https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAbXuJ2tK90 _________________ --
'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."
Coronavirus: Paris bans daytime outdoor exercise
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/world-europe-52202700 _________________ --
'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: 11 Nov 2008 Posts: 558 Location: Lancashire
Posted: Wed Apr 08, 2020 12:54 pm Post subject:
The Russian Collector Of The Secret Service, Pandemic Is A Lie, Psycho Info War And Special Operation In Progress
An ingenious prominent analyst at the Russian Centre for Military-Strategic Research at the RF Army General Staff – Colonel Vladimir Kwachkov, analyses the world coronavirus-induced psychosis and presents more than shocking and shocking data — information.
His thesis is:
1. There is no pandemic, it is a lie.
2. Panic around coronaviruses should be viewed in light of the operation of global powers : religious, political, financial, economic and national.
3. The pandemic, which does not exist, is a global strategic special operation. It is a command-and-control exercise behind the scenes, with the goal of gaining full control of humanity. This is the background for the appearance of coronaviruses. The backstage world, especially the financial one, aims to reduce the population on earth. According to them, there are too many of us on the planet. There should be about one hundred million and more servants, a maximum of about one billion on earth.
Published on 30 Mar 2020
Dear viewers! Due to the high demand for the interview with Ernst Wolff, we are now releasing it with English subtitles to reach an even wider audience.
The #Coronavirus is dominating the media with wall-to-wall coverage. Normal life has come to a grinding halt in a way that is unprecedented in modern life. But at this moment in time, it is crucial to ask ourselves - why? Is the Coronavirus [pandemic] potentially also a mechanism for the controlled demolition of the already battered world finance system?
A conversation with Ernst Wolff (Finance Expert, Journalist, & Author)
and Alex Quint.
Share it!!
We see ourselves as a medium that has set itself the task of providing space for alternative opinions that is often missing in the mainstream. We are a necessary part of the free media. Freedom of the press and freedom of expression are important pillars of democracy. A prerequisite [of democracy] is diversity of opinions. Our featured stories are an offer to complement developments within the media, politics and society in a comprehensive and diverse manner.
We allow our interview partners to share and circulate their opinions, theses and analyses even if they do not necessarily reflect our own. Our interviewee(s) do not participate out of economic interests but out of a social commitment to make a contribution as private persons and are not being paid for their engagements. _________________ --
'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."
BRITAIN could remain on lockdown until May amid warnings that the peak of the coronavirus outbreak is still 10 days away. Senior politicians have raised the prospect that Britons now face being shut away in their homes for at least another month as the virus continues its remorseless onslaught.
By Martyn Brown, Daily Express Senior Political Correspondent
PUBLISHED: 06:35, Thu, Apr 9, 2020 | UPDATED: 07:18, Thu, Apr 9, 2020
As the number of deaths due to Covid-19 surged past 7,000 Downing Street confirmed the current draconian restrictions will be reviewed as scheduled. Officials said there will be a review “on or around” the three-week mark – with the law requiring a technical extension by April 16. The Prime Minister's spokesman said: "We said we would make further announcements in three weeks. There is no change to that."
But with a further 936 more deaths from Covid-19 announced on Wednesday, there are fears that the worst of the killer disease could last for several more weeks.
Former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt suggested the lockdown could last until May.
When put to him that it could last for “another month, minimum”, he told Radio 4’s World at One programme: “I think that’s a reasonable assumption.”
Mr Hunt, who is now the chairman of the health and social care select committee in the House of Commons, said: "As we've seen from Italy and other countries, you don't get a peak and then an immediate reduction, you stay at that peak level for some time."
He added: "I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that the lockdown is going to need to continue for a while and we don't need to take this decision at the beginning of next week."
London Mayor Sadiq Khan yesterday warned that an easing of the restrictions could be a long way off.
“I think we are nowhere near lifting the lockdown,” he told the BBC.
“We think the peak, which is the worst part of the virus, is still probably a week and a half away.”
Officials in Wales have already confirmed the lockdown there will be extended.
First Minister Mark Drakeford has said stay-at-home measures in Wales will not end next week, with agreement on the nature of the lockdown extension to be announced "in the coming days".
Mr Drakeford told the Welsh Assembly: "The three weeks of stay-at-home restrictions provided for in the legislation, and which we have all faced, are due to end next week.
"I must be plain with all members, these restrictions will not end then. We will not throw away the gains we have made and the lives we have saved by abandoning our efforts just as they begin to bear fruit."
Pressed on when the UK's lockdown extension will happen, health minister Edward Argar told Radio 4's Today programme: “When the scientific advice is such that we appear to have gone over the peak and it is safe to do so.
"We couldn't want to judge or preempt that evidence. That isn’t a position we are in yet."
He added: "We will be reviewing it and we will be led by the scientific evidence when its the right time.
"We need to start seeing the numbers coming down and that's when you're in the negative.
"That's when you have a sense when that's sustained over a period of time, that you can see it coming out of that."
Both stand-in PM Dominic Raab and Professor Chris Whitty have stressed that Britain needs to reach the peak first before looking at whether the lockdown measures can be changed or relaxed.
It comes as the World Health Organisation has also offered a dire warning about the “dangerous” consequences of relaxing too early.
WHO regional director Hans Kluge said in an update that relaxing lockdown too early would be “dangerous”.
“We still have a long way to go in the marathon and the progress we have made so far in fighting the virus is extremely fragile,' he said.
“To think we are coming close to an end point would be a dangerous thing to do. The virus leaves no room for error or complacency.
“Any shift in our response strategy, relaxing of lockdown status or physical distancing measures requires very careful consideration.”
Despite the gloomy outlook Ministers have hinted that reopening schools should be one of the first moves in easing the lockdown.
Experts have said the closures are likely only to have a limited effect on the spread, and mean much of the workforce are tied up with childcare.
“We need to be led by the science, of course,” one minister told The Times.
“But if we can reopen schools after the Easter holidays things could begin to get back to normal. It could kick-start the economy.”
Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23 6 Apr, 2020 21:00
Henry Kissinger, eminence grise of imperial US foreign policy, has warned in an op-ed that no government – even his beloved hegemon – can defeat Covid-19 alone, implying that the New World Order he’s always preached must follow.
If the US doesn’t couple its efforts to rebuild its own economy with the first steps toward creating a global government, humanity is doomed, Kissinger wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.
Also on rt.com Why don’t we get rid of families and cash? Soros-funded progressive globalists using Covid-19 to push own ‘technocratic solutions’
“No country, not even the US, can in a purely national effort overcome the virus,” Kissinger warned. “Addressing the necessities of the moment must ultimately be coupled with a global collaborative vision and program.”
If we cannot do both in tandem, we will face the worst of each.
Kissinger laments that the pandemic has led to the return of a “walled city” model of nationalist governance, suggesting that “exploration at the frontiers of science” alone can save humanity from disease in his vision of a globalist utopia. But developing cures takes time, and the notion that countries should be discouraged from protecting themselves in the interim is suicidal. If anything, one of the reasons Italy, Spain, and France were hit so hard by coronavirus was the EU’s dysfunctional insistence on open borders amid the pandemic.
“Global trade and movement of people” are all well and good, but the pandemic has exposed the weaknesses of the globalist system like never before. It will take years for nations to rebuild, and repeating their mistakes is not something they can afford to do.
While serving as Secretary of State and National Security Adviser under presidents Nixon and Ford, Kissinger played a starring role in bombing campaigns against Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos and oversaw regime-change operations that placed brutal dictators in power in Argentina and Chile, as well as supporting state-sanctioned repression in Indonesia. A notorious report he penned for the Ford administration called for dramatic reductions in population growth across developing nations. One might think, given his record, that he’d be on the side of the virus.
But the Nobel Peace Prize recipient is here presenting himself as an experienced statesman who deeply cares about the future of humanity, calling on the US to “draw lessons from the development of the Marshall Plan and the Manhattan Project.” Sure, revisiting the Marshall Plan makes sense – there are no doubt insights to be gained from revisiting the rebuilding of Europe’s shattered post-war economies, especially since some of the countries hit hardest by the epidemic are in Europe.
Also on rt.com 'Big mistake': Italy blasts European Commission chief, says Europe needs 'great Marshall Plan' to battle pandemic crisis
But the Manhattan Project? How does a top-secret, international doomsday project that produced weapons with unparalleled killing potential have any bearing on the coronavirus crisis?
Listening to Kissinger, it must be said, is what got the US into its current situation – believing itself exceptional, distrusting all world powers who do not swear abject fealty to it, repeating the same failed policies to the point of parody. A looming presence in the George W. Bush administration, Kissinger advised the country to plunge headfirst into the ever-expanding War on Terror, penning an editorial in the days following 9/11 that called for taking on “any government that shelters groups capable of this kind of attack.” Following such guidance has bankrupted the US and turned it into a banana republic, printing money frantically while its roads and bridges crumble, its citizens struggle to keep a roof over their heads, and the international community looks on, mouths agape, as its government continues to lecture them about human rights.
Kissinger concludes his jeremiad with a warning that “failure [to safeguard the principles of the liberal world order] could set the world on fire.” If, as he himself writes, the “purpose of the legitimate state is to provide for the fundamental needs of the people: security, order, economic well-being, and justice,” those principles collapsed long ago. The US’ first step, post-pandemic, should be to put out the fires set by Kissinger and those like him who seek to cloak empire in the rhetoric of liberal democracy.
