The report by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Small Business stated:

“The Federal government has funded, developed, and promoted entities that aim to demonetize news and information outlets because of their lawful speech.”

The government’s actions fueled “a censorship ecosystem” that suppressed “individuals’ First Amendment rights” and “the ability of certain small businesses to compete online.”

The report focused on the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), which promoted and funded “tech start-ups and other small businesses in the disinformation detection space … with domestic censorship capabilities.”

The “fact-checking” firms named in the report include the International Fact-Checking Network — owned by the Poynter Institute — and NewsGuard.

The International Fact-Checking Network, established in 2015, has received funding from another State Department-affiliated group, the National Endowment for Democracy — and from Google, the Open Society Foundations and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

According to the House report, the federal government “assisted the private sector in detecting alleged MDM [misinformation-disinformation-malinformation] for moderation” and “worked with foreign governments with strict internet speech laws,” including European Union member states and the United Kingdom, to censor speech.

The report determined that the GEC and the National Endowment for Democracy violated international restrictions by “collaborating with fact-checking entities” to assess the content of domestic media outlets.

The “fact-checking” operations targeted independent media outlets, and as a result, “the scales are tipped in favor of outlets which express certain partisan narratives rather than holding the government accountable.”

Whether the State Department’s actions rise to “unconstitutional violations of the First Amendment is currently before the courts,” the report stated.

The State Department and several GEC officials are defendants in Murthy v. Missouri, a lawsuit alleging the Biden administration colluded with social media to censor free speech.

Children’s Health Defense (CHD) and its chairman on leave, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., are plaintiffs in Kennedy v. Biden, a similar lawsuit that last year was consolidated with Murthy v. Missouri.

The Poynter Institute is a defendant in another censorship lawsuit, CHD v. Meta, that CHD filed against Facebook’s parent company.

NewsGuard partnered with CDC, WHO to censor online content

According to the report, NewsGuard used money it received from the GEC and the U.S. Department of Defense to fund efforts to lower the advertising revenue “of businesses purported to spread MDM.”

“A system that rates the credibility of press is fatally flawed as it is subject to the partisan lens of the assessor, making the ratings unreliable,” the report states.

NewsGuard leveraged taxpayer dollars to develop Misinformation Fingerprints, a product that “catalogues what it determines to be the most prominent falsehoods and ‘misinformation narratives’” circulating online, “essentially outsourcing the U.S. government’s perception of fact to NewsGuard,” the report states.

NewsGuard later partnered with dozens of companies, organizations, universities and media outlets, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Office of the Surgeon General and the World Health Organization (WHO).

“During the pandemic, the WHO enlisted NewsGuard for its input, including regular reports, on which COVID-19 narratives it determined to be misinformation were prevalent online,” the report states. “The WHO then contacted social media companies and search engines asking them to remove this content.”

‘Nobody wanted’ fact-checkers until ‘actual truths started getting out’

Tim Hinchliffe, publisher of The Sociable, told The Defender, “These so-called ‘fact-checkers’ are not in the business of actually checking facts. They are in the business of controlling narratives … Nobody wanted or needed these organizations until actual truths started getting out.”

Catherine Austin Fitts, founder and publisher of the Solari Report and former U.S. assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development, told The Defender the government increasingly relies on censorship to promote its favored narratives.

“They need to institute more and more censorship,” Fitts said. “It’s hard to refute the gaslighting that flows from this imagination factory.”

Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., professor of international law at the University of Illinois, told The Defender he wasn’t surprised that the State Department is “working to censor those who disagree with U.S. government policies and their globalist agenda.”

The report recommends that no federal funds “should be used to grow companies whose operations are designed to demonetize and interfere with the domestic press” and that federal agencies “should not be outsourcing their perception of fact to speech-police organizations subject to partisan bias.”

GEC also faces the loss of its government funding. According to the Washington Examiner, “A provision through the annual State Department appropriations bill, which passed the House this summer and will be negotiated in the Senate, aims to ban future checks to the GEC.”

But for Boyle, this is not enough. He said the State Department has, “at a minimum,” committed “the federal crime of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government.”

Censorship ‘a pendulum that swings both ways’

The Gateway Pundit last week reported on additional links between the International Fact-Checking Network, other “fact-checking” firms and Big Tech.

In 2015, Poynter partnered with Google News Lab, which earlier that year, helped establish First Draft News. Active until 2022, First Draft was a consortium of social media verification groups that shared methods for combating “fake news.”

Another First Draft founder, fact-checking firm Bellingcat, also received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy.

First Draft was previously led by Claire Wardle, Ph.D., a Brown University professor who, according to “Twitter Files” released last year, advised the Biden administration on COVID-19 “misinformation” — despite having no science or medical credentials.

In 2016, Poynter and the International Fact-Checking Network partnered with First Draft “to tackle common issues, including ways to streamline the [news] verification process.” Other partners included Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, ABC News, NBC News and BBC News.

In 2017, Google News Lab partnered with the International Fact-Checking Network “to dramatically increase the searchable output of fact-checkers worldwide, expand fact-checking to new markets and support fact-checking beyond politics, such as in sports, health and science.” The following year, Poynter acquired PolitiFact.com.

Google was also one of the original funders of The Trust Project, a consortium of news organizations that developed eight “trust indicators” to help the public “easily assess the integrity of news.”

These “trust indicators” later became “one of the sources being used by NewsGuard Technologies for a new product to improve news literacy,” and formed “a foundation for NewsGuard review development.”

Hinchliffe warned that the beneficiaries of censorship based on today’s “fact-checking” may become its targets in the future.

“One of the problems of censorship that operates under the guise of misinformation and disinformation, apart from stifling free speech and suppressing actual truths, is that it’s a pendulum that swings both ways,” he said. “The people calling for censorship now may be in a greater position of power to do so, but it will one day swing back at them.”

The Defender on occasion posts content related to Children’s Health Defense’s nonprofit mission that features Mr. Kennedy’s views on the issues CHD and The Defender regularly cover. Mr. Kennedy, an independent candidate for president of the U.S., is on leave from CHD. In keeping with Federal Election Commission rules, this content does not represent an endorsement of Mr. Kennedy’s candidacy or his support for President Donald Trump’s campaign.

As a result, insect-containing foods have reached U.S. consumers, even though one of the few existing U.S. laws that address insects in the food supply refers to them as “filth” and a form of “adulteration.”

Crickets and grasshoppers reach U.S. consumers in a variety of forms, from protein bars to protein shakes. They’re also found on restaurant menus and are promoted as pet food and animal feed ingredients.

With few U.S. regulatory barriers to contend with, investors like Bill Gates and Big Food giants such as Tyson Foods have also begun investing in “alternative protein” startups — despite mainstream media “fact-checks” claiming Gates doesn’t support the consumption of insects.

Internist Dr. Meryl Nass, founder of Door to Freedom, told The Defender lax U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations — under which many insect-containing foods can be classified as “Generally Regarded as Safe” (GRAS) — “means they don’t require testing” and enable the FDA to “look the other way.”

“How long will it take before we learn whether these foods are safe? It could take generations,” Nass said.

Gates, U.S. military among backers of ‘alternative protein’ startups

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges Explorations program in 2012 funded All Things Bugs, a project to “develop a novel food product made from insects to treat malnutrition in children from famine stricken areas of the world,” according to Eurasia Review.

All Things Bugs has since expanded into the development of genetically modified insects. With funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), “we are using CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing and other methodologies to develop base technologies for creating insects as a new bioresource,” the company states.

DARPA is a research and development agency that operates under the U.S. Department of Defense.

All Things Bugs said that while insects are “a very sustainable source of protein,” it “is innovating to make them a feasible commodity for the food industry.”

Claire Robinson, managing editor of GMWatch, told The Defender, “With all GMOs [genetically modified organisms], including insects, it’s vital that they are subjected to a pre-marketing risk assessment for health and the environment.”

Robinson said, “This includes testing them for the presence of pathogens, possible allergens and substances that may be toxic to humans. Then they must be clearly labeled for the consumer.”

Gates’ investments in insect-based foods appear to be part of a broader strategy to invest in alternatives to animal-based foods for consumers.

In a February blog post, Gates said he invested in Savor, a startup producing butter made from air (carbon dioxide) and water (hydrogen). And in 2022, the Gates Foundation awarded a $4.76 million grant to Nature’s Fynd, a startup producing foods containing fungi-based protein. In 2020, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, founded by Gates, invested in Nature’s Fynd.

The U.S. government’s National Science Foundation (NSF) also is involved in the insects-as-food space, through its funding of the Center for Environmental Sustainability through Insect Farming (CEIF). Established in 2021, CEIF seeks “to develop novel methods for using insects as feed for livestock, poultry, and aquaculture.”

Institutions participating in CEIF include Texas A&M University, Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis and Mississippi State University — along with Tyson Foods, Protix and Innovafeed, backed by food processing giant ADM, formerly the Archer-Daniels-Midland Company.

Insect protein start-ups raised ‘over $1 billion in venture capital since 2020’

The production of insects for human food is expanding in the U.S. and globally, with support from the United Nations and the World Economic Forum (WEF).

In 2013, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations released a seminal report, “Edible insects: future prospects for food and feed security,” which promotes the environmental and nutritional benefits of insect consumption.”

A 2022 WEF paper, “5 reasons why eating insects can reduce climate change,” suggests people are “conditioned to think of animals and plants as our primary sources of proteins … but there’s an unsung category of sustainable and nutritious protein that has yet to widely catch on: insects.”

According to a November 2023 Washington Post report, “Insect start-ups have raised over $1 billion in venture capital since 2020.”

A 2021 report by Netherlands-based Rabobank claimed the demand for insect protein, “mainly as an animal feed and pet food ingredient, could reach half a million metric tons by 2030, up from today’s market of approximately 10,000 metric tons.”

A report by Grand View Research forecasted the global insect protein market will expand by an annual compound growth rate of 16.9% by 2030, while European projections estimate “the number of Europeans consuming insect-based food will [reach] a total of 390 million by 2030,” according to EuroNews.

Ynsect, for instance, has built factories in France and the Netherlands, and is erecting factories in the U.S. and Mexico, according to Feed Navigator. The company claims its insect-producing farms are “climate positive,” “benefit biodiversity” and are aligned with the Paris Agreement and the European Union’s “Fit for 55” goal.

In March 2022, Ynsect acquired Nebraska-based Jord Producers — a mealworm farm. And in December 2022, Ynsect signed an agreement with U.S. flour milling company Ardent Mills to build a factory in the Midwestern U.S. Ardent Mills is a joint venture between ConAgra Foods, Cargill and CHS, a global agribusiness cooperative.

Investors in Ynsect include actor Robert Downey Jr.’s FootPrint Coalition and France’s Crédit Agricole bank — along with support from the FAO and the European Commission. The company has raised over $600 million.

Celebrity chefs also are embracing insect food. In November 2023, the Financial Times featured Joseph Yoon, founder of Brooklyn Bugs, whose “goal is to popularise edible insects and build up this food source to help support global food security.”

Your dog can eat insects, too

In addition to a lack of FDA regulations governing the use of insects in foods for humans, the FDA also does not regulate the use of insects for pet food ingredients.

According to Animal Frontiers, “pet food is under the nongovernment Association of American Feed Control Officials (AAFCO)” in the U.S. In January, French firm Ynsect became the first company to receive AAFCO authorization for commercial production of mealworm protein for dog food in the U.S.

In October 2023, Big Food giant Tyson Foods announced the acquisition of an ownership stake in the Dutch insect ingredient producer Protix. Tyson said the new joint venture would construct “the first at-scale facility of its kind to upcycle food manufacturing byproducts into high-quality insect proteins and lipids which will primarily be used in the pet food, aquaculture, and livestock industries.”

