More athletes revealed they got sick in Wuhan during the Military World Games
They happened in October two months before the first confirmed case in China
German volleyball player Jacqueline Bock is the most recent athlete to speak out
Here’s how to help people impacted by Covid-19
By James Sharpe For The Mail On Sunday
Published: 23:10, 16 May 2020 | Updated: 08:24, 17 May 2020
More athletes have revealed they fell ill at a sports event in Wuhan in October – adding to fears the coronavirus was widespread months before China admitted it could be passed between humans.
Almost 10,000 competitors from more than 100 countries – but not Britain – attended the nine-day World Military Games.
Jacqueline Bock, part of the German volleyball team, told The Mail on Sunday how she and her colleagues contracted Covid-19 at the event in the city.
‘After a few days, some athletes from my team got ill,’ she said. I got sick in the last two days.’
Miss Bock’s father also became ill a few weeks after her return.
‘I have never felt so sick,’ she said. ‘Either it was a very bad cold or Covid-19. I think it was Covid-19.’
Pictured: The opening ceremony of the 7th International Military Sports Council Military World Games on October 18, 2019 in Wuhan
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Pictured: The opening ceremony of the 7th International Military Sports Council Military World Games on October 18, 2019 in Wuhan
It comes after French pentathlete Elodie Clouvel, 31, claimed she and her 27-year-old partner Valentin Belaud contracted the virus at the Games. Italian fencer Matteo Tagliariol also said everyone in his Wuhan apartment fell ill with ‘symptoms that looked like those of Covid-19’, which later spread to the 37-year-old’s son and girlfriend.
Pictured: French pentathlete Elodie Clouvel, 31, at the World Military Games in Wuhan, China in October 2019
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Pictured: French pentathlete Elodie Clouvel, 31, at the World Military Games in Wuhan, China in October 2019
Among dozens of other competitors contacted by the MoS, some said they had been told not to comment. Oliver Gorges, a triathlete from Luxembourg, said he became ill with flu-like symptoms and is now to undergo an antibody test this week to discover if he had contracted the coronavirus.
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The first confirmed case of Covid-19 in China was at the start of December, but Gorges claims Wuhan’s streets were ‘nearly empty’ when he went for a cycle ride in the city. ‘It was a ghost town,’ he said. ‘There were rumours that the government warned the inhabitants not to go out.’
Pictured: The delegation of United States entering the stadium during the opening ceremony of October's Military World Games
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Pictured: The delegation of United States entering the stadium during the opening ceremony of October's Military World Games
China admitted the disease could be spread between humans in January. Many other athletes at the Games commented on intense cleaning measures put in place in Wuhan, with almost 250,000 volunteers assisting the events.
Gorges, 22, had his temperature recorded on arrival at the airport, while athletes were forced to wash their hands every time they entered the canteen and were ordered not to take food out of the premises. ‘It was strange,’ he added.
According to a "parasite stress" hypothesis, authoritarian governments are more likely to emerge in regions characterized by a high prevalence of disease-causing pathogens. Recent cross-national evidence is consistent with this hypothesis, but there are inferential limitations associated with that evidence. We report two studies that address some of these limitations, and provide further tests of the hypothesis. Study 1 revealed that parasite prevalence strongly predicted cross-national differences on measures assessing individuals' authoritarian personalities, and this effect statistically mediated the relationship between parasite prevalence and authoritarian governance. The mediation result is inconsistent with an alternative explanation for previous findings. To address further limitations associated with cross-national comparisons, Study 2 tested the parasite stress hypothesis on a sample of traditional small-scale societies (the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample). Results revealed that parasite prevalence predicted measures of authoritarian governance, and did so even when statistically controlling for other threats to human welfare. (One additional threat—famine—also uniquely predicted authoritarianism.) Together, these results further substantiate the parasite stress hypothesis of authoritarianism, and suggest that societal differences in authoritarian governance result, in part, from cultural differences in individuals' authoritarian personalities.
Citation: Murray DR, Schaller M, Suedfeld P (2013) Pathogens and Politics: Further Evidence That Parasite Prevalence Predicts Authoritarianism. PLoS ONE 8(5): e62275. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0062275
Editor: Aric Gregson, University of California Los Angeles, United States of America
Received: October 12, 2012; Accepted: March 19, 2013; Published: May 1, 2013
Funding: This work was supported by a Canada Graduate Scholarship (awarded to DRM; http://www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Introduction
Systems of governance differ widely, and one important dimension on which they vary is authoritarianism. In contrast to liberal democratic forms of governance (characterized by popular participation in the political process, and by protection of individual civil rights and ideological freedoms), authoritarian governance is defined by highly concentrated power structures that repress dissent and emphasize submission to authority, social conformity, and hostility towards outgroups [1], [2]. Why is governance in some states and societies more authoritarian than in others? Economic variables—including the overall availability of economic resources and the manner in which those resources are distributed—provide partial answers to that question [3], [4], [5], [6]. Ecological variables may play a role as well. Recently, it has been suggested that societal variability in authoritarian governance may result, in part, from variability in the prevalence of disease-causing parasites [7]. (In this context, “parasite” is used to refer broadly to any pathogenic organism, including bacteria and viruses as well as helminths). Although results from several initial studies support this “parasite stress” hypothesis of authoritarian governance [7], [8], alternative explanations for those results remain unaddressed. Here, we report results from two additional investigations designed to test the parasite stress hypothesis and to address inferential limitations of previous studies.
Why might there be a causal link between the prevalence of infectious diseases in the local ecology and an authoritarian system of governance? The hypothesis follows from an analysis of several defining characteristics of authoritarian political systems (such as institutionalized emphasis on social conformity, intolerance of dissent, and ethnocentrism) that may have implications for the spread of infectious disease. Because many disease-causing parasites are invisible, and their actions mysterious, disease control has historically depended substantially on adherence to ritualized behavioral practices that reduced infection risk [9]. Individuals who openly dissented from, or simply failed to conform to, these behavioral traditions therefore posed a health threat to self and others. Thus, while there can be societal costs associated with any collective behavioral tendency toward obedience and conformity (e.g., inhibition of technological innovation), there can be disease-specific benefits too (presuming that a greater proportion of these behavioral traditions serve to mitigate, rather than propagate, the spread of disease). These benefits would have been greater (and more likely to outweigh the costs) under circumstances in which disease-causing parasites placed greater stress on human welfare—circumstances in which those parasites were especially virulent and/or prevalent.
This logical analysis has implications for predictable variation in individuals' attitudes and values, and for worldwide societal differences too. At a psychological level of analysis, empirical evidence reveals that the subjective perception of infection risk causes individuals to be more conformist, to prefer conformity and obedience in others, to respond more negatively toward others who fail to conform, and to endorse more conservative socio-political attitudes [10], [11], [12], [13], [14]. At a societal level of analysis, empirical evidence reveals that in countries and cultures characterized by historically higher prevalence of parasitic diseases, people are less individualistic, exhibit lower levels of dispositional openness to new things, are more likely to conform to majority opinion, and more strongly endorse "binding" moral values that emphasize group loyalty, obedience, and respect for authority [15], [16], [17], [18], [19].
In addition to their intolerance of nonconformity, authoritarian political systems are also characterized by nepotism and ethnocentrism [20]. These behavioral tendencies too have been empirically linked to the threat of disease. At a psychological level of analysis, individuals who are—or who merely perceive themselves to be—more vulnerable to infection tend to endorse more xenophobic and ethnocentric attitudes [21], [22], [23]. At a societal level of analysis, countries characterized by higher prevalence of parasitic diseases are also characterized by stronger family ties, increased frequency of intrastate ethnic conflict, and several indicators of increased ethnocentrism [24], [25], [26], although the interpretation of some these results remains a matter of some disagreement [27], [28].
To the extent that institutionalized forms of governance reflect the attitudes and values of the individuals who populate the local ecology, these lines of research have implications for predicting worldwide variability in authoritarian governance: In places where parasitic diseases have posed greater stress on human health and welfare, authoritarian forms of governance may be especially likely to emerge and to persist over time.
Thornhill and colleagues [7] empirically tested this parasite stress hypothesis, using modern geopolitical entities (e.g., countries) as units of analysis. The hypothesis was tested on four different measures of democratization and/or authoritarianism, using a parasite stress measure derived from a modern epidemiological database. Consistent evidence was observed across all measures: Higher levels of parasite stress were associated with less democratic, more highly authoritarian political systems (N’s >192, absolute r’s >.45, p’s<.001). These relationships remained statistically significant when statistically controlling for measures of economic development and economic inequality (as assessed by a country’s GDP per capita and GINI coefficient respectively). Additional analyses revealed that country-level differences in authoritarian governance were even more strongly predicted by a measure of historical (rather than modern-day) parasite prevalence [29]—a finding consistent with the hypothesis that authoritarian governance is a consequence (rather than a cause) of parasite stress.
However, nontrivial inferential issues arise from the use of contemporary nation-states as units of analysis [30]. Until these issues are addressed empirically, it is difficult to draw confident conclusions about the relationship between parasite stress and authoritarian governance.
One issue pertains to the history of European colonization, and its consequences. When countries colonize other geographic regions, they often impose their own political and economic institutions onto those regions; those institutions may persist even after those regions attain independence. It has been argued that ecological variables (such as the prevalence of infectious diseases) predict societal outcomes primarily because of their influence on particular patterns of colonial settlement, such that European colonial powers were more likely to establish long-lasting democratic political systems and economic institutions in regions characterized by lower incidences of infectious diseases [31], [32]. This represents a very different causal process than that implied by the parasite stress hypothesis.
We conducted two separate investigations, using two different empirical strategies, to address this inferential issue and thus to more rigorously test the hypothesized relation between parasite stress and authoritarian governance.
The first study revisits the country-level analyses reported previously [7]. The alternative explanation—differential colonial establishment of political institutions—is tested by examining relations not only between disease prevalence and state-level authoritarianism evident in government institutions, but also by examining the relation between those variables and authoritarian attitudes expressed by individuals who populate the country. The colonial-establishment-of-institutions explanation implies a direct causal influence of disease prevalence on state-level authoritarian governance, which may in turn have downstream consequences for individual-level authoritarian attitudes. Conversely, the parasite stress hypothesis implies a more direct causal influence of disease prevalence on individuals' authoritarian attitudes, which in turn would be expected to have a consequent influence on state-level systems of government. In statistical analytic terms, the alternative explanation implies an indirect relation between disease prevalence and individuals' authoritarian attitudes that is statistically mediated by authoritarian governance, whereas the parasite stress hypothesis implies an indirect relation between disease prevalence and authoritarian governance that is statistically mediated by individuals' authoritarian attitudes.
In addition to testing the alternative explanation, the results of this study also have implications for our understanding of individual-level authoritarian attitudes as they relate to societal outcomes. Research on “the authoritarian personality” of individuals indicates some relation between politically entrenched authoritarian systems of governance and individually expressed authoritarian personality traits (as such governments and individuals have in common their emphasis on adherence to conventional values, repression of dissent, and devotion to order and hierarchy [1], [2], [33]). But the direction of causality is unclear: To what extent does the correlation reflect the influence of government institutions on individuals' personalities, versus the influence of individuals' personalities on systems of governance? By introducing an additional variable into the analysis, and testing statistical mediation, our results may contribute toward some resolution to this question.
The second study further addresses alternative explanations based on European colonialism by testing the parasite stress hypothesis on a sample of more traditional societies documented within the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample [34]. The Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS) consists of 186 worldwide cultural populations, many of which are small-scale aboriginal societies. Cashdan and Steele [15] employed the SCCS dataset to test several other hypothesized consequences of disease prevalence that had previously been tested only with cross-national comparisons; their results provided important substantiation for the relationship between disease prevalence and collectivist values—especially those values pertaining to adherence to group norms. We employed the same strategy to provide an empirically complementary test of the hypothesis that ecological variation in disease prevalence predicts societal variation in authoritarian governance.
Drawing on an extensive ethnographic database, the cultures that comprise the SCCS are described by hundreds of numerically coded variables gathered by dozens of different ethnographers—including multiple variables pertaining to systems of governance [35]. These variables, in conjunction with two indicators of disease prevalence [15], [36], allow a statistically rigorous test of the relation between parasite stress and authoritarian governance in small-scale societies. Additional variables assess the prevalence of conceptually distinct threats to human welfare within these societies (e.g., famine, warfare). This allowed us to test the unique predictive effects of parasite stress, while statistically controlling for any effects associated with these other threats.
Study 1
Method
Analyses were conducted on 31 countries for which empirical data were available for the variables of primary conceptual interest: (a) authoritarian governance, (b) individual authoritarianism, and (c) historical prevalence of disease-causing parasites. The complete data for this study are available at http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~schaller/datasets/MurraySchallerSuedfeld-Stu dy1.sav; all statistical analyses were conducted using SPSS version 16.0.
Authoritarian Governance.
We employed four variables that are either directly or inversely indicative of authoritarian governance; previous analyses reveal that all four variables are predicted by measures of parasite stress [7], [29].
Two measures were obtained from www.freedomhouse.org which, for all countries, provides numerical values indicating (1) governmental restrictions on individuals' political rights and (2) governmental restrictions on individuals' civil liberties. Both scores are represented on 7-point scales, with higher values indicating more severe governmental restrictions on individuals' rights and civil liberties. We employed scores pertaining to the year 2007.
A third measure (obtained from www.heritage.org) assesses the extent to which the law protects the rights of individuals to own and accrue private property. Country level scores were represented on a 100-point scale, with higher values representing greater legal protection for individuals' property rights (indicative of a lower level of authoritarian governance). We employed scores from the years 2004–2008.
The fourth measure was Vanhanen’s [6] index of democracy for the years 1999–2001. This index was derived from two components of a democratic governance system—competition and participation in the electoral process—which were weighted equally in computation of the overall democracy index. Higher values indicate higher levels of democratization (and lower levels of authoritarian governance) within each country.
Individual Authoritarianism.
Adorno and colleagues [1] developed a questionnaire—the "F Scale"—to assess individual differences in traits and attitudes that define the authoritarian personality (e.g., conventionalism, authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, ethnocentrism). This scale has been validated in both Western and non-Western cultures [37]. Meloen [33] compiled results obtained from over 30,000 individuals worldwide who completed the F Scale, and reported mean standardized F Scale scores for individuals living within each of 31 countries. Meloen reported separate mean F Scale scores for student and non-student samples within each country. Although mean F Scale scores were different across these two types of samples (non-student means were generally higher), these two scores were almost perfectly correlated across the 31 countries (r>.99), and so virtually identical results emerge regardless of which set of scores is used as an indicator of individuals' authoritarian personality. In the analyses reported below, we employed mean F Scale scores obtained from non-student samples.
Prevalence of Disease-Causing Parasites.
Parasite stress was assessed with a previously developed measure of historical pathogen prevalence [29]. This measure is based on the incidence rates of 9 different kinds of infectious diseases, as indicated in old medical atlases and other sources of historical information about disease prevalence in different geographical regions (the nine disease-causing pathogens that were coded were leishmanias, trypanosomes, leprosy, schistosomes, filariae, tuberculosis, malaria, dengue, and typhus). The resulting index provides, for each country, a numerical estimate of the relative overall historical prevalence of disease. (This measure is internally reliable; across a worldwide sample of 160 countries, the 9-item index has Cronbach's alpha = .84).
Control Variables.
Country-level variables other than disease prevalence may also predict authoritarianism, and it is important that these variables be accounted for statistically in order to test the unique predictive effects of disease prevalence. In our analyses, we included four such variables. (Given that these variables are ostensibly predictors—rather than consequences—of authoritarianism, we attempted to obtain measures that predated data collection on the primary authoritarianism measures, while still retaining accurate data for as many countries as possible.)
GDP per capita.
Previous research indicates that authoritarian governance is associated with low levels of economic development [5]. As a measure of economic development, we used the World Bank's (www.data.worldbank.org) country-level scores of GDP per capita data for the year 1980.
Wealth Inequality.
Inequitable distribution of wealth predicts variation in democratic versus authoritarian governance [6]. As a measure of wealth inequality we used GINI coefficients obtained from CIA World Factbook (www.cia.gov). (A GINI coefficient of zero indicates total wealth equality within a country; a coefficient of one indicates maximal inequality.) The dates of these GINI scores ranged from 1991–1996.
Education.
Meloen [33] found that authoritarianism was inversely related to the mean level of education within a country. As a measure of this construct, we used the United Nations Education Index scores (obtained from www.hdr.undp.org) for the year 1990.
Life Expectancy Residual.
In addition to the specific threat posed by infectious diseases, other threats to human welfare have also been found to be predictive of individuals' authoritarian personality and related attitudes [38], [39], [40], [41], [42]. We employed a method used in previous cross-national investigations [16] to create an index that indirectly assessed disease-irrelevant threats: We regressed average life expectancy (obtained for the year 1990, from www.hdr.undp.org) on the index of disease prevalence and saved the residuals. These life expectancy residuals represent variation in life expectancy that cannot be predicted by variation in disease prevalence, and thus is indicative of various other threats to human welfare.
Results and Discussion
Preliminary analyses revealed that pathogen prevalence strongly predicted all four measures of authoritarian governance (r’s ranged from .47 to .67 in absolute value, all p’s<.01). These results replicate previous findings [7] on the smaller subset of countries included in our analyses.
Additional results (summarized in Table 1) revealed that individuals' authoritarianism scores were also strongly predicted by pathogen prevalence, r = .65 (p<.001). Individual authoritarianism was also predicted by GDP per capita, GINI, Education, and Life Expectancy Residual (r's ranged from .36 to .68 in absolute value, all p's<.05).
