Is it safe and reliable to use methodologies taken from intelligence analysts when looking for responsible parties? If a publication like the New York Times publishes a “pointed” misdirection piece, it is safe to assume, based on how outlandish the article is, that intent can be determined, based on analysis, intent, of course, to deceive?
“Deception and cover” are primary components in every intelligence operation. Were the US to attack nations such as China, Russia, Italy, Iran or others with a biological weapon, a capability Russia has long alleged the US continues to maintain in violation of convention, a “deception and cover” operation would be part of it and media organizations would be tasked with specific “pointed” propaganda tasks.
“Intent” can and usually does very much mean an admission of complicity. In this case, the Times, by some standards, admitted that the US created COVID 19 and desperately needs to blame someone else because they either unleashed it as an act of war or, more likely, lost control of a biological weapon because of corrupt contractors that turned to super-governmental organized crime.
We only need to examine the OPCW and their recent attempts to cover up use of chemical weapons in Syria by Western intelligence agencies as a “backdrop” as it were. If that was done, then might well COVID 19 be a similar operation?
Attacking, silencing, smearing anyone who asks if bio-warfare is a reality has obviously forgotten, perhaps out of choice, the very long history of the use of biological weapons against the Soviet Union, Cuba and China during the Cold War.
It wasn’t until 1969 that the US admitted it had brought Japan’s devastating “731” program into the US Department of Defense at the end of World War II. Though the US has openly rejected the use of biological weapons, after decades of research and mass production and alleged deployment, current programs that are supposedly defensive in nature deeply analog the prohibited programs of old. From FAS.org:
“A pathogen can be obtained from two major sources: its natural environment and a microbiology laboratory or bank. When acquired from environmental sources such as soil, water, or infected animals, enough of the microorganism would have to be obtained to allow purification and testing of its characteristics. The difficulty in acquiring agents stored in labs and banks, such as the American Type Culture Collection, depends on accessibility to the pathogens, security for the facility, or security measures for the bank’s ordering process. These agents are purified and of a known quality.
An alternative to acquiring agents is creating them. Toxins can be produced by adding the DNA coding for its production to bacteria. Also, advances in biotechnology have made it possible to synthesize certain viruses based on its genome, or an organism’s genetic instructions, and using basic materials such as DNA. Dr. Eckard Wimmer first demonstrated this by re-creating the poliovirus in 2001, which was followed by Dr. Craig Venter’s synthesis of the bacteriophage phiX174 in 2003 and the 2005 re-creation of the 1918 flu virus by Dr. Jeffrey Taubenberger and Dr. Terrence Tumpey.”
What is alleged is that these capabilities as described exist, the virus availability exists and the strains now spreading in the current pandemic have a clear history as with earlier delves into the Spanish Flu of 1918 and polio, a disease in resurgence in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
On April 13, 2020, the New York Times published a 3000-word propaganda attack on Russian President Vladimir Putin, accusing him of “declaring war on American science.”
However, their article said everything but, though it did say “everything,” meaning a cornucopia of accusations and smears.
Here is how they begin:
“On Feb. 3, soon after the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus to be a global health emergency, an obscure Twitter account in Moscow began retweeting an American blog. It said the pathogen was a germ weapon designed to incapacitate and kill. The headline called the evidence “irrefutable” even though top scientists had already debunked that claim and declared the novel virus to be natural.”
They were quoting Trevor Bedford, certainly a qualified scientist, one qualified scientist who, in fact, debunked nothing. Yes, COVID 19 could occur naturally but, in fact it first occurred at the University of North Carolina, as a “chimera” that was “generated” so that “no vaccine could be developed,” according to a 2017 paper.
Getting back to the Times, as with most propaganda, so many rules are broken that would normally make a real journalist cry. Here’s one:
“Analysts say that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has played a principal role in the spread of false information as part of his wider effort to discredit the West and destroy his enemies from within.”
We thus ask, what analysts? Here’s another even worse:
“The New York Times — involving scores of interviews as well as a review of scholarly papers, news reports, and Russian documents, tweets and TV shows — found that Mr. Putin has spread misinformation on issues of personal health for more than a decade.”
With this, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Is Putin against eating vegetables or brushing teeth? What does “personal health” mean? Is anyone against “personal health?” They do make it clear in the next sentence, however:
“His (Putin’s) agents have repeatedly planted and spread the idea that viral epidemics — including flu outbreaks, Ebola and now the coronavirus — were sown by American scientists. The disinformers have also sought to undermine faith in the safety of vaccines, a triumph of public health that Mr. Putin himself promotes at home.”
Where do we begin? OK, they say “agents,” but what agents? They never name them. And didn’t Russia develop the vaccine for Ebola? Then again, didn’t American scientists at the University of North Carolina develop coronavirus in a study paid for by USAID, an organization that has typically been considered, and this assertion has “legs,” part of the CIA? Now we continue, but as examples are on every sentence, making a valid point without tiresome redundancy, will require the use of judgement. Next:
“Moscow’s aim, experts say, is to portray American officials as downplaying the health alarms and thus posing serious threats to public safety.”
This one is very simple, there is one organization in the US that has, according to this allegation, aided Moscow more than any other and that is the New York Times. After all, it is the New York Times that has led the way in attacking the Trump regime for “downplaying the health alarms and thus posing serious threats to the public safety.”
We now descend into a maelstrom of idiocy as we continue:
“The Russian president has waged his long campaign by means of open media, secretive trolls and shadowy blogs that regularly cast American health officials as patronizing frauds. Of late, new stealth and sophistication have made his handiwork harder to see, track and fight.”
OK, now we understand. The Times can find no other source, perhaps other than itself, because “secretive trolls and shadowy blogs,” perhaps like Veterans Today, are so well hidden the best financed investigative amateur journalists and propagandists can’t find them.
To conclude, and perhaps to an extent for dramatic effect, we move down a paragraph or so, omitting perhaps the most absurd of allegations and try just one last one out:
“Because public interest in wellness and longevity runs high, health disinformation can have a disproportionally large social impact. Experts fear that it will foster public cynicism that erodes Washington’s influence as well as the core democratic value of relying on demonstrable facts as a basis for decision-making.”
Goodness! Now we have it. Russia is trying to erode Washington’s “core democratic value of relying on demonstrable facts.”
Where does one begin? First of all, no one knew Washington even alleged that it relied on anything but “alternative facts” in the first place. By nature, an “alternative fact” is never “demonstrable.”
A cursory Google search of “Trump-lies” brings up a dozen or more New York Times articles which include:
Google Gives Cover to Trump Lies (NYT)
No One Believes Trump (NYT)
The President is Lying About Corona Virus (NYT)
President Trump’s Lies, the Definitive List (NYT)
Trump, who the Times says is not to be believed, ever, accuses China, Russia and Iran of making COVID 19 and deploying it as a weapon, as voiced by both Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and others including:
On January 24, The Washington Times’ Bill Gertz wrote an article claiming, “The deadly animal virus epidemic spreading globally may have originated in a Wuhan laboratory linked to China’s covert biological weapons program, according to an Israeli biological warfare expert.”
Steve Bannon, former Breitbart News executive chairman and ex-White House adviser, hosted Gertz multiple times to discuss his article promoting the Wuhan lab conspiracy theory. Bannon also has ties to a Chinese billionaire-in-exile who has pushed false conspiracy theories about coronavirus.
On January 26, Gertz published another Washington Times article, in which he repeated the claim he had attributed to the “Israeli biological warfare expert” in his January 24 piece. Gertz also claimed that although China has denied “having any offensive biological weapons, … a State Department report last year revealed suspicions of covert biological warfare work.” Gertz’ s article earned over 165,000 interactions (shares, reactions, and comments) on public and private Facebook posts. Notably, it was shared on pro-Trump Facebook pages and groups, including ForAmerica and Bannon’s official Facebook page.
During a January 30 Senate Armed Services Committee meeting, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) suggested that COVID-19 may have been created in a Chinese “superlaboratory.”
On February 1, conspiracy theorist and Holocaust denier talk radio host Hal Turner posted a fearmongering blog on his website claiming COVID-19 is “a MILITARY BIO-WEAPON developed by China’s army.” In addition to posting out-of-context photos of a virus database, Turner’s website also suggested that HIV was somehow added to a “Bat-SARS-Like” coronavirus in a laboratory to create the current strain of COVID-19.
(credit Media Matters)
But what do we know? We know that since blaming a Chinese bio-warfare lab for spreading COVID 19 isn’t working, then attacking those who use hard evidence citing bio-warfare as a probable source is required but why?
Is it because the trail lead to US bio-weapons labs?
Whitney Webb & Raul Diego
The Last American Vagabond
Thu, 09 Apr 2020 00:00 UTC
Corner the Covid-19 Cure Market
Comment: An almost invaluable article in helping to see the intersection between Big Pharma, the Deep State and the US military. It seems that the implications of what's written could not be more relevant to what we see concerning the big push towards vaccinating (and ultimately digitally ID'ing) everyone and their mother. Part 1 here.
One of the most politically-connected yet scandal ridden vaccine companies in the United States, with troubling ties to the 2001 anthrax attacks and opioid crisis, is set to profit handsomely from the current Coronavirus crisis.
In August 2001, biopharmaceutical company BioPort faced imminent disaster. A series of company scandals, controversial federal bail-outs and severe, adverse health reactions among U.S. troops were causing both Congress and the Pentagon to reconsider its multi-million dollar contract to provide the military with an anthrax vaccine.
Formed for the sole purpose of acquiring a publicly-owned company in Michigan that held the exclusive license to manufacture the only FDA-approved anthrax vaccine in the United States, BioPort sought to quickly expand the size and scope of its contracts with the U.S. military. This strategy was made possible thanks to the former head of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, Adm. William Crowe, who would prove highly instrumental in the rise of BioPort's vaccine monopoly and its subsequent, aggressive hiring of former government officials as lobbyists.
Yet, soon after scoring these multi-million dollar contracts and securing a monopoly on anthrax vaccines, BioPort would claim that they were flailing financially and would subsequently be bailed out to the tune of $24 million at the Pentagon's request, which cited "national security concerns" as justification.
However, Pentagon auditors had found that much of the money awarded to BioPort was unaccounted for and the money they were able to trace had failed to go towards renovating their vaccine production facility, which had lost its license until numerous sanitary problems (sanitary and otherwise) were fixed. Meanwhile, scores of soldiers who had suffered ill health effects from BioPort's anthrax vaccine, some disabled for life, began speaking out, bringing BioPort's most critical product and chief source of income under unwanted scrutiny.
While BioPort seemingly faced imminent ruin from these and other scandals in August 2001, the 2001 anthrax attacks that followed a month later came at just the right time for the company, as demand for their anthrax vaccine soon skyrocketed, resulting in new lucrative government contracts. Their license was also quickly renewed thanks to intervention from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) despite many of the problems with its production facility persisting.
Though they were conveniently rescued by the unfortunate events of 2001, BioPort would soon lobby for larger contracts than ever before, calling for a massive increase in government purchases of their controversial anthrax vaccine. Riding the fear caused by the 2001 anthrax attacks, they pushed for the government to stockpile anthrax vaccines, not just for the military, but for civilians, postal workers, police and many more who could potentially be put in harm's way were the anthrax attacks to repeat themselves.
Jerome Hauer
Jerome Hauer
One of their biggest proponents of expanding BioPort's contracts was working for HHS at the time — Jerome Hauer, a man who not only had foreknowledge of the anthrax attacks, but had also participated in the Dark Winter simulation that would also predict those same attacks just months prior. Hauer would, months later, be appointed to a newly created position at HHS, one which oversaw the new biodefense stockpile from which BioPort would be a major beneficiary.
BioPort would be then renamed and repackaged as Emergent Biosolutions in 2004. It would then hire even more well-connected lobbyists and add several big names from government and the private sector to its board. One of these "big names" was none other than Jerome Hauer, who was added to Emergent's board soon after leaving HHS. Hauer still remains a company director and sits on three of its corporate governance committees.
Not only did Emergent Biosolutions profit from national anthrax fears, they would also cash in on subsequent pandemic panics and later receive substantial backing from the Bill Gates-backed Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). They would then turn their attention to the still-raging opioid addiction and overdose crisis by buying rights to the only drug approved for treating opioid overdoses at the scene while also suing any and all generic producers of this crucial, life-saving treatment.
Comment: There goes Bill Gates again! He seems to be nearly everywhere in the modern story of vaccine business.
Given its history, it should come as little surprise that Emergent Biosolutions is now set to profit from the Coronavirus (Covid-19) crisis. They are particularly well-suited to make record profits off of Covid-19, as they are backing not one, but two, vaccine candidates as well as an experimental blood plasma treatment already approved for trials in New York state, thanks in part to Jerome Hauer's old boss, New York governor Andrew Cuomo. As noted in a previous article for The Last American Vagabond, the other main companies developing Covid-19 vaccines in the U.S. are strategic partners of the controversial Pentagon research agency DARPA, which has become increasingly aligned with HHS in recent years thanks to another Dark Winter participant, Robert Kadlec.
In this second installment of the series "Engineering Contagion: Amerithrax, Coronavirus and the Rise of the Biotech-Industrial Complex," Emergent Biosolution's rise to prominence, made possible through acts of blatant corruption and the public-private revolving door, will be explored. The clear nexus between Big Pharma, Government and University-affiliated "Biosecurity Centers" offers a startling look into the Biotech-Industrial Complex that has long dominated U.S. biodefense policy and is now guiding much of the U.S. government's response to the Coronavirus crisis.
A Bio Threat is Born
For half a century, Vladimir Pasechnik had been a model Soviet citizen, with his scientific prowess in the field of bioweapons earning him an honorary rank of general. However, having been granted such a title didn't seem to inspire much loyalty when he made a call to the British embassy from a phone booth in France in 1989. The famed microbiologist subsequently defected to England, a decision that preceded the fall of the Berlin Wall by a matter of months. Yet, few could have provided a more riveting view behind the Iron Curtain than Pasechnik, who regaled Whitehall with shocking tales of monstrous pathogens engineered as part of the Biopreparat, communist Russia's top secret biological weapons program.