Although the announcement did not definitively exclude the production of insect-containing foods for humans, a Reuters “fact check” published in May stated, “Tyson Foods does not put insects into products for human consumption.”

Tyson has invested in Upside Foods, which in June 2023 won approval from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to produce lab-grown chicken. Upside garnered more than $600 million in research and development investments, including from Gates, Richard Branson, Elon Musk’s brother Kimbal Musk and Cargill.

Vanguard and BlackRock, the world’s two largest institutional investment firms, are also the two top institutional holders of Tyson Foods shares. BlackRock, and its CEO, Larry Fink, have promoted “sustainable” corporate practices.

During an interview July 5 at the Simposio Internacional de Actualización en Pediatría (International Symposium of Pediatric Updates) in Cartagena, Colombia, Hotez suggested organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO), the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and NATO should target “anti-vaccine aggression.”

Hotez said:

“What I’ve said to the Biden administration is, the health sector can’t solve this on its own. We’re going to have to bring in Homeland Security, the Commerce Department, Justice Department to help us understand how to do this.

I’ve said the same with — I met with Dr. Tedros [director general of the WHO] last month … to say, I don’t know that the World Health Organization can solve this on our own. We need the other United Nations agencies. NATO. This is a security problem because it’s no longer a theoretical construct or some arcane academic exercise. Two hundred thousand Americans died because of anti-vaccine aggression, anti-science aggression.

“And so, this is now a lethal force … and now I feel as a pediatric vaccine scientist … it’s important, just as important for me to make new vaccines, to save lives. The other side of saving lives is countering this anti-vaccine aggression.”

Send in all the militaries to ensure uptake of the sacred vaccines. https://t.co/eRneDbw3eQ

— Paul D. Thacker (@thackerpd) July 24, 2024

The full interview was available on YouTube until Wednesday evening, when it was removed. The Defender obtained a video recording of the full interview.

Hotez is dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor University College of Medicine and director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital, one of the sponsors of the symposium, which was organized by the Colombian Pediatric Society.

Aside from being a vaccine proponent and developer — he helped develop the Corbevax COVID-19 vaccine which was administered in India and has received at least $30 million in vaccine development grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — Hotez has crusaded against so-called “misinformation” about vaccines.

In March, The Hill reported that Hotez has found a “‘parallel career’ fighting misinformation.”

Hotez “finds his efforts to combat misinformation to be ‘meaningful,’” and says “pushing back on the anti-vaccine movement is just as important as developing vaccines,” The Hill wrote.

Hotez also holds six patents on the hookworm (helminth) vaccine, and has several listed patent applications as well, including those for SARS-CoV2 vaccines.

“Peter has cashed in significantly on the COVID-19 pandemic and gets a lot of money when shots go into arms,” said Brian Hooker, Chief Scientific Officer for Children’s Health Defense (CHD).

In his July 5 interview, Hotez called for more stringent action against “anti-vaxers,” whom he connected to entities such as the Russian government, and called for medical schools to educate new doctors about anti-vaccine sentiment.

“‘Anti-science’ and ‘anti-vaxxer’ are propaganda terms Hotez uses to establish a power dynamic over anyone who disagrees with him,” said cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough.

“Now Hotez is calling for a security state to enforce his propaganda instead of engaging in much needed dialogue over vaccine safety with a critical appraisal of short- and long-term side effects from the routine childhood vaccine schedule, including the COVID-19 shots,” McCullough added.

According to Harvey Risch, M.D., Ph.D., professor emeritus and senior research scientist in epidemiology (chronic diseases) at the Yale School of Public Health:

“Hotez has spent his entire career developing vaccines which have not achieved success in commercial use. His demands to impose public health martial law are reminiscent of the ‘Comité de salut public’ — ‘Committee of Public Safety’ — that Robespierre used to murder his political opponents [during the French Revolution].”

For Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., professor of international law at the University of Illinois, Hotez’s suggestions are a call to violate established international human rights law.

“Coercing vaccines upon human beings without their informed and voluntary consent violates the Nuremberg Code on Medical Experimentation, which is a crime against humanity,” Boyle said. “What we see at work here with Hotez is the Nazi mentality that pervades so many vaccinologists like him. Hotez is revealing his true colors.”

Independent journalist Paul D. Thacker has investigated Hotez for his site, The Disinformation Chronicle. He said, “This crackpot idea that we should deploy military forces to deal with moms worried about vaccine side effects and children … doesn’t that speak for itself?”

Dr. Sukharit Bhakdi, a microbiologist, questioned Hotez’s scientific credentials:

“Simple fact: Hotez is not a real scientist. He has never published any research article based on true scientific research. His publications transmit his personal opinions and beliefs. He has not conducted a single valid vaccine trial and has zero data to back his claims.

“He has been on the globalist team together with [Dr. Anthony] Fauci et al. and is now turning to violence to silence all dissenters. This very fact disqualifies him as a physician.”

“His evolution over the course of the pandemic is curious as he has become more and more shrill as time goes on,” Hooker said. “It seems he is trying to extend his 15 minutes of fame by ‘jumping the shark’ and inciting gestapo-like measures against ‘anti-vaxers’ and ‘science deniers.’ His definition of science is very ‘Fauci-esque’ indeed.”

Claim that unvaccinated caused ‘hundreds of thousands’ of deaths ‘an obvious untruth’

During his July 5 interview, Hotez asserted that the unvaccinated were responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic. He said:

“There’s anti-vaccine activity in every country, and each has its own unique national flavor. But the part that I’m worried about now is something very dark and accelerating in the United States.

“And the most dramatic evidence for that is what happened during the COVID pandemic … My estimate is 200,000 Americans died needlessly because they refused COVID vaccines in 2021, 2022.”

Hotez did not provide evidence supporting this figure, but it was similar to claims made by Dr. Anthony Fauci during Congressional testimony last month. Without citing evidence, Fauci said the unvaccinated are “probably responsible for an additional 200,000-300,000 deaths” in the U.S.”

Risch called this claim “an obvious untruth.”

“In the face of repeated major empirical CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] evidence and CDC’s public acknowledgement that the mRNA vaccines largely failed to reduce COVID transmission, Hotez absurdly claims that people choosing not to vaccinate themselves have contributed more to deaths from COVID than all of the large-scale breakthrough infections among vaccinated people,” Risch said.

McCullough said, “Hotez presumes COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective as any vaccinologist would dream. Sadly, his fantasy was over before it started. The COVID-19 vaccines were unsafe and failed to reduce hospitalization and death in prospective randomized trials or in valid observational studies. They never stopped transmission.”

“All experts, including Hotez, agreed theoretical protection from COVID-19 vaccines was just a few months, requiring frequent boosters,” McCullough added.

Hotez calls parents who choose not to vaccinate their children ‘victims’

In his interview, Hotez called for action — including more censorship — to counter what he called a “dark and accelerating” and “dangerous” anti-vaccine movement in the U.S. and globally that is “expanding and extending to childhood immunizations in the United States.”

“My worry is that this anti-vaccine movement, and it’s not misinformation or [an] infodemic, as many call it, it’s organized, it’s deliberate, it’s well-financed and it’s politically motivated … I worry that’s now globalizing to other countries on the African continent, in Asia and even Latin America,” he added.

On the topic of childhood vaccinations, Hotez said, “Parents who choose not to vaccinate their kids are victims” of this campaign, and called for medical schools to train doctors on how to respond to parents who oppose vaccinations.

“Pediatricians need to understand what the anti-vaccine ecosystem is, how it’s organized, how it operates, and to get educated about it,” he said. “I think that’s a first step … in our medical schools, in our pediatric residency training, in our conferences like this, being able to describe what this anti-vaccine monster looks like.”

But for journalist Rodney Palmer, formerly of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the increasing reluctance of parents to vaccinate their children is due to mounting concerns about vaccine safety. He said:

“The rising movement questioning the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines appears to be based on mounting evidence from government health data collection agencies and the life insurance industry.

“The fraud and cover-up of ivermectin as an effective prevention and treatment of COVID-19 caused a segment of the population to question the official guidance around vaccines — more so once they were mandated.”

Hotez blamed legacy and traditional media, as well as foreign governments, for fueling anti-vaccine sentiments.

“Fox News is now a source of anti-vaccine disinformation,” Hotez said. “If the parents are watching Fox News every night … They are going to be coming into your practice believing disinformation.”

Turning to social media, Hotez said, “Twitter, since Elon Musk has taken it over, has become an anti-vaccine site dominated by anti-vaccine groups and individuals who are monetizing the internet. They’re selling fake autism cures because they say vaccines cause autism, which they don’t.”

Hotez continues to be active on Twitter — now known as X.

Adversarial foreign governments are also to blame for propagating anti-vaccine rhetoric, according to Hotez. “For instance, the Russian government, the Putin government, is spreading anti-vaccine propaganda. The goal of this is to destabilize society and to have caused people to question authority,” he said.

Hotez did not provide any information to support this claim. Russia produces the Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine, under the auspices of the Russian Direct Investment Fund and The Gamaleya National Center of Epidemiology and Microbiology — an arm of the Russian federal government.

Hotez calls ‘anti-vaccine movement’ a tool of the ‘far-right’

Hotez also used the interview as an opportunity to plug his upcoming book, “The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science: A Scientist’s Warning.” He said the book “describes [the anti-vaccine] ecosystem and its political leanings in detail.”

According to the book’s publisher, Johns Hopkins University Press, Hotez “explains how anti-science became a major societal and lethal force” and how “the anti-vaccine movement became a tool of far-right political figures around the world.”

In 2022, Hotez fiercely criticized looming Congressional hearings into a possible lab-leak origin of COVID-19 and whether the National Institutes of Health (NIH) prematurely discredited the hypothesis, dismissing this as an “outlandish conspiracy.”

However, Hotez’s own 2012 to 2017 NIH grant — totaling $6.1 million — for the development of a SARS vaccine had the aim of responding to any “accidental release from a laboratory,” in addition to a possible zoonotic (or natural) spillover of the virus.

In a June 2023 interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., CHD’s chairman on leave, podcaster Joe Rogan offered to donate $100,000 to a charity of Hotez’s choice if he agreed to debate Kennedy.

Hotez — with the support of several legacy news media outlets and the American Medical Association — refused Rogan’s offer. He later claimed on social media that a “couple of anti-vaxers” “stalked” and “taunted” him outside his home after he declined the offer to debate Kennedy.

The Defender on occasion posts content related to Children’s Health Defense’s nonprofit mission that features Mr. Kennedy’s views on the issues CHD and The Defender regularly cover. In keeping with Federal Election Commission rules, this content does not represent an endorsement of Mr. Kennedy, who is on leave from CHD and is running as an independent for president of the U.S

Merck appears to have concealed the practice from public health agencies, which have taken no action to stop it.

Brian Hooker, Ph.D., chief scientific officer for Children’s Health Defense, joined “The Defender In-Depth” this week to discuss the revelations, which stem from a lawsuit two Merck whistleblowers filed in 2010 under the False Claims Act.

The 3rd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Philadelphia heard oral arguments in the case on July 9.

According to Hooker, the Merck measles, mumps rubella vaccine, MMR II — the only mumps vaccine licensed in the U.S. and listed on the childhood vaccine schedule for 12- to 18-month-olds — may contain up to 4 times the approved concentration of live mumps virus.

A two-part deposition by Dr. David Kessler, former head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), also indicates that Merck, rather than informing regulators that it was “overfilling” its MMR vaccine, relied on passive surveillance — reports from parents regarding vaccine reactions in their children — to identify possible safety signals.

