk www.radio4all.net/index.php/contributor/2149 http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf
"The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which alienates the possessor from the community" Carl Jung
https://37.220.108.147/members/www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/
Fort Detrick researchers banned from working with anthrax, Ebola and smallpox until procedures improved
Tim Wyatt
Tuesday 6 August 2019 13:19
Researchers at Fort Detrick have been barred from working with the most dangerous pathogens after an inspection
Researchers at Fort Detrick have been barred from working with the most dangerous pathogens after an inspection ( Shutterstock )
America’s main biological warfare lab has been ordered to stop all research into the deadliest viruses and pathogens over fears contaminated waste could leak out of the facility.
Fort Detrick, in Maryland, has been the epicentre of the US Army’s bioweapons research since the beginning of the Cold War.
But last month the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – the government’s public health body – stripped the base of its license to handle highly restricted “select agents”, which includes Ebola, smallpox and anthrax.
The unusual move follows an inspection by the CDC at Fort Detrick which found several problems with new procedures used to decontaminate waste water.
For years the facility used a steam sterilisation plant to treat waste water, but after a storm flooded and ruined that machinery last year, Fort Detrick switched to a new chemical-based decontamination system.
Forgotten Women: Survivors of Ebola
Show all 12
But the CDC inspectors found the new procedures were not sufficient, with both mechanical failures causing leaks and researchers failing to properly follow the rules.
As a result, the organisation sent a “cease and desist” order to Fort Detrick, forcing it to suspend all research on select agents.
Watch more
Student whose family were killed by Ebola takes exam in quarantine
Although the United States officially abandoned its biological weapons programme in 1969, Fort Detrick has continued defensive research into deadly pathogens on the list of “select agents”, including the Ebola virus, the organisms that cause the plague, and the highly toxic poison ricin.
The army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, based at Fort Detrick, says its primary mission today is to “protect the warfighter from biological threats” but its scientists also investigate outbreaks of disease among civilians and other threats to public health.
In recent years it has been involved in testing possible vaccines for Ebola, after several epidemics of the deadly virus in Africa.
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A spokeswoman for the lab, Caree Vander Linden, said despite the CDC suspension order, there had not been any threat to public health or any leaks of hazardous material outside the base.
US military plan to spread viruses using insects could create ‘new class of biological weapon’, scientists warn
The shutdown of research at Fort Detrick is likely to last several months, she also told the New York Times.
This is not the first time the lab has been temporarily shut down due to failures in handling the dangerous pathogens inside.
In 2009, research at Fort Detrick was suspended because it was discovered it was storing pathogens which were not listed on its inventory.
The regulations on keeping close track of hazardous biological material were tightened after the 2001 anthrax attacks, which saw five people die after spores were posted to several media newsrooms and Democratic senators.
Dilyana Gaytandzhieva
South Front
Mon, 29 Jan 2018 00:00 UTC
Pentagon bio-weapons
Dilyana Gaytandzhieva is a Bulgarian investigative journalist and Middle East Correspondent. Over the last two years she has published a series of reports on weapons smuggling to ISIS in Syria. In the past year she came under pressure from the Bulgarian National Security Agency and was fired from her job in the Bulgarian newspaper Trud Daily, without explanation. Despite this, Dilyana continues her investigations. The following report, first published on South Front, provides an overview of the Pentagon's secretive development of biological weapons in bio-labs around the world.
@dgaytandzhieva
The US Army regularly produces deadly viruses, bacteria and toxins in direct violation of the UN Convention on the prohibition of Biological Weapons. Hundreds of thousands of unwitting people are systematically exposed to dangerous pathogens and other incurable diseases. Bio warfare scientists using diplomatic cover test man-made viruses at Pentagon bio laboratories in 25 countries across the world. These US bio-laboratories are funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) under a $ 2.1 billion military program - Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP) - and are located in former Soviet Union countries such as Georgia and Ukraine, the Middle East, South East Asia and Africa.
Pentagon's Biolabs
The Lugar Center, Republic of Georgia
The Lugar Center, Republic of Georgia
Vaziani Air Base
The US Army has been deployed to Vaziani Military Air Base, 17 km away from the Pentagon bio-laboratory at the Lugar Center.
Georgia is a Testing Ground For Bioweapons
The Lugar Center is the Pentagon bio laboratory in Georgia. It is located just 17 km away from the US Vaziani military airbase in the capital Tbilisi. Tasked with the military program are biologists from the US Army Medical Research Unit-Georgia (USAMRU-G) along with private contractors. The Bio-safety Level 3 Laboratory is accessible only to US citizens with security clearance. They are accorded diplomatic immunity under the 2002 US-Georgia Agreement on defense cooperation.
DOT requirements
Defense Agreement
The USA-Georgia agreement accords diplomatic status to the US military and civilian personnel (including diplomatic vehicles), working on the Pentagon program in Georgia.
Information obtained from the US federal contracts registry clarifies some of the military activities at the Lugar Center - among them research on bio-agents (anthrax, tularemia) and viral diseases (e.g. Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever), and the collection of biological samples for future experiments.
Pentagon Contractors Produce Bio Agents Under Diplomatic Cover
The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) has outsourced much of the work under the military program to private companies, which are not held accountable to Congress, and which can operate more freely and move around the rule of law. US civilian personnel performing work at the Lugar Center have also been given diplomatic immunity, although they are not diplomats. Hence, private companies can perform work, under diplomatic cover, for the US government without being under the direct control of the host state - in this case the Republic of Georgia. This practice is often used by the CIA to provide cover for its agents.
DTRA contractors
Three private American companies work at the US bio-laboratory in Tbilisi - CH2M Hill, Battelle and Metabiota. In addition to the Pentagon, these private contractors perform biological research for the CIA and various other government agencies.
CH2M Hill has been awarded $341.5 million DTRA contracts under the Pentagon's program for bio-laboratories in Georgia, Uganda, Tanzania, Iraq, Afghanistan, South East Asia. Half of this sum ($161.1 million) is allocated to the Lugar Center under the Georgian contract.
According to CH2M Hill, the US Company has secured biological agents and employed former bio-warfare scientists at the Lugar Center. These are scientists who are working for another American company involved in the military program in Georgia - Battelle Memorial Institute.
As a $59 million subcontractor at the Lugar Center, Battelle has extensive experience in research on bio-agents, as the company has already worked on the US Bio-weapons Program under 11 previous contracts with the US Army (1952-1966).
Contractors
Source: US Army Activities in the US, Biological Warfare Programs, vol. II, 1977, p. 82
The private company performs work for the Pentagon's DTRA bio laboratories in Afghanistan, Armenia, Georgia, Uganda, Tanzania, Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam. Battelle conducts research, development, testing, and evaluation using both highly toxic chemicals and highly pathogenic biological agents for a wide range of US government agencies. It has been awarded some $2 billion federal contracts in total, and ranks 23 on the Top 100 US government contractors list.
The CIA-Battelle Project Clear Vision
Project Clear Vision (1997 and 2000), a joint investigation by the CIA and the Battelle Memorial Institute, under a contract awarded by the Agency, reconstructed and tested a Soviet-era anthrax bomblet in order to test its dissemination characteristics. The project's stated goal was to assess bio-agents dissemination characteristics of bomblets. The clandestine CIA-Battelle operation was omitted from the US Biological Weapons Convention declarations submitted to the UN.
Anthrax spores under microscope
Anthrax spores under microscope
Top Secret Experiments
Battelle has operated a Top Secret Bio laboratory (National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center - NBACC) at Fort Detrick, Maryland, under a US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) contract for the last decade. The company has been awarded a $344.4 million federal contract (2006 - 2016) and another $17.3 million contract (2015 -2026) by DHS.
Biowarfare scientists
Besides the military experiments at the Lugar Center in Georgia, Battelle has already produced bioterrorism agents at the Biosafety Level 4 NBACC Top Secret Laboratory at Fort Detrick in the US. An NBACC presentation lists 16 research priorities for the lab, including to characterize classical, emerging and genetically-engineered pathogens for their BTA (biological threat agent) potential; assess the nature of nontraditional, novel and non-endemic induction of disease from potential BTA; and to expand aerosol-challenge testing capacity for non-human primates.
The US Company Metabiota Inc. has been awarded $18.4 million federal contracts under the Pentagon's DTRA program in Georgia and Ukraine for scientific and technical consulting services.
Metabiota services include global field-based biological threat research, pathogen discovery, outbreak response and clinical trials.
Metabiota Inc. had been contracted by the Pentagon to perform work for DTRA before and during the Ebola crisis in West Africa, and was awarded $3.1 million (2012-2015) for work in Sierra Leone - one of the countries at the epicenter of the Ebola outbreak.
Metabiota labs
Metabiota worked on the Pentagon's project at the epicenter of the Ebola crisis, where three US biolabs are situated.
Ebola Crisis
A July 17, 2014 report, drafted by the Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium, accused Metabiota Inc. of failing to abide by an existing agreement on how to report test results and for bypassing the Sierra Leonean scientists working there. The report also raised the possibility that Metabiota was culturing blood cells at the lab, something the report said was dangerous, as well as misdiagnosing healthy patients. All of those allegations were denied by Metabiota.
Lugar Center
2011, the Lugar Center, Andrew C. Weber (on the right) - US Assistant Secretary of Defense (2009-2014), US DoD Deputy Coordinator for Ebola Response (2014-2015), is currently a Metabiota (US contractor) employee.
Military Experiments on Biting Insects
Entomological warfare is a type of biological warfare that uses insects to transmit diseases. The Pentagon has allegedly performed such entomological tests in Georgia and Russia.
mosquito
Biting Flies in Georgia
In 2014 The Lugar Center was equipped with an insect facility and launched a project titled 'Raising Awareness about Barcoding of Sand Flies in Georgia and Caucasus'. The project covered a larger geographic area outside of Georgia - the Caucasus region. In 2014-2015 Phlebotomine sand fly species were collected under another project, 'Surveillance Work on Acute Febrile Illness' and all (female) sand flies were tested to determine their infectivity rate. A third project, also including sand flies collection, studied the characteristics of their salivary glands.
A biting fly
A biting fly in a bathroom in Tbilisi, Georgia
As a result, Tbilisi has been infested with biting flies since 2015. These biting insects live indoors, in bathrooms, all year long, which was not the typical behavior of these species in Georgia previously (normally the Phlebotomine fly season in Georgia is exceptionally short - from June to September). Local people complain of being bitten by these newly-appeared flies while naked in their bathrooms. They also have a strong resistance to cold and can survive even in sub-zero temperatures in the mountains.
Biting Flies in Dagestan, Russia
Since the start of the Pentagon project in 2014, flies similar to those in Georgia have appeared in neighboring Dagestan (Russia). According to local people, they bite and cause rashes. Their breeding habitats are house drains.
Lugar Center map
biting flies
Flies in Georgia (on the left). The same fly in Dagestan (on the right)
Flies from the Phlebotomine family carry dangerous parasites in their saliva which they transmit through a bite to humans. The disease, which these flies carry, is of high interest to the Pentagon. In 2003 during the US invasion of Iraq, American soldiers were severely bitten by sand flies and contracted Leishmoniasis. The disease is native to Iraq and Afghanistan, and if left untreated the acute form of Leishmoniasis can be fatal.
A 1967 US Army report 'Arthropods of medical importance in Asia and the European USSR' lists all local insects, their distribution and the diseases that they carry. Biting flies, which live in drains, are also listed in the document. Their natural habitat, though, is the Philippines, not Georgia or Russia.
US Army material
'Arthropods of medical importance in Asia and the European USSR', US Army report, 1967
sand flies
Operation Whitecoat: Infected Flies Tested to Bite Humans
In 1970 and 1972, Sand Fly Fever tests were performed on humans according to a declassified US Army report - 'US Army Activities in the US, Biological Warfare Programs, 1977, vol. II, p. 203'. During Operation Whitecoat, volunteers were exposed to bites by infected sand flies. Operation Whitecoat was a bio-defense medical research program carried out by the US Army at Fort Detrick, Maryland, between 1954 and 1973.
Despite the official termination of the US bio-weapons program, in 1982 USAMRIID performed an experiment to see if sand flies and mosquitoes could be vectors of Rift Valley Virus, Dengue, Chikungunya and Eastern Equine Encephalitis - viruses which the US Army researched for their potential as bio-weapons.
Killer Insects
A. Aegypti
A. Aegypti
The Pentagon has a long history in using insects as vectors for diseases. According to a partially declassified 1981 US Army report, American bio warfare scientists carried out a number of experiments on insects. These operations were part of US Entomological Warfare under the Program for Biological Weapons of the US.
The Pentagon: How to Kill 625,000 People For Just $0.29 Cost Per Death
A US Army report in 1981 compared two scenarios - 16 simultaneous attacks on a city by A. Aegypti mosquitoes, infected with Yellow Fever, and Tularemia aerosol attack, and assessed their effectiveness in terms of cost and casualties.
Yellow Fever memo
cost for death
Operation Big Itch: Field tests were performed to determine coverage patterns and survivability of the tropical rat flea Xenopsylla cheopis for use as a disease vector in biological warfare.
Operation Big Buzz: 1 million A. Aegypti mosquitoes were produced, 1/3 were placed in munitions and dropped from aircraft, or dispersed on the ground. The mosquitoes survived the airdrop and actively sought out human blood.
history of field testing
Evaluation of Entomological Warfare as a potential Danger to the US and European NATO nations, US Army, March 1981 Report
Operation May Day: Aedes Aegypti mosquitoes were dispersed through ground-based methods in Georgia, USA, during a US Army operation codenamed May Day.
Operation May Day
Parts of the 1981 US Army report such as the "Mass production of Aedes Aegypti" have not been declassified, potentially meaning that the project is still ongoing.
Aedes Aegypti, also known as yellow fever mosquito, have been widely used in US military operations. The same species of mosquitoes are alleged to be the vectors of dengue, chikungunya and the Zika virus, which causes genetic malformations in newborns
Operation Bellweather: The US Army Chemical Research and Development Command, Biological Weapons Branch, studied outdoor mosquito biting activity in a number of field tests at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, in 1960. Virgin female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which had been starved, were tested upon troops out in the open air.
Operation Bellweather
For reference: OutdoorMosquito Biting Activity Studies,Project Bellweather I, 1960, Technical Report, US Army, Dugway Proving Ground
Military Experiments With Tropical Mosquitoes and Ticks in Georgia
Such species of mosquitoes and fleas (studied in the past under the US Entomological Warfare Program) have also been collected in Georgia and tested at the Lugar Center.
Under the DTRA project 'Virus and Other Arboviruses in Georgia' in 2014, the never-before-seen tropical mosquito Aedes albopictus was detected for the first time and after an absence of decades (60 years), the existence of Aedes Aegypti mosquito was confirmed in west Georgia.
Aedes Albopictus
Aedes Albopictus is a vector of many viral pathogens, Yellow fever virus, Dengue, Chikungunya and Zika.
These tropical mosquitoes Aedes Albopictus, having never been seen before in Georgia, have also been detected in neighboring Russia (Krasnodar) and Turkey. According to data provided by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, their spread is unusual for this part of the world.
Aedes Albopictus distribution
Click to see the full-size image
Aedes Aegypti mosquitoes have been distributed only in Georgia, southern Russia and northern Turkey. They were detected for the first time in 2014 after the start of the Pentagon program at the Lugar Center.
Aedes Aegypti Mosquitoes
Click to see the full-size image
Under another DTRA project, 'Epidemiology and Ecology of Tularemia in Georgia' (2013-2016), 6,148 ground ticks were collected; 5,871 were collected off cattle and 1,310 fleas and 731 ticks were caught. In 2016 a further 21,590 ticks were collected and studied at the Lugar Center.
