How Fanatics Took Over the World.

BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER   NOVEMBER 15th, 2021. Find Article Here:-

Early in the pandemic, I had been furiously writing articles about lockdowns. My phone rang with a call from a man named Dr. Rajeev Venkayya. He is the head of a vaccine company but introduced himself as former head of pandemic policy for the Gates Foundation.

Now I was listening.

I did not know it then, but I’ve since learned from Michael Lewis’s (mostly terrible) book The Premonition that Venkayya was, in fact, the founding father of lockdowns. While working for George W. Bush’s White House in 2005, he headed a bioterrorism study group. From his perch of influence – serving an apocalyptic president — he was the driving force for a dramatic change in U.S. policy during pandemics.

He literally unleashed hell.

That was 15 years ago. At the time, I wrote about the changes I was witnessing, worrying that new White House guidelines (never voted on by Congress) allowed the government to put Americans in quarantine while closing their schools, businesses, and churches shuttered, all in the name of disease containment.

I never believed it would happen in real life; surely there would be public revolt. Little did I know, we were in for a wild ride…

Last year, Venkayya and I had a 30-minute conversation; actually, it was mostly an argument. He was convinced that lockdown was the only way to deal with a virus. I countered that it was wrecking rights, destroying businesses, and disturbing public health. He said it was our only choice because we had to wait for a vaccine. I spoke about natural immunity, which he called immoral. So on it went.

The more interesting question I had at the time was why this certified Big Shot was wasting his time trying to convince a poor scribbler like me. What possible reason could there be?

The answer, I now realized, is that from February to April 2020, I was one of the few people (along with a team of researchers) who openly and aggressively opposed what was happening.

There was a hint of insecurity and even fear in Venkayya’s voice. He saw the awesome thing he had unleashed all over the world and was anxious to tamp down any hint of opposition. He was trying to silence me. He and others were determined to crush all dissent.

Fat chance. His greatest fears have been realized. The movement against what he did is now global, ferocious, and insuppressible. It’s not going away. It is only going to grow, despite his best efforts. 

This is how it has been for the better part of the last 21 months, with social media and YouTube deleting videos that dissent from lockdowns. It’s been censorship from the beginning. Now we see what happens: the lockdowns have birthed a new movement plus a new way of communicating plus new platforms that are threatening monopoly control the world over. Not only that: political and economic upheaval seem inevitable.

For all the problems with Lewis’s book, and there are plenty, he gets this whole backstory right. Bush came to his bioterrorism people and demanded some huge plan to deal with some imagined calamity. When Bush saw the conventional plan — make a threat assessment, distribute therapeutics, work toward a vaccine — he was furious.

“This is bulls**t,” the president yelled. 

“We need a whole-of-society plan. What are you going to do about foreign borders? And travel? And commerce?”

Hey, if the president wants a plan, he’ll get a plan.

“We want to use all instruments of national power to confront this threat,” Venkayya reports having told colleagues.

“We were going to invent pandemic planning.”

This was October 2005, the birth of the lockdown idea.

Dr. Venkayya began to fish around for people who could come up with the domestic equivalent of Operation Desert Storm to deal with a new virus. He found no serious epidemiologists to help. They were too smart to buy into it. He eventually bumped into the real lockdown innovator working at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico.

His name was Robert Glass, a computer scientist with no medical training, much less knowledge, about viruses. Glass, in turn, was inspired by a science fair project that his 14-year-old daughter was working on.

She theorized (like the cooties game from grade school) that if school kids could space themselves out more or even not be at school at all, they would stop making each other sick. Glass ran with the idea and banged out a model of disease control based on stay-at-home orders, travel restrictions, business closures, and forced human separation.

Crazy right? No one in public health agreed with him but like any classic crank, this convinced Glass even more. 

I asked myself, “Why didn’t these epidemiologists figure it out?” They didn’t figure it out because they didn’t have tools that were focused on the problem. They had tools to understand the movement of infectious diseases without the purpose of trying to stop them.

Genius, right? Glass imagined himself to be smarter than 100 years of experience in public health. One guy with a fancy computer would solve everything! Well, he managed to convince some people, including another person hanging around the White House named Carter Mecher, who became Glass’s apostle.

Please consider the following quotation from Dr. Mecher in Lewis’s book: “If you got everyone and locked each of them in their own room and didn’t let them talk to anyone, you would not have any disease.”

At last, an intellectual has a plan to abolish disease — and human life as we know it too! As preposterous and terrifying as this is — a whole society not only in jail but solitary confinement — it sums up the whole of Mecher’s view of disease. It’s also completely wrong.

Pathogens are part of our world; they are not generated by human contact. We pass them onto each other as the price for civilization, but we also evolved immune systems to deal with them. That’s 9th-grade biology, but Mecher didn’t have a clue.

Jump forward to March 12, 2020. Who exercised the major influence over the decision to close schools, even though it was known at that time that SARS-CoV-2 posed almost no risk to people under the age of 20? There was even evidence that they did not spread COVID-19 to adults in any serious way.

Didn’t matter. Mecher’s models — developed with Glass and others — kept spitting out a conclusion that shutting down schools would drop virus transmission by 80%. I’ve read his memos from this period — some of them still not public — and what you observe is not science but ideological fanaticism in play.

Based on the timestamp and length of the emails, Mecher was clearly not sleeping much. Essentially he was Lenin on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution. How did he get his way?

There were three key elements: public fear, media and expert acquiescence, and the baked-in reality that school closures had been part of “pandemic planning” for the better part of 15 years. The lockdowners, over the course of 15 years, had worn out the opposition. Lavish funding, attrition of wisdom within public health, and ideological fanaticism prevailed.

Figuring out how our expectations for normal life were so violently foiled, how our happy lives were brutally crushed, will consume serious intellectuals for many years. But at least we now have a first draft of history.

As with almost every revolution in history, a small minority of crazy people with a cause prevailed over the humane rationality of multitudes. When people catch on, the fires of vengeance will burn very hot.

The task now is to rebuild a civilized life that is no longer so fragile as to allow insane people to lay waste to all that humanity has worked so hard to build.

Author

Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown. He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture. tucker@brownstone.org

The Biden Administration Rejected an October Proposal for “Free Rapid Tests for the Holidays”.

BY KATHERINE EBAN. 23rd December 2021. Find Article Here:-

With omicron cases spreading like wildfire, the White House is finally taking steps to make free antigen tests available to all. But this fall, Vanity Fair has learned, it dismissed a bold plan to ramp up rapid testing ahead of the holidays. Frustrated experts explain how confusion, distrust, and a single-minded fixation on vaccinating Americans left testing on the back burner for so long.

On October 22, a group of COVID-19 testing experts joined a Zoom call with officials from the Biden administration and presented a strategy for overhauling America’s approach to testing.

The 10-page plan, which Vanity Fair has obtained, would enable the U.S. to finally do what many other countries had already done: Put rapid at-home COVID-19 testing into the hands of average citizens, allowing them to screen themselves in real time and thereby help reduce transmission. The plan called for an estimated 732 million tests per month, a number that would require a major ramp-up of manufacturing capacity. It also recommended, right on the first page, a nationwide “Testing Surge to Prevent Holiday COVID Surge.”

The antigen tests at the center of the plan can detect the virus when patients are at their most contagious. Though less sensitive than polymerase chain reaction (PCR) laboratory tests, which can detect the virus’s genetic material at any stage of infection, antigen tests provide a quick snapshot in time for those seeking assurance that they are safe to travel or won’t accidentally infect vulnerable relatives.