‘We do not know how this is going to affect the body’

In this week’s interview, Hooker emphasized that vaccine dosages with a higher concentration of live mumps virus were never tested for safety or efficacy.

“What is in the Merck MMR II vaccine is not what is being reported,” Hooker said. “This is a live virus vaccine, and these viruses are at higher concentrations. and we know, as far as the mumps vaccine, that the concentrations that are in the vials have never been tested for safety.”

Hooker explained that guidelines for the amount of live virus in the MMR II vaccine were last changed in 1999, “as a result of an FDA action that showed that the mumps portion of the vaccine was losing potency over its sort of two-year [shelf life] before the vaccine expired.”

This prompted Merck to “change the mumps concentration of the vaccine,” Hooker said. However, Merck did so without informing health regulators or the public, gaining regulatory approval or performing safety tests.

“The mumps portion of the vaccine lost its potency to an ineffective and an unacceptable endpoint, and the FDA notified Merck of this in 1998,” Hooker said. “In order to compensate for this, Merck merely did something that is called ‘overfill’ to the virus, overfilled the vials to a higher starting level.”

“They started out with …100,000 TCID50,” Hooker said — referring to the measure of the number of viral particles in a vaccine. “They changed that to 160,000 active virus particles in 1999.”

Hooker added:

“What that means from a production standpoint is that the exact middle concentration of virus is 160,000. The vials can deviate as much as four times over that, and they can be as high as 600,000 viral particles, or they can be as low as 100,000 viral particles.”

This poses a public health risk, Hooker said, because concentrations higher than 160,000 viral particles are “far beyond anything that has ever been tested for safety.”

“Safety testing has only been done to that lower limit of 160,000,” Hooker said. “In order to achieve immunity, according to the FDA, you only need 20,000 … virus particles. So, looking at that, Merck is overfilling the vaccine, and it can be as high as 30 times what is required.”

Hooker said:

“More virus particles mean more problems. It means that you can have a cytokine storm. It means that you can have autoimmune reactions, and this has never ever been tested for safety.

“That’s a serious safety problem because we do not know what will happen without a maximum. There is no cap.”

Cytokine storm refers to “life-threatening systemic inflammatory syndromes involving elevated levels of circulating cytokines and immune-cell hyperactivation,” according to The New England Journal of Medicine. Hooker said this can lead to cellular damage and autoimmune disorders.

Hooker noted that higher concentrations of virus do not just mean a higher level of live virus, but also a higher concentration of “dead virus, RNA particles within the vaccine,” which can also lead to adverse reactions.

Referring to Kessler’s deposition, Hooker said it “came to the conclusion that Merck concealed this information [and that] the packet insert was incorrect. It was nebulous and it did not reflect the higher concentration,” Hooker said. “He basically said Merck is deceiving the public.”

Kessler also testified that this practice continued at least until 2018. Hooker said, “Nothing has changed since 2018 that we know of … If Merck has done anything to change the formulation of the vaccine, it has not told the public, it has not told the FDA.”

This means the practice of “overfilling” might still continue today.

“We’re in no-man’s land,” Hooker said. “We do not know how this is going to affect the body because this has never been tested at this concentration. This was a brand experiment that they foisted on the public of the United States.”

Merck ‘defrauded’ the government and the public

Hooker said the revelations stemming from the whistleblower lawsuit show the FDA was initially unaware that Merck was “overfilling” the MMR II vaccine — calling into question the agency’s capability to perform oversight.

“The only way the FDA found out was when these court documents actually surfaced, because the only thing Merck directly told the FDA was the concentration of mumps virus [was] 160,000 virus particles,” Hooker said. “So, FDA had no idea that they’re going even higher.”

The lawsuit was filed under the False Claims Act — under which whistleblowers can be rewarded for disclosing fraud that results in a financial loss to the federal government.

It’s the same law under which a lawsuit alleging safety deficiencies during clinical trials for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine was filed.

The two whistleblowers in the Merck case — Stephen Krahling and Joan Wlochowski, virologists who worked for Merck in the early 2000s — have since become the subject of a recently released film, “Protocol 7,” which chronicles their claims.

According to Hooker, the revelations may lead to further legal implications for the company and may call into question the liability shield it enjoys for its MMR II vaccine.

“Merck not only defrauded the government … Merck defrauded the public,” Hooker said. “From my contention, that would be a very, very good legal argument to opt out of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program [because] it is a no-fault program, and it assumes that the vaccine manufacturers acted in good faith.”

Hooker said this “really means that this could be taken to court by … individual petitioners” because Merck was “duplicitous and they have not been forthcoming with the exact concentrations that are in those vials.”

“This is fraud, pure and simple,” Hooker said.

Merck ‘not an entity that we should trust to put things into our bodies’

According to Hooker, the allegations against Merck are indicative of broader corruption among public health agencies and pharmaceutical companies — including a “revolving door” between the two.

Hooker said Merck “is the company that brought us Vioxx, that basically knew that this was going to cause cardiac damage … in individuals that took Vioxx.”

Merck also faces hundreds of lawsuits relating to injuries and deaths connected to Gardasil, its human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine.

“The first version of Gardasil … that came out in 2007 was then very quickly put on the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] schedule,” Hooker said. “And then the CDC director [Dr. Julie Gerberding] … left the CDC in 2008 and started as the president of Merck’s vaccine manufacturing division … in 2009.”

“There’s a revolving door there, and I think that if we really were able to open the coffers in terms of the relationship with Merck and Gerberding while she was at the CDC, we would show that they did quite a few favors,” Hooker added.

“When you look at chief officials at the FDA, in the CDC and in the HHS [U.S. Department of Health and Human Services] … there’s so many conflicts of interest — and the conflicts of interest run not only at the top level, but they get down into the woodwork of the individual workers and scientists,” Hooker said.

Noting that Merck has had an “exclusive license” to distribute MMR vaccines in the U.S. “for many, many years,” Hooker said that this is likely why the company sought to quietly change the concentration of live mumps virus in its vaccine, “even if it meant fudging the books,” to maintain its market exclusivity.

“When you look at Vioxx, when you look at HPV, when you look at the … MMR II vaccine, this is not an entity that we should trust to put things into our bodies,” Hooker said, referring to Merck, adding that agencies like the FDA “are not trustworthy.”

“They are driven very, very much by financial gain directly through incentivization, through the pharmaceutical industry,” Hooker said.

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The secret campaign to counter what the U.S. “perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines,” launched during the same time the U.S. government was telling Americans COVID-19 vaccines were “safe and effective” and censoring vaccine critics, alleging they were spreading “misinformation.”

Sinovac was the first available COVID-19 vaccine in the Philippines in 2021, while vaccines from U.S. companies such as Pfizer and Moderna weren’t available until mid-2022.

Campaign ‘aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines’

According to Reuters, the campaign at first “aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid” provided by China using “phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos,” but then “morphed into an anti-vax campaign.”

The campaign began in the spring of 2020 and was not limited to the Philippines — it expanded beyond Southeast Asia before it was terminated in mid-2021.

“A key part of the strategy: amplify the disputed contention that, because vaccines sometimes contain pork gelatin, China’s shots could be considered forbidden under Islamic law,” Reuters reported.

The campaign was based on the principles of psychological warfare and was operated out of “trailers and squat buildings” at the MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida.

There, “U.S. military personnel and contractors would use anonymous accounts on X, Facebook and other social media to spread what became an anti-vax message,” Reuters reported, noting that the facility remains the U.S. Department of Defense’s “clandestine propaganda factory.”

The “contractors” in question included defense contractor General Dynamics IT. Reuters accused the company of employing “sloppy tradecraft, taking inadequate steps to hide the origin of the fake accounts” created on social media platforms for the propaganda campaign.

The Reuters investigation identified at least 300 such accounts on X — formerly Twitter — almost all of which were created in the summer of 2020 and centered on the slogan #Chinaangvirus, which is Tagalog for “China is the virus.”

Examples of the tweets generated by the accounts, which questioned not just the Sinovac vaccine but other COVID-19 pandemic measures, such as facemasks and the use of PPE, include:

• “COVID came from China and the VACCINE also came from China, don’t trust China!”
• “From China — PPE, Face Mask, Vaccine: FAKE. But the Coronavirus is real.”
• “Can you trust China, which tries to hide that its vaccine contains pork gelatin and distributes it in Central Asia and other Muslim countries where many people consider such a drug haram?”

The accounts had “tens of thousands of followers during the program,” Reuters reported, and came at a time when vaccine skepticism was high in the Philippines, leading the country’s then-president, Rodrigo Duterte, to threaten the unvaccinated with arrest. Duterte requested — and was granted — priority access to Sinovac.

This “anti-vax” campaign was launched by the U.S. government even as, in the U.S., the government helped fund behavioral psychology efforts — also known as “nudging” — “to increase uptake of COVID-19 vaccines and other recommended public health measures by countering mis- and disinformation.”

The U.S. government has acknowledged the existence of its Southeast Asia propaganda campaign.

“A senior Defense Department official acknowledged the U.S. military engaged in secret propaganda to disparage China’s vaccine in the developing world, but the official declined to provide details,” Reuters reported, citing a Pentagon spokeswoman who said that “a variety of platforms” were used “to counter those malign influence attacks aimed at the U.S., allies, and partners.”

The spokeswoman also claimed the efforts were in response to a “disinformation campaign” China launched “to falsely blame the United States for the spread of COVID-19.”

While U.S. operated ‘phony’ social media accounts abroad, ‘bots’ blamed for spreading ‘anti-vax’ messages in the U.S.

Citing a 2023 study published in Vaccines (Basel) that concluded when people become skeptical about one vaccine, that skepticism tends to extend to other vaccines, Reuters suggested that the Pentagon’s campaign in Southeast Asia may have decreased vaccination rates in those countries.

However, this was done as part of a broader geopolitical effort, according to Reuters, noting that while the U.S. was already engaged in such operations before the pandemic, “COVID-19 galvanized the drive to wage psychological operations against China,” citing a former senior Pentagon official who called the pandemic a “bolt of energy.”

Reuters cited claims made by the Chinese government beginning in 2020 that the U.S. was responsible for the origin or spread of the virus in China and worldwide.

At the same time, as Duterte developed closer relations with China early during the pandemic, leading to his government attaining priority access to Sinovac, “U.S. military leaders feared that China’s COVID diplomacy and propaganda could draw other Southeast Asian countries … closer to Beijing,” Reuters reported.

An order signed in 2019 by then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, along with a Pentagon spending bill Congress passed that year, “paved the way for the launch of the U.S. military propaganda campaign,” Reuters added.

Reuters noted that the U.S. military is prohibited from targeting Americans with propaganda. Reuters said it found no evidence the Pentagon’s influence operation did so, implying that there is no prohibition in U.S. law against the operation of such propaganda campaigns outside the country.

But, as the Pentagon and U.S. military waged the campaign in Southeast Asia, U.S. government officials touted COVID-19 vaccines as “safe and effective,” accused vaccine opponents of spreading “misinformation,” and urged social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to surveil or censor accounts engaging in such messaging.

And in 2021, the U.S. government implemented vaccine mandates domestically, for corporate workers, federal workers and military service members.

The domestic mandates came in the second half of 2021, and only after the U.S. government appears to have switched gears on using any rhetoric that could be construed as anti-vaccine, even outside the country’s borders.

According to Reuters, “By spring 2021, the National Security Council ordered the military to stop all anti-vaccine messaging,” citing a former senior military officer who said, “We were told we needed to be pro-vaccine, pro all vaccines.”

In 2021, public health experts and the media also blamed “bots” — or fake social media accounts — and figures such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., chairman on leave of Children’s Health Defense — for spreading “lies” about the COVID-19 vaccines on social media in the U.S.