The U.S. must protect its citizens from disease while starting the urgent work of planning for a new epoch.
The surreal atmosphere of the Covid-19 pandemic calls to mind how I felt as a young man in the 84th Infantry Division during the Battle of the Bulge. Now, as in late 1944, there is a sense of inchoate danger, aimed not at any particular person, but striking randomly and with devastation. But there is an important difference between that faraway time and ours. American endurance then was fortified by an ultimate national purpose. Now, in a divided country, efficient and farsighted government is necessary to overcome obstacles unprecedented in magnitude and global scope. Sustaining the public trust is crucial to social solidarity, to the relation of societies with each other, and to international peace and stability.
Nations cohere and flourish on the belief that their institutions can foresee calamity, arrest its impact and restore stability. When the Covid-19 pandemic is over, many countries’ institutions will be perceived as having failed. Whether this judgment is objectively fair is irrelevant. The reality is the world will never be the same after the coronavirus. To argue now about the past only makes it harder to do what has to be done.
The coronavirus has struck with unprecedented scale and ferocity. Its spread is exponential: U.S. cases are doubling every fifth day. At this writing, there is no cure. Medical supplies are insufficient to cope with the widening waves of cases. Intensive-care units are on the verge, and beyond, of being overwhelmed. Testing is inadequate to the task of identifying the extent of infection, much less reversing its spread. A successful vaccine could be 12 to 18 months away.
The U.S. administration has done a solid job in avoiding immediate catastrophe. The ultimate test will be whether the virus’s spread can be arrested and then reversed in a manner and at a scale that maintains public confidence in Americans’ ability to govern themselves. The crisis effort, however vast and necessary, must not crowd out the urgent task of launching a parallel enterprise for the transition to the post-coronavirus order.
Leaders are dealing with the crisis on a largely national basis, but the virus’s society-dissolving effects do not recognize borders. While the assault on human health will—hopefully—be temporary, the political and economic upheaval it has unleashed could last for generations. No country, not even the U.S., can in a purely national effort overcome the virus. Addressing the necessities of the moment must ultimately be coupled with a global collaborative vision and program. If we cannot do both in tandem, we will face the worst of each.
Drawing lessons from the development of the Marshall Plan and the Manhattan Project, the U.S. is obliged to undertake a major effort in three domains. First, shore up global resilience to infectious disease. Triumphs of medical science like the polio vaccine and the eradication of smallpox, or the emerging statistical-technical marvel of medical diagnosis through artificial intelligence, have lulled us into a dangerous complacency. We need to develop new techniques and technologies for infection control and commensurate vaccines across large populations. Cities, states and regions must consistently prepare to protect their people from pandemics through stockpiling, cooperative planning and exploration at the frontiers of science.
Second, strive to heal the wounds to the world economy. Global leaders have learned important lessons from the 2008 financial crisis. The current economic crisis is more complex: The contraction unleashed by the coronavirus is, in its speed and global scale, unlike anything ever known in history. And necessary public-health measures such as social distancing and closing schools and businesses are contributing to the economic pain. Programs should also seek to ameliorate the effects of impending chaos on the world’s most vulnerable populations.
Third, safeguard the principles of the liberal world order. The founding legend of modern government is a walled city protected by powerful rulers, sometimes despotic, other times benevolent, yet always strong enough to protect the people from an external enemy. Enlightenment thinkers reframed this concept, arguing that the purpose of the legitimate state is to provide for the fundamental needs of the people: security, order, economic well-being, and justice. Individuals cannot secure these things on their own. The pandemic has prompted an anachronism, a revival of the walled city in an age when prosperity depends on global trade and movement of people.
The world’s democracies need to defend and sustain their Enlightenment values. A global retreat from balancing power with legitimacy will cause the social contract to disintegrate both domestically and internationally. Yet this millennial issue of legitimacy and power cannot be settled simultaneously with the effort to overcome the Covid-19 plague. Restraint is necessary on all sides—in both domestic politics and international diplomacy. Priorities must be established.
We went on from the Battle of the Bulge into a world of growing prosperity and enhanced human dignity. Now, we live an epochal period. The historic challenge for leaders is to manage the crisis while building the future. Failure could set the world on fire.
Mr. Kissinger served as secretary of state and national security adviser in the Nixon and Ford administrations.
In announcing the most far-reaching restrictions on personal freedom in the history of our nation, Boris Johnson followed the scientific advice that he had been given. I’m a recently-retired Professor of Pathology and NHS consultant pathologist, and have spent most of my adult life in healthcare and science.
The simplest way to judge whether we have an exceptionally lethal disease is to look at the death rates. Are more people dying than we would expect to die anyway in a given week or month? Statistically, we would expect about 51,000 to die in Britain this month. At the time of writing, 422 deaths are linked to COVID-19, so 0.8 per cent of that expected total.
On a global basis, we’d expect 14 million to die over the first three months of the year. The world’s 18,944 coronavirus deaths represent 0.14 per cent of that total. These figures might shoot up but they are, right now, lower than other infectious diseases that we live with (such as flu). Not figures that cause drastic global reactions.
At the time of writing, the UK’s 422 deaths and 8,077 known cases give an apparent death rate of 5 per cent. This is often cited as a cause for concern, contrasted with the mortality rate of seasonal flu, which is estimated at about 0.1 per cent. But we ought to look very carefully at the data. Are these figures really comparable?
Most of the UK testing has been in hospitals, where there is a high concentration of patients susceptible to the effects of any infection. Any testing regime that is based only in hospitals will over-estimate the virulence of an infection. Also, we’re only dealing with those COVID-19 cases that have made people sick enough or worried enough to get tested. There will be many more unaware that they have the virus, with either no symptoms, or mild ones.
But there’s another, potentially even more serious problem: the way that deaths are recorded. If someone dies of respiratory infection in the UK, the specific cause of the infection is not usually recorded, unless the illness is a rare ‘notifiable disease’. So the vast majority of respiratory deaths in the UK are recorded as bronchopneumonia, pneumonia, old age or a similar designation.
We don’t really test for flu, or other seasonal infections. If the patient has, say, cancer, motor neurone disease or another serious disease, this will be recorded as the cause of death, even if the final illness was a respiratory infection. This means UK certifications normally under-record deaths due to respiratory infections.
Now, look at what has happened since the emergence of COVID-19. The list of notifiable diseases has been updated. This list, as well as containing smallpox (which has been extinct for many years) and conditions such as anthrax, brucellosis, plague and rabies (which most UK doctors will never see in their entire careers), has now been amended to include Covid-19, but not flu. That means every positive test for Covid-19 must be notified, in a way that it just would not be for flu or most other infections.
In the current climate, anyone with a positive test for COVID-19 will certainly be known to clinical staff looking after them: if any of these patients dies, staff will have to record the COVID-19 designation on the death certificate, contrary to usual practice for most infections of this kind.
recession-4
There is a big difference between COVID-19 causing death, and COVID-19 being found in someone who died of other causes. Making COVID-19 notifiable might give the appearance of it causing increasing numbers of deaths, whether this is true or not. It might appear far more of a killer than flu, simply because of the way deaths are recorded.
If we take drastic measures to reduce the incidence of COVID-19, it follows that the deaths will also go down. We risk being convinced that we have averted something that was never really going to be as severe as we feared. This unusual way of reporting COVID-19 deaths explains the clear finding that most of its victims have underlying conditions, and would normally be susceptible to other seasonal viruses, which are virtually never recorded as a specific cause of death.
Let us also consider the COVID-19 graphs, showing an exponential rise in cases, and deaths. They can look alarming. But if we tracked flu or other seasonal viruses in the same way, we would also see an exponential increase.
We would also see some countries behind others, and striking fatality rates. The United States Centers for Disease Control, for example, publishes weekly estimates of flu cases. The latest figures show that since September, flu has infected 38 million Americans, hospitalised 390,000 and killed 23,000. This does not cause public alarm because flu is familiar.
The data on COVID-19 differs wildly from country to country. Look at the figures for Italy and Germany. At the time of writing, Italy has 69,176 recorded cases and 6,820 deaths, a rate of 9.9 per cent. Germany has 32,986 cases and 157 deaths, a rate of 0.5 per cent.
Do we think that the strain of the virus is so different in these nearby countries as to virtually represent different diseases? Or that the populations are so different in their susceptibility to the virus that the death rate can vary more than twentyfold? If not, we ought to suspect a systematic error, that the COVID-19 data we are seeing from different countries is not directly comparable.
Look at other rates: Spain 7.1 per cent, US 1.3 per cent, Switzerland 1.3 per cent, France 4.3 per cent, South Korea 1.3 per cent, Iran 7.8 per cent.
Early evidence from Iceland, a country with a very strong organisation for wide testing within the population, suggests that as many as 50 per cent of infections are almost completely asymptomatic. Most of the rest are relatively minor. In fact, Iceland’s figures, 648 cases and two attributed deaths, give a death rate of 0.3 per cent.
Prof 3, when this absurdity ends millionaires
As population testing becomes more widespread elsewhere in the world, we will find a greater and greater proportion of cases where infections have already occurred and caused only mild effects. In fact, as time goes on, this will become generally truer too, because most infections tend to decrease in virulence as epidemic progress.