The plan, in effect, was a blueprint for how to avoid what is happening at this very moment—endless lines of desperate Americans clamoring for tests in order to safeguard holiday gatherings, just as COVID-19 is exploding again. Yesterday, President Biden told David Muir of ABC News, “I wish I had thought about ordering” 500 million at-home tests “two months ago.” But the proposal shared at the meeting in October, disclosed here for the first time, included a “Bold Plan for Impact” and a provision for “Every American Household to Receive Free Rapid Tests for the Holidays/New Year.”

Three days after the meeting, on October 25, the COVID-19 testing experts—who hailed from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the Rockefeller Foundation, the COVID Collaborative, and several other organizations—received a back channel communication from a White House official. Their big, bold idea for free home tests for all Americans to avoid a holiday surge, they were told, was dead. That day, the administration instead announced an initiative to move rapid home tests more swiftly through the FDA’s regulatory approval process.

The meeting attendees came away with mixed opinions. “The White House, in baseball terms, was playing small ball,” said Dr. Steven Phillips, a vice president of science and strategy for the Covid Collaborative, a team of high-level experts working to develop consensus recommendations for policy makers. “When it comes to rapid testing, they’re bunting the players along.” But Andrew Sweet, managing director of COVID-19 response and recovery at the Rockefeller Foundation, found the White House “responsive” and believes the meeting laid the groundwork for future announcements.

An administration official who attended the meeting told Vanity Fair that, while everyone present shared the same goal of expanding rapid testing as soon as possible, the plan could not be implemented at that time: “We did not have capacity to manufacture over-the-counter tests at that scale.” The problem, in essence, was twofold: The FDA had authorized only a handful of different home tests, and those it had authorized could not increase manufacturing fast enough.

On December 2, with omicron threatening an imminent wave of new infections, Biden announced a smattering of smaller-scale plans that included requiring insurance companies to reimburse privately insured patients who buy at-home rapid tests, which sell for as much as $35 for a box of two tests—if you can find them amid widespread shortages. Four days after that, White House press secretary Jen Psaki seemed to deride the very idea of free nationwide home tests. “Should we just send one to every American?” she mused sarcastically from the briefing room podium. “Then what happens if you—if every American has one test? How much does that cost, and then what happens after that?”

The fury with which public-health experts greeted Psaki’s comments reflected their longstanding frustration with an administration that, in their view, has put almost all its focus on vaccinating the American public, at the expense of other critical aspects of the response, from getting shots into arms overseas to making high-quality masks widely available. The rapid-test push, in particular, seems to have bumped up against the peculiar challenges of fighting COVID-19 in the 21st-century United States. Difficulties include a regulatory gauntlet intent on vetting devices for exquisite sensitivity, rather than public-health utility; a medical fiefdom in which doctors tend to view patient test results as theirs alone to convey; and a policy suspicion, however inchoate, that too many rapid tests might somehow signal to wary Americans that they could test their way through the pandemic and skip vaccinations altogether. “It’s undeniable that [the administration] took a vaccine-only approach,” said Dr. Michael Mina, a vocal advocate for rapid testing who attended the October White House meeting. The U.S. government “didn’t support the notion of testing as a proper mitigation tool.”

On Tuesday, faced with a terrifying omicron surge, a stampede of holiday travel, and images of Americans waiting in hours-long testing lines from Brooklyn to Miami, Biden finally announced that his administration would do what many experts had been urging since the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic: Give Americans the ability to diagnose themselves. The federal government will launch a website next month where individuals can request free rapid tests that will be mailed to their homes. That plan requires 500 million test kits that the administration has yet to procure.

“The administration has been focused on expanding testing since the very beginning,” Dr. Tom Inglesby, who in January will become senior adviser for testing on the White House COVID-19 response team, told Vanity Fair. “It has always been a major pillar of the approach.” When Biden took office, there were no rapid, at-home COVID tests on the market; there are now 13. And the monthly supply has almost quadrupled since late summer. The administration has invested more than $23 billion on expanding testing, surging manufacturing capacity, and improving genomic sequencing, according to Mara Aspinall, cofounder of the biomedical diagnostics program at Arizona State University.

But the president’s announcement on Tuesday struck many experts as “an exemplar of too little, too late,” as Dr. Eric Topol, director and founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, California, put it in a Substack post on Tuesday. Topol called the plan to make 500 million free rapid tests available sometime next year “totally inadequate,” writing, “We need several billion of these, and have needed them for over a year to help prevent spread, as validated and relied upon in many countries throughout the world.”

“The White House, in baseball terms, was playing small ball. When it comes to rapid testing, they’re bunting the players along.”

Critics say the Biden administration has been slow to act on testing, in part because it saw vaccination as the best pathway out of the pandemic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention assured Americans early this summer that, once vaccinated, they could shed their masks and forgo testing. Those declarations quickly proved untrue as breakthrough infections have risen. “We put all our eggs in the vaccine basket and it’s not enough,” Dr. Jay Wohlgemuth, chief medical officer at Quest Diagnostics, told Vanity Fair.

Three experts who interacted with the White House came to believe that the Biden administration had deprioritized rapid testing, partly out of concern that people would opt for that instead of getting vaccinated. As one expert put it, “It was clear they felt that people who didn’t want to get vaccinated might like no-strings-attached rapid testing.” The White House’s Tom Inglesby said the administration was always committed to both: “In our analysis, they are not competing with each other. They are not zero sum.”

It has fallen to a small but determined group of advocates to argue that rapid testing is an essential strategic tool, and should be pursued as aggressively as vaccinations. Chief among them is Dr. Michael Mina, who until recently worked as an assistant professor of epidemiology and immunology and infectious diseases at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, and as an associate medical director of molecular virology diagnostics at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He is now chief science officer at a Miami-based diagnostic company, eMed.

His journey began as early as January 2020, when he saw clearly that Boston was going to need COVID tests it didn’t have. He sought funding from Brigham and Women’s Hospital to build a test. “They thought it was a joke,” he said of some of the hospital’s pathology officials.

So he went to the Broad Institute, got approval to use its sequencing platform, and helped establish what became a prodigious testing laboratory there. From the Broad, he went back to top Boston hospitals, including Brigham and Women’s, Tufts Medical Center, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, to offer the Broad’s new testing capacity as an additional resource. “The pushback I got was amazing and swift,” he said. There were “pissing contests everywhere,” as the physicians worked to protect their turf running hospital-based tests.

Once Mina began to advocate for rapid home tests, he encountered the same mindset: doctors “trying to guard their domain.” Some doctors had long opposed home testing, even for pregnancy and HIV, arguing that patients who learned on their own about a given condition would not be able to act on the information effectively. Testing, in this view, should be used only by doctors as a diagnostic instrument, not by individuals as a public-health tool for influencing decisions.

A similar view prevailed within the FDA. The agency had approved PCR tests with perfect sensitivity that could tell people for certain whether they were infected with SARS-CoV-2. Those tests, while crucial, were expensive, hard to access, and tended to take days to yield results, meaning that they had little mitigating effect on spread. By contrast, low-cost antigen tests, which patients could administer themselves at home, were less sensitive. And sensitivity is what mattered inside the agency. As one FDA medical device reviewer told Vanity Fair, “We review data. If the data we’re presented with aren’t great, we’re not going to want the public to use that device.”

Mina understood that mentality. That’s why he told the Biden-Harris transition team in late 2020 that the FDA should have a separate, streamlined pathway to approve devices—such as less sensitive at-home tests—that are crucial to public health. “We had rapid tests last summer and fall, but the FDA wouldn’t authorize them,” said Mina. “But they were completely fine with PCR tests giving back results seven days later.” Ultra-accurate tests that take a long time to process have a clinical benefit for treating patients, but they are of no help in deciding if you should go to work or get on a plane that day. “If our goal is defined as public health, every test run last year was practically useless.”