According to Reuters, Facebook executives expressed concern to the Pentagon in the summer of 2020, saying that the company “had easily identified the military’s phony accounts,” which it said were “violating Facebook’s policies” and were “spreading COVID misinformation.”

In response, “The military argued that many of its fake accounts were being used for counterterrorism and asked Facebook not to take down the content, according to two people familiar with the exchange. The Pentagon pledged to stop spreading COVID-related propaganda, and some of the accounts continued to remain active on Facebook,” according to Reuters.

“The anti-vax campaign continued into 2021 as Biden took office,” Reuters reported.

While Big Tech companies may have expressed some concern about the Pentagon’s operations, the “Twitter Files” and “Facebook Files” revealed documents indicating these platforms collaborated with the FBI and other government agencies to censor COVID-19 counternarratives domestically.

Reuters reported that a 2022 report by the Stanford Internet Observatory flagged some of the social media accounts the Pentagon developed as “pro-Western bots.”

Yet according to the “Twitter Files,” the Stanford Internet Observatory, via its Virality Project, worked with Twitter and U.S. government agencies to develop an internal “ticketing system” for tweets opposing COVID-19 narratives to be further scrutinized for their content.

Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., professor of international law at the University of Illinois, told The Defender he finds it “remarkable that the Biden administration ordered the Pentagon to run a propaganda campaign” in favor of COVID-19 vaccines in the U.S. at the same time that it was operating its propaganda campaign in Southeast Asia.

Government used social media tactics developed during its ‘War on Terror’

According to Reuters, the U.S. used social media misinformation tactics it originally developed during the “War on Terror.” Reuters noted that in 2001, “the Pentagon began to wage a more ambitious kind of psychological combat previously associated only with the CIA.”

This included the creation of “front news outlets,” paying off “prominent local figures” and even funding “television soap operas in order to turn local populations against militant groups.”

“By 2010, the military began using social media tools, leveraging phony accounts to spread messages of sympathetic local voices — themselves often secretly paid by the United States government,” Reuters reported.

These efforts initially included the development of online news websites but, according to Reuters, now encompass “a sprawling ecosystem of social media influencers, front groups and covertly placed digital advertisements to influence overseas audiences.”

But while the U.S. military and Pentagon applied such tactics, developed as a counterterrorism effort following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, domestic critics of COVID-19 vaccines and mask mandates were sometimes placed under FBI surveillance.

The EPA said the proposed rule change will “improve water quality and protect human health and the environment.”

But some critics argue it also will hurt small processing facilities that won’t be able to afford the upgrades required to comply with the new rule.

Small facilities will either shut down, resulting in fewer local meat sources for consumers. Or they’ll sell out larger corporations, contributing to even greater consolidation in the meat industry.

Describing it as “a direct attack on the buy local foods movement” and local meat producers, American Stewards of Liberty, the Kansas Natural Resource Coalition and other organizations submitted comments opposing the proposed rule.

Small meat producers ‘unable to sustain these costs’

Representatives of the two groups told The Defender why they opposed the EPA’s proposal. Tracey Barton, Kansas Natural Resource Coalition’s executive director, said:

“The proposed EPA rule will require costly upgrades for meat processing facilities. The anticipated cost is $300,000-$400,000 for the initial upgrade with annual maintenance fees of $100,000.

“In Kansas, many small meat processors are unable to sustain these costs and will be forced to close their doors. For the facilities that are able to sustain the increase in capital, the costs will be passed onto farmers/ranchers as well as consumers, driving meat prices, which are at an all-time high, even higher.”

Margaret Byfield, executive director of American Stewards of Liberty, said, “What is very concerning to us is that in the rule, they have several alternatives … The most extreme of these would apply to, by their own numbers, around 3,700 meat processors. So, that’s going to capture your small local meat processor.”

According to American Stewards of Liberty, the EPA’s current rule, enacted in 1974 and last amended in 2004, applies only to “approximately 150 of the 5,055” small processors in the U.S.

Byfield said the rule would put small processors out of business and add to further concentration in the meat industry:

“The cost of the regulation is what is going to run these small meat processors out of business. It is taking away Americans’ ability to choose if they want to buy their food locally.

“And you probably know there’s a huge movement right now of people very concerned about the consolidation of food in America to where we only have four major meat processors in America, the big guys.”

According to Barton, an estimated 910 million pounds of protein are expected to be removed from the U.S. food supply if the rule change goes through as written.

“There are also indirect negative effects on farmers and ranchers: limiting access to local meat processors, restricting the ability to sell to local consumers and requiring herd reduction or liquidation.”

Howard Vlieger, a member of the board of advisers of GMO/Toxin Free USA, told The Defender the EPA’s proposed rule is devoid of common sense.

“The first question that I would ask is, what is their desired outcome? Is the agency wanting to drive small packers out of business?” he asked.

According to Barton, what prompted the EPA’s proposal was “an environmental sue and settle case,” Cape Fear River Watch et al. v. United States Environmental Protection Agency, which “the EPA settled within four months … agreeing to modify their rules.”

A consortium of environmental organizations filed the lawsuit in 2022, alleging most meat processing facilities were not governed by water pollution standards.

As a result of the settlement, the EPA determined that revisions to its water pollution rules for meat processing facilities were “appropriate” — leading to the new proposal.

Byfield said, “The rule isn’t in effect yet” and that “the next step in the process is to go through all those [public] comments … revise their rule based on those comments and then issue a new final rule.”

However, she warned the EPA may skip certain steps.

“Typically, in this process, you have a second comment period … However, what we’ve seen from this administration is, they bypass that second set of comments. We anticipate that they’re going to try and push this rule out as quickly as they can … before the window of the Congressional Review Act kicks in,” Byfield said.

What this means, said Byfield, is that if the administration changes, Congress can review and revoke “anything that was finalized” within 90 legislative days of that time.

Local economies, consumers will suffer

Local economies will suffer if small processing facilities close, Byfield said.

“When a beef is processed in a local meat processing plant, that butcher is buying his groceries there, he’s hiring people there, everybody is turning over their dollar in that community, and that’s what drives that local economy,” Byfield said.

“When you start shutting down industries, that’s one way to dry up a local economy so that people don’t live there anymore,” she added.

Writing on Substack, Dr. Robert Malone said the EPA anticipates the new rules will, at least, “result in the closure of 16 processing facilities across the country … However, on the high side, EPA estimates include an impact range of up to 845 processing facilities.”

Byfield was not optimistic, projecting that many meat processing facilities will be bought out by large companies and subsequently forced to close if the rule takes effect.

“I think that the likely scenario is they’d shut them down, because it makes more sense to spend the $300,000-400,000 in one facility, not in five or six. I mean, that’s a huge cost even to the big guys,” she said.

Vlieger said, “There are many common-sense options that could be utilized that would be cost-efficient and simultaneously utilize the nutrient sources for crop production, but the EPA seemingly wants to regulate small processors to death.”

Large meat processors — particularly concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs — are the ones who benefit from favorable policies, he said.

“Small processing facilities are already at a disadvantage due to the costs for the rendering components of slaughter of all species of meat animals and poultry. Whereas the largest packing companies receive credits for hide and offal, the small processors have an expense to dispose of the offal,” he said, referring to additional revenue large meat packing facilities can earn by selling meat by-products.

“This is an example of the government picking winners and losers. The losers are farmers/ranchers and small meat processors who cannot afford to comply with the capital investment to meet the EPA standards,” Barton said.

Byfield said consumers may be left with fewer options if the rule is passed:

“For those who really are interested in good nutrition and quality, they know the best food is that which is freshest, which was grown locally. That’s where you’re going to get your most nutritious food.

“This would take that option away because that meat processor now, or your local producer, whoever is raising your beef or your lamb or chicken, they’re going to have to travel such a large distance to go to a major processor that it’s going to be unprofitable for them. Or … they’re going to have to increase the price to where it’s out of range for the common citizen to make that choice.”

Byfield said that access to local meat producers also allows consumers to build relationships with farmers and ranchers and to learn what goes into the meat they buy.

“A lot of these local producers will invite you out to their property … And so, you know where your meat’s coming from and you know what it’s being fed, and whether it’s getting mRNA vaccines or some of these other very controversial things … You can see that, and you can monitor it because it’s local,” she said.

“We think people should have the ability to buy their food locally if that’s what they choose,” Byfield said, likening the EPA’s proposal to rules the agency implemented in the 1960s and 1970s that resulted in many small butcher shops going out of business.

“You no longer have that local butcher store,” Byfield said. “Now, you have more regional butcher shops where they have to be large enough so that they’re processing more meat pounds per day, per week, per month, so that they can afford that regulatory burden that’s already there,” Byfield said.

Byfield said that a proposed congressional bill, H.R.7079, also known as the “Beef Act,” would “stop this rule,” urging the public to call their local congressional representatives.

“Additionally, we believe there is going to be an effort to defund the rule through the appropriations process,” Byfield added.

“Consumers need to step up and speak out against these draconian government actions,” Vlieger said. “The number of small farmers is small, and their voice does not carry the weight that varying consumer organizations have.”

“More than ever, it is crucially important to know your farmer and know your food,” Vlieger said.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

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Hawaii Unites in May 2023 sued the state in the Circuit Court of the First Circuit in Hawaii. The group’s president and founder, Tina Lia, told The Defender:

“These biopesticide lab-altered mosquitoes are already being released in East Maui. Hawaii Unites has taken the state to court seeking a ruling to require an environmental impact statement for the project and comprehensive studies of the risks.”

She said Hawaii Unites describes itself as “a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to the conservation and protection of our environment and natural resources,” with a focus on “protecting the health of Hawai‘i’s people, wildlife, and the ‘āina from the State of Hawaii’s biopesticide bacteria-infected mosquito experiment.”

According to the group’s lawsuit, the state did not perform a sufficient environmental impact study prior to the launch of the project. Last year, state residents submitted 291 pages of public comments, both for and against the project.

“The final environmental assessment for this project is insufficient under the Hawai‘i Environmental Policy Act,” Lia said. “[It] fails to describe mitigation measures or biosecurity protocols for the mosquitoes, and the discussion of alternatives is inadequate.”

According to Lia, the Birds, Not Mosquitoes partnership claims it plans to suppress southern house mosquitoes that transmit avian malaria to native birds by rendering male mosquitoes — which carry the Wolbachia bacterium that causes avian malaria — unable to reproduce.

The technology, Wolbachia incompatible insect technique (IIT), previously was endorsed by Gates Philanthropy Partners, an arm of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, although there does not appear to be a direct link between these organizations and the Hawaii ongoing project.

An expert who testified on behalf of Hawaii Unites warned that the project, far from mitigating mosquito-borne illness, may lead to bacterial spread, the invasion of lab-altered mosquitoes into unintended areas and other environmental consequences.

But the court disagreed, ruling that the final environmental assessment “was compiled in good faith and set forth sufficient information to enable the [Board of Land and Natural Resources] to consider fully the environmental factors involved and to make a reasoned decision after balancing the risks of harm to the environment against the benefits to be derived from the proposed action.”

Court did not acknowledge ‘serious concerns’ of expert witness

According to the lawsuit, “documentation and studies from several sources, including government agencies, confirm that the experiment may not even work for its intended purpose and has the potential for significant environmental impacts.”

The lawsuit also noted that the IIT method has never been tried in Hawaii, while “the

specific experimental technique planned for use in East Maui has never been tried before anywhere in the world.”

According to the lawsuit, the regions of Maui where the release will take place include “the fragile ecosystems of East Maui’s Haleakalā National Park, Ko‘olau Forest Reserve, Hāna Forest Reserve, Hanawī Natural Area Reserve, Kīpahulu Forest Reserve, Makawao Forest Reserve, and Waikamoi Preserve,” as well as privately managed lands.