Anthrax Outbreak in Georgia and NATO Human Trials
In 2007 Georgia ended its policy of having compulsory annual livestock anthrax vaccination. As a result, the morbidity rate of the disease reached its peak in 2013. The same year NATO started human-based anthrax vaccine tests at the Lugar Center in Georgia.
vaccine stats
Click to see the full-size image
In 2007, despite the anthrax outbreak, the Georgian government terminated compulsory vaccination for 7 years. 2013 saw NATO begin human trials on a new anthrax vaccine in Georgia.
anthrax vaccine
Pentagon Research on Russian Anthrax
Anthrax is one of the bio agents weaponized by the US Army in the past. Despite the Pentagon's claims that its program is only defensive, there are facts to the contrary. In 2016 at the Lugar Center American scientists carried out research on the 'Genome Sequence of the Soviet/Russian Bacillus anthracis Vaccine Strain 55-VNIIVViM', which was funded by the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency's (DTRA) Cooperative Biological Engagement Program in Tbilisi, and administered by Metabiota (the US contractor under the Pentagon program in Georgia).
In 2017 the DTRA funded further research - 'Ten Genome Sequences of Human and Livestock Isolates of Bacillus anthracis from the Country of Georgia' - which was performed by USAMRU-G at the Lugar Center.
34 People Intentionally-Infected With Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF) in Georgia
Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever (CCHF) is caused by infection through a tick-borne virus (Nairovirus). The disease was first characterized in Crimea in 1944 and given the name Crimean hemorrhagic fever. It was then later recognized in 1969 as the cause of illness in Congo, thus resulting in the current name of the disease. In 2014 34 people became infected (including a 4-year old child) with CCHF. Three of them died. The same year, Pentagon biologists studied the virus in Georgia under the DTRA project 'Epidemiology of febrile illnesses caused by Dengue viruses and other Arboviruses in Georgia'. The project included tests on patients with fever symptoms and the collection of ticks, as possible vectors of CCHFV for laboratory analysis.
In 2016 another 21,590 ticks were collected for DNA databases for future studies at the Lugar Center under the Pentagon project 'Assessing the Seroprevalence and Genetic Diversity of Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever Virus (CCHFV) and Hantaviruses in Georgia'.
Symptoms of CCHF
Symptoms of CCHF
Military Bio-lab Blamed For Deadly CCHF Outbreak in Afghanistan
237 cases of Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF) have also been reported across Afghanistan, 41 of which were fatal as of December 2017. According to Afghanistan's Ministry of Health, most of the cases have been registered in the capital Kabul, where 71 cases have been reported with 13 fatalities, and in the province of Herat near the border with Iran (67 cases).
CCHF cases Afghanistan
CCHF outbreak bio-lab
Afghanistan is one of 25 countries across the world with Pentagon bio-laboratories on their territory. The project in Afghanistan is part of the US bio-defense program - Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP), which is funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). The DTRA contractors, working at the Lugar Center in Georgia, CH2M Hill and Battelle, have also been contracted for the program in Afghanistan. CH2M Hill has been awarded a $10.4 million contract (2013-2017). The Pentagon contractors in Afghanistan and Georgia are the same, and so are the diseases which are spreading among the local population in both countries.
Why The Pentagon Collects And Studies Bats
Bats are allegedly the reservoir hosts to the Ebola Virus, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), and other deadly diseases. However, the precise ways these viruses are transmitted to humans are currently unknown. Numerous studies have been performed under the DTRA Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP) in a search for deadly pathogens of military importance in bats.
Pentagon bats
221 bats were euthanized at the Lugar Center for research purposes in 2014.
euthanizing bats
Bats have been blamed for the deadly Ebola outbreak in Africa (2014-2016). However, no conclusive evidence of exactly how the virus 'jumped' to humans has ever been provided, which raises suspicions of intentional and not natural infection.
Engineering Deadly Viruses is Legal in the US
Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) first appeared in 2012 and is thought to have originated in bats and spread directly to humans and/or camels. However, like Ebola, the precise ways the virus spreads are unknown.
1,980 cases with 699 deaths caused by MERS-CoV were reported in 15 countries across the world (as of June 2017).
Such experiments aim to increase the transmissibility and/or virulence of pathogens.
Tularemia as Bioweapon
Tularemia, also known as Rabbit Fever, is classified as a bioterrorism agent and was developed as such in the past by the US. However, the Pentagon's research on tularemia continues, as well as on possible vectors of the bacteria such as ticks and rodents, which cause the disease. The DTRA has launched a number of projects on Tularemia along with other especially dangerous pathogens in Georgia.
Especially Dangerous Pathogens (EDPs), or select agents, represent a major concern for public health globally. These highly pathogenic agents have the potential to be weaponized, with proof of their military importance seen through the following Pentagon projects: Epidemiology and Ecology of Tularemia in Georgia (2013-2016) (60,000 vectors were collected for strain isolates and genome research); Epidemiology of Human Tularemia in Georgia; and Human Disease Epidemiology and Surveillance of Especially Dangerous Pathogens in Georgia (study of select agents among patients with undifferentiated fever and hemorrhagic fever/septic shock).
Human Tularemia
F. Tularensis is a highly infectious bacterium and has the potential to be weaponized for use through aerosol attacks.
cost summary 1
cost summary 2
Tularemia is one of the bio-weapons that the US Army developed in the past.
Source: 1981 US Army Report
Pentagon Bio-laboratories Spread Diseases in Ukraine
11 Pentagon Biolabs
11 Pentagon Biolaboratories in Ukraine and around Russia. Click to see full-size image
The DoD Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) has funded 11 bio-laboratories in Ukraine, which also borders on Russia:
DTRA 1
DTRA 2
DTRA 3
DTRA 4
DTRA 5
DTRA 6
DTRA 7
DTRA 8
DTRA 8
DTRA 9
DTRA 10
The US Military Program is Sensitive Information
Ukraine has no control over the military bio-laboratories on its own territory. According to the 2005 Agreement between the US Department of Defense and the Ministry of Health of Ukraine, the Ukrainian government is prohibited from public disclosure of sensitive information about the US program and Ukraine is obliged to transfer to the US DoD dangerous pathogens for biological research. The Pentagon has been granted access to certain state secrets of Ukraine in connection with the projects under their agreement:
agreement1
agreement2
Biowarfare Scientists Under Diplomatic Cover
Among the set of bilateral agreements between the US and Ukraine is the establishment of the Science and Technology Center in Ukraine (STCU) - an international organization funded mainly by the US government which has been accorded diplomatic status. The STCU officially supports projects of scientists previously involved in the Soviet biological weapons program. Over the past 20 years the STCU has invested over $285 million in funding and managing some 1,850 projects of scientists who previously worked on the development of weapons of mass destruction.
Protocol memo
The US personnel in Ukraine work under diplomatic cover.
364 Ukrainians Died From Swine Flu
One of the Pentagon laboratories is located in Kharkiv, where in January 2016 at least 20 Ukrainian soldiers died from a flu-like virus in just two days, with 200 more being hospitalized. The Ukrainian government did not report on the dead Ukrainian soldiers in Kharkiv. As of March 2016, 364 deaths were reported across Ukraine (81.3 % caused by Swine Flu A (H1N1) pdm09 - the same strain which caused the world pandemic in 2009).
Ukraine Swine Flu
Click to see the full-size image
According to Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) intelligence information, the US bio-lab in Kharkiv leaked the deadly virus.
Police Investigate Infection With Incurable Disease
Late last year, a highly suspicious Hepatitis A infection spread rapidly in just few months across South East Ukraine, where most of the Pentagon biolabs are located.
hundreds infected hepatitis A
Click to see the full-size image
37 people have been hospitalized for Hepatitis A in the Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv as of January 2018. Local police have launched an investigation into "infection with human immunodeficiency virus and other incurable diseases." Three years ago more than 100 people in the same city became infected with Cholera. Both diseases are alleged to have spread through contaminated drinking water.
In the summer of 2017, 60 people with Hepatitis A were admitted to hospital in the city of Zaporizhia. The cause of this outbreak is still unknown.
In the Odessa region, 19 children from an orphanage were hospitalized for hepatitis A in June 2017.
29 cases of Hepatitis A were reported in Kharkiv in November 2017. The virus was isolated in contaminated drinking water. One of the Pentagon bio-labs located in Kharkiv was blamed for the deadly Flu outbreak a year ago that claimed the lives of 364 Ukrainians.
Ukraine And Russia Hit By New Highly Virulent Cholera Infection
In 2011 Ukraine was hit by a cholera outbreak. 33 patients were reportedly hospitalized for severe diarrhea. A second outbreak struck the country in 2014 when more than 800 people all across Ukraine were reported to have contracted the disease. In 2015 at least 100 new cases were registered in the city of Mykolaiv alone.
Mariupol and Mykolaiv
Click to see the full-size image
Vibrio Cholera
A new highly virulent variant of the cholera agent Vibrio cholera, with a high genetic similarity to the strains reported in Ukraine, hit Moscow in 2014. According to a 2014 Russian Research Anti-Plaque Institute genetic study, the cholera strain isolated in Moscow was similar to the bacteria which caused the epidemic in neighboring Ukraine.
Southern Research Institute, one of the US contractors working at the bio-laboratories in Ukraine, has projects on Cholera, as well as on Influenza and Zika - all pathogens of military importance to the Pentagon.
Along with Southern Research Institute, two other private American companies operate military bio-labs in Ukraine - Black & Veatch and Metabiota.
DTRA contractors Ukraine
Black & Veatch Special Project Corp. was awarded $198.7 million in DTRA contracts to build and operate bio-laboratories in Ukraine (under two 5-year contracts in 2008 and 2012 totaling $128.5 million), as well as in Germany, Azerbaijan, Cameroon, Thailand, Ethiopia, Vietnam and Armenia.
Metabiota has been awarded a $18.4 million federal contract under the program in Georgia and Ukraine. This US company was also contracted to perform work for the DTRA before and during the Ebola crisis in West Africa, including $3.1 million (2012-2015) for work in Sierra Leone.
Southern Research Institute has been a prime subcontractor under the DTRA program in Ukraine since 2008. The company was also a prime Pentagon contractor in the past, under the US Biological Weapons Program for research and development of bio-agents, with 16 contracts between 1951 and 1962.
Fort Detrick Contracts
Source: US Army Activities in the US, Biological Warfare Programs, vol. II, 1977, p. 82
Soviet Defector Produced Anthrax For The Pentagon
Anthrax defector
Bacillus anthracis, magnified more than 12,000 times
Southern Research Institute was also a subcontractor on a Pentagon program for anthrax research in 2001. The prime contractor being Advanced Biosystems, whose president at that time was Ken Alibek (a former Soviet microbiologist and biological warfare expert from Kazakhstan who defected to the US in 1992).
Ken Alibek
Ken Alibek
Ken Alibek was the First Deputy Director of Biopreparat, where he oversaw a program for biological weapon facilities and was the Soviet Union's main expert on anthrax. After his defection to the US, he was engaged on Pentagon research projects.
$250,000 For Lobbying Jeff Sessions For "Research For US Intelligence"
Southern Research Institute lobbied the US Congress and US Department of State hard for "issues related to research and development for US intelligence" and "defense related research and development." The lobbying activities coincided with the start of the Pentagon projects on bio-labs in Ukraine and other former Soviet states.
The company paid $250,000 for lobbying then-Senator Jeff Sessions in 2008-2009 (currently the US Attorney General appointed by Donald Trump), when the institute was awarded a number of federal contracts.
Jeff Sessions
US Attorney General Jeff Sessions, US Senator for Alabama (1997-2017)
Watson Donald
Watson Donald
For a 10-year period (2006-2016) Southern Research Institute paid $1.28 million for lobbying the US Senate, House of Representatives, the State Department and the Department of Defense (DoD). Senator Jeff Sessions' aide on Capitol Hill, Watson Donald, is now a Senior Director at Southern Research Institute.
Police Investigate Botulism Toxin Poisoning in Ukraine
115 Botulism cases, with 12 deaths, were reported in Ukraine in 2016.
botulism
In 2017 the Ukrainian Ministry of Health confirmed a further 90 new cases, with 8 deaths, of botulinum toxin poisoning (one of the most poisonous biological substances known). According to local health authorities, the cause of the outbreak was food poisoning, into which police launched an investigation.
The Ukrainian government stopped supplying antitoxin in 2014 and no botulism vaccines in stock were available during the 2016-2017 outbreak.
Botulism is a rare and extremely dangerous illness caused by a toxin produced by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum.
1 gm of The Toxin Can Kill as Many as 1 Million People
botulism scientist
Botulinum neurotoxin poses a major bio-weapon threat because of its extreme potency, ease of production and transport. It causes muscles paralyses, respiratory failure and ultimately death if not treated immediately. A single gram of crystalline toxin, evenly dispersed and inhaled can kill more than one million people. It could be disseminated via aerosol, or by contamination of water and/ or food supplies.
The Pentagon Produces Live Viruses, Bacteria & Toxins
Botulinum Toxin was tested as a bio-weapon by the US Army in the past, as well as Anthrax, Brucella and Tularemia. Although the US bio-weapons program was officially terminated in 1969, documents show that the military experiments never ended. Presently the Pentagon produces and tests live bio-agents at the same military facility as it did in the past - Dugway Proving Ground.
Current Field Tests
capabilities report
Capabilities Report 2012, West Desert Test Center
Past Field Tests
Biological field testing
Source: 1977 US Army Report, p. 135
Bioweapons Factory in The US
The US Army produces and tests bio-agents at a special military facility located at Dugway Proving Ground (West Desert Test Center, Utah), as proven in a 2012 US Army Report. The facility is overseen by the Army Test and Evaluation Command.
The Life Sciences Division (LSD) at Dugway Proving Ground is tasked with the production of bio-agents. According to the Army report, scientists from this division produce and test aerosolized bio-agents at Lothar Saloman Life Sciences Test Facility (LSTF).
Dugway Proving Ground
Dugway Proving Ground
capabilities report 2012
Biological Agents produced by the US Army at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, USA
Source: Capabilities Report 2012, West Desert Test Center
The Life Sciences Division consists of an Aerosol Technology branch and a Microbiology Branch. The Aerosol Technology Branch aerosolizes biological agents and simulants. The Microbiology branch produces toxins, bacteria, viruses and agent-like organisms which are used in chamber and field testing.
Documents prove that the US Army produces, possesses and tests aerosols of the most lethal toxin in the world - Botulinum Neurotoxin. In 2014 the Department of the Army purchased 100 mg of Botulinum Toxin from Metabiologics for tests at Dugway Proving Ground.
The experiments date back to 2007 when an unspecified quantity of the toxin was procured for the Department of the Army by the same company - Metabiologics. According to the 2012 West Desert Test Center Report, the military facility performs tests with Botulinum Neurotoxin Aerosol, as well as with aerosolized Anthrax, Yersinia pestis, and Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis Virus (VEE).
Containment Aerosol Chamber
Source: Capabilities Report 2012, West Desert Test Center
Outdoor Field Test Programs at Dugway Proving Ground
US Army documents and photos show that the Pentagon has developed various dissemination methods for bioterrorism attacks, including via explosives.
Capapbilities Report
Source: Capabilities Report 2012, West Desert Test Center
Bacillus thuringiensis is an insect pathogen that is widely used as a bio-pesticide. B. thuringiensis (BT) Al Hakam was collected in Iraq by the UN Special Commission led by the US in 2003. It is named after Al Hakam - Iraq's bio-weapons production facility. Apart from Pentagon field tests, this bacterium is also used in the US for the production of GM corn, which is resistant to pests. Photos posted by the CIA prove that the bacteria was collected by the US in Iraq. According to the CIA, the vials containing bio-pesticide were recovered from an Al Hakam scientist's home.
CIA: A total of 97 vials - including those with labels consistent with the Al Hakam cover stories of single-cell protein and bio-pesticides - as well as strains that could be used to produce BW agents, were recovered from a scientist's residence in Iraq in 2003.
Bacillus thuringiensis
Information from the US federal contracts registry shows that the Pentagon performs tests using the bacteria stolen from Saddam Hussein's bio-weapons factory in Iraq.
The DTRA contractor on this project - Lovelace Biomedical and Environmental Research Institute (LBERI) - operates an Animal Bio-safety 3 Level (ABSL-3) laboratory, which has Select Agent status. The facility is designed to conduct bioaerosol studies. The company has been awarded a 5-year contract for field tests with biological simulants at Kirtland Air Force Base.