“We put all our eggs in the vaccine basket and it’s not enough.”

Speaking for the administration, Inglesby said of Mina’s idea, “There is a strong scientific consensus in the administration that there should not be a second, lower public health standard for some tests. Not only would this be confusing, but members of the public will use these tests to make very serious decisions for themselves and their families and so they need to meet the same standard.”

Doctors and regulators weren’t the only ones with qualms about rapid tests, which have been generally viewed as unreliable thanks to shaky reviews, bad press over recalls, and widespread confusion over what they can and cannot measure. One study found that the popular Binax Now test was 87% accurate in symptomatic cases and only 71% accurate in asymptomatic cases. According to Mina, however, the tests are “extremely sensitive for very contagious people. When you’re at peak viral load, these tests approach 100 percent sensitivity.”

Many Americans also recall that the Trump White House relied heavily on rapid tests in order to avoid canceling events or making them virtual, only to wind up swarmed with COVID cases. Only later did it turn out that Trump himself had ignored a positive test result and may well have sparked a September 2020 superspreader event in the Rose Garden himself. “That Rose Garden event created so much uncertainty around rapid tests,” says Mina. “It was the worst publicity.” But lost in the uproar was the fact that “the Trump administration tested every day before work and managed to go a full six months without having outbreaks,” he says. “No reporter ever writes about the outbreak that doesn’t happen. It’s not interesting.”

To address the misconception that rapid tests are all but uselessly inaccurate, Mina developed a chart that has made the rounds on social media. It shows that while a PCR test will detect an infection for many more days, rapid tests specifically indicate whether you are actively contagious at the time—a status that can change quickly, which is why it’s necessary to test often if you want to avoid infecting your grandmother at the Christmas party.

As the FDA lumbered along, rejecting antigen tests that inevitably failed to compete for accuracy with PCR tests, rapid home tests became ubiquitous in Europe. Private industry had leapt into the antigen home-testing market, with European governments from Germany to the United Kingdom becoming its biggest customers. “In Germany, you could take one [free] test a week,” said Peer Schatz, managing director of PS Capital Management, a venture fund for clinical diagnostics. “The U.K. was even more liberal. They flooded the market with these tests.”

With roughly 200 different home tests approved in Europe, the price is as low as $1.50 a test, said Schatz. “You go to offices and meetings, you see these tests lying around. It’s a free giveaway, like masks.” Schatz says the prevalence of home tests reflects a different mindset: “I really like the aggressive use of testing and the acceptance of this being a key pandemic tool and embracing the value of information, which tests provide, and accepting some of the weakness.” By contrast, some of the biggest testing companies, from Siemens to Roche, have not had rapid tests authorized by the FDA yet.

The U.S. is not the only country facing a shortage of rapid tests, as omicron sweeps the globe. This month, the British government ran out of rapid tests that it distributed through an official website. In Spain, pharmacy shelves were empty of rapid tests, after demand rose 500 percent in November. In Canada, after provincial governments vowed to distribute millions of rapid tests at pop-up sites, many citizens seeking them went away empty-handed. 

Once the Biden administration came into office, Mina, like many experts, saw an opportunity to transform the nation’s testing infrastructure.

In January, Mina and Dr. Steven Phillips of the COVID Collaborative sent the new administration a 23-page document outlining a national rapid-testing strategy that they argued would enable the country to reopen safely even before the vaccine rollout was complete. It made a case for rapid testing as the most powerful tool to reduce transmission and case counts quickly. But the Biden administration, said Phillips, lacked “the imagination to have an Operation Warp Speed-level program for testing.”

So far, the FDA has authorized only 13 rapid antigen tests. It has also authorized three at-home molecular tests, which have a sensitivity closer to that of a laboratory PCR test.

“If our goal is defined as public health, every test run last year was practically useless.”

One of those molecular tests, Detect, was developed with an $8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health’s Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics initiative. Authorized by the FDA on October 28, it was invented by Dr. Jonathan Rothberg, who set out back in March 2020 to make an affordable at-home COVID test that could detect the virus’s genetic code. The idea was to take a “$25,000 technology and put it into a $50 design,” said Owen Kaye-Kauderer, Detect’s cofounder and chief business officer.

The challenges were immense. The supply chain was so constrained that the start-up had to control all its materials, down to making its own swabs. It also had to raise $110 million without regulatory approval. But Rothberg had a considerable track record. Awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation by President Obama in 2016, he invented the Ion Torrent Next Generation sequencing technology, and the machine on which it runs, which was used in South Africa to first detect and sequence the omicron variant.

To design the at-home test, the Detect team analyzed 2 million separate sequences of the COVID-19 virus and conducted preclinical studies throughout Guilford, Connecticut, where the company is headquartered, testing more than 9,000 townspeople, including firefighters and police officers.

The resulting Detect test is 1,500 times more sensitive than a typical rapid antigen test. “When you get a positive on our tests,” says Rothberg, “you have COVID.”

The starter kit, which comes with the Detect hub and a single test, sells for $75, and additional tests cost $49 each. They went on sale December 15 and swiftly sold out. “Within minutes, we had to limit” the number of tests per order, said Rothberg. “We don’t want any stockpiled. We want people to use it.” The team hopes to get the cost down to roughly $20 per test.

Rothberg and his team view the Detect test as one in an array of tests necessary to end the pandemic. “If you are trying to get 30,000 people into a stadium, rapid antigen tests are great,” said Kaye-Kauderer.

If Detect is part of a promising future, it feels all too distant from the reality today, when many Americans would be glad to get their hands on any test at all. Still, Mina sees the administration’s long-awaited U-turn as a hopeful sign. “Omicron pushed them over the edge,” he said. “We have to admit at every level of government that vaccines are not the end of this.”

China launches nimble satellite capable of taking images three times faster than US counterpart.

By Simina Mistreanu and David Millward 28th December 2021. Find Article Here:-

Beijing launch shows China is catching the US in the global space race.

China launches Beijing 3 satellite CREDIT: Yang Fang, Spacecraft Engineering journal.

A new Chinese satellite equipped with artificial intelligence can grab high-resolution images of large areas up to three times quicker than current US-designed versions, according to scientists involved in the project.

The Beijing-3 can take images of extensive areas sharp enough to identify a military vehicle and any weapon it is carrying, all while rotating at unprecedented speeds of up to 10 degrees per second, claimed a study published in the Chinese peer-reviewed journal Spacecraft Engineering.  

The satellite’s “nimbleness” has enabled it to carry out some tasks previously considered technically impossible, such as capturing the winding, 3,915-mile Yangtze River between the Tibetan plateau and the East China Sea in just one trip from north to south over China, project lead scientist Yang Fang was quoted as saying in the South China Morning Post.

“China started relatively late on agile satellite technology but achieved a large number of breakthroughs in a short period of time,” said Mr Yang. “The level of our technology has reached a world-leading position.”

He described Beijing-3 as two to three times faster than WorldView-4, the most advanced Earth observation satellite developed by the US Lockheed Martin with similar technology.

The study comes amid a backdrop of growing concern in the US that China is rapidly catching up in the space race.

Earlier this month Gen David Thompson, vice chief of space operations for the US Space Force, which was established by the Trump administration, warned Beijing could take the lead by the end of the decade.

“It reflects the fact that Chinese space technology is catching up with the US,” Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard Smithsonian Centre, told the Telegraph.

China launches Beijing-3 satellite CREDIT: Yang Fang, Spacecraft Engineering journal

“This suggests that the US commercial satellite industry will face competition from the Chinese. We can assume that the Chinese military satellites are at least as good.

“Until now the Chinese have been investing a lot of money in space, but rather on the Soviet model. There has been a lot of quantity but not a lot of quality.

