WHO’s approval of Bavarian Nordic’s vaccine will help governments and international agencies such as the Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and UNICEF, buy it, MedicalXpress reported.

The MVA-BN vaccine — short for “Modified Vaccinia Ankara-Bavarian Nordic” — is a smallpox/mpox vaccine. It is sold in the U.S. under the name Jynneos.

WHO Assistant Director-General Yukiko Nakatani said, “The decision can also help national regulatory authorities to fast-track approvals, ultimately increasing access to quality-assured mpox vaccine products.”

Children’s Health Defense (CHD) Chief Scientific Officer Brian Hooker called the WHO’s approval of the shot for infants and children in Africa “a train wreck in the making.”

Hooker told The Defender:

“The safety profile is abysmal in adults (up to 2.1% serious cardiac events in clinical trials) and the vaccine has not been adequately tested for efficacy or safety in pediatric populations.

“In other words, the WHO has no idea whether it will work nor do they know how much damage it will do. The WHO has again abandoned good public health principles and waved their magic vaccine wand on the mpox outbreak.”

Dr. David Bell, a public health physician and biotech consultant, also criticized the WHO for overly focusing on mpox vaccines and neglecting to address broader public health issues in Africa.

“So far this year, about 40,000 children have died from malaria in the DRC [Democratic Republic of Congo] alone, and similar numbers of people from malnutrition, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDs,” Bell said.

Although these numbers “obviously dwarf” the number of mpox deaths, the WHO is allocating fewer resources to addressing them.

Bell — who formerly served as a medical officer and scientist at the WHO — explained what he sees occurring:

“We have become much better at detecting much rarer diseases such as mpox, and addressing these is certainly more lucrative for the growing industry feeding off the WHO’s misinformation regarding rapidly rising pandemic risk.

“However, it is clear that the people of DRC and Africa in general would benefit far more if WHO returned to impactful public health. There has been a move over recent years to a concentration on addressing the symptoms of diseases of poverty (which mpox is) with Western-developed commodities, rather than dealing with underlying causes.

“This signals a return to colonialist-era approaches rather than evidence-based public health. It presumably reflects the way WHO is now funded, with increasing control from the private sector and a few large Western nations with large Pharma industries.”

No clinical trials on kids

In its press release, the WHO said the MVA-BN vaccine can be administered to adults over 18 as a two-dose injection four weeks apart but can also be given as a single dose “in supply-constrained outbreak situations.”

“While MVA-BN is currently not licensed for persons under 18 years of age,” it said, “this vaccine may be used ‘off-label’ in infants, children and adolescents, and in pregnant and immunocompromised people.”

The WHO called for more data on the vaccine’s safety and efficacy in these situations.

The WHO Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization — which reviewed all available evidence and recommended the use of MVA-BN vaccine — noted in its Weekly Epidemiological Record report that “MVA-BN has not been specifically studied in clinical trials in children.”

However, they said:

“The same non-replicating MVA viral vector is used as a platform for other vaccines that include MVA-filo (Mvabea) against Ebola virus disease (EVD).

“The EVD vaccine is approved by the EU for adults and children aged 1 year and older. Data from 5 published studies on MVA-BN as a viral vector platform for the prevention of EVD, with a total population of 52 229 children, support the favourable safety profile of the product.”

The authors of a new study — published Sept. 11 in The BMJ — presented results on MVA-BN’s effectiveness in adult males but said nothing about children or pregnant women.

In 2023, researchers funded by the UK Health Security Agency looked at the health outcomes of 87 children who received a single dose of MVA-BN.

They reported that the vaccine was “well tolerated” but that larger studies needed to be done to fully assess the shot’s safety and efficacy in kids.

The Defender asked Bavarian Nordic for information about its mpox vaccine in pediatric populations but did not receive a response by the deadline.

The WHO’s process for granting a drug “prequalification” approval for “emergency use listing” requires drugmakers to “commit to continue generating missing information to fulfill prequalification requirements.”

“Once this information becomes available,” the WHO said, “a PQ [prequalification] application should be submitted to complete the full process to achieve  recommendation for international procurement in both emergency and non-emergency settings.”

It is unclear how much pediatric safety and efficacy data Bavarian Nordic has collected so far and what it showed.

Mpox vaccine approved for U.S. kids and teens since 2022

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2022 granted emergency use authorization for the vaccine for “in individuals less than 18 years of age determined to be at high risk for monkeypox infection.”

Jynneos has been licensed for use in U.S. adults since 2019.

The Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC)’s mpox vaccination website states that while teens and children at risk for mpox can receive Jynneos, it is not recommended for babies under 6 months.

The CDC also says Jynneos can be given to pregnant or breastfeeding women.

Although it remains unknown if Jynneos may pose risks to a developing fetus if taken during pregnancy, animal studies haven’t shown any harm to developing fetuses when the vaccine was given to pregnant animals, the agency said.

However, the study authors downplayed the finding by reporting that “overall outcomes were good,” according to Dr. Peter McCullough — a cardiologist and author of more than 1,000 publications — who analyzed the study on his Substack.

“In the COVID-19 crisis,” McCullough said, “we have learned to look at the data and the analyses ourselves because there are usually very important results downplayed by the authors — this time it is vaccine myopericarditis mortality.”

McCullough combined the numbers from the study’s results for myocarditis and pericarditis cases to show that 97 of the 1,014 (9.6%) myopericarditis cases were fatal.

Myopericarditis is an umbrella term for myocarditis, inflammation of the heart, and pericarditis, inflammation of the tissue surrounding the heart.

“A 9.6% case fatality rate for a vaccine side effect largely in young healthy men is astronomical and clinically unacceptable,” he said.

McCullough criticized the authors’ conclusion that “overall outcomes were good.”

“This can never be the conclusion when the case fatality rate was 97/1014 cases with followup out to 64 days after the shot,” he said.

The study authors extracted data from April 2004 to December 2023 in the Japanese Adverse Drug Event Report (JADER) — a large database for public reporting of adverse events — among people ages 12 and up who experienced myocarditis or pericarditis after getting an mRNA COVID-19 shot.

Among 759 reports of vaccine-induced myocarditis and 255 reports of pericarditis, 84 (11%) and 13 (5%) individuals died within 64 days of an mRNA COVID-19 shot, respectively.

The study, which is in press, was available online early this month in the Journal of Infection and Chemotherapy.

The Defender reached out to the study’s corresponding author — Kazuaki Taguchi, Ph.D., with the Faculty of Pharmacy at Keio University in Tokyo — for comment about the team’s conclusions but did not receive a response by the deadline.

Japanese males under 30 ‘should promptly seek medical assistance’

Taguchi and his co-authors said they undertook the study to clarify the association between mRNA vaccines and myocarditis/pericarditis.

They concluded that in the Japanese population, COVID-19 mRNA vaccination was “significantly associated with the onset of myocarditis/pericarditis.” They noted that influencing factors included being under 30 years old and male.

Japanese males under 30 should “promptly seek medical assistance for inspection and treatment upon experiencing chest symptoms after vaccination,” they wrote.

For the study, the authors first looked at adverse event reports to determine how soon after an mRNA vaccination people reported the onset of myocarditis or pericarditis.

The majority of cases occurred within a week of getting the vaccine. They noted that prior studies found a similar trend.

“Considering the results of the present study and previous reports,” they wrote, “it is necessary to pay particular attention to the onset of myocarditis and pericarditis within 7 days after SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccination.”

The authors then analyzed the outcome of the myocarditis and pericarditis cases — such as full recovery, remission, ongoing or increased symptoms, or death.