What the Pentagon is currently doing is exactly what it did in the past, meaning that its bio-weapons program was never terminated. The US Army performed 27 field tests with such biological simulants, involving the public domain from 1949 to 1968, when President Nixon officially announced the end of the program.
hisoty bio weapons
field testing
Source: US Army Activities in the US, Biological Warfare Programs, vol. II, 1977, p. 125-126
Field Tests in Chechnya
The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), which runs the US military program at the Lugar Center in Georgia, is alleged to have already performed field tests with an unknown substance in Chechnya, Russia. In the spring of 2017 local citizens reported a drone disseminating white powder close to the Russian border with Georgia. Neither the Georgian border police, nor the US personnel operating on the Georgia-Russia border, commented on this information.
$9.2 Million US Military Project on Russia-Georgia Border
DTRA has full access to the Russia-Georgia border, granted under a military program called 'Georgia Land Border Security Project'. The activities related to the project have been outsourced to a private American company - Parsons Government Services International. DTRA has previously contracted Parsons for similar border security projects in Lebanon, Jordan, Libya and Syria. Parsons have been awarded a $9.2 million contract under the Pentagon border security project on the Russia-Georgia border.
Lugar Center Tbilisi
Local citizens in Chechnya noticed a UAV sprayer near the Russian border with Georgia in 2017.
US Defense Agency Tests GM Insects to Transmit GM Viruses
The Pentagon has invested at least $65 million in gene editing. The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded 7 research teams to develop tools for genome engineering in insects, rodents and bacteria under DARPA's Safe Gene program, using a novel CRISPR-Cas9 technology.
Darpa engineering
insect weapon
Under another military program - Insect Allies - GM insects are engineered to transfer modified genes to plants. The $10.3 million DARPA project includes both gene editing in insects and in the viruses that they transmit. Ecological Niche-preference Engineering is a third ongoing military program for genome engineering in insects. The Pentagon's stated objective is to engineer GM organisms so that they can resist certain temperatures, change their habitat and food sources.
Besides gene editing in insects and in the viruses they transmit, the Pentagon wants to engineer humans as well.
genome engineering
DARPA Advanced Tools for Mammalian Genome Engineering Project seeks to create a biological platform inside the human body, using it to deliver new genetic information, and thus altering humans at the DNA level.
DARPA wants to insert an additional 47th artificial chromosome into human cells. This chromosome will deliver new genes that will be used for engineering the human body. SynPloid Biotek LLC has been awarded two contracts under the program totaling $1.1 million (2015-2016 - $100,600 for the first phase of the research; 2015-2017 - $999,300 for work which is not specified in the federal contracts registry). The company has only two employees and no previous record on bio-research.
Top Secret Research on Synthetic Viruses
Between 2008 and 2014, the United States invested approximately $820 million in synthetic biology research, Defense being a major contributor. Much of the military projects on synthetic biology are classified, among them are a number of classified studies by the secretive JASON group of US military advisors - e.g. Emerging Viruses and Genome Editing for the Pentagon, and Synthetic Viruses for the National Counterterrorism Center.
JASON is an independent scientific advisory group that provides consulting services to the U.S. government on matters of defense, science and technology. It was established in 1960 and most of their resulting JASON reports are classified. For administrative purposes, JASON's projects are run by the MITRE Corporation, which has contracts with the Defense Department, CIA and the FBI. Since 2014 MITRE has been awarded some $27.4 million in contracts with the DoD.
Although the JASON Reports are classified, another US Air Force study titled Biotechnology: Genetically Engineered Pathogens, sheds some light on what the secretive JASON group has researched - 5 groups of genetically engineered pathogens that can be used as bio-weapons. These are binary biological weapons (a lethal combination of two viruses), host swapping diseases (animal viruses that 'jump' to humans, like the Ebola virus), stealth viruses, and designer diseases. Designer diseases can be engineered to target a certain ethnic group, meaning that they can be used as ethnic bio-weapons.
Ethnic Bioweapons
Ethnic biological weapon (biogenetic weapon) is a theoretical weapon that aims to primarily harm people of specific ethnicities, or genotypes.
Although officially the research and development of ethnic bio-weapons have never been publicly confirmed, documents show that the US collects biological material from certain ethnic groups - Russians and Chinese.
The US Air Force has been specifically collecting Russian RNA and synovial tissue samples, raising fears in Moscow of a covert US ethnic bio-weapons program.
The US National Cancer Institute has been collecting biological material from patients of the Chinese Cancer Hospital in Beijing.
Chinese biological material has been collected under a series of federal projects, including saliva and cancer tissue. Among them, Genotyping DNA Samples from Lymphoma cases and from controls (healthy patients), breast cancer tissue blocks from breast cancer patients, saliva samples of 50 families who have 3 or more cases of UGI cancer, Genotype 50 SNP'S for DNA samples from the Cancer Hospital, Beijing, Genotypes from 3,000 cases of gastric cancer and 3,000 controls (healthy patients) in Beijing.
How The Pentagon Helped Tobacco Companies to Profit From Ebola
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has invested $100 million in vaccine production from tobacco plants.
The companies involved in the project are owned by the biggest American tobacco companies - Mediacago, Inc. is co-owned by Philip Morris and Kentucky BioProcessing is a subsidiary of Reynolds American, which is owned by British American Tobacco. Currently they are producing Flu and Ebola vaccines from tobacco plants.
The $100 million program Blue Angel was launched as a response to the H1N1 pandemic in 2009. Medicago was awarded $21 million to produce 10,000 million doses of an influenza vaccine within one month.
Blue Angel program manager Dr. John Julias explains: "Although there are multiple plant species and other organisms being explored as alternative protein production platforms, the US Government has continued to make an investment in tobacco-based manufacturing."
It is not clear why the Pentagon chooses to invest in vaccines produced from tobacco plants, from among all other plant species they explored. Medicago, co-owned by Philip Morris, paid $495,000 for lobbying the Department of Defense, Congress and the Department of Health and Human Services for "funding to advance technology to support public health preparedness applications." The Pentagon funded tobacco companies to develop new technology and to profit from vaccines.
Biological Experiments Are War Crimes
Article 8 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) defines biological experiments as war crimes. The US, however, is not a state party to the international treaty, and cannot be held accountable for its war crimes.
Comment: So much for Nixon ending the US deep state's mad science bio-weapons program in 1969.
Many years ago, we noted that Israel has a similar infatuation with finding something that will decimate Arabs and leave The Chosen Ones sole survivors in the Middle East.
The Pentagon's bio-weapon Frankenstein-research is not only alive and well, like NATO, it has metastasized since the collapse of the USSR, spreading into Africa, the Middle East, and on Russia's doorstep.
President Putin noted the uptick in US bio-research focused on 'Russians/Caucasians' last October and, addressing Russia's Human Rights Council, said:
"[...] do you know that biological material is being collected all over the country, from different ethnic groups and people living in different geographical regions of the Russian Federation? The question is - why is it being done? It's being done purposefully and professionally. We are a kind of object of great interest."
Franz Klintsevich, the first deputy chairman of the Federation Council's Committee for Defense and Security went on to add this on his Facebook page:
"I'm not saying that it is about preparing a biological war against Russia. But its scenarios, are, no doubt, being worked on. That is to say, in case the need arises."
It may, for now, remain more sci-fi than fact, but the concept of ethnic-specific weapons are clearly uppermost in certain American minds.
What do they think is going to happen if they unleash some kind of bio-weapon pandemic that ostensibly targets 'only Russians'?
It apparently hasn't yet dawned on them that most Caucasians are of mixed descent/genotype.
Any such 'country-specific targeting' would lay waste to the American population too.
(By the way, we have a fair idea why they're interested in tobacco.)
Fort Detrick researchers banned from working with anthrax, Ebola and smallpox until procedures improved
Tim Wyatt
Tuesday 6 August 2019 13:19
Researchers at Fort Detrick have been barred from working with the most dangerous pathogens after an inspection
Researchers at Fort Detrick have been barred from working with the most dangerous pathogens after an inspection ( Shutterstock )
America’s main biological warfare lab has been ordered to stop all research into the deadliest viruses and pathogens over fears contaminated waste could leak out of the facility.
Fort Detrick, in Maryland, has been the epicentre of the US Army’s bioweapons research since the beginning of the Cold War.
But last month the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – the government’s public health body – stripped the base of its license to handle highly restricted “select agents”, which includes Ebola, smallpox and anthrax.
The unusual move follows an inspection by the CDC at Fort Detrick which found several problems with new procedures used to decontaminate waste water.
For years the facility used a steam sterilisation plant to treat waste water, but after a storm flooded and ruined that machinery last year, Fort Detrick switched to a new chemical-based decontamination system.
Forgotten Women: Survivors of Ebola
Show all 12
But the CDC inspectors found the new procedures were not sufficient, with both mechanical failures causing leaks and researchers failing to properly follow the rules.
As a result, the organisation sent a “cease and desist” order to Fort Detrick, forcing it to suspend all research on select agents.
Watch more
Student whose family were killed by Ebola takes exam in quarantine
Although the United States officially abandoned its biological weapons programme in 1969, Fort Detrick has continued defensive research into deadly pathogens on the list of “select agents”, including the Ebola virus, the organisms that cause the plague, and the highly toxic poison ricin.
The army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, based at Fort Detrick, says its primary mission today is to “protect the warfighter from biological threats” but its scientists also investigate outbreaks of disease among civilians and other threats to public health.
In recent years it has been involved in testing possible vaccines for Ebola, after several epidemics of the deadly virus in Africa.
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A spokeswoman for the lab, Caree Vander Linden, said despite the CDC suspension order, there had not been any threat to public health or any leaks of hazardous material outside the base.
US military plan to spread viruses using insects could create ‘new class of biological weapon’, scientists warn
The shutdown of research at Fort Detrick is likely to last several months, she also told the New York Times.
This is not the first time the lab has been temporarily shut down due to failures in handling the dangerous pathogens inside.
In 2009, research at Fort Detrick was suspended because it was discovered it was storing pathogens which were not listed on its inventory.
The regulations on keeping close track of hazardous biological material were tightened after the 2001 anthrax attacks, which saw five people die after spores were posted to several media newsrooms and Democratic senators.
The FBI’s chief suspect in the 2001 case, Bruce Ivins, was a senior biological weapons researcher at Fort Detrick. He killed himself in 2008, shortly before the FBI was planning to charge him with the attacks.
Coronavirus: Upward Trajectory or Flattened Curve?
https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/21112/covid-19-growth-curve-selecte d-countries/
by Katharina Buchholz ,
Mar 24, 2020
The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic
As the coronavirus spreads rapidly around the world, case growth trajectories have started to differ between countries. According to numbers by Johns Hopkins collected by the website Worldometers, case counts in the U.S. and Spain have been growing faster recently. Both countries recorded 100+ cases for the first time on March 2. In the case of the U.S., officials have said that ramped-up testing has caused known case numbers to balloon since Saturday.
Italy, where there are currently more than 60,000 cases and public life has shut down, hit 100 cases on February 23, eight days earlier than the U.S. and Spain. France and Germany hit 100 cases or more on February 29 and March 1, respectively. Case numbers in the two countries appear to grow slower, but again, different testing regimen might obscure real case numbers.
The UK, which has less than 7,000 registered cases to date, also appears to be on a flatter trajectory, even though time will tell if those numbers tell the whole story.
The countries' collective aim is to "flatten the curve" of infections. While South Korea was able to stabilize its outbreak at around 9,000 cases - due to widespread free testing (including the now infamous drive-thru testing), quarantine measures and the harnessing of mobile technology for public information - China has stabilized theirs at around 80,000 cases. South Korea hit 100 cases on February 20 and managed to leave the steep upward trajectory around 14 days later. In the case of China, more than 100 cases were first recorded on January 20, and quarantine and testing measure succeeded in breaking the upwards trajectory by February 12 - around three and a half weeks later.
Note: If you visited this site more than once and the information in the text and the chart don't match up, try hitting F5 to refresh. _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Open Letter: Contact Tracking and NHSX
Rachel Coldicutt Mar 23 · 5 min read
As responsible technologists, we call upon the NHSX leadership and the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care to ensure new technologies used in the suppression of Coronavirus follow ethical best practice
Global map showing the spread of Coronavirus in shades of redGlobal map showing the spread of Coronavirus in shades of red
By Raphaël Dunant — Own work, data from 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic, List of countries and dependencies by population and Coronavirus map: The COVID-19 virus is spreading across the world, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=88208245
21 March 2020
During this global emergency, technology and data-driven decisions have a vital role in saving lives by delivering essential information, building communities and managing capacity across the NHS. But they are not a magic bullet to solve unsolvable problems. As Yuval Noah Harari says in the Financial Times this weekend, “We must act quickly and decisively. We should also take into account the long-term consequences of our actions.”
The imperative to innovate quickly, and the immense pressure being placed on teams within the NHS and NHSX to deliver at speed must not lead to ethical corners being cut that will undermine trust in the NHS.
As responsible technologists, we call upon NHSX leadership and the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care to urgently:
Institute a culture of working in the open, with clear, regular public communication about projects being undertaken and the publication of machine readable data and models — to build trust and minimise speculation
Introduce bold emergency governance measures, including privacy and rights impact assessments and the drafting of an expert governance panel, with public and patient participation, to ensure innovation works and is held to account
Develop collective mechanisms for social license, to balance the needs of individuals and the benefit to society, ensuring the communities and groups affected by data collection have a say, and publish clear terms and conditions for any new applications, following in the footsteps of the Singapore government app TraceTogether.
Any technology initiatives put in place now to suppress Coronavirus must protect human rights, be proportionate and work within the rule of law — not least because they will set the template for what comes next in the delivery of health services in the UK.
This is vital because we understand that NHSX are looking at app-based solutions for tracking and managing Coronavirus.
Contact tracking has been a successful factor in suppressing Coronavirus in South Korea, but those technologies and the South Korean social and political context cannot be reproduced in the UK.* Information published by Oxford BDI and SAGE indicates that any digital contact-tracking app will instantly trace (and perhaps identify) individuals who are exposed to someone who has tested positive to Coronavirus.
There is little detail in the public domain about who will build the app, how it will work, how its effectiveness will be monitored and who will provide oversight over its proportionality and compliance with fundamental rights. It is unclear how data will be collected and processed, whether there are strict legal limitations on the purposes for which this data can be used now and in the future, how and where it will be stored, for how long, and who will have access to this data, either now or in the future.
Additionally, mobile phone data from O2, EE and BT is already being used to understand the movement of people; information about this is coming to light in a piecemeal and ad hoc way and it is unclear what this data is and who has access to it. Part 3, section 61A of the Investigatory Powers Act enables people with symptoms or a diagnosis of Coronavirus to be tracked without notice, and it is unclear if the UK government is following the practices developed during the Ebola crisis.**
At the same time, the Coronavirus Bill gives immigration officers and police the power to detain people if they have “reasonable grounds to suspect … a person is infectious”. The combination of this new bill with existing far-reaching data-gathering powers creates the risk that location and contact tracking technology could be used as a means of social control.
Too much, too late
Contact tracking is unlikely to be effective in a country where not everyone has a mobile phone, and where many people live in shared accommodation — not everyone who carries the virus can or will be tracked, and cell recognition is not good enough to differentiate between people who, for instance, live in a single block of flats. Not only does this kind of surveillance risk contravening human rights, but it is not guaranteed to work — particularly at this stage of the Coronavirus outbreak.
In the UK, OFCOM figures show that 22% of UK adults do not have a smartphone, rising to 45% of adults over 55, and figures on device ownership for young children vary wildly. Relying on this data exclusively risks reinforcing existing inequalities, especially if it could be used to establish reasonable or reliable grounds for a person to be detained.
It is not yet clear how data will be collected, or used, within the legal framework. Nor what technical safeguards will be used. We are also concerned that data collected to fight Coronavirus could be stored indefinitely or for a disproportionate amount of time, or will be used for unrelated purposes.
Testing times, do not call for untested new technologies.