“If you thought that the US was sitting pretty as an unchallenged superpower, that was never going to last.”

According to the study, the Chinese satellite was tested in June by performing “an in-depth scan” of a central area of San Francisco Bay.

It captured images totalling 1,467 square miles in 42 seconds, wrote the scientists, who work for DFH Satellite Company, which is part of the Chinese Academy of Space Technology.

The images are 19.6 inches per pixel, which is “sharp enough to identify a military vehicle on the street and tell what type of weapon it might be carrying”, they added.

Commercial satellite WorldView-4 produces images of about 12 inches per pixel. Although other military-grade satellites can capture a similar level of detail to Beijing-3, according to experts, the main technological advance it brings is the area it can image at this resolution and the speed at which it appears to work.

 “I think what makes this satellite so exciting is that it’s using AI technology to pick where it’s going to be and then using the nimbleness of its tracking so it can actually look at things that normal satellites wouldn’t be able to see in a very quick time,” said Quentin Parker, director of the Laboratory for Space Research at the University of Hong Kong.

The challenge for satellite imaging has been that the camera needs to be very still while the satellite rotates because vibrations may blur the images.

But in this experiment, the satellite’s dramatic rotation changed the angle of its camera’s line of sight to the ground, allowing it to capture a larger area than previously managed while achieving a clear image.

In the past few years China has poured billions into developing an ambitious space programme.  

This year, it launched its own space station for the first time and landed a rover on Mars. Beijing wants to put astronauts on the Moon by 2036. It has also tested a number of different hypersonic aircraft, which are harder to detect and counter if they are carrying weapons.

Video: I Am the Last Surviving Prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials.

A Documentary Short by Ashton Gleckman 28th December 2021. Find Article and 15min Video Here:-

This video was originally published in November 2020.

The Story of Benjamin Ferencz, the last living prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials.

Just in his twenties – after landing on the beaches of Normandy, fighting in the Battle of the Buldge, and liberating various Nazi concentration camps – Ben became responsible for prosecuting members of the Einsatzgruppen death units, responsible for the deaths of over one million innocent people during the Nazi invasion of Russia.

‘Endless Boosters’ Will Destroy Immune Function.

Posted by TLB Staff 28th December 2021. Find Article and 22min Video Here:-_

Analysis by Dr. Joseph Mercola

A number of medical experts, scientists and published studies now warn that the COVID shots reprogram your immune system to respond in a dysfunctional manner. Aside from increasing vulnerability to infections, this can also result in autoimmune diseases and cancer.

Pfizer Shot Reprograms Both Arms of Your Immune System

A paper¹ posted May 6, 2021, on the preprint server medRxiv reported that the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID jab “reprograms both adaptive and innate immune responses,” causing immune depletion.

While they confirmed the jab “induced effective humoral and cellular immunity against several SARS-CoV-2 variants,” the shot “also modulated the production of inflammatory cytokines by innate immune cells upon stimulation with both specific (SARS-CoV-2) and nonspecific (viral, fungal and bacterial) stimuli.”

In other words, we’re looking at a horrible tradeoff. You may get some protection against SARS-CoV-2 and its variants, but you’re weakening your overall immune function, which opens the door wide to all sorts of other health problems, from bacterial, fungal and viral infections to cancer and autoimmunity.

After the injection, innate immune cells had a markedly decreased response to toll-like receptors 4, 7 and 8 (TLR4, TLR7, TLR8) ligands, while cytokine responses induced by fungi were stronger. According to the authors, defects in TLR7 have previously been linked to an increased susceptibility to COVID-19 in young males.

People who were “fully vaccinated,” having received two doses of the Pfizer shot, also produced significantly less interferon upon stimulation, and this can hamper the initial innate immune response against the virus.

Repeated Vaccinations and the Risk of Autoimmunity

Pathogenic infections and cancer are but two potential outcomes of this kind of reprogramming. Previous research, for example, has linked defects in the immune system to a higher risk of autoimmune diseases. What’s more, it’s been shown that antigens in vaccines, specifically, can induce this kind of immune system dysfunction.² As reported in the paper in question:³

“Repeated immunization with antigen causes systemic autoimmunity in mice otherwise not prone to spontaneous autoimmune diseases. Overstimulation of CD4+ T cells led to the development of autoantibody-inducing CD4+ T (aiCD4+ T) cell which had undergone T cell receptor (TCR) revision and was capable of inducing autoantibodies.

The aiCD4+ T cell was induced by de novo TCR revision but not by cross-reaction, and subsequently overstimulated CD8+ T cells, driving them to become antigen-specific cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL).

These CTLs could be further matured by antigen cross-presentation, after which they caused autoimmune tissue injury akin to systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Systemic autoimmunity appears to be the inevitable consequence of over-stimulating the host’s immune ‘system’ by repeated immunization with antigen, to the levels that surpass system’s self-organized criticality.”

Fast-forward to mid-May 2021, when a study⁴ in the Journal of Clinical Investigations reported that “SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines induce broad CD4+ T cell responses that recognize SARS-CoV-2 variants and HCoV-NL63.” HCoV-NL63 is a human coronavirus associated with the common cold.

“Interestingly, we observed a 3-fold increase in the CD4+ T cell responses to HCoV-NL63 spike peptides after vaccination,” the authors stated, adding, “Our results suggest that T cell responses elicited or enhanced by SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines may be able to control SARS-CoV-2 variants and lead to cross-protection against some endemic coronaviruses.”

What they did not address was that excessive CD4a+ T cell responses could also result in the development of autoantibodies and autoimmune disease.

COVID Shots May Also Cause More Hazardous Variants

We’ve long known that leaky or nonsterilizing vaccines can trigger the evolution of more hazardous viruses.^5,6,7,8 So far, SARS-CoV-2 variants have mutated into less dangerous versions, which is fortunate, but the risk of the COVID shots creating a “monster” still remains.

In a February 9, 2021, article,⁹ NPR highlighted this risk, stating that “vaccines could drive the evolution of more COVID-19 mutants.” According to NPR science correspondent Richard Harris, “the virus is always mutating. And if one happens to produce a mutation that makes it less vulnerable to the vaccine, that virus could simply multiply in a vaccinated individual.”

The Omicron variant appears to have significant resistance against antibodies produced by the original COVID shots, which is why Omicron infection is being primarily reported in those who have received the injections.

In 2018, Quanta Magazine detailed how vaccines drive the evolution of pathogens.¹⁰ I’ve referenced that article on previous occasions, as have many others. In response, the editor of Quanta Magazine added a “disclaimer” dated December 6, 2021, to the article, stating:

“This article from 2018 discusses how leaky vaccines — vaccines that do not reduce viral replication or transmission to others — can drive the pathogens they target to evolve and become more virulent. These concerns do not apply to COVID-19 vaccines, because COVID-19 vaccines significantly reduce coronavirus replication and transmission, reducing the chance that mutations occur and variants arise …”

That statement is clearly false, as studies have repeatedly shown the COVID shots are in fact leaky. They do not “significantly reduce” viral replication or transmission, as the editor claims. Quite the opposite.

People who have received one or more COVID shots have been found to harbor higher viral loads than the unvaccinated, and Israel (which appears to have the best tracking and monitoring) reports that the worst COVID cases are in those who are fully vaxxed.

December 6, 2021, Newsweek¹¹ reported a COVID outbreak among “fully vaccinated” hospital staff in Spain. After a Christmas dinner with more than 170 fully vaxxed health care workers in attendance, nearly 70 of them tested positive for COVID. Some reported mild symptoms. Daniel Horowitz pointed out the editor’s false note in a December 9, 2021, Blaze post:¹²

“Leaky vaccines are worse than no vaccine at all. That is the unmistakable conclusion one would derive from a May 2018 article in Quanta magazine, a top scientific publication, about the unsuccessful attempts to create vaccines for HIV, malaria, and anthrax that aren’t leaky and don’t run the risk of making the pathogens more dangerous.