Among the cases they analyzed, half of the people who reported getting pericarditis and nearly half (47%) of those who reported getting myocarditis recovered, they said.

Another 37% and 31% of pericarditis cases and myocarditis cases, respectively, reported being in “remission.”

They noted a “severe outcome” or “non-recovery” — but not death — occurred in 8% (20) of the pericarditis cases and 11% (80) of the myocarditis cases. As noted earlier, death occurred in 11% of the myocarditis cases and 5% of the pericarditis cases.

The authors appeared to not investigate the amount of time between onset and outcome. Also, because they examined myopericarditis cases that occurred between one and 64 days after vaccination, their study didn’t report on changes in outcome — such as improvement or worsening in symptoms — that happened more than 64 days post-vaccination.

The Japanese study received no funding from any government agency, for-profit or nonprofit group.

‘These data are just the tip of the iceberg’

According to McCullough, “These data are just the tip of the iceberg,” as prior studies suggest the risk of heart damage goes up roughly 2.5% with each successive booster and that half of myopericarditis cases may be subclinical, meaning asymptomatic.

The Japanese study looked only at the reports from symptomatic myopericarditis cases.

Taguchi and his co-authors said they couldn’t analyze the relationship between the number of vaccinations and the risk of myocarditis/pericarditis “due to the difficulty in determining the timing of the dose.” They called for more research.

McCullough said the Japanese data may not accurately show all cardiac harm caused by mRNA COVID-19 vaccines because some subclinical myopericarditis cases may only manifest later on — beyond the study’s 64-day window of inquiry — as cardiomyopathy, heart failure or sudden death.

Cardiomyopathy is a disease of the heart muscle that causes the heart to have a harder time pumping blood to the rest of the body, which can lead to symptoms of heart failure, according to the Mayo Clinic.

CDC fails to mention risk of death from vaccine-induced myopericarditis

McCullough pointed out that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) official guidance to U.S. healthcare practitioners regarding myopericarditis in teens and young adults after receipt of a COVID-19 vaccine fails to mention that the condition can be fatal.

The CDC’s Clinical Considerations website states:

“The severity of myocarditis and pericarditis cases can vary; most patients with myocarditis after mRNA COVID-19 vaccination have experienced resolution of symptoms by hospital discharge.”

McCullough said, “Hospitalization is a concerning outcome for any young person after taking a vaccine that should be safe and have a meaningful health benefit.”

The CDC’s Myocarditis and Pericarditis After mRNA COVID-19 Vaccination website similarly neglects to mention that the condition can be fatal.

The Defender asked the CDC if it plans to update the website by notifying the public about the risk of fatality but did not receive a response by the deadline.

The study authors — including Michael Kundi, Ph.D., with the Center for Public Health at the Medical University of Vienna, Austria — said they found “clear evidence for induction of acute toxicity and disturbance of the cell cycle (cytokinesis) as a consequence of exposure” to radiofrequency (RF) radiation levels used by 3G smartphones.

“These processes may possibly lead to the formation of neoplastic cells,” they wrote in their report, published in Environmental Research.

Malignant neoplasms are cancerous tumors, according to the Cleveland Clinic.

Kundi and his co-authors said their study — which used people, not mice — was the “first controlled human intervention trial concerning cytotoxic/genotoxic effects of mobile phone radiation.”

Dr. Rob Brown, a diagnostic radiologist with more than 30 years of experience, told The Defender that the cell damage found in the study “is significant and should be looked at with great concern.”

Brown is also the vice president of scientific research and clinical affairs for Environmental Health Trust (EHT), a nonprofit research and education group focused on the effects of wireless radiation.

He said the study is “particularly valuable” because it is an in-vivo study. “Most research to date exploring the biological effects of electromagnetic fields and radiofrequency radiation has been performed on in-vitro cell cultures, plants and animal models,” Brown said. “Because of this, they have been easier to discount by industry and policymakers.”

Kundi and his co-authors undertook their study because prior research suggests that cellphone radiation “may cause cancer in humans but the underlying molecular mechanisms are currently not known.”

Their results shed light on the molecular mechanisms that may be involved.

For instance, they found that 3G cellphone radiation didn’t cause chromosomal damage, but it did cause the formation of nuclear anomalies that are indicative of “acute cytotoxic effects” and “disturbed cytokinesis.”

Devra Davis, Ph.D., MPH — EHT’s founder and president emerita whose prior research cited “substantial scientific evidence” linking cellphone radiation to cancer — said that just because authors of the Austrian study didn’t find chromosomal damage in the exposed cells shouldn’t be interpreted as suggesting that cancer won’t develop.

“In fact, chromosomal damage is not a necessary precondition for carcinogenesis,” Davis told The Defender. “Carcinogenesis can occur without mutagenesis,” she said, “Factors contributing to cancer include damage to rates of cellular signaling and repair such as were found in this study.”

She said the study — which she called “well-designed” — added to prior studies showing harms from RF radiation by elucidating “additional reasons why phones should not be used close to the head or body.”

Participants wore RF radiation headsets mimicking cellphone radiation exposure

For the study, the authors randomly assigned 41 participants, whose average age was 29, to be in a high RF radiation exposure group — designed to simulate holding a cellphone using 3G next to their head — or a low RF radiation group, ostensibly designed to mimic other real-world exposures to RF radiation.

Participants wore a headset that emitted either high- or low-level RF radiation on one side of the head for two hours on five consecutive days.

The study authors collected buccal smear samples to examine the cells inside both cheeks just before and three weeks after the participants wore the RF radiation headsets.

The researchers also asked the participants to use hands-free devices three weeks before, during and three weeks after the intervention, to minimize other possible cellphone RF radiation to the cheek.

The participants recorded in a journal any potential confounding factors such as gingival bleeding, eating a spicy meal or visiting the dentist during the study timeframe. The journals showed such confounding factors were very rare or not present.

Through scientific analysis of the buccal samples, the researchers found that the cells from the cheeks of participants in the high RF radiation group showed “a significant increase of binucleated cells” — cells that contain two nuclei — “which are formed as a consequence of disturbed cell divisions, and of karyolitic cells, which are indicative for cell death.”

“No such effects were seen in cells from the less exposed side,” they said.

Their analysis revealed increased chromatin fragmentation in the cells, which prior research associated with two forms of cell death: apoptosis and necrosis.

“Both forms of cell death are preceded by condensation of chromatin,” they explained. “Notably in the present study we found also an increase of CC,” or condensed chromatin.

Brown said the findings provide “strong evidence that at least some frequencies emitted by the cellular phone passed through the entire thickness of the cheek’s soft tissue (typically 1 centimeter in thickness or more) to affect the sampled cells.”

He added, “A similar depth of penetration and perhaps even greater should therefore be expected in all parts of the body in which a cellphone may make contact.”

Many young people use a cellphone for more than 2 hours a day

The study authors noted that a limitation of their study was that the participants wore the RF radiation headset for only two hours during each exposure session.

Davis pointed this out, too. “The exposure times used in this study appear much less than those reported in surveys of phone use in many sections of the globe and in younger age groups.”

“For instance,” she said, “Gen Z users report about 6 or more hours daily use of smartphones.”

U.S. Americans on average spend 3 hours and 39 minutes a day on their smartphones, reported ExplodingTopics.com on June 4.

It’s difficult to accurately determine how many of those hours are spent with the phone held close to the head, Davis said.

The researchers looked at reports in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) from January 1990 through December 2023.

They counted the number of cerebral thromboembolism events — as in, blood clots of the brain’s veins or arteries — reported in people who received a COVID-19 shot compared with those who received a flu shot or other vaccines.

Blood clots that block blood flow to the brain account for roughly 87% of all strokes, according to the American Stroke Association, a division of the American Heart Association.

