• What is significant is that the German Health authorities based on official data have now been obliged under Freedom of Information to reveal the devastating nature and impacts of the Covid lockdowns imposed on 190 countries, starting March 11, 2020.

    Most of the independent studies including those conducted by Global Research have been the object of censorship.

    Of Significance, the official documents of the Germany’s Ministry of Health consistent with the independent reports published in the course of more than 4 years pertaining to the COVID-19 lockdowns, the mandatory wearing of the face mask, and the experimental mRNA vaccines.


    http://donshafi911.blogspot.com/2024/04/bombshell-official-data-from-germanys.html
    What is significant is that the German Health authorities based on official data have now been obliged under Freedom of Information to reveal the devastating nature and impacts of the Covid lockdowns imposed on 190 countries, starting March 11, 2020. Most of the independent studies including those conducted by Global Research have been the object of censorship. Of Significance, the official documents of the Germany’s Ministry of Health consistent with the independent reports published in the course of more than 4 years pertaining to the COVID-19 lockdowns, the mandatory wearing of the face mask, and the experimental mRNA vaccines. http://donshafi911.blogspot.com/2024/04/bombshell-official-data-from-germanys.html
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  • CASE 01 - Autopsy proven myocarditis death in AUSTRALIA
    Barrack Heights NSW, AUSTRALIA - Roberto Garin was only 52 when he ‘died suddenly’ on 28 July 2021. The healthy father of two teenagers began feeling ill 48 hours after his first Pfizer shot and dropped dead in front of his terrified wife Kirsti six days later while she was on the phone to paramedics.
    Garin’s family immediately suspected the vaccine caused his death. Kirsti was told her husband was the first person to die after a Pfizer shot. In fact, 176 deaths following Pfizer jabs had already been reported to the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), starting in the first week of the vaccine rollout.
    But when Kirsti shared her concerns with filmmaker Alan Hashem, who released the video together with the accounts of other vaccine injuries and deaths, it unleashed a storm.
    ‘Misinformation researchers’ published by the ABC dismissed Kirsti’s ‘claims her 52-year-old husband died from “sudden onset myocarditis” after receiving the Pfizer vaccine’ because it didn’t ‘square with official data’.
    Yet that was exactly what forensic pathologist Bernard l’Ons wrote in a brilliant report on his autopsy stating that the deceased’s heart showed a clear transition to severe giant cell myocarditis that could be ‘histologically dated to the time period of the Covid-19 mRNA vaccination’ and it was ‘reasonable to state that the deceased’s previously undiagnosed cardiac sarcoidosis may have transitioned to a fulminating myocarditis as a result of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccination’ noting that myocarditis had been reported in reactions to the Pfizer vaccine. L’Ons proposed a mechanism by which the vaccine could trigger fatal myocarditis and advised that a possible therapeutic implication was that sarcoid patients be given an echocardiogram to detect whether their heart was affected in which case alternative vaccination types could be considered.
    All of this was ignored by the TGA which refuses to admit to this day that any death can be attributed to a Pfizer vaccine and was parroted by the ABC. The TGA did admit that as of 22 August it had received ‘235 reports of suspected myocarditis, (inflammation of the heart muscle) and/or pericarditis (inflammation of the membrane around the heart) following vaccination’ with Pfizer but said, ‘These reports reflect the observations of the people reporting them and have not been confirmed as having been caused by the vaccine,’ and that ‘some events may be coincidental and would have happened anyway, regardless of vaccination.’
    This is a particularly misleading statement. Four out of five reports to the TGA are submitted not by random ‘people’, but by highly qualified health professionals and in Garin’s case by a forensic pathologist.
    Why would the TGA dismiss these reports? That’s a question Associate Professor Michael Nissen could perhaps shed light on. He was appointed to the TGA in February 2021, just as the Covid-19 vaccines were rolled out, to lead its Signal Investigation Unit which investigates safety issues that arise with vaccines in adverse reports or are raised by international regulators or the medical literature.
    Prior to his appointment, Nissen was the Director of Scientific Affairs and Public Health at GSK Vaccines from October 2014 to January 2021, a period during which GSK and Pfizer entered into a joint venture. Nissen worked concurrently in hospital-based medical care and academia. He has led over 40 clinical trials and authored over 200 peer-reviewed publications including vaccine studies. In all these areas pharmaceutical companies are a major source of funding.
    The TGA is sensitive about managing conflicts of interest for advisory committee members but offers no guidance on its website with regard to staff members although presumably the same principles should, at least in theory, apply. It notes that shares, involvement in clinical trials, employment, contracts, consultancies, grants, sponsorships, board memberships and so on, may give rise to a conflict of interest.
    Robert Clancy, an Emeritus Professor of Pathology at the University of Newcastle Medical School and a member of the Australian Academy of Science’s Covid-19 Expert Database wrote in Quadrant online last week that ‘the power of the pharmaceutical industry and its pervasive influence at every level of political and medical decision-making’ has been underestimated in shaping the pandemic narrative which has been driven by commercial imperatives to such an extent that it has crushed scientific debate.
    Clancy recounts that his approach to the College of Pathology (of which he was a Senior Fellow, a foundation Professor of Pathology, and past-Chairman of the College committee for undergraduate pathology education) calling for a national study to determine whether Covid vaccination was responsible for the increase in excess mortality in Australia and elsewhere by developing a protocol for post-mortems ‘to answer what is arguably the most important question facing medicine’ met with a rejection and a suggestion to take it instead to the TGA.
    Nowadays, dying suddenly has become ominously familiar. According to a new film Died Suddenly available as of this week to stream via Twitter, in the last 18 months, the term ‘Died Suddenly’ has risen to the very top of ‘most searched’ Google terms. The film documents the surge in excess mortality in highly vaccinated countries. Dr. Peter McCullough, internist, cardiologist, epidemiologist, and one of the top five most-published, and most censored, medical researchers in the US, says that sudden death frequently occurs because the heart has been damaged by inflammation caused by Covid vaccines.
    Papers that Pfizer and the Food and Drug Administration tried to hide for 75 years show that Pfizer knew in 2020 that myocarditis and pericarditis could be caused by its vaccine.
    And in the Pfizer trial in Argentina, a report on a healthy 36-year old  participant – Augusto German Roux – who developed pericarditis immediately after his second Pfizer jab, mysteriously disappeared from the published trial results.
    The Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) and the Cardiac Society of Australia and New Zealand (CSANZ) belatedly published a warning about myocarditis and pericarditis in September this year.
    It was too late for Garin. Had his doctors known, his life might have been saved. His grieving family have still not received a cent in compensation. But Pfizer has apparently grossed nearly $100 billion from its sales of Covid-19 vaccines and treatments.
    Rebecca Weisser is an independent journalist.
    ======