These are testing times, but they do not call for untested new technologies. Ethical data-driven decision-making requires good governance, transparency and willingness to course correct. We ask that the CEO of NHSX and the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care prioritise putting the best practices outlined here at the heart of how new technologies are delivered by NHSX, for the good of everyone in the United Kingdom.
Signed
Rachel Coldicutt
Jeni Tennison, Open Data Institute
Sarah Gold, Projects by IF
Peter Wells
Frederike Kaltheuner
Lilian Edwards, Professor of Law, Innovation and Society, Newcastle Law School.
Michael Veale, Lecturer, Faculty of Laws, UCL
Ian Brown
Dr Elinor Carmi, Faculty of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Liverpool University
Jennifer Cobbe, Department of Computer Science and Technology. University of Cambridge
Gemma Milne, science and technology journalist
Dr Laura James
Prof Mark Graham, Oxford Internet Institute
Harriet Kingaby, Mozilla Fellow
Maria Niedernhuber, PhD student in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Cambridge
David Mann, dxw
Amina Ahmad
Iain Henderson, JLINC Labs
Dr Becky Faith, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex
Andew Eland
Cori Crider and Martha Dark, Foxglove
Catherine Stihler, Open Knowledge Foundation
Andrew Strait
Dr. Jonathan Andrew, Geneva Academy
Ghislaine Boddington — Speaker / curator — BDS Creative Ltd — body>data>space
Elizabeth Renieris, Fellow, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University
Pat Walshe, Privacy Matters
Umesh Pandya
Dr Amanda M L Taylor-Beswick
Elettra Bietti, Harvard Law School
Anna Bacciarelli
Gemma Shields
Mary Branscombe, technology journalist
Heather Burns
James Mullarkey, notochrome.org
Daragh O’Brien
Dr Garfield Benjamin
Gavin Starks, IcebreakerOne.org
Silkie Carlo, Big Brother Watch
Mark Surman, Mozilla
Sheila Hayman, Director’s Fellow, MIT Media Lab
If you would like to add your signature to this letter, please email hello@careful.industries or leave your name in the comments below.
—
*See Q5 response from UK CMO Chris Whitty
*See https://www.gsma.com/mobilefordevelopment/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/g sma-Ebola-Mobile-Response-Blueprint.pdf and https://edpb.europa.eu/sites/edpb/files/files/file1/edpb_statement_202 0_processingpersonaldataandcovid-19_en.pdf
Edited 24 March to correct a typo, re: the no of UK adults aged 55+ who do not use a smartphone.
Rachel Coldicutt
WRITTEN BY
Rachel Coldicutt
Feminist. Responsible technologist. Reading and writing on equality,
The monitoring
bracelets the Hong Kong authorities hand out to everyone arriving
from abroad to ensure they observe a 14-day quarantine highlight the
inventive measures some governments are adopting to tackle the
coronavirus pandemic.
The lightweight bracelets carry a QR code that must be paired with
a smartphone app. The strength of surrounding communications signals
— such as WiFi and Bluetooth — can help determine whether or not
the wearer observes self-isolation. The move is a sensible precaution
to counter the coronavirus pandemic and protect the public. But it is
not hard to imagine how that same technology could be used for very
different purposes.
Suppose, for sake of argument, the Hong Kong authorities forced
all residents to wear such bracelets. That might help the medical
authorities trace those who had been in contact with an infected
person, as they have successfully been doing in South Korea, Taiwan
and Singapore. But it may also allow them to identify all those who
join anti-government protests that have been roiling Hong Kong in the
past few months.
Technological tools can be of immense use in helping to combat
this pandemic, but only if they are not abused. In democratic
societies, at least, the prime goal of government should be to
persuade rather than coerce its citizens. The further erosion of
societal trust should not be an unintended casualty of this
healthcare crisis.
That lesson applies more broadly to emergency legislation, too.
Take the coronavirus
bill being considered by the British parliament. Although the
government has been criticised for not being interventionist enough,
this bill will give it extraordinary new powers to combat the
pandemic, from banning public meetings to shutting down airports.
International law includes access to healthcare as a core human
right and accepts that temporary restrictions of other rights can be
justified in emergencies. Few would disagree, but it is a question of
degree.
In Britain, the joint parliamentary committee on human rights has
highlighted several areas in which the draft bill
threatens to suspend or curtail fundamental rights, including the
right to meet, travel, go to school or work, and visit sick relatives
in hospital or prison. Even the Police Federation has questioned the
wisdom of new powers to detain anyone suspected of being infectious.
That risks turning patients into prisoners.
There are two other main concerns about the British legislation.
First, the sunset clause in the bill is too loose. When it comes to
security legislation, few laws have proved as permanent as the
temporary. For example, temporary
measures to deal with the threat of the IRA in 1939 remained on
the statute book for decades.
Parliament must insist on fully restoring the hard-won rights of
citizens once this particular crisis has passed. “We need an
absolute, brick-wall stop on this legislation at 12 months,†David
Davis, the Tory former Brexit minister, has
said.
The second concern is the danger of mission creep. Measures passed
for one purpose often end up being used for others, as we saw in the
aftermath of 9/11. In 2008, the British government used antiterrorism
powers to help recover money owed to UK depositors from failing
Icelandic banks.
Such concerns are becoming more acute as we enter a world of
pervasive biometric data. In an open
letter, some of Britain’s leading data scientists have already
warned of the dangers of the National Health Service rushing to
introduce data-tracking apps that infringe users’ rights. “These
are testing times, but they do not call for untested new
technologies,†they wrote.
Sylvie Delacroix, a law professor at the University of Birmingham,
says there is a clear risk that the healthcare crisis extends the use
of intrusive surveillance technologies. But perhaps the greater risk
is that public trust will be so eroded by rash measures taken today
that it will make it harder to deploy safe and beneficial
technologies tomorrow.
“My main worry is that we are going into this blind,†Prof
Delacroix says. “We do not know how such data is going to be used
or who is going to safeguard it. It demands a huge amount of trust
that we have no reason to give.â€
She argues that more trustworthy data governance regimes are
needed to preserve public trust and enable us to maximise the
benefits of technology. “It is one thing to highlight the dangers,
another to highlight the missed opportunities,†she says.
In emergencies, it is always tempting for security officials to
argue that the ends justify the means, but such logic is often
self-defeating. As the writer Aldous Huxley once said: “The end
cannot justify the means, for the simple and obvious reason that the
means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.â€
Of course, we want democratic governments to take every necessary
measure to counter the coronavirus crisis. And we should recognise
the dangers of inaction, as well as of action. But ultimately we will
all lose if governments push their mandate too far and undermine the
consent of the governed.
john.thornhill@ft.com
_________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Let’s take a look at some real life scenario’s.
The Black economy .. you need a (legitimate) essential reason to go out ..
What the government actually deems to be essential will come out in later versions of the marshall law which is currently be applied in stages ..
So let’s look at the “Black Economy” two of the main sectors are prostitution and drugs, selling stolen property or goods that have been imported illegally could also be included but I think most people will be happy to see people involved in these sectors .. closed down.
People that sell animal feed, heating fuels will surely be considered essential suppliers will remain open and people will be allowed to visit them.
But Supermarkets and food stores are is probably going to be the places that people frequent the most.
So presumably if prostitutes want to continue there business they will have operate from Supermarket car parks, perhaps in camper vans or other suitable vehicles .. I guess they will adapt to the circumstances.
A hell of a lot of people use drugs in the UK so drug dealers will also have to adapt, they might well start hanging out around supermarkets .. most of the other shops will be closed.
Chemists already sell their own drugs ..it is unlikely they will come to some kind of an agreement with the dealers Supermarkets. mini markets. bakers and grocery stores will come to the fore.
Of course there are usually tons of CC TV camera’s around Supermarkets and indeed in the main thoroughfares .. So the cops will be able to sit back and watch the action.. but as everyone is and will be wearing masks ..this also becomes a bit tricky .
The illegal drugs market is worth billions each year and apart from the actual crime of possession and or dealing drugs there is a multitude of other drug related crime ..many of which lead to murder.
So if the dealers do relocate to the supermarkets they will bring their drug related crimes with them.
As the dealers are often gang members ,, supermarkets will become trouble hot spots.
The government will respond with tougher measures . There will be sniffer dogs at the entrance of most shops and you will probably have to show ID to get in and out and prove that you have either cash or credit, and that you have bought and paid for shopping .
I would think that very soon they will invent a device that reads any kind of digital ID .. Passport, driving license even an Oyster card hooked up to a camera with facial recognition .. as a prelude to a micro chip which will come in with later modification of the emergency measures ..
Charlie Holmes _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Hmmm .. Interesting analysis, I copy:
WHAT CHINA ACHIEVED IN THE LAST 3 MONTHS:
1. China has successfully prepared itself for a new generation war - biological. They conducted exercises demonstrating to the world their master class in this field and the helplessness of opponents.
2. Conducted a census. Fast and efficient.
3. The digital dictatorship was sharpened. They control social networks and all communications.
4. A system was created to quickly identify all social networks of the desired person: who is in contact with him, with whom he drove the car, where she was, with whom he communicated.
5. All illegal immigrants were identified and many were expelled from the country
6. Many foreigners were expelled in a mild manner. They also tried to evacuate themselves. Others were identified and controlled.
7. A mechanism for mass and rapid blocking of the entire country was developed.
8. Demonstrate to the whole world what China can do. Placing 1.5 billion people in full quarantine, applying masks to everyone - it's a great feat, as well as building a huge hospital in a week.
9. The whole country has been taught how to care for hygiene.
10. A law was passed prohibiting the consumption of wild meat, which is the norm in many provinces.
10. It was shown to the world how dependent it is on China.
11. Production chain links around the world have been frozen, causing a global crisis.
12. The use of drones and automatic tracking devices is massively introduced in police and response services.
13. The implementation of mass thermography systems with automatic identification of anomaly data has been developed.
14. The algorithms of video cameras for face recognition have been updated for mask wearers; currently, the way people move is also recognized in recognizing people.
15. Automated goods delivery systems are created on an operational scale on a massive scale.
16. An electronic concentration camp system was developed.
17. Protests in Hong Kong ceased and the influence of the Chinese government increased.
18. Most important.
As the world continues to plunge into crisis, China has emerged from it and is ready:
- buy cheap assets,
- help financially weak countries, increasing their global influence in return
- play at lower oil prices. _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Where did the coronavirus begin? China or the United States? Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian has sparked a new coronavirus controversy, when he suggested that the US army might have brought the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) to Wuhan, the city where the virus was first detected in the country.
Zhao made the accusation in several tweets on Thursday, following the admission to US Congress by director of the US’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Redfield, that some Americans who seemingly died from influenza were subsequently tested positive for COVID-19.
“When did patient zero begin in US? How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe us an explanation!” Zhao tweeted.
In October 2019, some US soldiers took part in a military championship games in Wuhan.
Robert R. Redfield, Director of US Centers for Disease Control at the US Congress on Wednesday
The US president, Donald Trump in a broadcast on Wednesday described coronavirus as ‘a foreign virus’.
The coronavirus was first detected in Wuhan, Hubei province, in late December. It was said to have been passed on to man by an animal in a Chinese sea food market.
China has the most of confirmed cases – over 80,900, including over 3,000 deaths.
As of now, the peak of the epidemic in China is over, with the country registering no new cases in any city of Hubei province, except Wuhan, over the past week.
Yet, the outbreak is ramping up across other countries of the world, in Italy, South Korea, Japan, United States, Germany with the World Health Organization now calling it a pandemic.
Zhao ramped up his accusation against the United States today, by quoting an article by Global Research that he claimed confirmed that coronavirus started in the US.
Here is an excerpt from the report:
The Taiwanese physician noted that in August of 2019 the US had a flurry of lung pneumonias or similar, which the Americans blamed on ‘vaping’ from e-cigarettes, but which, according to the scientist, the symptoms and conditions could not be explained by e-cigarettes. He said he wrote to the US officials telling them he suspected those deaths were likely due to the coronavirus. He claims his warnings were ignored.
Immediately prior to that, the CDC totally shut down the US Military’s main bio-lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland, due to an absence of safeguards against pathogen leakages, issuing a complete “cease and desist” order to the military. It was immediately after this event that the ‘e-cigarette’ epidemic arose.
We also had the Japanese citizens infected in September of 2019, in Hawaii, people who had never been to China, these infections occurring on US soil long before the outbreak in Wuhan but only shortly after the locking down of Fort Detrick.
Then, on Chinese social media, another article appeared, aware of the above but presenting further details. It stated in part that five “foreign” athletes or other personnel visiting Wuhan for the World Military Games (October 18-27, 2019) were hospitalised in Wuhan for an undetermined infection.
The article explains more clearly that the Wuhan version of the virus could have come only from the US because it is what they call a “branch” which could not have been created first because it would have no ‘seed’. It would have to have been a new variety spun off the original ‘trunk’, and that trunk exists only in the US. (1)
There has been much public speculation that the coronavirus had been deliberately transmitted to China but, according to the Chinese article, a less sinister alternative is possible.
If some members of the US team at the World Military Games (18-27 October) had become infected by the virus from an accidental outbreak at Fort Detrick it is possible that, with a long initial incubation period, their symptoms might have been minor, and those individuals could easily have ‘toured’ the city of Wuhan during their stay, infecting potentially thousands of local residents in various locations, many of whom would later travel to the seafood market from which the virus would spread like wildfire (as it did).
That would account also for the practical impossibility of locating the legendary “patient zero” – which in this case has never been found since there would have been many of them.
Next, Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease expert at Georgetown University in Washington, said in an article in Science magazine that the first human infection has been confirmed as occurring in November 2019, (not in Wuhan), suggesting the virus originated elsewhere and then spread to the seafood markets. “One group put the origin of the outbreak as early as 18 September 2019.”
Zhao asked people to read the article, in a tweet on Friday.
“Please read and retweet it. COVID-19: Further Evidence that the Virus Originated in the US”, he wrote.
In another tweet, Zhao also drew attention to another article confirming that coronavirus began in America :
. _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
BBC scaling back news output amid coronavirus with shows including Victoria Derbyshire replaced
Picture: BBC Two Victoria Derbyshire Show cancelled
BBC has announced its news service amid the coronavirus pandemic (Picture: BBC)
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author imageMel Evans
Tuesday 17 Mar 2020 10:39 pm
The BBC has announced its plans to scale back its news output amid the deadly spread of coronavirus.
Revealing it’s to focus on ‘core’ output, the Beeb will be replacing some scheduled programmes across its channels, with the broadcaster’s director of news Fran Unsworth saying that these are ‘unprecedented and difficult days’.
The broadcaster will be operating what it’s calling a ‘core news service’ on the BBC News Channel, which will see some scheduled programming, including Politics Live and Victoria Derbyshire, sidelined.
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Meanwhile, The Andrew Neil Show, Newswatch, The Travel Show and Hardtalk are being suspended.
Newsnight and The Andrew Marr Show will remain on air, however they will be operated by fewer technical staff on the ground.
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Political staple Question Time will continue to be broadcast at 8pm on Thursdays, but will be recorded without a studio audience ‘for a period’.
METROGRAB BBC responds to Question Time complaint Provider: BBC
Question Time will be held without a live audience (Picture: BBC)
Audiences will instead be asked to remotely submit their questions for guests to answer.
Not just affecting the TV programming, BBC’s Newscast podcast will change into a daily edition of The Coronavirus Podcast, while Americast, Beyond Today and The Next Episode will be suspended.
Speaking on the changes being made to the broadcaster, Unsworth added: ‘Trusted, accurate information is vital in a public health emergency and the BBC has a key role to play.
‘We will continue offering our audience continuous news service on TV, radio and online but this will look a bit different in the weeks ahead.
‘Like many organisations we are unable to have all our staff on site due to the coronavirus outbreak.
‘We are therefore making some changes to what we do to streamline our output to ensure we can work with fewer people and protect the staff who are at work.’