McCullough — a cardiologist with over 1,000 publications and over 685 citations in the National Library of Medicine — told The Defender the study showed “an unacceptable risk of catastrophic thrombotic injuries to the brain” in individuals who took one or more COVID-19 shots.

McCullough summarized the study’s results on Substack:

“Compared to influenza vaccines given over 34 years, COVID-19 vaccines in 36 months of use had over 1000-fold increased risk of most blood clot events, and compared to all vaccines combined administered over 34 years, this risk remained at over 200-times greater with COVID-19 vaccination.”

Prior research has suggested that the spike protein in both the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the COVID-19 vaccine can cause serious blood clotting, McCullough and his co-authors noted in their report.

Blood clots in the brain are difficult to treat, McCullough told The Defender, and “oftentimes leave patients with devastating disabilities.”

“This and other sources of data,” he added, “support calls to remove all COVID-19 vaccines from public use.”

The study — co-authored with Claire Rogers, Dr. James Thorp and Kirstin Cosgrove — is under peer review and available online as a preprint.

Women especially at risk

For the study, McCullough and his co-authors used 12 search terms to find VAERS reports of adverse events related to blood clots in the brain: cavernous sinus thrombosis, cerebral artery thrombosis, cerebral infarction, cerebral thrombosis, cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, cerebral venous thrombosis, embolic cerebral infarction, ischaemic cerebral infarction, sigmoid sinus thrombosis, superior sagittal sinus thrombosis, thrombotic cerebral infarction and transverse sinus thrombosis.

In the three years since the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, they found 5,137 reports of a brain blood clot event in those who received one or more COVID-19 shots.

Meanwhile, VAERS data showed only 52 reports since 1990 of a brain blood clot event following a flu vaccine and 282 since 1990 following all other vaccinations, they said.

The actual number of events may be higher due to underreporting in VAERS, they said, for several reasons.

First, CDC staff may have “tremendous difficulty” in processing the reports due to an overwhelming increase in VAERS reports since the COVID-19 vaccine rollout.

Also, clinicians may not have the necessary awareness and knowledge to recognize injuries as being vaccine-related and thus may not report them in VAERS.

Moreover, they added, “The VAERS database is well known for its difficulty in entering events, making it even more challenging for healthcare workers to submit each event with limited time in a hospital or clinic setting.”

The authors said their findings are especially concerning for women of reproductive age — who are particularly at risk for certain blood clotting events in the brain, such as cerebral venous thrombosis.

The American Heart Association said in a Jan. 29 review article that roughly two-thirds of all cerebral venous thrombosis cases occurred in women of reproductive age.

Given this reality, the study’s authors called for “an immediate global moratorium on the use of COVID-19 vaccines … with an absolute contraindication in women of reproductive age.”

CDC: no plan to change COVID vaccine recommendations

The Defender asked the CDC if it planned to alter its COVID-19 vaccination recommendations in light of McCullough and his co-authors’ findings.

A CDC spokesperson told The Defender, the “CDC does not comment on findings or claims by individuals or organizations outside of CDC. Current CDC recommendations can be found here.”

The CDC has found the COVID-19 vaccines to be safe and effective, the spokesperson said. “The CDC continues to encourage Americans to get vaccinated, as the COVID-19 vaccination continues to be the best way to protect against serious illness.”

When asked specifically about the risks of COVID-19 vaccination for women of reproductive age, the CDC spokesperson directed The Defender to the CDC’s webpage COVID-19 Vaccines While Pregnant or Breastfeeding, which states that the vaccines are safe and effective.

Little did they know then that American Towers, AT&T and T-Mobile would soon build a cell tower just 900 feet from their home — a tower that would later forever change Marcia’s life as she knew it.

Nearly immediately after the cell tower was “upgraded” in 2019, Marcia became disabled from the intense levels of radiofrequency (RF) radiation emitted by the tower.

Since then, she has suffered 51 strokes, vision loss, hearing loss, headaches, sleep disruption, chronic fatigue and cognitive impairment. She experiences ongoing issues with balance, orientation and mobility.

Now, backed by the legal team in Children’s Health Defense’s (CHD) Electromagnetic Radiation (EMR) & Wireless program, Marcia plans to sue the companies operating the tower, under the Americans with Disability Act.

Marcia alleges that the companies must provide her with a “reasonable accommodation” and/or “modify their policies, practices or procedures” to comply with federal disability law.

Hers is the second in CHD’s strategic line of cases trying out new legal avenues for individuals suffering from RF radiation exposure.

The cases also draw attention to the need for better federal regulation of RF radiation and outline the scientific evidence that debunks the “RF radiation is safe” narrative.

W. Scott McCollough, lead litigator for the cases, told The Defender that Marcia’s legal team in January sent the telecom companies a demand letter and plans to file the initial complaint in her lawsuit later this month.

Marcia and Jay — who also have an 18-year-old son whose health they say has been impaired by the tower’s radiation — spoke to The Defender about Marcia’s illness and the importance of her legal battle in raising awareness that RF radiation can hurt people’s health.

‘Something’s wrong in my head’

In late September 2019, Marica and Jay noticed workmen doing a “major upgrade” on the 300-foot cell tower on the property adjacent to theirs.

Marcia, who at the time was in her third year of nursing school and worked as a certified nursing assistant at a hospital, said the work lasted about 10 days.

“They put a big crane up there,” said Jay, who runs a trucking business. “We had seen them go up there without a crane multiple times, but this was the first time where it was a major overhaul type thing.”

What exactly did the workers do?

“We’re thinking [they upgraded the tower for deploying] 5G,” Marcia said. “They [the companies] won’t admit to what they did. They say they don’t have to tell us.”

On the weekend after the workers completed the upgrade, Marcia was at home and began feeling dizzy and as if something “just didn’t feel right.”

She called Jay, telling him, “Something’s wrong in my head … I don’t know how to explain it. I just feel like crap.”

Did she need him to come home? No, she told him. “I’ll be fine.”

The physical sensation was “awful,” Marcia said. In addition to dizziness, she had headaches and nausea. “I couldn’t pick my head up off the pillow without the room spinning and feeling very sick.“

‘We think you’re having a stroke’

The symptoms continued. On Monday, she went to urgent care and was diagnosed with vertigo.

She returned home. A few days later, she had blind spots in her vision and tingling in her arm with “almost a numb feeling.”

Marcia called the on-call nurse center. They told her, “You need to come down to the emergency room. We think you’re having a stroke.”

An MRI of Marcia’s brain showed numerous damaged areas called lesions. She was admitted to the hospital on Oct. 10, 2019, and diagnosed with strokes, vision loss and balance difficulties.

After three days in the hospital, the strokes stopped happening — meaning MRIs of her brain no longer showed lesions — and Marcia returned home.

But before the end of the month, Marcia “started feeling the same thing again” and went back to the emergency room.

Jay recalled, “We were home — the kid and I — and she was cooking dinner … She turned around and her face had actually drooped on this one. It was like ‘uh-oh.’”

Marcia went back to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with more brain lesions. A neurologist told Marcia the MRI scan of her brain looked like a “starry night” because of how many white spots, or lesions, appeared.

The doctors still did not know what was causing them, she said.

Marcia goes to Mayo Clinic

Over the following weeks, Marcia went “back and forth a few times” between her home and her local hospital.

After a night or two at the hospital, she would begin feeling better. But after returning home, her symptoms reemerged and she’d have to return to the hospital. “Each time, more strokes,” she said.

According to Jay, “A week or 10 days later, there’d be seven or 10 new ones [lesions appearing in the MRI scans]. This was going on for about a month. I think we rounded up to about 51 complete strokes.”