    https://open.substack.com/pub/makismd/p/mrna-injury-stories-australian-dad?r=29hg4d&utm_medium=ios
    CASE 01 - Autopsy proven myocarditis death in AUSTRALIA Barrack Heights NSW, AUSTRALIA - Roberto Garin was only 52 when he ‘died suddenly’ on 28 July 2021. The healthy father of two teenagers began feeling ill 48 hours after his first Pfizer shot and dropped dead in front of his terrified wife Kirsti six days later while she was on the phone to paramedics. Garin’s family immediately suspected the vaccine caused his death. Kirsti was told her husband was the first person to die after a Pfizer shot. In fact, 176 deaths following Pfizer jabs had already been reported to the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), starting in the first week of the vaccine rollout. But when Kirsti shared her concerns with filmmaker Alan Hashem, who released the video together with the accounts of other vaccine injuries and deaths, it unleashed a storm. ‘Misinformation researchers’ published by the ABC dismissed Kirsti’s ‘claims her 52-year-old husband died from “sudden onset myocarditis” after receiving the Pfizer vaccine’ because it didn’t ‘square with official data’. Yet that was exactly what forensic pathologist Bernard l’Ons wrote in a brilliant report on his autopsy stating that the deceased’s heart showed a clear transition to severe giant cell myocarditis that could be ‘histologically dated to the time period of the Covid-19 mRNA vaccination’ and it was ‘reasonable to state that the deceased’s previously undiagnosed cardiac sarcoidosis may have transitioned to a fulminating myocarditis as a result of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccination’ noting that myocarditis had been reported in reactions to the Pfizer vaccine. L’Ons proposed a mechanism by which the vaccine could trigger fatal myocarditis and advised that a possible therapeutic implication was that sarcoid patients be given an echocardiogram to detect whether their heart was affected in which case alternative vaccination types could be considered. All of this was ignored by the TGA which refuses to admit to this day that any death can be attributed to a Pfizer vaccine and was parroted by the ABC. The TGA did admit that as of 22 August it had received ‘235 reports of suspected myocarditis, (inflammation of the heart muscle) and/or pericarditis (inflammation of the membrane around the heart) following vaccination’ with Pfizer but said, ‘These reports reflect the observations of the people reporting them and have not been confirmed as having been caused by the vaccine,’ and that ‘some events may be coincidental and would have happened anyway, regardless of vaccination.’ This is a particularly misleading statement. Four out of five reports to the TGA are submitted not by random ‘people’, but by highly qualified health professionals and in Garin’s case by a forensic pathologist. Why would the TGA dismiss these reports? That’s a question Associate Professor Michael Nissen could perhaps shed light on. He was appointed to the TGA in February 2021, just as the Covid-19 vaccines were rolled out, to lead its Signal Investigation Unit which investigates safety issues that arise with vaccines in adverse reports or are raised by international regulators or the medical literature. Prior to his appointment, Nissen was the Director of Scientific Affairs and Public Health at GSK Vaccines from October 2014 to January 2021, a period during which GSK and Pfizer entered into a joint venture. Nissen worked concurrently in hospital-based medical care and academia. He has led over 40 clinical trials and authored over 200 peer-reviewed publications including vaccine studies. In all these areas pharmaceutical companies are a major source of funding. The TGA is sensitive about managing conflicts of interest for advisory committee members but offers no guidance on its website with regard to staff members although presumably the same principles should, at least in theory, apply. It notes that shares, involvement in clinical trials, employment, contracts, consultancies, grants, sponsorships, board memberships and so on, may give rise to a conflict of interest. Robert Clancy, an Emeritus Professor of Pathology at the University of Newcastle Medical School and a member of the Australian Academy of Science’s Covid-19 Expert Database wrote in Quadrant online last week that ‘the power of the pharmaceutical industry and its pervasive influence at every level of political and medical decision-making’ has been underestimated in shaping the pandemic narrative which has been driven by commercial imperatives to such an extent that it has crushed scientific debate. Clancy recounts that his approach to the College of Pathology (of which he was a Senior Fellow, a foundation Professor of Pathology, and past-Chairman of the College committee for undergraduate pathology education) calling for a national study to determine whether Covid vaccination was responsible for the increase in excess mortality in Australia and elsewhere by developing a protocol for post-mortems ‘to answer what is arguably the most important question facing medicine’ met with a rejection and a suggestion to take it instead to the TGA. Nowadays, dying suddenly has become ominously familiar. According to a new film Died Suddenly available as of this week to stream via Twitter, in the last 18 months, the term ‘Died Suddenly’ has risen to the very top of ‘most searched’ Google terms. The film documents the surge in excess mortality in highly vaccinated countries. Dr. Peter McCullough, internist, cardiologist, epidemiologist, and one of the top five most-published, and most censored, medical researchers in the US, says that sudden death frequently occurs because the heart has been damaged by inflammation caused by Covid vaccines. Papers that Pfizer and the Food and Drug Administration tried to hide for 75 years show that Pfizer knew in 2020 that myocarditis and pericarditis could be caused by its vaccine. And in the Pfizer trial in Argentina, a report on a healthy 36-year old  participant – Augusto German Roux – who developed pericarditis immediately after his second Pfizer jab, mysteriously disappeared from the published trial results. The Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) and the Cardiac Society of Australia and New Zealand (CSANZ) belatedly published a warning about myocarditis and pericarditis in September this year. It was too late for Garin. Had his doctors known, his life might have been saved. His grieving family have still not received a cent in compensation. But Pfizer has apparently grossed nearly $100 billion from its sales of Covid-19 vaccines and treatments. Rebecca Weisser is an independent journalist. ====== https://open.substack.com/pub/makismd/p/mrna-injury-stories-australian-dad?r=29hg4d&utm_medium=ios
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  • The WHO Pandemic Agreement: A Guide
    By David Bell, Thi Thuy Van Dinh March 22, 2024 Government, Society 30 minute read
    The World Health Organization (WHO) and its 194 Member States have been engaged for over two years in the development of two ‘instruments’ or agreements with the intent of radically changing the way pandemics and other health emergencies are managed.

    One, consisting of draft amendments to the existing International health Regulations (IHR), seeks to change the current IHR non-binding recommendations into requirements or binding recommendations, by having countries “undertake” to implement those given by the WHO in future declared health emergencies. It covers all ‘public health emergencies of international concern’ (PHEIC), with a single person, the WHO Director-General (DG) determining what a PHEIC is, where it extends, and when it ends. It specifies mandated vaccines, border closures, and other directives understood as lockdowns among the requirements the DG can impose. It is discussed further elsewhere and still under negotiation in Geneva.

    A second document, previously known as the (draft) Pandemic Treaty, then Pandemic Accord, and more recently the Pandemic Agreement, seeks to specify governance, supply chains, and various other interventions aimed at preventing, preparing for, and responding to, pandemics (pandemic prevention, preparedness and response – PPPR). It is currently being negotiated by the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB).

    Both texts will be subject to a vote at the May 2024 World Health Assembly (WHA) in Geneva, Switzerland. These votes are intended, by those promoting these projects, to bring governance of future multi-country healthcare emergencies (or threats thereof) under the WHO umbrella.

    The latest version of the draft Pandemic Agreement (here forth the ‘Agreement’) was released on 7th March 2024. However, it is still being negotiated by various committees comprising representatives of Member States and other interested entities. It has been through multiple iterations over two years, and looks like it. With the teeth of the pandemic response proposals in the IHR, the Agreement looks increasingly irrelevant, or at least unsure of its purpose, picking up bits and pieces in a half-hearted way that the IHR amendments do not, or cannot, include. However, as discussed below, it is far from irrelevant.

    Historical Perspective

    These aim to increase the centralization of decision-making within the WHO as the “directing and coordinating authority.” This terminology comes from the WHO’s 1946 Constitution, developed in the aftermath of the Second World War as the world faced the outcomes of European fascism and the similar approaches widely imposed through colonialist regimes. The WHO would support emerging countries, with rapidly expanding and poorly resourced populations struggling under high disease burdens, and coordinate some areas of international support as these sovereign countries requested it. The emphasis of action was on coordinating rather than directing.

    In the 80 years prior to the WHO’s existence, international public health had grown within a more directive mindset, with a series of meetings by colonial and slave-owning powers from 1851 to manage pandemics, culminating in the inauguration of the Office Internationale d’Hygiene Publique in Paris in 1907, and later the League of Nations Health Office. World powers imposed health dictates on those less powerful, in other parts of the world and increasingly on their own population through the eugenics movement and similar approaches. Public health would direct, for the greater good, as a tool of those who wish to direct the lives of others.

    The WHO, governed by the WHA, was to be very different. Newly independent States and their former colonial masters were ostensibly on an equal footing within the WHA (one country – one vote), and the WHO’s work overall was to be an example of how human rights could dominate the way society works. The model for international public health, as exemplified in the Declaration of Alma Ata in 1978, was to be horizontal rather than vertical, with communities and countries in the driving seat.

    With the evolution of the WHO in recent decades from a core funding model (countries give money, the WHO decides under the WHA guidance how to spend it) to a model based on specified funding (funders, both public and increasingly private, instruct the WHO on how to spend it), the WHO has inevitably changed to become a public-private partnership required to serve the interests of funders rather than populations.

    As most funding comes from a few countries with major Pharma industrial bases, or private investors and corporations in the same industry, the WHO has been required to emphasize the use of pharmaceuticals and downplay evidence and knowledge where these clash (if it wants to keep all its staff funded). It is helpful to view the draft Agreement, and the IHR amendments, in this context.

    Why May 2024?

    The WHO, together with the World Bank, G20, and other institutions have been emphasizing the urgency of putting the new pandemic instruments in place earnestly, before the ‘next pandemic.’ This is based on claims that the world was unprepared for Covid-19, and that the economic and health harm would be somehow avoidable if we had these agreements in place.

    They emphasize, contrary to evidence that Covid-19 virus (SARS-CoV-2) origins involve laboratory manipulation, that the main threats we face are natural, and that these are increasing exponentially and present an “existential” threat to humanity. The data on which the WHO, the World Bank, and G20 base these claims demonstrates the contrary, with reported natural outbreaks having increased as detection technologies have developed, but reducing in mortality rate, and in numbers, over the past 10 to 20 years..

    A paper cited by the World Bank to justify urgency and quoted as suggesting a 3x increase in risk in the coming decade actually suggests that a Covid-19-like event would occur roughly every 129 years, and a Spanish-flu repetition every 292 to 877 years. Such predictions are unable to take into account the rapidly changing nature of medicine and improved sanitation and nutrition (most deaths from Spanish flu would not have occurred if modern antibiotics had been available), and so may still overestimate risk. Similarly, the WHO’s own priority disease list for new outbreaks only includes two diseases of proven natural origin that have over 1,000 historical deaths attributed to them. It is well demonstrated that the risk and expected burden of pandemics is misrepresented by major international agencies in current discussions.

    The urgency for May 2024 is clearly therefore inadequately supported, firstly because neither the WHO nor others have demonstrated how the harms accrued through Covid-19 would be reduced through the measures proposed, and secondly because the burden and risk is misrepresented. In this context, the state of the Agreement is clearly not where it should be as a draft international legally binding agreement intended to impose considerable financial and other obligations on States and populations.

    This is particularly problematic as the proposed expenditure; the proposed budget is over $31 billion per year, with over $10 billion more on other One Health activities. Much of this will have to be diverted from addressing other diseases burdens that impose far greater burden. This trade-off, essential to understand in public health policy development, has not yet been clearly addressed by the WHO.