One pretty clear indicator is death. If a new infection is causing many extra people to die (as opposed to an infection present in people who would have died anyway) then it will cause an increase in the overall death rate. But we have yet to see any statistical evidence for excess deaths, in any part of the world.
COVID-19 can clearly cause serious respiratory tract compromise in some patients, especially those with chest issues, and in smokers. The elderly are probably more at risk, as they are for infections of any kind.
You may not survive the cure
The average age of those dying in Italy is 78.5 years, with almost nine in ten fatalities among the over-70s. The life expectancy in Italy, that is, the number of years you can expect to live to from birth, all things being equal, is 82.5 years. But all things are not equal when a new seasonal virus goes around.
It certainly seems reasonable, now, that a degree of social distancing should be maintained for a while, especially for the elderly and the immune-suppressed. But when drastic measures are introduced, they should be based on clear evidence. In the case of COVID-19, the evidence is not clear.
Coronona in proportion
Clearly, the various lockdowns will slow the spread of COVID-19 so there will be fewer cases. When we relax the measures, there will be more cases again. But this need not be a reason to keep the lockdown: the spread of cases is only something to fear if we are dealing with an unusually lethal virus. That’s why the way we record data will be hugely important. Unless we tighten criteria for recording death due only to the virus (as opposed to it being present in those who died from other conditions), the official figures may show a lot more deaths apparently caused by the virus than is actually the case.
What then? How do we measure the health consequences of taking people’s lives, jobs, leisure and purpose away from them to protect them from an anticipated threat? Which causes the least harm?
Published on 8 Apr 2020
On the 7th April 2020, the ITNJ held an emergency hearing to discuss the Corona Pandemic and the Planetary Shutdown.
ITNJ Founder – Sacha Stone with Commissioners, Del Bigtree, G. Edward Griffin, Dr. Sandra Rose Michael, Former CIA Spy – Robert David Steele, Filmmaker – Sean Stone along with ITNJ Trustee – Thomas J. Brown and Chief Justice – Sir John Walsh of Brannagh.
Link to Sean Stone's short film: 'Singularity'. https://m.imdb.com/video/vi2602107673 _________________ --
'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."
Medical staff at an NHS coronavirus disease testing facility in Wolverhampton.
Healthcare professionals are being silenced and threatened with disciplinary action for speaking out about their work during the coronavirus outbreak, the Guardian can reveal.
Many NHS staff are increasingly concerned that their ability to share stories about their work is being restricted by a clampdown on speaking out publicly.
It follows reports of doctors and nurses being gagged by hospitals and other NHS bodies from speaking out about widespread shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE). Tactics have included threatening emails, the possibility of disciplinary action, and some people even being sent home from work.
While there could be some logic to hospitals wanting to stop scaremongering when communications departments are overloaded with work at a busy time, many staff feel they are being blocked from highlighting their work during the pandemic.
Workers who have spoken to the Guardian say they fear being disciplined. Several professionals said they worried about losing their jobs. Examples include an email signed by the chief executive of one NHS trust forbidding all staff from talking to the media, and incidents where staff suspect emails and social media accounts are being monitored. Requests by staff to communications departments to permit them to talk to the press have been turned down, leaving staff anxious and fearful for their jobs during the worst global public health crisis of this century.
One nurse who wanted to highlight the vital role of his profession received an email (later recalled) from his trust to all staff, which banned public communications. When he contacted the communications department, he was shocked to receive a response saying simply no media. The team did not say what action they might take to enforce the ban, he said, but the tone was threatening..
The nurse added: “As healthcare workers I think we feel generally quite secure – there’s always work for nurses. But in my correspondence with the communications department I felt quite powerless all of a sudden. It makes me so sad.” Ironically, he added, coronavirus has in fact led to the role of nurses being highlighted in a way they could never have otherwise dreamed of, including being featured on the front cover of glossy magazines.
Play Video 8:07
How coronavirus changed the world in three months – video
Not all NHS trusts in England have imposed a blanket ban on staff speaking out and some are encouraging professionals who wish to talk about their work. A range of staff recently explained their behind-the-scene roles to the Guardian, but most of those speaking out tend to be doctors, often in secure positions where they are less likely to be challenged or threatened.
Kate Jarman, director of corporate affairs at Milton Keynes University hospital NHS foundation trust, believes staff should be supported to talk about what life is like in their roles. “There’s always a balance to be struck in how staff get messages across,” she said. “People should be mindful of patient confidentiality and the core messages of public information and safety but from what I’ve seen, they are doing that.”
The Guardian is aware of several cases where staff have been silenced. They include:
A health professional who was left anxious for their job after their communications department found out they had spoken to a journalist about their work.
Staff at one trust who faced disciplinary action for speaking out. A blanket email signed by one trust’s chief executive was sent, warning staff not to speak to media under any circumstances. Some staff believe social media accounts are being monitored.
Healthcare workers from different trusts who volunteered to be interviewed about their job in times of coronavirus and were told they could not mention the trust or their work at the hospital.
One hospital manager who said they had received guidance about press/media from the trust they worked for and would not be able to say anything for the foreseeable future.
One mental health worker working on a secure psychiatric ward who said they were terrified of speaking out publicly because they have been reprimanded by senior management before for highlighting aspects of patient care.
Unions representing NHS staff have expressed their concerns. Colenzo Jarrett-Thorpe, national officer for health at the Unite union, which represents 100,000 health staff, said officials had been hearing that some NHS bosses may have been clamping down on staff wishing to expose failings in the system and improve the wellbeing of patients.
A spokesman from the Institute of Biomedical Science, a professional body for scientists, support staff and students, said members working for the NHS who wanted to talk about their vital role in the crisis were increasingly coming up against the same barriers. “Hospital trusts in England are silencing our requests for members to talk.”
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The ramifications of such a clampdown at a time when NHS staff are risking their lives and being celebrated by the general public are chilling, but come as no surprise to some. Roger Kline, a research fellow at Middlesex University who has done a lot of work looking into whistleblowing, said: “Old habits die hard, and I’ve certainly been contacted by NHS and social care staff anxious about going public and nervous about challenging local managers.”
Play Video 4:41
Why are coronavirus mortality rates so different? – video explainer
One mental health professional told the Guardian that the unspoken rule is that staff should keep their heads down, follow orders and say nothing. “When it comes to the day-to-day clinical issues and challenges we face, there is a definite power dynamic at play, and [we] are generally petrified to speak out,” they said.
Preventing people from speaking out about their work is not only happening in the UK. In the US, hospitals are threatening to fire healthcare workers who publicise their working conditions during the coronavirus pandemic – and have in some cases followed through.
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So what is it about Italy? It’s not difficult to trace the coronavirus path along the Muslim pilgrim routes of Iran. But it seems much more difficult to account for the extraordinary spread of the virus in Lombardy and 14 other provinces. Why have the Italian authorities placed 16 million of their people in quarantine while at the same time failing to explain to us why the richest part of their country has engendered so many cases of coronavirus around the world? Across Europe, recent visitors to Italy have returned home as carriers, infected and potentially infecting their family and friends as well as complete strangers in their own countries. Is there something about Italy we don’t know?
First, an important digression. At the time of writing, in Italy, 7,375 people have tested positive and 366 have died. But that’s only 20 more than the dead of the two Boeing 737 Max aircraft that fell to earth in Indonesia and Ethiopea, terrifying and tragic though these disasters were. And as we all know, up to 626,000 folk die every year around the world from common or garden flu. As Alex Thomson of Channel 4 keeps repeating: perspective, perspective, perspective. After all, when an expert talked on the same channel last week of coronavirus and the Second World War in the same sentence, I asked myself some simple questions. Yes, there are now more than 100,000 cases around the globe, almost four thousand of whom have died. But wasn’t the total death toll in the Second World War close to 70 million? Didn’t the Soviet Union lose 20 million souls in the war against Hitler?
But now back to Italy. Why is it a centre for coronavirus in Europe? My travels these past few weeks have included Lebanon, Turkey and Ireland, so Italy has not been on my journalistic radar. Indeed, I might have left this question about the people of northern Italy in the air had I not picked up on a comment made by the Italian ambassador to Dublin, Paolo Serpi, to RTE, Ireland’s national radio service.
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He was telling listeners to the daily Irish current affairs programme Drivetime that they should not overdramatise or become hysterical about coronavirus. EU members – the Republic of Ireland is in the European Union, of course, and has only 21 cases and no deaths – are responsible for each other. “It is a serious situation but we don’t want to transform it into a drama when it is not a drama,” said Italy’s man in Ireland. And so say all of us.
But then Signor Serpi spoke about northern Italy, and suddenly added: “It has Italy’s largest Chinese population because of the textile industry. That is why Italy was the first country to be affected in Europe on such a scale.”
Italian authorities patrol streets with loud speakers at night as entire nation placed on lockdown
I have always suspected that journalists and police officers have a lot in common. Both dwell on the costs of human folly. So when I read these words of Signor Serpi, I naturally wondered what it was that we were not being told about the Italian outbreak of coronavirus. Or whether what we are being told is correct. For Italian colleagues are reporting that even amid the largest Chinese community in northern Italy – in Prato near Florence – there has not been a single case of coronavirus. There are around 300,000 Chinese people in Italy and 20,000 among Prato’s population of 190,000. That’s around one in 10.