Pasechnik's MI6 handler, Christopher Davis, shared all of the intelligence gathered with his counterparts in the United States, including claims that Biopreparat programs had developed antibiotic-resistant strains of anthrax, tularemia and botulinum toxin. Ancient diseases like the plague had also been modified, according to Davis. When the stories ran out, Pasechnik was given a job at Britain's own biodefense facilities at Porton Down, where he would remain for another decade before branching out and founding his own biotech firm.
Comment: Porton Down is the same facility that figured so deeply in the whole Skripal affair. See:
Skripal Lie Redux: Two More People "Poisoned" Near Porton Down
Big surprise! Porton Down was producing and testing novichok in 2014, four years before the Skripal Affair
Salisbury Nerve Agent Attack Uncovers $70 Million Pentagon Bioweapons Program at Porton Down
The Western geopolitical establishment, however, wasted no time in cementing a new narrative of imminent, worldwide bioweapons threats following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev's resignation in 1991 abruptly crashed the Cold War rhetoric market in the West and the massive military-industrial complex that had profited from those tensions remained revved up, yet lacking a boogeyman.
Pasechnik was just one of several Biopreparat alumni who had defected to Western countries, with another well-known example being Ken Alibek (born Kanatjan Alibekov), who defected to the US as opposed to the UK. Many of Alibek's sensational claims and dire warnings regarding the Soviet bioweapons program in the 1990s would later be proven to be imaginative falsehoods. Despite this, Alibek retained influence in the biotechnology industry and Washington, where the ability to sell fear is often a sought-after trait.
Pasechnik, however, wasn't so lucky, dying of a suspected heart attack in November 2001. He was one of 11 of the world's top microbiologists to die under mysterious circumstances from November 2001 to March 2002.
In light of the claims made by Pasechnik, Alibek and others in the 1990s, a relatively small group of well-connected individuals — many of whom would later participate in the June 2001 Dark Winter simulation — asserted that Biopreparat presented an enduring threat, hypothesizing that defectors from the program might not turn to the West, but instead to rival regimes like Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
Anthrax was quickly deemed to be one of the top threats by these bioweapons doomsayers and then, just months after the Soviet Union's collapse, the U.S. Department of Defense issued a competitive bid solicitation for the production of 6.3 million doses of the anthrax vaccine. Its previous contract, only a year before, had called for merely 700,000 doses by comparison.
Sourcing Problems
The Michigan Biologic Products Institute (MBPI) had been founded in 1926 by the State to serve the vaccination needs of its largely rural population, many of whom worked on farms and required inoculation against naturally occurring anthrax spores and rabies. By the 1980s, the Institute stood alone as the only anthrax vaccine manufacturer in the U.S. after 1970s-era regulations had driven most private vaccine manufacturers out of business. MBPI's anthrax vaccine was known as Anthrax Vaccine Adsorbed (AVA) or BioThrax.
Aligning himself with policy recommendations issued by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy - a front for the controversial Koch brothers, Michigan's governor, John Engler, cited the MBPI's endemic financial losses to justify putting the nation's only licensed anthrax vaccine manufacturer up for sale in 1996. However, upon closer examination, the real reason behind the decision had more to do with a sudden spike in demand by the lab's only customer, the US government, and the MBPI's inability to meet it.
The Michigan facility required massive renovations if it was to fulfill the needs of a national security establishment that had come to reconstitute itself around the threat of weapons of mass destruction and biowarfare, a threat largely manufactured by the stories of Soviet defectors. The Pentagon offered to pony up $1.8 million for the necessary renovations, but there were no takers — at least, none with a US passport.
That same year, perennial US defense contractor, Dyncorp, went into business with a shadowy group of biotech entrepreneurs from across the pond, forming the DynPort Vaccine Company, LLC., a combination of DynCorp's name with that of its UK-based partner, Porton International, Inc. The latter company's president, Zsolt Harsanyi, would also lead DynPort as the British firm began to lay the groundwork for its second attempt at securing a crucial monopoly within the American biotech space.
Germ Monopoly
Porton Down SignPorton International had come into existence as a result of the Thatcherite revolution that balkanized British public sector assets and distributed them among private interests that frequently had close and cozy ties with Thatcher-era officials and other UK politicians. Among these assets was the Centre for Applied Microbiology and Research (CAMR), a biotechnology arm of the United Kingdom's infamous Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, commonly referred to as Porton Down, which also happened to house the UK's own anthrax vaccine program.
Porton International began operations in 1982, when London financier, Wensley Haydon-Baillie, founded the company to develop a herpes medication invented by Dr. Gordon Skinner, which had stalled during clinical trials and never actually entered the market. In 1985, Haydon-Baillie secured exclusive rights to commercialize drugs developed by the CAMR, a sweetheart deal from the Thatcher government that drew in large investments from British Telecom and Lloyds Bank, among others, totaling £76 million. Haydon-Ballie profited handsomely from the venture, collecting annual dividends of half a million pounds and selling some of his shares for £24 million in 1986.
In 1989, Porton International acquired Sera-lab and Hazleton Biologics, Inc., providing it with an established distribution network. The following year, the company's bid to outright purchase the 650-employee CAMR lab, would be accepted by British Health Secretary, Kenneth Clark, despite opposition from the staff who had voted against the takeover.
House of Fuad
By the time the sale closed, Haydon-Ballie — once the 50th richest man in England — was on the brink of being forced out of Porton International over accusations of illicit enrichment. Around the same time, the anthrax vaccine was set to enter a bull market and Porton International was now in a prime position to reap the full benefits.
A year earlier in 1989, Ibrahim El-Hibri, a Venezuelan citizen who had made a fortune working for US telecommunications companies, had become a silent partner in Porton International. His son, Fuad El-Hibri, was made director of Porton Products, Ltd, a Porton International subsidiary, which was the conduit by which the El-Hibri family had made a killing selling anthrax vaccines to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states at $300 to $500 a dose. Fuad El-Hibri had previously been an intelligence contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton and an executive at the Wall Street giant, CitiGroup.
ADM William J. Crowe Jr., USN.
ADM William J. Crowe Jr., USN.
The elder El-Hibri had a knack for business that ran back decades to the 1970s when he lived in Qatar, where he befriended the then-head of US Central Command, Admiral William Crowe. The career military man kept in touch with El-Hibri through the years and perhaps even gave him a few business leads at a time when Crowe was also serving on the board of pharmaceutical behemoth, Pfizer. Crowe would later pick up the phone in late 1997 (officially at least, but probably well before) to make a proposition to his old friend.
In 1997, then-US Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen announced a plan to vaccinate every single member of the US Armed Forces against anthrax, which ultimately resulted in the vaccination of approximately 2.4 million troops by 2003. Admiral Crowe, who was serving as the US ambassador to the UK at the time, quickly contacted El-Hibri to discuss the US government anthrax vaccine market in light of this new Pentagon policy.
The only obstacle was getting his son, Fuad El-Hibri, a U.S. passport so that he could run the business stateside. To easily and quickly circumvent this issue, the politically-connected Admiral — with his deep ties to the Pentagon intact — was made a director of BioPort and given 10% of company stock, despite not having put a single penny into the company.
The stage was set to bring Porton International into the exclusive government contract business in the United States as BioPort, Inc. As luck would have it, Porton International's president, Zsolt Harsanyi, had just received a ten-year DoD contract worth roughly $322 million through DynPort Vaccine Company, LLC, and — thanks to Michigan's governor — the only licensed anthrax vaccine manufacturing plant in the country was back on the auction block.
A Steal and a Scam
In September 1998, BioPort acquired the MBPI facility through a $25 million package of loans, cash and promises to pay Michigan state more for the company in the future, promises that were later broken. It was later revealed that El-Hibri and other BioPort partners had only placed $4.5 million of their own money into this package.
As previously mentioned, the MBPI plant in Lansing, MI had come with issues and had been closed for renovations six months prior to its purchase by BioPort. However, the MBPI had received millions from the Pentagon to fix the issues identified by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that had affected the vaccine's "stability, potency and purity."
Along with these issues, BioPort had also inherited military contracts worth nearly $8 million for anthrax vaccines. They quickly secured another contract for the same totaling more than $45 million, with an additional $16 million in cash for immediate renovations — a sizable deal likely due to BioPort's aggressive hiring of former Pentagon and federal officials as lobbyists in addition to Crowe's own deep ties to the Pentagon.
Despite the massive influx of cash, BioPort did not spend the money on renovating the plant and its sanitary issues, likely due to the fact that the deal required the Pentagon to buy anthrax vaccines from BioPort even if the plant and the vaccines it had produced lacked a FDA license.
With the Pentagon obligated to buy the vaccine, regardless of whether it was usable, BioPort spent millions renovating its executives' offices, as opposed to the vaccine factory, and millions more on bonuses for "senior management." Pentagon auditors would later find that still millions more had gone "missing" and BioPort's staff were unaware of the cost of producing a single dose of the vaccine.
Despite the clear mismanagement and corruption, BioPort demanded to be bailed out by the Pentagon, requesting even more money to replace what they had lost and squandered. Though Pentagon auditors argued that the company should be abandoned, top military officials cited "national security" and awarded BioPort with an additional $24.1 million. They also upped the price to be paid for each dose of the anthrax vaccine, which only has a shelf life of 3 years, from $4.36 to $10.64.
Congress would hold hearings on the bail-out, hearings that went nowhere. During one of those hearings, then-Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC) would state the following:
"The message seems clear: If a company wants to make millions without providing a product or service, enter into a sole-source contract with the Department of Defense to produce vaccines. BioPort appears to have the government over a barrel."
Unsurprisingly, this would only be the first of BioPort's federal bail-outs.
Fortune favors the corrupt
With BioPort well aware of its powerful position early on, it dragged its feet in getting its factory relicensed and up to federal standards. Meanwhile, due to the nature of the contract, the Pentagon kept buying up large amounts of vaccines that were unusable, and arguably unsafe, while also still paying BioPort for storage of the useless product.
During this time, anthrax vaccine doses made prior to these renovations were being used on U.S. troops, with many of those soldiers claiming that the vaccine produced in the troubled facility had given them permanent headaches, joint pain, loss of memory and other, more severe symptoms. Some were even disabled for life. Congress again held hearings, but they were stuffed with BioPort employees posing as "experts" as well as others who supported the Pentagon's contract with the company.
Comment: The Pentagon has an appalling record of vaccinating US soldiers with dangerous ingredients:
Gulf war syndrome: United States veterans suffering from multiple debilitating symptoms
Gulf war syndrome: The U.S. Government's conspiracy of silence
However, in 2000, the Pentagon did finally lose patience and demanded that BioPort stop making BioThrax. BioPort obliged, but kept receiving government money to keep it afloat. By August 2001, the Lansing facility was still unlicensed and BioPort was still demanding government money to keep it from going out of business. That month, Congress and the Pentagon began to publicly discuss abandoning BioPort. The Pentagon began preparing a report, due to be released in September 2001, that would detail a plan for letting BioPort go.
Fortunately for BioPort but unfortunately for the nation, the events of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent anthrax attacks led to major increases in fear and panic that anthrax attacks could become a recurrent nightmare for the American public and that radical terror groups and rival nations sought to target, not just American soldiers with anthrax, but also the country's civilians.
The ensuing panic led the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to intervene, returning BioPort its license in January 2002 despite persisting safety concerns at its vaccine production facility. BioPort was not content to merely see its past contracts with the Pentagon restored, however, as it began lobbying heavily for new contracts for anthrax vaccines intended for American civilians, postal workers and others. They would get them, largely thanks to HHS' then-counter-terrorism adviser and soon to be HHS' newest Assistant Secretary — Jerome Hauer.
Jerome Hauer's Curious Past
Jerome Hauer and Rudy Giuliani
Jerome Hauer and Rudy Giuliani
As BioPort secured its control over the only licensed anthrax vaccine producer in the country in 1998, New York's emergency crisis manager and bioterrorism expert, Jerome Hauer, was busy working and making doomsday contingency plans from his "bunker" on the 23rd floor of World Trade Center Building 7.
Put on the job by then-NY Mayor Rudy Giuliani in 1996, Hauer had previously managed worldwide emergency response for technology giant IBM. He also was an adviser to the Justice Department, had briefed President Clinton on bioterror threats and was known to "consult regularly with Scotland Yard and the Israeli military." It was reportedly Hauer's idea to locate the city's emergency management office at Building 7, even though placing it there was considered controversial at the time due to the 1993 World Trade Center bombings, bombings that were later revealed to have disturbing links to the FBI.
Comment: So Hauer likely has deep and extensive ties to all manner of intelligence agancies.
In 1999, the New York Times would describe Hauer's job as "sitting around all day thinking up horrifying ways for things to be destroyed and people to die." It would also note that Hauer described his expertise regarding specific emergency situations as follows: "helicopter crash, subway fire, water main break, ice storm, heat wave, blackout, building collapse, building collapse, building collapse." His obsession with building collapses even led him to house "trophies" of the building collapses he had overseen and responded to. How odd then that Hauer's multi-million dollar "bunker" itself would later fall victim to building collapse, falling into its own footprint in 7 seconds on September 11, 2001.
That fateful day, Hauer was no longer with NY's Office of Emergency Management, having left in February 2000. However, in 2001, Hauer still worked at the World Trade center complex, running security for the buildings as managing director of Kroll Inc. Informally known as the "CIA of Wall Street", Kroll was alleged to be an actual front for the CIA by French intelligence agencies, according to the Washington Post. Though it claimed to be mainly involved in corporate security and investigations, it also frequently investigated targets of Washington foreign policy, including Saddam Hussein. Kroll was also the company tapped to "reorganize" Enron in 2002.
Though Hauer should have been at his office at the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, he did not show up for work that day and instead made TV media appearances, where he claimed that Osama bin Laden had been responsible for the attacks just hours after the towers collapsed in an interview with Dan Rather.