    The WHO DG stated recently that the WHO does not want the power to impose vaccine mandates or lockdowns on anyone, and does not want this. This begs the question of why either of the current WHO pandemic instruments is being proposed, both as legally binding documents. The current IHR (2005) already sets out such approaches as recommendations the DG can make, and there is nothing non-mandatory that countries cannot do now without pushing new treaty-like mechanisms through a vote in Geneva.

    Based on the DG’s claims, they are essentially redundant, and what new non-mandatory clauses they contain, as set out below, are certainly not urgent. Clauses that are mandatory (Member States “shall”) must be considered within national decision-making contexts and appear against the WHO’s stated intent.

    Common sense would suggest that the Agreement, and the accompanying IHR amendments, be properly thought through before Member States commit. The WHO has already abandoned the legal requirement for a 4-month review time for the IHR amendments (Article 55.2 IHR), which are also still under negotiation just 2 months before the WHA deadline. The Agreement should also have at least such a period for States to properly consider whether to agree – treaties normally take many years to develop and negotiate and no valid arguments have been put forward as to why these should be different.

    The Covid-19 response resulted in an unprecedented transfer of wealth from those of lower income to the very wealthy few, completely contrary to the way in which the WHO was intended to affect human society. A considerable portion of these pandemic profits went to current sponsors of the WHO, and these same corporate entities and investors are set to further benefit from the new pandemic agreements. As written, the Pandemic Agreement risks entrenching such centralization and profit-taking, and the accompanying unprecedented restrictions on human rights and freedoms, as a public health norm.

    To continue with a clearly flawed agreement simply because of a previously set deadline, when no clear population benefit is articulated and no true urgency demonstrated, would therefore be a major step backward in international public health. Basic principles of proportionality, human agency, and community empowerment, essential for health and human rights outcomes, are missing or paid lip-service. The WHO clearly wishes to increase its funding and show it is ‘doing something,’ but must first articulate why the voluntary provisions of the current IHR are insufficient. It is hoped that by systematically reviewing some key clauses of the agreement here, it will become clear why a rethink of the whole approach is necessary. The full text is found below.

    The commentary below concentrates on selected draft provisions of the latest publicly available version of the draft agreement that seem to be unclear or potentially problematic. Much of the remaining text is essentially pointless as it reiterates vague intentions to be found in other documents or activities which countries normally undertake in the course of running health services, and have no place in a focused legally-binding international agreement.

    REVISED Draft of the negotiating text of the WHO Pandemic Agreement. 7th March, 2024

    Preamble

    Recognizing that the World Health Organization…is the directing and coordinating authority on international health work.

    This is inconsistent with a recent statement by the WHO DG that the WHO has no interest or intent to direct country health responses. To reiterate it here suggests that the DG is not representing the true position regarding the Agreement. “Directing authority” is however in line with the proposed IHR Amendments (and the WHO’s Constitution), under which countries will “undertake” ahead of time to follow the DG’s recommendations (which thereby become instructions). As the HR amendments make clear, this is intended to apply even to a perceived threat rather than actual harm.

    Recalling the constitution of the World Health Organization…highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic or social condition.

    This statement recalls fundamental understandings of public health, and is of importance here as it raises the question of why the WHO did not strongly condemn prolonged school closures, workplace closures, and other impoverishing policies during the Covid-19 response. In 2019, WHO made clear that these dangers should prevent actions we now call ‘lockdowns’ from being imposed.

    Deeply concerned by the gross inequities at national and international levels that hindered timely and equitable access to medical and other Covid-19 pandemic-related products, and the serious shortcomings in pandemic preparedness.

    In terms of health equity (as distinct from commodity of ‘vaccine’ equity), inequity in the Covid-19 response was not in failing to provide a vaccine against former variants to immune, young people in low-income countries who were at far higher risk from endemic diseases, but in the disproportionate harm to them of uniformly-imposed NPIs that reduced current and future income and basic healthcare, as was noted by the WHO in 2019 Pandemic Influenza recommendations. The failure of the text to recognize this suggests that lessons from Covid-19 have not informed this draft Agreement. The WHO has not yet demonstrated how pandemic ‘preparedness,’ in the terms they use below, would have reduced impact, given that there is poor correlation between strictness or speed of response and eventual outcomes.

    Reiterating the need to work towards…an equitable approach to mitigate the risk that pandemics exacerbate existing inequities in access to health services,

    As above – in the past century, the issue of inequity has been most pronounced in pandemic response, rather than the impact of the virus itself (excluding the physiological variation in risk). Most recorded deaths from acute pandemics, since the Spanish flu, were during Covid-19, in which the virus hit mainly sick elderly, but response impacted working-age adults and children heavily and will continue to have effect, due to increased poverty and debt; reduced education and child marriage, in future generations.

    These have disproportionately affected lower-income people, and particularly women. The lack of recognition of this in this document, though they are recognized by the World Bank and UN agencies elsewhere, must raise real questions on whether this Agreement has been thoroughly thought through, and the process of development been sufficiently inclusive and objective.

    Chapter I. Introduction

    Article 1. Use of terms

    (i) “pathogen with pandemic potential” means any pathogen that has been identified to infect a human and that is: novel (not yet characterized) or known (including a variant of a known pathogen), potentially highly transmissible and/or highly virulent with the potential to cause a public health emergency of international concern.

    This provides a very wide scope to alter provisions. Any pathogen that can infect humans and is potentially highly transmissible or virulent, though yet uncharacterized means virtually any coronavirus, influenza virus, or a plethora of other relatively common pathogen groups. The IHR Amendments intend that the DG alone can make this call, over the advice of others, as occurred with monkeypox in 2022.

    (j) “persons in vulnerable situations” means individuals, groups or communities with a disproportionate increased risk of infection, severity, disease or mortality.

    This is a good definition – in Covid-19 context, would mean the sick elderly, and so is relevant to targeting a response.

    “Universal health coverage” means that all people have access to the full range of quality health services they need, when and where they need them, without financial hardship.

    While the general UHC concept is good, it is time a sensible (rather than patently silly) definition was adopted. Society cannot afford the full range of possible interventions and remedies for all, and clearly there is a scale of cost vs benefit that prioritizes certain ones over others. Sensible definitions make action more likely, and inaction harder to justify. One could argue that none should have the full range until all have good basic care, but clearly the earth will not support ‘the full range’ for 8 billion people.

    Article 2. Objective

    This Agreement is specifically for pandemics (a poorly defined term but essentially a pathogen that spreads rapidly across national borders). In contrast, the IHR amendments accompanying it are broader in scope – for any public health emergencies of international concern.

    Article 3. Principles

    2. the sovereign right of States to adopt, legislate and implement legislation

    The amendments to the IHR require States to undertake to follow WHO instructions ahead of time, before such instruction and context are known. These two documents must be understood, as noted later in the Agreement draft, as complementary.

    3. equity as the goal and outcome of pandemic prevention, preparedness and response, ensuring the absence of unfair, avoidable or remediable differences among groups of people.

    This definition of equity here needs clarification. In the pandemic context, the WHO emphasized commodity (vaccine) equity during the Covid-19 response. Elimination of differences implied equal access to Covid-19 vaccines in countries with large aging, obese highly vulnerable populations (e.g. the USA or Italy), and those with young populations at minimal risk and with far more pressing health priorities (e.g. Niger or Uganda).

    Alternatively, but equally damaging, equal access to different age groups within a country when the risk-benefit ratio is clearly greatly different. This promotes worse health outcomes by diverting resources from where they are most useful, as it ignores heterogeneity of risk. Again, an adult approach is required in international agreements, rather than feel-good sentences, if they are going to have a positive impact.

    5. …a more equitable and better prepared world to prevent, respond to and recover from pandemics

    As with ‘3’ above, this raises a fundamental problem: What if health equity demands that some populations divert resources to childhood nutrition and endemic diseases rather than the latest pandemic, as these are likely of far higher burden to many younger but lower-income populations? This would not be equity in the definition implied here, but would clearly lead to better and more equal health outcomes.

    The WHO must decide whether it is about uniform action, or minimizing poor health, as these are clearly very different. They are the difference between the WHO’s commodity equity, and true health equity.

    Chapter II. The world together equitably: achieving equity in, for and through pandemic prevention, preparedness and response

    Equity in health should imply a reasonably equal chance of overcoming or avoiding preventable sickness. The vast majority of sickness and death is due to either non-communicable diseases often related to lifestyle, such as obesity and type 2 diabetes mellitus, undernutrition in childhood, and endemic infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV/AIDS. Achieving health equity would primarily mean addressing these.

    In this chapter of the draft Pandemic Agreement, equity is used to imply equal access to specific health commodities, particularly vaccines, for intermittent health emergencies, although these exert a small fraction of the burden of other diseases. It is, specifically, commodity-equity, and not geared to equalizing overall health burden but to enabling centrally-coordinated homogenous responses to unusual events.

    Article 4. Pandemic prevention and surveillance

    2. The Parties shall undertake to cooperate:

    (b) in support of…initiatives aimed at preventing pandemics, in particular those that improve surveillance, early warning and risk assessment; .…and identify settings and activities presenting a risk of emergence and re-emergence of pathogens with pandemic potential.

    (c-h) [Paragraphs on water and sanitation, infection control, strengthening of biosafety, surveillance and prevention of vector-born diseases, and addressing antimicrobial resistance.]