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Table 1. Results from analyses on 31 countries (Study 1): Correlations between mean individual F-scale scores, historical pathogen prevalence, and other country-level variables.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0062275.t001
In order to test unique effects on individuals' authoritarian scores, pathogen prevalence and the four control variables were entered simultaneously as predictors into a regression equation, with individual authoritarianism as the dependent variable. Results revealed that the predictive effects of the control variables were all statistically nonsignificant (absolute values of β’s<.32, p’s >.10), but that—despite relatively low statistical power—there was a significant unique effect of pathogen prevalence, β = .73 (p = .04). (The partial correlation coefficient between pathogen prevalence and authoritarian scores when controlling for these four control variables was r = .48, p = .04). This result is conceptually consistent with previous research linking pathogen prevalence uniquely to other conformist attitudes and personality traits 17,18.
The key question is whether the relation between pathogen prevalence and authoritarian governance is mediated by individual-level authoritarianism. To address this question, we employed a bootstrapping procedure [43]. We determined path coefficients by regression analyses, and determined indirect effects and their 95 percent confidence intervals based upon 10,000 nonparametric bootstrapped samples. Results of all 4 mediation tests indicated that the relation between pathogen prevalence and authoritarian governance was significantly mediated by individual authoritarianism, with none of the bootstrapped confidence intervals containing zero. The mediated effect accounted for 77% of the total effect of pathogen prevalence on political rights (Unstandardized regression coefficients [B's] between pathogen prevalence and political rights = .29/1.28 after/before mediation), for 63% of the total effect on civil liberties (B's = .50/1.38 after/before mediation), for 60% of the total effect on democracy (B's = –3.45/–8.60 after/before mediation, and for 37% of the effect on property rights (B's = –16.00/–25.56 after/before mediation). Of the 4 measures of authoritarian governance, only for the measure of property rights did the direct effect of pathogen prevalence remain significant when statistically controlling for individual authoritarianism (β = –.48, p = .02); for the remaining three measures of authoritarian governance, the direct effect of pathogen prevalence was reduced to nonsignificance (absolute values of β's<.23, p's >.20).
For the sake of comparison, we performed another set of bootstrapping analyses that tested an alternative mediational model that specified authoritarian governance as the mediator between pathogen prevalence and individual Authoritarianism. This alternative model was not as well supported by the data. Across the four analyses, the mediated effect accounted for between 31–48% of the total effect of pathogen prevalence on individual authoritarianism. The direct effect of pathogen prevalence on individual Authoritarianism remained significant in every analysis when controlling for state-level authoritarian governance (p’s ranged from .005 – .04).
These mediation results suggest that the ecological prevalence of infectious diseases predicts the individual authoritarian personalities of people living within that ecological region, and these individual-level dispositions in turn give rise to (and sustain) authoritarian systems of governance. These results are consistent with the logical implications of the parasite stress hypothesis, and are inconsistent with an alternative explanation suggesting that the correlation between disease prevalence and authoritarianism is based solely on colonial establishment of state-level institutions.
Study 2
Method
Analyses were conducted on 90 cultural populations described within the Standard Cross Cultural Sample (SCCS) [34], for which empirical data were available for the variables of primary conceptual interest: (a) authoritarian governance, and (b) historical prevalence of infectious disease. Complete data for this study are available at http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~schaller/datasets/MurraySchallerSuedfeld-Stu dy2.sav; all statistical analyses were conducted using SPSS version 16.0.
Authoritarian Governance.
Drawing on ethnographic observations, Ross [35] coded 42 numerical variables assessing aspects of political life in 90 societies within the SCCS. Factor analytic results reported by Ross revealed that 12 of these variables loaded highly on a common underlying factor, which Ross called "concentration of political power"—a defining feature of authoritarian political systems. These variables are: Political role differentiation, Basis of local community leadership selection, Perceptions of political leaders’ power (as seen by society), Checks on leaders’ power, Removal of leaders who are incompetent or disliked, Leaders’ exercise of authority, Operation of decision making bodies, Extensiveness of adult participation in community decisions, Litigation/use of third parties for binding decisions, Formal sanctions and enforcement for community decisions, Prevalence of enforcement specialists (e.g. police, tax collectors), and Level of taxation paid to local community (SCCS variable numbers 756, 758, 759, 761, 762, 763, 764, 766, 772, 776, 777, 784). Due to society-specific missing (or insufficiently precise) data, N's for these variables range from 77 to 90.
We employed all 12 of these variables as indicators of authoritarian governance. As originally coded, greater authoritarianism (i.e., greater concentration of political power) was indicated by lower numerical values on 11 of the 12 variables (all except SCCS variable #766, Extensiveness of adult participation in community decisions). For our analyses, we reverse-coded those 11 items so that, for all 12 variables, higher values represented higher levels of authoritarian governance. (Following the recoding, all 12 variables were positively inter-correlated; r’s ranged from .26 to .77, with median r = .54.) We then created a single composite index by standardizing the 12 variables (converting them to z-scores), and computing the mean of these z-scores. This 12-item index (Cronbach’s alpha = .94) served as the primary measure of authoritarian governance.
Prevalence of Disease-Causing Parasites.
We conducted parallel sets of analyses employing two different measures of parasite prevalence. One measure was developed by Cashdan and Steele [15], based upon the historical prevalence of ten disease-causing pathogens. These authors employed the same source materials employed by Murray and Schaller [29] (described in Study 1 above), and assigned a historical pathogen prevalence score to each of the 186 SCCS societies based upon local conditions (within 200 km) of each society. The specific pathogens coded were leishmanias, trypanosomes, malaria, schistosomes, filariae, dengue, typhus, leprosy, spirochetes, and plague. (Cashdan and Steele generated new codings for 8 of the 10 pathogens; data for the remaining two pathogens—leprosy and spirochetes—were obtained from previously published work [36].) This measure was internally reliable, Cronbach’s alpha = .81.
The second measure was an index of "total pathogen stress" (SCCS variable #1260) developed previously by Low [36], who drew upon similar source materials but coded fewer categories of parasitic diseases. This index is based on the overall extent to which 7 specific kinds of infectious diseases were present within the region occupied by each society. Across all 186 societies in the SCCS dataset, this 7-item index has Cronbach’s alpha = .77.
These two indices [15], [36] are highly correlated, r = .87 (p<.001).
Control Variables.
Given previous evidence that authoritarianism may be associated with lack of valued resources or by other threats to human welfare [44], [45], [46] we also included 3 additional measures in our analyses.
Malnutrition.
The SCCS dataset includes 3 variables that assess regular shortages in nutritional resources of the sort that predict chronic malnutrition: ordinary malnutrition, short-term starvation, and seasonal starvation (SCCS variable #'s 1261 – 1263) [47]. Each variable is coded on a 4-point scale. We created a single index by first converting the 3 variables to z-scores, and then computing the mean of these z-scores (for the 3-item scale, Cronbach’s alpha = .63).
Famine.
The SCCS dataset includes 4 variables that indicate the prevalence of acute famines: occurrence, severity, persistence, and recurrence of famine (SCCS variable #'s 1265, 1267, 1268 and 1269) [47]. Each variable is coded on a 4-point scale. We created a single index assessing threat of famine by first converting the 4 variables to z-scores, and then computing the mean of these z-scores (for the 4-item scale, Cronbach’s alpha = .90). (The malnutrition and famine variables are related, but differ in several important aspects. As defined by these variables, malnutrition is characterized by regular caloric deficiency but is rarely characterized by mortality; in contrast, famine is characterized by significant mortality. Malnutrition is a relatively predictable and chronic state of affairs and so rarely creates alarm within a society; in contrast, famine is an unpredictable and acute event characterized by marked disruptions in community life).
Warfare.
The SCCS dataset includes separate variables pertaining to the frequency of internal warfare and the frequency of external warfare (SCCS variable #'s 773 and 774) [35]. Each variable is coded on a 4-point scale. We created a single index assessing threat of warfare by first converting these 2 variables to z-scores, and then computing the mean of these z-scores (for the 2-item scale, Cronbach’s alpha = .45.)
Results and Discussion
Table 2 presents zero-order correlations between variables. Both parasite stress measures were positive predictors of authoritarian governance (r's = .42 and .29, p's<.01). In addition, the threat of famine also correlated positively with authoritarian governance (r = .26, p = .01). Neither malnutrition nor warfare was significantly associated with authoritarian governance. (In an additional analysis, we aggregated society-level values within each of the 6 world regions identified by Murdock [48], and thus computed composite measures of pathogen prevalence [15] and authoritarian governance for each of these six culturally-independent world regions. The correlation between these region-level composite variables provides an ancillary test of the parasite stress hypothesis. This correlation was strongly positive, r(6) = .67, p = .14.)
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Table 2. Results from analyses on the Standard Cross Cultural Sample (Study 2): Zero-order correlations between 12-item index of authoritarian governance, two measures of parasite stress, and three measures assessing other threats to health and welfare.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0062275.t002
We conducted follow-up multiple regression analyses to test whether parasite stress uniquely predicted authoritarian governance, even when controlling for additional threats. In one analysis, the set of predictors included the 3 control variables (famine, malnutrition, and warfare) along with Cashdan and Steele’s [15] measure of historical pathogen prevalence. Results revealed that both pathogen prevalence and the threat of famine were unique predictors of authoritarian governance (β's = .47 and .36, respectively; p's<.001). In a conceptually identical analysis the predictors included the 3 control variables along with Low's [36] measure of total pathogen stress. The results were inferentially identical: Pathogen stress and the threat of famine were unique predictors of authoritarian governance (β's = .36 and .34 respectively; p's<.005).
We also performed separate multiple regression analyses on each of the 12 individual variables that comprised the index of authoritarian governance (the 12 variables that Ross [35] identified as indicators of "concentration of political power"). Predictor variables in each analysis included the 3 control variables (famine, malnutrition, and warfare) along with Cashdan and Steele’s [15] measure of historical pathogen prevalence. (Virtually identical results were obtained in separate analyses that instead included Low's [36] measure of pathogen stress.) Results are summarized in Table 3, and reveal that pathogen prevalence uniquely predicted 11 of the 12 variables: Higher levels of pathogen prevalence were associated with ethnographic observations indicating more authoritarian systems of governance. In addition, famine uniquely predicted 8 of the 12 variables, such that greater threat of famine was associated with greater authoritarianism. Malnutrition uniquely predicted 1 of the 12 variables (greater malnutrition was associated with the perception of leaders as less powerful). Warfare did not uniquely predict any of these variables.
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Table 3. Results from analyses on the Standard Cross Cultural Sample (Study 2): Standardized regression coefficients (β's) identifying unique predictive effects of threats due to pathogens, famine, malnutrition and warfare on indicators of authoritarian governance.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0062275.t003
Overall, these results support the parasite stress hypothesis, with both the authoritarian composite measure and all but one of its twelve constituent parts producing convergent results. These results also suggest that the prevalence of a disease-irrelevant threat—famine—may also uniquely encourage authoritarian political governance, which is consistent with past research that links other threats to authoritarianism [41], [42].
General Discussion
Results from both studies provide empirical substantiation for the hypothesis that societal differences in authoritarian governance may result, in part, from ecological variation in the prevalence of disease-causing parasites. Study 1 was designed to address one specific alternative explanation for a previously documented relation between parasite stress and contemporary nation-level markers of authoritarianism [7]. Results revealed that the relation between parasite prevalence and authoritarian governance was mediated by individual authoritarianism—a result that is consistent with the parasite stress hypothesis, and inconsistent with an alternative explanation based solely on the colonial spread of political and economic institutions. (These results do not challenge the important role of colonial history in explaining contemporary nation-level differences in political and economic outcomes [31], [32]. The results simply indicate that a colonial-spread-of-institutions process cannot provide a complete explanation for the relation between parasite prevalence and authoritarianism.)
Study 2 was designed to provide a complementary analysis in a sample of traditional small-scale societies. Results revealed that parasite prevalence predicted the level of authoritarian governance across a diverse sample of 90 small-scale societies within the Standard Cross Cultural Sample (SCCS). These results provide further, empirically independent evidence of the hypothesized relation between parasite stress and authoritarian governance.
The magnitude of the statistical relationships between parasite prevalence and authoritarian governance differed across the two studies: These relations were more modest in the sample of small-scale societies than in the sample of modern geopolitical regions. (Similar differences in magnitude are evident in empirical results linking pathogen stress to collectivist values [8], [15]) Why might this be? One possibility is that, when using contemporary nation states as units of analysis, the relationship is more likely to be spuriously inflated (due, for instance, to conceptually independent processes such as those involved in European colonialism). Another possibility is that, when using the SCCS dataset, the relationship is more likely to be artificially attenuated (due to the measurement error that almost certainly attends any attempt to turn ethnographers' qualitative observations into numerical codings). These considerations suggest caution in drawing any conclusions about actual effect sizes, and attest further to the value of using multiple methods (and multiple samples) to test functional hypotheses of cross-cultural differences.
In addition to parasite prevalence, Study 2 also assessed several additional, conceptually distinct forms of threat to human welfare: malnutrition, famine, and warfare. Results revealed that both parasite prevalence and famine uniquely predicted variability in authoritarian governance. These results suggest that the societal implications of parasite stress (and the societal implications of famine) are distinct from the implications of other variables that might also affect individual fitness and mortality. This conclusion is consistent also with psychological evidence showing that, while other threats can also influence individuals' conformist and ethnocentric attitudes, the perceived threat of infectious disease has effects that are empirically unique and, often, especially powerful [13], [14], [21].
The finding that the threat of famine predicts authoritarian governance in small-scale societies is also convergent with psychological research showing that individual-level authoritarianism is generally higher during times of resource scarcity [42], [49]. Two other threats to human welfare (malnutrition and warfare) had negligible relations with authoritarian governance in small-scale societies. Malnutrition may fail to exact any substantial societal-based influence due to its chronic and enduring nature (whereas famines are acute, and therefore more threat-like). The null result for warfare is perhaps more surprising, given the prevailing belief that authoritarian governments are more likely to go to war [50]. This null result may simply be due to scale. The war-like nature of authoritarian regimes has typically been ascribed to large nation states; the same principles may not apply small-scale societies of the sort represented in the SCCS.
Although these empirical results provide evidence that ecological variation in parasite stress (as well as famine) uniquely predicts societal-level differences in authoritarian governance, these results cannot address deeper questions about the specific underlying processes through which this relation may have emerged. Although the pattern of results is consistent with previous research in the psychological sciences that documents specific cognitive and behavioral changes that occur when individuals perceive that they are vulnerable to infectious diseases, additional mechanisms may also plausibly explain the same societal outcomes [51], [52]. Nor can these kinds of results distinguish whether the unique effects of parasite stress and famine reflect the operation of a single underlying mechanism that responds to any kind of stressor or threat, or whether these two effects reflect the complementary operation of multiple mechanisms that are each functionally attuned to different forms of threat. A simple appeal to parsimony favors the former interpretation. Considerable evidence at an individual level of analysis—including experiments that reveal different effects of different threats on attitudes relevant to authoritarianism—suggests the latter [13], [21], [53].
Although one cannot confidently draw inferences about individual-level processes from population-level data, the results of Study 1 may have other implications at the psychological level of analysis. It has been suggested that an authoritarian personality serves a self-protective function [54]. Consequently, rather than being a stable trait, individuals' authoritarian tendencies may temporarily increase when threats are psychologically salient [39], [55], [56], [57]. Our results provide novel evidence of a relationship between a conceptually distinct form of threat—the threat of infectious disease—and individuals' authoritarian tendencies. This relationship is consistent with a wide range of additional evidence indicating that individuals are sensitive to disease-connoting cues within their immediate environment, and respond to these cues with functionally adaptive shifts in cognition and behavior [58], [59].
These results have further implications for understanding the direction of the presumed causal relation between individual-level authoritarian attitudes and state-level authoritarian governance. Are people who live within authoritarian states more likely to adopt authoritarian attitudes? Or are people who hold authoritarian attitudes more likely to give rise to authoritarian governments? By including an additional variable (parasite prevalence), and using mediation analyses to test the direct and indirect implications of this variable, Study 1 addressed these questions in a novel manner. Results suggest that, consistent with some lines of speculation [56], individual-level authoritarianism shapes political systems, rather than political systems shaping individual attitudes (although, of course, neither causal path necessarily operates at the exclusion of the other).
In addition to their conceptual implications, these results may also have useful implications for predicting the collateral consequences of health-related public policies. If indeed parasite stress has unique causal implications for authoritarian governance, then disease-eradication programs may not only have direct consequences for human health, they may also have indirect consequences for individual rights, civil liberties, and political freedoms. (Thornhill and colleagues [7] noted that the democratic transitions in North America and Europe were preceded by dramatic reductions in the prevalence of infectious disease.) There may also be implications for reduced levels of xenophobia and other prejudices that are linked to authoritarian attitudes [1], [2], [60], [61], and for increased levels of creativity, innovation, and open-mindedness more generally.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Vincent Fang for his work on this manuscript, and Elizabeth Cashdan for her helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this manuscript.