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The Chinese now run most of Prato’s textile industry and long before the current pandemic, writers and journalists examined what this meant for local Italians. Simple. The traditional clothing industry in the city had been taken over by Chinese immigrants, importing cheap textiles from Wenzhou in Zhejiang province – home city for most of the Chinese people in Prato – and producing fast-fashion shirts, trousers and jackets and later clothes for luxury fashion houses such as Gucci and Prada. The labels bore the precious – and accurate – moniker: Made in Italy.
When New Yorker staff writer DT Max visited Prato in the spring of 2018 – almost two years before Italy’s coronavirus outbreak – he found 6,000 businesses registered to Chinese citizens and an infection of xenophobia among Italian residents. He quoted a right-wing senator, Patrizio La Pietra, who told a local newspaper that the city should confront “Chinese economic illegality” and that their underground economy had “brought Italy to its knees, eliminated thousands of jobs, and exposed countless families to hunger”.
Native residents accused Chinese immigrants of bringing crime, gang warfare and garbage to Prato. An Italian leather artisan, who told Max that her husband was forced out of bag-making by local Chinese competition, said of the immigrants: “They copy, they imitate. They don’t do anything original.”
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Max noted that the traditionally left-wing city was now voting for right-wing politicians. There was indeed evidence of a Chinese mafia in Prato which, intriguingly, operated without any connection to the homegrown Italian variety. Sweat shops there were aplenty – but also well-run and modern Chinese clothing factories. Some Chinese businesspeople are now among Prato’s richest men and women, sending their children to an elite university in Milan. There are friendly relations between Chinese and Italian people.
But let’s go back to the origins of Prato’s Chinese population. By far the largest majority come from Wenzhou in the Chinese coastal province of Zhejiang – 500 miles from Wuhan, the epicentre of the original virus outbreak. Yet today, Chinese authorities have quarantined 30 million people around Wenzhou – some literally locked into their homes, according to a recent Washington Post report – to which the respiratory illness has now spread.
Wenzhou has the most coronavirus infections outside Hubei province whose capital is Wuhan – where more than 100,000 Wenzhou people also live. As the outbreak took hold, the Post has reported, 20,000 people were placed under quarantine in Wenzhou hotels. Some visitors to Wenzhou found themselves harshly treated when they returned to their homes elsewhere in Zhejiang province. Xenophobia it seems, like coronavirus, knows no barriers.
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Which brings us back to the Wenzhou Chinese of Prato. Until recently, there were regular direct flights between Wenzhou and Rome – and you’d think this might be a sure way of transmission of the virus from China to a city scarcely 20 miles from Florence. Yet it seems not. Thousands of Chinese in Prato, so local papers have reported, have voluntarily isolated themselves in their homes for two weeks without any proof that they might be carriers of the virus – regarding their actions as a civic duty towards their fellow Italian and Chinese neighbours. The miserable conditions in which many of these Chinese work in Prato have led, it appears, to no outbreak of coronavirus. The same applies in Rome’s Chinatown on the Esquiline hill where no coronavirus has been reported.
While the public’s eyes are riveted on the progression of coronavirus numbers, a profound reorganization of the executive is taking place, giving primacy to senior health officials over policy. In the shadows, bankers and soldiers are agitating in the hope of confiscating power for their own benefit.
Voltaire Network | Damascus (Syria) | 31 March 2020
On February 1, US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper instructed General Terrence J. O’Shaughnessy to stand by. On February 13, O’Shaughnessy testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that he was preparing for the worst-case scenario. In the event of a health disaster, the "Continuity of Government" plan would make him the next dictator (in the ancient sense) of the United States.
The primacy of administrative logic over political logic
Many governments in industrialized countries decided to respond to the Covid-19 epidemic by confining their populations. This strategy does not stem from medicine, which has never practised isolation of healthy people, but from good management of medical resources to prevent a massive influx of sick people so as not to clog hospitals. Few industrialized countries, such as Sweden, have rejected this administrative approach to the epidemic. They have opted for a medical approach and therefore do not practise generalised containment.
The first lesson of the current period is therefore that in developed countries, administrative logic is now superior to medical experience.
Yet even without medical expertise, I have no doubt that millennia of medical experience can be more effective against a disease than bureaucratic recipes. Incidentally, if we continue to observe the current phenomenon, we can see that, at the moment, Sweden has 10 deaths per million inhabitants, while Italy mourns 166 per million. Of course, this is only the beginning of the epidemic and these two countries are very different. However, Italy will probably have to deal with a second and then a third wave of infection, while Sweden will have acquired group immunity and will be protected from it.
The primacy of senior health officials over the elected representatives of the people
This being said, the widespread containment of capital goods not only disrupts the economy, but also modes of government. Almost everywhere, we see the word of politicians fading in the face of that of senior health officials, who are supposed to be more effective than they are. This makes sense because the decision to contain is purely administrative. We have collectively agreed to fight for our hospitals and to prevent disease, not to fight it.
Unfortunately, everyone can see that, contrary to appearances, we have not become more efficient. For example, the Member States of the European Union have not been able to provide the necessary medical equipment and medicines in good time. This is the fault of the usual rules. For example: economic globalisation has resulted in there being only one manufacturer of artificial respirators, and it is Chinese. Tendering procedures take several months before they are available, and policies are no longer in place to override these procedures. Only the United States has been able to solve this problem immediately through company requisitions.
France, which during the Second World War, under Philippe Pétain, experienced an administrative dictatorship known as the "French State", has already experienced a political takeover by senior civil servants over the past three decades. We then spoke of ENArchie. Identically and without her being aware of it, she deprived politicians of the knowledge of the administration that the accumulation of local and national mandates conferred on them. From now on, elected officials are less well informed than senior civil servants and have all the trouble in the world to control them.
Just as senior health officials suddenly find themselves vested with an authority that does not normally belong to them, so bankers and the military aspire to the same promotion at the expense of politicians.
Bankers lurking in the shadows
The former Chancellor of the Exchequer (Minister of Finance), then British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, published an op-ed in the Financial Times [1] In it, he argues for using the fear of Covid-19 to achieve what failed during the financial crisis of 2008. At the time, he had failed to create a global financial government and had to settle for mere consultation with the G20. It would be possible today, he continued, to create a global health government. And to consider which powers should be associated with the permanent members of the Security Council.
There is no reason to believe that this global government would be more successful than national governments. The only thing that is certain is that it would escape any form of democratic control.
This project is no more likely to succeed than that of the world financial government. Gordon Brown was also a staunch supporter of keeping the United Kingdom in the European Union. Again, he lost.
The deep US state lurks in the shadows
Historically, in all crises, attempts are made to use the argument of "urgency" to change Power without the public having time to think, and often this is successful.
On January 30, 2020, the WHO declared a "state of public health emergency of international concern". The next day, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper secretly signed a Warning Order stating that NorthCom was to stand ready for possible application of the new "Continuity of Government" rules.
These rules are classified Above-Top Secret, meaning that communication is restricted to persons with the highest level of clearance and with a Special Access Program (SAP).
It should be remembered that the principle of "continuity of government" was forged at the beginning of the Cold War. It was designed to protect the United States in the event of a nuclear war against the Soviet Union and the death or incapacity of the President, Vice President, and Speaker of the House of Representatives. According to a written directive from President Dwight Eisenhower, a replacement military government was to provide immediate continuity of command during the war until democratic procedures were restored [2].
This replacement government was never requested, except on September 11, 2001, by the National Counter-Terrorism Coordinator, Richard Clarke [3] However, if the country was undergoing a terrible attack, neither the President, the Vice-President nor the Speaker of the House of Representatives had died or been prevented from doing so, which led me to conclude that it was a coup d’état. In any case, President George Bush Jr. regained his prerogatives the same day in the evening and no explanation was ever given of what happened during the ten hours of suspension of his authority [4].
According to the best Pentagon expert, William Arkin, in Newsweek [5], there are now seven separate plans:
- Rescue & Evacuation of the Occupants of the Executive Mansion (RESEM) to protect the President, the Vice President and their families.
- Joint Emergency Evacuation Plan (JEEP) to protect the Secretary of Defense and key military leaders.
- Atlas Plan to protect members of Congress and the Supreme Court.
- Octagon, about which nothing is known.
- Freejack, also unknown.
- Zodiac, still unknown.
- Granite Shadow, which provides for the deployment of special units in Washington and stipulates the conditions for the use of force and the passage of places under military authority [6].
Note that RESEM is intended to protect the president and vice-president, but can only be applied once they are dead or incapacitated.
In any event, the implementation of these seven plans would be the responsibility of the United States Military Command for North America (NorthCom) under the responsibility of an illustrious unknown, General Terrence J. O’Shaughnessy.
It should be remembered that under US law, this man is required to become the dictator of the United States only in the event of the death or incapacity of the three principal elected officials of the federal state, but in practice, his predecessor, General Ralph Eberhart, has sometimes exercised this power without this condition being met. Eberhart, now 73 years old, is the head of the major US military avionics companies.
General O’Shaughnessy told the Senate Armed Services Committee on February 13 that NorthCom was preparing for the worst. To this end, it liaises on a daily basis with the ten other US Central Commands for the World [7].