Yet, not all Kroll employees were as lucky as Hauer. John O'Neil had just begun working for Kroll and was at the World Trade Center that day, dying in the attacks. O'Neil had previously worked with the FBI and was the country's top expert on Osama bin Laden and his activities. He had resigned in mid-2001 after his investigations into bin Laden were repeatedly blocked by his superiors, something that happened to numerous federal investigators prior to 9/11, and was subsequently offered a job at Kroll by none other than Jerome Hauer himself.
Also on the day of 9/11, Hauer had told top Bush administration officials to start taking the antibiotic Cipro to prevent infection via anthrax and Hauer would subsequently make public hints via mass media that foreign terrorists were working with Saddam Hussein to unleash an anthrax attack on the American public. All of this took place well before the first anthrax attack victim, photojournalist Robert Stevens, would even show symptoms.
Hauer had prepared for a scenario just like the anthrax attacks as part of the Dark Winter biowarfare simulation, which occurred just months prior and at a time when Hauer was a member of the Johns Hopkins Working Group on Civilian BioDefense, part of what is now the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, then led by Dark Winter co-author Tara O'Toole. The Dark Winter exercise and its current relevance are discussed in detail in Part I of this series.
Also of note is the fact that, while working for Kroll Inc. Hauer was also working for the Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a defense and intelligence contractor. There he became a co-worker of Stephen Hatfill, who Hauer had actually met years prior. At SAIC, Hatfill worked on developing protocols for handling "anthrax hoax letters," a phenomenon present in Dark Winter and later during the actual 2001 anthrax attacks. Hatfill would later be accused of having committed those very attacks, but was later cleared of suspicion, winning a hefty multi-million dollar settlement from the government.
In addition to his work for SAIC and Kroll as the events of September 11, 2001 transpired, Hauer was also a national security adviser to then-head of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Tommy Thompson. Hauer closely advised Thompson during the 2001 anthrax attacks and after, helping to shape HHS response and subsequent biodefense policy, which focused heavily on BioPort's anthrax vaccine.
Hauer and HHS
As the anthrax attacks unfolded, Hauer advised Secretary Thompson to establish a new office at HHS, the Office of Public Health Preparedness (OPHP), whose first acting director was Dr. D.A. Henderson, a former official with the World Health Organization and the original founder of the Johns Hopkins Working Group on Civilian Biodefense, which had sponsored Dark Winter and included Jerome Hauer as well as Dark Winter co-authors Tara O'Toole and Thomas Inglesby. In early 2002, Hauer himself would replace Henderson as head of the newly created OPHP.
In May 2002, Hauer — while leading OPHP — co-authored a report with members of the Johns Hopkins Working Group, including O'Toole and Inglesby. In that paper, published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Hauer, O'Toole, Inglesby and their co-authors argued that greater production and purchase of anthrax vaccine was necessary in light of the 2001 anthrax attacks and that government funding was also needed to research a new anthrax vaccine. They also asserted that the vaccine did not cause any significant adverse effects.
Notably, just months prior, O'Toole and Inglesby had come under scrutiny in their attempts to link the anthrax attacks to Al Qaeda, several months after that possibility had been ruled out completely by federal investigators and other independent scientists.
The paper authored by the Johns Hopkins Working Group would also come under scrutiny, particularly their recommendation that the government acquire more BioThrax. This was largely because the evidence from the attacks showed that antibiotics were much more effective and less expensive in responding to anthrax attacks, with subsequent studies claiming that calls for stockpiling more BioThrax "defy medical evidence and expert recommendations" based on lessons learned during the anthrax attacks.
Then, in June 2002, the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act was signed into law by President Bush, creating the post of Assistant Secretary for Public Health Emergency Preparedness, which was quickly filled by Hauer and gave him near-complete power over HHS' biodefense policy and all HHS matters related to "national security."
In July 2002, Hauer and his deputy William Raub helped push the Pentagon to restart vaccinating the troops, despite long-standing concerns over the vaccine's safety. Per the new immunization program, the number of troops being vaccinated would "jump," according to officials. However, the size of that increase was never made public. In addition, half of the Pentagon's BioThrax purchases would be stockpiled for civilian use.
Though Hauer, O'Toole, Inglesby, the Pentagon and, of course, BioPort, continued to assert that BioThrax was safe for human use, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) would release its findings just months later that showed that the vaccine "caused adverse reactions in most recipients [85%] and helped prompt many Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard members to transfer to other units or leave the military between 1998 and 2000." The Pentagon and HHS rejected the GAO's conclusions.
Despite rejections from the Pentagon and HHS, the number of veterans suffering ill effects from BioThrax continued to mount. Even mainstream sources began to report on claims linking BioThrax to over 20 deaths and over 4,000 illnesses, 347 of which were deemed to be "serious."
As a result, in March 2003, six military service-members and Defense Department civilian contractors sued the Pentagon, HHS and the FDA over the mandatory BioThrax vaccination policy, claiming that the way the vaccine had been administered in the 1990s and in the early 2000s was experimental.
This claim was based on the fact the FDA had not approved BioThrax for use against aerosol exposure to anthrax (i.e. anthrax inhalation). However, the Pentagon was using BioThrax to ostensibly protect soldiers from exposure to aerosol anthrax, which is the form of anthrax that would be encountered by soldiers in a bioweapon or bioterrorist scenario. Thus, the Pentagon was injecting soldiers with BioThrax for a use for which it was not federally approved, rendering its use experimental. Given that the federal mandating of experimental vaccines is illegal, a federal judge ruled that the Pentagon's mandatory Biothrax vaccination program was illegal in October 2004.
The ruling was a blow to BioPort, which had reorganized that year and took on the name Emergent BioSolutions. However, BioPort/Emergent BioSolutions would find relief in 2006, when the Pentagon decided to resume mandatory anthrax immunizations among U.S. servicemen soon after the FDA decided to approve BioThrax as a treatment for anthrax inhalation.
BioSolution's BioShield
Robert KadlecJust months before the Pentagon's BioThrax vaccine program was deemed illegal, Congress passed the Project BioShield Act, an act that was largely written by Emergent BioSolution lobbyists and greatly influenced by Robert Kadlec, who was then serving as the Homeland Security Council's Director of Biodefense. The goal of the act was to allocate $5 billion to be used to purchase vaccines, including millions of doses of anthrax vaccine, and stockpile them in the event of a future bioterrorist attack. Given that these vaccines have a limited shelf life (three to four years in BioThrax's case), the stockpile would continually need to be renewed as its contents gradually expired.
Not long after BioShield was signed into law, Emergent BioSolutions co-founded a lobby group called the Alliance for Biosecurity as part of its strategy to easily secure lucrative BioShield contracts. That lobby group saw Emergent BioSolutions join forces with the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Biosecurity, which was created in 2003 and populated with former members of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Civilian Biodefense Strategies. At the time, the University of Pittsburgh's Center was led by Tara O'Toole.
Though Emergent BioSolutions had contacts with the key organizations and people in the biodefense-industrial complex, the Bush administration and the military, BioShield initially didn't go as planned for the company. Instead of pumping even more money into the controversial BioThrax, HHS decided to invest in a new anthrax vaccine that involved fewer doses and fewer adverse side effects, and thus less controversy.
In November 2004, HHS through BioShield awarded VaxGen Inc. a $877.5 million contract to produce a recombinant anthrax vaccine and was the first contract made via BioShield. In great contrast to Emergent's past BioThrax contracts with the government, the VaxGen contract did not provide the company with government money until the vaccine was approved and subsequently delivered.
The VaxGen contract greatly concerned BioPort/Emergent Biosolutions for obvious reasons. In order to avoid losing their vaccine monopoly, they invested heavily in lobbying and spent $5.29 million on lobbyists from 2004 to 2007. By comparison, over that same period, VaxGen spent $720,000 on lobbyists.
One of those lobbyists was Jerome Hauer, who was also added to Emergent's board shortly after leaving HHS. Despite Hauer having supported a new anthrax vaccine other than BioThrax while he had worked at HHS, Hauer suddenly began to insist that BioThrax was the solution. He also demanded that his replacement at HHS, Stewart Simonson, who was ultimately responsible for VaxGen's BioShield contract, be stripped of his authority. Other lobbyists hired by Emergent at the time included two former aides to then-Vice President Dick Cheney and former aides to influential members of Congress.
The hiring of Hauer and others well-connected to the Bush administration and Congress was just part of Emergent's aggressive lobbying against the VaxGen contract, as the company also employed mafia-esque tactics, telling lawmakers and government officials that U.S. civilians "were at risk of death without an immediately expanded stockpile of [BioThrax] anthrax vaccine" and threatening to "stop making the vaccine if the government chose not to buy its product for the stockpile."
The war between Emergent BioSolutions and VaxGen spread to Congressional hearings, where Congressmen who had received thousands from Emergent's then-CEO attacked the VaxGen BioShield contract, with one calling it "highly suspect" and angrily demanding that HHS explain why it had not purchased more BioThrax. It also spread to the press, where Emergent lobbyists wrote Op-Eds in influential newspapers.
Comment: Who knew that the vaccine business, aside from being so unethical in its pushing of harmful substances - was also so cutthroat?! But it makes a certain amount of sense when one considers the psychopathic nature of such figures as Hauer, doesn't it.
Emergent even found unlikely supporters in "progressive" journalists like Jeremy Scahill, who wrote an article for The Nation in which he praised Jerome Hauer, framing him as a champion of public health preparedness who was at odds with Bush-era neocons (despite his membership in organizations stuffed with those same neocons). Scahill also strongly criticized Hauer's successor Stewart Simonson and the VaxGen contract.
Scahill did not mention in his report that Hauer was then working as a lobbyist for Emergent BioSolutions or was a member of its board, despite interviewing him for the piece. Scahill didn't even mention Emergent BioSolutions (or its previous name BioPort) once in the entire article, despite it being VaxGen's main competitor.
Finally, in 2006, HHS terminated VaxGen's contract after the company hit a developmental snag with its vaccine, declining to offer them the type of lifelines that Emergent BioSolutions had received on numerous occasions under its previous name BioPort.
After VaxGen's contract with HHS was crushed, Emergent BioSolution's anthrax vaccine monopoly remained intact, at least for a time. However, PharmAthene, another biotechnology company that had co-formed the Alliance for Biosecurity lobby group with Emergent, soon announced its plans to develop its own recombinant anthrax vaccine. This prompted Emergent to end up buying the essentially bankrupt VaxGen and acquiring the very VaxGen anthrax vaccine it had spent millions of dollars over several years to discredit.
A few years later, Emergent's competitors made inroads with the Pentagon, with the military offering contracts for the anthrax vaccine developed by PharmAthene and another manufactured by PaxVax. Emergent aggressively challenged its competitors or bought them out in order to retain its monopoly, while also developing three new anthrax vaccines (one of which was the VaxGen vaccine) to satisfy government demand for a new anthrax vaccine. Only one, dubbed NuThrax, ever made any progress.
NuThrax, a combination of BioThrax and an adjuvant, would be yet another gold mine for Emergent Biosolutions. The company received $127 million from HHS' Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for early development. Meanwhile, they began to dramatically scale up their production of BioThrax with even more grants from BARDA. Then, in 2016, it received an additional $198 million from HHS for further development of NuThrax as well as a government promise to purchase up to 50 million doses for the national biodefense stockpile. That promise was made as part of a contract valued at up to $1.6 billion and was also made before NuThrax received approval by the FDA. To date, NuThrax still remains unapproved by the FDA.
The A Team
Emergent biosolutionsIt is worth noting that Hauer was not the only key government official that had aided BioPort and was later awarded with a position on its board of directors. A few years after Hauer became a board member of Emergent Biosolutions, the company added Dr. Sue Bailey to its board in 2007. Bailey had previously served as the Pentagon's former top medical official during the late 1990s and played a key role in keeping the military's anthrax vaccine program from being derailed from persistent concerns from veterans about its safety and adverse side effects.
Back in 1999, when Congress had held its hearings into the anthrax vaccine's safety following concerns raised by affected veterans, Bailey was part of a panel of experts, which had included BioPort's Admiral William Crowe. In her prepared statement, Bailey began by underscoring the urgency of the bioterrorist threat, claiming that "at least ten nation states and two terrorist groups" possessed biowarfare capabilities and citing a 1958 study by Johns Hopkins University as proof that anthrax vaccinations were safe. She concluded by reassuring members of Congress that they had a "safe and effective vaccine to respond to a well-documented threat." Neither of these statements would turn out to be true.
Another expert Dr. Katherine Zoon, who was then director of the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation, concurred with Dr. Bailey's assessment regarding the safety of the anthrax vaccine in her statement. Zoon, who would subsequently hold key posts at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), was also added to Emergent's board of directors.
The statements that had been made by Zoon and Bailey at that hearing were a significant divergence from the FDA's own appraisal on the long-term safety of the vaccine, according to testimony by Kwai-Cheung Chan of the General Accounting Office (GAO). Chan practically invalidated both Bailey's and Zoon's testimony by revealing that the studies they had cited were carried out on a completely different anthrax vaccine that was produced by Merck, not Emergent BioSolutions, among other details. Chan's testimony made it clear that BioThrax had no safety track record at all. Not unlike Hauer, Emergent later rewarded Bailey and Zoon for their loyalty to the private sector as opposed to public health with board positions and lucrative stock options.
"Never let a good crisis go to waste"
Though Emergent Biosolutions has enjoyed its privileged status regarding the anthrax vaccine for over two decades, it has long since branched out and profiteered from a variety of pandemic scares, including Ebola and Zika, and public health crises both globally and domestically. They have also acquired other vaccine monopolies, including the U.S.' only licensed smallpox vaccine through their purchase of Sanofi, which came with a $425 million government contract and the promise of subsequent multi-year renewals on that contract for the ever-increasing national biodefense stockpiles.
Another drug monopoly acquired by Emergent Biosolutions has allowed them to profit handsomely off of the U.S.' devastating opioid epidemic. In 2018, a year when the opioid crisis claimed the lives of nearly 70,000 Americans and was considered the top health crisis facing the nation, Emergent acquired the producer of Narcan, the only FDA-approved nasal spray of naloxone, which is used to treat opioid overdoses at the scene. At the time of acquisition, Emergent BioSolutions executive Daniel J. Abdun-Nabi referred to U.S. high schools and colleges as lucrative, "untapped markets" for Narcan.