“”Trust Who” is a brave solo mission.” (Kino Kino, BR)
“What Lilian Franck uncovered through research and interviews with journalists, activists and whistleblowers is both terrifying and worth watching!.” Tip Berlin
“… The wide range of questions with which Lilian Franck confronts critics and WHO officials during an extensive filming process makes for a highly convincing documentary. In the end, it poses the important question as to whether the WHO – with 70% of its budget financed by non-governmental sources like industry – is still able to fulfill its duties.” Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger
“Lilian Franck’s documentary critically examines how the work of the World Health Organization WHO is influenced by its various financial backers and partnerships to the detriment of the general public. The filmmaker persistently confronts her high-ranking interview partners from the Geneva authorities with allegations made against the WHO with regards to the tobacco industry, pandemic alerts during the swine flu and the assessment of health consequences of the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear disasters.” Spielfilm.de
“The World Health Organization protects us in the best possible way by alerting the public, taking precautions and recommending the appropriate actions! If only… The WHO’s authorities have long been infiltrated by industry and corruption. They downplay catastrophes or exaggerate pandemics – however politics and the pharmaceutical lobby see fit. Director Lilian Franck is outraged by this, so she does her research.“ Choices.de
“Franck’s conclusions are sobering and a cry out for a restructuring of the institution that is now largely supported by NGOs and foundations. The facts she presents are crushing. The personal approach emotionalises the complex topic. “Indiekino.de
“The topic of ´trustWHO´ is important. Lilian Franck’s documentary gloomily depicts how the World Health Organization WHO, founded 70 years ago with the aim of achieving the best possible level of health for all people, is now dominated by lobbyists of the nuclear, tobacco or pharmaceutical industries. Lilian Franck gets through to the very heart of the matter by confronting her interview partners by means of ruthless, tenacious and persistent questioning, refusing to be turned down or thrown off by empty phrases.“ Deutschlandfunk Corso
“Lilian Franck’s documentary film “trust WHO ” is a comprehensive portrait of the World Health Organization WHO. Through extensive discussions with WHO authorities and critics alike, she provides a deep insight into the structures of the organization. This shows how commercial enterprises are increasingly enforcing their interests within the WHO, endangering or even taking lives on one hand, and affecting many other public organizations on the other.” Aviva-berlin.de
“”Trust Who” is a brave solo mission.” (Kino Kino, BR)
“What Lilian Franck uncovered through research and interviews with journalists, activists and whistleblowers is both terrifying and worth watching!.” Tip Berlin
“… The wide range of questions with which Lilian Franck confronts critics and WHO officials during an extensive filming process makes for a highly convincing documentary. In the end, it poses the important question as to whether the WHO – with 70% of its budget financed by non-governmental sources like industry – is still able to fulfill its duties.” Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger
“Lilian Franck’s documentary critically examines how the work of the World Health Organization WHO is influenced by its various financial backers and partnerships to the detriment of the general public. The filmmaker persistently confronts her high-ranking interview partners from the Geneva authorities with allegations made against the WHO with regards to the tobacco industry, pandemic alerts during the swine flu and the assessment of health consequences of the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear disasters.” Spielfilm.de
“The World Health Organization protects us in the best possible way by alerting the public, taking precautions and recommending the appropriate actions! If only… The WHO’s authorities have long been infiltrated by industry and corruption. They downplay catastrophes or exaggerate pandemics – however politics and the pharmaceutical lobby see fit. Director Lilian Franck is outraged by this, so she does her research.“ Choices.de
“Franck’s conclusions are sobering and a cry out for a restructuring of the institution that is now largely supported by NGOs and foundations. The facts she presents are crushing. The personal approach emotionalises the complex topic. “Indiekino.de
“The topic of ´trustWHO´ is important. Lilian Franck’s documentary gloomily depicts how the World Health Organization WHO, founded 70 years ago with the aim of achieving the best possible level of health for all people, is now dominated by lobbyists of the nuclear, tobacco or pharmaceutical industries. Lilian Franck gets through to the very heart of the matter by confronting her interview partners by means of ruthless, tenacious and persistent questioning, refusing to be turned down or thrown off by empty phrases.“ Deutschlandfunk Corso
“Lilian Franck’s documentary film “trust WHO ” is a comprehensive portrait of the World Health Organization WHO. Through extensive discussions with WHO authorities and critics alike, she provides a deep insight into the structures of the organization. This shows how commercial enterprises are increasingly enforcing their interests within the WHO, endangering or even taking lives on one hand, and affecting many other public organizations on the other.” Aviva-berlin.de
“Lilian Franck believes that the WHO should speak more openly about such problems. Because their work ultimately extends to our everyday lives, affecting many factors from medication and vaccinations to health promotion.” (Tagesschau.de; there I was quoted as a” WHO expert “)
Video taken from madziraki. - The World Health Organization (WHO) was founded with the aim of building a healthier future for people all over the world. Whether it’s the effects of smoking, the Swine flu pandemic or a nuclear disaster, the WHO is the body we rely on to advise on and resolve a public health crisis. But can it be trusted? TrustWho documents filmmaker Lilian Franck’s quest to discover what lies behind the altruistic façade of the world’s largest public health body. What she uncovers is an alarming picture of corruption and opacity. This powerful investigative doc shines a light on how industry lobbies have infiltrated the WHO and asks whether the organisation can be trusted to keep the public healthy.
Ghostlake
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgW532D2yHdP8jccquWdfFQ
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Strategic intelligence - The World Economic Forum have mapped out their diabolical plan for mankind. It is over 200 layers deep and covers everything from 5G, fracking, vaccines, microchips, tracing, surveillance, AI, World government, Biotechnology, to how to change young peoples outlook on aging. With Ovid at the core of it all, it aims to systemically change peoples values and culture. Credit goes to the mirror project.
The 2021 Bilderberg is an unknown quantity. This page highlights the involvement of numerous Bilderbergers in the COVID-19event.
It is unknown whether a 2021 Bilderberg Meeting was held; no leaks have emerged and the group has made no public statement. The 2020 Bilderberg was reportedly cancelled due to concerns about COVID-19. All Bilderberg meetings of the 2010s began and ended in June. Bilderberg meetings tend to invite about 50% newcomers. The other half the guests might have been expected to be from the list of 2985 past Bilderbergers.[1]
Many Bilderbergers have experience at Pandemic Planning, and the group has been well represented at such exercises for at least 20 years.[3] Those with the most obvious ties:
Shiraz Maher - 2015 - A "Terror expert" who reportedly had a case of COVID-19 which was "classified as “mild” by British health authorities". Maher wrote a "horrifying account of his experience with COVID-19" which was picked up by the commercially-controlled media after it "went viral" on Twitter.[4]
Big tech is notoriously opaque in its censorship, which reached record heights in 2020/21 on the topic of COVID-19.[9] As such, involvement is the censorship is difficult to prove, but it seems likely that censorship was carried out with the agreement of (or at the behest of) the following chief execs:
“People act like they have a choice. You don't have a choice. Normalcy only returns when we've largely vaccinated the entire global population [against COVID-19].” Bill Gates (2020) [12]
John Bell - 2013 - Researcher whose interests include DNA mutation, on the UK Vaccine Task Force, who stated in an interview that “These [COVID-19] vaccines are unlikely to completely sterilize a population. They're very likely to have an effect which works in a percentage. Say, 60% or 70%.” [14]
Alex Karp - 2019-2012 - Co-founded Palantir, which has been active internationally[16] with COVID,[17][18] and provided the software for Operation Warp Speed.
Tom Tugendhat - 2019 - UK MP who in November 2020 suggested that COVID vaccination could be mandated for UK workers or travellers.[21] In 2021, asked for investigation of the claim of Matthew Pottinger (also a 2019 Bilderberger) that the virus came from the WIV.[22]
Angela Merkel - 2005 - Stated in February 2021 that "I stressed in my intervention that the pandemic is not over until all people in the world have been vaccinated"[23], later that “We have all agreed that we need vaccine certificates.”[24]
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It is as if the battle lines of civil war have been drawn up between masses of Americans who have been led to believe in either a false “bottom up” approach to economics, as defined by the Austrian School represented by Friedrich von Hayek, or in the “top-down” approach of John Maynard Keynes. The former sacrifices the general welfare of the whole nation for the sake of the parts (i.e. individual liberties), while the latter sacrifices the individual liberties of each citizen for the sake of the general welfare (or at least some oligarch’s definition of what that should be).
In my last article, I introduced, in broad strokes, a history of the American System of political economy as advanced by Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Henry Clay, Henry Carey, Lincoln, and McKinley. We reviewed how it was derailed by McKinley’s 1901 murder and was only revived 30 years later with Franklin Roosevelt’s 1932 presidential victory which put a stop to the 1933 Bankers Dictatorship.
Finally, we briefly explored how and why both John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich von Hayek whose ideas so deeply influence the polarization of the USA today, not only despised FDR but hated everything the republic stood for.
In this second installment of a three-part series, we will shed light on the anti-human ideas and the political operations that shaped the mind, the life and the politics of Lord John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946).
Keynes the Fabian Eugenicist
Although Keynes is heralded as the guiding light of the New Deal (and, as such defended by modern “Green New Dealers” and Great Reset technocrats wishing to impose a top-down system of governance onto the world), the fact is that Keynes not only detested Franklin Roosevelt, but also humanity more in general.
This will be seen clearly in 1) his devotion to the theories of Thomas Malthus, 2) his promotion of eugenics as a science of racial purification and population control, and 3) his general devotion to World Government as a leading member of the Fabian Society.
From his earliest days at Cambridge where he rose quickly to become one of the select Cambridge Apostles and shared, among other things, a lifelong friendship with Lord Bertrand Russell, Keynes devoted himself to the service of empire, becoming Knight of the Order of Bath and Order of Leopold by 1919.
His early 1911 book on Indian Currency and Finance (conducted during his five-year foray in the Empire’s Indian Office) ignored all actual political reasons for the famines plaguing India and argued coldly for a greater integration of the Indian banking system into the City of London controls which would somehow solve India’s problems. The provable reality was that Indian famines were coordinated tools of population control by the Malthusian elite of the British establishment who considered “war, famine and disease” as the gifts nature gave the strong to manage the weak.
While his later 1919 Consequences of the Peace appeared to be a reasonably sympathetic warning that the draconian Versailles reparations would do incredible damage and lead to a new world war, in reality, Keynes was displaying a cold sleight of hand. Serving as British Treasury representative to the Versailles Conference, Keynes never opposed fascism: he merely argued that a more liberal pathway to global fascism could be established under the direction of the Bank of England. His opposition, though, to the more violent approach preferred by conservative imperialists among the British Intelligentsia, was one of form more than substance.
Keynes and his fellow Fabians H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell and G.B Shaw preferred the “slow and steady” “long game”, reminiscent of the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus who famously fought his enemies by slow attrition rather than in full-scale confrontation. Due to the public’s general ignorance of this strategy, we celebrate these Fabian Society luminaries for their pacifism, though in reality they were just as racist, fascist and eugenics-loving as their more short-sighted, hard-stomached counterparts sir Oswald Mosley, Lord Alfred Milner and even Winston Churchill.
Where the real solution to the hyperinflationary money printing and economic industrial shutdown of Germany during the post WWI years was to be found in the German-Russian Rapallo Agreement (destroyed with the assassination of American System Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau), Keynes and his ilk merely called for economic integration of the German banking and military system under Bank of England/League of Nations control.
Malthus, Eugenics and Keynes
Two theories advanced by the British Empire in response to the growth of the American System, first in the USA, and later internationally, were those of Thomas Malthus, and of Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin who coined the term “eugenics” in 1883. These sister concepts served as nothing less than religious precepts for the ruling elite as it desperately reorganized itself in the late 19th century.
It must be kept firmly in mind that at this period the British Empire was weak, and incapable of stopping the electric spread of win-win cooperation as the American System was sped around the world bringing progress and full-spectrum economics in its wake. One of the leading voices of the American System in 1890 was Colorado’s first Governor William Gilpin whose The Cosmopolitan Railway laid out a practical vision for a world united by rail, development, and national banking [see map].
Nevertheless, the Empire was determined to put an end to the spread of the American System.
A new breed of think tanks was created to shape the Empire’s grand strategy in the face of this growth of independent sovereign nations: these were T.H. Huxley’s X Club (c.1865), the Fabian Society (c.1884), and the Roundtable Group (c.1902). Where Huxley’s X Club coordinated with Cambridge, and the Roundtable Group/Rhodes Trust interfaced with Oxford, the Fabian Society created a new school called the London School of Economics. All three worked together as one unit.
Defining his misanthropic belief in overpopulation, Thomas Malthus (a British East India Company economist) stated in his famous 1799 Essay on Population:
“The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.”
How could this crisis be avoided? Malthus answers it like only a devout imperialist could:
“We should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavoring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality; and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction, which we compel nature to use. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague.”
Darwin himself admitted in his autobiography that his theory of evolution arose only after his 1838 reading of Malthus’ Essay on Population in which he “at last got a theory by which to work”.
So, Darwinism is really an extension of Malthus’s Hobbesian social theories onto all of living nature: a mere struggle for survival in a universe of entropy and diminishing returns. After a Malthusian version of biology was created, Darwin’s theories were in turn re-applied to human society as imperial tools for population control under the form of Galton’s Eugenics thus giving the same old evil practices of empire, war and slavery a “scientific validation”.
Although some apologists considered Keynes an anti-Malthusian- due to his theory that overpopulation might be overcome by encouraging spending rather than savings, which would, in turn, somehow create markets and thence new factories and more growth, the reality was the opposite. Keynes not only spoke gushingly of Malthus throughout his life as one of the greatest minds of all time, but even plagiarized many of Malthus’ own theories, for instance that of “demand deficiency causing unemployment and recession” outlined in his 1930 Treatise on Money. In his 1933 Essay on Malthus, Keynes wrote:
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“Let us think of Malthus today as the first of the Cambridge economists—as, above all, a great pioneer of the application of a frame of formal thinking to the complex confusion of the world of daily events. Malthus approached the central problems of economic theory by the best of all routes.”
In his May 2, 1914 lecture Population, Keynes argued that government should “mould law and custom deliberately to bring about that density of population which there ought to be” and that “there would be more happiness in the world if the population of it were to be diminished.”
Saying that “India, Egypt and China are gravely overpopulated”, Keynes advocated using violence to defend the “superior white races” in this struggle of survival with the pacifist saying: “Almost any measures seem to me to be justified in order to protect our standard of life from injury at the hands of more prolific races. Some definite parceling out of the world may well become necessary; and I suppose that this may not improbably provoke racial wars. At any rate such wars will be about a substantial issue.”
As Acting chair of the Neo-Malthusian League, Keynes stated in 1927: “We of this society are neo-Malthusians… I believe that for the future the problem of population will emerge in the much greater problem of Hereditary and Eugenics. Quality must become the preoccupation.”
By 1946, Keynes, still a member of the British Eugenics Society (after serving as Vice President from 1936-1944) wrote in The Eugenics Review: “Galton’s eccentric, sceptical, observing, flashing, cavalry-leader type of mind led him eventually to become the founder of the most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists, namely eugenics.”
This was not ivory tower theorizing, but concepts with very real-world significance.
By 1937, Keynes’ General Theory of Employment was published in Nazi Germany. If anyone wishes to defend the idea that the economist was somehow an anti-fascist defender of “liberal values”, let them read his own words in the preface and then either redefine “liberal values” or their naïve idea of Keynes:
“I may perhaps expect to find less resistance among German readers than among English ones, when I put before them a theory of employment and production as a whole… The theory of production as a whole which is the object of this book, can be much better adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than the theory of production and distribution of wealth under circumstances of free competition.”
Hitler himself was not only a devout eugenicist (whose racial purification policies emerged through the funding of the Rockefeller, Carnegie Foundations as well as British establishment), but was also a devout Malthusian saying:
“The day will certainly come when the whole of mankind will be forced to check the augmentation of the human species, because there will be no further possibility of adjusting the productivity of the soil to the perpetual increase in the population.”
Keynes was by this time extremely frustrated that the intention-driven system of political economy defining the New Deal under the helm of FDR’s leadership was not absorbing his trojan horse theories on employment, demand, and inflation. However, by the end of the war, many Council on Foreign Relation (CFR)-affiliated operatives pushing Keynesianism were making successful inroads into all branches of U.S. bureaucracy and penetrated the highest levels of the state department and treasury. At one point in 1943, Franklin Roosevelt commented on his understanding of this British Deep State operation when he told his son Elliot:
“You know, any number of times the men in the State Department have tried to conceal messages to me, delay them, hold them up somehow, just because some of those career diplomats over there aren’t in accord with what they know I think. They should be working for Winston. As a matter of fact, a lot of the time, they are [working for Churchill]. Stop to think of ’em: any number of ’em are convinced that the way for America to conduct its foreign policy is to find out what the British are doing and then copy that!” I was told… six years ago, to clean out that State Department. It’s like the British Foreign Office….”
The Battle for Bretton Woods
During the Bretton Woods conference (July 1-20, 1944), the two opposing paradigms, on the one hand the American System of anti-colonialism, and on the other hand the. British System of zero sum Malthusianism, went to war.
This war took the form of the battles waged by FDR’s trusted collaborator Henry Dexter White against John Maynard Keynes at Bretton Woods, where 730 delegates representing 44 nations gathered to settle the terms of the post-war order.
Although this conference is famously associated with the creation of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), it is falsely assumed to be a Keynesian creation. Keynes’ role as representative of the British Empire, much like his earlier role at Versailles in 1919, was defined by the intention at all costs to shape the conditions of a post-nation state world order on behalf of the City of London. Like Bertrand Russell and other Cambridge Apostles before and since, Keynes was trained in the sophistical deployment of statistics and mathematical logic to cover for the imperial rape of target nations.
Where Dexter White and Franklin Roosevelt demanded a U.S. dollar-backed post-war system of fixed exchange rates (to block speculation on commodities as a tool of economic war), theirs was not an idea premised on imperialism which FDR’s recorded battles with Churchill attest. Unlike the hard vs soft imperialism of Churchill and Keynes, FDR and his allies rather looked to a post-war system defined by U.S.-China-Russia friendship, and the internationalization of the New Deal applying a win-win approach to foreign policy.
At Bretton Woods, Dexter White and Henry Morganthau reached agreements to provide vast technology transfers to help South America industrialize. At the same time, large-scale programs modelled on the New Deal were presented by delegations from India, Eastern Europe, and China. It is noteworthy that the Chinese delegation introduced infrastructure plans first laid out by Sun Yat-sen in his 1920 International Development of China which both Mao, and Zhou Enlai endorsed alongside the Kuomintang’s Chiang Kai-Shek! Had these plans not been sabotaged, it is amazing to consider what sort of progress might have opened up for the Chinese 70 years before anyone heard of the “Belt and Road Initiative”.