The BBC said that when it comes to radio, it believed it can ‘protect much of our regular, trusted output at this point’, but added it was ‘keeping the situation under close review and will be making some initial changes'
The Mash Report will film from Nish Kumar's home amid coronavirus self-isolation
On World Service English, The World This Week will be suspended from tomorrow, while World Update and Weekend will be suspended from next week. BBC Radio 4’s The Week In Westminster will be suspended after 21 March.
As more people began to work from home, as countless other remained in self-isolation since the deadly spread of Covid-19, the broadcaster said it had seen ‘unprecedented’ use of the digital platforms over the last few weeks, adding: ‘We will be making some changes to the way our teams are organised to sustain these vital services – and to ensure we can distribute important information via social media.’
Chief Medical Officer says there are 'global shortages' of coronavirus tests _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
In Italy, the proportion of infected people dying from the novel coronavirus — 10 percent according to the latest figures — seems through the roof. Unsurprisingly, there is more to this terrifying figure than meets the eye.
You do not need to be an expert to calculate the mortality rate. It is one number divided by another — the number of people who have died from the virus divided by the total number of confirmed cases. In the case of Italy, 7,503 dead divided by 74,386 infected gives a mortality rate of roughly 10 percent. But that does not mean that one in ten people who contract the virus will die, despite what the scaremongering media would have you believe.
The first reason why is that the first, smaller number — the number of deaths from Covid-19 — is impossible to underestimate. People are either alive or dead, and usually as soon as a person dies they will quickly find their way into the national statistics.
But the larger number, the confirmed cases, must by definition be an underestimate. It would be impossible for every person in a country positive for the coronavirus to have been already tested and added to the confirmed cases. The virus can be dormant in people for up to two weeks, and young people can experience very mild or even no symptoms at all, and still be positive for the virus. Since that figure is by definition too low, the mortality rates being reported are by definition too high.
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Failing to test
Another factor is that governments are being pushed well beyond their capabilities for mass testing and contact tracing, some more than others. With typical efficiency, Germany is on top of their testing situation, and as such have picked up many milder cases. Therefore they have a high number of confirmed cases relative to the true number of infected people in Germany.
This is keeping the mortality rate in Germany down at 0.5 percent, baffling experts who are expecting apocalyptic scenes at the hospitals, the likes of which have so far only materialized in Italy. Perhaps the cases will soon mount up in Germany, and their mortality rate will climb toward the four or five percent that seems to be the European average. But due to the asymptomatic people (a majority according to the best research) even that is an exaggeratedly high rate.
Apply this principle to Italy, whose civil protection chief Angelo Borrelli told La Repubblica newspaper on Monday that “It is credible to estimate that there are 10 positive cases for every one officially reported.” If this were true, and as many as 640,000 people are infected in Italy, their actual mortality rate would in a stroke become one percent instead of ten percent. The scale of the problem begins to look quite different in that context.
Cause of death
Yet another reason for Italy’s inflated mortality rate is how deaths are being recorded there. Professor Walter Ricciardi, an adviser to the Italian minister of health, told the Telegraph on Monday that “the way in which we code deaths in our country is very generous in the sense that all the people who die in hospitals with the coronavirus are deemed to be dying of the coronavirus.’’
A thought experiment may elucidate this. Imagine that one thousand people, all over the age of 75, died in hospitals in northern Italy last week. All of them had tested positive for the coronavirus at some point during the past few weeks.
The vast majority of Covid-19 fatalities, 99 percent according to Italian research, have had a pre-morbidity, if not two or three. These are underlying health issues,like heart disease, cancer or various infections. Some might have been comatose, with life support machines and artificial breathing the only thing keeping them alive anyway.
Eventually, their bodies gave out, and they simply could not fight on any longer. But does that mean that in the absence of the coronavirus, those one thousand people would still be alive? In other words, is it really true to say that all of these people died of Covid-19? But amidst this crisis, when health systems and governments have tunnel vision for this one ailment, all one thousand are chalked off as victims of the plague.
More spanners in the works
A recent article in the Guardian wrestling with Germany’s apparently too-low mortality rate concludes that because they are not conducting widespread testing of dead bodies for the coronavirus people could be dropping dead inside their own homes of Covid-19 and going unrecorded. This seems unlikely to be much of a factor, but there may be other reasons why Italy has so far been an outlier in coronavirus casualties.
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Many have pointed to Italy’s elderly population as the catch-all reason for their unnaturally high death rates. But that idea is a non-starter. Germany has the next oldest population in Europe, and Germans are not as healthy as Italians (who live long lives precisely because they are healthy), and yet Germany has the lowest death rate of the ten worst affected countries. Age cannot explain away the disparity.
Another factor is doubtless the unpreparedness of Italy’s health system, and the dearth of beds and equipment that is now spawning rumors about doctors being forced to jettison some patients to make room for others. Germany is better equipped, but may not have been put to the test yet, as the virus is yet to explode there as it has in northern Italy.
Crisis around the corner?
Experts are still saying that the reason for all of these disparities is simply that some countries are further along the epidemic curve than others. This could explain why so many more have died in China and Italy and so few in Germany and the UK, for example, but it cannot explain the wild fluctuations in the mortality rates.
None of this is meant to take away from the severity of the crisis in Italy, or that which may be just around the corner for the rest of the world. But the key point to take away from this is that the 10 percent mortality rate being reported from Italy is grossly misleading. It is being waved around by the mainstream media as a bit of old-fashioned sensationalism at best, and a calculated tool of propaganda at worst. A figure like 0.3 percent - barely higher than the common flu - simply does not have the same power in getting people to swallow unprecedented legislation that gives the state tremendous new powers in a host of new areas... all in the name of public health of course.
Last edited by item8 on Thu Mar 26, 2020 7:45 am; edited 1 time in total
Many think Covid-19 is some kind of alien invasion that spells the end of the world. But the real threat to us is a much deadlier virus: a hatred of all the values that have underpinned our civilisation for centuries.
For years, I was puzzled as to why the Roman Empire ceased to exist and was replaced by communities that were uncivilized by comparison. How and why could mankind’s progress reverse in this way? Recent experience has eliminated the mystery. No special devastating event was needed; the cause of Rome's demise was simply the loss of its people's desire to support their ‘empire’ and its underlying values. And as it was 1,500 years or so ago, so I fear it is now.
The Covid-19 crisis – specifically, the reaction to it – demonstrates that people have grown bored, detached, and easily impressionable by things that have nothing to do with the roots of their society. We are all – or too many of us – fin de siècle Romans now.
A large number of Westerners are happy to accept the suicidal shutting down of their economies to try to halt a virus that predominantly causes old and sick people to die just a few weeks or months before they would have anyway. Just as they enthusiastically endorse proclamations such as that there are 46 sexes, not two; that the flatulence of a cow must be reduced to save a polar bear; that millions of migrants from the Third World must be invited to Europe and assumed to be neurosurgeons; and so on.
The widespread opinion that everything, including economies, must be sacrificed to beat coronavirus is a revival of medieval witch hunts; the sacrifice seems more important than finding an effective method to deal with the problem.
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Our increasingly decadent mass culture has gradually become more ideological and openly opposed to the values Western civilization is based upon. And while it boasts of being ‘counter-culture’ and independent, it’s acquired a monopoly over almost all the information channels that determine opinions, including mainstream media and political parties.
Our leaders have become sucked into this group-thinking and happily institute policies that unleash shutdowns that may cause the worst recession in history. Thousands of businesses are closing and long-term prospects are bleak.
Governments are stepping in to pay wages and fund other services. As tax revenue will be virtually non-existent, public debt will soar. Some governments may default on their debts or resort to printing money, causing soaring inflation. These countries may be unable to fund healthcare, their police or their military, and be so weakened they will be invaded by others and be erased from the world map.
That may be a worst-case scenario, but it’s almost certain that the impact of the shutdowns will be a recession comparable to the Great Depression. Yet what do most Western citizens make of it? Well, they are either unaware, uncaring, or they’re happy about it. They don’t seem to appreciate the consequent dangers. Instead, they are more obsessed with the latest celebrity who’s caught the virus.
The consumers of this mass culture haven't built anything like what our ancestors did – enlightenment, the theory of relativity, parliamentary democracy, industrialisation, major advances in philosophy, science, literature and engineering. They don't have to defend any real values against a tangible enemy, because hiding in a herd with uniform group-think is good enough for them.
Our ancestors had difficult, short lives; they had to work hard, produce enough to survive, fight enemies, and defend what they’d inherited. Numerous lasting values emerged from those efforts. The current generations of Westerners are good only at producing and escalating irrationality and panic.
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If a two-month lockdown isn’t deemed enough to contain the virus, they’re happy to extend it to six months, if not years. China decided to impose strict policies, but they were assertive enough to be relatively short-lived; many Westerners want less perfect policies to last for a much longer time. That’s clearly an irrational approach; instead of ‘flattening a curve’, rational leaders (like Beijing’s) try to turn the curve into a cliff. The faster you eliminate the virus, the cheaper it is.
Immortality as an entitlement
This support for economically suicidal policies didn't start with Covid-19. Westerners have spent recent decades amid a prosperity in which they took material wealth and good healthcare for granted. They forgot what hunger (and, in most cases, unemployment) meant. They got used to demanding ever deeper ‘entitlements’, such as the ‘right not to be offended’.
Activists sensationalised smaller and more implausible threats and demanded that governments mitigated them. In particular, the climate change movement advocated that the 1-2 °C of warming caused by CO2 emissions in a century was equivalent to an armageddon that had to be avoided, whatever the cost.
In this context, it could be expected that the first ‘real challenge’ – and a new flu-like disease is certainly one – would make people fearful. Because if people were led to believe that 1-2 °C of warming was basically the end of the world, is it surprising that they're absolutely terrified of a new disease that has the potential to kill a few million old and sick people?
The existential threat posed by coronavirus – or at least, our irrationality towards it – is greater than the climate threat (though still very small). Westerners who haven't seen any real threats for a long time have developed a condition – termed "affluenflammation" by the American musician Remy – which is a pathological habit of inflating negligible threats. When this inflation of feelings is applied to a real threat, namely a pandemic, they lose their composure.
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The context of Covid-19, where every death is presented with horror, makes it clear that ‘immortality’ is just another ‘human right’. This wisdom says that our leaders are failing because they cannot defend this so-called right. But this excessive sensitivity is just one part of the problem.
Many Westerners actively want to harm their economies, corporations, rich people, and governments, because they don't feel any attachment to or responsibility for them. They take security and prosperity for granted. Their money and food arrive from ‘somewhere’, and they don’t care about the source.
And they believe that the structures which allow them to survive – the governments, banks, and so on – are ‘evil’. Some are just financially illiterate. But others know what they are saying, and rejoice in demanding that trillions be sacrificed in order to infinitesimally increase the probability that a 90-year-old will avoid infection and live a little bit longer. They don't accept their dependence on society and the system at all. They don't realise that their moral values, their ‘human rights’, are only available if paid for by prosperous societies.
I have used some dramatic prose, so let me be clear: the scenario I’ve outlined – ending in the suicide of the West – is avoidable, and I hope and believe it will be. I know some who are willing to fight for its survival.
But even if this acceleration towards shutdowns is reversed and countries restore their pre-virus businesses, our world won't be the same. Many people will conclude that the crisis was exciting, and try to kickstart a repetition. The curfew is likely to reduce CO2 emissions this year, so climate activists may try for similar results in the future. Terrorists may deploy some new disease – which, after all, is likely to be more effective than any stabbing or bombing.
It's conceivable that the West’s brush with mortality will lead people to regain some common sense and survival instincts. Perhaps several nations going bankrupt will be a wake-up call. Maybe people will realise that the reaction to the coronavirus was disproportionate. But even if that is so, I’m afraid it won’t be enough.
We need to accept that the positive relationship of Westerners to the roots of their civilization will be still missing – and that this is a virus that poses a much more fundamental existential threat than Covid-19.
19-Mar-2020, Biohackinfo News.
In a Reddit Q&A, billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates revealed his plan to use 'digital certificates' to identify those who have been tested for COVID-19.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates will launch human-implantable capsules that have ‘digital certificates’ which can show who has been tested for the coronavirus and who has been vaccinated against it.
The 64 year old tech mogul and currently the second richest person in the world, revealed this yesterday during a Reddit ‘Ask Me Anything’ session while answering questions on the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic.
Gates was responding to a question on how businesses will be able to operate while maintaining social distancing, and said that, “Eventually we will have some digital certificates to show who has recovered or been tested recently or when we have a vaccine who has received it.”
The ‘digital certificates’ Gates was referring to are human-implantable ‘QUANTUM-DOT TATTOOS’ that researchers at MIT and Rice University are working on as a way to hold vaccination records. It was last year in December when scientists from the two universities revealed that they were working on these quantum-dot tattoos after Bill Gates approached them about solving the problem of identifying those who have not been vaccinated.
The quantum-dot tattoos involve applying dissolvable sugar-based microneedles that contain a vaccine and fluorescent copper-based ‘quantum dots’ embedded inside biocompatible, micron-scale capsules. After the microneedes dissolve under the skin, they leave the encapsulated quantum dots whose patterns can be read to identify the vaccine that was administered.
The quantum-dot tattoos will likely be supplemented with Bill Gates’ other undertaking called ID2020, which is an ambitious project by Microsoft to solve the problem of over 1 billion people who live without an officially recognized identity. ID2020 is solving this through digital identity. Currently, the most feasible way of implementing digital identity is either through smartphones or RFID microchip implants. The latter will be Gates’s likely approach not only because of feasibility and sustainability, but also because for over 6 years, the Gates Foundation has been funding another project that incorporates human-implantable microchip implants. This project, also spearheaded by MIT, is a birth control microchip implant that will allow women to control contraceptive hormones in their bodies.
As for ID2020, to see it through, Microsoft has formed an alliance with four other companies, namely; Accenture, IDEO, Gavi, and the Rockefeller Foundation. The project is supported by the United Nations and has been incorporated into the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals initiative.
It will be interesting to see how Bill Gates and ID2020 will execute all this because many Christians, and surprisingly a growing number of Shia Muslims, are very opposed to the idea of microchipping and any form of body-invasive identification technology. Some Christian legislators and politicians in the United States have even tried to ban all forms of human microchipping.
But, on the other hand, this is Bill Gates’ perfect opportunity to see the projects through because as the coronavirus continues to spread and more people continue to die from the pandemic, the public at large is becoming more open to problem-solving technologies that will contain the spread of the virus.
The main reason many Christians and some Shia Muslims are opposed to body-invasive identification technologies, however helpful such technologies are for preventing pandemics, is because they believe that such technologies are the so called ‘Mark of Satan’ mentioned in the Bible and some Mahdi prophecies. In the Book of Revelations in the Bible, anyone who does not have this “mark” is not allowed to buy or sell anything.
Last year in November, a Denmark-based tech company which had contracts to produce microchip implants for the Danish Government and the US Navy, had to cancel the launch of its supposedly “revolutionary” Internet-of-Things powered microchip implant after Christian activists attacked its offices in Copenhagen.
ID2020 2016 Summit at the United Nations.
To everyone freaking out in the comments, Please, this has nothing to do with your conspiracy theories! This is clearly one solution to pandemics. A solution with many other applications that could improve the lives of billions and pull them out of the misery and suffering that your conspiracy theories and superstitions have never been able to solve. It is mind boggling how in the 21st century, all of you – who have access to technology and clearly know how to use it, are recklessly coming to your crazed superstitious conclusions about simple technologies! Calm down. Bill Gates is a… Read more »
UK Column News - 25th March 2020: The whole programme
UK Column Published on 25 Mar 2020
Brian Gerrish and Mike Robinson with today's UK Column News ...
Today's Youtube live stream failed 30 minutes in. The Facebook stream did not, so whatever the problem was, it wasn't at our end. So here is the full programme.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82qsclco1Oo _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Visitors will be urged to reconsider spending time in picturesque but impoverished communities at great risk from Covid-19
Charlotte Graham-McLay in Wellington Mon 23 Mar 2020 23.30 GMT
The rugged mountainous countryside of Ruatoria, where Māori iwi are setting up coronavirus roadblocks Photograph: Stewart Watson/Alamy Stock Photo
The East Cape of New Zealand’s North Island is a remote and picture-postcard idyll – boasting a historic lighthouse, wild beaches and mist-cloaked mountains. But as the country prepares to lockdown for four weeks of national self-isolation to fight the spread of Covid-19, indigenous groups in the region say the measures will not go far enough to keep them safe and plan checkpoints on highways into their towns to turn away anyone who doesn’t live or work there.