Still, her local hospital doctors couldn’t explain why this was happening.

In early November 2019, Marcia was referred to the Mayo Clinic where doctors found her symptoms consistent with Susac syndrome, a rare autoimmune disease.

She stayed at the Mayo Clinic until Nov. 22, 2019. She received plasmapheresis to put new plasma in her blood, steroids and a medication called CellCept.

Treatment just wasn’t working

The treatment didn’t work, and when Marcia returned home, she had more strokes. So she went back to the Mayo Clinic for her second two-week round of the same treatment.

But after the second round of treatment, Marcia had more strokes — including one that temporarily impaired her hearing — and she continued to experience extreme fatigue.

Both Marcia and Jay looked back on these months of Marcia’s sickness as a time of emotional stress and pain.

Jay had to withdraw Marcia from school and convince her employer that she needed an indefinite leave of absence because of her health condition.

Meanwhile, because one of Marcia’s symptoms was cognitive impairment, she “thought she was fine” and was upset at Jay for doing so.

Marcia had also been a volunteer firefighter and emergency medical responder. “I was so mad at my husband because he — behind my back — told the fire department … ‘You can’t send her pages anymore because she wants to go on these calls and she cannot go on these calls.’”

Time to live in a different location

During one of Marcia’s stays at the Mayo Clinic, Jay “just woke up” with a strong sense that the cell tower radiation was causing Marcia’s symptoms. “Then he started doing research and that’s when we started piecing things together,” Marcia explained.

Based on what Jay was discovering, he and Marcia decided to try living elsewhere.

On March 3, 2020, they and their son moved into Marcia’s parents’ house a mile further away from the tower. Marcia “got a lot better,” she said. The strokes stopped.

By June, she was talking about returning to school, Jay said. “We’d go fishing every night and she just had a lot more energy.”

Around the same time, Marcia’s doctors at the Mayo Clinic had Marcia taking pill chemotherapy. “So they’re patting themselves on the back for the chemo,” Jay said, “I think it was moving that made it stop.”

But in October 2020, Marcia’s parents returned so Jay, Marcia and their son moved back to their house close to the tower.

In just a week, Marcia started experiencing the same symptoms again.

Building the ‘penalty box’

Jay and Marcia became more convinced that the RF radiation from the tower was making Marcia sick.

Oct. 16, 2020, they hired Frank DiCristina — a certified building biologist and certified EMR specialist — to measure the wireless radiation levels throughout their home.

DiCristina’s report showed peaks of up to 18 milliwatts per squared meter (mW/m2) — which is 18 times higher than what the Standard of Building Biology considers the “extreme limit,” noted DiCristina in the report.

Marcia and Jay loved the location of their home and didn’t want to move. So they set about making their property more livable for Marcia.

In late October 2020, Jay constructed a Faraday cage — an enclosure with metal lining that blocks out all RF radiation — to give Marcia a place of relief from the radiation.

Having a space free of RF radiation has made a big difference in Marcia’s well-being.

She said she can feel her head relax when she’s in the Faraday cage. But anywhere else in the house or yard, her head feels “loud” and “full … like a motor’s running.”

Despite the relief provided by the cage, Marcia made it clear it’s not fun having to go into a small enclosed space to feel OK.

She and Jay call the Faraday cage “the penalty box.” It’s a tiny room with no power and no windows — just a “complete black box with two beds,” Marcia said.

She and Jay sleep there. “I would be nervous to sleep in my house because I don’t want to get sick again,” Marcia said.

Sleeping out there isn’t convenient, though. “There’s no bathroom in the garage,” she said. “So if I get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, I have to leave the garage, go outside, come in the house.”

Marcia also now wears a metal-lined baseball cap when in her home to mitigate her symptoms.

With these measures, she slowly was able to complete her nursing program and return to work.

‘We’re not crazy’

Marcia hopes her lawsuit will force the telecom companies to relocate their tower so she can move freely on her property without risking her health.

She also wants her case to raise public awareness that people experience physical symptoms from RF radiation. “We’re not crazy,” she said. “This really is happening.”

For instance, she and Jay think living so close to the tower may have been a factor in Jay’s development of rheumatoid arthritis.

Their son, too, has had negative health episodes — including a major blood clot in his left arm — that Marcia and Jay suspect may have been linked to the radiation. In 2022, their then-16-year-old son, Clay, called Marcia from work and asked, “Is it normal that my arm is blue and tight?”

The two shared a quick video call. “No, that’s not normal,” Marcia said when she saw Clay’s arm. She immediately picked him up and took him to the hospital.

CT scans showed Clay had a blood clot starting from his elbow that extended into his neck and two more clots in his lungs.

Clay’s bloodwork showed that, while he tested negative for COVID-19, he at some point in the past had had an asymptomatic case of COVID-19 — which the doctors said could have caused the clots.

But Marcia found this explanation unlikely and confirmed with an integrative medicine doctor — who was knowledgeable of the possible health impacts of wireless radiation — that the blood clots could have been caused by Clay’s ongoing exposure to RF radiation.

Marcia and Jay also said they’ve witnessed animals affected by the tower’s radiation. Their dog, Daisy, developed fatty tumors throughout her body that limited her mobility and quality of life to the point that Marcia and Jay had to put her down.

“The deer definitely have these tumors like the dog did,” Jay said. “Not every deer, but some of the deer.”

When Marcia and Jay tell others about their experiences, people tend to “just kind of brush it off” and say, “That’s not going to happen to me or to anybody I know besides you guys.”

But “we’re not the only ones out there that this is happening to,” Marcia said.

Although estimates vary, a 2019 analysis suggested that 1.5% of the population experience severe symptoms from exposure to RF radiation, 5% have moderate symptoms and 30% have mild symptoms.

That means roughly 2.16-99.7 million Americans are likely affected.

Marcia and Jay recently shared their story on CHD.TV.

The National Toxicology Program (NTP) has no plans to further study the effects of cellphone radiofrequency radiation (RFR) on human health — even though the program’s own $30 million study that took about 10 years to complete in 2018 reported evidence of cancer and DNA damage.

The NTP said in an updated January 2024 fact sheet that it was abandoning further investigation because “the research was technically challenging and more resource-intensive than expected.”

For decades, the NTP has been the premier governmental testing program for pharmaceuticals, chemicals and radiation, according to Devra Davis, Ph.D., MPH, a toxicologist and epidemiologist who served on the board of scientific counselors for the NTP when it was launched in the 1980s.

Commenting on the news, Davis said, “It is the ultimate arrogance and folly to stop doing research on this major growing environmental pollutant, precisely when we have ample evidence of harm.”

Davis has authored more than 200 peer-reviewed publications in books and journals, ranging from The Lancet to the Journal of the American Medical Association.

In February 2023, she and her colleagues published a review of more than 200 studies that linked wireless radiation to negative biological effects including oxidative stress and DNA damage, cardiomyopathy, carcinogenicity, sperm damage, memory damage and other neurological effects.

They will soon publish a “major new article” in Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development journal about “new science” on RFR and call for precaution, she said.

Davis — who also is the founding director of the Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology of the U.S. National Research Council at the National Academy of Sciences and the founder and president of Environmental Health Trust — called out the U.S. government for failing to ensure that wireless radiation is safe:

“The government’s decision to stop funding research on cellphone radiation is consistent with the Chinese proverb ‘If you don’t want to know, don’t ask.’

“The US government has a variation of that in the policy of, ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ If you don’t want to know whether cell tower radiation is having a biological impact, stop doing the research!”