    The WHO intends the Agreement to have force under international law. Therefore, countries are undertaking to put themselves under force of international law in regards to complying with the agreement’s stipulations.

    The provisions under this long article mostly cover general health stuff that countries try to do anyway. The difference will be that countries will be assessed on progress. Assessment can be fine if in context, less fine if it consists of entitled ‘experts’ from wealthy countries with little local knowledge or context. Perhaps such compliance is best left to national authorities, who are more in use with local needs and priorities. The justification for the international bureaucracy being built to support this, while fun for those involved, is unclear and will divert resources from actual health work.

    6. The Conference of the Parties may adopt, as necessary, guidelines, recommendations and standards, including in relation to pandemic prevention capacities, to support the implementation of this Article.

    Here and later, the COP is invoked as a vehicle to decide on what will actually be done. The rules are explained later (Articles 21-23). While allowing more time is sensible, it begs the question of why it is not better to wait and discuss what is needed in the current INB process, before committing to a legally-binding agreement. This current article says nothing not already covered by the IHR2005 or other ongoing programs.

    Article 5. One Health approach to pandemic prevention, preparedness and response

    Nothing specific or new in this article. It seems redundant (it is advocating a holistic approach mentioned elsewhere) and so presumably is just to get the term ‘One Health’ into the agreement. (One could ask, why bother?)

    Some mainstream definitions of One Health (e.g. Lancet) consider that it means non-human species are on a par with humans in terms of rights and importance. If this is meant here, clearly most Member States would disagree. So we may assume that it is just words to keep someone happy (a little childish in an international document, but the term ‘One Health’ has been trending, like ‘equity,’ as if the concept of holistic approaches to public health were new).

    Article 6. Preparedness, health system resilience and recovery

    2. Each Party commits…[to] :

    (a) routine and essential health services during pandemics with a focus on primary health care, routine immunization and mental health care, and with particular attention to persons in vulnerable situations

    (b) developing, strengthening and maintaining health infrastructure

    (c) developing post-pandemic health system recovery strategies

    (d) developing, strengthening and maintaining: health information systems

    This is good, and (a) seems to require avoidance of lockdowns (which inevitably cause the harms listed). Unfortunately other WHO documents lead one to assume this is not the intent…It does appear therefore that this is simply another list of fairly non-specific feel-good measures that have no useful place in a new legally-binding agreement, and which most countries are already undertaking.

    (e) promoting the use of social and behavioural sciences, risk communication and community engagement for pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.

    This requires clarification, as the use of behavioral science during the Covid-19 response involved deliberate inducement of fear to promote behaviors that people would not otherwise follow (e.g. Spi-B). It is essential here that the document clarifies how behavioral science should be used ethically in healthcare. Otherwise, this is also a quite meaningless provision.

    Article 7. Health and care workforce

    This long Article discusses health workforce, training, retention, non-discrimination, stigma, bias, adequate remuneration, and other standard provisions for workplaces. It is unclear why it is included in a legally binding pandemic agreement, except for:

    4. [The Parties]…shall invest in establishing, sustaining, coordinating and mobilizing a skilled and trained multidisciplinary global public health emergency workforce…Parties having established emergency health teams should inform WHO thereof and make best efforts to respond to requests for deployment…

    Emergency health teams established (within capacity etc.) – are something countries already do, when they have capacity. There is no reason to have this as a legally-binding instrument, and clearly no urgency to do so.

    Article 8. Preparedness monitoring and functional reviews

    1. The Parties shall, building on existing and relevant tools, develop and implement an inclusive, transparent, effective and efficient pandemic prevention, preparedness and response monitoring and evaluation system.

    2. Each Party shall assess, every five years, with technical support from the WHO Secretariat upon request, the functioning and readiness of, and gaps in, its pandemic prevention, preparedness and response capacity, based on the relevant tools and guidelines developed by WHO in partnership with relevant organizations at international, regional and sub-regional levels.

    Note that this is being required of countries that are already struggling to implement monitoring systems for major endemic diseases, including tuberculosis, malaria, HIV, and nutritional deficiencies. They will be legally bound to divert resources to pandemic prevention. While there is some overlap, it will inevitably divert resources from currently underfunded programs for diseases of far higher local burdens, and so (not theoretically, but inevitably) raise mortality. Poor countries are being required to put resources into problems deemed significant by richer countries.

    Article 9. Research and development

    Various general provisions about undertaking background research that countries are generally doing anyway, but with an ’emerging disease’ slant. Again, the INB fails to justify why this diversion of resources from researching greater disease burdens should occur in all countries (why not just those with excess resources?).

    Article 10. Sustainable and geographically diversified production

    Mostly non-binding but suggested cooperation on making pandemic-related products available, including support for manufacturing in “inter-pandemic times” (a fascinating rendering of ‘normal’), when they would only be viable through subsidies. Much of this is probably unimplementable, as it would not be practical to maintain facilities in most or all countries on stand-by for rare events, at cost of resources otherwise useful for other priorities. The desire to increase production in ‘developing’ countries will face major barriers and costs in terms of maintaining quality of production, particularly as many products will have limited use outside of rare outbreak situations.

    Article 11. Transfer of technology and know-how

    This article, always problematic for large pharmaceutical corporations sponsoring much WHO outbreak activities, is now watered down to weak requirements to ‘consider,’ promote,’ provide, within capabilities’ etc.

    Article 12. Access and benefit sharing

    This Article is intended to establish the WHO Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing System (PABS System). PABS is intended to “ensure rapid, systematic and timely access to biological materials of pathogens with pandemic potential and the genetic sequence data.” This system is of potential high relevance and needs to be interpreted in the context that SARS-CoV-2, the pathogen causing the recent Covid-19 outbreak, was highly likely to have escaped from a laboratory. PABS is intended to expand the laboratory storage, transport, and handling of such viruses, under the oversight of the WHO, an organization outside of national jurisdiction with no significant direct experience in handling biological materials.

    3. When a Party has access to a pathogen [it shall]:

    (a) share with WHO any pathogen sequence information as soon as it is available to the Party;

    (b) as soon as biological materials are available to the Party, provide the materials to one or more laboratories and/or biorepositories participating in WHO-coordinated laboratory networks (CLNs),

    Subsequent clauses state that benefits will be shared, and seek to prevent recipient laboratories from patenting materials received from other countries. This has been a major concern of low-and middle-income countries previously, who perceive that institutions in wealthy countries patent and benefit from materials derived from less-wealthy populations. It remains to be seen whether provisions here will be sufficient to address this.

    The article then becomes yet more concerning:

    6. WHO shall conclude legally binding standard PABS contracts with manufacturers to provide the following, taking into account the size, nature and capacities of the manufacturer:

    (a) annual monetary contributions to support the PABS System and relevant capacities in countries; the determination of the annual amount, use, and approach for monitoring and accountability, shall be finalized by the Parties;

    (b) real-time contributions of relevant diagnostics, therapeutics or vaccines produced by the manufacturer, 10% free of charge and 10% at not-for-profit prices during public health emergencies of international concern or pandemics, …

    It is clearly intended that the WHO becomes directly involved in setting up legally binding manufacturing contracts, despite the WHO being outside of national jurisdictional oversight, within the territories of Member States. The PABS system, and therefore its staff and dependent entities, are also to be supported in part by funds from the manufacturers whom they are supposed to be managing. The income of the organization will be dependent on maintaining positive relationships with these private entities in a similar way in which many national regulatory agencies are dependent upon funds from pharmaceutical companies whom their staff ostensibly regulate. In this case, the regulator will be even further removed from public oversight.

    The clause on 10% (why 10?) products being free of charge, and similar at cost, while ensuring lower-priced commodities irrespective of actual need (the outbreak may be confined to wealthy countries). The same entity, the WHO, will determine whether the triggering emergency exists, determine the response, and manage the contracts to provide the commodities, without direct jurisdictional oversight regarding the potential for corruption or conflict of interest. It is a remarkable system to suggest, irrespective of political or regulatory environment.

    8. The Parties shall cooperate…public financing of research and development, prepurchase agreements, or regulatory procedures, to encourage and facilitate as many manufacturers as possible to enter into standard PABS contracts as early as possible.

    The article envisions that public funding will be used to build the process, ensuring essentially no-risk private profit.

    10. To support operationalization of the PABS System, WHO shall…make such contracts public, while respecting commercial confidentiality.

    The public may know whom contracts are made with, but not all details of the contracts. There will therefore be no independent oversight of the clauses agreed between the WHO, a body outside of national jurisdiction and dependent of commercial companies for funding some of its work and salaries, and these same companies, on ‘needs’ that the WHO itself will have sole authority, under the proposed amendments to the IHR, to determine.

    The Article further states that the WHO shall use its own product regulatory system (prequalification) and Emergency Use Listing Procedure to open and stimulate markets for the manufacturers of these products.

    It is doubtful that any national government could make such an overall agreement, yet in May 2024 they will be voting to provide this to what is essentially a foreign, and partly privately financed, entity.

    Article 13. Supply chain and logistics

    The WHO will become convenor of a ‘Global Supply Chain and Logistics Network’ for commercially-produced products, to be supplied under WHO contracts when and where the WHO determines, whilst also having the role of ensuring safety of such products.