At this early stage, Russia was still happy to be a founding member of the IMF and World Bank which were designed to act as cheap lending mechanisms for long-term, low-interest, high-tech global development.
Commenting on support for FDR’s post-war system of mutual interest, Stalin stated: “Can we count on the activities of this international organization being sufficiently effective? They will be effective if the Great Powers who have borne the brunt of the burden of the war against Hitler’s Germany continue to act in a spirit of unanimity and harmony. They will not be effective if this essential condition is violated”.
In opposition to this anti-imperial win-win system defended by Dexter White, and FDR, Keynes demanded a bankers’ dictatorship with a new supranational currency controlled by the Bank of England called the Bancor, as well as an international clearing house. The Bancor was later revived in a modified form when Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) were established, bringing the world closer to the sort of green synthetic hegemonic currency now promoted by the likes of Mark Carney, Klaus Schwab and George Soros under the veil of a Great Reset and Central Bankers Climate Compact.
Similarly to the League of Nations’ earlier design for World Government, Keynes’ arguments entailed the virtual castration of nation states, preventing their involvement in their own economic planning. These arguments also demanded that the USA fully recognize the legitimacy of the British Empire in the post war age (something which Dexter White and Morgenthau refused to do). In Keynes’ view, nation states should relinquish their sovereign financial controls to Malthusian technocrats managing the levers of production and consumption through a system of globally interconnected central banks.
Keynes’ model of governance would ensure that the sorts of INTENTION-driven large-scale projects that could finally end colonialism would not see the light of day.
The Keynesian World That Emerged Over FDR’s Dead Body
Under the Keynesian takeover of Bretton Woods that emerged during the Anglo-American special relationship created by Truman and Churchill, Trans Atlantic nations became increasingly dominated by bloated bureaucratic systems while plans for genuine development were undermined. With Roosevelt dead by 1945, Harry Hopkins dead by 1946, Dexter White dead by 1948, and Henry Wallace’s presidential efforts sabotaged by 1948, the last serious resistance to Britain’s reconquest of the USA had been put down.
After the war, eugenics-promoting organizations and think tanks changed their names while continuing their work, morphing into new forms by the 1960s such as the environmental movement, transhumanist movement, while not even the pharmaceutical/healthcare sector was left untouched.
In the next chapter we will close up this short series by reviewing the figure of Friedrich von Hayek and the Austrian School of Economics which emerged with the collapse of the Keynesian Bretton Woods in 1971 and the rise of the “Conservative Revolution”.
Matthew Ehret is the Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Patriot Review , Senior Fellow at the American University in Moscow, BRI Expert on Tactical talk, and has authored 3 volumes of ‘Untold History of Canada’ book series. In 2019 he co-founded the Montreal-based Rising Tide Foundation. He can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com
… _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Sharon Lerner, Mara Hvistendahl
September 7 2021, 2:06 a.m.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, in China’s central Hubei province, is seen on Feb. 3, 2021. Photo: Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images
NEWLY RELEASED DOCUMENTS provide details of U.S.-funded research on several types of coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. The Intercept has obtained more than 900 pages of documents detailing the work of EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based health organization that used federal money to fund bat coronavirus research at the Chinese laboratory. The trove of documents includes two previously unpublished grant proposals that were funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as well as project updates relating to EcoHealth Alliance’s research, which has been scrutinized amid increased interest in the origins of the pandemic.
The documents were released in connection with ongoing Freedom of Information Act litigation by The Intercept against the National Institutes of Health. The Intercept is making the full documents available to the public.
“This is a road map to the high-risk research that could have led to the current pandemic,” said Gary Ruskin, executive director of U.S. Right To Know, a group that has been investigating the origins of Covid-19.
One of the grants, titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” outlines an ambitious effort led by EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak to screen thousands of bat samples for novel coronaviruses. The research also involved screening people who work with live animals. The documents contain several critical details about the research in Wuhan, including the fact that key experimental work with humanized mice was conducted at a biosafety level 3 lab at Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment — and not at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as was previously assumed. The documents raise additional questions about the theory that the pandemic may have begun in a lab accident, an idea that Daszak has aggressively dismissed.
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The bat coronavirus grant provided EcoHealth Alliance with a total of $3.1 million, including $599,000 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology used in part to identify and alter bat coronaviruses likely to infect humans. Even before the pandemic, many scientists were concerned about the potential dangers associated with such experiments. The grant proposal acknowledges some of those dangers: “Fieldwork involves the highest risk of exposure to SARS or other CoVs, while working in caves with high bat density overhead and the potential for fecal dust to be inhaled.”
Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute, said the documents show that EcoHealth Alliance has reason to take the lab-leak theory seriously. “In this proposal, they actually point out that they know how risky this work is. They keep talking about people potentially getting bitten — and they kept records of everyone who got bitten,” Chan said. “Does EcoHealth have those records? And if not, how can they possibly rule out a research-related accident?”
According to Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, the documents contain critical information about the research done in Wuhan, including about the creation of novel viruses. “The viruses they constructed were tested for their ability to infect mice that were engineered to display human type receptors on their cell,” Ebright wrote to The Intercept after reviewing the documents. Ebright also said the documents make it clear that two different types of novel coronaviruses were able to infect humanized mice. “While they were working on SARS-related coronavirus, they were carrying out a parallel project at the same time on MERS-related coronavirus,” Ebright said, referring to the virus that causes Middle East Respiratory Syndrome.
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Asked about the grant materials, Robert Kessler, communications manager at EcoHealth Alliance, said, “We applied for grants to conduct research. The relevant agencies deemed that to be important research, and thus funded it. So I don’t know that there’s a whole lot to say.”
The grant was initially awarded for a five-year period — from 2014 to 2019. Funding was renewed in 2019 but suspended by the Trump administration in April 2020.
The closest relative of SARS-CoV-2, which causes Covid-19, is a virus found in bats, making the animals a focal point for efforts to understand the origins of the pandemic. Exactly how the virus jumped to humans is the subject of heated debate. Many scientists believe that it was a natural spillover, meaning that the virus passed to humans in a setting such as a wet market or rural area where humans and animals are in close contact. Biosafety experts and internet sleuths who suspect a lab origin, meanwhile, have spent more than a year poring over publicly available information and obscure scientific publications looking for answers. In the past few months, leading scientists have also called for a deeper investigation of the pandemic’s origins, as has President Joe Biden, who in May ordered the intelligence community to study the issue. On August 27, Biden announced that the intelligence inquiry was inconclusive.
Biden blamed China for failing to release critical data, but the U.S. government has also been slow to release information. The Intercept initially requested the proposals in September 2020.
“I wish that this document had been released in early 2020,” said Chan, who has called for an investigation of the lab-leak origin theory. “It would have changed things massively, just to have all of the information in one place, immediately transparent, in a credible document that was submitted by EcoHealth Alliance.”
The second grant, “Understanding Risk of Zoonotic Virus Emergence in Emerging Infectious Disease Hotspots of Southeast Asia,” was awarded in August 2020 and extends through 2025. The proposal, written in 2019, often seems prescient, focusing on scaling up and deploying resources in Asia in case of an outbreak of an “emergent infectious disease” and referring to Asia as “this hottest of the EID hotspots.”
CONTACT THE AUTHOR:Sharon Lerner
Sharon Lerner
sharon.lerner@theintercept.com
@fastlerner
Mara Hvistendahl
Mara Hvistendahl
mara.hvistendahl@theintercept.com
@MaraHvistendahl _________________ --
'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."
A 2018 grant proposal sought to combine data from similar strains for new virus
It was submitted by scientists from US, China and Singapore, but was rejected
A genetics expert from the WHO told The Telegraph that such work could explain why a close ancestor for Covid-19 has yet to be found in nature
The Wuhan Institute of Virology has consistently denied creating Covid-19
By CHARLOTTE MITCHELL FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 23:08, 5 October 2021 | UPDATED: 02:59, 6 October 2021
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US and Chinese scientists were planning to create a new coronavirus before the pandemic erupted, leaked proposals show.
Last month, a grant application submitted to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) revealed that an international team of scientists had planned to mix genetic data of similar strains to create a new virus.
The grant application was made in 2018 and leaked to Drastic, the pandemic origins analysis group.
'We will compile sequence/RNAseq data from a panel of closely related strains and compare full length genomes, scanning for unique SNPs representing sequencing errors.
'Consensus candidate genomes will be synthesised commercially using established techniques and genome-length RNA and electroporation to recover recombinant viruses,' the application states.
US and Chinese scientists were planning to create a new coronavirus before the pandemic erupted, leaked proposals show. Pictured: The Wuhan Institute of Virology, whose scientists were involved in a grant proposal for the research +3
US and Chinese scientists were planning to create a new coronavirus before the pandemic erupted, leaked proposals show. Pictured: The Wuhan Institute of Virology, whose scientists were involved in a grant proposal for the research
This would result in a virus which had no clear ancestor in nature, a World Health Organization (WHO) expert told The Telegraph.
The expert, who asked the paper not to publish their name, said that, if such a method had been carried out, it could explain why no close match has ever been found in nature for Sars-CoV-2.
The closest naturally occurring virus is the Banal-52 strain, reported in Laos last month. It shares 96.8 per cent of Covid-19's genome.
No direct ancestor, which would be expected share around 99.98 per cent, has been found so far.
The WHO expert told The Telegraph that the process detailed in the application would create 'a new virus sequence, not a 100 per cent match to anything.'
+3
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'They would then synthesise the viral genome from the computer sequence, thus creating a virus genome that did not exist in nature but looks natural as it is the average of natural viruses.
'Then they put that RNA in a cell and recover the virus from it.
'This creates a virus that has never existed in nature, with a new 'backbone' that didn't exist in nature but is very, very similar as it's the average of natural backbones,' the expert said.
The proposal was rejected and the database of viral strains at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was taken offline some 18 months later, making it impossible to check what scientists there were working on.
The institute's scientists have consistently denied creating the coronavirus in their lab.
The grant application proposal was submitted by British zoologist Peter Daszak on behalf of a group, which included Daszak EcoHealth Alliance, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the University of North Carolina and Duke NUS in Singapore, The Telegraph reported.
The grant application proposal was submitted by British zoologist Peter Daszak on behalf of a group, which included Daszak EcoHealth Alliance +3
The grant application proposal was submitted by British zoologist Peter Daszak on behalf of a group, which included Daszak EcoHealth Alliance
Experts told the paper that creating an 'ideal' average virus could have been part of work to create a vaccine that works across coronaviruses.
Last month, it emerged that the US had funded similar research to that outlined in the 2018 grant proposal.
Files obtained by The Intercept as part of an FOI request to drill down the possible root of COVID and whether the US had any role in it showed that in 2014, the National Health Institute (NIH) approved a five-year, yearly grant of $666,000 a year for five years ($3.3million) for EcoHealth Alliance, a US research organization, into bat coronavirus.
EcoHealth Alliance, in its proposal to the NIH, acknowledged the risks involved were 'the highest risk of exposure to SARS or other CoVs' among staff, who could then carry it out of the lab.
The NIH gave them the money anyway - something Dr Anthony Fauci was previously forced to admit when testifying before Congress in May this year. EcoHealth Alliance then gave $599,000 of the money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
At the time and repeatedly since, Fauci has denied that the research constituted what's known as 'gain-of-function' research.
Gain-of-function research is the scientific term given to research that deliberately changes an organism to make give it new functions in order to test a theory.
When applies to studying human viruses, it can mean making the virus more transmissible and or even deadly in order to test what can and can't survive it.
'The documents make it clear that assertions by the NIH Director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID Director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at WIV are untruthful,' Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, tweeted.
Government condemned for not releasing details of key email conversations
Conversation in question involves leading scientists discussing Covid origins
Mail on Sunday FOI obtained 32 emails but nearly every word was blacked out
By IAN BIRRELL FOR THE MAIL ON SUNDAY
PUBLISHED: 22:01, 2 October 2021 | UPDATED: 00:12, 3 October 2021
The Government has been condemned after refusing to release details of key email conversations involving leading scientists over the origins of Covid-19.
This newspaper used Freedom of Information rules to obtain a cache of 32 emails about a secretive teleconference between British and American health officials held early in the pandemic.
But officials blacked out almost every word before releasing the crucial documents.
Before this discussion, several of the world’s most influential experts believed the new virus most likely came from a laboratory – but days later, the scientists began dismissing such scenarios as ‘implausible’ and branding them conspiracy theories.
This newspaper used Freedom of Information rules to obtain a cache of 32 emails about a secretive teleconference between British and American health officials held early in the pandemic +4
This newspaper used Freedom of Information rules to obtain a cache of 32 emails about a secretive teleconference between British and American health officials held early in the pandemic
The critical call is at the centre of concerns that the scientific establishment tried to stifle debate on the pandemic’s origins, as damning new evidence emerges of US ties to high-risk research on bat viruses in Wuhan, where the first cases emerged in late 2019.
The Mail on Sunday requested emails, minutes and notes on the call between Sir Patrick Vallance – Britain’s chief scientific adviser – and its organisers Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust medical charity, and Anthony Fauci, the US infectious diseases expert and presidential adviser.
Yet when the documents were released they had page after page redacted with thick lines of black ink by Whitehall officials. Even the names of experts copied in on discussions were blocked – and exchanges as trivial as one Edinburgh biologist’s ‘thank you’ for being invited – leaving only a few basic details about the call visible.
The lines left intact include a demand for the discussions, involving 13 participants around the world, to be conducted in ‘total confidence’, and an intriguing email line suggesting ‘we need to talk about the backbone too, not just the insert’.
That was possibly sent by Dutch virologist Marion Koopmans, a member of the World Health Organisation team that produced a widely criticised report into Covid’s origins.
Such absurd state secrecy is highly contemptuous towards taxpayers and to a world that wants to know what caused this devastating pandemic to guard against similar catastrophes in the future.
The Mail on Sunday requested emails, minutes and notes on the call between Sir Patrick Vallance ¿ Britain¿s chief scientific adviser ¿ and its organisers Sir Jeremy Farrar (pictured), director of the Wellcome Trust medical charity, and Anthony Fauci, the US infectious diseases expert and presidential adviser +4
The Mail on Sunday requested emails, minutes and notes on the call between Sir Patrick Vallance – Britain’s chief scientific adviser – and its organisers Sir Jeremy Farrar (pictured), director of the Wellcome Trust medical charity, and Anthony Fauci, the US infectious diseases expert and presidential adviser
The response was condemned by Tory MP and freedom of information campaigner David Davis.
‘This is a matter of massive public and global importance,’ he said. ‘It is hard to see why there should be such secrecy that it outweighs the immense public interest and requires them to redact this sort of important data.’
He is right. Such official obfuscation only serves to fuel concerns over a possible cover-up on Covid’s origins – and about Britain’s strange silence on issues of such global importance, which surprises some close international allies. I began attempting to obtain details of Government notes and discussions with key participants at the start of August, yet these derisory blacked-out pages are all I have winkled out of Whitehall so far.
A request for emails, notes or transcripts of Vallance’s conversations with Farrar on origins of Sars-CoV-2 (the strain of coronavirus that causes Covid-19), Wuhan Institute of Virology or Shi Zhengli, its infamous ‘Batwoman’ expert, was rejected on cost grounds.
The Government confirmed, however, that ‘we hold the information that you have requested’.
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‘This all begs an obvious question, just as with China’s secrecy: why would officials not share such information if there was nothing to hide?’ said Tory MP Bob Seely, a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee.
Perhaps this is down to arrogant politicians and an army of aloof civil servants who believe the public does not have the right to know what is being done in their name.
Tony Blair flipped from supporting Freedom of Information rules when in opposition to saying ‘I quake at the imbecility’ of the idea when his government made them law, his memoirs revealed. And there has been a sharp rise in refusals to grant requests since the Tories took power in 2010.
Yet surely the origins of the pandemic, an event that has caused such disruption and misery to so many, is of utmost public interest – even if the implications might be profound for our relations with China or the unfettered pursuit of science?
The pivotal role of this teleconference on February 1 last year emerged from emails obtained in the US and a recent book on the pandemic by Farrar. Two days before the call, the WHO had belatedly raised the alert level on the unfolding public health disaster.
A request for emails, notes or transcripts of Vallance¿s conversations with Farrar on origins of Sars-CoV-2 (the strain of coronavirus that causes Covid-19), Wuhan Institute of Virology or Shi Zhengli, its infamous ¿Batwoman¿ expert, was rejected on cost grounds +4
A request for emails, notes or transcripts of Vallance’s conversations with Farrar on origins of Sars-CoV-2 (the strain of coronavirus that causes Covid-19), Wuhan Institute of Virology or Shi Zhengli, its infamous ‘Batwoman’ expert, was rejected on cost grounds
The discussion was convened after Fauci, America’s Chief Presidential Medical Adviser, was sent an article from Science magazine examining how researchers were attempting to unravel the virus origins. The article, which Fauci hastily sent to other key officials, discussed controversies over risky ‘gain of function’ research – manipulating viruses in labs to make them more infectious – and detailed work by British scientist Peter Daszak and his friend Prof Shi in sampling bats and finding new coronaviruses.
The teleconference was led by Farrar, an expert on infectious diseases, who admits that he saw the ‘huge coincidence’ of a novel coronavirus erupting in ‘a city with a superlab’ that was ‘home to an almost unrivalled collection of bat viruses’.
Many prominent scientists, including several participants on the call, feared the new virus looked engineered – among them California-based immunologist Kristian Andersen, who told Farrar beforehand he was alarmed by Covid’s unusual properties.
He said the binding mechanism ‘looked too good to be true, like a perfect key for entering human cells’ while its furin cleavage site – a feature not found on similar types of coronavirus that allows it to enter efficiently into human cells – might be expected ‘if someone had set out to adapt an animal coronavirus to humans by taking a specific suit of genetic material from elsewhere and inserting it.’