Two months after Emergent completed its acquisition of the Narcan monopoly, HHS began recommending that doctors co-prescribe the drug alongside opioid painkillers. However, HHS offered no measures aimed at preventing the over-prescription of opioid painkillers like fentanyl and has remained silent regarding efforts to make opioid painkillers a controlled, schedule 1 substance. After the HHS recommendation regarding Narcan, several states subsequently passed laws requiring doctors to co-prescribe the nasal spray. Emergent's sale of Narcan, which now costs $150 per dose, predictably spiked.
Regarding its Narcan monopoly, Emergent has long claimed that they are working to keep the drug affordable and they have even donated Narcan to public libraries and YMCAs as part of a major public relations push. However, Emergent's same-old aggressive tactics still apply to Narcan, as they have sued any competitors aiming to market a cheaper, generic version of the drug. In addition, government promotion of Narcan as opposed to other, longer-term solutions to opioid addiction, have come under scrutiny, with some arguing that Narcan actually enables opioid addiction and may actually be worsening the crisis.
Cornering the Covid-19 market
Emergent's history of corruption and profiteering has in no way prevented them from cashing in on the Covid-19 global health crisis. On March 10, Emergent announced a partnership with Novavax to produce a Covid-19 vaccine, a vaccine also backed by the Bill Gates-backed Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). CEPI had previously partnered with Emergent Biosolutions, giving them over $60 million in 2018. Emergent further expanded its partnership with NovaVax on March 31.
Just 8 days after partnering with Novavax, Emergent partnered with yet another producer of a Covid-19 vaccine candidate, VaxArt. Unlike the Emergent-Novavax vaccine, the vaccine candidate co-produced with VaxArt will be oral and in pill form, "offer[ing] enormous logistical advantages in the roll-out of a large vaccination campaign," according to VaxArt CEO Wouter Latoud.
While backing two of the most prominent vaccine candidates for Covid-19 gives Emergent an advantage in terms of profiting from whatever vaccines end up being approved for use by the government, Emergent's star has risen during the current Coronavirus crisis largely thanks to its two experimental blood plasma treatments.
Announced just one day after their Novavax vaccine partnership, Emergent's first experimental blood plasma treatment involves pooling and concentrating blood plasma from recovered Covid-19 patients, while the second uses plasma taken from horses that have been injected with parts of the virus. These treatments were slated to begin clinical trials later this year, but have been greatly aided by HHS' BARDA, which falls under the authority of Robert Kadlec. These treatments are now expected to begin Phase II trials by late summer.
On April 3, BARDA awarded Emergent Biosolutions $14.5 million for the development of its blood plasma treatment. Though the sum is smaller than other contracts Emergent has received from BARDA in the past, the partnership allows Emergent to overcome its greatest obstacle in developing this product, a massive supply of blood plasma from recovered Covid-19 patients. Thanks to their partnership with BARDA, Emergent will gain access to blood donations made by recovered Covid-19 to public blood centers.
Emergent's Dr. Lisa Saward confirmed this in a recent interview with TechCrunch, stating "we are overcoming [the lack of "source material" i.e. blood plasma] with the help of partnerships like that of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority within Health and Human Services, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases announced earlier this week."
Comment: In other words, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who we've been hearing about so much lately, is totally on board with all this horses***.
However, Emergent's use of donated plasma to develop its product may prove controversial, since the plasma donated by recovered Covid-19 patients is currently being used as a treatment for seriously ill Covid-19 patients. The use of plasma to treat critical patients began late last month after New York's state government first authorized its use in such cases, followed by the FDA's offer to approve its use for critical Covid-19 patients nationwide on a case-by-case basis. Yet, thanks to the BARDA and Emergent partnership, a significant amount of that plasma will instead go towards helping Emergent corner yet another key market.
Question Everything, Come To Your Own Conclusions.
Comment: See the third part in this series: Meet the companies poised to build the Kushner-backed "coronavirus surveillance system" _________________ --
'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: 30 Jul 2006 Posts: 6060 Location: East London
Posted: Thu Apr 16, 2020 10:25 pm Post subject:
This is 'slam dunk' proof for me - I was pretty sure before:
'WUHAN OUTBREAK: CHINA DEMANDS AN HONEST ACCOUNTING':
https://alethonews.com/2020/03/22/wuhan-outbreak-china-demands-an-hone st-accounting/?
'Covid - 19' Made In America! _________________ '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.
Children's Health Defense
10.2K subscribers
Why are the world's top vaccine promoters, like Paul Offit and Peter Hotez, frantically warning us about the unique and frightening dangers inherent in developing a coronavirus vaccine?
Scientists first attempted to develop coronavirus vaccines after China's 2002 SARS-CoV outbreak. Teams of US & foreign scientists vaccinated animals with the four most promising vaccines. At first, the experiment seemed successful as all the animals developed a robust antibody response to coronavirus. However, when the scientists exposed the vaccinated animals to the wild virus, the results were horrifying. Vaccinated animals suffered hyper-immune responses including inflammation throughout their bodies terminating with fatal lung infections. Researchers had seen this same "enhanced immune response" during human testing of the failed RSV vaccine tests in the 1960s. Two children died.
Offit, Hotez and even Anthony Fauci (in an unguarded moment), have warned that any new coronavirus vaccine could trigger lethal immune reactions when vaccinated people come in contact with the wild virus. Instead of proceeding with caution, Fauci has made the reckless choice to fast track vaccines, partially funded by Gates, without animal studies (that could provide early warning of runaway immune response). Gates is so worried about the danger that he says he won’t distribute his vaccines until governments agree to indemnify him against lawsuits. On Feb 4th 2020, when there were only 11 active CV cases in the USA, the U.S. quietly pushed through Federal regulations giving coronavirus vaccine makers full immunity from liability. Are you willing to take the risk?
The Indegraph Times
4.63K subscribers
CBS ” 60 MINUTES” documentary on the swine flu epidemic of 1976 in the U.S. It went on air only once and was never shown again. Watch this video documentary and listen to testimony of people who caught Gullian-Barre paralysis because of the swine flu vaccine. They sued the US government for damages.
500 cases of Gullian-Barre paralysis, including 25 deaths—not due to the swine flu itself, but as a direct result of the vaccine. At the time President Gerald Ford, on advice from the CDC, called for vaccination of the ENTIRE population of the United States.
Fears that majority of ministers are out of the loop have resurfaced
Stephen O’Brien and Justine McCarthy Sunday April 12 2020, 12.01am BST, The Sunday Times
Doubts about new powers being given to gardai during the lockdown were raised by some ministers at a cabinet meeting last week
SAM BOAL/ROLLINGNEWS.IE
In his fourth week as finance minister in March 2011, Michael Noonan declared that September 30, 2008 would be remembered as “the blackest day in Irish history since the outbreak of the civil war”. While the daily toll of death and illness from the coronavirus exceeds the misery of Ireland’s €440bn banking guarantee, there is a certain déjà vu about the sense of crisis enveloping the nation.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has revealed its three leading candidates in the race to find a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind COVID-19, with more than 70 vaccines in development worldwide.
The top candidates are the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology in partnership with Hong Kong's CanSino Biological Inc and US biotechnology companies Inovio Pharmaceuticals and Moderna, the latter in collaboration with the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). All three are in the process of recruiting participants for and undertaking human trials.
A table published by WHO on Sunday (NZ time) shows the current stage of clinical evaluation for each candidate and the 70 developers worldwide.
According to the US National Library of Medicine, a safety trial for the Moderna and NIAID vaccine, mRNA-1273, is estimated to be completed by June 2021. Forty-five healthy participants aged between 18 and 55 will receive a series of injections of the vaccine in the deltoid muscle and will be followed through 12 months after the second vaccination.
The first participant was enrolled in the study on March 3 and people are being recruited from Decatur, Georgia, Seattle, Washington and a third location in Maryland.
The clinical trial for the Inovio Pharmaceuticals vaccine candidate is estimated to be completed by November 2020, according to the information available.
The study of its DNA plasmid vaccine involves 40 healthy volunteers aged 18 to 50 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Kansas City, Missouri. The first participant was enrolled on April 3.
While both US candidates are in the recruitment process according to the US National Library of Medicine, some reports are claiming both trials already began last week.
Meanwhile, the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology has already moved on to phase II - a "randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled phase II clinical trial" expected to run from April until January 2021, according to the Chinese Clinical Trial Registry.
The trial consists of three groups, the first with a sample size of 250 and the second and third with sample sizes of 125. The first two groups will be administered a middle dose and a low dose respectively, while the third group will receive a placebo - a substance that has no physiological effect.
Four days after the release of the information, the global COVID-19 death toll has risen to an estimated 134,354. There have been more than 2 million cases confirmed worldwide. The US, Spain, Italy, Germany and France have the highest rates of COVID-19 respectively, although Italy has the highest death toll at roughly 21,645, according to Johns Hopkins University's live COVID-19 tracker.
"Under WHO's coordination, a group of experts with diverse backgrounds is working towards the development of vaccines against COVID-19," WHO said in a statement on Monday.
"The group makes a call to everyone to follow recommendations to prevent the transmission of the COVID-19 virus and protect the health of individuals."
The remaining 67 vaccine candidates are still in the preclinical stages of development at institutes such as Osaka University in Japan, Australia's University of Queensland and the University of Oxford and Imperial College London.
According to a report by Bloomberg, the pharmaceutical industry is hoping to dramatically reduce the time it takes to get a vaccine on the market from roughly 10 to 15 years to within the next 12 months.
Despite the leading candidates moving on to human trials, a number of public health officials and media outlets are reiterating that a 12 to 18-month timeframe is to be expected before any mass vaccination campaign. The Guardian claims an experimental yet safe and effective vaccine could be available within weeks or months, but would likely only be available to limited high-risk groups, such as medical workers.
On Wednesday, Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield revealed that New Zealand may work with Australia to help research, develop and produce a COVID-19 vaccine.
Speaking on behalf of the Ministry of Health during Wednesday's daily briefing, Dr Bloomfield was asked whether he was concerned New Zealand may be down the pecking order for a cure to the virus. He said he "will make sure" that doesn't happen.
"I'm not concerned about it because we will make sure that we're not, and I think there are a couple of ways we can do that. But predominantly that will be making sure we work closely with Australia, which is undertaking research," he said.
Dr Bloomfield says the Health Research Council has put out the call for COVID-19 research funding proposals and it will make an announcement later this week on who it will support.
Joined: 30 Aug 2011 Posts: 6 Location: Mid Wales UK
Posted: Fri Apr 17, 2020 10:12 pm Post subject:
With virtually the whole world now imprisoned, the globalist elite, surprised at the success of their covid-19 psyop, must now be sitting in their chateaux chinking glasses of Dom Perignon and laughing their arses off in sheer delight – how easy was that? They will be chortling.
No martial law, no armed military on the streets, no lines of cops with riot gear. All it took was a government and mainstream media well programmed to pump out endless fear-porn from the corner of everyone’s ‘living room.’
Fortunately many of us have the advantage of having researched the bigger story of what is really going on in the world. Without this knowledge I’m sure that we would all fall prey to gullibility, obediently accepting that there is a deadly invisible enemy waiting for a chance to hop aboard our bodies and send us to our graves.
But what now? The world will never be the same again. It seems as though this is just the practise run. Already compulsory PPE wearing will be enforced as the prison gates are opened, and apps for our phones are being designed to track us and our contacts under the guise of keeping the world safe from covid-19. The carrying of a phone with this app may/will be made compulsory in the future, and entering a pub or shop without one will be difficult to say the least. Billions have already been allocated to roll-out a cure-all vaccine for covid-19.
As with all false flags and psyops the perpetrators never waste the opportunity to kill more than one bird with one stone. With the covid hoax, the two most obvious are – loss of freedoms; stock market manipulation; profits for big pharma from vaccinations; reduction of population via vaccinations as openly admitted by Bill Gates.
But it's not all doom and gloom. News is coming in of the people around the US protesting against lockdown, and I believe their are other uprisings around the world. And there is one distinct difference about getting out the truth to people in a normal functioning world and one under lockdown. People will be spending more time online, and hopefully start researching what is really going on.
Another blessing is that there are many highly qualified scientists and medical people who have seen through the scamdemic. One of the most knowledgeable and articulate in this field it seems is Dr. Andrew Kaufman, who is basically saying that you cannot catch a virus. David Icke has done a brilliant summary of what Kaufman is saying, so maybe start with Icke. . . . . . or pile straight into this top interview.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. revealed disturbing information about Dr. Anthony Fauci’s medical career in the government, calling out the celebrated physician for a history of disturbing practices ranging from costly cover ups to outright fraud.
Kennedy repeatedly slammed Fauci on the Thomas Paine Podcast on Wednesday, revealing disturbing information about Fauci’s problematic career steering key medical policy for the United States. Kennedy described Fauci as a workplace tyrant who has ruined careers of upstanding physicians and researchers in order to cover up scandals and costly medical research disasters at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases where Fauci has served as director since 1984 as part of the National Institute of Health.
“Tony Fauci didn’t want the American public to know that he has poisoned an entire generation of Americans,” Kennedy said, alleging Fauci targeted a whistleblower who was trying to uncover the blood supply in the country was tainted with deadly strains.
US intelligence agencies alerted Israel to the coronavirus outbreak in China already in November, Israeli television reported Thursday.
According to Channel 12 news, the US intelligence community became aware of the emerging disease in Wuhan in the second week of that month and drew up a classified document.
Information on the disease outbreak was not in the public domain at that stage — and was known only apparently to the Chinese government.
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US intelligence informed the Trump administration, “which did not deem it of interest,” but the report said the Americans also decided to update two allies with the classified document: NATO and Israel, specifically the IDF.
Medical staff wear protective clothing to help stop the spread of a deadly virus which began in the city, work at the Wuhan Red Cross Hospital in Wuhan on January 25, 2020. (Hector Retamal/)
The network said Israeli military officials later in November discussed the possibility of the spread of the virus to the region and how it would affect Israel and neighboring countries.