NorthCom has authority not only over the United States, but also over Canada, Mexico and the Bahamas. Under international agreements, it can, on its own initiative, deploy US troops to these three countries.
In 2016, President Barack Obama signed the top-secret Presidential Policy Directive 40 on "National Continuity Policy". FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate signed Federal Continuity Directive 1 two days before President Donald Trump took office, specifying some of the details at lower levels.
They’ve thought of everything, and are prepared for the worst. The outbreak provides them with the motive to act. So the questions asked by Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian about a possible deliberate release of the virus by the US military make sense.
Thierry Meyssan
Translation
Roger Lagassé
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[1] “End the dog-eat-dog mentality to tackle the crisis”, Gordon Brown, Financial Times (UK), Voltaire Network, March 26, 2020.
[2] Continuity of Government: Current Federal Arrangements and the Future, Harold C. Relyea, Congresionnal Research Service, August 5, 2005.
[3] Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, Richard Clarke, Free Press (2004).
[4] A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies, James Bamfort, Anchor Books (2005).
[5] “Exclusive: Inside The Military’s Top Secret Plans If Coronavirus Cripples the Government”, William M. Arkin, Newsweek, March 18, 2020.
[6] “Top Secret Pentagon Operation “Granite Shadow” revealed. Today in DC: Commandos in the Streets?”, William Arkin, Washington Post, September 25, 2005.
Am I the only person who thinks this worldwide lockdown is shocking? We have all probably been infected with a corona virus at some point in our lives and this is just a new variant with a death rate similar to flu. We don't have a day by day death count when we have a flu epidemic and I remember the 1957 epidemic when almost everyone in my class at school caught flu and one person aged in her twenties in our road died. Yet there was no panic despite 5 million reported deaths - and of course there may have been more. The pandemic of 1918 killed 50-100 million people yet we commemorate the First World War that killed a mere 20 million and forget those who died ingloriously with flu. The media is obsessed with this pandemic and normally rational people are terrified of a disease that most probably would mean a week's sickness if they got it - the death rate is only 15% for those over 80 for God's sake and who knows the death rate for those who are younger as many cases may be unrecorded if people have a minor illness and stay at home. Worldwide extraordinary measures have been taken - governments taking away our rights, ordinary people denied medical care they need whether it is routine surgery, chemotherapy, or elderly people with chronic disease who are denied a hospital admission they need and then die at home from something that is not the virus - but had they gone to hospital they might have survived. Journalists have been imprisoned in many countries for trying to say what I am saying. Ethnic minorities have been harassed in many countries using the virus as an excuse - for example Muslims in India and it is not reported in our news. The story is that this is a pandemic, you must be scared, you must do everything the government says, and the only criticism is whether there is enough equipment to protect nursing and medical staff, or whether the timing of the lockdown was correct or incorrect - limited discourses. The discourse that is not allowed is that the super elites such as the Bilderbergers had decided that the next pandemic would be a practice run for scaring ordinary people to comply with ludicrous measures of control and we are doing it. Meanwhile, the rich are making millions, the working class and middle class losing their jobs, income and businesses - it's like the cure is worse than the disease. And meanwhile in Yemen people are welcoming the corona virus as it may give impetus to a peace process. Who cares that 2 million people have cholera with a 5% mortality rate, that a huge number of people especially children die every day from starvation and minor illnesses due to lack of medical care, and Trump has withdrawn food aid this week. In spite of their terrible suffering they are welcoming the virus as it is much less threatening than war. Let's hope that some good comes out of it. But if 'they' can force people to change their lives so dramatically (and in my own view needlessly, the same number will get the virus but just spread over a longer period of time, and for those the NHS saves from the virus probably the same number will die from untreated illnesses, some of them severe) then they could tell the truth about climate change and get people to give up their dependence on fossil fuels - which in the end will kill us all and much of the world with us. And now I'm waiting to see if I am banned from Facebook for daring to talk outside permitted discourses.
from Judith Brown _________________ --
'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."
Say no to house arrest. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hVmb51qNthg _________________ --
'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."
As virus death toll nears 10,000, Labour leader Keir Starmer calls for talks with Speaker
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Sat 11 Apr 2020 20.27 BST
Newly elected Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer arrives at BBC Broadcasting House in London.
Keir Starmer said there was “no substitute for parliamentary scrutiny” particularly “at this time of national crisis”. Photograph: Aaron Chown/PA
The government faces a chorus of cross-party calls on Sunday for the urgent recall of parliament in “virtual” form as MPs and peers demand the right to hold ministers to account over the escalating coronavirus crisis.
PETER HITCHENS: Matt Hancock is trying to run the UK like my 1950s prep school
PRI148805186 This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column.
Until I started travelling in the Communist world, my main experience of living under tyranny was my time at a boarding school on the edge of Dartmoor, 60 years ago.
The headmaster, an enormous, booming man, had many fine qualities. But he was given to dreadful rages, which tended to strike late on Saturday afternoons.
He would throb with fury because some of the more loutish boys had left their games clothes on the changing room floor. For some reason, he viewed this as a terrible crime closely related to murder.
So he would summon us into the assembly hall, and harangue us as darkness fell outside. The more we stood mulishly in front of him, saying nothing and with our eyes downcast, the angrier he became.
Sometimes he would hold up a pair of muddy football shorts as horrific evidence of the latest atrocity.
Collective punishments – a ban on eating toast, or the cancellation of a promised film show – would follow, along with more shouting and angry notices in red ink, threatening worse to come.
Most of us were guiltless of wrongdoing. But we were small, and he was huge. The staff seemed more scared of him than we were.
We were on a windswept hilltop miles from anywhere. We had no escape. We assumed our letters home were censored, so we put up with these ludicrous exhibitions and waited for the storm to pass.
Oddly enough, the terror did not work. People carried on leaving their clothes on the floor, just the same.
I had thought such childish things were long over in my life. But a week ago I found that I was, once again, living at the mercy of an equally petulant would-be despot.
Matthew Hancock, Secretary of State for Health, went on national TV to threaten to ban outdoor exercise if people continued to break ‘social distancing’ rules.
From a Government that claims to be preserving life and health, this threat was literally mad.
Banning exercise for any length of time will lead to the deaths and illness of many thousands of currently healthy, older people who know that such exercise is vital to their physical and mental wellbeing.
Such exercise can easily be taken while maintaining the required distance from others. The threat was a dictatorial one, of collective punishment of all for the wrongdoing of others.
This is illegal under Article 33 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. A foreign occupier would not be allowed to do it.
Mr Hancock also said it was ‘quite extraordinary’ that some people had spent the weekend sunbathing in public places despite it being against Government guidance.
Getting into his stride, he urged people not to sit down even for a minute on a park bench, saying those who disobeyed the rules were putting their own and others’ lives at risk.
What is this nonsense? The words of Ministers and the words and actions of the police show a pointlessly bossy side to these measures – the attempted ban on Easter egg purchases, the sunbathing squad, alleged arrests of people for just buying wine and crisps, the lumpish threat by a police chief to search the baskets of shoppers.
Provided the people doing these things do not break the distancing rules, why are they wrong?
Sunbathing, for instance, probably reduces the risk of infection, and if people keep a proper distance apart, what on earth is wrong with it? Why shouldn’t someone sit on a park bench?
Mr Hancock said: ‘I say this to the small minority of people who are breaking the rules or pushing the boundaries: you are risking your own life and the lives of others and you’re making it harder for us all.’
I almost expected him to produce some rumpled piece of games kit and snarl ‘You have brought all this on yourselves’, as the nation cowered, trembling in short trousers before his unchallenged might
Actually I try hard to follow the Government’s rule on social distancing. I do this much as I seek to respect the local religion when I go to Muslim or Buddhist countries.
I don’t believe in it, but it is only polite not to offend openly against it. And I very much urge you to do the same. Nobody should take my words as any kind of encouragement to ignore the rules.
Unlike the Government’s wild destruction of the economy, and its attack on personal liberty, it can do no harm to keep your distance from others. It might do some good.
But I sense something more going on here. The Government are trying to get us to accept a far higher level of state intrusion in our lives than we have ever endured. They are treating us as if we were unruly children.
This is despite what I regard as a quite extraordinary willingness among the great majority to do as we are asked. It has gone to their heads. They need to calm down, for the sake of all of us.
We are not children, this is not some 1950s prep school ruled by the swish of the cane, and Mr Hancock is not our headmaster.
Throwing schools, hospitals and RAF Squadrons into the Sea - our government's economic policy
Are you trying to picture the effect of the government’s actions in shutting down a large part of the economy, strangling its own tax revenues and paying people not to work for weeks on end.
Think of it this way. It is as if Rishi Sunak and his colleagues were throwing two or three brand-new general hospitals into the sea every day; or 50 or 60 new schools; or a couple of RAF squadrons. And then they will send us the bill for this wanton waste, which we will pay, for decades, in higher taxes, shrivelled pensions, inferior public services and lower real wages.
The death numbers that just don’t add up
What do the daily death figures, supposedly from Covid-19, really mean? People who don’t know that 1,600 people die normally every day, and who don’t study the sombre official figures, or listen carefully to what officials say, may get the wrong impression.
Here are some facts for you. A week ago, at the daily official briefing, Dr Jenny Harries, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer, confirmed my point that many deaths with Covid are not necessarily from Covid.