Farrar opened the discussion, which was then led by Andersen and Eddie Holmes, an Australian-based virologist who told the Wellcome chief before the call he was ‘80 per cent sure this thing had come out of a lab’. Yet after their conference call, these same experts played leading roles in efforts to dismiss such fears as conspiracy theories in science journals and on social media.
Farrar admitted he was torn on the origins in a follow-up email to Fauci, yet signed a notorious Lancet article secretly organised by British scientist Peter Daszak days later that condemned ‘conspiracy theories’ alleging Covid was not natural, claiming they spread ‘fear’ and ‘prejudice’, while incredibly praising Beijing’s ‘open and transparent’ sharing of data. Farrar also convened a hugely influential Nature paper by Andersen, Holmes and three others insisting ‘any type of laboratory-based scenario’ was not ‘plausible’.
Farrar admitted he was torn on the origins in a follow-up email to Fauci (pictured), yet signed a notorious Lancet article secretly organised by British scientist Peter Daszak days later that condemned ¿conspiracy theories¿ alleging Covid was not natural, claiming they spread ¿fear¿ and ¿prejudice¿, while incredibly praising Beijing¿s ¿open and transparent¿ sharing of data +4
Farrar admitted he was torn on the origins in a follow-up email to Fauci (pictured), yet signed a notorious Lancet article secretly organised by British scientist Peter Daszak days later that condemned ‘conspiracy theories’ alleging Covid was not natural, claiming they spread ‘fear’ and ‘prejudice’, while incredibly praising Beijing’s ‘open and transparent’ sharing of data
Just three days after the conference call, Andersen emailed Daszak to discuss how to counter ‘crackpot theories’ suggesting ‘this virus being somehow engineered with intent’ when it was ‘demonstrably not the case’.
Andersen, who deleted his combative Twitter account after emails emerged that exposed his earlier views, later said this was ‘a textbook example of the scientific method’ in which a preliminary theory was rejected as more information emerged. Yet there remains no evidence to show Sars-CoV-2 spilled over naturally from animals. So we need to understand why these experts changed their minds so fast and so decisively that they scorned people with views they had held themselves only recently.
This is why the Government’s secrecy is both deplorable and dangerous, according to Gary Ruskin, head of the public health group US Right To Know that has exposed the activities of key experts including Daszak in this saga.
‘Transparency is crucial to expose corruption, abuse of power and hidden conflicts of interest,’ he said. ‘Even in the US, which is weak in science transparency, we have been able to unearth documents useful in pursuing the origins of Covid-19. Such efforts seem impossible in the UK. That is regrettable – and subsequent generations may end up paying for it with their lives if we cannot use the tools of transparency to figure out how Covid-19 came upon us.’
It is, finally, accepted outside China there are two credible theories on the origins: natural spillover from animals, or some kind of laboratory incident.
Concerns over a possible research incident have grown as fresh evidence emerges about the risky work of Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, and Shi, head of the Centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases at Wuhan Institute of Virology.
First, explosive documents detailing two grants in 2014 and 2019 to EcoHealth Alliance showed how the US was in effect outsourcing ‘gain of function’ work to China – even during a three-year period when it was banned in America.
The US supported the construction of new ‘chimeric’ Sars-related coronaviruses that combined a spike gene from one with genetic material from another – and the resulting creation could infect human cells and have more potential to cause disease.
So we now know beyond debate that speculative ‘gain of function’ experiments on mutant bat viruses were taking place in Wuhan laboratories – and in units that did not have top-level biosafety – despite Batwoman’s vociferous denials.
Then a team of researchers known as Drastic obtained an astonishing proposal by Daszak for a US grant to study pathogens by creating infectious bat coronaviruses in a lab and inserting genetic features designed to boost their ability to infect human cells.
EcoHealth even proposed to work with Shi and another prominent US expert on introduction of ‘appropriate human specific cleavage sites’ into Sars-like viruses – an intriguing suggestion given the unusual cleavage site in Sars-CoV-2.
The $14.2 million (£10.5 million) grant bid was rejected. But did another funder pick up the proposal? At the very least, this proves the researchers were toying with precisely the sort of risky science that could have cooked up a virus eerily similar to the one behind the pandemic.
It is baffling that the US Congress has not demanded that New York-based Daszak, who led efforts to crush debate over a possible lab leak despite obvious conflicts of interest, appear under oath and disclose all his organisation’s data.
Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120
and Gag
Prashant Pradhan$1,2, Ashutosh Kumar Pandey$1, Akhilesh Mishra$1, Parul Gupta1, Praveen
Kumar Tripathi1, Manoj Balakrishnan Menon1, James Gomes1, Perumal Vivekanandan*1and
Bishwajit Kundu*1
1Kusuma School of biological sciences, Indian institute of technology, New Delhi-110016, India.
2Acharya Narendra Dev College, University of Delhi, New Delhi-110019, India
$Equal contribution
* Corresponding authors- email: bkundu@bioschool.iitd.ac.in vperumal@bioschool.iitd.ac.in
Abstract:
We are currently witnessing a major epidemic caused by the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-
nCoV). The evolution of 2019-nCoV remains elusive. We found 4 insertions in the spike
glycoprotein (S) which are unique to the 2019-nCoV and are not present in other coronaviruses.
Importantly, amino acid residues in all the 4 inserts have identity or similarity to those in the HIV-
1 gp120 or HIV-1 Gag. Interestingly, despite the inserts being discontinuous on the primary
amino acid sequence, 3D-modelling of the 2019-nCoV suggests that they converge to constitute
the receptor binding site. The finding of 4 unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV, all of which have
identity /similarity to amino acid residues in key structural proteins of HIV-1 is unlikely to be
fortuitous in nature. This work provides yet unknown insights on 2019-nCoV and sheds light on
the evolution and pathogenicity of this virus with important implications for diagnosis of this virus.
Introduction
Coronaviruses (CoV) are single-stranded positive-sense RNA viruses that infect animals and
humans. These are classified into 4 genera based on their host specificity: Alphacoronavirus,
Betacoronavirus, Deltacoronavirus and Gammacoronavirus (Snijder et al., 2006). There are seven
known types of CoVs that includes 229E and NL63 (Genus Alphacoronavirus), OC43, HKU1,
MERS and SARS (Genus Betacoronavirus). While 229E, NL63, OC43, and HKU1 commonly
infect humans, the SARS and MERS outbreak in 2002 and 2012 respectively occurred when the
virus crossed-over from animals to humans causing significant mortality (J. Chan et al., n.d.; J. F.
W. Chan et al., 2015). In December 2019, another outbreak of coronavirus was reported from
Wuhan, China that also transmitted from animals to humans. This new virus has been temporarily
termed as 2019-novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) by the World Health Organization (WHO) (J. F.-
W. Chan et al., 2020; Zhu et al., 2020). While there are several hypotheses about the origin of
2019-nCoV, the source of this ongoing outbreak remains elusive.
The transmission patterns of 2019-nCoV is similar to patterns of transmission documented in the
previous outbreaks including by bodily or aerosol contact with persons infected with the virus.
.CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licenseIt is made available under a perpetuity.preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in
The copyright holder for this. http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871doi: bioRxiv preprint first posted online Jan. 31, 2020;
Cases of mild to severe illness, and death from the infection have been reported from Wuhan. This
outbreak has spread rapidly distant nations including France, Australia and USA among others.
The number of cases within and outside China are increasing steeply. Our current understanding
is limited to the virus genome sequences and modest epidemiological and clinical data.
Comprehensive analysis of the available 2019- nCoV sequences may provide important clues that
may help advance our current understanding to manage the ongoing outbreak.
The spike glycoprotein (S) of cornonavirus is cleaved into two subunits (S1 and S2). The S1
subunit helps in receptor binding and the S2 subunit facilitates membrane fusion (Bosch et al.,
2003; Li, 2016). The spike glycoproteins of coronoviruses are important determinants of tissue
tropism and host range. In addition the spike glycoproteins are critical targets for vaccine
development (Du et al., 2013). For this reason, the spike proteins represent the most extensively
studied among coronaviruses. We therefore sought to investigate the spike glycoprotein of the
2019-nCoV to understand its evolution, novel features sequence and structural features using
computational tools.
Methodology
Retrieval and alignment of nucleic acid and protein sequences
We retrieved all the available coronavirus sequences (n=55) from NCBI viral genome database
(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) and we used the GISAID (Elbe & Buckland-Merrett,
2017)[https://www.gisaid.org/] to retrieve all available full-length sequences (n=2 of 2019-
nCoV as on 27 Jan 2020. Multiple sequence alignment of all coronavirus genomes was performed
by using MUSCLE software (Edgar, 2004) based on neighbour joining method. Out of 55
coronavirus genome 32 representative genomes of all category were used for phylogenetic tree
development using MEGAX software (Kumar et al., 2018). The closest relative was found to be
SARS CoV. The glycoprotein region of SARS CoV and 2019-nCoV were aligned and visualized
using Multalin software (Corpet, 1988). The identified amino acid and nucleotide sequence were
aligned with whole viral genome database using BLASTp and BLASTn. The conservation of the
nucleotide and amino acid motifs in 28 clinical variants of 2019-nCoV genome were presented by
performing multiple sequence alignment using MEGAX software. The three dimensional structure
of 2019-nCoV glycoprotein was generated by using SWISS-MODEL online server (Biasini et al.,
2014) and the structure was marked and visualized by using PyMol (DeLano, 2002).
Results
Uncanny similarity of novel inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and
Gag
Our phylogentic tree of full-length coronaviruses suggests that 2019-nCoV is closely related to
SARS CoV [Fig1]. In addition, other recent studies have linked the 2019-nCoV to SARS CoV.
We therefore compared the spike glycoprotein sequences of the 2019-nCoV to that of the SARS
CoV (NCBI Accession number: AY390556.1). On careful examination of the sequence
alignment we found that the 2019- nCoV spike glycoprotein contains 4 insertions [Fig.2]. To
further investigate if these inserts are present in any other corona virus, we performed a multiple
.CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licenseIt is made available under a perpetuity.preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in
The copyright holder for this. http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871doi: bioRxiv preprint first posted online Jan. 31, 2020;
sequence alignment of the spike glycoprotein amino acid sequences of all available
coronaviruses (n=55) [refer Table S.File1] in NCBI refseq (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) this includes one
sequence of 2019-nCoV[Fig.S1]. We found that these 4 insertions [inserts 1, 2, 3 and 4] are
unique to 2019-nCoV and are not present in other coronaviruses analyzed. Another group from
China had documented three insertions comparing fewer spike glycoprotein sequences of
coronaviruses . Another group from China had documented three insertions comparing fewer
spike glycoprotein sequences of coronaviruses (Zhou et al., 2020).
Figure 1: Maximum likelihood genealogy show the evolution of 2019- nCoV: The evolutionary history
was inferred by using the Maximum Likelihood method and JTT matrix-based model. The tree
with the highest log likelihood (12458.8 is shown. Initial tree(s) for the heuristic search were
obtained automatically by applying Neighbor-Join and BioNJ algorithms to a matrix of pairwise
distances estimated using a JTT model, and then selecting the topology with superior log likelihood
.CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licenseIt is made available under a perpetuity.preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in
The copyright holder for this. http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871doi: bioRxiv preprint first posted online Jan. 31, 2020;
value. This analysis involved 5 amino acid sequences. There were a total of 1387 positions in the
final dataset. Evolutionary analyses were conducted in MEGA X.
Figure 2: Multiple sequence alignment between spike proteins of 2019-nCoV and SARS. The
sequences of spike proteins of 2019-nCoV (Wuhan-HU-1, Accession NC_045512) and of SARS
CoV (GZ02, Accession AY390556) were aligned using MultiAlin software. The sites of difference
are highlighted in boxes.
We then analyzed all available full-length sequences (n=2 of 2019-nCoV in GISAID (Elbe &
Buckland-Merrett, 2017) as on January 27, 2020 for the presence of these inserts. As most of these
sequences are not annotated, we compared the nucleotide sequences of the spike glycoprotein of
all available 2019-nCoV sequences using BLASTp. Interestingly, all the 4 insertions were
absolutely (100%) conserved in all the available 2019- nCoV sequences analyzed [Fig.S2, Fig.S3].
.CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licenseIt is made available under a perpetuity.preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in
The copyright holder for this. http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871doi: bioRxiv preprint first posted online Jan. 31, 2020;
We then translated the aligned genome and found that these inserts are present in all Wuhan 2019-
nCoV viruses except the 2019-nCoV virus of Bat as a host [Fig.S4]. Intrigued by the 4 highly
conserved inserts unique to 2019-nCoV we wanted to understand their origin. For this purpose,
we used the 2019-nCoV local alignment with each insert as query against all virus genomes and
considered hits with 100% sequence coverage. Surprisingly, each of the four inserts aligned with
short segments of the Human immunodeficiency Virus-1 (HIV-1) proteins. The amino acid
positions of the inserts in 2019-nCoV and the corresponding residues in HIV-1 gp120 and HIV-1
Gag are shown in Table 1. The first 3 inserts (insert 1,2 and 3) aligned to short segments of amino
acid residues in HIV-1 gp120. The insert 4 aligned to HIV-1 Gag. The insert 1 (6 amino acid
residues) and insert 2 (6 amino acid residues) in the spike glycoprotein of 2019-nCoV are 100%
identical to the residues mapped to HIV-1 gp120. The insert 3 (12 amino acid residues) in 2019-
nCoV maps to HIV-1 gp120 with gaps [see Table 1]. The insert 4 (8 amino acid residues) maps to
HIV-1 Gag with gaps.
Although, the 4 inserts represent discontiguous short stretches of amino acids in spike glycoprotein
of 2019-nCoV, the fact that all three of them share amino acid identity or similarity with HIV-1
gp120 and HIV-1 Gag (among all annotated virus proteins) suggests that this is not a random
fortuitous finding. In other words, one may sporadically expect a fortuitous match for a stretch of
6-12 contiguous amino acid residues in an unrelated protein. However, it is unlikely that all 4
inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike glycoprotein fortuitously match with 2 key structural proteins of
an unrelated virus (HIV-1).
The amino acid residues of inserts 1, 2 and 3 of 2019-nCoV spike glycoprotein that mapped to
HIV-1 were a part of the V4, V5 and V1 domains respectively in gp120 [Table 1]. Since the 2019-
nCoV inserts mapped to variable regions of HIV-1, they were not ubiquitous in HIV-1 gp120, but
were limited to selected sequences of HIV-1 [ refer S.File1] primarily from Asia and Africa.
The HIV-1 Gag protein enables interaction of virus with negatively charged host surface
(Murakami, 2008) and a high positive charge on the Gag protein is a key feature for the host-virus
interaction. On analyzing the pI values for each of the 4 inserts in 2019-nCoV and the
corresponding stretches of amino acid residues from HIV-1 proteins we found that a) the pI values
were very similar for each pair analyzed b) most of these pI values were 10±2 [Refer Table 1] . Of
note, despite the gaps in inserts 3 and 4 the pI values were comparable. This uniformity in the pI
values for all the 4 inserts merits further investigation.
As none of these 4 inserts are present in any other coronavirus, the genomic region encoding these
inserts represent ideal candidates for designing primers that can distinguish 2019-nCoV from other
coronaviruses
Zero Hedge, a popular US news blog focussing on the capital markets, was suspended by Twitter on Friday shortly after it tweeted a post about an article on the novel coronavirus outbreak in China. The post alleged that the coronavirus was obtained by China and was being modified into a 'bioweapon'.
coronavirus cover Know all about the coronavirus outbreak in the latest issue of THE WEEK
Interestingly, the post also cited a research paper on the coronavirus by a group of Indian scientists from the school of biological sciences at IIT Delhi and Acharya Narendra Dev College of University of Delhi.
Earlier, Zero Hedge had uploaded contact details of a Chinese scientist, who it effectively held as being responsible for being behind the coronavirus outbreak. The revelation of personal details violates Twitter's policies.
The research paper was uploaded on January 31 on bioRxiv, an open source initiative containing resources on biological research. The research paper claims the spike protein in novel coronavirus contained four "insertions" that "are not present in other coronaviruses". The research paper notes, "amino acid residues in all the 4 inserts have identity or similarity to those in the HIV1 gp120 or HIV-1 Gag". HIV is the virus that causes AIDS.
The scientists argue that similarity in amino acid identity was "not a random fortuitous finding", hinting that it could have been engineered. However, the paper does not delve deeper into the possibility of virus being engineered deliberately.
also read
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Pak halts flights to and from China till Feb 2 as death toll due to coronavirus rises
Coronavirus in Kerala: Patient's condition is improving, says health minister
However, the study by the Indian scientists has attracted some scepticism already. Dr Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist who has been associated with Harvard and Johns Hopkins, said the research work had not been peer reviewed in order for it to be verified or refuted.
Earlier this week, an Indian news portal, GreatGameIndia, claimed the origin of the coronavirus can be traced to Canada and two Chinese biological warfare program agents who smuggled it into China
Over the past few days, the mainstream press has vigorously pushed back against a theory about the origins of the coronavirus that has now infected as many as 70,000+ people in Wuhan alone (depending on whom you believe). The theory is that China obtained the coronavirus via a Canadian research program, and started molding it into a bioweapon at the Institute of Virology in Wuhan. Politifact pointed the finger at Zero Hedge, in particular, though the story was widely shared across independent-leaning media.
The theory is that the virus, which was developed by infectious disease experts to function as a bio-weapon, originated in the Wuhan-based lab of Dr. Peng Zhou, China's preeminent researcher of bat immune systems, specifically in how their immune systems adapt to the presence of viruses like coronavirus and other destructive viruses. Somehow, the virus escaped from the lab, and the Hunan fish market where the virus supposedly originated is merely a ruse.