“At the highest frequency, this could result in over 807 billion mosquitoes released in one of the most unique and fragile ecosystems in the world,” the lawsuit stated. “Contrary to the assertions in the [final environmental assessment], the plan could actually pose serious risks to native birds, wildlife, the ‘āina, and public health.”

The State of Hawaii refuted these claims in its motion for summary judgment, filed Dec. 22, 2023.

Hawaii Unites on Jan. 9 filed a 70-page memorandum further detailing the group’s arguments, but First Circuit Court Judge John M. Tonaki granted summary judgment in favor of the state.

Lia told The Defender there are “several issues” with the ruling should the group decide to appeal Tonaki’s decision.

Lia said that there are significant differences between what was proposed in the final environmental assessment and what is currently being implemented in East Maui. For example, she said the group believes mosquitoes are being released solely by helicopter rather than drones, which is inconsistent with the release system described in the environmental assessment.

“This means that helicopters are flying closer to the tree canopy than the level stated in the FEA [final environmental assessment], increasing the potential for adverse impacts such as noise disturbances; nesting, breeding, and roosting disturbances; helicopter rotor wash; accidents and collisions; and wildland fires,” she said.

According to Lia, Tonaki disregarded the testimony of an expert witness, tropical disease and vector expert Dr. Lorrin Pang, head of Hawaii’s District Health Office for Maui, who testified as a private citizen on behalf of Hawaii Unites “about the state’s lack of study of the risks of the project.”

Lia said:

“The court failed to acknowledge Dr. Pang’s serious concerns about horizontal transmission of introduced bacteria, biopesticide wind drift of lab-altered mosquitoes into unintended areas, superinfection of mosquitoes with multiple bacteria strains, increased pathogen infection and disease-spreading capability in mosquitoes, and the experimental nature of the project — all issues that were insufficiently addressed or missing entirely from the FEA, and facts material to the lawsuit.”

Project enjoys powerful backing

According to Lia, the U.S. Department of the Interior provided more than $30 million for the avian malaria phase of the state’s plan. The project also has secured more than $14 million from the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act enacted in 2021 and an additional $16 million through President Joe Biden’s 2023 Investing in America Agenda to Prevent the Imminent Extinction of Hawaiian Forest Birds.

“Grants, partnerships with mainland universities, and public and private funding are anticipated to incentivize the use of lab-altered mosquito technology in Hawai‘i well into the future,” she said.

Birds, Not Mosquitoes states that the project is funded through a mix of public and private donors, including anonymous donors, including the American Bird Conservancy, Hawaiʻi Department of Land and Natural Resources, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, The Nature Conservancy, and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.

Previous funders included “the Hawaiʻi Invasive Species Council and anonymous private donors.”

Another organization that partners in the project, the Kauai Forest Bird Recovery Project, lists Corteva Agriscience as one of its partners. Corteva Agriscience is a conglomerate formed via the merger of Dow AgroSciences and DuPont/Pioneer and owns many patents for the CRISPR gene-editing technology.

Notably though, the mosquitoes in use in the Hawaii project are not known to be genetically modified.

In a March 2022 interview with Gates Philanthropy Partners, Scott O’Neill, Ph.D., founder of the World Mosquito Program, praised the abilities of Wolbachia, the bacterium now in use in the Hawaii project, which he said is “safe for humans because it thrives in honeybees, butterflies, moths, and fruit flies,” as they are “part of our food chain.”

O’Neill added:

“What makes Wolbachia a medical miracle is the fact that when it is introduced into Aedes aegypti [mosquitoes], it effectively blocks the capacity of many of the viruses that make people sick from growing in the mosquito. And if the viruses can’t replicate, they can’t be transmitted to humans.

“Our team successfully introduced a strain of Wolbachia taken from fruit flies into Aedes aegypti more than a decade ago, and over the past 10 years, we have shown that when Wolbachia-carrying Aedes aegypti are released into the environment, they collapse dengue transmission in that location. We are also confident that it is effective against chikungunya, Zika, and many other arboviruses based on our laboratory research.”

‘Maui is ground zero for these mosquito releases’

Lia said her group is concerned that the mosquitoes currently being released are experimental.

“The state has lied about the fact that foreign bacteria is being brought into Hawai‘i through the infection of these mosquitoes, and the mosquitoes themselves are foreign organisms that originate from outside the islands. The state has also lied about the documentation showing that up to 3,103 lab-altered female mosquitoes that bite, breed and spread disease are allowed to be released weekly on Maui,” Lia added.

“There are no biosecurity protocols for these imported mosquitoes and no mitigation plan in place if something goes wrong,” she said.

“Wolbachia bacterium is a life form, and there’s no way for this project to be self-contained. The bacteria can transmit horizontally in the environment to wild mosquitoes and other insect vectors of disease.”

“Mosquito populations on Maui might be overtaken and replaced by these lab-altered mosquitoes,” Lia said.

“What if it turns out that they are more capable of spreading disease?” Lia asked. “Southern house mosquitoes transmit human diseases including West Nile virus, encephalitis and elephantiasis, and they’re a potential vector of Zika virus.”

She added:

“Pathogen screenings for these mosquitoes are unknown, and that information is being withheld from the public. Lab-infected male mosquitoes can transmit viruses to biting females through mating. Biopesticide drift, the drift of lab-altered mosquitoes on the wind to unintended areas, could affect not only the efficacy but the safety of the project. Superinfection of mosquitoes with multiple strains of Wolbachia bacteria could also impact efficacy and safety.

“All of these mechanisms can interact with each other and cumulatively have substantial adverse effects. None of this has been studied by the Birds, Not Mosquitoes agencies releasing these mosquitoes … The scope and magnitude of this plan have potential significant impacts that could cause catastrophic effects on the health of our islands.”

According to Lia, Hawaii Unites has launched a campaign to raise $30,000 needed by the end of the month to file an appeal.

“If the Judge’s decision is not appealed, it will set a precedent for allowing inadequate environmental review of future proposed experimental projects that could have significant impacts to our fragile ecosystems,” Lia said.

Should an appeal go forward, Lia said her group expects “to obtain admissions from the state that proper studies have not been done to assess the risks of this project.”

“We further anticipate that documents, contracts, and communications requested from the state will reveal important details about this project that have been misrepresented to the public,” she added.

“Maui is ground zero for these mosquito releases, and our case in environmental court can set a strong precedent for stopping this agenda from moving forward here in Hawai‘i and from expanding globally,” Lia said. “This case, and our voices as a community, have a right to be heard.”

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

In late 2021, Gail Seiler was enjoying life with her husband, adult children and her grandchildren. She was happily employed as a technology manager near Dallas after spending several years living in Europe.

All this changed in December 2021, however, when Seiler said her “nightmare began.” On Dec. 3, 2021, two days after testing positive for COVID-19, low oxygen levels led her to go to her local hospital, Medical City of Plano, Texas, for treatment.

Unbeknownst to Seiler or her family, this would mark the beginning of a 13-day ordeal  of being subjected to what she described as “cruel and inhuman” treatment. Seiler was denied nutrition and medications and was listed as “Do Not Resuscitate” (DNR) — despite repeated insistence to the contrary by her and her family.

In an interview with The Defender, Seiler, now 55, said the hostile treatment at the hospital began when doctors there learned that she had not received a COVID-19 vaccine. It culminated when her family, following a “standoff” in her hospital room, succeeded in removing her from the hospital and taking her home, which Seiler said saved her life.

Despite her doctors’ insistence that she would die if she left the hospital, Seiler says she has fully recovered. She credits medications such as ivermectin in helping to save her.

Seiler’s experience motivated her to get involved with a nonprofit group, the FormerFedsGroup Freedom Foundation, campaigning to raise awareness about COVID-19 protocols sanctioned by the Centers for Disease Control and prevention and the harms they caused. Seiler shared extensive documentation with The Defender to corroborate her story.

‘The first question he asked me was if I was vaccinated’

Seiler told The Defender she went to the Medical City of Plano because it was the closest hospital to their home and also where prominent Texas politician and former gubernatorial candidate, Col. Allen West and his wife had received the America’s Frontline Doctors treatment protocol there.

The protocol included “hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and budesonide along with vitamins,” she said. West was not vaccinated for COVID-19, and Seiler said his illness received extensive media coverage connecting his illness and hospitalization to his unvaccinated status.

Intending to receive the same treatment, Seiler said her husband printed out a couple of copies of the Frontline Doctor protocol and took them to the hospital with her. With her oxygen level at 77, Seiler was taken to the emergency room, but was not seen for at least an hour. When examined, Seiler gave the nurse a copy of the protocol and was told “yes, we’ve done this protocol, we can do this protocol.”

Instead, “They just put me on some oxygen,” she said.

Seiler spent 26 hours in the ER before being admitted to an ICU on Dec. 5, 2021, where she was examined by Dr. Giang Quash. “The first question he asked me was if I was vaccinated,” she said.

Quash responded by telling her, “I’m so sorry Mrs. Seiler, but you are going to die,” and that her only options were to receive remdesivir and be placed on a ventilator — although even with that treatment, he said she was going to die anyway.

Seiler told Quash he was fired, but since he gave her a terminal diagnosis, she wanted her priest and she cited the Right to Try Act — and demanded she wanted to “try Ivermectin and Budesonide.”

Seiler said her husband, a former military nurse, “was very well informed about the mRNA technology and what it can do, and he questioned the speed to deliver [the COVID-19 vaccines] and the lack of informed consent obtained from patients.”

Seiler also had already had COVID-19 and “recovered fairly quickly” from it without hospitalization, and that as a result, she “wasn’t afraid of it.”

‘Cruel and inhuman’ treatment

Seiler said she knew Quash was “gaslighting me,” and immediately delegated all decision-making responsibility regarding her health to her husband, who was also “shocked” that she had been told she would die.

“I didn’t want them to say to my family, if they killed me, ‘Oh, she agreed to this’ or that ‘she agreed to death’ or ‘she agreed to be put on a ventilator.’ I didn’t want that to happen.”

Instead, Seiler and her husband insisted on receiving hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin and budesonide, as well as vitamins. However, “They said no to everything,” she said, ignoring her requests even when she referenced the Right to Try Act or requested a copy of her rights as a patient. Seiler said that what followed instead was “cruel and inhuman treatment” with numerous examples of abuse.

Seiler said that the doctors and nurses claimed they were unfamiliar with the Frontline Doctors protocol and “would demonize ivermectin.” Instead, she was placed on a BiPAP machine, which Seiler said “blows hot air, forced air, into your lungs,” which she described as “excruciating and unnecessary.”

She also was denied basic nutrition, water and personal care.

“Even though I was more than capable of drinking,” Seiler was denied water for seven days and received “no nutrients for the first 11 days,” after which she “finally got a banana bag as per my daughter’s persistence.”

Seiler said her husband was able to bring her Ensure, but that it was placed “out of my reach” in the hospital room. After receiving no mouth care for 13 days, “I was developing thrush,” Seiler said, , “and was starting to get worse,” having developed a film covering her teeth that “required medication to clear up.”

In addition, Seiler said she was forced to have a catheter on her first day in the ICU, which was subsequently never cleaned, leading to an infection. Doctors also “started loading me up with diuretics, so that I could not control my bladder or bowels,” she said, also described receiving “very little cleaning up,” leading to matted and lost hair.

She also was denied physical therapy.

Some nurses were also particularly harsh in their treatment toward her because of her unvaccinated status, according to Seiler, sharing one example of an “nurse who was literally very cruel” The nurse did not respond to Seiler’s calls for over 20 minutes after a cord connected to her oxygen machine came loose. She was forced to hold it in manually so it would work.