She said: ‘These are Covid-associated deaths, they are all sad events, they would not all be a death as a result of Covid.’ What nobody says is how many are as a result of the virus.
Then, if you look at the Office for National Statistics weekly death charts, for week 13 of each year (the week which this year ended on March 27), you find some interesting things.
The total of deaths for that week in 2020 is higher than the five-year average for that time of year, which is 10,130. In fact, it is up to 11,141.
This is 1,011 more deaths than normal per week, 144 more deaths than normal per day, regrettable but not gigantic. Do these figures justify the scale of our reaction?
If you add up the total deaths for the first quarter of the year from respiratory diseases, the figure so far for 2020 (22,877) is less than those for 2013 (25,495), 2015 (28,969), 2017 (25,800), 2018 (29,898) and 2019 (23,336). Again, is this event as exceptional as we are being told? If not, why the shutdown?
(TMU) — In addition to quarantines and lockdowns, some governments like those in China, Taiwan, and South Korea have been using a surveillance strategy called “contact tracing” to reduce the spread of the novel coronavirus.
While each country’s contact tracing program has slight variations, all of them are essentially cell phone apps that keep a running record of the user’s heath and the health records of all the people they come into contact with.
If a cell phone comes in close contact with someone who might have the virus, the user receives a text message informing them and then instructing them to self-quarantine for 14 days.
However, the quarantine is not necessarily voluntary, depending on where you live. In some countries, phones have been used as a sort of house arrest ankle-bracelet that will notify authorities if the person being monitored leaves the house for any reason.
These apps are being touted as the way to end the shut down in both Italy and the UK and it appears that officials are going to be taking things in that direction.
At face value, it may appear that this could be a useful strategy in preventing the spread of disease, but privacy advocates and tech experts are concerned that this information could be misused and that the unprecedented surveillance capabilities could be kept and held by corrupt governments long after the pandemic is over.
In a recent interview with Vice, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden expressed his concerns about the coming surveillance program, calling it the “architecture of oppression.”
“Do you truly believe that when the first wave, this second wave, the 16th wave of the coronavirus is a long-forgotten memory, that these capabilities will not be kept? That these datasets will not be kept? No matter how it is being used, what’ is being built is the architecture of oppression,” Snowden said.
Snowden recognized that the virus was a serious threat and said that the intelligence community was well aware that it was only a matter of time before a massive pandemic crippled the country, even back when he was working in the NSA.
“There is nothing more foreseeable as a public health crisis in a world where we are just living on top of each other in crowded and polluted cities, than a pandemic. And every academic, every researcher who’s looked at this knew this was coming. And in fact, even intelligence agencies, I can tell you firsthand, because they used to read the reports had been planning for pandemics,” he said.
Snowden questioned the positive numbers that have come out of China in recent weeks and pointed out that the Chinese government has been credited with reducing the spread of the illness because they took such draconian measures during the lockdown.
Perhaps their extreme strategy is not working as well as they say it is, but since the government maintained tight control of any information coming out of the country, it is impossible to say for sure.
“If you’re looking at countries like China, where cases seem to have leveled off, how much can we trust that those numbers are actually true? I don’t think we can. Particularly, we see the Chinese government recently working to expel Western journalists at precisely this moment where we need credible independent warnings in this region,” Snowden said.
In a statement published on Friday, Apple and Google announced that they were teaming up in a rare partnership to develop compatible contact tracing apps, which they claim will work on an “opt-in” basis.
However, according toBloomberg, the companies are planning to eventually build the contact tracing into the device’s updates.
Apple and Google insist that you will still be able to opt-out of the program if you don’t want to participate, but it is possible that rankings on these apps could be used to gain entry into grocery stores or larger businesses and events once the economy opens up again.
“As authoritarianism spreads, as emergency laws proliferate, as we sacrifice our rights, we also sacrifice our capability to arrest the slide into a less liberal and less free world,” Snowden warned.
British academics have shared conspiracy theories about the coronavirus online
Organisation for Propaganda Studies tweeted interview 'Is Coronavirus New 9/11?' in which Dr Piers Robinson called Covid-19 a 'low fatality virus'
Academics include Profs Tim Hayward and Mark Crispin Miller, both of the OPS
Dr Robinson is accused of whitewashing the Syrian and Russian regimes, and has appeared on Russian state channels RT and Sputnik
Learn more about how to help people impacted by COVID
British academics including a former disgraced lecturer accused of whitewashing the Syrian regime have shared conspiracy theories about the coronavirus online.
The Organisation for Propaganda Studies, co-founded by Piers Robinson, tweeted a YouTube interview last week entitled 'Is Coronavirus The New 9/11?'
In that video, Dr Robinson called Covid-19 a 'low fatality virus' with 'no indication that it's significantly different from what we see with major flu outbreaks every year'.
He alleges that 'propagandistic information' has created 'so much hype around it, there is so much fear', according to The Times.
Dr Robinson said: 'The question is who was involved in influencing, arranging, and which states, including from within the US political system.
'And if that's the case with 9/11 it's perfectly possible that there are actors at play in relation to this. Some people have talked about bioweapons.'
It comes as communications masts around the UK have been destroyed after unfounded claims 5G technology was causing the coronavirus to spread went viral.
The Times named that academics who are accused of sharing bogus coronavirus theories, including environmental political theory professor Tim Hayward of the University of Edinburgh, and New York University professor Mark Crispin Miller.
Prof Crispin Miller, another director of the OPS, has written that the coronavirus 'may be an artificially created bioweapon'. He was approached for comment.
This week, Prof Hayward retweeted a Canadian environmentalist's claim that the WEF, UN, and Imperial College London might be part of a plot to exploit the pandemic by promoting vaccines and creating gene-modified flu-resistant chickens.
He also tweeted Oliver Stone, who made a SHOWTIME series on Vladimir Putin, speculating on whether the virus could have been a biological attack on China.
Prof Hayward told The Times: 'If I retweet interesting tweets by an influential public figure, I think it is up to other people what they make of it.
'If controversial ideas are not discussed, mistakes cannot be revealed.'
The OPS defended its associated thinkers, claiming: 'Its function is to scrutinise propaganda and intelligence campaigns, specifically examining the role of British media organisations in amplifying those state propaganda campaigns.'
Prof Hayward, along with Prof David Miller and Dr Robinson, are members of the OPS, a vehicle accused of whitewashing the Syrian regime.
Dr Robinson is also a founder of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media, whose declared aim is to examine various accounts of the conflict in Syria.
He lectured at Liverpool University from from 1999 to 2005 and became a Senior Lecturer in International Politics at Manchester University until 2015.
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Bungling 5G conspiracy theorists set fire to mobile mast after believing new tech sparked coronavirus... without realising it was a 4G tower
Scientists slam celebrities such as Woody Harrelson, Calum Best and Lee Ryan for 'fanning the flames' of false conspiracy theory blaming 5G technology for coronavirus
Dr Robinson was the Chair in Politics, Society and Political Journalism at Sheffield University but left this post and the university in 2019.
At the time, he was accused by academics of promoting baseless conspiracy theories and of 'having no interest in truth or justice'.
Dr Robinson has appeared on Russian state channels RT and Sputnik, where he has defended a Russian regime 'demonised' by Western countries.
Scientists slam celebrities such as Woody Harrelson, Calum Best and Lee Ryan for 'fanning the flames' of false conspiracy theory blaming 5G technology for coronavirus
Steve Powis said the 5G conspiracy theories were 'absolute and utter rubbish' +10
Steve Powis said the 5G conspiracy theories were 'absolute and utter rubbish'
Scientists have hit out at celebrities promoting conspiracy theories linking 5G technology with the novel coronavirus.
5G masts have been set on fire around Britain after theories about the link between the mobile technology and Covid-19 circulated online.
One scientist said celebrities who are 'fanning the flames' of 5G conspiracy theories on coronavirus 'should be ashamed'.
Cheers actor Woody Harrelson and former Dancing on Ice judge Jason Gardiner are among stars who have shared theories.
Calum Best shared a picture with the words 'I say no to 5G' on Instagram
National medical director of NHS England Steve Powis said: 'I'm absolutely outraged, absolutely disgusted, that people would be taking action against the very infrastructure that we need to respond to this health emergency.
'It is absolute and utter rubbish.'
Michael Gove added: 'That's just nonsense, dangerous nonsense as well.' _________________ --
'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."
By: Kanika Saigal Published on: Thursday, April 02, 2020 The number of cashless transactions is rising as the coronavirus pandemic limits the use of physical cash. Order Kanika Saigal payments_780 Covid19_shutterstock-600x150 Read all
Euromoney coronavirus coverage
When the World Health Organization released a statement on March 9 recommending that people turn to cashless transactions to fight the spread of Covid-19, a number of governments and retailers across the world took action. In China, thousands of banknotes were destroyed or disinfected to eliminate the spread of the virus.
South Korea followed suit, and in the US, the Federal Reserve has started storing banknotes that have come in from Asia before recirculating them back into the economy. Canadians, however, have taken a different approach. Rumours persist that some people have been shoving banknotes into washing machines to rid them of the virus – taking advantage of the fact that their ‘paper’ money is made of plastic. This takes money laundering to a whole new level.