Now, a respected epidemiologist who recently caught flack for claiming in a twitter threat that the virus appeared to be much more contagious than initially believed is pointing out irregularities in the virus's genome that suggests it might have been genetically engineered for the purposes of a weapon, and not just any weapon but the deadliest one of all.
In "Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag", Indian researchers are baffled by segments of the virus's RNA that have no relation to other coronaviruses like SARS, and instead appear to be closer to HIV. The virus even responds to treatment by HIV medications.
For those pressed for time, here are the key findings from the paper, which first focuses on the unique nature of 2019-nCoV, and then observe four amino acid sequences in the Wuhan Coronavirus which are homologous to amino acid sequences in HIV1:
Our phylogentic tree of full-length coronaviruses suggests that 2019-nCoV is closely related to SARS CoV [Fig1].
In addition, other recent studies have linked the 2019-nCoV to SARS CoV. We therefore compared the spike glycoprotein sequences of the 2019-nCoV to that of the SARS CoV (NCBI Accession number: AY390556.1). On careful examination of the sequence alignment we found that the 2019- nCoV spike glycoprotein contains 4 insertions [Fig.2]. To further investigate if these inserts are present in any other corona virus, we performed a multiple sequence alignment of the spike glycoprotein amino acid sequences of all available coronaviruses (n=55) [refer Table S.File1] in NCBI refseq (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) this includes one sequence of 2019-nCoV[Fig.S1]. We found that these 4 insertions [inserts 1, 2, 3 and 4] are unique to 2019-nCoV and are not present in other coronaviruses analyzed. Another group from China had documented three insertions comparing fewer spike glycoprotein sequences of coronaviruses . Another group from China had documented three insertions comparing fewer spike glycoprotein sequences of coronaviruses (Zhou et al., 2020).
We then translated the aligned genome and found that these inserts are present in all Wuhan 2019-nCoV viruses except the 2019-nCoV virus of Bat as a host [Fig.S4]. Intrigued by the 4 highly conserved inserts unique to 2019-nCoV we wanted to understand their origin. For this purpose, we used the 2019-nCoV local alignment with each insert as query against all virus genomes and considered hits with 100% sequence coverage. Surprisingly, each of the four inserts aligned with short segments of the Human immunodeficiency Virus-1 (HIV-1) proteins. The amino acid positions of the inserts in 2019-nCoV and the corresponding residues in HIV-1 gp120 and HIV-1 Gag are shown in Table 1.
The first 3 inserts (insert 1,2 and 3) aligned to short segments of amino acid residues in HIV-1 gp120. The insert 4 aligned to HIV-1 Gag. The insert 1 (6 amino acid residues) and insert 2 (6 amino acid residues) in the spike glycoprotein of 2019-nCoV are 100% identical to the residues mapped to HIV-1 gp120. The insert 3 (12 amino acid residues) in 2019- nCoV maps to HIV-1 gp120 with gaps [see Table 1]. The insert 4 (8 amino acid residues) maps to HIV-1 Gag with gaps.
Why do the authors think the virus may be man-made? Because when looking at the above insertions which are not present in any of the closest coronavirus families, "it is quite unlikely for a virus to have acquired such unique insertions naturally in a short duration of time." Instead, they can be found in cell identification and membrane binding proteins located in the HIV genome.
Since the S protein of 2019-nCoV shares closest ancestry with SARS GZ02, the sequence coding for spike proteins of these two viruses were compared using MultiAlin software. We found four new insertions in the protein of 2019-nCoV- “GTNGTKR” (IS1), “HKNNKS” (IS2), “GDSSSG” (IS3) and “QTNSPRRA” (IS4) (Figure 2). To our surprise, these sequence insertions were not only absent in S protein of SARS but were also not observed in any other member of the Coronaviridae family (Supplementary figure). This is startling as it is quite unlikely for a virus to have acquired such unique insertions naturally in a short duration of time.
The insertions were observed to be present in all the genomic sequences of 2019-nCoV virus available from the recent clinical isolates. To know the source of these insertions in 2019-nCoV a local alignment was done with BLASTp using these insertions as query with all virus genome. Unexpectedly, all the insertions got aligned with Human immunodeficiency Virus-1 (HIV-1). Further analysis revealed that aligned sequences of HIV-1 with 2019-nCoV were derived from surface glycoprotein gp120 (amino acid sequence positions: 404-409, 462-467, 136-150) and from Gag protein (366-384 amino acid) (Table 1). Gag protein of HIV is involved in host membrane binding, packaging of the virus and for the formation of virus-like particles. Gp120 plays crucial role in recognizing the host cell by binding to the primary receptor CD4.This binding induces structural rearrangements in GP120, creating a high affinity binding site for a chemokine co-receptor like CXCR4 and/or CCR5.
And some visuals, which lead the paper authors to conclude that "this structural change might have also increased the range of host cells that 2019-nCoV can infect":
3D modelling of the protein structure displayed that these insertions are present at the binding site of 2019-nCoV. Due to the presence of gp120 motifs in 2019-nCoV spike glycoprotein at its binding domain, we propose that these motif insertions could have provided an enhanced affinity towards host cell receptors. Further, this structural change might have also increased the range of host cells that 2019-nCoV can infect. To the best of our knowledge, the function of these motifs is still not clear in HIV and need to be explored. The exchange of genetic material among the viruses is well known and such critical exchange highlights the risk and the need to investigate the relations between seemingly unrelated virus families.
A good recap of the findings was provided by Dr. Feigl-Ding, who started his explanatory thread by pointing out that the transmission rate outside China has surpassed the rate inside China.
But the 'smoking gun' in this case are pieces of the virus's genetic code that Indian researchers, led by Prashant Pradhan at the Indian Institute of Technology, found may have been 'embedded' from HIV, which belongs to an entirely different family of viruses.
The punchline:
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To be sure, Dr. Feigl-Ding insists that he's not trying to promote any 'conspiracies' about the virus being a bioweapon developed by the Chinese, although it is difficult to find a proper name for what appears to be an artificial, weaponized virus.
Another doctor chimed in with what he thought was a solid explanation for the virus's irregularities...
...Until he realized something disturbing.
Oh my god. Indian scientists have just found HIV (AIDS) virus-like insertions in the 2019-nCov virus that are not found in any other coronavirus. They hint at the possibility that this Chinese virus was designed ["not fortuitous']. Scary if true. https://t.co/h6xPX1gYvj pic.twitter.com/kCpd1I00uE
— Anand Ranganathan (@ARanganathan72) January 31, 2020
"Scary"... but relax, it's just another ridiculous "conspiracy."
_________________ --
'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 Chinese city of Anyang joined Xi’an and Yuzhou in lockdown because of a COVID-19 outbreak, according to the Associated Press (AP).
On Monday, the government announced that they were locking down the city after two cases of Omicron were reported. It is not clear how long the lockdown of Anyang is expected to last.
The city, home to 5.5 million people, will add on to the millions of Chinese people confined to their homes, totaling 20 million in strict quarantine in China. Anyang, however, is the only locked down city reporting an Omicron variant outbreak. Xi’an and Yuzhou have had outbreaks of the Delta variant.
The Omicron cases in Anyang are allegedly connected to two other cases in Tianjin. According to the reported cases, the first report of Omicron in mainland China came from those who arrived from abroad and their immediate contacts.
There are also concerns about how this will affect Beijing’s Winter Olympics, which begin on Feb. 4. Huang Chun, a Beijing Olympics official responsible for disease control, said they are relying on athletes and officials to help avoid an outbreak during the event, according to AP.
“If the mass cluster transmission happens, it will impact the Games and the schedule for sure,” Huang said. “The worst scenario, if it happens, is independent of man’s will, so we leave our options open.”
Meanwhile, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam said kindergartens and primary schools would be closed after student infections were reported across the city. The schools will close on Friday and will remain closed until the first week of February, which also happens to be the start of Lunar New Year.
One hour twenty minutes of Dr Mike Yeadon ex ceo of Pfeizer blowing the whistle on the evil the pharma companies are doing. He is a very well qualified medical expert and holds nothing back in his accusations of the deliberate harm the "vacccine" is doing.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres announced the appointment of Michael R. Bloomberg as his Special Envoy for Climate Ambition and Solutions. The COP26 High Level Climate Action Champions, Gonzalo Muñoz and Nigel Topping, also named Mr. Bloomberg the first Global Ambassador for the Race to Zero and Race to Resilience campaigns.
In his third Special Envoy role, Mr. Bloomberg will mobilize stronger and more ambitious climate action in the lead-up to the pivotal Glasgow Climate Conference – COP 26 – in November 2021. Building on decades of proven experience fighting climate change across business, government and philanthropy, Mr. Bloomberg will support the Secretary-General’s work to grow and strengthen the coalition of governments, companies, cities and financial institutions committing to net-zero before 2050. He will also engage government officials and members of the private sector and civil society – particularly in high-emitting countries, industries and sectors – to vastly accelerate the transition to a clean energy economy and help deliver on the Secretary-General’s global call for an expedited phase out of coal, in line with the Paris Agreement.
“Mayor Bloomberg is a leader who is undaunted by the big challenges and we are pleased to welcome him back in this role as Special Envoy for Climate Ambition and Solutions in this critical year,” said Secretary-General António Guterres. “Mayor Bloomberg’s deep commitment to climate action and his essential experience bridging the interests of business, finance, policy makers and philanthropy are uniquely suited to helping to accelerate impact as we rebuild better together and drive toward a global commitment for COP26 and beyond.”
Mr. Bloomberg’s work will be rooted in the Secretary-General’s call to ensure efforts to rebuild better together from the COVID-19 pandemic do not just reset the world economy but transform it – through new investment in clean infrastructure, new jobs, and a resilient future free from dirty fossil fuels.
“Fighting climate change is a global challenge that requires strong global collaboration. I’m honored to be returning as Special Envoy to the UN Secretary-General to help drive the fight forward and secure a greener, healthier future for generations to come,” said Michael R. Bloomberg. “I look forward to continuing to rally and support the efforts of cities, states, businesses, and local groups through our ongoing work at Bloomberg Philanthropies, and by serving as ambassador for the UNFCCC’s Race to Zero and Race to Resilience campaigns. Local climate action is so vital to achieving the UN’s climate targets – and together, we can make even more progress accelerating the transition to clean energy and reaching net-zero emissions by 2050.”
As the first Global Ambassador for the Race to Zero and Race to Resilience campaigns, Mr. Bloomberg will continue to draw on his long track record of spurring ambitious subnational climate action to work with the UN’s Climate Ambition Alliance to rally leadership and mobilize support from cities, regions, businesses, and investors in the largest ever coordinated campaign to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 at the very latest.
“We are delighted to welcome Mr. Bloomberg as the first Global Ambassador for the Race to Zero and Race to Resilience,” said Nigel Topping, COP26 High-Level Champion of the United Kingdom. “In this position, he will play a pivotal role in helping to raise awareness and drive growth for both campaigns, with a special emphasis on engagement with cities and regions.”
Gonzalo Muñoz, COP25 High-Level Champion of Chile, added, “The appointment of Mr. Bloomberg as the first Global Ambassador will be followed by further appointments of men and women across the world who will join him as fellow representatives to unlock the efforts of non-state actors in support of a zero carbon, resilient world.”
These positions build on Mr. Bloomberg’s previous appointments as UN Special Envoy for Climate Action in 2018 and UN Special Envoy on Cities and Climate Change by then Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon in 2014.
As founder of Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg Philanthropies and the 108th mayor of New York City, Mr. Bloomberg is globally recognized for his work to accelerate climate action, including support for the Beyond Coal movement, which has successfully turbocharged the clean energy transition in the United States and other countries, and America’s Pledge – an initiative to quantify and report the actions of U.S. states, cities, businesses, and organizations to drive down their greenhouse gas emissions consistent with the goals of the Paris Agreement.
In addition to leading a wide range of global climate initiatives, Mr. Bloomberg uniquely supports efforts of cities and mayors taking climate action at the local level. Mr. Bloomberg is the board president of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, a global network of 97 major cities, and co-chair of the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy, a network of more than 10,000 cities and local governments. Mr. Bloomberg also currently serves as chair of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, and at the Secretary-General’s request, formed the Climate Finance Leaders Initiative in 2019.
The 2021 Bilderberg is an unknown quantity. This page highlights the involvement of over 130 Bilderbergers in the COVID-19event.
It is unknown whether a 2021 Bilderberg Meeting was held; the group's website stated that it "had to be cancelled, due to travel and meeting restrictions."[1] Of the 1838 living Bilderbergers, over 130 have played significant roles in managing the COVID-19 event:
Many Bilderbergers have profited from COVID-19[2]. This page lists Bilderbergers who have taken active roles in the COVID-19 event. Many, perhaps most, have been active in various roles, in which case this page attempts to list them under the most important role held. Steering committee members (both present and former) are underlined.
A lot of evidence suggests that SARS-CoV2 did not occur naturally, but was genetically manipulated from a naturally occurring bat coronavirus and possibly parts of additional viruses[3]. Bilderberg members have done important work in developing the CRISPR gene editing technique:
Many Bilderbergers have experience at Pandemic Planning, and the group has been well represented at such exercises for at least 20 years.[8] Those with the most obvious ties:
Jeffrey Zients - 2017 - Became White House coronavirus coordinator in 2021,[12] announced in August that year that “it’s time to impose some requirements” where COVID jabs are concerned.[13]
The "response" to COVID-19 was a sweeping set of social changes enforced by fiat, having minimal scientific justification, if any. They directly contradicted best practice up to 2020.
A WEF tweet which was quickly deleted after it raised criticism.
Most nation states decreed what was termed a "lockdown", i.e. a drastic restriction of freedom of movement. This was in opposition to the 2019 WHO best practice guide for pandemics, which specifically advised against this practice. As of Summer 2021, there is little scientific evidence that these measures had any measurable impact on spread of COVID-19, but this claim remains part of the COVID-19 official narrative.
Alberto Alesina - 2018 - "Strongly agreed" in March 2020 with all 3 points of the Bilderberg consensus Lockdown policy, with a high degree of confidence.[28] Died in May 2020, aged 63.
Sauli Niinistö - 1997 - As President of Finland uncritically wrote of "the need for strict, short-term restrictive measures..." and was similarly uncritical about the need for a fast rollout of "vaccines"[31]
Bill Morneau - 2017, 2016 - as Canadian Finance Minister in 2020 "approved the spending of nearly $200 billion in federal aid in a deliberate effort to shut down huge portions of Canadian society"[32]
György Surányi - 1997 - Wrote a long essay in April 2020 suggesting the Hungarian government pay targeted subsidies to those who lose their jobs due to lockdowns.[34]
Digitalization
Carlo Ratti - 2014 - Architect who published about Reimagining the Office[35]
Bain & Company's instructions on how workplaces should change due to COVID-19
Dianne Feinstein - 1991 - In July 2020 proposed withholding COVID-19 relief from states without mask mandates.[37] Both she and her husband sold stock in Allogene Therapeutics in 2021 before the lockdowns.[38][39]
Orit Gadiesh - 1998, 1997 - Chairman of Bain & Company, which was closely involved in directing government policy in various nations. In France it was entrusted by the government to steer the country's Covid testing strategy.[40] On 29 April 2020 it put out a guide describing how workplaces should change due to COVID-19.[41]
Bilderberg 2021.jpg
Date June 2021
Perpetrators Bilderberg/Steering committee
Description The 2021 Bilderberg is an unknown quantity. This page highlights the involvement of over 130 Bilderbergers in the COVID-19 event.
It is unknown whether a 2021 Bilderberg Meeting was held; the group's website stated that it "had to be cancelled, due to travel and meeting restrictions."[1] Of the 1838 living Bilderbergers, over 130 have played significant roles in managing the COVID-19 event:
Contents
1 COVID-19
1.1 Virus R & D
1.2 Pandemic Planning
1.3 Task Forces
1.3.1 National Task Forces
1.3.1.1 Handlers
1.3.2 Others
1.4 Social change
1.4.1 Lockdowns
1.4.2 Furlough Schemes
1.4.3 Digitalization
1.4.4 Masks
1.4.5 Social distancing
1.4.6 Track and Trace
1.5 Controlling the Narrative
1.5.1 Academia
1.5.2 Big media
1.5.3 Promoting panic
1.5.4 Opinion polling
1.5.5 Censorship
1.6 "Vaccines"
1.6.1 Sidelining repurposed drugs
1.6.2 Uncritical promotion
1.6.3 R & D
1.6.4 Production & distribution
1.6.5 Scapegoating of non-recipients
1.6.6 Mandation
1.6.7 "Vaccine Passports"
1.6.7.1 Sidelining natural immunity
1.7 Great Reset
1.7.1 COVID handouts
1.7.1.1 French Covid debt commission
1.8 Unproven/Unclear role
2 Rating
3 References
COVID-19
Many Bilderbergers have profited from COVID-19[2]. This page lists Bilderbergers who have taken active roles in the COVID-19 event. Many, perhaps most, have been active in various roles, in which case this page attempts to list them under the most important role held. Steering committee members (both present and former) are underlined.