The intelligence also reached Israel’s decision makers and the Health Ministry, where “nothing was done,” according to the report.
Last week, ABC News reported that US intelligence officials were warning about the coronavirus in a report prepared in November by the American military’s National Center for Medical Intelligence.
It was unclear if that was the same report that was said to have been shared with Israel.
Colonel Shane Day, the NCMI director, denied last week that any such report existed. “As a matter of practice the National Center for Medical Intelligence does not comment publicly on specific intelligence matters,” he said. “However, in the interest of transparency during this current public health crisis, we can confirm that media reporting about the existence/release of a National Center for Medical Intelligence Coronavirus-related product/assessment in November of 2019 is not correct. No such NCMI product exists.”
In this photo released by Xinhua News Agency, Chinese President Xi Jinping visits the Chuanshan port area of the Ningbo-Zhoushan Port in east China’s Zhejiang Province, Sunday, March 29, 2020. (Ju Peng/Xinhua via AP)
In its first major step to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, Israel announced on January 30 it was barring all flights from China, ten days after Chinese leader Xi Jinping issued his first public comments on the virus and the Asian country’s top epidemiologist said for the first time it could be spread from person to person.
An Associated Press report on Wednesday said Xi’s warning came seven days after Chinese officials secretly determined that they were likely facing a pandemic, potentially costing China and other countries valuable time to prepare for the outbreak.
Doctors in Wuhan, the city at the center of the outbreak in China, are reported to have first tried to have warn about the virus in December, but were censored.
Joined: 30 Aug 2011 Posts: 6 Location: Mid Wales UK
Posted: Sat Apr 18, 2020 9:46 am Post subject:
It's amazing that the whole world has been 'imprisoned' through fear of something that they know nothing about - a Virus! We should all educate ourselves whilst we still have the internet. Download as many articles and videos as possible, store them on two or three hard drives and give a back-up copy to a friend for safety.
I just came across this awesome video: Invaluable information from this guy - Aajonus Vonderplanitz.
A virus is a solvent, a soap and it's doing a good job of cleaning toxins from our cells. AIDS is man-made. Etc. etc. One of the best vids I've watched to date.
HOW YOU GET A VIRUS Aajonus Vonderplanitz Mirrored
Stephen Grey, Andrew MacAskill APRIL 7, 2020 / 4:17 PM / 13 DAYS AGO
LONDON (Reuters) - It was early spring when British scientists laid out the bald truth to their government. It was “highly likely,” they said, that there was now “sustained transmission” of COVID-19 in the United Kingdom.
FILE PHOTO: Britain's Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty (L) and Chief Scientific Adviser Patrick Vallance look on as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson gestures as he speaks during a coronavirus disease (COVID-19) news conference inside 10 Downing Street, London, Britain March 19, 2020. Leon Neal/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo
If unconstrained and if the virus behaved as in China, up to four-fifths of Britons could be infected and one in a hundred might die, wrote the scientists, members of an official committee set up to model the spread of pandemic flu, on March 2. Their assessment didn’t spell it out, but that was a prediction of over 500,000 deaths in this nation of nearly 70 million.
Yet the next day, March 3, Prime Minister Boris Johnson was his cheery self. He joked that he was still shaking hands with everyone, including at a hospital treating coronavirus patients.
“Our country remains extremely well prepared,” Johnson said as Italy reached 79 deaths. “We already have a fantastic NHS,” the national public health service, “fantastic testing systems and fantastic surveillance of the spread of disease.”
Alongside him at the Downing Street press conference was Chris Whitty, the government’s chief medical adviser and himself an epidemiologist. Whitty passed on the modelling committee’s broad conclusions, including the prediction of a possible 80% infection rate and the consequent deaths. But he played them down, saying the number of people who would be infected was probably “a lot lower” and coming up with a total was “largely speculative.”
The upbeat tone of that briefing stood in sharp contrast with the growing unease of many of the government’s scientific advisers behind the scenes. They were already convinced that Britain was on the brink of a disastrous outbreak, a Reuters investigation has found.
Interviews with more than 20 British scientists, key officials and senior sources in Johnson’s Conservative Party, and a study of minutes of advisory committee meetings and public testimony and documents, show how these scientific advisers concluded early the virus could be devastating.
But the interviews and documents also reveal that for more than two months, the scientists whose advice guided Downing Street did not clearly signal their worsening fears to the public or the government. Until March 12, the risk level, set by the government’s top medical advisers on the recommendation of the scientists, remained at “moderate,” suggesting only the possibility of a wider outbreak.
“You know, there’s a small little cadre of people in the middle, who absolutely did realise what was going on, and likely to happen,” said John Edmunds, a professor of infectious disease modelling and a key adviser to the government, known for his work on tracking Ebola. Edmunds was among those who did call on the government to elevate the warning level earlier.
From the outset, said Edmunds, work by scientists had shown that, with only limited interventions, the virus would trigger an “overwhelming epidemic” in which Britain’s health service was not going “to get anywhere near being able to cope with it. That was clear from the beginning.”
But he said: “I do think there’s a bit of a worry in terms you don’t want to unnecessarily panic people.”
Johnson, who himself has sickened with the virus, moved more slowly than the leaders of many other prosperous countries to adopt a lockdown. He has been criticised for not moving more swiftly to organise mass tests and mobilise supplies of life-saving equipment and beds. Johnson was hospitalized on April 5 and moved to intensive care the next day.
It is too soon to judge the ultimate soundness of the UK’s early response. If history concludes that it was lacking, then the criticism levelled at the prime minister may be that, rather than ignoring the advice of his scientific advisers, he failed to question their assumptions.
Interviews and records published so far suggest that the scientific committees that advised Johnson didn’t study, until mid-March, the option of the kind of stringent lockdown adopted early on in China, where the disease arose in December, and then followed by much of Europe and finally by Britain itself. The scientists’ reasoning: Britons, many of them assumed, simply wouldn’t accept such restrictions.
The UK scientists were also mostly convinced - and many still are - that, once the new virus escaped China, quarantine measures would likely not succeed. Minutes of technical committees reviewed by Reuters indicate that almost no attention was paid to preparing a programme of mass testing. Other minutes and interviews show Britain was following closely a well-laid plan to fight a flu pandemic - not this deadlier disease. The scientists involved, however, deny that the flu focus ultimately made much difference.
Now, as countries debate how to combat the virus, some experts here say, the lesson from the British experience may be that governments and scientists worldwide must increase the transparency of their planning so that their thinking and assumptions are open to challenge.
John Ashton, a clinician and former regional director of Public Health England, the government agency overseeing healthcare, said the government’s advisers took too narrow a view and hewed to limited assumptions. They were too “narrowly drawn as scientists from a few institutions,” he said. Their handling of COVID-19, Ashton said, shows the need for a broader approach. “In the future we need a much wider group of independent advisers.”
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Michael Cates, who succeeded Stephen Hawking as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, is leading an initiative by the Royal Society, the UK’s leading scientific body, to bring modellers in from other scientific disciplines to help understand the epidemic.
“Without faulting anyone so far, it’s vital, where there is such a lot at stake, to throw the maximum possible light on the methods, assumptions and data built into our understanding of how this epidemic will develop,” he told Reuters.
In a statement to Reuters, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care said the government was delivering “a science-led action plan” to contain the outbreak. “As the public would expect, we regularly test our pandemic plans and what we learned from previous exercises has helped us to rapidly respond to COVID-19.”
A LOW RISK TO THE PUBLIC
When news came from China in January of a new infectious disease, Johnson had reason to believe his country was well prepared. It had some of the world’s best scientists and a well-drilled plan to deal with potentially lethal pandemics. Perhaps, some scientists say in hindsight, the plan made them slow to adapt.
For many years, the Cabinet Office - a collection of officials who act as the prime minister’s direct arm to run the government - took the threat of pandemics seriously. Presciently, it rated pandemics as the Number 1 threat to the country, ahead of terrorism and financial crashes.
At the centre of planning was a small group of scientists, among them Edmunds. His research group at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine runs one of the two computer modelling centres for epidemics that have mostly driven government policy. The other is at nearby Imperial College. Edmunds remembers that early in the outbreak, the data from China were sketchy, in the period “where the Chinese were trying to pretend that this wasn’t transmissible between humans.”
Edmunds and his colleague at Imperial, Neil Ferguson, were part of an alphabet soup of committees that fed advice into the Cabinet Office machinery around the prime minister. Both were founders of the flu pandemic modelling committee, known as SPI-M, that produced the March 2 report warning of more than 500,000 deaths. This committee had met together for nearly 15 years.
Ferguson did not respond to a request to be interviewed for this article.
Edmunds and Ferguson were also part of NERVTAG, the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group. Both too were members of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, known as SAGE, that advises the government in times of crisis. SAGE reports directly to Johnson and the government’s main emergency committee, COBRA.
At first, when NERVTAG met on January 13, it studied information from China that there was “no evidence of significant human to human transmission” of the new virus, according to minutes of the meeting. The scientists agreed the risk to the UK population was “very low.”
The evidence soon changed, but this wasn’t reflected in the official threat level. By the end of January, scientists in China began releasing clinical data. Case studies published in the British medical journal, The Lancet, showed 17% of the first 99 coronavirus cases needed critical care. Eleven patients died. Another Chinese study, in the same magazine, warned starkly of a global spread and urged: “Preparedness plans and mitigation interventions should be readied for quick deployment globally.”
Edmunds recalled that “from about mid January onwards, it was absolutely obvious that this was serious, very serious.” Graham Medley, a professor of infectious diseases modelling at the London School and chairman of SPI-M, agreed. He said that the committee was “clear that this was going to be big from the first meeting.” At the end of January, his committee moved into “wartime” mode, he said, reporting directly into SAGE.
Dr Jon Read, a senior lecturer in biostatistics at the University of Lancaster, also a member of SPI-M, said by the end of January it was apparent the virus had “pandemic potential” and that death rates for the elderly were brutal. “From my perspective within the sort of modelling community, everybody’s aware of this, and we’re saying that this is probably going to be pretty bad,” he said.
But the scientists did not articulate their fears forcefully to the government, minutes of committee meetings reveal.
On January 21, scientists on NERVTAG endorsed the elevation of the UK risk warning from COVID-19 from “very low” to “low.” SAGE met formally for the first time the following day about the coronavirus threat. So did COBRA, which was chaired by Matt Hancock, the health secretary, who would contract the virus himself in late March. He told reporters after the meeting: “The clinical advice is that the risk to the public remains low.”
In response to questions from Reuters, the government’s Department of Health declined to clarify how the risk levels are defined or what action, if any, they trigger. In a statement, a spokesperson said: “Increasing the risk level in the UK is a belt and braces measure which allows the government to plan for all future eventualities.”
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Two days later, China put the city of Wuhan, where the outbreak began, into a complete lockdown. Hubei, the surrounding province, would follow. But already, 17 passenger flights had flown directly from Wuhan to Britain since the start of 2020, and 614 flights from the whole of China, according to FlightRadar24, a flight-tracking service. That meant thousands of Chinese, some of them potential carriers, had come to Britain. On April 5, scientific adviser Ferguson said he estimated only one-third of infected people reaching Britain had been detected.
As they watched China impose its lockdown, the British scientists assumed that such drastic actions would never be acceptable in a democracy like the UK. Among those modelling the outbreak, such stringent counter-measures were not, at first, examined.
“We had milder interventions in place,” said Edmunds, because no one thought it would be acceptable politically “to shut the country down.” He added: “We didn’t model it because it didn’t seem to be on the agenda. And Imperial (College) didn’t look at it either.” The NERVTAG committee agreed, noting in its minutes that tough measures in the short term would be pointless, as they “would only delay the UK outbreak, not prevent it.”
That limited approach mirrored the UK’s longstanding pandemic flu strategy. The Department of Health declined a request from Reuters for a copy of its updated pandemic plan, without providing a reason. But a copy of the 2011 “UK Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy 2011,” which a spokesman said was still relevant, stated the “working presumption will be that Government will not impose any such restrictions. The emphasis will instead be on encouraging all those who have symptoms to follow the advice to stay at home and avoid spreading their illness.”
According to one senior Conservative Party politician, who was officially briefed as the crisis unfolded, the close involvement in the response to the coronavirus of the same scientific advisers and civil servants who drew up the flu plan may have created a “cognitive bias.”
“We had in our minds that COVID-19 was a nasty flu and needed to be treated as such,” he said. “The implication was it was a disease that could not be stopped and that it was ultimately not that deadly.”
While the UK was prepared to fight the flu, Asian states like China, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea had built their pandemic plans with lessons learned from fighting the more lethal SARS outbreak that began in 2002, he said. SARS had a fatality rate of up to 14%. As a result, these countries, he said, were more ready to resort to widespread testing, lockdowns and other draconian measures to keep their citizens from spreading the virus.
Scientists involved in the UK response disagree that following the government’s flu plan clouded their thinking or influenced the outbreak’s course. The plan had a “reasonable worst case” scenario as devastating as the worst predictions for COVID-19, they note.
Mark Woolhouse, a professor of infectious diseases epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, and a member of the SPI-M committee, said COVID-19 did behave differently than an expected pandemic flu - for example school closures proved to be far less effective in slowing the spread of the coronavirus. But, broadly, “the government has been consistently responsive to changing facts.”
By the end of January, the government’s chief medical adviser, Whitty, was explaining to politicians in private, according to at least two people who spoke to him, that if the virus escaped China, it would in time infect the great majority of people in Britain. It could only be slowed down, not stopped. On Jan 30, the government raised the threat level to “moderate” from “low.”
The country’s medical officers “consider it prudent for our governments to escalate planning and preparation in case of a more widespread outbreak,” a statement said at the time. Whitty did not respond to questions from Reuters for this article.
A TIME TO PREPARE
On the evening of January 31, Boris Johnson sat before a fireplace in 10 Downing Street and told the nation, in a televised address: “This is the moment when the dawn breaks and the curtain goes up on a new act in our great national drama.”