    Having mutual support coordinated between countries is good. Having this run by an organization that is significantly funded directly by those gaining from the sale of these same commodities seems reckless and counterintuitive. Few countries would allow this (or at least plan for it).

    For this to occur safely, the WHO would logically have to forgo all private investment, and greatly restrict national specified funding contributions. Otherwise, the conflicts of interest involved would destroy confidence in the system. There is no suggestion of such divestment from the WHO, but rather, as in Article 12, private sector dependency, directly tied to contracts, will increase.

    Article 13bis: National procurement- and distribution-related provisions

    While suffering the same (perhaps unavoidable) issues regarding commercial confidentiality, this alternate Article 13 seems far more appropriate, keeping commercial issues under national jurisdiction and avoiding the obvious conflict of interests that underpin funding for WHO activities and staffing.

    Article 14. Regulatory systems strengthening

    This entire Article reflects initiatives and programs already in place. Nothing here appears likely to add to current effort.

    Article 15. Liability and compensation management

    1. Each Party shall consider developing, as necessary and in accordance with applicable law, national strategies for managing liability in its territory related to pandemic vaccines…no-fault compensation mechanisms…

    2. The Parties…shall develop recommendations for the establishment and implementation of national, regional and/or global no-fault compensation mechanisms and strategies for managing liability during pandemic emergencies, including with regard to individuals that are in a humanitarian setting or vulnerable situations.

    This is quite remarkable, but also reflects some national legislation, in removing any fault or liability specifically from vaccine manufacturers, for harms done in pushing out vaccines to the public. During the Covid-19 response, genetic therapeutics being developed by BioNtech and Moderna were reclassified as vaccines, on the basis that an immune response is stimulated after they have modified intracellular biochemical pathways as a medicine normally does.

    This enabled specific trials normally required for carcinogenicity and teratogenicity to be bypassed, despite raised fetal abnormality rates in animal trials. It will enable the CEPI 100-day vaccine program, supported with private funding to support private mRNA vaccine manufacturers, to proceed without any risk to the manufacturer should there be subsequent public harm.

    Together with an earlier provision on public funding of research and manufacturing readiness, and the removal of former wording requiring intellectual property sharing in Article 11, this ensures vaccine manufacturers and their investors make profit in effective absence of risk.

    These entities are currently heavily invested in support for WHO, and were strongly aligned with the introduction of newly restrictive outbreak responses that emphasized and sometimes mandated their products during the Covid-19 outbreak.

    Article 16. International collaboration and cooperation

    A somewhat pointless article. It suggests that countries cooperate with each other and the WHO to implement the other agreements in the Agreement.

    Article 17. Whole-of-government and whole-of-society approaches

    A list of essentially motherhood provisions related to planning for a pandemic. However, countries will legally be required to maintain a ‘national coordination multisectoral body’ for PPPR. This will essentially be an added burden on budgets, and inevitably divert further resources from other priorities. Perhaps just strengthening current infectious disease and nutritional programs would be more impactful. (Nowhere in this Agreement is nutrition discussed (essential for resilience to pathogens) and minimal wording is included on sanitation and clean water (other major reasons for reduction in infectious disease mortality over past centuries).

    However, the ‘community ownership’ wording is interesting (“empower and enable community ownership of, and contribution to, community readiness for and resilience [for PPPR]”), as this directly contradicts much of the rest of the Agreement, including the centralization of control under the Conference of Parties, requirements for countries to allocate resources to pandemic preparedness over other community priorities, and the idea of inspecting and assessing adherence to the centralized requirements of the Agreement. Either much of the rest of the Agreement is redundant, or this wording is purely for appearance and not to be followed (and therefore should be removed).

    Article 18. Communication and public awareness

    1. Each Party shall promote timely access to credible and evidence-based information …with the aim of countering and addressing misinformation or disinformation…

    2. The Parties shall, as appropriate, promote and/or conduct research and inform policies on factors that hinder or strengthen adherence to public health and social measures in a pandemic, as well as trust in science and public health institutions and agencies.

    The key word is as appropriate, given that many agencies, including the WHO, have overseen or aided policies during the Covid-19 response that have greatly increased poverty, child marriage, teenage pregnancy, and education loss.

    As the WHO has been shown to be significantly misrepresenting pandemic risk in the process of advocating for this Agreement and related instruments, its own communications would also fall outside the provision here related to evidence-based information, and fall within normal understandings of misinformation. It could not therefore be an arbiter of correctness of information here, so the Article is not implementable. Rewritten to recommend accurate evidence-based information being promoted, it would make good sense, but this is not an issue requiring a legally binding international agreement.

    Article 19. Implementation and support

    3. The WHO Secretariat…organize the technical and financial assistance necessary to address such gaps and needs in implementing the commitments agreed upon under the Pandemic Agreement and the International Health Regulations (2005).

    As the WHO is dependent on donor support, its ability to address gaps in funding within Member States is clearly not something it can guarantee. The purpose of this article is unclear, repeating in paragraphs 1 and 2 the earlier intent for countries to generally support each other.

    Article 20. Sustainable financing

    1. The Parties commit to working together…In this regard, each Party, within the means and resources at its disposal, shall:

    (a) prioritize and maintain or increase, as necessary, domestic funding for pandemic prevention, preparedness and response, without undermining other domestic public health priorities including for: (i) strengthening and sustaining capacities for the prevention, preparedness and response to health emergencies and pandemics, in particular the core capacities of the International Health Regulations (2005);…

    This is silly wording, as countries obviously have to prioritize within budgets, so that moving funds to one area means removing from another. The essence of public health policy is weighing and making such decisions; this reality seems to be ignored here through wishful thinking. (a) is clearly redundant, as the IHR (2005) already exists and countries have agreed to support it.

    3. A Coordinating Financial Mechanism (the “Mechanism”) is hereby established to support the implementation of both the WHO Pandemic Agreement and the International Health Regulations (2005)

    This will be in parallel to the Pandemic Fund recently commenced by the World Bank – an issue not lost on INB delegates and so likely to change here in the final version. It will also be additive to the Global Fund to fight AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, and other health financing mechanisms, and so require another parallel international bureaucracy, presumably based in Geneva.

    It is intended to have its own capacity to “conduct relevant analyses on needs and gaps, in addition to tracking cooperation efforts,” so it will not be a small undertaking.

    Chapter III. Institutional and final provisions

    Article 21. Conference of the Parties

    1. A Conference of the Parties is hereby established.

    2. The Conference of the Parties shall keep under regular review, every three years, the implementation of the WHO Pandemic Agreement and take the decisions necessary to promote its effective implementation.

    This sets up the governing body to oversee this Agreement (another body requiring a secretariat and support). It is intended to meet within a year of the Agreement coming into force, and then set its own rules on meeting thereafter. It is likely that many provisions outlined in this draft of the Agreement will be deferred to the COP for further discussion.

    Articles 22 – 37

    These articles cover the functioning of the Conference of Parties (COP) and various administrative issues.

    Of note, ‘block votes’ will be allowed from regional bodies (e.g. the EU).

    The WHO will provide the secretariat.

    Under Article 24 is noted:

    3. Nothing in the WHO Pandemic Agreement shall be interpreted as providing the Secretariat of the World Health Organization, including the WHO Director-General, any authority to direct, order, alter or otherwise prescribe the domestic laws or policies of any Party, or to mandate or otherwise impose any requirements that Parties take specific actions, such as ban or accept travellers, impose vaccination mandates or therapeutic or diagnostic measures, or implement lockdowns.

    These provisions are explicitly stated in the proposed amendments to the IHR, to be considered alongside this agreement. Article 26 notes that the IHR is to be interpreted as compatible, thereby confirming that the IHR provisions including border closures and limits on freedom of movement, mandated vaccination, and other lockdown measures are not negated by this statement.

    As Article 26 states: “The Parties recognize that the WHO Pandemic Agreement and the International Health Regulations should be interpreted so as to be compatible.”

    Some would consider this subterfuge – The Director-General recently labeled as liars those who claimed the Agreement included these powers, whilst failing to acknowledge the accompanying IHR amendments. The WHO could do better in avoiding misleading messaging, especially when this involves denigration of the public.

    Article 32 (Withdrawal) requires that, once adopted, Parties cannot withdraw for a total of 3 years (giving notice after a minimum of 2 years). Financial obligations undertaken under the agreement continue beyond that time.

    Finally, the Agreement will come into force, assuming a two-thirds majority in the WHA is achieved (Article 19, WHO Constitution), 30 days after the fortieth country has ratified it.

    Further reading:

    WHO Pandemic Agreement Intergovernmental Negotiating Board website:

    https://inb.who.int/

    International Health Regulations Working Group website:

    https://apps.who.int/gb/wgihr/index.html

    On background to the WHO texts:

    Amendments to WHO’s International Health Regulations: An Annotated Guide
    An Unofficial Q&A on International Health Regulations
    On urgency and burden of pandemics:

    https://essl.leeds.ac.uk/downloads/download/228/rational-policy-over-panic

    Disease X and Davos: This is Not the Way to Evaluate and Formulate Public Health Policy
    Before Preparing for Pandemics, We Need Better Evidence of Risk
    Revised Draft of the negotiating text of the WHO Pandemic Agreement:

    Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
    For reprints, please set the canonical link back to the original Brownstone Institute Article and Author.