Virus R & D
Full article: COVID-19/Origins
A lot of evidence suggests that SARS-CoV2 did not occur naturally, but was genetically manipulated from a naturally occurring bat coronavirus and possibly parts of additional viruses[3]. Bilderberg members have done important work in developing the CRISPR gene editing technique:
Preventing Global Catastrophic Biological Risks, held in February 2020 before the Munich Security Conference, attended by three veteran Bilderberger pandemic planners: Gro Harlem Brundtland, Sam Nunn and Avril Haines
Bernard Cazeneuve - 2018 - In 2017 attended the founding ceremony of the BSL-4 lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, together with Yves Lévy, whose wife abruptly banned over-the-counter sales of hydroxychloroquine in France in January 2020,[4] declaring it "poisonous" without explanation.[5][6]
Emmanuelle Charpentier - 2016 - Pioneered CRISPR as a tool for genome editing (for which she was co-recipient of a Nobel prize in 2020)
Sean Parker - 2010 - Billionaire who was the first to gain NIH approval for a trial of CRISPR[7]
Pandemic Planning
Full article: Pandemic/Planning
Many Bilderbergers have experience at Pandemic Planning, and the group has been well represented at such exercises for at least 20 years.[8] Those with the most obvious ties:
Gro Harlem Brundtland - 1982, 1983, introduced A Spreading Plague (2019 Pandemic planning exercise), and attended Atlantic Storm, and the February 2020 Preventing Global Catastrophic Biological Risks exercise
Avril Haines - 2017 - US Deep State actor who participated in Event 201 and the February 2020 Preventing Global Catastrophic Biological Risks exercises. Deputy Director of the CIA 2013-15, Director of National Intelligence since 2021
Sam Nunn - 1997, 1996 - Long experience at pandemic planning, Operation Dark Winter, A Spreading Plague, the February 2020 Preventing Global Catastrophic Biological Risks exercise
Judith Rodin took part in the 2010 Lock Step exercise about using a pandemic to usher in high tech totalitarianism
Judith Rodin - 2005 - As President of the Rockefeller Foundation took part in the Lock Step exercise which foresaw a pandemic as the means by which a technototalitarian government might unfold.
Task Forces
Full article: COVID-19 Task Force
In Spring 2020, many nation states formed COVID-19 Task Forces, many of which had, or acted as if they had, "state of emergency" powers to override standard operating procedure.
National Task Forces
Vittorio Colao - 2018 - Leader of a special task force to handle "Phase 2" of the Italian Covid Task Force
Christopher Liddell - 2017 - Member of Trump's White House Coronavirus Task Force
Matthew Pottinger - 2019 - Member of Trump's White House Coronavirus Task Force. His wife Yen Pottinger was explaining the importance of social distancing in mid March 2020[9]
Kathleen Sebelius - 2008, 2007 - Member of Biden's White House Coronavirus Task Force[10] and a board member of the Kaiser Family Foundation[11]
Jeffrey Zients - 2017 - Became White House coronavirus coordinator in 2021,[12] announced in August that year that “it’s time to impose some requirements” where COVID jabs are concerned.[13]
Handlers
Mark Carney, Tri-national, quad-Bilderberger, Governor of the Bank of England until March 2020, when he became an "informal adviser" to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
Mark Carney - 2019, 2018, 2012, 2011 - "acting as an informal adviser to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on the federal government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic."[14]
Andrew Liveris - 2012 - Ex Dow CEO and Member of the Board of Citigroup, "Special Adviser" to the Australia/National COVID-19 Coordination Commission[15]
Others
Other significant institutions have appointed Bilderbergers to their Covid or pandemic groups:
Jeffrey Sachs, who was made chair of the Lancet Commission on COVID-19 after Peter Daszak recused himself
Laurence Boone - 2015 - A Commissioner of the Lancet Commission on COVID-19[16] - As the Global Economic Forum's chief economist, advising about the economic response to COVID-19[17][18]
Sylvia Burwell - 2018 - Co-chair of the Council on Foreign Relations's "Independent Task Force on Improving Pandemic Preparedness
Mitchell Daniels - 2012 - Member of the Council on Foreign Relations's "Independent Task Force on Improving Pandemic Preparedness"
Paul Polman - 2012 - Member of the The Lancet's COVID-19 commission.[19]
Olli Rehn - 2007 - As Governor of Bank of Finland, in 2021 became chair of FIFA's COVID-19 Relief Plan steering committee.[20], published about "Monetary policy in the emerging post-pandemic context"[21]
Jeffrey Sachs - 1990 - Chaired The Lancet's COVID-19 commission.[22][23]
Tidjane Thiam - 2019, 2013 - One of the four African Union’s COVID-19 Special Envoys[24]
Philip Zelikow - 2007, 2006 - Drafter of the 9/11 Commission Report,[25] appointed to lead the University of Virginia's COVID Commission Planning Group[26]
Social change
The "response" to COVID-19 was a sweeping set of social changes enforced by fiat, having minimal scientific justification, if any. They directly contradicted best practice up to 2020.
Stefan Löfven - 2013 - As Swedish PM, managed the Swedish Covid measures.[27]
Lockdowns
Full article: COVID-19/Lockdown
A WEF tweet which was quickly deleted after it raised criticism.
Most nation states decreed what was termed a "lockdown", i.e. a drastic restriction of freedom of movement. This was in opposition to the 2019 WHO best practice guide for pandemics, which specifically advised against this practice. As of Summer 2021, there is little scientific evidence that these measures had any measurable impact on spread of COVID-19, but this claim remains part of the COVID-19 official narrative.
Alberto Alesina - 2018 - "Strongly agreed" in March 2020 with all 3 points of the Bilderberg consensus Lockdown policy, with a high degree of confidence.[28] Died in May 2020, aged 63.
Cathy Berx - 2018 - Governor of Antwerp who oversaw the introduction of lockdown and curfew measures in Antwerp in July 2020.[29]
Stefano Feltri - 2019 - Italian journalist who wrote supporting the official narrative, that lockdowns were "inevitable"[30].
Demis Hassabis - 2018, 2016, 2015 - Dialed in to a meeting of SAGE which promoted the UK COVID Lockdown.
Sauli Niinistö - 1997 - As President of Finland uncritically wrote of "the need for strict, short-term restrictive measures..." and was similarly uncritical about the need for a fast rollout of "vaccines"[31]
Bill Morneau - 2017, 2016 - as Canadian Finance Minister in 2020 "approved the spending of nearly $200 billion in federal aid in a deliberate effort to shut down huge portions of Canadian society"[32]
Norbert Röttgen - 2014 - As chair of the CDU he was promoting the German Covid lockdowns[33]
Erna Solberg - 2011 - Norwegian PM who led the national lockdowns. Directed billions of dollars to international vaccine programs (GAVI etc)[citation needed]
Furlough Schemes
György Surányi - 1997 - Wrote a long essay in April 2020 suggesting the Hungarian government pay targeted subsidies to those who lose their jobs due to lockdowns.[34]
Digitalization
Carlo Ratti - 2014 - Architect who published about Reimagining the Office[35]
Frans Timmermans - 2008 - Co-Executive Vice President of the European Commission for A Europe Fit for the Digital Age, Vice-President of the European Commission, took many opportunities to opine on "Which world do we want after COVID-19?"[36]
Margrethe Vestager - 2014 - Co-Executive Vice President of the European Commission for A Europe Fit for the Digital Age
Masks
Full article: Mask
Bain & Company's instructions on how workplaces should change due to COVID-19
Dianne Feinstein - 1991 - In July 2020 proposed withholding COVID-19 relief from states without mask mandates.[37] Both she and her husband sold stock in Allogene Therapeutics in 2021 before the lockdowns.[38][39]
Social distancing
Full article: Social distancing
Orit Gadiesh - 1998, 1997 - Chairman of Bain & Company, which was closely involved in directing government policy in various nations. In France it was entrusted by the government to steer the country's Covid testing strategy.[40] On 29 April 2020 it put out a guide describing how workplaces should change due to COVID-19.[41]
Track and Trace
Full article: Rated 3/5 Mass surveillance
Louise Arbour - 2019 - In 2020 made Honorary President of COVI Canada, which released the COVI application.[42][43]
Dido Harding - 2016 - Placed in charge of producing the NHSX app for Covid
Controlling the Narrative
George Soros, of The Good Club, is suspected to have been controlling the narrative through groups such as BLM
Regina Dugan - 2015 - DARPA, Facebook, Google, "The global pandemic is our generation’s Sputnik", CEO of Wellcome Trust
Henry Kissinger - 2019-2010 , 2008-1994 , 1992-1980, 1978, 1977, 1971, 1964, 1957 October, 1957 February - Arch-Bilderberger deep politician, numerous influential public pronouncements on COVID-19
Charles Michel - 2018, 2016, 2015 - As President of the European Council, in December 2020 he proposed an international treaty on pandemics.[44]
George Soros - 2002, 2000, 1996, 1994, 1990 - The Good Club, influence of BLM to control the narrative in 2020[45]
Sidney Taurel - 2007 - Chair of Pearson which "implement[ed] new health and safety principles" and "launched an online community for our people to connect, share stories and support each other",[46] chair emeritus of Eli Lilly which produced bamlanivimab.[47]
Academia
Senem Aydın-Düzgit - 2016 - Professor of International Relations, published multiple papers on COVID and governance, some co-authored with Fuat Keyman
Fuat Keyman - 2012 - Professor of International Relations and Vice
President at Sabancı University, published multiple papers on COVID and governance, some co-authored with Senem Aydın-Düzgit
James Orbinksi - 2011 - Developed the COVID-19 Global Health Portal.[48] Also published various research about COVID-19[49][50]
Ole Petter Ottersen - 2011 - Presented at the July 2020 International Symposium On Novel Ideas In Science And Ethics Of Vaccines Against Covid-19 Pandemic,[51] published research on Addressing production gaps for vaccines in African countries
Arild Underdal - 2004 - Editing academic research about COVID-19[52][53][54]
James Vaupel - 2011 - Edited and co-authored academic research about COVID-19,[55] on topics such as the death toll in Sweden after their refusal to instigate widespread lockdowns.[56][57][58]
Big media
The non reporting of Bilderberg by TV or newspapers reveals that the group has considerable control of big media, which was mobilised to support the official narrative.
Juan Luis Cebrián - 2018-2001, 1993, 1990-1987, 1985, 1983- Billionaire, media mogul, one of the ten most influential Spaniards in Spain and Latin America for 44 years (from 1976 to 2019).
Andrew Coyne - 2015 - Canadian columnist and aggressive pusher of the COVID official narrative. e.g. He dismissed the Great Reset as a "conspiracy theory"[citation needed], and in December 2021 headlined an article Is the case for vaccine mandates like the case for seatbelt laws? No, it’s much, much stronger[59]
Mathias Döpfner - 2019-2014, 2007-2005 - Billionaire, Axel Springer Publishing House/CEO
Felix Gutzwiller - 2013 - On Swiss TV in March 2020 answering public questions about COVID-19.[60]
François Lenglet - 2017 - French editor who in March 2021 termed vaccine passports "the best recovery instrument available".[61]
In March 2020 Shiraz Maher wrote a first hand account of his mild case of COVID-19
Promoting panic
Full article: COVID-19/Panic
Commercially-controlled media's coverage of COVID-19 was a more-or-less monotone echo of the fear-driven official narrative, while calmer, more scientific voices “were never invited to the expert table”, as the editor of Bild admitted in August 2021.[62]
Oliver Bäte - 2017 - A German businessman who made various alarmist statements about the virus, such as comparing it to a "worldwide meteor impact" or the explosion of a nuclear power station.[63]
Shiraz Maher - 2015 - A "Terror expert" who reportedly had a case of COVID-19 which was "classified as “mild” by British health authorities". Maher wrote a "horrifying account of his experience with COVID-19" which was picked up by the commercially-controlled media after it "went viral" on Twitter.[64]
Kenneth Rogoff - 2012 - Former IMF economist whose dire predictions in early 2020 were widely reported in commercially-controlled media.[65] Also predicted that COVID would speed the move away from cash[66]
“Every time I open the obituary pages of the local newspaper, I find so many people that I know have died. A whole generation is being wiped out.”
Beppe Severgnini (25 April 2020) [67]
Beppe Severgnini - 2017 - Italian editor/journalist who reported from north Italy in March 2020, stating in April 2020 that "a whole generation is being wiped out".
Opinion polling
Renate Köcher - 2018 - A German pollster who researched attitudes to COVID-19 and was interviewed about them by corporate media[68][69]
Censorship
Full article: COVID-19/Censorship
"I urge world leaders to fully support the Global Vaccination Strategy I launched with the World Health Organization last month. We need to get vaccines into the arms of 40 per cent of people in all countries by the end of this year [2021] — and 70 per cent by mid-2022."
António Guterres - 2005, 1990 - In March 2020, as UN secretary general, asked for increased censorship by big tech of online "hate speech" in response to COVID-19.[citation needed] In October 2021, advocating swift vaccination of the whole world's population.[70]
Big tech is notoriously opaque in its censorship, which reached record heights in 2020/21 on the topic of COVID-19[71], as predicted by Event 201. Involvement in censorship is difficult to prove, but it seems likely that censorship was carried out with the agreement of (or at the behest of) the following chief execs:
Jared Cohen - 2019, 2018 - Jigsaw CEO (formerly Google Ideas)
Reid Hoffman - 2019-2014, 2012, 2011, LinkedIn Executive Chairman
Robert Kimmitt - 1995 - Appointed Facebook's "lead independent director" in March 2020[72]
Patrick Pichette - 2018 - Appointed Twitter's CEO in June 2020.[73]
Eric Schmidt - 2019, 2017-2007 - US billionaire who works for Alphabet, with a track record of arranging YouTube censorship of dissent.[74]
Jens Stoltenberg - 2002-2015-2017-2018-2019 - NATO General-Secretary. Using censorship mechanisms established during Russiagate, NATO played a role in "combatting the spread of harmful, false and misleading narratives through disinformation." [75]
"Vaccines"
Full article: “COVID-19/Vaccine”
Audrey Azoulay, UNESCO Director general, "Every day, people are searching for a path out of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, scientific international cooperation and vaccines have created hope that a brighter future is within reach..."[76]
The experimental gene therapies always referred to by commercially-controlled media as "COVID-19 vaccinations" received emergency use authorisations which could not have been given if alternative treatments were available. It was therefore necessary to sideline drug therapies.
Sidelining repurposed drugs
Jens Spahn was made German Health minister after attending the 2017 Bilderberg, rejected a donation of hydroxychloroquine in 2020[77] and stated that "vaccines are the way out of this pandemic"
Sidelining of drugs to treat the disease was a requirement for the granting of Emergency Use Authorisation of the experimental jabs. Many Bilderberg controlled groups, such as Médecins Sans Frontières, termed repurposed drugs "disinformation".[78][79]
Werner Baumann - 2017 - CEO of Bayer, who in early 2020 initially announced a plan to create a Chloroquine production facility in Europe,[80] which transitioned to a partnership with Curevac to create CVnCoV, a COVID-19 Vaccine candidate.[81]
Trine Eilertsen - 2015 - Promoted to Editor in chief of Aftenposten in 2020, a paper as of June 2021 which was questioning the need for "experimental treatment" of COVID-19 cases with ivermectin.[82]
Jens Spahn - 2017 - German Health minister since March 2018, close to big pharma.[83] Was specifically requested to look into ivermectin as a tool to control the spread of the disease,[84] but moved towards mandating vaccines and stated that "vaccines are the way out of this pandemic".[85]
Uncritical promotion
Scores, perhaps hundreds of Bilderbergers have been actively promoting the jabs. This list contains only the most fervent advocates and those with key jobs allowing them to throw large institutional weight behind such opinions:
“COVID-19 does not respect borders. No country will be safe until the people of every country have access to the vaccine.”
Audrey Azoulay [86]
Audrey Azoulay - 2019, 2018 - UNESCO Director general. Vocal, uncritical promotion of the COVID official narrative
Carl Bildt - 2014-2013, 2011-2006, 2000-1999, 1997-1996, 1993-1992 - "An unprecedented threat demands an unprecedented response"[87] - appointed by Tedros Ghebreyesus in March 2021 as WHO Special Envoy for the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator[88], which was Bill Gates's "bid to organize the development and distribution of everything from therapeutics to testing."[89]
Ana Botín - 2019-2015, 2010 - Head of Banco Santander, who declared at the virtual Davos Agenda summit of global leaders that vaccinations against coronavirus are “the most effective 2021 economic policy.”[90]
“People act like they have a choice. You don't have a choice. Normalcy only returns when we've largely vaccinated the entire global population [against COVID-19].”
Bill Gates (2020) [91]
Bill Gates - 2010 - Aggressive promotion of vaccines, ID2020 and vaccine passports. Predicted in March 2020 that "Eventually we will need some digital certificates to show who has recovered or been tested (for COVID-19) recently, or when we have a vaccine, who has received it."[92]
Melinda Gates - 2004 - Of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation which sponsored ID2020 and is heavily invested in vaccine research, development and advocacy
Luis de Guindos - 2017, 2013 - As Vice-President of the European Central Bank, in late 2020/early 2021 was talking up the economic benefits of fast vaccine rollouts[93] and of banks in helping businesses affected by the lockdown measures.
Walter Isaacson - 2004 - Former editor of Time magazine, widely interviewed in commercially-controlled media, where his glowing account of being one of 44,000 people to participate in Pfizer trial termed the COVID jabs "a miracle for genetic medicine"[94][95] In 2021 published The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race.
Rolf Soiron - 2011. Former Chairman (2005–2018) of the Board of Directors of Lonza Group, a company with insider access to the World Economic Forum and manufacturing billions of COVID-19 vaccines for Moderna.
Bill Richardson - 2000, 1999 - In November 2021 went to Myanmar to help the leadership "identify specific ways to speed the delivery of COVID-19 vaccines from the COVAX facility to Myanmar and to help mitigate a possible fourth wave of COVID-19".[96]
Augosto Santos Silva - 2006 - As Portuguese foreign minister pledged to donate 5% of their vaccines to Portuguese ex-colonies,[97] “Supporting international vaccination is essential for the eradication of the COVID-19 pandemic. No country in the world will be safe until everyone is safe"[98]
R & D
The interviewer, John Snow covered his mouth after this remark, interrupted him, hesitated and did not ask any further questions.