Some retailers have banned the use of cash in their stores to keep employees and customers safe, opting for contactless payments instead. Meanwhile, for those confined to their homes, online shopping is a lifeline. Even the most unwilling are keen to adapt. Manish Kohli, head of cash management at Citi, says from his home office in New York that even his wife –previously hostile to mobile money – has started to use Venmo to transfer funds to members of the community who have been braving the streets to get goods for others in need.
"People are adapting to the new normal," he says. Necessity over convenience Digital payments, once born out of convenience, have become a necessity for some. Yes, there might still be a number of people who hoard cash – as is often the case in times of crisis – but others will cease to see the point if they are not able to use physical money to buy essential goods and services.
Luckily, we live in a time where much of the infrastructure required to complete an online purchase is already in place. This may not have been possible even ten years ago. Cash managers and payments experts agree that payment volumes will be down across the board. But they also agree that the number of digital transactions relative to physical cash transactions will soar as more and more countries go into lockdown. Santosh Tripathy 160x186 Santosh Tripathy, SmartStream "It is probably too early for the data to tell us this, but most of us in the payments space are certain that this is the case," says Santosh Tripathy, practice lead, digital payments with financial transaction management company SmartStream Technologies.
"In this environment, cash is losing its shine," he says. This could be the push needed for some countries to become truly cashless. "It's no longer inconceivable for entire countries to run on digital cash – we are already seeing this play out," says Victor Penna, global head of treasury solutions at Standard Chartered. "Most people have access to a mobile phone – which can also act as a digital wallet – and a number of central banks are thinking about introducing digital currencies. This is how we can boost financial inclusion and support the most vulnerable in society." "One good thing to come out of this crisis is that I think more and more economies will start going cashless," says Kohli. Benefits and challenges There are plenty of benefits to going cashless: digital payments are convenient and – in current circumstances – are increasingly necessary. More importantly, however, they are a lot cheaper to process than their cash equivalents. Take one example: In India, 1.7% of GDP – or $210 billion – is spent on printing, storing and distributing cash. If all payments were digital, Tripathy argues that the cost would be a fraction of this. There is also the argument that digital offerings will boost financial inclusion, as more and more individuals are able to open bank accounts online and transact digitally without ever having to enter a physical bank branch – difficult at times like this in most developed economies, almost impossible for rural populations in emerging markets that live far from their nearest town or city. But the transition from cash to cashless isn’t all that straightforward. Online payments may seem easy enough, but there still remains a lack of standardization in the system that delays payments and creates bottlenecks.
For example, real-time payments within the UK are a reality, but challenge your bank to make an instant payment to a recipient in India or Brazil, for instance, and delays are inevitable. If any one country was to move entirely towards digital payments, bank liquidity would be essential because people and businesses need to have confidence in the banking sector - Santosh Tripathy, SmartStream Fintechs such as Transferwise, WorldRemit and Revolut have plugged some of the gaps, but this often means that an individual may have a number of different accounts with a number of different payment providers and banks – which arguably removes the convenience that digital payments offered in the first place. Moreover, capacity is often limited and large transactions by multinational corporates still require strict due diligence and bank support for completion. Until application programming interfaces are much more commonly used, the fragmentation in the payments space will be another barrier to fully cashless societies. In addition – and perhaps most importantly within the current context – bank liquidity will be essential to the success of implementing and maintaining a cashless society. "If any one country was to move entirely towards digital payments, bank liquidity would be essential because people and businesses need to have confidence in the banking sector," says Tripathy. "A cashless society would mean that, hopefully, there wouldn't be a run on the banks, but individuals still want to be confident in the fact that if they wanted to withdraw their money from their accounts, they could," he says. Liquidity is essential for people to remain confident in the whole financial system. Following the global financial crisis, banks' financial buffers have become much more robust, but liquidity may soon dwindle as banks introduce a number of measures to prop up corporate clients and the economy, including emergency funding for repo markets, debt restructuring, mortgage holidays, new credit lines, huge credit drawdowns and more. This is the paradox we face right now: while a viral pandemic is conducive to the establishment of cashless societies, the pressure on banks is not.
And in return you can ignore this from the UK @karvan40115346: If you add up the total UK deaths for the first quarter of the year from respiratory diseases, the figure so far for 2020 (150,057) is less than those for 2015 (160,471) 2017 (153,759) and 2018 (164,625). https://t.co/9Xsqk6lWCK
_________________ --
'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."
By Mark Gurman
11 April 2020, 05:00 GMT+12 Updated on 11 April 2020, 11:53 GMT+12
Tech giants in rare partnership via iPhone, Android devices
Users will be alerted if they were close to infected person
Bloomberg’s daily technology newsletter is chronicling the impact of Covid-19 on the global tech industry. Sign up here.
Apple Inc. and Google unveiled a rare partnership to add technology to their smartphone platforms that will alert users if they have come into contact with a person with Covid-19. People must opt in to the system, but it has the potential to monitor about a third of the world’s population.
The technology, known as contact-tracing, is designed to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus by telling users they should quarantine or isolate themselves after contact with an infected individual.
The Silicon Valley rivals said on Friday that they are building the technology into their iOS and Android operating systems in two steps. In mid-May, the companies will add the ability for iPhones and Android phones to wirelessly exchange anonymous information via apps run by public health authorities. The companies will also release frameworks for public health apps to manage the functionality.
This means that if a user tests positive for Covid-19, and adds that data to their public health app, users who they came into close proximity with over the previous several days will be notified of their contact. This period could be 14 days, but health agencies can set the time range.
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The second step takes longer. In the coming months, both companies will add the technology directly into their operating systems so this contact-tracing software works without having to download an app. Users must opt in, but this approach means many more people can be included. Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android have about 3 billion users between them, over a third of the world’s population.
The pandemic has killed more than 100,000 and infected 1.63 million people. Governments have ordered millions to stay home, sending the global economy into a vicious tailspin. Pressure is building to relax these measures and get the world back to work. Contact-tracing is a key part of this because it can help authorities contain a potential resurgence of the virus as people resume regular activities.
2020-coronavirus-cases-world-map-cases-since-inline
Still, this technology is controversial because it involves sharing sensitive health information from billions of people via mobile devices that are constantly broadcasting their location. Some politicians and regulators have been warning that citizens’ privacy should be protected.
“We caution that actions taken to contain spreading of coronavirus must also preserve the right to privacy held by each and every American,” members of the House Freedom Caucus, a group of conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives, wrote in a letter to U.S. President Donald Trump. “Google’s colossal stores of data on daily movements of Americans, coupled with the might of local, state, and federal governments is an alarming prospect.”
Apple and Google stressed on Friday that their system preserves users’ privacy. Consent is required and location data is not collected. The technology also won’t notify users who they came into contact with, or where that happened. The companies said they can’t see this data either, and noted that the whole system can be shut down when needed.
Aside from privacy and trust concerns, challenges include the availability of widespread and free testing to complement the app, as well as access to mobile phones and other wireless devices, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.
“We must be realistic that such contact tracing methods are likely to exclude many vulnerable members of society who lack access to technology and are already being disproportionately impacted by the pandemic,” Jennifer Granick, ACLU’s surveillance and cybersecurity counsel, said in a statement.
For Apple and Google, such a close partnership between these longtime rivals is extremely rare. The technology giants have competed in smartphone operating systems, app stores, media services, and voice-recognition technology for years -- while trading barbs over the privacy of each others’ platforms. However, both companies have been under pressure to use their prodigious resources to help fight the pandemic.
“All of us at Apple and Google believe there has never been a more important moment to work together to solve one of the world’s most pressing problems,” the companies said in a joint statement.
Their system uses Bluetooth, a standard way for most mobile devices to communicate with each other. Apple and Google shared a theoretical example to explain how it works.
Two people meet to chat for a few minutes, and in the background via Bluetooth their smartphones exchange anonymous identifiers to register that they have been in contact. These digital keys change every 15 minutes or so and remain on these people’s devices to preserve privacy.
Several days later, one of these individuals is diagnosed with Covid-19. The person enters the results into a health-agency app on their phone. The system then asks for this user’s consent. If granted, the person’s smartphone sends a record of the other mobile devices that have been in close proximity during the previous days. This information is temporarily stored in a remote computer server for about 14 days.
Meanwhile, the other person’s phone checks the server periodically to see if any identifier keys have been associated with a positive Covid-19 diagnosis. The phone downloads all positive keys and matches it anonymously to the key belonging to the individual from the original meeting days earlier. This sends a notification to the other person’s phone with information from health agencies about how to quarantine or self-isolate.
The contact-tracing technology isn’t the first step against Covid-19 for either company. Google launched an information website in March, while Apple has released its own screening tools for iPhone users. Apple has also donated over 20 million masks to health-care workers and has designed face shields, and Verily, a unit of Google parent Alphabet Inc., is running virus-testing sites in some parts of California.
Other organizations are also working on contact-tracing. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology earlier this week announced plans for a similar system. Some countries and third-party developers have also tried implementing contact-tracing on phones, but they have faced privacy and connectivity issues that the new system is designed to avoid.
Parents of children such as cancer sufferer Ilhan Ates-Suddes have been asked to sign a Do Not Resuscitate order by their GP
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Parents of vulnerable and sick children are furious after being asked by GPs to sign Do Not Resuscitate orders if their loved ones catch Covid-19.