Yet now that we are seeing such a microbiological Frankenstein play out in real life and people like Dr. Robert Malone have been citing this article to raise red flags about the leaky COVID shots, Quanta magazine took the unprecedented step of slapping an editor’s note on an article three and a half years later to get people to stop applying it to the leakiest vaccine of all time.”

COVID Shots Stop Working Within a Few Months

A study in the New England Journal of Medicine, published December 9, 2021, also confirms that whatever protection you get from the Pfizer COVID shot is short in duration. As explained by the authors:¹³

“In December 2020, Israel began a mass vaccination campaign against coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) by administering the BNT162b2 vaccine, which led to a sharp curtailing of the outbreak.

After a period with almost no cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection, a resurgent Covid-19 outbreak began in mid-June 2021. Possible reasons for the resurgence were reduced vaccine effectiveness against the delta (B.1.617.2) variant and waning immunity.

We used data on confirmed infection and severe disease collected from an Israeli national database for the period of July 11 to 31, 2021, for all Israeli residents who had been fully vaccinated before June 2021.

We used a Poisson regression model to compare rates of confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection and severe Covid-19 among persons vaccinated during different time periods, with stratification according to age group and with adjustment for possible confounding factors.

Among persons 60 years of age or older, the rate of infection in the July 11-31 period was higher among persons who became fully vaccinated in January 2021 (when they were first eligible) than among those fully vaccinated 2 months later, in March (rate ratio, 1.6 …)

Among persons 40 to 59 years of age, the rate ratio for infection among those fully vaccinated in February (when they were first eligible), as compared with 2 months later, in April, was 1.7 … Among persons 16 to 39 years of age, the rate ratio for infection among those fully vaccinated in March (when they were first eligible), as compared with 2 months later, in May, was 1.6 …

The rate ratio for severe disease among persons fully vaccinated in the month when they were first eligible, as compared with those fully vaccinated in March, was 1.8 … among persons 60 years of age or older and 2.2 … among those 40 to 59 years of age …

These findings indicate that immunity against the delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 waned in all age groups a few months after receipt of the second dose of vaccine.”

Two Doses Aren’t Enough

Earlier this year, vaccine makers and health authorities said the shots were about 95% effective and if enough people got the shots, normalcy would be restored. We now know that was a false promise. The goal post was moved back with the emergence of Delta and then Omicron, for which we’re now told we need a third booster.

December 13, 2021, Reuters¹⁴ reported that British scientists have concluded “two-dose COVID-19 vaccine regimens do not induce enough neutralizing antibodies against the Omicron coronavirus variant,” and that “increased infections in those previously infected or vaccinated may be likely.”

‘Just Deal With’ Booster Shots, Fauci Says

When in mid-December 2021, Dr. Anthony Fauci was asked if Americans should expect annual COVID boosters, he replied in the affirmative, saying that Americans will “just have to deal with” the prospect of getting boosters at regular intervals.¹⁵ So, in essence, Fauci wants us to accept that booster deficiency is the reason why the COVID-19 “pandemic” continues.

Clearly, that is not the case. The real reason COVID is still an issue is because Fauci and the medical establishment have suppressed viable early treatments. If early treatment was the norm, COVID would rapidly become a distant memory.As predicted over a year ago, we’re now on an injection treadmill with no end in sight, and every single dose carries the risk of serious side effects, up to and including permanent disability and death. The only scientifically sound way out of this failed experiment is to stop. No more boosters.

Instead, the captured U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted emergency use authorization to novel gene transfer technologies that don’t work like conventional vaccines in that they don’t prevent infection and spread, thus creating an evil cycle of new vaccine-resistant variants. As demonstrated by James Lyons-Weiler (in a now broken weblink), the more we vaccinate, the higher the COVID caseload.

Weiler’s graph looks very much like that in a September 30, 2021, study¹⁶ in the European Journal of Epidemiology, which found that the higher the vaccination rate in a given area, the higher the COVID case rate.

Dr. Chris Martenson discusses this finding in the video below. As noted by Martenson, “the line goes the wrong way,” meaning the more heavily “vaccinated” a population is, the worse things get.

As predicted over a year ago, we’re now on an injection treadmill with no end in sight, and every single dose carries the risk of serious side effects, up to and including permanent disability and death. The only scientifically sound way out of this failed experiment is to stop. No more boosters.

Fortunately, it seems most Americans are starting to catch on, and so far, the fearmongering around Omicron has not resulted in a rush for boosters.¹⁷ According to an Axios/Ipsos poll conducted December 10 through December 13, 2021, 67% of unvaccinated respondents said Omicron makes no difference in their decision of whether to get vaccinated; 19% said it makes them more likely while 11% said it makes them less likely to get the shot.

Among respondents who already had received one or two doses, 59% said Omicron makes no difference in their decision to get a third dose; 36% said it makes them more likely and 5% said it makes them less likely to get it.

Considering the shots have been shown to deregulate your immune function, it would be wise to “just say no” to further boosters. Should you develop symptoms of SARS-CoV-2 infection, remember there are safe and effective early treatment protocols, including the I-MASK+¹⁸ and I-MATH+,¹⁹ protocols, which are available for download on the COVID Critical Care website in multiple languages. Other protocols that have great success are:

• The AAPS protocol
• Tess Laurie’s World Council for Health protocol
• America’s Frontline Doctors
• Dr. Peter McCullough’s Ambulatory Treatment of COVID-19

This is a load of information to review, especially if you are fatigued and sick with COVID or have a family member struggling. After reviewing all of these protocols, I believe the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance’s protocol is among the easiest to follow. Below is a summary of that protocol, with minor amendments.

The UK Online Safety Act – An Act of Betrayal

By IAIN DAVIS 7th December 2021. Find Article Here:-

The Online Safety Bill (OSB) has been presented to the public as an attempt to protect children from online grooming and abuse and to limit the reach of terrorist propaganda.

This, however, does not seem to be its primary focus. The real objective of the proposed Online Safety Act (OSA) appears to be narrative control.

In order to understand where the legislation is heading, first we have to interpret it. Even seasoned legal experts have struggled to get to grips with it. For a reasonably voluminous piece of legislation (the Bill alone runs to 134 pages), it is almost completely devoid of any relevant definitions.

The proposed Act, as it currently stands in Bill form, is an abstract jumble of ill-defined and seemingly meaningless terms, requiring practically limitless legal interpretation before anyone can even begin to consider what it means. A thorough breakdown of this mess has been attempted by CyberLeagle:

The draft Online Safety Bill is nothing if not abstract […] [it] resolutely eschews specifics […] The detailing of the draft Bill’s preliminary design is to be executed in due course by secondary legislation, with Ofcom [broadcasting regulator] guidance and Codes of Practice to follow.

In other words, the OSB is full of references to legal concepts and terms which no-one can decipher—including the Members of Parliament who will vote on it. Once it becomes law, it will then be adapted through secondary legislation and Ofcom regulation, as yet unwritten.

Unless stopped, MPs will be creating a law that has no defined parameters. This will allow the Government to insert whatever objectives they wish after it is enacted, as they have done with the Coronavirus Act.

The use of secondary legislation to give effective meaning to the OSA will greatly reduce parliamentary scrutiny.

MPs can reject secondary legislation but they can’t amend it. Therefore, the scope of the OSB can be continually amended and subsequently resubmitted until the Government gets whatever it wants.