Miriam Eckenfels-Garcia, director of Children’s Health Defense’s (CHD) Electromagnetic Radiation (EMR) and Wireless program, told The Defender:

“Discontinuing government-funded research because it is ‘technically challenging’ and ‘resource-intensive’ is not what we expect from government agencies that are supposed to protect people from the harms of big industry.

“This research is important so that people can make informed decisions when it comes to the use of technology.”

W. Scott McCollough, lead litigator for CHD’s EMR cases, agreed. “I am concerned that the absence of evidence will be contorted into a claim of evidence of absence.”

As of early last year, the NTP was still conducting RFR research. A February 2023 fact sheet said scientists had “overcome several technical issues” and developed a better system for exposing animals to RFR for their studies.

NTP said researchers were “now making progress” on four research goals:

• Determining the impact of RFR exposure on behavior and stress.
• Conducting physiological monitoring, including evaluation of heart rate.
• Investigating whether RFR induces heating.
• Further evaluating whether RFR exposure causes DNA damage.

In its January 2024 fact sheet, the NTP reported the researchers had “tested the new exposure system … in vivo rodent studies” and that their research was “complete.”

The NTP did not say whether the researchers had achieved those four research goals and, if so, what the results were. It did, however, make clear that its previous studies — which used 2G and 3G cellphones — “do not apply” to 4G or 5G technologies.

The Defender reached out to NTP’s press office for clarification about why the new fact sheet appears to contradict the NTP website (updated Jan. 8, 2024) on cellphone radiation research which says NTP still has “current research efforts,” however NTP did not respond by our publication deadline.

The NTP’s discontinuation of its RFR research suggests the U.S. government has no intention of studying the possible biological effects of 5G.

Meanwhile, researchers such as Davis continue to say there is reason for concern. Davis pointed out that infertility clinics ask men about their wireless devices and cellphone habits:

“They tell them to take these phones off their bodies and out of their pockets because there is evidence … where the greater the exposure, the lower the sperm count, and the poorer the sperm quality.

“This has been repeatedly shown in studies with human sperm done under controlled conditions, as well as cross-sectional studies.”

“In fact,” she added, “whether the government stops doing the research or not, there is a massive study underway because we have billions of people being exposed to ever-increasing levels of wireless radiation throughout the world. Millions of American children are exposed every day in classrooms.”

“The only problem is there is no control group anymore, which will make it difficult, but not impossible, to discern the impacts of wireless radiation,” Davis said.

What NTP’s 2018 study found

As The Defender previously reported, NTP researchers in 2018 concluded there was “clear evidence” that male rats exposed to high levels of RF similar to those emitted by 2G and 3G cellphones developed cancerous heart tumors, and “some evidence” of tumors in the brain and adrenal gland of exposed male rats.

Davis said NTP’s conclusions were consistent with and corroborated dozens of other studies. “It wasn’t like it [the NTP study] was a one-off study,” she said.

Once the word got out that the findings of the NTP study were positive — meaning the government researchers had found an association between cellphone radiation and the growth of cancerous tumors — the telecommunication industry “started its tactics” to suppress the findings, Davis said.

Davis has been researching those tactics for more than a decade. She is the author of “Disconnect: The Truth About Cell Phone Radiation, What the Industry Is Doing to Hide It, and How to Protect Your Family.”

Instead of the NTP study report being released in 2016, when it was first ready, she said, the telecom industry exerted pressure to subject the study’s conclusions to an unprecedented level of scrutiny.

“When the first drafts began to circulate internally, it was elevated for a peer review unlike any that has ever been conducted in the history of the entire program — and I can say that with great certainty. No other compound or substance [studied by the NTP] has ever been subject to this level of peer review,” Davis said.

A panel of external scientific experts convened for a three-day review of the study and its conclusions in March 2018.

However, rather than downplaying the study’s conclusions, the experts concluded that the scientific evidence in the study was so strong they recommended the NTP reclassify some of its conclusions from “some evidence” to “clear evidence” of carcinogenic activity.

To date, more than 250 scientists — who together have published more than 2,000 papers and letters on the biologic and health effects of non-ionizing electromagnetic fields (EMFs) produced by wireless devices, including cellphones — signed the International EMF Scientist Appeal, which calls for health warnings and stronger exposure limits.

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 U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) recently launched an effort to make computerized clothing a reality — a move critics say could result in massive biometric surveillance of citizens and an increase in people’s exposure to radiofrequency radiation.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) on Aug. 22 announced that the IC’s advanced research and development arm, Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), would develop its computerized clothing program — Smart Electrically Powered and Networked Textile Systems, or SMART ePANTS — over the next three-and-a-half years.

The government’s SMART ePANTS program works to create clothing with “integrated audio, video, and geolocation sensor systems that feature the same stretchability, bendability, washability, and comfort of regular textiles.”

Items slated for production include shirts, pants, socks and underwear.

IARPA, in partnership with the Naval Information Warfare Center, Pacific, awarded research contracts to develop and manufacture the computerized clothing totaling over $22 million to Nautilus Defense and Leidos, Inc., according to an Aug. 9 Pentagon announcement.

SRI International, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Areté received undisclosed amounts to develop the technology, according to an article in The Intercept.

Investment giants Vanguard and Black Rock — which benefited from the sale of COVID-19 vaccines and have ownership stakes in technology companies developing vaccine passports and digital wallets — are listed among Nautilus Defense’s and Leidos’ top investors.

SMART ePANTS Program Manager Dawson Cagle, Ph.D., who traced his inspiration for the program to a desire for better health-monitoring options for his diabetic father, said in the recent press release, “IARPA is proud to lead this first-of-its-kind effort for both the IC and broader scientific community which will bring much-needed innovation to the field of ASTs [Active Smart Textiles].”

An article published in January in PubMed hyped the potential of electronic textiles as a “new age of wearable technology for healthcare and fitness solutions,” touting their uses in products as varied as diapers, masks and bedding, and for such applications as “monitoring health conditions, treating chronic diseases, rehabilitation, and improving health and social lifestyles.”

“SMART ePANTS could revolutionize the Internet of Things by collecting data to help intelligence, medical and sports commmunities,” wrote the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association.

But critics — including Ted Claypoole, legal expert and cyberspace law committee chair for the American Bar Association — said IARPA’s program raises major “obvious” privacy concerns.

Claypoole told The Defender that fabrics being developed by the IC are likely “not just for keeping our people safe, but also for finding and following smart-fabric wearers who do not know they are being followed.”

The development of smart fabrics and computer wearables is not a new effort, he said.

In their book, “Privacy in the Age of Big Data: Recognizing Threats, Defending Your Rights, and Protecting Your Family,” Claypoole and Theresa Payton traced commercial efforts to create smart clothing over the past decade, including a ski jacket with earphones in the hood and input devices on the sleeve that connect to the wearer’s phone via bluetooth. However, the fact that these smart wearables are being designed by the IC is particularly worrisome to Claypoole:

“The technology, when used by the government, opens a new level of intrusion that raises serious Constitutional concerns. Will the government need a warrant to anonymously track people using these fabrics? It should, but that determination will need to be made by courts over time.”

‘I question whether any of this is legal’

W. Scott McCollough — Children’s Health Defense (CHD)’s chief litigator for the organization’s electromagnetic radiation (EMR) cases — shared Claypoole’s concerns.

“While the person choosing to wear the computerized clothing at least has given some kind of consent, all those around that person have no say at all,” McCullough said. “I question whether any of this is legal. The technology will gather biometric data from those nearby, as well as capture all audio and visual data. There are states where all-party consent is required for this.”

Nicole de Haay, an IARPA spokesperson, told The Intercept that IARPA programs are “designed and executed in accordance with, and adhere to, strict civil liberties and privacy protection protocols.”