He was talking of finally delivering Brexit, or what he called “this recaptured sovereignty.” Until that moment, Johnson’s premiership had been utterly absorbed by delivering on that challenge.
With Brexit done, Johnson had the chance to focus on other matters the following month, among them the emerging virus threat. But leaving the European Union had a consequence.
Between February 13 and March 30, Britain missed a total of eight conference calls or meetings about the coronavirus between EU heads of state or health ministers - meetings that Britain was still entitled to join. Although Britain did later make an arrangement to attend lower-level meetings of officials, it had missed a deadline to participate in a common purchase scheme for ventilators, to which it was invited. Ventilators, vitally important to treating the direst cases of COVID-19, have fallen into short supply globally. Johnson’s spokesman blamed an administrative error.
A Downing Street aide told Reuters that from around the end of January, Johnson concentrated his attention increasingly on the coronavirus threat, receiving “very frequent” updates at least once per day from mid February, either in person or via a daily dashboard of cases.
In the medical and scientific world, there was growing concern about the threat of the virus to the UK. A report from Exeter University, published on February 12, warned a UK outbreak could peak within four months and, without mitigation, infect 45 million people.
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That worried Rahuldeb Sarkar, a consultant physician in respiratory medicine and critical care in the county of Kent, who foresaw that intensive care beds could be swamped. Even if disease transmission was reduced by half, he wrote in a report aimed at clinicians and actuaries in mid-February, a coronavirus outbreak in the UK would “have a chance of overwhelming the system.”
With Whitty stating in a BBC interview on February 13 that a UK outbreak was still an “if, not a when,” Richard Horton, a medical doctor and editor of the Lancet, said the government and public health service wasted an opportunity that month to prepare quarantine restriction measures and a programme of mass tests, and procure resources like ventilators and personal protective equipment for expanded intensive care.
Calling the lost chance a “national scandal” in a later editorial, he would testify to parliament about a mismatch between “the urgent warning that was coming from the frontline in China” and the “somewhat pedestrian evaluation” of the threat from the scientific advice to the government.
After developing a test for the new virus by January 10, health officials adopted a centralised approach to its deployment, initially assigning a single public laboratory in north London to perform the tests. But, according to later government statements, there was no wider plan envisaged to make use of hundreds of laboratories across the country, both public and private, that could have been recruited.
According to emails and more than a dozen scientists interviewed by Reuters, the government issued no requests to labs for assistance with staff or testing equipment until the middle of March, when many abruptly received requests to hand over nucleic acid extraction instruments, used in testing. An executive at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine at the University of Oxford said he could have carried out up to 1,000 tests per day from February. But the call never came.
“You would have thought that they would be bashing down the door,” said the executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity. By April 5, Britain had carried out 195,524 tests, in contrast to at least 918,000 completed a week earlier in Germany.
Nor was there an effective effort to expand the supply of ventilators. The Department of Health told Reuters in a statement that the government started talking to manufacturers of ventilators about procuring extra supplies in February. But it was not until March 16, after it was clear supplies could run out, that Johnson launched an appeal to industry to help ramp up production.
Charles Bellm, managing director of Intersurgical, a global supplier of medical ventilation products based outside London, said he has been contacted by more than a dozen governments around the world, including France, New Zealand and Indonesia. But there had been no contact from the British government. “I find it somewhat surprising, I have spoken to a lot of other governments,” he said.
Countering such criticism, Hancock, the health minister, said the government is on track to deliver about 10,000 more ventilators in the coming weeks. One reason Britain was behind some countries on testing, he said, was the absence of a large diagnostics industry at the outbreak of the epidemic. “We didn’t have the scale.”
GAME OVER
It was during the school half-term holidays in February that frontline doctor Nicky Longley began to realise that early efforts to contain the disease were likely doomed.
For weeks now, doctors and public health workers had been watching out for people with flu-like symptoms coming in from China. Longley, an infectious diseases consultant at London’s Hospital for Tropical Diseases, was part of a team that staffed a public health service helpline for those with symptoms. The plan, she said, had been to make all effort to catch every case and their contacts. And “to start with, it looked like it was working.”
But then, bad news. First, on Wednesday the 19th of February, came the shock news from Iran of two deaths. Then, on Friday the 21st, came a death in Italy and a bloom of cases in Lombardy and Veneto regions. Britain has close links to both countries. Thousands of Britons were holidaying in Italy that week.
“I don’t think anybody really foresaw what was happening in Italy,” Longley said. “And I think, the minute everybody saw that, we thought: ‘This is game over now.’”
Until then, Longley said, everyone felt “there was a chance to stamp it out” even though most were sceptical it could be done long-term. But after Iran and Italy, it was obvious containment would not work. The contact tracing continued for a while. But as the cases in London built up, and the volume of calls to the helpline mushroomed, the priority began to shift to clinical care of the serious cases. “At a certain point you have to make a decision about where you put your efforts as a workforce.”
Edmunds noted that Iran and Italy had hardly reported a case until that point. “And then, all of sudden you had deaths recorded.” There was a rule of thumb that, in an outbreak’s early stages, for each death there were probably 1,000 cases in a community. “And so it was quite clear that there were at least thousands of cases in Italy, possibly tens of thousands of cases in Italy right then.”
Amid the dreadful news from Italy, the scientists at NERVTAG convened by phone that Friday, 21st February. But they decided to recommend keeping the threat level at “moderate,” where it had sat since January 30th. The minutes don’t give a detailed explanation of the decision. Edmunds, who had technical difficulties and couldn’t be heard on the call, emailed afterwards to ask the warning to be elevated to “high,” the minutes revealed. But the warning level remained lower. It’s unclear why.
“I just thought, are we still, we still thinking that it’s mild or something? It definitely isn’t, you know,” said Edmunds.
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A spokesman for the government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, didn’t directly respond to Reuters questions about the threat level. Asked whether, with hindsight, the scientists’ approach was the right one, the spokesperson said in a statement that “SAGE and advisers provide advice, while Ministers and the Government make decisions.”
HERD IMMUNITY
On Sunday, March 1st, Ferguson, Edmunds and other advisers spent the day with NHS public health service experts trying to work out how many hospital beds and other key resources would be needed as the outbreak exploded. By now, Italian data was showing that a tenth of all infected patients needed intensive care.
The following day, pandemic modelling committee SPI-M produced its “consensus report” that warned the coronavirus was now transmitting freely in the UK. That Thursday, March 5, the first death in the UK was announced. Italy, which reached 827 deaths by March 11, ordered a national lockdown. Spain and France prepared to follow suit.
Johnson held out against stringent measures, saying he was following the advice of the government’s scientists. He asserted on March 9: “We are doing everything we can to combat this outbreak, based on the very latest scientific and medical advice.”
Indeed, the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, SAGE, had recommended that day, with no dissension recorded in its summary, that the UK reject a China-style lockdown. SAGE decided that “implementing a subset of measures would be ideal,” according to a record of its conclusions. Tougher measures could create a “large second epidemic wave once the measures were lifted,” SAGE said.
On March 12 came a bombshell for the British public. Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, announced Britain had moved the threat to UK citizens from “moderate” to “high.” And he said the country had moved from trying to contain the disease to trying to slow its spread. New cases were not going to be tracked at all. “It is no longer necessary for us to identify every case,” he said. Only hospital cases would, in future, be tested for the virus. What had been an undisclosed policy was in the open: beyond a certain point, attempts to completely extinguish the virus would stop.
The same day, putting aside his jokey self, Johnson made a speech in Downing Street, flanked by two Union Jacks and evoking the spirit of Winston Churchill’s “darkest hour” address. He warned: “I must level with you, level with the British public - more families, many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time.”
For most Britons, it came as a shock. Several of the next day’s newspapers splashed Johnson’s words on their front pages.
Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, who chaired SAGE, said in a BBC interview on March 13 that the plan was to simply control the pace of infection. The government had, for now, rejected what he called “eye-catching measures” like stopping mass gatherings such as football games or closing schools. The “aim is to try and reduce the peak, broaden the peak, not to suppress it completely.” Most people would get the virus mildly, and this would build up “herd immunity” which, in time, would stop the disease’s progress.
But by now, the country was rebelling. Major institutions decided to close. After players began to get infected, the professional football leagues suspended their games. As Johnson still refused to close schools and ban mass gatherings, the Daily Mirror’s banner headline, summing up a widespread feeling, asked on March 13: “Is It Enough?”
The catalyst for a policy reversal came on March 16 with the publication of a report by Neil Ferguson’s Imperial College team. It predicted that, unconstrained, the virus could kill 510,000 people. Even the government’s “mitigation” approach could lead to 250,000 deaths and intensive care units being overwhelmed at least eight times over.
Imperial’s prediction of over half a million deaths was no different from the report by the government’s own pandemic modelling committee two weeks earlier. Yet it helped trigger a policy turn-around, both in London and in Washington, culminating seven days later in Johnson announcing a full lockdown of Britain. The report also jarred the U.S. administration into tougher measures to slow the virus’ spread.
Ferguson was now in isolation himself after catching the virus. Testifying by video link to a committee in Parliament, he explained why he and other scientific advisers had shifted from advocating partial social-distancing measures to warning that without a rigorous shutdown, the NHS would be overwhelmed. The reason, he said, lay in data coming out of Italy that showed large numbers of patients required critical care.
“The revision was that, basically, estimates of the proportion of patients requiring invasive ventilation, mechanical ventilation, which is only done in a critical care unit, roughly doubled,” he said.
Edmunds had a different explanation for the policy shift.
What allowed Britain to alter course, said Edmunds, was a lockdown in Italy that “opened up the policy space” coupled with new data. First came a paper by Edmunds’ own London School team that examined intermittent lockdowns, sent to the modelling committee on March 11 and validated by Edinburgh University. Ferguson’s revised Imperial research followed.
Woolhouse, the Edinburgh professor, confirmed the sequence.
Edmunds said these new studies together had demonstrated that if the British government imposed a lengthy period of tougher measures, perhaps relaxed periodically, then the size of the epidemic could be substantially reduced.
Still, without a vaccine or effective treatments, it’s going to be hard to avoid a substantial part of the British population getting infected, said Edmunds. “Until you get to a vaccine, there is no way of getting out of this without certainly tens of thousands of deaths,” he said. “And probably more than that.”
Now subject to intense public scrutiny, the modelling teams at universities across Britain continue to work on different scenarios for how the world can escape the virus’s clutches. According to Medley, the chairman of the SPI-M pandemic modelling committee, no one now doubts, for all the initial reservations, that a lockdown was essential in Britain.
Medley added: “At the moment we don’t know what’s going to happen in six months. All we know is that unless we stop transmission now, the health service will collapse. Yep, that’s the only thing we know for sure.”
Reporting by Stephen Grey and Andrew MacAskill; Additional reporting by Elizabeth Piper in London, Gabriela Baczynska in Brussels; editing by Janet McBride
Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
REUTERS NEWS NOW _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
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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."
Apart from the 'opinion' parts at the end, this is remarkable info, given what we know about the PTB Perps 'Telegraphing' their intentions. _________________ '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.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Tue Apr 21, 2020 11:35 am Post subject:
We need rapid testing now to know: 1. Who has protective immunity? 2. Who is actively shedding virus? 3. Who has high antibody titers that can be used to treat others? This way, scientists can discover and doctors can move from damage control to rational containment/treatment.
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Posted: Tue Apr 21, 2020 1:15 pm Post subject:
OffGuardian has published a new article, 'WATCH: Perspectives on the Pandemic #4'
In this long-awaited follow-up to his interview in late March, Dr. John Ioannidis discusses the results of three preliminary studies, (including his latest, which shows a drastically reduced infection fatality rate); the worrisome effects of the lockdown; the Swedish approach; the Italian data; the ups and downs of testing; the feasibility of "contact tracing", [...]
The government is facing very difficult circumstances but really you couldn’t make it up at times, because of all the inconsistencies. It’s definitely become more like a script from a satirical news program like The Last leg or Have I got news for you. My personal perspective is that I view everything and everyone as contaminated and just wash my hands more often, seems sensible to be cautious. It’s difficult to make light of it, as ultimately over 14,000 people have died, which is a tragedy, yet somehow we have to live through this and humour is one way of coping. Drinking tea is also a well known UK strategy in a crisis!
Mary Page
Borrowed from Tim Lord & Sarah Dee from whoever they got it from!
As we enter the next 3 weeks of lockdown here is a summary of the advice:
1. You MUST NOT leave the house for any reason, but if you have a reason, you can leave the house
2. Masks are useless at protecting you against the virus, but you may have to wear one because it can save lives, but they may not work, but they may be mandatory, but maybe not
3. Shops are closed, except those shops that are open
4. You must not go to work but you can get another job and go to work
5. You should not go to the Drs or to the hospital unless you have to go there, unless you are too poorly to go there
6. This virus can kill people, but don’t be scared of it. It can only kill those people who are vulnerable or those people who are not vulnerable people. It’s possible to contain and control it, sometimes, except that sometimes it actually leads to a global disaster
7. Gloves won't help, but they can still help so wear them sometimes or not
8. STAY HOME, but it's important to go out
9. There is no shortage of groceries in the supermarkets, but there are many things missing. Sometimes you won’t need loo rolls but you should buy some just in case you need some
10. The virus has no effect on children except those children it effects
11. Animals are not affected, but there is still a cat that tested positive in Belgium in February when no one had been tested, plus a few tigers here and there…
12. Stay 2 metres away from tigers (see point 11)
13. You will have many symptoms if your get the virus, but you can also get symptoms without getting the virus, get the virus without having any symptoms or be contagious without having symptoms, or be non contagious with symptoms...
14. To help protect yourself you should eat well and exercise, but eat whatever you have on hand as it's better not to go out shopping
15. It's important to get fresh air but don't go to parks but go for a walk. But don’t sit down, except if you are old, but not for too long or if you are pregnant or if you’re not old or pregnant but need to sit down. If you do sit down don’t eat your picnic
16. Don’t visit old people but you have to take care of the old people and bring them food and medication
17. If you are sick, you can go out when you are better but anyone else in your household can’t go out when you are better unless they need to go out
18. You can get restaurant food delivered to the house. These deliveries are safe. But groceries you bring back to your house have to be decontaminated outside for 3 hours including Pizza...