    Authors

    David Bell
    David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. He is a former medical officer and scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO), Programme Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland, and Director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in Bellevue, WA, USA.

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    Thi Thuy Van Dinh
    Dr. Thi Thuy Van Dinh (LLM, PhD) worked on international law in the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Subsequently, she managed multilateral organization partnerships for Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund and led environmental health technology development efforts for low-resource settings.

    View all posts
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    https://brownstone.org/articles/the-who-pandemic-agreement-a-guide/

    https://www.minds.com/donshafi911/blog/the-who-pandemic-agreement-a-guide-1621719398509187077
    The WHO Pandemic Agreement: A Guide By David Bell, Thi Thuy Van Dinh March 22, 2024 Government, Society 30 minute read The World Health Organization (WHO) and its 194 Member States have been engaged for over two years in the development of two ‘instruments’ or agreements with the intent of radically changing the way pandemics and other health emergencies are managed. One, consisting of draft amendments to the existing International health Regulations (IHR), seeks to change the current IHR non-binding recommendations into requirements or binding recommendations, by having countries “undertake” to implement those given by the WHO in future declared health emergencies. It covers all ‘public health emergencies of international concern’ (PHEIC), with a single person, the WHO Director-General (DG) determining what a PHEIC is, where it extends, and when it ends. It specifies mandated vaccines, border closures, and other directives understood as lockdowns among the requirements the DG can impose. It is discussed further elsewhere and still under negotiation in Geneva. A second document, previously known as the (draft) Pandemic Treaty, then Pandemic Accord, and more recently the Pandemic Agreement, seeks to specify governance, supply chains, and various other interventions aimed at preventing, preparing for, and responding to, pandemics (pandemic prevention, preparedness and response – PPPR). It is currently being negotiated by the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB). Both texts will be subject to a vote at the May 2024 World Health Assembly (WHA) in Geneva, Switzerland. These votes are intended, by those promoting these projects, to bring governance of future multi-country healthcare emergencies (or threats thereof) under the WHO umbrella. The latest version of the draft Pandemic Agreement (here forth the ‘Agreement’) was released on 7th March 2024. However, it is still being negotiated by various committees comprising representatives of Member States and other interested entities. It has been through multiple iterations over two years, and looks like it. With the teeth of the pandemic response proposals in the IHR, the Agreement looks increasingly irrelevant, or at least unsure of its purpose, picking up bits and pieces in a half-hearted way that the IHR amendments do not, or cannot, include. However, as discussed below, it is far from irrelevant. Historical Perspective These aim to increase the centralization of decision-making within the WHO as the “directing and coordinating authority.” This terminology comes from the WHO’s 1946 Constitution, developed in the aftermath of the Second World War as the world faced the outcomes of European fascism and the similar approaches widely imposed through colonialist regimes. The WHO would support emerging countries, with rapidly expanding and poorly resourced populations struggling under high disease burdens, and coordinate some areas of international support as these sovereign countries requested it. The emphasis of action was on coordinating rather than directing. In the 80 years prior to the WHO’s existence, international public health had grown within a more directive mindset, with a series of meetings by colonial and slave-owning powers from 1851 to manage pandemics, culminating in the inauguration of the Office Internationale d’Hygiene Publique in Paris in 1907, and later the League of Nations Health Office. World powers imposed health dictates on those less powerful, in other parts of the world and increasingly on their own population through the eugenics movement and similar approaches. Public health would direct, for the greater good, as a tool of those who wish to direct the lives of others. The WHO, governed by the WHA, was to be very different. Newly independent States and their former colonial masters were ostensibly on an equal footing within the WHA (one country – one vote), and the WHO’s work overall was to be an example of how human rights could dominate the way society works. The model for international public health, as exemplified in the Declaration of Alma Ata in 1978, was to be horizontal rather than vertical, with communities and countries in the driving seat. With the evolution of the WHO in recent decades from a core funding model (countries give money, the WHO decides under the WHA guidance how to spend it) to a model based on specified funding (funders, both public and increasingly private, instruct the WHO on how to spend it), the WHO has inevitably changed to become a public-private partnership required to serve the interests of funders rather than populations. As most funding comes from a few countries with major Pharma industrial bases, or private investors and corporations in the same industry, the WHO has been required to emphasize the use of pharmaceuticals and downplay evidence and knowledge where these clash (if it wants to keep all its staff funded). It is helpful to view the draft Agreement, and the IHR amendments, in this context. Why May 2024? The WHO, together with the World Bank, G20, and other institutions have been emphasizing the urgency of putting the new pandemic instruments in place earnestly, before the ‘next pandemic.’ This is based on claims that the world was unprepared for Covid-19, and that the economic and health harm would be somehow avoidable if we had these agreements in place. They emphasize, contrary to evidence that Covid-19 virus (SARS-CoV-2) origins involve laboratory manipulation, that the main threats we face are natural, and that these are increasing exponentially and present an “existential” threat to humanity. The data on which the WHO, the World Bank, and G20 base these claims demonstrates the contrary, with reported natural outbreaks having increased as detection technologies have developed, but reducing in mortality rate, and in numbers, over the past 10 to 20 years.. A paper cited by the World Bank to justify urgency and quoted as suggesting a 3x increase in risk in the coming decade actually suggests that a Covid-19-like event would occur roughly every 129 years, and a Spanish-flu repetition every 292 to 877 years. Such predictions are unable to take into account the rapidly changing nature of medicine and improved sanitation and nutrition (most deaths from Spanish flu would not have occurred if modern antibiotics had been available), and so may still overestimate risk. Similarly, the WHO’s own priority disease list for new outbreaks only includes two diseases of proven natural origin that have over 1,000 historical deaths attributed to them. It is well demonstrated that the risk and expected burden of pandemics is misrepresented by major international agencies in current discussions. The urgency for May 2024 is clearly therefore inadequately supported, firstly because neither the WHO nor others have demonstrated how the harms accrued through Covid-19 would be reduced through the measures proposed, and secondly because the burden and risk is misrepresented. In this context, the state of the Agreement is clearly not where it should be as a draft international legally binding agreement intended to impose considerable financial and other obligations on States and populations. This is particularly problematic as the proposed expenditure; the proposed budget is over $31 billion per year, with over $10 billion more on other One Health activities. Much of this will have to be diverted from addressing other diseases burdens that impose far greater burden. This trade-off, essential to understand in public health policy development, has not yet been clearly addressed by the WHO. The WHO DG stated recently that the WHO does not want the power to impose vaccine mandates or lockdowns on anyone, and does not want this. This begs the question of why either of the current WHO pandemic instruments is being proposed, both as legally binding documents. The current IHR (2005) already sets out such approaches as recommendations the DG can make, and there is nothing non-mandatory that countries cannot do now without pushing new treaty-like mechanisms through a vote in Geneva. Based on the DG’s claims, they are essentially redundant, and what new non-mandatory clauses they contain, as set out below, are certainly not urgent. Clauses that are mandatory (Member States “shall”) must be considered within national decision-making contexts and appear against the WHO’s stated intent. Common sense would suggest that the Agreement, and the accompanying IHR amendments, be properly thought through before Member States commit. The WHO has already abandoned the legal requirement for a 4-month review time for the IHR amendments (Article 55.2 IHR), which are also still under negotiation just 2 months before the WHA deadline. The Agreement should also have at least such a period for States to properly consider whether to agree – treaties normally take many years to develop and negotiate and no valid arguments have been put forward as to why these should be different. The Covid-19 response resulted in an unprecedented transfer of wealth from those of lower income to the very wealthy few, completely contrary to the way in which the WHO was intended to affect human society. A considerable portion of these pandemic profits went to current sponsors of the WHO, and these same corporate entities and investors are set to further benefit from the new pandemic agreements. As written, the Pandemic Agreement risks entrenching such centralization and profit-taking, and the accompanying unprecedented restrictions on human rights and freedoms, as a public health norm. To continue with a clearly flawed agreement simply because of a previously set deadline, when no clear population benefit is articulated and no true urgency demonstrated, would therefore be a major step backward in international public health. Basic principles of proportionality, human agency, and community empowerment, essential for health and human rights outcomes, are missing or paid lip-service. The WHO clearly wishes to increase its funding and show it is ‘doing something,’ but must first articulate why the voluntary provisions of the current IHR are insufficient. It is hoped that by systematically reviewing some key clauses of the agreement here, it will become clear why a rethink of the whole approach is necessary. The full text is found below. The commentary below concentrates on selected draft provisions of the latest publicly available version of the draft agreement that seem to be unclear or potentially problematic. Much of the remaining text is essentially pointless as it reiterates vague intentions to be found in other documents or activities which countries normally undertake in the course of running health services, and have no place in a focused legally-binding international agreement. REVISED Draft of the negotiating text of the WHO Pandemic Agreement. 