“Our people are scared,” says Tina Ngata, one of the organisers of the checkpoint to be set up outside the town of Te Araroa; another will spring up outside Ruatoria with more planned further up the coast. “We want to minimise people coming to the region.”
New Zealand has 102 cases of the virus, with no reported deaths. But Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister, announced on Monday that she would raise the country’s alert level to four, the highest possible, from Wednesday night in a preemptive effort to prevent thousands from dying.
'Kiwis – go home': New Zealand to go into month-long lockdown to fight coronavirus
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But Ngata and others worry that people of Ngāti Porou – her Māori iwi, or tribe – will fare much worse than the general population, even with the new restrictions.
After more than a century of colonisation, Māori in New Zealand suffer much worse health outcomes than Pākehā –New Zealanders of European descent – and for Ngāti Porou, the figures are even worse.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus may have originated at the Fort Detrick lab, escaped into the wild due to lax safety precautions and infected military personnel at the base.
US expert Dennis Etler shared his views with Eurasia Diary regarding the spread of Coronavirus-COVID-19 in the world as well as the role of the United States in the origination of this terrible disease.
"Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson has raised the question as to whether the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) actually originated in the US, not China. His suggestion has raised hackles in the US media and government. Zhao, however, has not accused Washington of launching a bio-weapon attack against China, he has just raised some pertinent questions that need to be answered.
Using a contagious virus as a bio-weapon makes no strategic sense. It would and obviously did backfire if the intent was to derail China's economy. In the long-run it will do the exact opposite, it will ruin the Western economies and strengthen China's economy. The modelers in the "deep state” would surely understand this. The logic of launching a viral attack creating a pandemic thus doesn't make much strategic sense.
But there is countervailing evidence that the virus itself had its origins outside of China;
1) In August 2019 the bio-weapons lab at Fort Detrick was shut down because of safety concerns. One of the special agents being researched there was the SARS-CoV coronavirus. It seems that waste water from the plant was contaminated. So, there is a potential source for a SARS-CoV coronavirus (the COVID-19 virus is SARS-CoV-2) that may have escaped into the wild and infected military personnel.
2) Soon thereafter, in October 2019, US military personnel participated in the International Military Games held in Wuhan. It is feasible that some of the roughly 300 US military participating in the games may have been infected with the virus.
3) Genetic evidence shows that the ancestral form of the virus is not found in China but has been found in the USA and Europe.
4) Reports indicate that US military stationed in Afghanistan have had COVID-19-like symptoms but have not been tested for it, suggeting that early carriers of the virus may have mistaken it for the flu since young, healthy military personnel would most likely have very mild or asymptomatic cases of COVID-19 that went unrecognized. This would be particularly true before the disease spread into Wuhan and infected more vulnerable people who got severe symptoms.
5) The US has been very secretive about the outbreak and held classified White House meetings that medical specialists did not attend, because they lacked security clearances, suggesting the intelligence service attendees knew more than they have let on about the virus..
6) On Nov. 18, 2019 a conference on preparations for a coronavirus pandemic (EVENT 201) was held in New York attended by private and public figures. Nonetheless, Washington has feigned total ignorance of the potential for any impending pandemic.
There are other unsubstantiated claims that have circulated on-line, but that doesn't take away from the evidence discussed above.
The conclusion seems to be that the SARS-CoV-2 virus may have originated at the Fort Detrick lab, escaped into the wild due to lax safety precautions and infected military personnel at the base. The virus then spread within the military, mutated into a number of haplotypes and was introduced to Wuhan during the International Military Games,
No conspiracy, but typical lax security and poor procedures by the US military that led to the virus being spread in Wuhan, leading to the local epidemic and the subsequent global pandemic.
The above evidence should not be dismissed out of hand, as it should be read and investigated by a neutral international team of forensic experts."
Картинки по запросу
Dennis Etler is an expert on Chinese Studies. Mr Etler holds a doctorate in anthropology from the University of California, Berkley. He conducted archaeological and anthropological research in China throughout the 1980s and 1990s and taught at the college and university level for over 35 years.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus may have originated at the Fort Detrick lab, escaped into the wild due to lax safety precautions and infected military personnel at the base _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
The government has passed all stages of its 329-page emergency bill through the House of Commons.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock told MPs the emergency legislation will allow "extraordinary measures" never seen in peace time in the UK.
The bill has cleared the House of Lords, and will become law shortly.
What does the legislation include?
The bill gives the government wide-ranging powers unlike any other recent legislation.
Mr Hancock has stressed that the powers in the bill would only be used "when strictly necessary" and would remain in force only for as long as required to respond to the crisis.
More coronavirus myths to ignore
When will the pandemic end?
Five reasons to find hope
Workforce
Speaking in the Commons, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said 7,563 recently retired clinicians had so far "answered the call" to return to work to help with the emergency.
He told MPs that the returnees included nurses, midwives, paramedics and social workers - adding that priority would be given to ensure their training was up to date and they were fully insured.
Easing pressure
There are multiple sections aimed at reducing the pressure on other frontline sectors, for example by relaxing rules around detention under mental health laws and increasing the use of audio and video links in courts.
This category of measures shows just how wide the subject matters range.
Organisations could be required to provide space or resources for the storage or management of dead bodies, while rules relating to investigatory powers will be relaxed while the law is in force.
Limiting contact
One of the more high-profile measures in the bill is the power to restrict events and shut down premises such as pubs.
The government initially appeared to be relying on the goodwill of landlords and other business owners to comply, with the implied threat of action through local licensing powers, but the bill will give them sweeping powers to force shutdowns.
If UK and devolved ministers decide an event or venue poses a threat to public health, the owner of a venue or an organiser of the event can be forced to cancel, close down or restrict access.
Failure to do so could result in a fine.
The government introduced secondary legislation to this effect on Monday, so the bill will streamline and clarify the law.
Similarly, the government has decided to use secondary legislation to enforce the new social distancing rules, announced by the prime minister of Monday evening.
Using secondary legislation allows ministers to enforce new rules without waiting for the full bill to pass. They can do so using powers included in legislation passed in 1984.
Controlling borders
Once the bill passes, officials will have the power to close the borders in the event that the Border Force is under intense pressure due to staffing shortages.
It also puts into law powers to isolate or detain individuals who are judged to be a risk to containing the spread of Covid-19.
Sick pay
Since the outbreak of coronavirus, there has been pressure on the government to support workers who are unable to work during the crisis.
To support businesses, the bill will allow employers to reclaim statutory sick pay funds from HMRC to help with the burden of increased staff absence. For workers, it will scrap the three-day waiting period so that they can receive the payments from the day they stop working.
Are MPs concerned about the bill?
Following pressure from Tory MPs, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the bill would be debated and voted on every six months to ensure Parliament was "content with its continuation".
Acknowledging the "difficult" powers being sought by ministers were "unprecedented in peacetime", he insisted they would be "relinquished" as soon as the threat to the UK had passed.
A succession of Conservative MPs welcomed the move but sought assurances that the measures would only apply to fighting the virus.
Tom Tugendhat expressed concern that the powers could - in different circumstances - be used in a "malicious fashion".
David Davis sought reassurances that individual elements of the bill could be removed if they were not working as intended, while Steve Baker called for a sunset clause - when the bill would automatically expire - of one rather than two years.
Other MPs are angry about the measures introduced to protect renters from eviction after the prime minister promised to address fears.
Labour's shadow Housing Secretary John Healey criticised a government amendment passed on Monday that extended the eviction warning period to three months, tweeting: "This legislation does not stop people losing their homes as a result of coronavirus, just gives them some extra time to pack their bags."
Will anything in the bill be changed?
Labour's shadow Health Secretary Jonathan Ashworth said no MPs "came into this House" to give powers of this kind to the executive, "curtailing some of the basic freedoms our forebears fought for and we take for granted".
While Labour believed unprecedented measures were now needed to "save lives and protect our communities", he said the measures would "chill every Liberal in the House" and it only offered its support with a "heavy heart".
However, he said the bill required careful scrutiny to ensure the "quite extraordinary" powers were not abused, particularly in changes to rules on mental health sectioning and the provision of social care.
The bill, he warned, would give councils the power to "downgrade" care for the disabled and the elderly and that this should be subject to a review by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission.
While councils should be able to prioritise those with the greatest needs in the event of staff shortages, "what no-one of us wants to see is the legal minimum of support become the default".
When will it all come in to force?
Any legislation has to pass to the House of Lords once it has cleared the Commons. The government has no majority on the red benches, so peers could cause some problems if they want to make changes to the bill.
It is more likely that ministers will introduce their own amendments to correct or clarify some of the measures.
If they do, this would probably happen on Wednesday, at report stage. It could return to MPs immediately if they in session.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWyO9Xq-ByI
The US Embassy to Tbilisi transports frozen human blood and pathogens as diplomatic cargo. Internal documents, leaked to me by Georgian insiders, implicate US scientists in the transportation of and experimenting on pathogens under diplomatic cover. According to these documents, Pentagon scientists have been deployed to the Republic of Georgia and have been given diplomatic immunity to research deadly diseases and biting insects at the Lugar Center – the Pentagon biolaboratory in Georgia’s capital Tbilisi. The military facility is just one of the many Pentagon biolaboratories in 25 countries across the world
https://dilyana.bg/diplomatic-viruses/ _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
TODAY The emergency Coronavirus Bill will be rushed through as law. Today sees the 2nd reading, if passed it will immediately proceed to 3rd and on. It contains the most draconian powers ever proposed in peace-time Britain. It will be rushed through Parliament and the powers will last two years. The powers will affect your freedom and take away your rights.
Forced detention and isolation can be of anyone, including children, and for any amount of time.
Authorities can FORCEABLY take biological samples from your body.
There’s no clear access to legal rights from as-yet unidentified isolation facilities.
Powers last up to 2.5 years
Lockdown powers could prevent protests against measures.
State surveillance safeguards weakened.
Protections from forced detainment and treatment under Mental Health Act lowered.
Cremations can be enforced against personal and religious wishes.
Changes to the court system. Registration of deaths.
No inquests into suspicious deaths! No requirement for any medical certification for burials or cremations!
It also indemnifies the health service should they fail for what ever reason to provide care.
The most frightening part. Only one medical 'officer' is required to sign off COMPULSORY TREATMENT ORDER which means... in the real world you can be forced to accept medication. Or held down and injected with whatever is seen fit. THAT is the biggest and worst threat to your own freedoms. Schedule 8 Pt1.
Local Authorities will now be exempted from compliance with their duties under The Care Act 2014. Schedule 11.
The BBC wont be telling you that bit.
So. If someone dies in police custody or any type of custody they can simply dispose of the body without any paperwork medical exam or certification or inquest.
Forget what that box in the corner of your room is 'programming' you with. Get the facts.
This is a terrible day for freedoms.
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
~ Joseph Goebbels
https://media.urmedium.com/video/2020/03/27/637209282343875808video.mp 4 _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
The hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman turned a $27 million position into a $2.6 billion windfall as the coronavirus outbreak dragged stocks to multiyear lows and threatened deep economic recession.
Pershing Square Capital Management turned to credit protection on investment-grade and high-yield bond indexes to bet on an increased risk of corporate default.
The multibillion-dollar profit offset losses elsewhere in Ackman's portfolio and drove a 7.9% gain in March through Tuesday's close for Pershing Square's public fund, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The fund has since used its profits to bolster bets on Berkshire Hathaway, Hilton, Lowe's, Restaurant Brands International, and Agilent.
Visit the Business Insider homepage for more stories.
Pershing Square Capital Management CEO Bill Ackman minted a multibillion-dollar profit as coronavirus fears tanked US stocks.
The hedge-fund billionaire turned a $27 million position into $2.6 billion through defensive hedge bets, a Wednesday letter to investors said. The profit offset losses elsewhere in the firm's portfolio and helped Ackman's public fund land a 7.9% gain in March through Tuesday's close, The Wall Street Journal reported. The S&P 500 slid 17% over the same period.
Pershing Square used credit protection on investment-grade and high-yield bond indexes to land the massive profits. The assets rise in value as the odds of corporate defaults increase. As measures to combat the virus outbreak cut into economic activity, corporate bond ratings tanked, and investors feared the worst.
The fund was able to purchase the investment vehicles about a month ago "at near-all-time tight levels of credit spreads," so the risk of loss was "minimal at the time of purchase," Ackman wrote.
Read more: The world's biggest wealth manager expects the worst of the coronavirus to be over in the US by May — and lists 5 ways investors should prepare for the recovery now
The hedge fund began liquidating its protective bets last week after unprecedented action from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department shifted sentiment toward corporate credit health. Ackman fully exited the position on Monday, the same day the US central bank announced it would begin buying corporate bonds to prop up the battered market.
Ackman has since used the profits to bolster Pershing Square's investments in Berkshire Hathaway, Hilton, Lowe's, Restaurant Brands International, and Agilent. The fund also reestablished a stake in Starbucks after selling its position in January.
The fund founder used Twitter and an appearance on CNBC last week to predict that the coronavirus outbreak would cause economic turmoil if the US didn't institute a 30-day shutdown.
Ackman urged CEOs of his portfolio companies to take precautions as "hell is coming" and said a national stay-at-home order was "the only answer" for saving the economy. Markets slid further through the March 18 session during Ackman's emotional CNBC interview.
Read more: Bill Miller's fund crushed the market for a record 15 straight years. He told us his strategy for the coronavirus meltdown, calling it 'one of the five great buying opportunities of my lifetime'
After commentators accused him of fearmongering and intentionally driving markets lower, the investor said that he was "confident the president will do the right thing."
Ackman said in his Wednesday letter that he still believes a monthlong shutdown is necessary and that the US "can be reopened carefully as China has so far successfully done" once the lockdown is over.
Police said members of the public should not drive to walk dogs or exercise. But the Guardian checked with the Cabinet Office, which is overseeing restrictions on movement, who said guidelines do not prohibit driving somewhere for exercise or dog walking.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/26/uk-police-use-drones-and -roadblocks-to-enforce-lockdown _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
PLEASE SHARE. Michel Chossudovsky: "Of significance, Hackett confirmed that the project to develop a vaccine commenced not only prior to the discovery and identification of the coronavirus (January 2020) but several months prior to the October 2019 simulation exercise... It’s called the ID2020 Agenda, which, according to Peter Koenig constitutes “an electronic ID program that uses generalized vaccination as a platform for digital identity”... The Founding Partners of ID2020 are Microsoft, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) among others.
"It is worth noting the timeline: The ID2020 Alliance held their Summit in New York, entitled “Rising to the Good ID Challenge”, on September 19,2020, exactly one month prior to nCov-2019 simulation exercise entitled Event 201 at John Hopkins in Baltimore... ID2020 is part of a “World Governance” project which, if applied, would roll out the contours of what some analysts have described as a Global Police State encompassing through vaccination the personal details of several billion people Worldwide." Readers/viewers of Drugs as Weapons... may remember that the Rockefeller Foundation was behind the Eugenics movement that ruled the U.S. from 1910 to WWII when Nazi Germany put it out of vogue.
The tendency is towards a Worldwide lockdown spearheaded by fear and media disinformation. Currently, hundreds of millions of people Worldwide are under lockdown.
What is the next step in the evolution of the COV-19 Crisis?
A coronavirus vaccine program was announced at Davos at the World Economic Forum (21-24 January) barely 2 weeks after the cornonavirus was identified by the Chinese authorities on January 7.
The lead entity for the novel coronavirus vaccine initiative is the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) an organization sponsored and financed by the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Note the chronology: The development of the 2019 nCoV vaccine was announced at the Davos World Economic Forum (WEF) a week prior to the official launching by the WHO of a Worldwide Public Health Emergency (January 30) at a time when the number of “confirmed cases” Worldwide (outside China) was 150 (including 6 in the US).