John Bell - 2013 - Gates Foundation, GAVI researcher whose interests include DNA mutation, on the UK Vaccine Task Force, who stated in an interview that “These [COVID-19] vaccines are unlikely to completely sterilize a population. They're very likely to have an effect which works in a percentage. Say, 60% or 70%.” [99]
Production & distribution
Clément Beaune announcing the vaccine strategy
José Manuel Barroso - 2019-2015, 2013, 2005, 2003, 1994, made GAVI CEO in 2021[100]
Clément Beaune - 2019 - Emmanuel Macron's "Monsieur Europe", as French European Affairs Minister, outlined France's strategy for the deployment of vaccines[101]
François-Philippe Champagne - 2019, 2018 - In August 2021, as Canada's Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, announced Canada has established an MOU with Moderna to build a state-of-the-art "mRNA vaccine" production facility in Canada.[102]
Leif Johansson - 2000, 2001 - Chairman of AstraZeneca[103]
Alex Karp - 2019-2012 - Co-founded Palantir, which has been active internationally[104] with COVID,[105][106] and provided the software for Operation Warp Speed.
Jared Kushner - 2019 - Charged with fast tracking a Covid vaccine, announced Operation Warp Speed.[107]
Peter Thiel, Co-founder and largest shareholder of Palantir, which is heavily involved in crunching COVID data
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Jacek Szwajcowski - 2005 - Co-owner of KIPF, a holding company for Pelion Pharma, which the EBRD granted PLN 110M "to actively manage working capital needs across business lines in light of increased sales volatility caused by the Covid-19 outbreak."[108]
Peter Thiel - 2019-2007 - Co-founder and largest shareholder of Palantir as of 2020
“It is by coming together on vaccine research, mass production and distribution, that we will deliver safe and fair access to vaccines to all that need it, leaving no one behind.”
Jutta Urpilainen (3 February 2021) [109]
Jutta Urpilainen - 2013, 2012 - European Community Commissioner for International Partnerships, "Team Europe is working on preparedness of our partners. We are assisting partners with technical assistance and guidance to prepare national vaccination strategies, logistics, and information campaigns. National ownership and responsibility for preparing and deploying COVID-19 vaccines remains paramount."[110]
Scapegoating of non-recipients
"Hunt for the non-vaccinated. There are 17 million more" on the front page of Maurizio Molinari's Republicca
Maurizio Molinari - 2017 - Italian editor whose paper ran with "Hunt for the non-vaccinated" on its front page on 17 July 2021.
Michael O'Leary - 2019-2015 - "If you’re not vaccinated, you shouldn’t be allowed in the hospital, you shouldn’t be allowed to fly, you shouldn’t be allowed on the London Underground, and you shouldn’t be allowed in the local supermarket or your pharmacy either."
Olaf Scholz - 2010 - As German vice chancellor stepped up pressure on refuseniks[111][112] whom in January 2022 he termed "a tiny minority of reckless extremists."[113]
Mandation
Full article: COVID-19/Vaccine/Mandation
Bilderbergers have been both calling for and decreeing mandatory injections in response to COVID-19.
Mario Draghi - 2009, 2008, 2004-2000, 1995,1994 - As Prime Minister of Italy announced mandatory injection for healthcare workers in Italy,[114] later floated mandatory injection of all adults.
Harold Ford - 2008 - After joining FOX News in April 2021[115], took part in debates on mandatory jabs and related internet censorship.[116][117][118]
Christoph Franz - 2015 - As Hoffmann-La Roche President called for mandatory injections in Switzerland.[119]
Lilli Gruber - 2019-2015, 2013, 2012 - Italian journalist: "Yes to mandatory vaccines"[120][121]
Jon Huntsman - 2012 - Had direct control of the Salt Lake Tribune in Jan 2022 when it called for the deployment of the US National Guard "to ensure that people without proof of vaccination would not be allowed, well, anywhere."[122]
Bernard Kouchner - 2005 - 3 time French Health Minister who started Médecins Sans Frontières, took part in Atlantic Storm. Aggressive promotion of mandatory injections.[123][124]
Ursula von der Leyen, a figure of great importance in COVID-19 event
Ursula von der Leyen - 2019, 2018, 2016, 2015 - President of the European Commission since December 2019, in 2021 announced a proposal to "revive the EU tourism industry and for cross-border friendships to rekindle - safely," referring to permitting travel only for recipients of the COVID jabs[125] She claimed to have lost the text messages she exchanged with Albert Bourla (Pfizer's CEO) during the EU’s COVID jab procurement talks.[126] In December 2021 was promoting EU wide mandatory COVID jabs.[127]
Emmanuel Macron - 2014 - As French President, set up France's COVID-19 Scientific Council in March 2020.[128] Declared mandatory jabs for access to common facilities in France in 2021.[citation needed]
Angela Merkel as German Chancellor stated that "the pandemic is not over until all people in the world have been vaccinated"
Angela Merkel - 2005 - Stated in February 2021 that "the pandemic is not over until all people in the world have been vaccinated"[129], later that “We have all agreed that we need vaccine certificates.”[130]
Pamela Rendi-Wagner - 2018 - Months after her Bilderberg, made head of the Austrian Social Democratic Party, which in 2021 voted for mandatory vaccination enforced by fines and prison sentences. "Although compulsory vaccination was never our goal, unfortunately it has now become necessary."[131]
Tom Tugendhat - 2019 - UK MP who in November 2020 floated the idea that COVID jabs could be mandated for UK workers or travellers.[132] In 2021, asked for investigation of the claim of (fellow 2019 Bilderberger) Matthew Pottinger that the virus came from the WIV.[133]
"Vaccine Passports"
Full article: Vaccine/Passport
Mark Rutte, six time Bilderberg visitor, as Dutch PM fired his Economic Affairs Minister, Mona Keijzer, shortly after she publicly criticised the Dutch Vaccine passport.[134]
Dominique Anglade - 2018 - Made leader of the Quebec Liberal Party in 2020. Calling for "freedom passports" in August 2021.[135][136]
Tony Blair - 1993 - Aggressive promotion of "Vaccine passports",[137] early suggester of locking down people who declined the jabs.[138]
Ana Brnabić - 2018 - As Serbian PM, stated in September 2021 that the government was “preparing for the introduction of the COVID passes.”[139]
Patrice Caine - 2019 - CEO of Thales Group, arms manufacturer with an established E-passport/digital identity technology business[140][141]
Gunilla Carlsson - 2012 - GAVI board member, shaping vaccine passport policy[142] "Were similar vaccine passports to become the norm for international travel, the Green Certificate could set a precedent..."[143]
Sharon Dijksma- 2016 - Mayor of Utrecht who ordered a restaurant closed after it refused to check vaccine passports[144]
Kyriakos Mitsotakis - 2018, 2016 - As Greek PM displayed Klaus Schwab's The Great Reset on his desk. In 2021 he was promoting the idea of a "vaccine passport".[145]
George Osborne - 2018, 2017, 2015-2013, 2011, 2009-2006 - UK deep politician, promoter of vaccine passports, e.g. “Already some employers are demanding that their employees have vaccines. Leading a normal working life as part of society will become impossible without proof you’ve had a vaccine. Government shouldn’t stand in the way of that — it should facilitate it. As our real passports already say on the first page, Covid passports will “allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance”. Bring them on.” [citation needed]
Mark Rutte - 2019-2018, 2016-2015, 2013-2012 - As Dutch PM, fired his Economic Affairs Minister, Mona Keijzer, shortly after she publicly criticised the Dutch Vaccine passport.[146]
Sidelining natural immunity
An especially obvious glitch in the official COVID narrative has been the refusal to admit that the scientific truth that natural immunity is far more durable than anything provided by the COVID jabs.
William Lewis - 1997 - Non-executive Director of AP, which claimed that "Natural immunity is ... not long-lasting" to promote the COVID official narrative[147]
Great Reset
Full article: Great Reset
Klaus Schwab, ex-Bilderberg Steering Committee
The Great Reset is an SDS attempt to reframe of economic inequality in a positive light: "You'll own nothing, and you'll be happy". COVID-19 has greatly increased economic inequality as small and medium enterprise have been forced under while unprecedented peacetime increases in the money supply and corporate welfare have been doled out to a few large organisations.
Magdalena Andersson - 2016 - As Swedish finance minister in April 2021 promoted a global economic restart. Emphasized "the need for strong international cooperation to accelerate vaccine production and support affordable and equitable distribution to all."[148]
Olivier Blanchard - 2016 - French economist widely published on how COVID-19 could or should change the economic world order, especially with fellow Bilderberger, Jean Pisani-Ferry[149][150][151][152]
Børge Brende - 2016-2018, 2019 - President of the World Economic Forum since 2017. "The direction we need to head is toward greater dialogue, coordination and collective action".."the principles call for greater public-private collaboration"[153]
Miguel Fernández Ordóñez Spanish central banker and promoter of central bank digital currencies.
He Liu - 2014 - As the Chinese vice-premier, stated that "We need to strengthen market mechanisms, form healthy competition, reduce institutional transaction costs, and establish a unified, open, competitive and orderly high-standard market system"[154]
Thomas de Maizière - 2016 - Suggesting the German constitution needed to be changed to account for the next great emergency after Covid...[155]
Mario Monti - 2015-2013, 2011-2003, 2001, 1999, 1996, 1994-1983 - Took over leadership of the European WHO commission in August 2020.[156]
Jean Pisani-Ferry - 2009 - French economist widely published on how COVID-19 could or should change the economic world order, especially with especially with fellow Bilderberger, Olivier Blanchard[157][158][159][160]
Klaus Schwab - 2016, 2007, 2003, 1997-1995, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, which has been central in the entire deep event
Johan Rockström - 2019 - Swedish professor who at the 2019 Bilderberg presented a Planetary Emergency Action Plan written for the Club of Rome.
Ignazio Visco - 2004 - Governor of the Bank of Italy, widely quoted about the financial consequences of "the necessary lockdown and social distancing measures".[161][162][163]"The main instrument we have at the moment is neither monetary nor fiscal, it is vaccinations"[164]
COVID handouts
As President of the European Central Bank, spent at least €1,850 billion on an asset purchase program during COVID-19.[165]Declared intent to "vaccinate the whole world".[166]
Gordon Brown - 1991 - In April 2021, promoted a $60 billion effort to increase vaccination in "poor countries".[167] Appointed WHO ambassador for global health financing in September 2021.[168]
Elisa Ferreira- 2002 - Appointed European Commissioner for Cohesion and Reforms in December 2019 by Ursula von der Leyen, in charge of smaller EU handouts,[169] and on committees deciding about REACT-EU: “The additional European cohesion fund of €47 billion makes an important contribution towards rebuilding after the crisis. We need coherent and long-term strategies which rapidly trigger the green and digital transition and which are adapted to the local needs and potential.”[170]
Luis Garicano - 2016 - In March 2020, proposed a €500 billion "bazooka" to fight the virus, stabilise the European economy, and protect its jobs while the economy is in the "freezer".[171]
Kristalina Georgieva - 2016 - As IMF managing director organised “emergency financing on a scale [and at a speed] never seen before”[172] - issuing dire economic forecasts[173]
Austan Goolsbee - 2012 - Obama advisor, published on the economics of COVID[174] Fan of heavy COVID-19 spending.[175] "The number one rule of virus economics is that you have to stop the virus before you can do anything about economics."[176]
Christine Lagarde -2017, 2016, 2014, 2013, 2009 - As President of the European Central Bank she spent €1,850 billion on asset purchase program during COVID-19.[177] In joint interview with Klaus Schwab she declared an intent to "vaccinate the whole world".[178]
Stephen Poloz speaking in March 2020.[179]
Stephen Poloz - 2014 - Took over from Mark Carney as Governor of the Bank of Canada. In late March 2020, announced a minimum $5-billion-per-week of market purchases of Government of Canada bonds, “to address strains in the government of Canada debt market and to enhance the effectiveness of all other actions taken so far.”[180] "We have taken several actions to unclog key lending channels, adding over $200 billion of liquidity, or around 10% of Canadian GDP. As I said recently, no one has ever criticized a firefighter for using too much water. When the system demands more liquidity, the central bank must provide it."[181]
Nout Wellink - 2010, 2009 , 2006 - As ex-President of the Central Bank of the Netherlands, in March 2020, was promoting "Coronabonds".[182]
Pierre Wunsch - 2017 - As Governor of the National Bank of Belgium signed off on measures involving a 50 billion euro "financial buffer" that he named a “financial bazooka”.[183]
French Covid debt commission
France’s Prime Minister Jean Castex chose the French Covid debt commission to "steer the nation’s deliberations on the future of public finances in the aftermath of the pandemic." He is not known to have attended the Bilderberg, but 3 of his 10 commissioners have:[184]
Beatrice Weder di Mauro - 2016, Laurence Parisot - 2007, Hélène Rey - 2013
Unproven/Unclear role
Nicolas Berggruen - 2014 - Billionaire funder of various groups including the Berggruen Institute, which has been active in researching COVID-19 as a social change agent[185] and in influencing attitudes and policies about it.[186]
Sigrid Kaag - 2019, 2018 - Dutch diplomat and politician who from 2018 sits on the WHO and World Bank Group's Global Preparedness Monitoring Board
Johanna Rosén - 2017 - Expert on the electrical properties of thin films, including graphene
Peter Brabeck-Letmathe - 2011 - Chairman of Nestlé and on the World Economic Forum Board of Trustees
The “last dictator of Europe”—the only guy who hasn’t aggressively pushed unproven genetic slurries and cattle tags on his people—has once again stated the obvious:
“Coronavirus has its own beneficiaries, billionaires all over the world—this is already a fact—they have significantly increased their fortunes, the gap between the very rich and the rest of the population has noticeably increased. The rich have become even richer, and the poor have become even poorer.
Is this mafia going to give up trillions of its profits? Therefore, they continue to whip up panic, and vaccines become elements of big politics. Real vaccine wars have unfolded in the West. They do not recognize Sputnik V, they treat Sinopharm with caution, at the same time imposing their own product like Pfizer. But in fact, they divide the markets and sort people.”
Lukashenko made the remarks during a State of Belarus-type address before his country’s national assembly. BELTA has a decent writeup.
Credit: Sommerman
Lukashenko nailed it. The only thing we would add is that the “vaccine war”—which is indeed being used to divide up markets and sort people!—is a collaborative effort.
We know this because the Kremlin teamed up with Big Pharma and is excited about creating clot-shot cocktails. It’s out in the open. They openly talk about this.
Working with Big Pharma to achieve a “common goal.”
Anyway. Leader-worship is probably not a great idea in 2022. But Luka certainly knows how to work a crowd.
Please support our ongoing work. _________________ --
'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's crime agency says it shared “red flag indicators” with banks to help them tackle fraudulent applications
By Michael O'Dwyer 2 October 2020 • 3:48pm
Organised criminals are exploiting the Government’s emergency pandemic loan scheme for small businesses, crime investigators have warned.
The National Crime Agency (NCA) said on Friday it had received intelligence that criminals are targeting the Bounce Back Loan Scheme under which banks have approved about £38bn of lending to 1.3m businesses since May.
The agency said it had shared "red flag indicators" with banks lending under the scheme to help them tackle fraudulent applications for loans.
Under the scheme, small businesses can borrow up to £50,000 from commercial lenders at an annual interest rate of 2.5pc.
The Government guarantees 100pc of any losses banks suffer if borrowers fail to repay their bounce back loans.
The crime agency’s statement comes days after it emerged that the Government launched the bounce back scheme despite concerns raised by the British Business Bank, which administers the programme.
Keith Morgan, then chief executive of the British Business Bank, wrote to Alok Sharma, the Business Secretary, warning that the scheme carried "very significant fraud and credit risks".
Mr Morgan said: "The scheme is vulnerable to abuse by individuals and by participants in organised crime."
The bounce back scheme was rushed into place in May as the Government tried to prop up millions of small businesses facing a cash crunch during the Covid-19 lockdown.
Many businesses applying for the loans have found they are ineligible and close to 300,000 applications have been rejected.
An NCA spokesman said: "Our intelligence suggests that the bounce back loan scheme is being exploited, including by organised criminals.
"On the basis of our assessments, we have provided red flag indicators to the banking sector to aid their detection of fraudulent applications.
"We are providing intelligence to assist partner investigations, and we will investigate cases ourselves where there is a serious and organised crime element."
HSBC stopped accepting applications for bounce back loans from new customers this week so that it can deal with a huge backlog of applications.
The bank is also halting the opening of new small business accounts as it ploughs resources into processing loan applications instead.
Taxpayers could be left with a £23bn bill for bad debts under the Government's three main lending schemes, according to accounts published by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) this week.
A Government spokesman said this week that the loan schemes had helped thousands of businesses survive the pandemic and protected millions of jobs.
"We've looked to minimise fraud - with lenders implementing a range of protections including anti-money laundering and customer checks, as well as transaction monitoring controls. Any fraudulent applications can be criminally prosecuted for which penalties include imprisonment or a fine or both," the spokesman said.
Major pharmaceutical companies, including coronavirus vaccine makers Pfizer and Moderna, have been involved in US military biological activities in Ukraine. This was stated by the head of the Russian Armed Forces' radiation, chemical, and biological protection troops, Igor Kirillov, during a briefing in Moscow on Wednesday.
"While socially significant diseases, such as HIV infection, polio, measles, hepatitis, are a priority for Ukrainian healthcare, American customers are interested in completely different ones: [cholera, tularaemia, plague, hantaviruses]," DefMin employee underlined.
Kirillov specified that the facts of working with these pathogens, 'which might be potential components of biological weapons' have been confirmed.
He added that American experts are testing new drugs, 'avoiding international safety standards'.
Earlier, the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry called Russian statements on the creation of biological weapons in Ukraine 'disinformation and provocation'.
The Ukrainian Health Ministry also denied the information about any urgent trail sweeps concerning the military biological program funded by the US Defenсe Department.
Moscow launched a military offensive on Ukraine in late February after recognising the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics' independence (DPR and LPR).
Kiev has denounced the Russian offensive into its territory, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has imposed martial law throughout the country, announcing a general mobilisation.
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