7th March, 2024 Preamble Recognizing that the World Health Organization…is the directing and coordinating authority on international health work. This is inconsistent with a recent statement by the WHO DG that the WHO has no interest or intent to direct country health responses. To reiterate it here suggests that the DG is not representing the true position regarding the Agreement. “Directing authority” is however in line with the proposed IHR Amendments (and the WHO’s Constitution), under which countries will “undertake” ahead of time to follow the DG’s recommendations (which thereby become instructions). As the HR amendments make clear, this is intended to apply even to a perceived threat rather than actual harm. Recalling the constitution of the World Health Organization…highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic or social condition. This statement recalls fundamental understandings of public health, and is of importance here as it raises the question of why the WHO did not strongly condemn prolonged school closures, workplace closures, and other impoverishing policies during the Covid-19 response. In 2019, WHO made clear that these dangers should prevent actions we now call ‘lockdowns’ from being imposed. Deeply concerned by the gross inequities at national and international levels that hindered timely and equitable access to medical and other Covid-19 pandemic-related products, and the serious shortcomings in pandemic preparedness. In terms of health equity (as distinct from commodity of ‘vaccine’ equity), inequity in the Covid-19 response was not in failing to provide a vaccine against former variants to immune, young people in low-income countries who were at far higher risk from endemic diseases, but in the disproportionate harm to them of uniformly-imposed NPIs that reduced current and future income and basic healthcare, as was noted by the WHO in 2019 Pandemic Influenza recommendations. The failure of the text to recognize this suggests that lessons from Covid-19 have not informed this draft Agreement. The WHO has not yet demonstrated how pandemic ‘preparedness,’ in the terms they use below, would have reduced impact, given that there is poor correlation between strictness or speed of response and eventual outcomes. Reiterating the need to work towards…an equitable approach to mitigate the risk that pandemics exacerbate existing inequities in access to health services, As above – in the past century, the issue of inequity has been most pronounced in pandemic response, rather than the impact of the virus itself (excluding the physiological variation in risk). Most recorded deaths from acute pandemics, since the Spanish flu, were during Covid-19, in which the virus hit mainly sick elderly, but response impacted working-age adults and children heavily and will continue to have effect, due to increased poverty and debt; reduced education and child marriage, in future generations. These have disproportionately affected lower-income people, and particularly women. The lack of recognition of this in this document, though they are recognized by the World Bank and UN agencies elsewhere, must raise real questions on whether this Agreement has been thoroughly thought through, and the process of development been sufficiently inclusive and objective. Chapter I. Introduction Article 1. Use of terms (i) “pathogen with pandemic potential” means any pathogen that has been identified to infect a human and that is: novel (not yet characterized) or known (including a variant of a known pathogen), potentially highly transmissible and/or highly virulent with the potential to cause a public health emergency of international concern. This provides a very wide scope to alter provisions. Any pathogen that can infect humans and is potentially highly transmissible or virulent, though yet uncharacterized means virtually any coronavirus, influenza virus, or a plethora of other relatively common pathogen groups. The IHR Amendments intend that the DG alone can make this call, over the advice of others, as occurred with monkeypox in 2022. (j) “persons in vulnerable situations” means individuals, groups or communities with a disproportionate increased risk of infection, severity, disease or mortality. This is a good definition – in Covid-19 context, would mean the sick elderly, and so is relevant to targeting a response. “Universal health coverage” means that all people have access to the full range of quality health services they need, when and where they need them, without financial hardship. While the general UHC concept is good, it is time a sensible (rather than patently silly) definition was adopted. Society cannot afford the full range of possible interventions and remedies for all, and clearly there is a scale of cost vs benefit that prioritizes certain ones over others. Sensible definitions make action more likely, and inaction harder to justify. One could argue that none should have the full range until all have good basic care, but clearly the earth will not support ‘the full range’ for 8 billion people. Article 2. Objective This Agreement is specifically for pandemics (a poorly defined term but essentially a pathogen that spreads rapidly across national borders). In contrast, the IHR amendments accompanying it are broader in scope – for any public health emergencies of international concern. Article 3. Principles 2. the sovereign right of States to adopt, legislate and implement legislation The amendments to the IHR require States to undertake to follow WHO instructions ahead of time, before such instruction and context are known. These two documents must be understood, as noted later in the Agreement draft, as complementary. 3. equity as the goal and outcome of pandemic prevention, preparedness and response, ensuring the absence of unfair, avoidable or remediable differences among groups of people. This definition of equity here needs clarification. In the pandemic context, the WHO emphasized commodity (vaccine) equity during the Covid-19 response. Elimination of differences implied equal access to Covid-19 vaccines in countries with large aging, obese highly vulnerable populations (e.g. the USA or Italy), and those with young populations at minimal risk and with far more pressing health priorities (e.g. Niger or Uganda). Alternatively, but equally damaging, equal access to different age groups within a country when the risk-benefit ratio is clearly greatly different. This promotes worse health outcomes by diverting resources from where they are most useful, as it ignores heterogeneity of risk. Again, an adult approach is required in international agreements, rather than feel-good sentences, if they are going to have a positive impact. 5. …a more equitable and better prepared world to prevent, respond to and recover from pandemics As with ‘3’ above, this raises a fundamental problem: What if health equity demands that some populations divert resources to childhood nutrition and endemic diseases rather than the latest pandemic, as these are likely of far higher burden to many younger but lower-income populations? This would not be equity in the definition implied here, but would clearly lead to better and more equal health outcomes. The WHO must decide whether it is about uniform action, or minimizing poor health, as these are clearly very different. They are the difference between the WHO’s commodity equity, and true health equity. Chapter II. The world together equitably: achieving equity in, for and through pandemic prevention, preparedness and response Equity in health should imply a reasonably equal chance of overcoming or avoiding preventable sickness. The vast majority of sickness and death is due to either non-communicable diseases often related to lifestyle, such as obesity and type 2 diabetes mellitus, undernutrition in childhood, and endemic infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV/AIDS. Achieving health equity would primarily mean addressing these. In this chapter of the draft Pandemic Agreement, equity is used to imply equal access to specific health commodities, particularly vaccines, for intermittent health emergencies, although these exert a small fraction of the burden of other diseases. It is, specifically, commodity-equity, and not geared to equalizing overall health burden but to enabling centrally-coordinated homogenous responses to unusual events. Article 4. Pandemic prevention and surveillance 2. The Parties shall undertake to cooperate: (b) in support of…initiatives aimed at preventing pandemics, in particular those that improve surveillance, early warning and risk assessment; .…and identify settings and activities presenting a risk of emergence and re-emergence of pathogens with pandemic potential. (c-h) [Paragraphs on water and sanitation, infection control, strengthening of biosafety, surveillance and prevention of vector-born diseases, and addressing antimicrobial resistance.] The WHO intends the Agreement to have force under international law. Therefore, countries are undertaking to put themselves under force of international law in regards to complying with the agreement’s stipulations. The provisions under this long article mostly cover general health stuff that countries try to do anyway. The difference will be that countries will be assessed on progress. Assessment can be fine if in context, less fine if it consists of entitled ‘experts’ from wealthy countries with little local knowledge or context. Perhaps such compliance is best left to national authorities, who are more in use with local needs and priorities. The justification for the international bureaucracy being built to support this, while fun for those involved, is unclear and will divert resources from actual health work. 6. The Conference of the Parties may adopt, as necessary, guidelines, recommendations and standards, including in relation to pandemic prevention capacities, to support the implementation of this Article. Here and later, the COP is invoked as a vehicle to decide on what will actually be done. The rules are explained later (Articles 21-23). While allowing more time is sensible, it begs the question of why it is not better to wait and discuss what is needed in the current INB process, before committing to a legally-binding agreement. This current article says nothing not already covered by the IHR2005 or other ongoing programs. Article 5. One Health approach to pandemic prevention, preparedness and response Nothing specific or new in this article. It seems redundant (it is advocating a holistic approach mentioned elsewhere) and so presumably is just to get the term ‘One Health’ into the agreement. (One could ask, why bother?) Some mainstream definitions of One Health (e.g. Lancet) consider that it means non-human species are on a par with humans in terms of rights and importance. If this is meant here, clearly most Member States would disagree. So we may assume that it is just words to keep someone happy (a little childish in an international document, but the term ‘One Health’ has been trending, like ‘equity,’ as if the concept of holistic approaches to public health were new). Article 6. Preparedness, health system resilience and recovery 2. Each Party commits…[to] : (a) routine and essential health services during pandemics with a focus on primary health care, routine immunization and mental health care, and with particular attention to persons in vulnerable situations (b) developing, strengthening and maintaining health infrastructure (c) developing post-pandemic health system recovery strategies (d) developing, strengthening and maintaining: health information systems This is good, and (a) seems to require avoidance of lockdowns (which inevitably cause the harms listed). Unfortunately other WHO documents lead one to assume this is not the intent…It does appear therefore that this is simply another list of fairly non-specific feel-good measures that have no useful place in a new legally-binding agreement, and which most countries are already undertaking. (e) promoting the use of social and behavioural sciences, risk communication and community engagement for pandemic prevention, preparedness and response. This requires clarification, as the use of behavioral science during the Covid-19 response involved deliberate inducement of fear to promote behaviors that people would not otherwise follow (e.g. Spi-B). It is essential here that the document clarifies how behavioral science should be used ethically in healthcare. Otherwise, this is also a quite meaningless provision. Article 7. Health and care workforce This long Article discusses health workforce, training, retention, non-discrimination, stigma, bias, adequate remuneration, and other standard provisions for workplaces. It is unclear why it is included in a legally binding pandemic agreement, except for: 4. [The Parties]…shall invest in establishing, sustaining, coordinating and mobilizing a skilled and trained multidisciplinary global public health emergency workforce…Parties having established emergency health teams should inform WHO thereof and make best efforts to respond to requests for deployment… Emergency health teams established (within capacity etc.) – are something countries already do, when they have capacity. There is no reason to have this as a legally-binding instrument, and clearly no urgency to do so. Article 8. Preparedness monitoring and functional reviews 1. The Parties shall, building on existing and relevant tools, develop and implement an inclusive, transparent, effective and efficient pandemic prevention, preparedness and response monitoring and evaluation system. 