This is a complete betrayal of the democracy most people imagine they live in. It is difficult to envisage how the opacity of the OSB is anything other than deliberate. It suggests a plan to hide legislation from scrutiny before it is made law.

This raises the suspicion that the Government knew that openly stating their full intentions for what will presumably become the Online Safety Act (OSA) would elicit stiff opposition from Parliament and the public. It appears the Government has consequently attempted to obscure that intent.

However, we can still discern the Government’s objectives if we consider both the content of the OSB, the arguments presented in support of it, and the aims of those making them. When we do, what is revealed is so deeply undemocratic that it lends further credence to the view that this legislation has been misrepresented to Parliament.

All we can hope is that MPs will inform themselves and try to understand the nature of this dictatorial bill before they pass it into law. If they don’t yet understand how pernicious the proposed Act is, they need their constituents to inform them. 

The Online Safety Act — A Wholly Unconvincing Argument

In the OSB Explanatory Notes, the Government states:

The Online Safety Bill establishes a new regulatory regime to address illegal and harmful content online, with the aim of preventing harm to individuals.

We are immediately faced with two separate, undefined concepts: illegal content and harmful content. While illegal content is also harmful content, harmful content is not necessarily illegal content and is supposedly distinct from it. However, we should note that, for the purposes of the proposed Act, the aim with regard to sanctioning both “illegal” and “harmful” content appears to be one and the same: preventing harm to individuals.

This will become crucial later on. Please bear it in mind as we progress.

Leaving aside the lack of definition, we find that three subcategories of harmful content are covered in the OSB: illegal content, content that is harmful to children, and content that is harmful to adults.

There are also two types of services in scope of the legislation. User-to-user services means the social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter; search engines means Google, Bing, etc. We are also told that some of these online service providers will meet the threshold for being a Category 1 service. That threshold isn’t defined.

We then get to the claimed justification for the imminent Online Safety Act:

The prevalence of the most serious illegal content and activity online is unacceptable, and it threatens the United Kingdom’s national security and the physical safety of children.

The Government claims that, under the proposed Act, it will be illegal content and activity that becomes unacceptable. This is clarified further as the Government states that the regulator will have:

Powers in relation to terrorism content and child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA) content.

This, then, suggests itself as the content which the Government considers “illegal”, as indeed it undoubtedly should be. In regard to potential harmful content, the Government states:

The Bill also imposes duties on such providers in relation to the protection of users’ rights to freedom of expression and privacy. Providers of user-to-user services which meet specified thresholds (“Category 1 services”) are subject to additional duties in relation to content that is harmful to adults.

In addition to illegal content, the Government claims that the major social media platforms will also have—at this stage unspecified—“duties” in relation to content that is deemed to be “harmful to adults”. The Government claims it will also protect freedom of expression (including free speech). 

As we shall see, this is a self-contradictory claim by the Government. The duties that will be imposed by this legislation will obliterate online freedom of speech and expression.

This has caused consternation among some legal experts. Ultimately, the OSB states that some of this content harmful to adults must be taken down by the user-to-user services. What’s more, the OSB creates a powerful role for the responsible Secretary of State (as advised by the relevant Ministry), who will effectively decree what content is to be taken down.

Legal professionals have struggled to reconcile how this can possibly be done for content that is not illegal, while protecting important freedoms. CyberLeagle notes:

The Secretary of State is able (under a peculiar regulation-making power that on the face of it is not limited to physical or psychological harm) to designate harassing content (whether or not illegal) as priority content harmful to adults […] Content is non-priority content harmful to adults if its nature is such that ‘there is a material risk of the content having, or indirectly having, a significant adverse physical or psychological impact on an adult of ordinary sensibilities’ […] [T]he ‘non-priority content harmful to adults’ definition […] appears to have no discernible function in the draft Bill […]  if it does have an effect of that kind, it is difficult to see what that could be intended to be.

Perhaps CyberLeagle can see it but just can’t believe it. There is no commitment in the OSB to protect freedom of expression or speech. Non-priority content “harmful to adults” and priority content “harmful to adults” are indistinguishable in the wording of the Bill, and both are treated the same as “illegal content”. Once this is understood, the intent of the OSB becomes evident. 

Before we address the touted excuse that this legislation is needed to tackle online child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA)—and it is a mere excuse—we first need to be clear about what the UK Government means by national security. It does not just mean terrorism.

National security is a broad umbrella term for a whole raft of policy areas. Of course, it is not defined in the offered Bill. We must look elsewhere.

In the 2018 National Security Capability Review, the term covered terrorism, extremism and instability, the erosion of the rules-based international order, the undermining of democracy and “consensus”; technology, technological development, cybersecurity, the economy, the financial system, public health and the environment (climate change). This is by no means an exhaustive list, but you get the idea of what national security means in government circles.

Therefore, the aim of the OSB is to prevent illegal activity online—but that activity refers to anything which the Government judges to pose a threat relevant to any of these national security policy areas. To reiterate, the aim of the legislation is to treat “illegal” and “harmful” content identically.

With regard to CSEA, the Government has used the propaganda technique known as card-stacking. It has presented something everyone can agree upon—that child abuse is wicked—in order to induce people, including our representatives in Parliament, to believe that the legislation is necessary. It most certainly is not.

Everyone, other than paedophiles, wants to protect children online. The OSA, if enacted, will do nothing to assist in this effort.

Paedophiles already have been and are being prosecuted for online abuses in increasing numbers. Law enforcement already has the legal power and technological capability to detect and arrest online paedophiles. Resource shortages are the problem, and the approaching Act does not address them.

The UK Government freely admits that online child sexual abuse and exploitation (CSEA) overwhelmingly occurs on the dark web. Yet the supposed solution advanced in the OSB is to place a responsibility upon the social media giants of the surface web (unhidden internet) to police everyone’s social media activity.

If the Government is so worried about child grooming on the Category 1 social media platforms, then a sensible start to tackling the problem would be for it to insist that Facebook—by far the biggest platform—remove its dark web site. As long as it remains online, child predators will continue to access Facebook via the dark web route. This makes catching them much harder for law enforcement. Again, the OSB offers nothing on this front to address something which genuinely is an unacceptable risk.

The Government claims that the legislation is intended to tackle online CSEA—yet it doesn’t. Government has avoided taking the steps that would work towards that goal, and has instead simply appended a vacuous claim to the narrative that it is  selling. The Government is offering child protection, but delivering censorship.

The other supposed no-brainer of a talking point used to market the OSB is the assertion that it is designed to tackle terrorist propaganda and so-called online radicalisation. To date, the British state has shown little interest in removing real terrorist propaganda, which has been widely circulated online for nearly two decades. YouTube (owned by Google) is among the many platforms that openly host terrorist-related material.

The Government and its agencies have long had both the authority and the ability to remove online terrorist incitement, but haven’t. To lobby us now that they must to do something about it is not credible. Clearly, this is just another sales technique to promote the legislation.

Following the murder of Sir David Amess MP, the political class was quick to call for “David’s Law”—as the Online Safety Bill has been dubbed—to tackle the alleged problem (22:18) of people using the internet anonymously. This is based upon the spurious idea that it is internet use which leads to radicalisation. There is no evidence to support that claim.

The UK Government is presenting us with an absurd notion. It seems to be suggesting not only that paedophiles and terrorists will migrate to using the surface web—instead of what is, for them, the much safer dark web; but that they will also meekly register under their real names if told to do so by the authorities.

There is no reason to believe that the OSB is designed to stop the sharing of either terrorist or CSEA content. It won’t stop criminals of any kind from using the dark web to access illegal content or to commit crimes on social media. This is especially the case while the social media platforms maintain the means to enable terrorists and child abusers to do so undetected. Nor will it force criminals of any kind to suddenly to obey the law.