CEPI is seeking a “monopoly” role in the vaccination business the objective of which is a “global vaccine project”, in partnership with a large number of “candidates”. It announced funding for its existing partnership with Inovio and The University of Queensland (Australia). In addition, CEPI confirmed (January 23) its contract with Moderna, Inc. and the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has been instrumental in waging the fear and panic campaign across America: “Ten Times Worse than Seasonal Flu”.
According to a report of the WHO pertaining to China’s epidemic (which has currently been resolved):
The most commonly reported symptoms [of COVID-19] included fever, dry cough, and shortness of breath, and most patients (80%) experienced mild illness. Approximately 14% experienced severe disease and 5% were critically ill. Early reports suggest that illness severity is associated with age (>60 years old) and co-morbid disease. (largely basing on WHO’s assessment of COVID-19 in China)
Screenshot The Hill, March 19, 2020
The Central Role of CEPI
CEPI is dealing simultaneously with several pharmaceutical companies. The Moderna- NIAID in all likelihood is slated to implement the COV-19 vaccine in the US.
On January 31st, the day following the WHO’s official launching of the pandemic and Trump’s decision to curtail air travel with China, CEPI announced its partnership with CureVac AG, a German-based biopharmaceutical company. A few days later, in early February, CEPI “announced that major vaccine manufacturer GSK would allow its proprietary adjuvants— compounds that boost the effectiveness of vaccines — to be used in the response”.
There are many “potential vaccines in the pipeline” with “dozens of research groups around the world racing to create a vaccine against COVID-19”.
In turn the EU and the US are currently competing for the vaccine markets on behalf of powerful pharmaceutical conglomerates, with the European Commission “offering up to €80 million in financial support to the CureVac AG” after it was reported that Trump “was attempting to secure exclusive access to a COVID-19 vaccine it is developing”, under the auspices of NIAID headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci.
The October 2019 Coronavirus Event 201 Simulation Exercise
The coronavirus was initially named 2019-nCoV by CEPI and the WHO: exactly the same name as that adopted in the WEF-Gates-John Hopkins Event 201 pertaining to a coronavirus simulation exercise held in Baltimore in mid October 2019.
The Event 201 John Hopkins simulation addressed the development of an effective vaccine in response to millions of cases (in the October 2019 simulation) of the 2019 nCoV. The simulation announced a scenario in which the entire population of the planet would be affected. “During the initial months of the pandemic, the cumulative number of cases [in the simulation] increases exponentially, doubling every week. And as the cases and deaths accumulate, the economic and societal consequences become increasingly severe.”
The scenario ends at the 18-month point, with 65 million deaths. The pandemic is beginning to slow due to the decreasing number of susceptible people. The pandemic will continue at some rate until there is an effective vaccine or until 80-90 % of the global population has been exposed. From that point on, it is likely to be an endemic childhood disease.
The COV-19 Global Vaccination Program
CEPI (on behalf of Gates-WEF, which funded the simulation exercise) is currently playing a key role in a large scale (global?) vaccination program in partnership with biotech companies, Big Pharma, government agencies as well as university laboratories.
.
“We’re having conversations with a broad array of potential partners”.
And critical to those conversations is: What’s the plan to make very large quantities of vaccine within a time frame that is potentially relevant to what people seem to be increasingly certain will be a pandemic, if it isn’t already there? …” [Richard Hatchett, CEPI CEO in interview with stat.news.com]. …
The underlying focus is to develop a global vaccine.
And part of that was doing a global survey of manufacturing capacity to think about where we wanted to plant the manufacturing of any successful products we were able to bring forward.
Of significance, Hackett confirmed that the project to develop a vaccine commenced not only prior to the discovery and identification of the coronavirus (January 2020) but several months prior to the October 2019 simulation exercise.
“We did that in the last year or so. … We are using the information that we have collected and have that team now thinking about opportunities for scaling vaccines of various different types. That is a work in progress. For some of the technologies the tech transfer [to a manufacturer] may be something that could be done in a time frame that was pertinent to the epidemic, potentially.
I think it is going to be really important to engage those folks who have access to really substantial production capacity. And having the big producers at the table — because of their depth, because of their experience, because of their internal resources — would be very, very important.
The candidate vaccines will be very, very quick. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of NIAID [who has been spreading panic on network TV], is out in public as saying he thinks the clinical trial for the Moderna vaccine may be as early as the spring. (emphasis added)
What is unfolding in real life is in some regards similar to the October 2019 simulation exercise at John Hopkins. The scenario is how to produce millions of vaccine shots on the presumption that the pandemic will spread.
The CEPI sponsored vaccine conglomerates had already planned their investments well in advance of the global Worldwide health emergency.
I [Hackett] think part of the general strategy is to have a large number of candidates. [and] you want to have enough candidates that at least some of them are moving rapidly through the process.
And then for each candidate, you need to ask yourself the question: How do you produce that? … [And] how are you going to get to that point with production at a scale that is meaningful in the context of a disease that is going to infect the whole of society? (Interview conducted by Helen Branswell, statsnews, February 3, 2020)
Moderna Inc
Moderna Inc based in Seattle is one of several candidates involved and supported by CEPI.
Moderna announced on February 24th the development of “an experimental mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, known as mRNA-1273″. “The initial batch of the vaccine has already been shipped to U.S. government researchers from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)” headed by Dr. Antony Fauci.
While Moderna Inc initially stated that the first clinical trials would commence in late April, tests involving human volunteers started in mid-March in Seattle:
Researchers in Seattle gave the first shot to the first person in a test of an experimental coronavirus vaccine Monday — leading off a worldwide hunt for protection even as the pandemic surges. …
Some of the study’s carefully chosen healthy volunteers, ages 18 to 55, will get higher dosages than others to test how strong the inoculations should be. Scientists will check for any side effects and draw blood samples to test if the vaccine is revving up the immune system, looking for encouraging clues like the NIH earlier found in vaccinated mice.
“We don’t know whether this vaccine will induce an immune response, or whether it will be safe. That’s why we’re doing a trial,” Jackson stressed. “It’s not at the stage where it would be possible or prudent to give it to the general population.” (FOX news local)
CEPI’s nCoV-2019 Global Vaccine and the ID2020 Digital Identity Platform
While CEPI announced the launching of a global vaccine at the Davos World Economic Forum, another important and related endeavor was underway. It’s called the ID2020 Agenda, which, according to Peter Koenig constitutes “an electronic ID program that uses generalized vaccination as a platform for digital identity”.
“The program harnesses existing birth registration and vaccination operations to provide newborns with a portable and persistent biometrically-linked digital identity”. (Peter Koenig, March 2020)
The Founding Partners of ID2020 are Microsoft, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) among others.
It is worth noting the timeline: The ID2020 Alliance held their Summit in New York, entitled “Rising to the Good ID Challenge”, on September 19,2020, exactly one month prior to nCov-2019 simulation exercise entitled Event 201 at John Hopkins in Baltimore.
Is it just a coincidence that ID2020 is being rolled out at the onset of what the WHO calls a Pandemic? – Or is a pandemic needed to ‘roll out’ the multiple devastating programs of ID2020? (Peter Koenig, March 2020)
ID2020 is part of a “World Governance” project which, if applied, would roll out the contours of what some analysts have described as a Global Police State encompassing through vaccination the personal details of several billion people Worldwide.
In the Wake of the Lockdown
The fear campaign will continue in the wake of the lockdown. Will the hardships of the economic and social crisis encourage people to get vaccinated?
To implement the Global Vaccine, the propaganda campaign must continue. The Truth must be suppressed. These are their “guidelines”, which must be confronted and challenged.
The main actors including CEPI will require the firm endorsement of the WHO (which they control), a green light from the scientific community as well bold statements by corrupt politicians.
Moreover, they will have to suppress information and analysis on the features of the virus, how it can be cured (without a vaccine), which is currently the object of debate by virologists and physicians in several countries including the US.
Remember the 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic when Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology compared the H1N1 pandemic to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic while reassuring the public that the latter was more deadly. (CBC: Get swine flu vaccine ready: U.S. advisers)
Based on incomplete and scanty data, the WHO Director General predicted with authority that: “as many as 2 billion people could become infected over the next two years — nearly one-third of the world population.” (World Health Organization as reported by the Western media, July 2009).
It was a multibillion bonanza for Big Pharma supported by the WHO’s Director-General Margaret Chan.
In a subsequent statement she confirmed that:
“Vaccine makers could produce 4.9 billion pandemic flu shots per year in the best-case scenario”,Margaret Chan, Director-General, World Health Organization (WHO), quoted by Reuters, 21 July 2009).
“Swine flu could strike up to 40 percent of Americans over the next two years and as many as several hundred thousand could die if a vaccine campaign and other measures aren’t successful.” (Official Statement of Obama Administration, Associated Press, 24 July 2009).
There was no pandemic affecting 2 billion people… Millions of doses of swine flu vaccine had been ordered by national governments from Big Pharma. Millions of vaccine doses were subsequently destroyed: a financial bonanza for Big Pharma, an expenditure crisis for national governments.
There was no investigation into who was behind this multibillion fraud. Several critics said that the H1N1 Pandemic was “Fake”
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), a human rights watchdog, is publicly investigating the WHO’s motives in declaring a pandemic. Indeed, the chairman of its influential health committee, epidemiologist Wolfgang Wodarg, has declared that the “false pandemic” is “one of the greatest medicine scandals of the century.” (Forbes, February 10, 2010)
We are currently in a Lockdown, We have time to reflect. There are important lessons to be learnt from the 2009 H1N1 Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic is far more serious and diabolical than the 2009 H1N1. The COV-19 pandemic has provided a pretext and a justification for destabilizing the economies of entire countries, impoverishing large sectors of the World population. Unprecedented in modern history.
And it is important that we act cohesively and in solidarity with those who are victims of this crisis. People’s lives are in a freefall and their purchasing power has been destroyed. What kind of twisted social structure awaits us in the wake of the lockdown?
Can we trust the World Health Organization (WHO) and the powerful economic interest groups behind it.
Can we trust the main actors behind the multibillion dollar global vaccination project?
Can we trust the Western media which has led the fear campaign? Disinformation sustains the lies and fabrications. Can we trust our “corrupt” governments? Our national economy has been devastated.
This is an act of “economic warfare” against humanity.
The original source of this article is Global Research _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Sat Mar 28, 2020 12:28 am Post subject:
'Be kind', or be little Hitlers? How long will 'CoVid-19 lockdown' last? Are Coronavirus Act emergency powers justified? Will lockdown bankrupt 1000s of small and medium businesses? Event 201 and ID 2020, can Bill Gates' 'human microchip' beat Covid19? 'Apocalyptic atmosphere' with a hidden agenda? BCfm Politics Show Dialect special presented from New Zealand by Tony Gosling
A recent study conducted by a group of Chinese scientists have found further genome evidence to prove that the seafood market in Wuhan is not the source of the novel coronavirus – a claim first made in a paper published on The Lancet.
The study, led by researchers from Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden of Chinese Academy of Sciences, South China Agricultural University and Chinese Institute for Brain Research, was published on ChinaXiv on Saturday in a pre-print version without peer review.
Per the study, genetic data suggests the virus was introduced from elsewhere and had already circulated widely among humans in Wuhan before December 2019, probably beginning in mid to late November.
The crowded seafood market facilitated the virus transmission to buyers and spread to the whole city on a large scale in early December 2019, corresponding to the estimated population expansion time, the study shows.
Screenshot from ChinaXiv.
Researchers collected the genome-wide data from 93 new coronavirus samples shared on the GISAID EpiFlu, an international database that stores information about influenza virus, to study the evolution and human-to-human transmission of the virus over the past two months.
Among the 93 samples which were taken from 12 countries across four continents: 54 were collected from China before January 22 and the rest of the 39 samples were taken from Australia, France, Japan and the U.S. after the said date.
Screenshot from the paper.
Moreover, two sudden population expansion of the new coronavirus were found in the study before February 12, with the latest expansion date being January 6, when the National Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a second-level emergency response.
Researchers said the response just served as a warning but failed to arise wider public attention, otherwise the number of cases spreading nationally and globally in mid-to-late January would have been lowered.
Evolutionary relationships and geographical distribution of 58 haplotypes of SARS-CoV-2 (A, B). Evolutionary paths (C) of haplotypes and possible transmission and spreading routes (D) were also inferred based on evolutionary analyses and epidemiologic research. /Figure from research paper
The mysterious source of the novel coronavirus outbreak has led to a divide among scientists worldwide.
Read more:
Conflicting studies on source of coronavirus divide scientists
With the total number of confirmed cases worldwide climbing to over 77,000, finding the source of the outbreak has become one of the most pressing tasks and is crucial to preventing and controlling future outbreaks of the virus.
China has become an epicenter for disease outbreaks, and the problem lies in its food supply.
There have now been over 28,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus in at least 25 countries, with 563 deaths, including ones in Hong Kong and the Philippines. And all indications point to the virus breaking out in a seafood wet market in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
In 2019, China ranked 51st out of 195 countries on the Global Health Security Index for its ability to prevent and respond to disease outbreaks. While this may signal that the country is more apt to deal with outbreaks than much of the rest of the world, China—as the world’s most populous country and an economic superpower—still has significant strides to make in improving public health and safety.
While the coronavirus is the first novel disease outbreak in China in years to infect humans, in the recent past China has suffered disease outbreaks among its livestock. African Swine Fever, for instance, has devastated China’s pig population since 2018, reducing the number of pigs there by 40% and straining the country’s food supply. And just last week, China reportedly culled 18,000 chickens after finding cases of bird flu.
To be clear, the diseases share little in common genetically, according to Linda Saif, a professor in food animal health at Ohio State University, and coronavirus is the only one of these currently known to spread between and infect humans. Yet the outbreaks all point to a similar culprit: persisting problems in China’s food supply.
Amid the coronavirus crisis, China’s wet markets—featuring produce and meats and sometimes live animals—have received significant attention. Yet a seismic shift such as closing down these markets altogether might not be the answer to better controlling disease in the long term, experts say. Rather, what’s required is more regulatory enforcement on a local level, a tricky prospect for a country where power is increasingly centralized.
China’s food market
As China has transformed into a major world power in the last several decades, feeding the country of 1.4 billion has proved a challenge of outsize proportions.
The country long depended on a network of small farmers for its food; land was redistributed to individual households under Chairman Mao Zedong in the 1970s. More recently, particularly in the last few years, China has aimed to industrialize its food system.
Protestors in Hong Kong gather in February to oppose government plans to convert a local heritage site into a quarantine camp amid the outbreak of the novel coronavirus which began in the central Chinese city of Wuhan.
PHILIP FONG/AFP via Getty Images
“The government in China has been making long-term pushes toward agriculture modernization including large scale farms for many years now,” said Darin Friedrichs, senior Asia commodity analyst at INTL FCStone in Shanghai.
Beijing promoted buying food from supermarkets after the spread of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which emerged from an animal market in Guangzhou. After an avian influenza outbreak in 2013, the government tried unsuccessfully to ban wet markets altogether, but was forced to reopen many of them when more dangerous black markets popped up in their place.
But scandals involving deadly infant milk powder, fake seaweed, and fraudulent shrimp have undermined the modernization efforts by compromising consumers’ confidence in mass food production. Chinese consumers continue to go to wet markets in cities across China to access fresher, cheaper meat and produce, according to Si Zhenzhong, an expert in food security and safety in China at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.
Wet markets remain a viable resource for small farmers who aren’t able to sell to large supermarket chains, said Friedrichs, “and plenty of consumers have a preference towards buying at their local wet market.” In fact, the markets account for up to half of all of China’s food goods. The day-to-day commodities that are the markets’ biggest sellers don’t necessarily pose a “disease risk.” The biggest danger comes from the live animals sometimes sold in the markets, Friedrichs said. Diseases can spread between animals during transport, and then to humans at the markets themselves, which makes the whole trade a breeding ground for disease.