According to Seiler, when the nurse finally came in, “she hit me, slapped me on the shoulder, grabbed the cord, and said ‘I can’t come in here very much because you’re unvaccinated and you have COVID.’” Seiler said her response literally was, “If you’ve gotten the shot [but] are too afraid to come in my room, it reinforces why it was right for me to refuse to get the shot.”

Seiler also said she was administered insulin, despite not being a diabetic, and that she wasn’t told if there was a medical reason for this. When administering the insulin, the nurse “would plunge the needle into my stomach,” recounted Siler “I had so many bruises all over my stomach. It was horrific. My husband was livid when he saw it.”

“She was very aggressively harmful,” Seiler said. “I call it medical battery.”

After two evenings of this, Seiler said she could take no more. “The third night she came in, I thought, ‘dear God, I can’t do this. This woman’s going to kill me.’” Seiler texted her daughter, telling her she was “terrified” of her nurse and worried “she’s going to kill me.”

After her daughter submitted a complaint, the individual in question, a travel nurse, was switched out with no explanation.

At one point Seiler and her daughter requested high-dose vitamin C, only to be told there was a “national shortage.” The hospital would not let her daughter bring Seiler’s vitamins from home, instead only giving her “a kind of a child vitamin. “A high dose alone makes a huge difference — it saves lives, Seiler said.

Even when Seiler was eventually granted vitamin C, she said the dose administered was lower than recommended.

“Protocol is one milligram every four hours through a nebulizer,” Seiler said. “And they would only do one milligram every 10 hours,” noting that the hospital pharmacist overruled the protocol and “would not allow it,” despite not having examined her.

Even with such a reduced dose though, Seiler began to show signs of recovery and was told by Quash “I’ve never seen this before.”

“I thought, well, he’s seeing the light,” Seiler said. But when she asked him if her Vitamin C dose could be increased to protocol levels, her request was denied, as were her requests for “medications that I needed to fight pneumonia.” Seiler said these requests were denied “with no explanation” even for medications “they promised to give.”

Seiler said that her medical charts listed her as a “DNR” despite repeated insistence by her and her family members to the contrary. Even after her attorney intervened, “They wouldn’t change it,” Seiler said, although in notes accompanying her medical chart, “they acknowledged that I’m saying I’m a full code.” Yet, “on the chart, which is what they’re going to look at if something happens, it says ‘DNR.’”

Instead of her requested treatment, Seiler was told that if she agreed to take remdesivir, she would be permitted visitation from her priest.

“Our faith is very important to us,” Seiler said, “and so we agreed.” However, when her priest was called away to an emergency on the night of his scheduled visit, the doctors administered the remdesivir anyway, she said.

“So, they got one round, which you know, we knew about the hospital bonuses,” Seiler said, referring to bonuses given to hospitals which administered the COVID protocol, including remdesivir, to COVID-19 patients. “They got their 30 pieces of silver, right?”

‘If I stay here, they’re going to murder me’

After 13 days, Seiler said her husband and daughter “made the bold decision” to remove me into home hospice care so that I would have a chance to live,” adding that they had made arrangements with a private company “to set up a 7-day support and care plan.”

“The hospital made this very difficult for us to do,” Seider said. “They tried to deny it, block it, scare me into staying … I asked many times if I was a prisoner or a patient.”

“I knew that I wasn’t going to die of COVID,” Seiler said. “I felt I was going to be murdered in this hospital. … I wanted to go home, even if I died.”

On Dec. 14, 2021, Seiler’s husband arrived at the hospital with copies of two Texas laws, House Bill 2211 (“Relating to in-person visitation with hospital patients during certain periods of disaster”) and Senate Bill 572, which includes provisions allowing clergy to visit hospital patients. However, “they would not let him in,” she said.

Following this, the local sheriff and police were called, but according to Seiler, “They wouldn’t enforce the legislation.” Instead, officers stood guard at the door to her hospital room. Seiler said she told the officer “If I stay here, they’re going to murder me,” but that in response, the officer left without taking any action.

Early in the morning on Dec. 15, 2021, Seiler’s husband called her and asked if anyone was in the room. Hearing there wasn’t, he said he was going to “come to save my life.”

In a stroke of good fortune, Seiler’s husband encountered open doors and no security upon arrival at the hospital. Dropping off a cease-and-desist letter and copies of the two Texas laws at the entrance, her husband was able to make it all the way to the ICU unit. “They couldn’t stop him,” she said.

Hospital personnel soon arrived and informed her husband that he “needed to leave, to get out.” However, his response was “I’m not leaving this hospital without her. You’re not going to murder my wife. She’s not your guinea pig. I’m taking her home today.” Following this, a “standoff” began, as Seiler described it.

Eventually, the hospital and police offered to allow Seiler release “against medical advice” (AMA) instead of home hospice — which Seiler refused. There were legal distinctions at play here, according to Seiler, since if an AMA form is signed, insurers can deny payment for treatment.

Seiler recalled telling hospital personnel that she did have medical advice from outside doctors advising her to leave, noting that the hospital itself had said she “was terminal.” According to Seiler, her husband was able to alter the release forms the hospital provided, “crossing out things,” and she signed it. Her husband also furnished a small bottle of oxygen to sustain her for the trip home.

‘As soon as you walk in the hospital, you are a paycheck’

Despite her ordeal at the hospital and her poor physical state upon leaving the hospital, Seiler said she did eventually recovered fully. She began taking ivermectin and budesonide and was connected to a larger oxygen tank at home, in “a scary 72 hours getting me titrated off the oxygen.”

“When my husband drove away from the hospital, that was the first time I felt I was going to live during the whole experience,” Seiler said. “And it wasn’t easy. I was a mess … I couldn’t walk. We had to have a wheelchair and walker … I couldn’t eat … I lost a lot of hair.”

She said it took months to recover but she has no lingering physical aftereffects from her hospital experience. “Just yesterday, I did … elliptical and swam,” she said. However, she noted that from an emotional perspective, she was obliged to start counseling and therapy for the effects of PTSD.

Seiler explained why, in her view, she received the treatment that she did:

“Had I been given the ivermectin and budesonide at the hospital instead of them pushing only the harmful option of remdesivir and ventilation, my stay would have been very short. Instead, the doctors and the hospital administration made an early decision that I was going to die.

“They get a lot of money from the CARES Act if they give you remdesivir and more if they ventilate you. That combination gives you a 12% chance to survive!

“But they also get more money if they can put COVID-19 on your death certificate. It’s very lucrative for them. The bonus of killing the unvaccinated is in driving up the statistics. You can’t prove a pandemic of the unvaxxed unless you can drive the death count up by killing the unvaxxed.”

For Seiler, a silver lining in this experience is the advocacy work she now performs on behalf of hospital protocol victims and their families.

In March 2022, Seiler joined the FormerFedsGroup Freedom Foundation, which had launched a citizen task force and the COVID-19 Humanity Betrayal Memory Project (CHBMP), which describes itself as an effort to build “a living archive of ongoing Crimes Against Humanity.”

Through this organization, Seiler said “we have heard from tons of people” and “have documented many stories,” over 1,200 in all, although “most are not survivors” but instead, family members of those who didn’t survive.

CHBMP has compiled a list of 25 commonalities shared by many of the victims whose stories the organization has documented. According to CHBMP, commonalities include isolation of the victim, denial of informed consent and alternative treatments, gaslighting, removal of communication devices, discrimination against the unvaccinated, dehumanization, dehydration and starvation, non-emergency ventilation, refusal of transfer and strict adherence to Emergency Use Authorization protocols.

Citing CDC statistics, Seiler said 1.6 million people are listed as having died of COVID-19, influenza or pneumonia — out of which only 167,000 died at home.

“The rest of them died in facilities, hospitals, some type of inpatient setting,” Seiler said. “And so, that’s where you start looking. … That tells you, look at the protocol,” along with “the isolation, the overall treatment. … They’re kind of thrown into these units like animals. It’s just incredible.”

“As soon as you walk in the hospital, you are a paycheck,” Seiler said. “You have a target on your head from these bonuses. So … you’ve just walked into basically a prison … and they’re not letting go.”

FormerFedsGroup also launched a public awareness campaign, according to Seiler, with billboards placed in Michigan and New Jersey, asking people to question the deaths of loved ones attributed to COVID-19 and directing them to the CHBMP website.

Seiler said that the FormerFedsGroup’s citizen task force has approximately 125 volunteers, who are “mostly victims turned advocates fighting for justice and change.” She described them as “eyewitnesses to crimes against humanity” who “lived through it and are not going to sit down and take it” and are instead sharing their stories.

Support groups for victims and their family members have also been organized. “It’s empowering” to connect with others who “have said the same thing” and who “see that they’re not alone,” Seiler said.

Seiler advised victims and their relatives to “not let anyone else silence you. Tell your story as much as you know it and connect with others. Don’t just take this. Be brave. We can help you.”

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

The World Health Organization (WHO) this week concluded its 76th World Health Assembly (WHA) without ratifying a new pandemic treaty or the proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR).

However, the meetings, held May 21-30 in Geneva, Switzerland, did include announcements about new WHO bodies created to respond to pandemic threats and new calls to “restrict personal liberties” during health emergencies.

The meetings also included circulation of the new “bureau’s text” of the pandemic treaty, dated May 22, but the WHA did not make available an updated document for the proposed IHR amendments.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus urged member states to reach an agreement on both instruments by 2024.

Independent journalist James Roguski, who has extensively tracked the pandemic treaty and IHR amendment negotiations, described this year’s WHA as “a big theatrical production.”

“You can focus on a million details and forget that what they are doing is negotiating these documents,” Roguski told The Defender. “It’s a dog and pony show.”

Roguski said it was always the WHO’s plan not to ratify the treaty and amendments during the WHA meetings, despite warnings to the contrary by some analysts whom he accused of “fearmongering.” It was “always their schedule … they’ve been saying all along they’re shooting for 2024,” he said.

New pandemic treaty ‘dystopian in its scope and its cleverness’

The “bureau’s text” of the pandemic treaty was revealed for the first time at the WHA. At 42 pages, it is shorter than previous drafts that exceeded 200 pages and appears to have consolidated many previous proposals submitted by the negotiating parties.

In a recent video produced by Roguski, he described the new text as “good news, as it seems the WHO has finally revealed its true plan” — but also, “bad news, as it is absolutely dystopian in its scope and its cleverness.”

According to the Geneva Health Files, member states will discuss the bureau’s text in early June and in mid-June will take up a drafting group process. It remains unclear if this will “form the basis of any negotiation.”

Speaking last week on CHD.TV’s “Friday Roundtable,” Dr. Meryl Nass, an internist, biological warfare epidemiologist and member of Children’s Health Defense scientific advisory committee, said the WHO is now calling the pandemic treaty and IHR amendments “instruments,” perhaps “because treaty sounds like it has to be ratified by the Senate, and they’re trying to find a way around that.”

On the same broadcast, Nass and Roguski said the new IHR amendments are “a completely new document.” Writing on Substack, Roguski questioned why “an updated version of the 307 proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations” was not made available.

Roguski told The Defender:

“They really didn’t talk very much. I can’t find any version 2.0 of an edited version of the negotiations that have been going on. They have not published anything. And so, the amendments that were submitted in September were kept secret until mid-December, and that is still the only version that we have.”

In his analysis of the bureau’s text, Roguski noted that article 33 appears to provide countries with “no way to opt out of adopted protocols,” even if they voted against a particular amendment.