The Government could potentially stop the sharing of terrorist-related content on platforms like YouTube, but to do so requires enforcement. There has been none to date, so it isn’t at all clear how this proposed legislation will end such dissemination.

The Online Safety Act — The Entirely Dependent Regulator

The UK Government’s Online Harms White Paper, which led to the Online Safety Bill, stated that an independent regulator would be appointed. The OSB speaks of the same office, and Britain’s broadcasting regulator Ofcom was subsequently appointed as the Online Safety Regulator. Despite the claim in the adjective, Ofcom is in no way independent from government, nor from a plethora of commercial interests.

Not only is Ofcom “directly accountable” to the UK Parliament, it is funded by many of the broadcasters it currently regulates and it is “sponsored” by the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), among other government agencies and departments.

Ofcom is currently the regulator for the video-sharing platforms (VSPs) where terrorist-related material is openly hosted. Under the OSB, it is to receive additional counter-terrorism powers, but, since it hasn’t shown any inclination to use those it already possesses, why should anyone imagine it is about to start wielding any new ones?

When we consult the Ofcom board’s declared register of interests, any tenuous notion of independence evaporates. Of the 40 board members in all (spread between Ofcom’s executive, content and advisory boards), eleven have financial ties to the BBC and 26 are either currently, or were formerly, in government roles.

Other interests represented by Ofcom board members include Google, GlaxoSmithKline (via the Wellcome Trust), Akamai (the global cybersecurity and content hosting giant), numerous media consultancies and other commercial enterprises who stand to profit from Ofcom “regulations”.

The only people Ofcom appear to be independent from are the public. This is crucial, because despite the allegation that the OSA will impose a duty on the tech giants to operate safely, it is actually about taking down individual pieces of content posted by ordinary users.

During the DCMS Joint Parliamentary Scrutiny Committee hearings, written evidence was submitted from the DCMS, which stated:

The Bill is entirely centred on systems and processes, rather than individual pieces of content […] The focus on robust processes and systems rather than individual pieces of content has a number of key advantages […] a focus on content would be likely to place a disproportionate burden on companies […] companies would be incentivised to remove marginal content. The focus on processes and systems protects freedom of expression […] The regulator will not make decisions on individual pieces of content.

Yet, while the Government maintains that it is not attempting to establish control over content, the overwhelming focus of the text of the OSB is upon nothing but content. The Governments appear to be foisting the responsibility for policing the internet onto the social media giants. Simultaneously, the Government will define the “duties” which will determine how the the “user-to-user” services are to manage that content and to “take down” content that the Government doesn’t approve of.

The Online Safety Act — How the Censorship will Work

Section 98 of the Online Safety Bill (OSB) discusses the duties pertaining to disinformation. The concept of disinformation is mentioned solely in this brief section. Yet this is the primary focus of the whole Bill. It does nothing to combat either CSEA or terrorism—but it does establish the basis for censorship of cyberspace.

The Government will identify the sorts of disinformation that preoccupy it by means of secondary legislation and by stipulating Ofcom regulations at a later date. But first, the OSB attempts to bury this draconian censorship agenda in plain sight.

The OSB leaves disinformation and misinformation entirely undefined. Instead, these concepts are enveloped by the term content that is harmful to adults.

Section 98 of the OSB places a duty on Ofcom, following the obtaining of advice from Ofcom’s own newly-established internal committee, to specify how user-to-user and search engine services should “deal with disinformation and misinformation”. Then, Section 98 (4) (b) notes that Ofcom has a power “under section 49 to require information of a kind mentioned in subsection (4) of that section, so far as relating to disinformation and misinformation”.

The OSB doesn’t mention either the term disinformation or misinformation in Section 49 (4) at all. It appears to refer to nothing more than an Ofcom duty to require services for the purposes of preparing an annual transparency report. However, Section 49 (4) (e) stipulates that service providers must also provide:

Information about systems and processes which a provider uses to deal with illegal content, content that is harmful to children and content that is harmful to adults, including systems and processes for identifying such content, and — (i) in the case of a user-to-user service, taking down such content.

References to claimed disinformation and misinformation are tucked neatly away inside the broader notion of content that is harmful to adults. This leaves the reader, such as scrutinising MPs, wrongly believing that disinformation isn’t within scope. In reality, that is what “taking down such content” specifically refers to.

Section 137 (2) clarifies the position as follows:

References in this Act to “taking down” content are to any action that results in content being removed from a user-to-user service or being permanently hidden so users of the service cannot encounter it (and related expressions are to be construed accordingly).

Once the Online Safety Act is established in law, the Secretary of State or Ofcom can, at their discretion, label the types of content they don’t like as content that is harmful to adults. Category 1 providers will then have a duty to establish systems to take down such content.

Section 46 is entitled Meaning of “content that is harmful to adults”, etc. The Secretary of State has complete control over the censorship agenda. Pursuant to Section 46 (2) (b), any content that is claimed to be disinformation or misinformation will be targeted for removal wherever it is:

[o]f a description designated in regulations made by the Secretary of State as priority content that is harmful to adults.

This confirms that the Government intends to use secondary legislation to list the topics for censorship after the OSA is enacted. In addition, the big tech platforms will also be empowered to police freedom of speech. Section 46 (3) declares that content is also harmful to adults whenever the provider:

[…] has reasonable grounds to believe that the nature of the content is such that there is a material risk of the content having, or indirectly having, a significant adverse physical or psychological impact on an adult of ordinary sensibilities.

If the user-to-user service doesn’t want to breach the regulations, it will have to establish systems which err on the side of caution, pre-emptively banning content. These services will be compelled to ban and/or shadowban (make invisible to searches) all content which they suspect the Secretary of State or Ofcom might disapprove of.

Though it is comprehensively obscured within the OSB, there is no doubt as to the objective. The House of Lords Communications Committee expressed concern about the censorship outlined in the OSB. In response, the Government said:

Where harmful misinformation and disinformation does not cross the criminal threshold, the biggest platforms (Category 1 services) will be required to set out what is and is not acceptable on their services, and enforce the rules consistently. If platforms choose to allow harmful content to be shared on their services, they should consider other steps to mitigate the risk of harm to users, such as not amplifying such content through recommendation algorithms or applying labels warning users about the potential harm.

None of this is expressly stated in the OSB. The proposed Online Safety Act makes the sharing of information, such as the article you are currently reading, subject to state censorship via the major social media platforms. The decision as to whether or not it is deemed disinformation or misinformation is entirely that of the Government, of its appointed arm’s-length quango—Ofcom—or of multinational corporations.

All of the powers in the Bill allegedly designed to tackle illegal content are equally applicable to content which does not cross the criminal threshold. The determination of the potential harms caused will also consider whether the offending content threatens the United Kingdom’s national security. 

Our ability to question the consensus on climate change, asking questions about vaccine safety and efficacy, or questioning government fiscal policy are all to be scrutinised by the state and its industry partners. If they don’t like the look of it, they will take it down.

There is nothing good about this legislation. No government should have the power simply to censor the people and stop them freely sharing information and ideas. Such a government has no interest in representative or any other kind of democracy. It is a tyranny. Yet that is the intent of the proposed Online Safety Act.

It is imperative everyone who reads this contact their MP and politely but firmly demand that they vote against this dictatorial legislation. This kind of bill makes a mockery of the lives lost that we have just remembered with such reverence.

The Online Safety Act exemplifies what they fought against and died to protect us from. It is an act of betrayal.

What to do about the UK’s unvaccinated? No 10’s Covid dilemma.