“IARPA performs civil liberties and privacy protection compliance reviews throughout our research efforts,” she added.

The IARPA did not elaborate further on how it would ensure that citizens’ privacy is not breached.

Computerized clothing likely to exacerbate negative health impacts of EMR

Miriam Eckenfels-Garcia, director of the CHD’s EMR work, pointed out that computerized clothing also raises potential health concerns.

“As with all new technology that is being sold as exciting and new,” she said, “there are concerns and drawbacks. We know about the negative health impacts of EMR. Having this technology so close to the body could pose additional health risks.”

Moreover, Eckenfels-Garcia added, “SMART ePANTS is a step closer to the merger between humans and technology. This technology, with its many sensors, makes you part of the Internet of Things, which is part of the World Economic Forum’s agenda.”

Annie Jacobsen, author of “The Pentagon’s Brain,” about the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, pointed out that SMART ePANTS’s developments could usher in troubling new forms of government biometric surveillance.

“They’re now in a position of serious authority over you,” Jacobsen told The Intercept. “In TSA, they can swab your hands for explosives. Now suppose SMART ePANTS detects a chemical on your skin — imagine where that can lead.”

U.S. spy agencies spend billions — and want to spend more

IARPA noted the “smart” clothing could “assist personnel and first responders in dangerous, high-stress environments, such as crime scenes and arms control inspections without impeding their ability to swiftly and safely operate.”

In addition to running IARPA, the ODNI also oversees the National Intelligence Program which in 2022 was given $65.7 billion of taxpayer money by Congress. For its 2023 and 2024 budgets, the program asked Congress for $67.1 and $72.4 billion, respectively. These amounts are not yet approved.

The ODNI director, appointed by the president with the advice and consent of the senate, serves as the head of the U.S. Intelligence Community by advising the president, vice president, the National Security Council and the Homeland Security Council on intelligence matters related to national security.

‘We need an electronic privacy bill of rights’

According to John Whitehead, a civil liberties attorney and author, we have already moved into a system of total surveillance. The government’s funding of computerized clothing that spies on its citizens is yet another example of this, he told The Defender. Whitehead said that the FBI already collects samples of citizens’ DNA.

“Supposedly, the police say they are doing their job to collect this information and that it doesn’t violate the Fourth Amendment. Well, that’s a stupid argument,” he said, adding that the courts are always behind when it comes to technology.

Whitehead said:

“Most judges do not understand it. Most are so either pro-government or pro-police that they’re going to do anything to get around [saying that it is unconstitutional].

“What we need now in this government is an electronic privacy bill of rights.”

Whitehead is working with a number of law firms to develop the concept of a legal document that “really clearly” protects citizens from electronic privacy violations of this kind.

Realistically, there is no way to escape surveillance, according to Whitehead. “The only hope we have is if enough people will get vigilant for freedom and we can establish some kind of electronic privacy bill of rights that will limit what these people can do,” he said.

“Education precedes action, so I’m telling people to get educated about what’s going on and understand this,” he added.

Watch IARPA’s program manager discuss SMART ePants:

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

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation this month awarded a $4.8 million grant to a company that sells “smart” face masks for cows.

ZELP, which stands for Zero Emissions Livestock Project, claims its artificial intelligence (AI) mask technology for livestock will reduce methane emissions—considered to be a main greenhouse gas—and curb climate change. Cows and other ruminant animals emit methane in the process of digesting their food.

The mask goes around the cow’s head and captures the methane gas exhaled by the animal, oxidizing it and then releasing it into the air as carbon dioxide and water vapor, according to ZELP. It also has sensors that continuously collect millions of data points on the animals that are processed by machine learning algorithms.

“Our AI is trained to detect heat, flag welfare conditions, and identify the most efficient animals with a high-level of accuracy,” ZELP said.

But critics, including third-generation farmer Howard Vlieger, said the Gates-funded venture is illogical and driven by greed.

Vlieger, who advises crop and livestock farmers across the United States, said, “This is what you would get when you combine greed and stupidity.”

Commenting on the news, Will Harris—a fourth-generation regenerative farmer who runs his family’s farm White Oak Pastures, told The Defender all he could say was, “Surely this is a hoax.”

Critical Sway, a researcher and investigator, tweeted, “You couldn’t make this stuff up. … We’re living in ridiculous times my friends.”

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation just announced a $4.7 million grant for a company that sells face masks for cows.

You couldn't make this stuff up. pic.twitter.com/U8vkorBKwr

— Critical Sway (@CriticalSway) March 11, 2023

ZELP—which collaborates with the agricultural giant Cargill—makes its money by leasing the smart masks out to farmers and by selling carbon offset credits, Critical Sway said.

“History will show that the vast majority of so-called environmentally beneficial projects like this are going to make Bernie Madoff look like an altar boy,” Vlieger said.

Madoff, whose name became synonymous with financial fraud, was behind the $20 billion Ponzi scheme that CNN called the largest financial fraud in history.

Gates’ Love Affair With Techno-Fixes

Smart masks for cows aren’t the first money-making tech fix Gates has attempted to apply to a natural problem. Last year, the billionaire partnered with Samsung in an attempt to make a toilet that would turn human feces into ash.

And Gates recently claimed his genetically altered seeds were necessary for solving world hunger because climate change alters growing conditions.

He also promotes AI-driven digital agriculture that relies on large-scale monocultures and is “basically a surveillance agriculture,” according to environmental activist Vandana Shiva, Ph.D.

The technology forces farmers “to get addicted to chemicals and chemical fertilizers” that harm the planet and people while reducing natural biodiversity, Shiva said.

Shiva said Gates’ solutions ignore obvious natural remedies for environmental problems, such as the regenerative agriculture practices of managed grazing and natural soil enrichment.

Industrial Farming Practices–Not Cows–Are the Problem

ZELP’s design was one of four winners last year in the Terra Carta Design Lab, an environmental sustainability competition for cutting methane emissions.

Prince Charles—who launched the competition as part of his Sustainable Markets Initiative—praised the mask design as “fascinating,” reported Business Insider in April 2022. But according to Vlieger, ruminant animals in their natural habitat are not the key drivers of environmental problems.

“When the settlers worked their way across the plains, there were millions of buffalo,” Vlieger said. “If ruminant animals were the problem, why didn’t we have climate change problems then?”

Techno-fixes like ZELP’s smart masks ignore the issue of where and how the animals graze, Vlieger and others said.

Conventional livestock production—which includes confining large numbers of animals in concentrated animal feeding operations, more commonly known as factory farms—“manipulates pieces of the ecosystem in an effort to maximize production and profits, thereby leading to the complication and expense of dealing with unintended consequences,” according to a 2015 report by the Savory Institute, a regenerative agriculture organization that promotes wholistic management of livestock.

An intact ecosystem effectively balances ruminant methane production and breakdown, the report authors said.

Indeed, researchers—including W. Richard Teague, Ph.D., professor emeritus and grazing ecologist at Texas A&M AgriLife Research & Extension Center—found that with appropriate regenerative crop and grazing management, ruminant animals not only reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions but also provide essential ecosystem services that increase soil carbon sequestration and reduce environmental damage.

Teague and his colleagues said in a 2016 article published in the Journal of Soil and Water Conservation that “to ensure long-term sustainability and ecological resilience of agroecosystems, agricultural production should be guided by policies and regenerative management protocols that include ruminant grazing.”

Allowing cows to open graze “under appropriate management results in more carbon sequestration than emissions,” Teague told Successful Farming.

Grazing systems that are regenerative cause soil microorganisms to increase, which helps drive carbon sequestration and methane oxidization, Teague added.