He also cited Article 22, which calls for the formation of an “Implementation and Compliance Committee” to “review compliance with” the text. The Biden administration has shown support for the creation of this committee, while reaffirming support for the pandemic treaty and IHR amendments.

The provision for a monitoring system of member-state compliance is even stricter in the amendments to the IHR — proposed by the Biden Regime.

Its ratification would establish a “Compliance Committee” in charge of the following: pic.twitter.com/JYO6o3HAc8

— We Hurt Others (@WeHurtOthers) May 24, 2023

In January, The Lancet called for a similar monitoring system.

Roguski pointed out that the bureau’s text also contains proposals for the recognition of the One Health approach (Article 5), removing conditions on public funding of Big Pharma research and development (Article 9), and a variety of definitions for concepts that include “pathogen with pandemic potential” and “infodemic” (Article 1).

The text also proposes the creation of a new and separate “Conference of the Parties” (COP) that, according to Roguski, “would be empowered to adopt ‘protocols’ in the future without Congressional oversight.”

In his video, Roguski said:

“This bureaucratic conference of the parties would also include representatives of the United Nations and their specialized and related agencies, as well as representatives of any body or organization, governmental or non-governmental, private sector or public sector that could apply to be a member of the conference of parties.

“The work of the conference of parties would be carried out by three committees and a panel of experts [Articles 23-25] to provide scientific advice and would be empowered to add protocols to the agreement far away from the prying eyes of the public with no ability whatsoever to reject them.

“The agreement would set up a universal health preparedness review. It calls for the scheduling of tabletop simulation exercises, and it would trigger a massive expansion of the pharmaceutical hospital emergency industrial complex.”

Speaking on CHD.TV, Roguski compared the WHO’s proposed texts with its 2003 Framework Convention for Tobacco Control, one of only two legally binding treaties the WHO has ratified since its inception in 1948, referring to the bureau’s text as a “cookie-cutter copy” of the framework.

On his Substack, Roguski wrote that this framework “seeks to enable the member nations to agree to a relatively vague document now, that would empower and authorize unknown bureaucrats to make legally-binding decisions at some point in the future, when those decisions can be well-hidden from the view of the general public.”

In his opening address to the WHA, Tedros praised the 2003 framework. Noting that many articles in the bureau’s text contain various “options” that could be chosen or rejected, Roguski wrote that this “seems to indicate that the member nations are very far from agreement.”

Separately, Roguski told The Defender that some delegates at the WHA expressed “displeasure” at not having received updated versions of either the bureau’s text or the IHR amendments.

“Quite frankly, they’re a mess,” Roguski added. “They’re arguing amongst themselves and as far as I know, there has been no type of vote on anything.”

According to the Geneva Health Files, “Countries also indicated that they wanted greater coordination between the negotiating processes of the amendments to the IHR and Pandemic Accord.”

According to Stand for Health Freedom, the co-chair of the working group drafting the proposed IHR amendments “expressed a handful of times that the IHR already has all it needs to address a pandemic; the only issue was compliance,” leading to a possible interpretation that the IHR amendments may be considered unnecessary.

Dr. David Bell, a public health physician and biotech consultant and former director of global health technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund, described this lack of consensus as a positive.

“The upside is that the entire narrative is built on obvious gross falsehoods,” Bell said, as “real pandemics are not common,” adding that “houses built on sand don’t last that well when things get stormy.”

As WHO notes*, 'pandemics' come ~once per generation, and kill far less than endemic diseases.

People who got very rich off Covid are telling us they are increasingly frequent and severe.

This is untrue, and the reasons for this false messaging should be obvious to anyone.

— David Bell (@bell00david) May 25, 2023

Members call for ‘prioritizing actions that may restrict individual liberties’

One of the most chilling aspects of the new bureau’s text is Article 18, on “Communication and public awareness,” according to Roguski, who said the article “would empower the World Health Organization to tackle false, misleading, misinformation or disinformation.’”

The text of Article 18 states:

“The Parties shall strengthen science, public health and pandemic literacy in the population, as well as access to information on pandemics and their effects and drivers, combat the infodemic, and tackle false, misleading, misinformation or disinformation, and including through promotion of international cooperation.”

Article 18 calls for “regular community outreach, social listening, and periodic analysis and consultations with civil society organizations and media outlets,” “effective measures to increase digital health literacy among the public and within the health sector” and “research … on factors that hinder adherence to public health and social measures in a pandemic.”

According to Nass, Article 18 shows that “The WHO is integrated into the censorship propaganda industrial complex.”

However, new restrictions stemming from the pandemic treaty and/or the IHR amendments may not be restricted just to speech. Dr. Abdulla Assiri, co-chair of the WHO’s Working Group on Amendments to the International Health Regulations and Saudi Arabia’s deputy assistant minister for preventative health, said at the WHA:

“Implementing the amended IHR shall enable member states to detect, prevent, and respond to public health emergencies and reduce the chance of pandemics.

“The world, however, requires different level of legal mandates, such as the Pandemic Treaty, to navigate through a particular pandemic, should one occur, and it will, prioritizing actions that may restrict individual liberties, mandating and sharing of information, knowledge, and resources.”

https://twitter.com/BernieSpofforth/status/1661253625555853313

Remarking on this on CHD.tv, Roguski suggested that Assiri “should be removed from his position as the co-chair because he’s exhibiting a lack of respect for dignity, human rights, fundamental freedoms.” Roguski told The Defender, “Maybe that’s how it is in Saudi Arabia … but that is just completely untenable.”

Bell, also remarking on Assiri’s statement, told The Defender:

“Human rights and democracy are no longer even given lip service, so those running this agenda are clearly very confident in their mastery of the media and the narrative generally.

“The co-chair of the Working Group on the IHR can talk publicly about the need to take away the basic freedom of individuals globally, when a group of people in Geneva, sponsored by Pharma and Pharma investors, and heavily influenced by a number of totalitarian regimes and military dictatorships, would like to.”

WHA members adopted a “resolution on behavioural sciences for better health,” sponsored by Malaysia, which urges member states to “acknowledge the role of behavioural science in achieving better health outcomes” and “to identify opportunities for increased use.”

According to the WHO, the passage of this resolution reflects “broad consensus towards the need for integrating systematically behavioural science theory, methods and approaches across health topics and public health functions.”

A tenet of behavioral science theory is the concept of “nudging,” described as a technocratic solution for tricky policy issues involving a perceived need to encourage, in a “voluntary manner,” policies or measures that would otherwise be unpopular, and which was widely employed to increase compliance to COVID-19 countermeasures.

WHO, UN could gain new ‘emergency’ powers

Addressing the WHA May 22, Tedros noted several new and recent WHO initiatives.

These include the Pandemic Fund launched with the World Bank, the Universal Health and Preparedness Review for “enhanced accountability,” the WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence and International Pathogen Surveillance Network for “enhanced surveillance,” the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board for “enhanced monitoring” and the Global Health Emergency Corps” for “an enhanced emergency response workforce.”

For the latter body, Tedros specifically thanked German Federal Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach and Chris Elias, president of global development for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Surveillance figures prominently in many of these institutions, just as it does in the proposed pandemic treaty and IHR amendments. For instance, Tedros praised the completion of the beta version of the World Health Data Hub and mentioned the forthcoming launch of its public portal, DataDot.

On May 20, the WHO announced the launch of the International Pathogen Surveillance Network, with a goal of “detect[ing] and respond[ing] to disease threats before they become epidemics and pandemics, and to optimize routine disease surveillance.”

It will work with the WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence, launched in 2021 “in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which demonstrated weaknesses around the world in how countries detect, monitor and manage public health threats” in order to “gather and analyse data for early warning surveillance.”

On May 19, Tedros issued a report suggesting that nations establish a “global architecture for health emergency preparedness, prevention, response, and resilience (HEPR),” in response to what he described as a lack, on the part of individual countries, of a “global architecture” to respond to “health emergencies,” as well as hunger, poverty, climate change, ecological degradation and economic and social inequalities.

In his May 22 remarks, Tedros also addressed the forthcoming High-Level Meeting on Pandemic Preparedness, Prevention and Response (PPPR), to take place in September, following a resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly last year.

Roguski told The Defender that PPPR may “empower the UN Secretary-General to step into a position of authority if there’s some kind of an emergency.” A roadmap for the adoption of a political declaration for PPPR by September has been set forth by the UN.

As reported by The Geneva Health Files, “the High-Level Meeting in September will … be the first ever UN General Assembly high-level meeting on PPR at heads of states and governmental level.” Some analysts, however, state that establishing PPR would not be possible without revising the WHO constitution.

The details of this proposal were included in a March UN document, “Strengthening the International Response to Complex Global Shocks — An Emergency Platform,” which stated that “Enhanced international cooperation is the only way we can adequately respond to these shocks” and that “the United Nations is the only organization with the reach and legitimacy to convene at the highest level and galvanize global action.”

The document calls on the UN General Assembly to grant the Secretary-General “standing authority to convene and operationalize automatically an Emergency Platform in the event of a future complex global shock of sufficient scale, severity and reach.”

Nass, analyzing the document on CHD.tv’s “Friday Roundtable” last week, said such “global shocks” may include areas such as climate, pandemics, biological warfare, supply chain disruption, cyberspace disruption, an “event in outer space” and an “unforeseen black swan event.”

Nevertheless, proposals for the PPPR have been accompanied by recommendations from the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response for the creation of a Global Health Threats Council, an independent coordination body between the WHO, UN, financial institutions and other “stakeholders.”

The Independent Panel released a report in May titled “A Road Map for a World Protected from Pandemic Threats,” stating that “new pandemic threats are inevitable, but pandemics are a political choice.” It calls for the IHR amendments to be passed, an “independent, well-functioning and authoritative WHO” and “a high-level political council for pandemic threats.”

Speaking on “Friday Roundtable,” Nass observed that the PPPR and other recently proposed bodies would operate at the level of the UN instead of at the level of the WHO. She said that while the PPPR is intended to “work together” with the pandemic treaty and IHR amendments, “if one aspect of it fails, then they have all these fallbacks.”

Notably, Bill Gates expressed support for such a UN mechanism as far back as 2015. Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, he suggested that, “Through the United Nations, some global institution could be empowered and funded to coordinate the system,” based on “lessons from the Ebola epidemic.”

The Geneva Health Files also reported that discussions on the formation of a new WHO medical countermeasures platform, the WHE (WHO World Health Emergencies) Intelligence and Surveillance Systems Division and the WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence, took place at this year’s WHA.

In remarks shared with The Defender regarding these new bodies, Bell said that “Centralization through WHO is poor policy by incompetent people.”

He added:

“Public health experience tells us that addressing such preventable or treatable diseases is the best way to lengthen lives and promote sustainable good health. They are most effectively addressed by people on the ground, with local knowledge of behavior, culture and disease epidemiology.

“This involves empowering communities to manage their own health.”

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website.

As the World Economic Forum (WEF) today wrapped up its weeklong annual meeting of nearly 3,000 political, business, media and academic elites, mainstream media largely continued to sing the meeting’s praises, while independent media outlets took aim at the WEF’s agenda and its promoters.

The Associated Press (AP) described the meetings in Davos, Switzerland, as taking on the “pressing global issues” while simultaneously being the “target of bizarre claims from a growing chorus who believe it involves a group of elites manipulating events for their own benefit.”

Among those critics was Twitter owner and CEO Elon Musk, who responded to a tweet: “WEF is increasingly becoming an unelected world government that the people never asked for and don’t want.”

Musk posted an online poll — that generated 2.42 million votes — where he asked whether “The World Economic Forum should control the world.” Eighty-six percent of respondents said “no.”

The Defender on Wednesday reported on the first few days of meetings. This article lists eight key takeaways from Davos — and why they matter.