One shocked mum, Margaret Ates-Suddes, whose 11-year-old son Ilhan has cancer, yesterday branded the life or death request as inhumane.
Another enraged mother claims her 16 year-old son was called directly by their GP surgery to ask to consent to a DNR form.
The order instructs medics not to perform CPR if a patient stops breathing or their heart stops.
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence had told doctors to assess people with learning disabilities, autism or cerebral palsy on a “clinical frailty scale” meaning some would be denied hospital treatment.
Days later Nice did a U-turn after being challenged by disabled charities but there are concerns about how the guidance is being interpreted by GPs.
Ilhan Ates-Suddes has a rare form of cancer called fibrosarcoma in his neck and jaw
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Ilhan, of Scar-borough, North Yorks, has a rare form of cancer called fibrosarcoma in his neck and jaw.
He has to feed through a tube and has a hole in his throat to breath.
Mum Margaret, 32, says the shock call from her GP surgery came “totally out of the blue” this week.
She said: “They asked if we wanted a DNR if Ilhan had to be taken to hospital with coronavirus.
“When I complained, one GP told me there had been a mistake. But how on earth can someone see an 11-year-old boy’s age on a computer and think that it is responsible behaviour? Ilhan is an oncology patient and this is something we would decide with his consultant at Leeds General Infirmary, where the treatment has been amazing.”
She added: “Ilhan has fought cancer for seven years and there’s no way I’m going to let anyone give up on him.
“Nobody has the right to decide whether someone is worthy of CPR or not. Ilhan is a fighter, always has been.”
There was no one available for comment at Ilhan’s surgery, which we have chosen not to name.
Ilhan Ates-Suddes's mum Margaret says the shock call from her GP surgery came 'totally out of the blue'
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A 16-year-old lad from Colchester, Essex, also received a call from his surgery asking if he would agree to the DNA order. The boy, who has asthma and the connective tissue disorder Ehlers-Danlos, has a say in his own care plan.
His mum said: “The surgery called to ask if he had enough asthma packs, then asked if he would agree to a DNR on his notes. He asked them what it meant and when they told him he said, ‘Hell no, I’m only 16.’
“He is about to sit his A-levels. How can his life be worth nothing? He thinks the Government wants him dead.”
Last night the boy’s GP surgery said it was unable to comment due to data protection.
Elizabeth John, 61, of Bridgend, South Wales, also got an apology from her GP surgery after they sent a DNR form.
Elizabeth, who has cancer, said: “I was made to feel like I was worthless and a burden to society. But I’m not dying yet.”
Mum Margaret says: 'Ilhan is a fighter and he always has been'
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Her surgery wrote: “Our letter was poorly worded and did not properly articulate the care and commitment we have for our patients. We would like to sincerely apologise.”
Mencap Chief Executive Edel Harris said: “These letters from GP surgeries are deeply troubling.
"They wrongly conflate having support needs with frailty and risk people with a learning disability not getting equal access to healthcare and potentially dying avoidably.
“We are extremely concerned these letters have already forced parents or carers to make potentially life or death decisions.”
Labour’s shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth said: “This will already be a hugely worrying time for vulnerable people and their families and being asked to make a decision like this will undoubtedly cause more distress for them.
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“Families must not be put under unacceptable pressure in these circumstances and it’s time NHS leaders offered clear guidance.”
A spokesman for NHS England would not comment on individual cases but said: “The key principle is that each person is an individual whose needs and preferences must be taken account of individually.
“Blanket policies are inappropriate whether due to medical condition, disability, or age.” _________________ --
'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 a nutshell Covid19 is a "chimera" a gene-spliced hybrid with a "gain of function" to make it more virulent, The virus was first synthesized in 2015 in the USA, Chinese Dr's were taught the technique & the Woohan institute contracted to continue further "work" on the virus. Despite a previous moratorium in 2014 to stop such work due to an uncontrolled outbreak being too risky. Covid19 was also granted a patent in November 2019. The following videos contain detailed analysis & proof, cited papers & a trail of evidence, names , papers etc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR8gw6GLwug[/youtube] _________________ --
'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: Wed Apr 15, 2020 11:15 am Post subject:
Roger Stone is saying Bill Gates funded and conjured this bioweapon and the vaccine..a pefect loop..Plenty of evidence that he and Fauci and the NIH are up their eyeballs in dirt..which always floats to the surface...hold on the battle is pitched..!
Paul Craig Roberts on my show again Thursday, he was Treasury Secretary with President Ronald Reagen, truths will abound so tune in...
I wrote these glaringly obvious facts a couple of days ago:
As the Coronavirus lockdown and police state persist people will fall into two categories..and many torn in between...Many people will be so desperate for things to go back to normal (it was never 'normal' it was a global casino mental asylum of debt and fear and slavery that had become/seemed 'normal') that they will accept almost any type of draconian Bill Gates scenarios, such as you cant leave your house, or work, or shop, or socialize without a mandatory vaccination, 5G, microchip/tattoo (mark of the beast) Communist China app on your phone to track your temperature, whereabouts etc...
And the second category is those people who will not accept any of the above and thus will have to swiftly create communities and systems independantly of government control with their own food, water, power, and internet supply so as not to be able to be rendered helpless again by governments..Break away societies as some have said it..Most of you already feel and know which people you are, and the time is coming quickly, very quickly, where you will be forced to decide, to choose which person you are...even you inbetweeners!
Coronavirus Bioweapon Crime Scene or Natural Virus Pandemic, New Perpectives with Gilad Atzmon _________________ 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/
So far as I am aware, Sweden remains the only major Western country that has not imposed a strict lockdown on its citizens to deal with the Covid-19 outbreak. Other than a ban on gatherings of 50 or more people, and advice such as over-70s being urged to stay at home, Swedish schools, shops, restaurants and pubs all remain open. It almost seems to me that the Government there has decided to treat grown adults like they are ... well grown adults.
However, despite being a sovereign nation, with the right to set its own policy, it appears that this is not acceptable to the "international community", and the Swedish Government is coming under huge pressure to change course. The World Health Organization (WHO), for instance, recently called for the nation to impose more restrictions, saying that it is "imperative" that Sweden:
"increase measures to control spread of the virus, prepare and increase capacity of the health system to cope, ensure physical distancing and communicate the why and how of all measures to the population."
Donald Trump also felt the need to give his two cents as well:
"Sweden did that, the herd, they call it the herd. Sweden's suffering very, very badly."
But is Sweden really suffering very, very badly in comparison to other countries that have imposed severe restrictions? Is it really imperative that they change course and fall in line with what most other countries have done? Or do these calls proceed from a different motive entirely: a fear that Sweden's comparatively measured approach of dealing with Covid-19 without introducing the most draconian civil restrictions ever seen and without crashing its economy might actually work and in so doing show the response of other countries to have been wildly disproportionate?
This is not something we should leave to a matter of opinion, so let's instead look at what the data tells us. Below are four charts comparing the UK, which went into lockdown on 23rd March, with Sweden and its far more relaxed approach. All the data on these charts comes from the official reports from both countries up to and including 11th April (here and here). It comes with the caveats that of course this is by no means final and the situation may well change to produce a very different picture in the coming weeks, nor is it possible to know with any certainty whether both countries are counting their cases and deaths in a way that is consistent with one another. Nevertheless, since it is from official data sources, it is the best guide we currently have to what is happening in both countries.
(Note: Charts 1 and 3 compare cases and deaths in absolute terms. Charts 2 and 4 take into account the relative population sizes (UK = 67.9 million; Sweden = 10.10 million) by looking at the number of cases per million people).
UK and Sweden Covid cases
UK and Sweden Covid cases
UK and Sweden Covid deaths
UK and Sweden Covid cases
(Note: In terms of timelines, Sweden reported its first Covid-cases eight days before the UK (15 on 3rd March, compared with 77 on 11th March in the UK), whilst the UK recorded its first deaths two days before Sweden (10 on 14th March, compared with 4 for Sweden on 16th March)).
Looking at these charts, particularly charts 2 and 4 which are a like-for-like comparison, as at 11th April, I think we can say the following:
In terms of reported cases, the data shows no evidence that the UK lockdown approach has been any more successful than the Swedish approach. In fact, per million people, Sweden has had fewer cases than the UK.
In terms of recorded deaths, again there is no evidence so far that the UK lockdown approach has been any more successful than the Swedish approach. In fact, per million people, Sweden has had fewer deaths than the UK
London’s new Nightingale Hospital has remained largely empty with just 19 patients being treated there over the weekend, according to senior figures.
The temporary hospital in Docklands is designed to have 2,900 intensive care beds and 750 additional beds.
In early March there were fears that London’s existing intensive care units, which had a total of about 770 beds, would be overwhelmed by coronavirus patients. This led to plans for a four-fold increase in ICU capacity with the construction of a hospital Hospital at the Excel conference centre.
Joined: 30 Jul 2006 Posts: 6060 Location: East London
Posted: Thu Apr 16, 2020 2:23 am Post subject:
'12 Experts Questioning the Coronavirus Panic';
https://off-guardian.org/2020/03/24/12-experts-questioning-the-coronav irus-panic/
Meanwhile, back on the ranch, Britain sends a warship along with France to the Caribbean to join Trump's buildup against 'drug trafficking' off the Venezuelan coast... _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
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