By Rowena Mason 28th December 2021. Find Article Here:-

Analysis: growing frustration at vaccine refusers has crept into ministers’ speeches recently.

The government’s approach to getting people to take up the offer of vaccination has been almost all carrot and no stick so far. Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA

A growing sense of frustration with people who have not been vaccinated against Covid has been creeping into the speeches of senior government figures from Sajid Javid to Boris Johnson in recent weeks.

The health secretary has accused those who have chosen not to take up the offer of free vaccination of taking up hospital beds, damaging society and potentially harming their families as well as themselves.

The prime minister also began rolling the pitch for a possibly tougher approach towards the unvaccinated when he spoke of the need for a “national conversation” about how the NHS would cope with the Omicron wave and further new variants.

“I don’t believe we can keep going indefinitely with non-pharmaceutical interventions, restrictions on people’s way of life, just because a substantial proportion of the population still, sadly, has not got vaccinated,” he said.

Given the libertarian instincts of today’s Tory party, No 10 has followed the path of allowing people to choose freely whether or not to get vaccinated, unless they want to work in the NHS and the care sector. A mandatory vaccination policy would almost certainly result in a challenge to Johnson’s authority from his backbenches. Those same MPs, however, are also opposed to national restrictions that hit all of society to prevent the NHS from being overwhelmed.

If another Covid wave were to push the health service to the point of collapse, Downing Street would face two possibilities: lock down everyone or reserve the harshest restrictions for the 5 million people who have declined to be vaccinated in the hope it would ease the burden on hospitals and slow the spread of an outbreak. Javid has estimated that 90% of the most severely ill in hospital at the moment are unvaccinated.

Some countries have already decided that choosing not to be vaccinated should carry a cost, given the impact on wider society of Covid spreading more quickly among the unvaccinated and the greater potential for hospitalisation.

Greece and France went down the Covid passport route as early as July. Israel and Denmark also adopted pass systems early, phased them out, and then brought them back when infections were surging.

In Italy, proof of vaccination, recovery or a negative test has been required for many indoor public places since October and a new super-green pass was added in December that is available only to people who have been vaccinated or recovered from Covid in the last six months.

All moves by the UK government so far to encourage vaccination have been firmly rooted in persuasion and “nudge” theory. It has been almost all carrot and no stick, even when it comes to Covid passports. Ministers insist they should not be called “vaccine passports” because people will be allowed to show a recent lateral flow test result instead.

The approach of encouragement is continuing, with a campaign texting everyone to “get boosted now”. But there also now appears to be an attempt to introduce an element of social stigma to vaccine refusal, and a move to suggest it is people’s civic responsibility to get jabbed.

No 10’s view is that there is still scope to drive up vaccination rates further – particularly when it comes to the booster – and that this is preferable to using vaccination status as a dividing line. Almost 90% of over 12s have now had a first dose, 82% have their second and 56.5% are boosted.

One major missing piece of the puzzle, currently under consideration, is a strategy that gets to the bottom of why 5 million people remained unvaccinated, especially those in communities with an ingrained distrust of authority.

No 10 even turned to an artificial intelligence (AI) company earlier in the year to determine the causes of vaccine hesitancy, but Whitehall sources acknowledge there is still a lack of understanding about how many of the unvaccinated remain so because of entrenched anti-vax ideology, misconceptions that could be turned around, a lack of time or transport to get to vaccine centres, or just apathy.

One option being weighed is the idea of greater personal outreach – learning from the personal touch of GPs who have phoned all their most vulnerable vaccine refusers. Ministers are even thinking about teams of door-to-door vaccinators who could deliver shots on the spot.

If this last push were not to work, however, and further restrictions are deemed necessary, Johnson may have to confront a difficult choice, unpalatable to his party, about whether everyone – the vaccinated and the unvaccinated – are all in it together any more.

Study Destroys Justification for Vaccine Mandates.

By Aaron Siri October 19th 2021. Find Article Here:-

CDC and State Health Department scientists find similar or higher viral load of Covid-19 virus among the vaccinated as compared to the unvaccinated.

Civil and individual rights are only meaningful if they continue to protect individuals during difficult situations.  It is why the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of neo-Nazis to march through Jewish neighborhoods.  It is why it upheld the right to burn the American flag.  Protecting these rights when it is difficult protects us all.  It assures that government will not erode these civil and individual rights, including during a pandemic. 

The CDC and State Health Department scientists just released a study that again reflects the dangers of making civil and individual rights contingent on a medical procedure.  This study, titled Shedding of Infectious SARS-CoV-2 Despite Vaccination, reviewed swab specimens from 36 counties in Wisconsin from the end of June to the end of July 2021.   They then checked the viral load of SARS-CoV-2 in each swab. 

What did they find?  High viral load in “158 of 232 unvaccinated (68%…) and 156 of 225 fully vaccinated (69%…) symptomatic individuals.”  Meaning there was effectively no difference between the symptomatic vaccinated and unvaccinated in terms of who was carrying, and therefore spreading, the virus. 

But the study does not end there.  It also found high viral loads in “7 of 24 unvaccinated (29%…) and 9 of 11 fully vaccinated asymptomatic individuals (82%…).” Meaning, among asymptomatic individuals, the vaccinated had a higher percentage with a high viral load.  As I explained in an interview with Shannon Bream, this reflects that the unvaccinated that catch the virus are more likely to be at home in bed with symptoms, while the vaccinated that catch the virus are more likely to have no symptoms and hence continue their daily routine unknowingly spreading the virus. 

These findings are depicted in the following chart.  Note that the lower the “N1 Ct value” the higher the viral load (and that a team at Oxford concluded that an N1 Ct value over 24 should not be taken to indicate the presence of any actual virus):

Reflecting that the vaccine does not prevent spread is a paper out of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies titled Increase in COVID-19 are unrelated to level of vaccination across 68 countries and 2,497 counties in the United States.  It found that, “the trend line suggests a marginally positive association such that countries with higher percentage of population fully vaccinated have higher COVID-19 cases per 1 million people.  Notably, Israel with over 60% of their population fully vaccinated had the highest COVID-19 cases per 1 million people in the last 7 days.”  The paper had a similar finding for U.S. counties, wherein higher vaccination did not equate to less cases. 

What these papers really found is that the CDC’s justification for crushing civil and individual rights has disappeared.  Federal health authorities crushed those rights based on the argument that the Covid-19 vaccine will prevent the spread of the virus.  The viral load study, with nothing more, yet again shows this to be false.  It is one in a line of studies with similar findings, including:

• A CDC study of an outbreak in Barnstable County, Massachusetts which found that 74% of those infected were fully vaccinated for Covid-19 and that the vaccinated had on average more virus in their nose than the unvaccinated who were infected. 
• An Tel-Aviv University study of a SARS-CoV-2 outbreak among 42 patients in a hospital setting, “39 were fully vaccinated,” the “index case was … fully vaccinated,” “all transmission between patients and staff occurred between masked and vaccinated individuals, as experienced in an outbreak from Finland,” and that this “outbreak exemplifies the high transmissibility of the SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant among twice vaccinated and masked individuals.”

Will our public health authorities admit their mistake?  Will they admit that their justification for why students had to be expelled and employees fired does not exist because these products do not prevent the spread?  Dictators and tyrants are often born through a genuine desire to do good – but when their approach fails, and relinquishing power would cause a self-inflicted wound, illiberalism often follows.  The CDC appears incapable of admitting it was wrong lest it too cause a self-inflicted wound on its reputation. 

The lesson here is not that health authorities should never make mistakes.  They will.  It happens.  The lesson is that civil and individual rights should never be contingent upon a medical procedure.  Everyone that wants to get vaccinated and boosted is free to do so.  But nobody should be coerced to partake in any medical procedure.