‘This Is Wrong in so Many Ways’

Vlieger said ZELP’s smart mask would generate electromagnetic radiation that could harm the animals.

“Many years ago when the USDA [U.S. Department of Agriculture] was talking about the electronic ID ear tags for cattle, I wrote an article about the dangers of the electromagnetic frequencies—and that was way before we had a fraction of the information that we have today,” he said.

“The potential for tumors and other ill health effects are significant,” Vlieger added.

Blogger Tessa Lena also criticized the cow smart mask because it is a step in normalizing “smart” facewear for both animals and humans—something that is “a win-win for all fascists,” she said in a March 14 Substack post.

Lena said:

“It’s a very lucrative ‘product adoption curve for Big Tech—and extremely consistent with how they’ve been going about their ‘product adoption curves’ since day one of the industry’s existence.”

Smart faceware is also “useful to the totalitarian types in the government” and a “treasure trove of yummy ‘new oil’ biometric data for the delight of all fascists,” Lena added.

Her solution? People must wake up and refuse to do this, she 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.

A New York hospital pulled a 30-second ad about myocarditis in children after Children’s Health Defense (CHD) and numerous doctors accused the hospital of normalizing and trivializing the condition.

NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital in early September published the 30-second ad, which promoted the medical center’s pediatric services for treating the condition.

The hospital pulled the ad amid public outcry following three CHD.TV episodes featuring discussions about how the ad appeared to normalize and trivialize myocarditis in children. CHD.TV is produced by Children’s Health Defense.

The ad, “Pediatric Patient Story,” featured a young girl named Suri and transitioned between live-action footage and animation.

“I’ve been into fashion since I can remember,” Suri said in the ad. “But one day, I had a stomachache so bad I didn’t want to do anything.”

Suri continued:

“The team at NewYork-Presbyterian said it was actually my heart. It was severely swollen — something called ‘myocarditis.’

“But doctors gave me medicines and used machines to control my heartbeat. They saved me. So now I can become the next great fashion designer.”

The ad ended with the caption “Stay Amazing” and then faded to the hospital’s logo, without any mention of what may have caused the potentially fatal heart condition.

Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show a strong link between cases of myocarditis and COVID-19 vaccines.

Between Dec. 14, 2020, and Sept. 16, 2022, 23,926 cases of myocarditis and pericarditis were reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, with 18,186 cases attributed to Pfizer, 5,304 cases to Moderna and 410 cases to the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine.

VAERS is the primary government-funded system for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S. Historically, VAERS has been shown to report only 1% of actual vaccine adverse events.

‘ … they make a ton of money on providing medical help.’

“I almost have no words for this type of advertisement,” said Aimee Villella McBride, CHD director of communications, in a Sept. 9 episode of CHD.TV’s “Friday Roundtable.”

“It left me speechless the first time I saw it,” she said.

Summit News on Sept. 16 called out the hospital’s commercial for treating myocarditis in children “as if it’s a common illness.”

Dr. Vinay Prasad, a hematologist-oncologist and professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, retweeted the ad on Sept. 18, adding his own questions and comments.

Why would anyone try to normalize myocarditis, when it is easy to try to reduce it?
Lower doses
Space out doses
No moderna & Fewer doses in young men
Exemptions for future doses for people who already had COVID19

All preferable to TV ads hinting heart inflammation is no biggie https://t.co/DrOOAzqLkO

— Vinay Prasad MD MPH (@VPrasadMDMPH) September 18, 2022

On Sept. 19, America’s Frontline News said the ad targeted children and noted that myocarditis is a “hallmark side effect of the COVID-19 injections.”

And in the Sept. 19 episode of CHD.TV’s “This Week,” Mary Holland, CHD president and general counsel, pointed out the significance of the ad, noting that NewYork-Presbyterian, which is affiliated with Columbia University, is not “any old hospital.”

“This is one of the biggest and most prestigious hospitals in New York City,” Holland said.

Holland highlighted how the girl in the ad says the hospital’s doctors “saved me.”

“I think what’s left out of this ad,” Holland said, “is, ‘Yes, and they also injured her.’”

She added:

“They are the people — if they gave her a COVID shot — that caused myocarditis. They first injured her. They made a little bit of money on that. And then they made a ton of money on providing her medical help.

“And they lied to her about what the cause might be. I think they also neglected to say that myocarditis can result in needing a heart transplant within a matter of years.”

Holland commented further in a Sept. 18 tweet:

‘They make a little bit of money on [the shot], + then they make a ton of money on providing medical help.’ — Mary Holland on recent NY Presbyterian Myocarditis ad

‘This is turning the healthcare system against the people.’ #ThisWeek #CHDTVhttps://t.co/rLDXWMB3Yq

— Children’s Health Defense (@ChildrensHD) September 19, 2022

On Sept. 22, Tucker Carlson of Fox News  discussed the ad with Dr. Marty Makary, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University, who early on warned the CDC that they needed to “rigorously study the long-term effects of vaccine-induced myocarditis.”

“Severe heart damage in otherwise healthy children” is not something “we’ve always had” happening, Carlson said. “What type of life will someone have at age 50 when they suffer unnecessary heart damage as a child?”

That same evening, Dr. Peter McCullough, an internist and cardiologist in Dallas, Texas, retweeted a clip of the Fox news interview with Makary, with this comment:

Dr. Mackary on with Tucker Carlson. Long term effects of myocarditis devastating and far more common than the CDC led Americans to believe. Tucker asks: "What type of life will someone have at age 50 when they suffer unnecessary heart damage as a child?" pic.twitter.com/wiPxNWTSw2

— Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH® (@P_McCulloughMD) September 23, 2022

The next day, McCullough pointed out during the Sept. 23 episode of CHD.TV’s “Friday Roundtable” that there have been many fatal cases documented of vaccine-related myocarditis.

He pointed to a U.K. study published in August that reported 100 deaths due to vaccine-related myocarditis.

Sometime between Sept. 23 and Sept. 29, the hospital pulled the ad, which is still available on alternative media sites. The original youtube video is listed as private.

The Defender reached out to NewYork-Presbyterian’s public relations department to inquire about the ad and why it was pulled, but officials there did not respond by deadline.

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.

Unlike the Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson shots, Novavax is not derived from fetal cells. Therefore, the religious objections to the basis of the original three jabs can no longer be applied to the new injection. Some companies are using this to get their employees jabbed. According to the article below by Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., many healthcare workers aren’t be given a choice. (This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website.)

Wisconsin Healthcare Workers Who Had Religious, Medical Exemptions Must Get Novavax COVID Shot or Lose Job

A Wisconsin hospital this week said it is withdrawing medical and religious exemptions for some employees from the hospital’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate, giving those employees until Sept. 21 to get the Novavax vaccine.

A Wisconsin hospital this week said it is withdrawing medical and religious exemptions for some employees from the hospital’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate, giving those employees until Sept. 21 to get the Novavax vaccine.

Froedtert & the Medical College of Wisconsin, which operates 11 hospitals and more than 45 health centers and clinics throughout the midwest and employs more than 2,000 physicians, in an email said the Novavax vaccine option “eliminates conflicts” for those who originally declined COVID-19 vaccination for religious or medical reasons.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration in July granted Emergency Use Authorization of the Novavax COVID-19 vaccine for adults ages 18 and up. While the prior COVID-19 vaccines made by Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson used fetal cell lines from unborn fetuses in various stages of development and testing, the Novavax vaccine is made differently and does not use human fetal cell lines.

Froedtert employees who don’t get the first Novavax dose by Sept. 21 will be terminated as Froedtert will consider them to have “voluntarily resigned,” the company said.