The American press makes its annual pilgrimage to genuflect to Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab and get its marching orders from the billionaires.https://t.co/1Xe6JoETeL

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) January 18, 2023

Global elites really want vaccine passports

One of the proposals that generated the most attention at this year’s WEF meeting came from embattled former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, now executive chairman of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.

Blair proposed the development of a “national digital infrastructure,” stating, “We should be helping countries to develop a national digital infrastructure which they will need with these new vaccines” — a statement that strongly suggested “new vaccines” are coming and we will “need” them.

Blair also said:

“You need to know who’s been vaccinated and who hasn’t been. Some of the vaccines that will come down the line, there will be multiple shots.

“So [for vaccines] you’ve got to have — for reasons to do with healthcare more generally but certainly for pandemics — a proper digital infrastructure and most countries don’t have that.”

As previously reported by The Defender, Blair endorsed the “Good Health Pass,” a digital vaccine passport launched by ID2020, a collaborative effort between Mastercard, the International Chamber of Commerce and the WEF.

Members of the Good Health Pass Collaborative include Accenture, Deloitte and IBM, while general partners of ID2020 include Facebook and Mastercard.

ID2020’s founding partners include Microsoft, the Rockefeller Foundation, Accenture, GAVI, The Vaccine Alliance (a core partner of the World Health Organization, or WHO), UNICEF, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Bank.

Global ‘leaders’ appear to be clairvoyant

On the disease front, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that “a resurgence of tuberculosis may be coming … sooner or later.”

Statements like Tedros’ appear to belie a knowledge of future developments. This has been the norm at previous WEF meetings — and it was the case again this year.

Investigative journalist Jordan Schachtel pointed out that “Event 201, the pre-pandemic coronavirus simulation, was announced at a Davos WEF conference in 2019.”

Similarly, this year, Lawrence “Larry” Summers, who served as U.S. secretary of the treasury between 1999 and 2001 and director of the National Economic Council from 2009 to 2010, said “the odds in my view are better than 50-50” that “there will be a COVID-scale problem within the next 15 years.”

Summers made these remarks as part of a panel, “Global Economic Outlook: Is this the End of an Era?” whose panelists included International Monetary Fund (IMF) Director Kristalina Georgieva and former IMF managing director and current president of the European Central Bank Christine Lagarde.

During a press conference, officials presented the WEF’s “Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2023” report, predicting a “catastrophic cyber event” said to be “likely in the next two years.”

These are people who think very highly of themselves

Statements by WEF’s Founder and Executive Chair Klaus Schwab and WEF meeting participants also revealed how the “elite” meeting participants appear to believe they are the self-anointed saviors — or rulers — of the world.

In an interview with India Today, which sent two attendees to this year’s WEF meeting, Schwab said the world will soon no longer be run by superpowers such as the U.S., but instead by WEF “stakeholders,” such as BlackRock and Bill Gates.

During another session, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, foreign affairs minister of Pakistan whose mother, Benazir Bhutto, was formerly the country’s prime minister, talked about a “new world order” that is being stymied by “hyper-partisan[ship].”

Also during the same panel, Slovenian Foreign Minister Tanja Falon, said, “We have countries that are respecting their national interest going beyond the rules,” referring to “global rules,” adding that “we have to take into consideration The World Order.”

And Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry told meeting attendees, “We are a select group of human beings” who “sit in a room and come together and actually talk about saving the planet.”

WEF Participants make decisions in ‘lock step’ — no debate, please

Schachtel noted that at the WEF meetings, “conformity is required and debate is a cancel-worthy sin.”

He elaborated on this point in a recent blog post, describing the WEF meetings as “a reinforced echo chamber in which there is one problem, one objective, and only one solution,” instead of being “a place for a healthy, robust debate.”

Schachtel wrote:

“Regardless of who populates these panels and speeches, whether it’s invited corporate media, governmental officials, and/or business executives, there’s never any apparent dissent or difference of opinion expressed.

“The truth of the matter is that the WEF and its leaders prefer conformity to debate. In fact, debate is actively discouraged, and stepping out of line — via a narrative violation — is grounds for permanent removal from Club Davos.”

Journalist and author Walter Kirn tweeted similar sentiments:

What strikes me most about the WEF is how little disagreement there is. The largest matters on earth are at stake (supposedly) yet the conferees don't argue. They don't debate. All points seem smugly settled. It's an ego orgy, a great self-satisfied mutual grope.

— Walter Kirn (@walterkirn) January 19, 2023

Journalist Jack Pobosiec said the “WEF/WHO and the Davos mindsets are essential to understand [because] this is the mindset that governs our world here in the West. Vast amounts of our leaders, even down to lower levels, ascribe to the globally homogenized and technocratic vision of the world. Do not overlook this.”

They want you to believe there’s a digital solution for (almost) every problem

The annual WEF meetings are renowned for their promotion of technocracy, and this year’s meeting continued that trend.

An example of this was a session titled “Improving Livelihoods with Digital ID,” which promoted “an international ID policy to realize financial, social and health equity through digital identification.”

According to journalist Andrew Lawton, this panel “was not streamed and was not open to the press.” The panel included participants from the Global Digital Policy Incubator, Hedera, the Dubai Future Foundation and DataKind.

During another session, panelists predicted “humans will soon embrace implanted brain technology so they ‘can decode complex thought,’” adding that “neurosignals can be used for biometrics” and that the more widely adopted neurotechnology becomes, the more data can be gathered on humans.

Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Communications and Information Technology Abdulla Al-Swaha told attendees in Davos his country is “embracing metaverse technology [which] has already shown its environmental benefits with the planning and development of some of the Kingdom’s biggest projects.”

The WEF is a proponent of the metaverse, as previously reported by The Defender.

They want to change what you think, and how you live

Many of the proposals presented this week will necessarily involve large-scale changes to people’s livelihoods and habits.

In an example of the behavioral psychology concept of “nudging,” Cepsa CEO Maarten Wetselaar advocated in favor of “much higher carbon prices,” in order to “make what you try to avoid expensive and subsidize the thing that you try to build.” He called this a “very capitalist intervention.”

Lawton noted that while it may seem odd for an oil and gas executive “to be so enthusiastic about transitioning away from oil and gas,” Cepsa “is also involved in green hydrogen and clearly sees the writing on the wall and wants some of those subsidies Wetselaar is calling for.”

Australian mining executive Andrew Forrest spoke in favor of “zero emissions, not just net-zero emissions,” saying this can be done using existing technology: “solar, wind, batteries, green hydrogen.”

The “15-minute city” concept, where people will be car-less, was also touted, while a member of Switzerland’s Green Party called for “punishing businesses that don’t adhere to climate agreements.” Indeed, a “5-minute city” proposal was also put forth, that would be “100% solar and wind-powered.”

Meat — or discouraging its consumption — was also on the agenda. Jim Hagemann Snabe, chairman of Siemens, said, “If a billion people stop eating meat, I tell you, it has a big impact. Not only does it have a big impact on the current food system, but it will also inspire innovation of food systems.” Snabe also advocated for synthetic meat.

MUST WATCH! @joerogan chats with 4th generation farmer Will Harris of @whiteoakpasture on what industrial ag gets wrong and how regenerative farming can fix it.https://t.co/uhJ36Vyybu

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) November 30, 2022

The global elite don’t like free speech or public opinion

Participants at this year’s meeting also expressed contempt for free speech.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, for instance, said:

“Politicians need to understand, sometimes we are faced with these kinds of challenges. It is better to take today decisions that will eventually be not popular [sic] but to be essential, to be able to shape the public opinion itself.”

On another panel, Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said the “pandemic is still ongoing” and was critical of scientific, political and public debate about COVID-19 vaccines.

Responding to a prompt from Sasha Vakulina, a Ukrainian journalist working for European news network Euronews, who described “the extent of this misinformation when it comes to vaccination” as “overwhelming,” Bancel said:

“In some countries you saw scientific debate on TV, in prime time, so you can imagine some people were scared.

“You saw the differences in countries where all the parties would say, you know, these have been approved by the regulators, clinical studies have been done, you should get your vaccines.

“The social media was just terrible, just terrible. You could see some countries where you had scientific debate and political debate and social media … those three things and the vaccine rate was very very low.”

To this, Vakulina simply replied, “absolutely.”

On the same panel, Michelle Williams, dean of faculty at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said, “In a diverse society, you are going to need to have layers and layers of communicators and different styles and ways of communicating.”

Williams said governments should “work collaboratively and respectfully in addressing the appropriate message and messenger to really promote the change.”

Seth Berkley, CEO of the Gates-affiliated GAVI, The Vaccine Alliance, said:

“It was amazing the amount of misinformation that was there, and that information then went straight to the rest of the world … the way we normally deal with misinformation is we get the local chief, the local religious leader, the local healthcare workers who are trusted, but all of a sudden they’re like, ‘but look at what’s going on in Germany or in the U.S. or in other places, and here’s what I’m getting in my social media,’ and that has been a real problem.

“So the trust goes even broader. We don’t trust the institutions. We have misinformation, and it’s getting worse, not better.”

In another session, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said COVID-19 vaccines were “politicized” because people questioned whether they worked, and that this questioning was “constantly in our way.”

Similarly, Erik Brynjolfsson, professor and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI [artificial intelligence], expressed concern about the flow of so-called “polarizing information.” He also discussed the importance of communicating the “truth to the right people.”

The head of Britain’s telecommunications and broadcast regulator Ofcom, Dame Melanie Dawes, defended “free and frank and open conversations on any topic,” but then qualified that statement by saying “Well, there are sometimes cases where we open up an investigation but … let’s see how that goes.”

These are people who don’t practice what they preach

The “cost of living” crisis was a big theme at this year’s meeting. Yet panel discussions such as “Stemming the Cost of Living Crisis” included participants like Gita Gopinath, the first deputy managing director of the IMF — an institution known for imposing austerity measures globally.

Journalist James Melville, remarking on this theme, wrote:

“Millions of people are suffering the consequences of the cost of living crisis. But when they see our global elites grandstanding their power & control at the WEF/Davos, it’s hardly a surprise that people feel disenfranchised and forgotten.”

And journalist Michael Shellenberger noted the WEF, even though it purports to advocate more transparency and disclosure from corporations, is highly secretive with its own financial disclosures.

According to the WEF, “Swiss law does not require financial reporting for foundations,” although the 2022 WEF annual report says part of its portfolio is managed by Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management.

Lawton noted the WEF meetings operate under the “cash-for-access” model, with business leaders reportedly paying $250,000 to attend, although politicians participate for free. This is in addition to annual WEF membership and partnership dues which are as high as $650,000.

According to Lawton, the WEF meeting also operates alongside a type of caste system, where “your value in Davos isn’t determined by your net worth but by the colour of your ID badge,” as access to certain spaces is prohibited for those with the “wrong” color.

And while participants proclaim to be engaged in the business of saving the world, Greenpeace noted attendees arrived “in droves of private jets.” The Guardian reported that private jet emissions quadrupled during the 2022 WEF meeting.

One attendee, interviewed by independent journalist Savanah Hernandez, justified the extensive use of private jets in these terms: “I think it’s more important what decisions are made here rather than how the people come here, by plane or by train,” while a driver for VIPs in Davos revealed that, for such figures, “I cannot drive electricity car.”

Despite the WEFs agenda to reduce meat consumption, Hernandez noted, “All of the attendees in the food halls are eating MEAT. Also, the hors d’oeuvres served to WEF attendees at parties have MEAT [emphasis original].”

And according to Lawton, attendees enjoyed “wine and hors d’œuvres” while discussing “food insecurity in Africa.”

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Children’s Health Defense.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.