19. You can't see your older mother or grandmother, but they can take a taxi and meet an older taxi driver
20. You are safe if you maintain the safe social distance when out but you can’t go out with friends or strangers at the safe social distance
21. The virus remains active on different surfaces for two hours ... or four hours... six hours... I mean days, not hours... But it needs a damp environment. Or a cold environment that is warm and dry... in the air, as long as the air is not plastic
22. Schools are closed so you need to home educate your children, unless you can send them to school because you’re not at home. If you are at home you can home educate your children using various portals and virtual class rooms, unless you have poor internet, or more than one child and only one computer, or you are working from home. Baking cakes can be considered maths, science or art. If you are home educating you can include household chores to be education. If you are home educating you can start drinking at 10am
23. If you are not home educating children you can also start drinking at 10am
24. The number of corona related deaths will be announced daily but we don't know how many people are infected as they are only testing those who are almost dead to find out if that's what they will die of… the people who die of corona who aren’t counted won’t be counted
25. You should stay in locked down until the virus stops infecting people but it will only stop infecting people if we all get infected so it’s important we get infected and some don’t get infected
26. You can join your neighbours for a street party and turn your music up for an outside disco and your neighbours won’t call the police. People in another street are allowed to call the police about your music.
27. No business will go under due to Coronavirus except those businesses that will have already gone under. _________________ --
'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."
BCfm's weekly Politics Show presented by Tony Gosling with Irish Republican Labour activist Martin Summers - internet only BCfm Politics Show available Friday afternoons. We are ready to go live remotely, awaiting a BCfm Covid-19 Emergency Schedule slot from managing editor Pat Hart and the team. In the light of government and Ofcom guidance they have decided not to broadcast discussion or political shows that might put the FM licence at risk and don't want the added burden of dealing with potential Ofcom complaints.
An exclusive interview with Bristol mum Irina Bondariuk believes she, along with her two young children, caught Covid-19 on the last day of February 2020, suffered badly with all the publicised symptoms for over a month, and still has some remaining now after 40 days of isolation with her children in Shirehampton. She says she still cannot get her or her young ones tested by medical authorities, so is unlikely to have been included in official statistics.
Agence France-Presse / @afpfr / Twitter Professor Luc Montagnier is a controversial figure within the scientific community
A controversial French Nobel prize-winning scientist has accused biologists of having created SARS-CoV-2 - the virus that causes Covid-19 - in a lab, but the wider scientific community has so far refuted the claim.
Luc Montagnier, who won the Nobel Prize in 2008 for his work on HIV - and who is a very controversial figure in the scientific community - said in an interview this week that “the virus has come out of a laboratory in Wuhan, which has been specialising in these types of coronaviruses since the beginning of the 2000s”.
He made the claim during an interview with news platform CNews.
He said: “We have arrived at the conclusion that this virus was created.” He accused “molecular biologists” of having inserted DNA sequences from HIV into a coronavirus, “probably” as part of their work to find a vaccine against AIDS.
He said that it was not clear how the virus had been able to escape the laboratory, and condemned scientists for doing “the work of a sorcerer’s apprentice”.
Professor Montagnier has said that he is not the first to suggest the connection, and added that “a group of renowned Indian researchers” had also tried to publish a study showing that the new coronavirus includes ... _________________ --
'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."
_________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
The UK will have to live with some disruptive social measures for at least the rest of the year, the government's chief medical adviser has said.
Prof Chris Whitty said it was "wholly unrealistic" to expect life would suddenly return to normal soon.
He said "in the long run" the ideal way out would be via a "highly effective vaccine" or drugs to treat the disease.
But he warned that the chance of having those within the next calendar year was "incredibly small".
"This disease is not going to be eradicated, it is not going to disappear," he said, at the government's daily coronavirus briefing.
"So we have to accept that we are working with a disease that we are going to be with globally... for the foreseeable future."
The latest figures show a further 759 people have died with the virus in UK hospitals, bringing the total number of deaths to 18,100.
Raab vows to hit 100k test target in eight days
Prof Whitty said the public should not expect the number of coronavirus-related deaths to "fall away" suddenly after the peak.
"In the long run, the exit from this is going to be one of two things, ideally," he said.
"A vaccine, and there are a variety of ways they can be deployed... or highly effective drugs so that people stop dying of this disease even if they catch it, or which can prevent this disease in vulnerable people."
Prof Whitty warned there were multiple different ways in which the coronavirus epidemic would result in deaths or ill health.
Media captionProf Chris Whitty on easing restrictions: "It's going to take a long time"
As well as those dying from Covid-19, he said others may die indirectly because the NHS has had to be "reoriented towards Covid", leading to fewer elective procedures and screening.
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He also said if the interventions in place "extend deprivation among people" that would increase the risk to their long-term health.
"So what we have to do is think very seriously about this: what is the best balance of measures that gives us the best public health outcome?"
He said there was a "proper trade-off" which ministers would have to consider.
Presentational grey line
Analysis box by Hugh Pym, health editor
The government's chief medical adviser and other experts have often said the only secure long term route out of the coronavirus epidemic is the discovery of either a vaccine or effective drugs.
So Prof Whitty's latest comments are not a total surprise, however they throw cold water on any idea that lockdown restrictions will be fully lifted in the summer or even the autumn.
A vaccine and drugs are unlikely to materialise until next year and until then some form of social distancing will be required, according to Prof Whitty.
But that certainly doesn't mean all the current restrictions remain in place until then.
Schools, some businesses and public transport might well be reopened in the not too distant future. Pubs and restaurants, under this scenario, will probably be nearer the bottom of the list.
Prof Whitty of course is an adviser and it's up to the politicians to decide. They will have to weigh up the impact on the economy and society but also, as they often say, be guided by the science.
Presentational grey line
Also speaking at the briefing, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said easing social distancing measures too soon would risk a second spike of coronavirus cases.
He said this could trigger a second lockdown that would "prolong the economic pain" across the country.
Mr Raab, who is deputising for Prime Minister Boris Johnson, acknowledged the mental, physical and economic strain social distancing measures were having on people throughout the UK, but said they "must remain in place for the time being".
Gen Sir Nick Carter, the chief of the defence staff, also joined Wednesday's press conference and described the military response to coronavirus as the "single greatest logistical feat" of his 40 years of service.
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Gen Carter said the military has worked in support of healthcare workers on the front line, and has been involved with planning and testing - along with helping the Foreign Office with repatriation efforts.
He added that the military was also preparing mobile pop-up testing centres in a bid to roll-out more Covid-19 testing.
Earlier, the government insisted it would meet its target of 100,000 tests a day by the end of April - an increase of 82,000 on Monday's levels.
Sir Keir Starmer, who was making his debut in Prime Minister's Questions as Labour leader, said the UK had been "very slow and way behind other European countries" on testing.
He asked how it was possible to go from 18,000 tests a day to 100,000 in just eight days.
Mr Raab said the UK currently had testing capacity of 40,000 a day and, with new laboratories coming on stream, the government would reach its target.
In other developments:
Coronavirus is likely to result in a high mortality rate in care homes, Prof Whitty says
E-commerce giant eBay has built a new pilot e-portal for NHS staff to order personal protective equipment (PPE) which it says is in the final stage of testing
Downing Street denies anyone put pressure on the Foreign Office permanent secretary to retract his testimony to MPs that a "political decision" was taken not to join EU schemes to source medical equipment
An RAF plane carrying a delayed delivery of protective equipment has arrived in the UK as the government remains under pressure about NHS supplies
The last Britons to remain on a cruise ship during the pandemic will finally disembark the Costa Deliziosa in Genoa, Italy, on Wednesday, the Foreign Office says
A group of 25 doctors has written to the health secretary over concerns about the UK's current advice on self-isolation for coronavirus
Delays in diagnosing and treating cancer could lead to more years of lost life than with Covid-19, a leading cancer expert says _________________ --
'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."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTLii-e_UtY _________________ --
'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."
Ministers told the Mirror that the elderly and vulnerable face having to stay at home until a vaccine is developed or so-called ‘herd immunity’ is achieved
DOMINIC RAAB: LOCKDOWN WILL BE EXTENDED BY THREE MORE WEEKS
The elderly and vulnerable could be shielded from coronavirus for weeks longer than the rest of the population under Government plans to ease the lockdown.
The most “at risk” groups of people face having to stay at home until a vaccine is successfully developed or so-called ‘herd immunity’ is achieved which could take more than a year.
Ministers told the Mirror that it was inevitable that the over-70s and those with underlying health conditions would have to be protected the longest.
One minister told the Mirror: “This is one of the most difficult aspects. I know people don’t want to be the reason why Granny or Grandad get sick.”
But they admitted: “This will get harder the longer it goes on. I doubt it can last too many months behind others.”
The Governmen't 'traffic light plan' to ease restrictions
However, another minister added the public would have to get used to the idea - meaning that “you can’t see Granny for 18 months”.
The proposal was included in a “traffic light plan” reportedly drawn up by officials to restart the economy after the country was shut down during the outbreak to protect the NHS from collapse.
Cabinet Minister Michael Gove downplayed the strategy to gradually start easing the lockdown within weeks.
He said that it was “entirely understandable” people wanted to know when lockdown could end but that it was still too early to tell.
“It is the case that we are looking at all of the evidence, but we have set some tests which need to be passed before we can think of easing restrictions in this lockdown,” he added.
If the green, amber and red system is introduced, ministers could start taking the first small steps towards lifting the lockdown around May 11.
Warm weather and joggers and cyclists enjoy the day as they head through Sale, Cheshire
This first phase “green” would include small, non-essential shops, hairdressers and nurseries - though travel would still be discouraged.
The “amber” phase could see small businesses and restaurants with strict seating rules.
Wearing a mask on public transport would also be compulsory in this phase, expected towards the end of May.
The final “red” phase, pencilled in for mid-June, would see cinemas, theatres and pubs reopen with some restrictions.
Weddings and funerals could take place and gyms could open with enhanced sanitation rules.
Ministers are discussing how to start to ease restrictions though are concerned about muddying the message for the public that they must continue to stay at home.
A Whitehall insider said: “It’s going to be a slow path back. But just because we aren’t talking about it doesn’t mean we aren’t thinking about it.”
Education Secretary Gavin Williamson denied reports there was a plan for schools to reopen in three weeks time.
Social distancing rules have been eased for certain people (stock photo)
Social distancing rules would be eased at different times (stock photo) (Image: Getty Images)
It was claimed today that the Government was looking at dates in late May, early June and September for reopening the school gates.
“No decision has been made on when we will reopen schools. I can reassure schools and parents that they will only reopen when the scientific advice indicates it is the right time to do so,” he tweeted.
Mr Williamson later said that key measures - such as falling death rates - had to be achieved before schools could reopen their gates for millions of pupils.
He told the No 10 press conference: “Of course I want nothing more than to see schools back, get them back to normal. But I can’t give you a date.”
He also ruled out schools staying open during the summer holidays so that disadvantaged children had a chance to catch up before the following academic year.
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Coronavirus self-isolating hacks
Top Government scientific adviser Jeremy Farrar cautioned: “If we were to release those lockdowns too soon whilst the infection rates are still high... then the epidemic would come back again, it would come back very quickly. It would rebound within a few weeks or a couple of months.”
But ministers remainder under pressure from key figures - led by Labour leader Keir Starmer - to set out how it would begin to ease the lockdown.
Sir Keir said: “We need a clear plan for what comes next.
"The lockdown has been extended and I support that. But we need to have clarity about what is going to happen next.
“Other countries have begun to set out a roadmap to lift restrictions in certain sectors of the economy and for certain services, especially social care, when the time is right.
“This of course must be done in a careful, considered way with public health, scientific evidence and the safety of workers and families at its heart. But the UK Government should be doing likewise.”
Deputy chief medical officer Dr Jenny Harries defended the country’s approach to managing the spread of the virus so far as the Government’s scientific advisers came in for criticism.
She told the No 10 press conference: “We had and we still have a very clear plan - we had a containment phase and it was very successful.
“We had very strict quarantine regimes from high-risk areas, we followed up individual cases and families wherever that was possible.
“But once you end up with seeding and cases across the community, our focus has to be on managing the clinical conditions of those individuals.”
But Professor Anthony Costello, former director of the WHO, said: “I cannot believe what I am hearing at the press conference.
“Deputy CMO Jenny Harries still believes that testing policy in the UK has been correct.
Every week as the coronavirus outbreak continues, hundreds, and now thousands, more people are dying than we would normally expect in normal times. The death rate in the UK is now at its highest for more than 20 years, 75 per cent above the five-year average, according to the Office of National Statistics.
But crucially, and fascinatingly to the scientific community, not all of these extra deaths are attributed to Covid-19. Of the nearly 8,000 extra deaths that took place in England and Wales in the week ending 10 April, only 6,200 were directly attributed to coronavirus, leaving nearly 2,000 extra, unexplained deaths.
“The disparity was even larger last week,” emphasises Dr Jason Oke, senior statistician in the Oxford University Medical Statistics Group. “In the week ending 3 April, there were 6,000 excess deaths, and 3,000 to 4,000 were unexplained. That was particularly surprising.”
As the graphic below illustrates, deaths in the UK have happened at slightly above the seasonal average since January, but in the recent weeks of the Covid-19 outbreak the number of unexplained excess deaths has risen to above a level that can be explained by natural fluctuations week by week. “That 2,000 can’t be explained by random variation,” Dr Oke confirms. “It’s larger than that, so there’s definitely something.”
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Graph by Nicu Calcea
There’s definitely something, but the “death gap” leaves medics and statisticians in the strange situation of being unable to explain further, beyond a reasonable certainty that there are two possible explanations. Dr Oke said: “There’s not enough information to know whether this is under-reporting of Covid or whether this is, not a term I particularly like, but one that has been bandied around, ‘collateral damage’ as a result of the lockdown.”