Concern In China As Mystery Virus Spreads
A Chinese man wears a protective mask as he walks in an empty commercial street in Beijing, China, in February. Much of the country has been on lockdown as a virus, believed to have started in a Wuhan wet market, sweeps the country.
Kevin Frayer—Getty Images
China has temporarily banned the sale of wild animals. Christian Walzer, chief global veterinarian for the Wildlife Conservation Society, says sales should be stopped permanently.
“The pattern (of disease outbreaks) will keep repeating itself until we ban, not only in China, but in other countries, the sale of wildlife, specifically for food and in food markets,” said Walzer.
Wild animals can carry diseases that do not ordinarily come into contact with humans, according to Walzer. Another expert, Jeroen Dewulf, a veterinarian at Ghent University in Belgium, told the Guardian that “live animals are the largest source of infection (in spreading diseases),” because it’s the most efficient way to introduce novel diseases to humans.
It seems that China might be taking these calls more seriously. On Monday, President Xi Jinping released a statement vowing to “resolutely ban and severely crack down on illegal wildlife markets and trade.”
But simply banning wildlife sales and policing wet markets might pose new problems, such as black markets for such goods. According to some experts, China needs to better enforce its existing regulations, like more regular health and safety inspections from China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, to more effectively control disease spread.
“What ‘wet markets’ in China require is more scientific and evidence-based regulation, rather than being abolished and driven underground,” anthropologists Christos Lynteris and Lyle Fearnley, who have studied disease outbreaks in China, argued in a recent piece for The Conversation.
Local challenges
But enforcing regulations on a local level is complicated by the growing influence of China’s central government. Local leaders are incentivized to appease Beijing, rather than raise red flags. Local officials in Wuhan have come under fire for not communicating the disease’s severity early enough, and senior party officials admitted to “shortcomings and deficiencies” in the city’s early response to the outbreak.
China’s entire state apparatus now appears fully mobilized behind containing the disease: an area with a population equal to California and New York State combined is under complete lockdown, new hospitals are being built in a matter of days, and much of the country is paralyzed by travel restrictions.
For those following African Swine Fever in the last few years, this might be a familiar story. The central government announced sweeping measures to cull hundreds of millions of pigs (and even worked with tech firms to roll out pig facial recognition technology to track sick animals) after the disease broke out in August 2018, yet today the problem remains as acute as ever. It is a worldwide epidemic that’s wiped out up to a quarter of the world’s pigs.
Edgar Wayne Johnson of Enable Ag-Tech Consulting in Beijing argues that the government “sat on [its] hands in the early stages” of the swine fever, and is still struggling to enforce local regulations.
The government is “looking very seriously” at making vaccinations compulsory for state school pupils and has taken advice on how such a law could work, the health secretary has said.
Matt Hancock, a vehement critic of anti-vaccination campaigners, has previously suggested such a plan. Speaking at a fringe event at the Conservative party conference, he said he was “very worried” by falling vaccination rates, indicating the government could act soon.
“I’ve said before that we should be open-minded, and frankly, what I’d say is that when the state provides services to people then it’s a two-way street – you’ve got to take your responsibilities, too,” Hancock told the Q&A session hosted by the Huffington Post.
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“So I think there’s a very strong argument for having compulsory vaccinations for children when they go to school, because otherwise they’re putting other children at risk.
“Then I’d want to make it very easy if the children do arrive at school not vaccinated, simply to get vaccinated, and make it the norm. But I think there’s a very strong argument for movement to compulsory vaccination, and I think the public would back us.”
Several US states, including California, have introduced such laws for state school pupils but also faced lengthy legal challenges.
Asked about such potential opposition in the UK, Hancock said: “Actually, I’ve received advice inside government this week on how we might go about it, and I’m looking very seriously at it.”
The UK has lost its official measles-free country status from the World Health Organization after a gradual fall in rates of MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) immunisation.
Figures released earlier this week showed that for vaccinations administered at the ages of 12 months, 24 months and five years, there has been a marked decline for 13 different diseases, including whooping cough, diphtheria and meningitis.
Hancock said this was “a serious problem” and added: “It’s unbelievable, I think, that Britain has lost its measles-free status, and it should be a real wake-up call. I think that the social media companies have got a lot to answer for, because they allow the spread of anti-vaccine messages.
“I will do whatever I can – the science is absolutely clear and settled on the importance of vaccination. And the worst thing is that if you don’t vaccinate your child, and you can, then the person you’re putting at risk is not only your child but it’s also the child who can’t be vaccinated for medical reasons.”
Hancock said that vaccination rates below 95% lost the so-called herd immunity effect, and thus put at risk children unable to be vaccinated, for example those undergoing treatment for cancer.
He added: “You’ve got to make sure the system would work, because some children can’t be vaccinated and some may hold very strong religious convictions that you’d want to take into account, but frankly, the proportion of people in either of these categories is tiny, compared to the 7% or 8% now who don’t get vaccinated.”
Hancock first raised the idea of compulsory vaccinations in May, saying he did not wish to do it but might be forced to act if no other solutions to improve take-up rates could be found.
He said: “Those who have promoted the anti-vaccination myth are morally reprehensible, deeply irresponsible and have blood on their hands.”
Confidence in the MMR vaccination seems to have dropped at least partly in response to social media misinformation and scare stories. The discredited claims of Andrew Wakefield, who in 1998 theorised that the jab was linked to autism, are widely circulated.
By Jon Hall , in Current Events on January 25, 2020 . Tagged width: Coronavirus , L , Wuhan
During the start of Lunar New Year celebrations, a mystery virus is spreading and infecting throughout China.
As for official statistics, 54 people in the mainland have died and over 1,700 people (as of writing) have been sickened. Although unverified video claims up to 90,000 have already been infected by the coronavirus.
A laboratory in Wuhan, China was cleared to work with the most dangerous pathogens in the world in 2017. Once the outbreak of the coronavirus went public, it was reported that the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market (just 8 miles from the lab) was the culprit of the virus, where wild (and often illegal) animals are sold. However, no link with the market and Patient Zero were found.
The market likely had some hand in transmitting the virus, given its unsanitary conditions and high volume of human traffic, but the coincidence of the Wuhan lab’s location becomes even more disconcerting when viewed in light of the currently “unrelated” events.
In what has to be bizarre coincidence, in just November of last year, the Gates Foundation held a simulation called “Event 201”. Event 201 simulated an outbreak of a “zoonotic “coronavirus”. “Zoonatic” would be the spread of disease through animals (vertebrates).
Let’s study how the scenario concluded:
The scenario ends at the 18-month point, with 65 million deaths. The pandemic is beginning to slow due to the decreasing number of susceptible people. The pandemic will continue at some rate until there is an effective vaccine or until 80-90 % of the global population has been exposed. From that point on, it is likely to be an endemic childhood disease.
Other interesting tidbits from the simulation:
“Although at first some countries are able to control it, it continues to spread and be reintroduced, and eventually no country can maintain control“.
“There is no possibility of a vaccine being available in the first year“.
“Since the whole human population is susceptible, during the initial months of the pandemic, the cumulative number of cases increases exponentially, doubling every week“.
2 cases of the coronavirus have been confirmed in the U.S. by the CDC. President Xi of China has warned that the outbreak is accelerating and says the country is facing a grave situation.
In the months prior to the most ferocious stock market crash in history and the eruption of the biggest public health crisis of our generation, we witnessed the biggest exodus of corporate CEOs that we have ever seen.
And as you will see below, corporate insiders also sold off billions of dollars worth of shares in their own companies just before the stock market imploded.
In life, timing can be everything, and sometimes people simply get lucky. But it does seem odd that so many among the corporate elite would be so exceedingly “lucky” all at the same time. In this article I am not claiming to know the motivations of any of these individuals, but I am pointing out certain patterns that I believe are worth investigating. One financial publication is using the phrase “the great CEO exodus” to describe the phenomenon that we have been witnessing.
It all started last year when chief executives started resigning in numbers unlike anything that we have ever seen before. The following was published by NBC News last November… Chief executives are leaving in record numbers this year, with more than 1,332 stepping aside in the period from January through the end of October, according to new data released on Wednesday.
While it’s not unusual to see CEOs fleeing in the middle of a recession, it is noteworthy to see such a rash of executive exits amid robust corporate earnings and record stock market highs. Last month, 172 chief executives left their jobs, according to executive placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. It’s the highest monthly number on record, and the year-to-date total outpaces even the wave of executive exits during the financial crisis.
By the end of the year, an all-time record high 1,480 CEOs had left their posts. But to most people it seemed like the good times were still rolling at the end of 2019. Corporate profits were rising and the stock market was setting record high after record high. Yes, there were lots of signs that the global economy was really slowing down, but most experts were not forecasting an imminent recession.
So why did so many chief executives suddenly decide that it was time to move on?
The following are just a few of the big name CEOs that chose to step down in 2019…
Dennis Muilenburg — Boeing
United Airlines — Oscar Munoz
Alphabet — Larry Page
Gap — Art Peck
McDonald’s — Steve Easterbrook
Wells Fargo — Tim Sloan
Under Armour — Kevin Plank
PG&E — Geisha Williams
Kraft Heinz — Bernardo Hees
HP — Dion Weisler
Bed, Bath & Beyond — Steven Temares
Warner Bros. — Kevin Tsujihara
Best Buy — Hubert Joly
New York Post — Jesse Angelo
Colgate-Palmolive — Ian Cook
RevContent InArticle SOLO
MetLife — Steven Kandarian
eBay — Devin Wenig
Nike — Mark Parker
Of course the mass exodus of chief executives did not end there.
In fact, a whopping 219 CEOs stepped down during the month of January 2020 alone. By then, it was starting to become clear that the coronavirus that was ripping through China could potentially become a major global pandemic, and I certainly can understand why many among the corporate elite would choose to abandon ship at that moment.
Some of these CEOs have made absolutely absurd salaries for many years, and it is much easier to take the money and run than it is to stick around and steer a major corporation through the most difficult global crisis that any of us have ever experienced.
The following are just a few of the well known CEOs that have resigned so far in 2020…
Bob Iger, CEO of Disney
Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM
Harley-Davidson CEO Matt Levatich
T-Mobile’s CEO John Legere
LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner
Mastercard CEO Ajay Banga
Keith Block, co-CEO of Salesforce
Tidjane Thiam, CEO of Credit Suisse
Hulu CEO Randy Freer
It is important for me to say that I do not have any special insight into the personal motivations of any of these individuals, and every situation is different. But I do think that it is quite strange that we have seen such an unprecedented corporate exodus at such a critical moment in our history.
Meanwhile, top corporate executives were dumping billions of dollars worth of shares in their own companies just before the market completely cratered. The following comes from the Wall Street Journal…
“Top executives at U.S.-traded companies sold a total of roughly $9.2 billion in shares of their own companies between the start of February and the end of last week, a Wall Street Journal analysis shows. The selling saved the executives—including many in the financial industry—potential losses totaling $1.9 billion, according to the analysis, as the S&P 500 stock index plunged about 30% from its peak on Feb. 19 through the close of trading March 20.”
In the stock market, you only make money if you get out in time, and many among the corporate elite seem to have impeccable timing. Perhaps they just got really lucky. Or perhaps they were reading my articles and understood that COVID-19 was going to cause the global economy to shut down.
In any event, things worked out really well for those that were able to dump their stocks before it was too late. And it turns out that several members of Congress were also selling stocks just before the market went nuts…
Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California and three of her Senate colleagues reported selling off stocks worth millions of dollars in the days before the coronavirus outbreak crashed the market, according to reports.
The data is listed on a U.S. Senate website containing financial disclosures from Senate members. Of course most ordinary Americans were not so “lucky”, and the financial losses for the country as a whole have been absolutely staggering.
BEIJING/WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - China is withdrawing the press credentials of American journalists at three U.S. newspapers, intensifying a bitter fight between the world’s top two economies that has widened to include the coronavirus outbreak and media freedoms.
Beijing announced on Wednesday what it said was retaliation against U.S. restrictions on Chinese journalists that includes revoking the accreditations of American correspondents with the New York Times (NYT.N), News Corp’s (NWSA.O) Wall Street Journal and Washington Post whose credentials expire by the end of 2020.
The move is a sharp escalation of a dispute that saw Washington last month force Chinese state media firms to register as foreign embassies.
Beijing then expelled three Wall Street Journal correspondents - two Americans and an Australian - following an opinion column by the newspaper that called China the “real sick man of Asia.”
Washington then slashed the number of journalists permitted to work in the United States at four major Chinese state-owned media outlets to 100, from 160 previously. It cited a “deepening crackdown” on independent reporting inside China.
Beijing said the expelled journalists would not be permitted to work in mainland China, Hong Kong or Macau. It said they must hand back their press cards within 10 days.
The expulsion is expected to affect at least 13 journalists, according to the Foreign Correspondents Club of China, which said it “deplores” China’s decision.
China’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a faxed request for comment on how many journalists are affected.
Beijing also said the China branches of the three papers plus the Voice of America broadcaster and Time magazine must “declare in written form information about their staff, finance, operation and real estate in China.”
Journalist attend the daily press briefing of the Chinese Foreign Ministry in Beijing, China, March 18, 2020. REUTERS/Thomas Peter
WAR OF WORDS
The latest development follows a war of words between Washington and Beijing over the outbreak of the new coronavirus, which causes a highly contagious, sometimes fatal, respiratory illness COVID-19.
The virus originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan late last year and has so far killed 7,400 people globally, bringing normal life in many parts of the world to a standstill.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters at a State Department news conference that Beijing’s move on Wednesday would deprive the world and the Chinese people of information in “incredibly challenging” times brought about by the coronavirus.
“I regret China’s decision today to further foreclose the world’s ability to conduct the free press operations that frankly would be really good for the Chinese people,” he said. “This is unfortunate... I hope they’ll reconsider.”
Media executives denounced the move.
“We unequivocally condemn any action by China to expel U.S. reporters,” Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron said in a statement. “The Chinese government’s decision is particularly regrettable because it comes in the midst of an unprecedented global crisis, when clear and reliable information about the international response to COVID-19 is essential.”
Dean Baquet, executive editor at The New York Times, also condemned the decision.
“It is a grave mistake for China to move backwards and cut itself off from several of the world’s top news organizations,” he said.
Matt Murray, editor in chief at The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires, said: “We oppose government interference with a free press anywhere in the world. Our commitment to reporting fully and deeply on China is unchanged.”
Time Editor in Chief and CEO Edward Felsenthal said: “We oppose any effort by the Chinese government or any other government to expel reporters or intimidate those whose job is to provide accurate information, especially during this crucial period for the world.”
A representative of Voice of America was not immediately reachable.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang takes a question from a journalist during the daily press briefing of the Foreign Ministry in Beijing, China, March 18, 2020. REUTERS/Thomas Peter
‘ONE COUNTRY, TWO SYSTEMS’
A striking aspect of Beijing’s move was its decision to bar the journalists from working in Hong Kong and Macau, two semi-autonomous territories of China with their own media accreditation rules. In the past, foreign journalists kicked out of China were allowed to work in Hong Kong.
That raised questions about Hong Kong’s autonomy under the “one country, two systems” agreement that still prevails between the territory and the mainland.
“There’s no precedent for China dictating who can and can’t report from Hong Kong openly,” said Steven Butler, the Committee to Protect Journalists’ Asia programme coordinator. “It very seriously erodes Hong Kong’s autonomy and freedom of the press.”
The Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong said it was alarmed at the decision to expel the journalists and even more concerned that they would be banned from working as journalists in Hong Kong.
It said Hong Kong must provide assurances that foreign journalists working in Hong Kong and those applying to work in the city will continue to be issued employment visas without interference from the Chinese government.
Beijing said on Wednesday that its actions “are entirely necessary and reciprocal countermeasures that China is compelled to take in response to the unreasonable oppression the Chinese media organizations experience in the United States.”
Pompeo said he did not think Beijing’s latest move was a balanced response. “This isn’t apples to apples,” he said, charging that the Chinese journalists who had faced restrictions were part of “propaganda outlets.”
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