The hospital said in a statement:

“Froedtert Health requires staff and providers be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 as a federal requirement that is monitored for compliance. We join many other health systems around southeast Wisconsin and the U.S. that have made vaccination a condition of employment.

“The Novavax vaccination for COVID-19 is now available. This protein-based vaccination option eliminates conflicts for those staff with religious or medical exemptions caused by mRNA-based vaccines and other concerns.

“Since those staff are now eligible for a vaccination that does not conflict with their religious beliefs or medical situation, their exemption will expire. This affects a small percentage of staff with a vaccine exemption. Eligible staff continue to be exempt from a COVID-19 vaccine for religious and medical reasons.

“Froedtert Health respects the right of staff and providers to engage in activity protected by state and federal law.”

A Froedtert employee who spoke anonymously to WISN 12 News on Wednesday said Froedtert’s abrupt demand will have negative repercussions.

“Anyone in healthcare knows we’re very understaffed and overworked right now and this is just going to take away a lot of nurses from the bedside,” she said. “This will affect patient care and safety.”

Although according to Froedtert, as of October 2021 — their most recent count — nearly 99% of their employees had been vaccinated against COVID-19, the employee said she thought about 100 nurses would be affected. The employee, a Catholic, said the previous vaccines were against her religious beliefs because of the ingredients. However, the Novavax vaccine also goes against her religious beliefs, she said.

“Now that we’re two, almost three years into this [COVID-19 pandemic] and we know more, we should be able to make our own educated decision,” she said.

She added:

“It’s my body, my temple. God is within us. If we’re uncomfortable, or not sure about something, then we shouldn’t do it.”

The employee said she’s presently unsure what she will do.

“I carry the health insurance for our family. I have a week to decide if I feel comfortable taking this vaccine otherwise I honestly don’t know. I don’t know if any other healthcare facilities in this area even take exemptions,” she said.

Froedtert officials said their recent exemption withdrawal complies with federal regulations that mandate all employees must be vaccinated against COVID-19 or have legitimate religious or medical exemptions.

Mark Goldstein, an employment lawyer, told WISN 12 News employees affected by the mandate could “attempt to recast their religious exemption as a more generalized claim.”

“Quick frankly,” he added, “some of it depends on how strident they are in that regard.”

The hospital’s requirement is that employees be fully vaccinated against COVID-19, but not that they have to get the new Omicron-specific booster shot made by Pfizer and Moderna.

Novavax pushed on unvaccinated despite safety concerns

As The Defender reported in late July when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended the Novavax COVID-19 vaccine for adults age 18 and up, Operation Warp Speed in 2020 awarded Novavax — which like Moderna, had never brought a product to market before COVID-19 — a secret contract worth $1.6 billion (now being reported as $1.8 billion).

It was one of the largest taxpayer handouts channeled through Operation Warp Speed. The media characterized the Novavax injection as a “game changer” in comparison to the mRNA and adenovirus-vectored gene therapy shots, claiming it should be “reassuring to those who are hesitant.”

In fact, according to the CDC’s advisors, the unvaccinated represent the “primary target population for Novavax.”

Some media outlets claimed Novavax — made with recombinant moth-cell-based nanoparticle technology, the problematic surfactant polysorbate 80 and a never-before-approved nanoparticulate adjuvant called Matrix-M — is “free of side effects.”

However, the day after the FDA issued its Novavax authorization, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) updated its product information for the Novavax shot to disclose “new” side effects. The EMA’s list of side effects included “severe allergic reaction [anaphylaxis] and unusual or decreased feeling in the skin” (called paresthesia and hypoesthesia, respectively).

In addition, the EMA said it would assess myocarditis and pericarditis as Novavax side effects — safety signals that also were on display in the FDA’s briefing document on Novavax. And in clinical trials, older adults who received the Novavax vaccine experienced an increased incidence of hypertension compared to those in the placebo group.

Not as ‘traditional’ as portrayed

The Novavax vaccine relies on a protein-based technology used for decades, leading some media outlets to portray it as a “traditional” vaccine compared with other COVID-19 vaccines that use newer technologies.

But according to Dr. Meryl Nass, an internist with a special interest in vaccine-induced illnesses, chronic fatigue syndrome and toxicology, the media’s portrayal of Novavax as a more traditional vaccine is not accurate.

Nass, a member of the Children’s Health Defense (CHD) scientific advisory committee, pointed out that the Novavax shot contains a novel adjuvant, Matrix-M, “so it is not really an old-fashioned shot.”

Nass raised safety concerns specific to the adjuvant, while others voiced concerns about Novavax being linked to heart inflammation and blood clots, and the fact that the vaccine was designed for use against the original Wuhan strain of SARS-CoV-2 — not the Omicron variants that are dominant today.

Adjuvant used in Novavax linked to autoimmune disease

Because Novavax is a protein subunit vaccine, it uses just the spike protein as the antigen rather than the whole pathogen (an inactivated or attenuated virus). Using the whole pathogen would expose the host to the virus’ entire protein coat instead of just one protein.

Protein subunit vaccines are often less immunogenic (less likely to provoke the immune system) than vaccines that use whole pathogens as the antigen, and may not generate a strong enough immune response.

That’s why they require the use of an adjuvant — in this case, Matrix-M — in addition to the antigen to get a stronger immune response. However, few adjuvants are both potent and non-toxic enough for clinical use.

The proposed primary series for Novavax is two intramuscular injections 21 days apart at the dose level of 5 µg of the recombinant spike protein and 50 µg of the Matrix-M adjuvant. Matrix-M, originally called QS-21, was one of the saponins derived from Quillaja saponaria, which is the soap bark tree native to Chile.

Some reports point out that the Matrix-M adjuvant — unlike the polyethylene glycol (PEG) lipid used in mRNA vaccines — is not linked to anaphylaxis (a severe allergic reaction), making it more attractive to people who are allergic to PEG. But according to Nass, while it’s true that Matrix-M — which is not found in any other vaccines in the U.S. — isn’t linked to anaphylaxis, it is linked to autoimmune diseases.

“While touted as a replacement for the PEG lipid found in the mRNA vaccine, Matrix-M is less likely to cause anaphylaxis but more likely to cause autoimmune diseases,” Nass said.

Nass voiced other safety concerns about Novavax technology, including the use of moth cells. According to the University of Nebraska Medical Center, where Novavax Phase 3 clinical trials were conducted, the Novavax vaccine uses moth cells to create a nanotechnology version of the COVID-19 spike protein.

Nass said insect cells can be used to grow proteins rapidly. “There is one flu vaccine made the same way: Flublok,” Nass said. Flublok is one of two egg-free flu vaccines licensed for use in the U.S.

“How many insect and viral proteins or other molecules are being injected into you when you get the Novavax vaccine — which is a function of how purified the vaccine is —  is unknown,” Nass said.

Novavax still uses the spike protein

The SARS-CoV-2 virus encodes 29 proteins, but Novavax — like Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson — chose to target only the spike protein. As previously reported in The Defender, it is not known if the spike protein itself is safe.

“We have known for a long time that the spike protein is a pathogenic protein,” said Byram Bridle, Ph.D., associate professor of viral immunology at the University of Guelph, Ontario. “It is a toxin. It can cause damage to our body if it gets into circulation.”

According to Brian Hooker, Ph.D., P.E., CHD’s chief scientific officer, “If you wanted to pick the most toxic protein, you know what represents the highest virulence, the highest amount of damage on the COVID-19 virus? You would pick the spike protein.”

The spike protein “has been consistently shown to create clotting issues in the blood,” Hooker 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.