Both explanations point towards an alarming trend. The first suggests an under-reporting of coronavirus deaths despite the ONS’s efforts to ensure the fullest picture of potential Covid deaths. The ONS figures referred to in this article and by Dr Oke take into account all registered deaths, not simply those registered in hospitals, and include any death where Covid-19 is mentioned on the death certificate — even if not mentioned as the primary cause. This means any potential difficulty in determining whether Covid-19 was a cause of death to a particularly ill patient with multiple comorbidities does not apply: any death “with” Covid-19 is counted by the ONS under “deaths involving Covid-19”.
Furthermore, ONS guidelines are clear that “a doctor can certify the involvement of Covid-19 based on symptoms and clinical findings – a positive test result is not required”. Noting that the “death gap” has narrowed since the week ending 3 April, Dr Oke suggested that doctors may be more willing to certify Covid-19 without a test than they were in earlier weeks, reducing the number of unexplained excess deaths.
The other possible explanation is that these figures do indeed point to an increase in deaths by non-coronavirus causes, an early indication of the potentially devastating impact that the pandemic response has had on wider healthcare provision, from a 50 per cent drop in A&E attendance to “eerily quiet” wards, as reported in an in-depth study on the time-bomb of patients avoiding hospital.
“It’s going to be one of those two causes,” Dr Oke said, adding: “It’s something that everybody who’s interested in epidemiology and statistics is paying great attention to, but unfortunately at the moment we can’t get any deeper into it.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6S9YD65I9cw
Hmm, well, the White House staff were vaccinated for anthrax before the 9/11 'anthrax attack', weren't they? _________________ '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.
The United States openly uses the COVID-19 pandemic to address its geopolitical and geo-economic challenges. Therefore, without waiting for an investigation to be carried out by the World Health Organisation, other countries are accused of spreading coronavirus.
At the same time, the US itself does not want to say anything about their 400 biological laboratories? These bio-laboratories are scattered across the planet and their activities are not regulated by any international agreements. What are they engaged in? What experiments are carried out?
In order to answer this question, it is enough to recall the history of the origin of these bio-laboratories. Their origins should be sought in the period of German-American cooperation of the 1920s-1930s. Within the framework of this cooperation, American and German scientists carried out joint research in the field of medicine and the development of bacteriological weapons. This process continued until the United States entered the war in December 1941. At the same time, American colleagues were not embarrassed by the fact that the Nazis used concentration camp prisoners for “experiments”.
In particular, the prisoners of the oldest concentration camp of the “Third Reich” Dachau were experimented on with malaria and tularemia. The latter was discovered, and actually created, by virologists from the California anti-plague station located near Lake Tulare in the United States. From the name of the latter came the name of an infectious disease, the causative agent of which was bacterium tularensis.
The symptoms of this disease are almost impossible to distinguish from malaria. It is therefore difficult to detect in the field, especially during hostilities. It is no accident that studies of tularemia have become one of the most “promising” within the framework of the American-German “scientific exchange of experience”.
In fact, the Nazi concentration camps became the first laboratories for the development of biological weapons. The Americans gave money and shared scientific knowledge, and the Nazis tested the theories of their colleagues in practice, including through inhumane experiments. In the future, these experiments were continued in the field conditions. Here we will give examples related to this same tularemia.
READ: Lyashko Claims That Poroshenko Secretly Met with Mike Pompeo in Ukraine
The first large-scale outbreak of this infectious disease was registered in the winter of 1941/1942. Back then the Wehrmacht had to retreat under the blows of the Red Army. When retreating to the abandoned territories of the Rostov and Lugansk regions, the Nazis released a large number of rodents vaccinated with bacterium tularensis. At that time in the Rostov region alone in January 1942 14,000 people died from tularemia. The consequences for the Lugansk region were no less severe.
The next use of a bacteriological weapon called “tularemia” occurred during the battle of Rzhev in 1942. Here, on the territory liberated from the Nazis, a huge number of mice infected with bacterium tularensis were also found. According to the memoirs of Soviet doctors, their invasion was so great that small carriers of the infection even during the day swarmed the dugouts and trenches. They were everywhere – in duffel bags and bowler hats. And they spread the infection everywhere. Fortunately, by this time Soviet doctors had already invented an effective vaccine against the pathogen. The outbreak was quickly extinguished.
But Nazi experimentalists did not disappear after that. The next case of provoking the tularemia epidemic is related to the Battle of Stalingrad. Here the Nazis used the fact that almost all medical centers were destroyed on the territory of the Stalingrad region, and the military medical services of the Red Army were overwhelmed by the wounded. Therefore, our military doctors often had neither time nor opportunity to fight the epidemiological threat. Especially since the Nazis used… their own soldiers as carriers of the disease.
READ: The Javelin "Rips Apart" the T-72: The Attempt at Deception Failed
According to Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, at the height of the liquidation of the encircled group Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus… “among our soldiers tularemia suddenly appeared, spread by mice. The number of people infected was huge”. In 70% of cases, the lungs of those infected were affected. Just like the COVID-19 situation. When they started to find out the causes, they found several sources of infection at once.
During the retreat, the Germans filled the fields of numerous haystacks of hay with virus-infected rodents. The Red Army soldiers, unaware of this, used this hay as a lining in trenches and dugouts. Of course, at the same time quickly becoming infected. Another source of infection spread is wells. The Nazis dumped hundreds of rodent bodies infected with tularemia into them.
But the most cynical way is to encourage infectious diseases among their own soldiers. German doctors in many cases ignored epidemiological measures, including those to combat tularemia. After all, Hitler’s order about the inadmissibility of being taken into Soviet captivity was in force. At the same time, Paulus’ surrounded army was doomed. Therefore, the calculation was that after the capture, Wehrmacht soldiers affected by infectious diseases would also infect the Red Army soldiers. That’s partly what happened. At the same time, most soldiers of the 6th Army died themselves from diseases developed in Nazi laboratories, including tularemia.
Finally, the civilian population suffered the greatest losses from the agent bacterium tularensis. In most settlements of the Stalingrad region mortality reached 75%.
These examples alone are sufficient to state that our people have been the target of one of the largest biological wars in history. But this fact did not embarrass our “allies” – the American partners of the Third Reich. They did not stop financing Nazi projects until the last days of the Great Patriotic War. Some of these funds were spent on the implementation of inhuman biological “experiments”.
Thus, none other than the Americans became the sponsors of the Nazi bacteriological warfare. They received almost all Nazi documentation in the field of biological weapons, as well as patents for German inventions. This happened after the surrender of Germany and became the basis for the launch of the American bacteriological program. Its continuation can be observed today in the form of US bio-laboratories. These laboratories scattered around the world are a direct continuation of Nazi projects.
READ: The National Guard of Ukraine Received American Grenade Launchers
Let’s add just one thing to this. The Anglo-Saxons have no concept of “the value of human life”. They have always sought to regulate the size of humanity, but not by promoting individual responsibility, but by mass murder. Therefore, it is not worth weaving yourself with illusions that closed US bio-laboratories do not develop new, even more dangerous viruses.
Yury Gorodnenko _________________ --
'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: 30 Jul 2006 Posts: 6060 Location: East London
Posted: Sun Apr 26, 2020 11:20 pm Post subject:
From above article: '....But the most cynical way is to encourage infectious diseases among their own soldiers. German doctors in many cases ignored epidemiological measures, including those to combat tularemia...'
This is what many people suspect happened in Wuhan:(from Aletho News):
WUHAN OUTBREAK: CHINA DEMANDS AN HONEST ACCOUNTING
https://alethonews.com/2020/03/22/wuhan-outbreak-china-demands-an-hone st-accounting/?
Being fit military, and possibly vaccinated against the virus, they could carry it and spread it with little effect to them (though five were trested in hospital in China for a fever on 23rd October 2019, five days after the Games began). _________________ '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.
60 Minutes Swine Flu 1976 - Lets see how long this video stays up before YouTube kills it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67LMv17Kaic _________________ --
'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: Mon Apr 27, 2020 12:01 am Post subject:
Giesecke: Why Lockdowns Are The Wrong Policy
Posted By Ian Schwartz On Date April 18, 2020
No Reinfection! Lockdowns Pointless! Ex Swedish Govt Epidemiologist Prof Johan Giesecke On Covid-19
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/warch?v=9MgFwA0digk[/youtube]
https://www.youtube.com/warch?v=9MgFwA0digk
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Mon Apr 27, 2020 9:40 am Post subject:
Ambassador says coronavirus imported to China, points to genetic sequence as proof
On Wednesday, Fox News reported, citing its sources, that the virus had allegedly spread from a Wuhan laboratory
https://tass.com/world/1146127
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"Five reputable scientific organizations, including the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden and the Central Botanical Garden of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, have collected data on 93 genome specimens of COVID-19, published in a global database covering 12 countries on four continents," the diplomat specified. "The research revealed that the earliest ‘ancestor’ of the virus is mv1, which evolved into haplotypes H13 and H38, and they, in turn, led to emergence of the second-generation haplotype — H3, which evolved into H1."
For clarity, the ambassador used family ties to trace the virus’s development. Thus, the mv1 haplotype is "the grand-grandfather," while H13 and H38 are "the grandma and grandpa," H3 — is "the father" and H1 is "the child."
"The virus that was discovered at Wuhan’s seafood market was of the H1 variety," he continued. "Only the H3 haplotype was discovered in Wuhan earlier, but it had nothing to do with the seafood market."
The previous gene sequences, H13 and H38, were never discovered in Wuhan.
"This suggests that the H1 specimen was brought to the seafood market by some infected person, which sparked the epidemic. The gene sequence cannot lie," Zhang Hanhui asserted.
The ambassador castigated attempts to pin the blame for the pandemic on China as libel, and reiterated that the country had to undertake huge efforts and suffer a lot of casualties in order to beat the disease.
"In doing so, China bought time for other nations — two entire months — in order to allow them to take prevention and control measures," he concluded.
Earlier, US President Donald Trump doubted that China had divulged all information about the virus’s emergence and spread. On Wednesday, Fox News reported, citing its sources, that the virus had allegedly spread from a Wuhan laboratory. Trump promised to look into this version.
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The initial source of COVID-19’s spread has not been identified yet, but it could be a number of regions, Zhang Hanhui stated.
"Numerous facts indicate that the source of COVID-19 has not been identified yet and point towards various regions. The virus is the common enemy of all of mankind, and the search for ‘patient zero’ is aimed not to nail them to a ‘pillar of shame’ but to better understand this virus, discover its evolutionary path and then defeat it completely," the diplomat explained. "By relying on contemporary science and technologies, we can trace the source of the virus and be sure that, sooner or later, the day will come when everything that’s been concealed will be revealed."
According to the envoy, although the novel coronavirus was first discovered in Wuhan, there are no facts determining that the source had originated from there.
He provided an example of a married couple from Japan, who contracted the disease in Hawaii between January 28 and February 7, "without visiting China or contacting any Chinese." Notably, the husband had symptoms by February 3.
Zhang Hanhui pointed to media reports that speculate that the virus had appeared in Italy’s Lombardy as early as January 1.
"Besides, according to some media, a renowned Italian medical specialist Giuseppe Remuzzi opined that the epidemic in Italy had begun spreading before it started in China," he pointed out.
The diplomat also recalled a comment made by Robert Redfield, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who speculated that the large number of flu deaths in the US could have in fact been caused by COVID-19, but the US did not test for it at that time.
"Italy hoped to trace the first infection case by conducting an exhumation, but the US vehemently disagreed," the Chinese envoy emphasized.
US allegations
Beijing furnished the United States with coronavirus data on time, Zhang Hanhui told TASS Friday, commenting on Washington’s allegations that Beijing withheld information about the epidemic.
The diplomat recalled that in late December 2019, the Wuhan Center for Disease Prevention and Control (China CDC) discovered the previously unknown pneumonia cases. According to the ambassador, starting January 3, 2020, China "promptly and timely provided the World Health Organization (WHO), the US and nations’ relevant agencies with information on the epidemic."
"On January 4, the head of the Chinese CDC contacted the US CDC Director and briefed him on the epidemiologic situation," the envoy said. "On January 8 and 19, the Chinese and American Centers again directly held contacts on the coronavirus issue."
The diplomat added that China shared the virus’s entire genome sequence with the WHO and the nations of the world, while the National Health Commission published daily bulletins on the epidemic on its official websites and other media platforms.
Zhang Hanhui underscored that the WHO Director-General Thedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus thanked Beijing for its openness and cooperation.
Earlier, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed that the fight against the coronavirus in the US was complicated by China’s failure to provide Washington with comprehensive information about the disease.
China's international help
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Up to now, China has assisted 120 nations and four international organizations in battling the coronavirus by shipping medical masks, protective attire and ventilators, Zhang Hanhui told TASS.
According to the ambassador, the People’s Republic has done everything to restore production as soon as the initial coronavirus outbreak was contained, and currently is manufacturing more than a half of world’s stockpile of medical equipment.
"[China] has provided 120 countries and four international organizations with general use medical masks, N95 respirators, protective wear, nucleic acid detection chemicals and ventilators," the envoy said. "Besides, [Beijing] also contributed $20 million to the World Health Organization to support international cooperation in battling COVID-19. Ignoring China’s contribution and sacrifices goes against moral norms and conscience."
The envoy also noted that no one is safe in the face of the pandemic, and therefore all nations "must unite, instead of pinning the blame on one another."
"Racism and a Cold War mindset are not only useless in the fight against the ongoing epidemic, but can even drag our world into the abyss," he underscored. "[The pandemic] knows no borders. Nations of the world are a community bound by a single destiny."
What is needed most of all is an effective joint prevention strategy to fight the coronavirus, Zhang Hanhui believes.
"We must also work together to iron out economic relations, unblock trade channels, overcome possible financial crises, and prevent a global economic downturn," the envoy emphasized. "Only through the unity and joint efforts of all of humanity will we achieve a comprehensive victory in the global fight against the pandemic."
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Investigative reports: As former US military contractor Edward Snowden warns 
An exclusive interview with 