2. Each Party shall assess, every five years, with technical support from the WHO Secretariat upon request, the functioning and readiness of, and gaps in, its pandemic prevention, preparedness and response capacity, based on the relevant tools and guidelines developed by WHO in partnership with relevant organizations at international, regional and sub-regional levels. Note that this is being required of countries that are already struggling to implement monitoring systems for major endemic diseases, including tuberculosis, malaria, HIV, and nutritional deficiencies. They will be legally bound to divert resources to pandemic prevention. While there is some overlap, it will inevitably divert resources from currently underfunded programs for diseases of far higher local burdens, and so (not theoretically, but inevitably) raise mortality. Poor countries are being required to put resources into problems deemed significant by richer countries. Article 9. Research and development Various general provisions about undertaking background research that countries are generally doing anyway, but with an ’emerging disease’ slant. Again, the INB fails to justify why this diversion of resources from researching greater disease burdens should occur in all countries (why not just those with excess resources?). Article 10. Sustainable and geographically diversified production Mostly non-binding but suggested cooperation on making pandemic-related products available, including support for manufacturing in “inter-pandemic times” (a fascinating rendering of ‘normal’), when they would only be viable through subsidies. Much of this is probably unimplementable, as it would not be practical to maintain facilities in most or all countries on stand-by for rare events, at cost of resources otherwise useful for other priorities. The desire to increase production in ‘developing’ countries will face major barriers and costs in terms of maintaining quality of production, particularly as many products will have limited use outside of rare outbreak situations. Article 11. Transfer of technology and know-how This article, always problematic for large pharmaceutical corporations sponsoring much WHO outbreak activities, is now watered down to weak requirements to ‘consider,’ promote,’ provide, within capabilities’ etc. Article 12. Access and benefit sharing This Article is intended to establish the WHO Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing System (PABS System). PABS is intended to “ensure rapid, systematic and timely access to biological materials of pathogens with pandemic potential and the genetic sequence data.” This system is of potential high relevance and needs to be interpreted in the context that SARS-CoV-2, the pathogen causing the recent Covid-19 outbreak, was highly likely to have escaped from a laboratory. PABS is intended to expand the laboratory storage, transport, and handling of such viruses, under the oversight of the WHO, an organization outside of national jurisdiction with no significant direct experience in handling biological materials. 3. When a Party has access to a pathogen [it shall]: (a) share with WHO any pathogen sequence information as soon as it is available to the Party; (b) as soon as biological materials are available to the Party, provide the materials to one or more laboratories and/or biorepositories participating in WHO-coordinated laboratory networks (CLNs), Subsequent clauses state that benefits will be shared, and seek to prevent recipient laboratories from patenting materials received from other countries. This has been a major concern of low-and middle-income countries previously, who perceive that institutions in wealthy countries patent and benefit from materials derived from less-wealthy populations. It remains to be seen whether provisions here will be sufficient to address this. The article then becomes yet more concerning: 6. WHO shall conclude legally binding standard PABS contracts with manufacturers to provide the following, taking into account the size, nature and capacities of the manufacturer: (a) annual monetary contributions to support the PABS System and relevant capacities in countries; the determination of the annual amount, use, and approach for monitoring and accountability, shall be finalized by the Parties; (b) real-time contributions of relevant diagnostics, therapeutics or vaccines produced by the manufacturer, 10% free of charge and 10% at not-for-profit prices during public health emergencies of international concern or pandemics, … It is clearly intended that the WHO becomes directly involved in setting up legally binding manufacturing contracts, despite the WHO being outside of national jurisdictional oversight, within the territories of Member States. The PABS system, and therefore its staff and dependent entities, are also to be supported in part by funds from the manufacturers whom they are supposed to be managing. The income of the organization will be dependent on maintaining positive relationships with these private entities in a similar way in which many national regulatory agencies are dependent upon funds from pharmaceutical companies whom their staff ostensibly regulate. In this case, the regulator will be even further removed from public oversight. The clause on 10% (why 10?) products being free of charge, and similar at cost, while ensuring lower-priced commodities irrespective of actual need (the outbreak may be confined to wealthy countries). The same entity, the WHO, will determine whether the triggering emergency exists, determine the response, and manage the contracts to provide the commodities, without direct jurisdictional oversight regarding the potential for corruption or conflict of interest. It is a remarkable system to suggest, irrespective of political or regulatory environment. 8. The Parties shall cooperate…public financing of research and development, prepurchase agreements, or regulatory procedures, to encourage and facilitate as many manufacturers as possible to enter into standard PABS contracts as early as possible. The article envisions that public funding will be used to build the process, ensuring essentially no-risk private profit. 10. To support operationalization of the PABS System, WHO shall…make such contracts public, while respecting commercial confidentiality. The public may know whom contracts are made with, but not all details of the contracts. There will therefore be no independent oversight of the clauses agreed between the WHO, a body outside of national jurisdiction and dependent of commercial companies for funding some of its work and salaries, and these same companies, on ‘needs’ that the WHO itself will have sole authority, under the proposed amendments to the IHR, to determine. The Article further states that the WHO shall use its own product regulatory system (prequalification) and Emergency Use Listing Procedure to open and stimulate markets for the manufacturers of these products. It is doubtful that any national government could make such an overall agreement, yet in May 2024 they will be voting to provide this to what is essentially a foreign, and partly privately financed, entity. Article 13. Supply chain and logistics The WHO will become convenor of a ‘Global Supply Chain and Logistics Network’ for commercially-produced products, to be supplied under WHO contracts when and where the WHO determines, whilst also having the role of ensuring safety of such products. Having mutual support coordinated between countries is good. Having this run by an organization that is significantly funded directly by those gaining from the sale of these same commodities seems reckless and counterintuitive. Few countries would allow this (or at least plan for it). For this to occur safely, the WHO would logically have to forgo all private investment, and greatly restrict national specified funding contributions. Otherwise, the conflicts of interest involved would destroy confidence in the system. There is no suggestion of such divestment from the WHO, but rather, as in Article 12, private sector dependency, directly tied to contracts, will increase. Article 13bis: National procurement- and distribution-related provisions While suffering the same (perhaps unavoidable) issues regarding commercial confidentiality, this alternate Article 13 seems far more appropriate, keeping commercial issues under national jurisdiction and avoiding the obvious conflict of interests that underpin funding for WHO activities and staffing. Article 14. Regulatory systems strengthening This entire Article reflects initiatives and programs already in place. Nothing here appears likely to add to current effort. Article 15. Liability and compensation management 1. Each Party shall consider developing, as necessary and in accordance with applicable law, national strategies for managing liability in its territory related to pandemic vaccines…no-fault compensation mechanisms… 2. The Parties…shall develop recommendations for the establishment and implementation of national, regional and/or global no-fault compensation mechanisms and strategies for managing liability during pandemic emergencies, including with regard to individuals that are in a humanitarian setting or vulnerable situations. This is quite remarkable, but also reflects some national legislation, in removing any fault or liability specifically from vaccine manufacturers, for harms done in pushing out vaccines to the public. During the Covid-19 response, genetic therapeutics being developed by BioNtech and Moderna were reclassified as vaccines, on the basis that an immune response is stimulated after they have modified intracellular biochemical pathways as a medicine normally does. This enabled specific trials normally required for carcinogenicity and teratogenicity to be bypassed, despite raised fetal abnormality rates in animal trials. It will enable the CEPI 100-day vaccine program, supported with private funding to support private mRNA vaccine manufacturers, to proceed without any risk to the manufacturer should there be subsequent public harm. Together with an earlier provision on public funding of research and manufacturing readiness, and the removal of former wording requiring intellectual property sharing in Article 11, this ensures vaccine manufacturers and their investors make profit in effective absence of risk. These entities are currently heavily invested in support for WHO, and were strongly aligned with the introduction of newly restrictive outbreak responses that emphasized and sometimes mandated their products during the Covid-19 outbreak. Article 16. International collaboration and cooperation A somewhat pointless article. It suggests that countries cooperate with each other and the WHO to implement the other agreements in the Agreement. Article 17. Whole-of-government and whole-of-society approaches A list of essentially motherhood provisions related to planning for a pandemic. However, countries will legally be required to maintain a ‘national coordination multisectoral body’ for PPPR. This will essentially be an added burden on budgets, and inevitably divert further resources from other priorities. Perhaps just strengthening current infectious disease and nutritional programs would be more impactful. (Nowhere in this Agreement is nutrition discussed (essential for resilience to pathogens) and minimal wording is included on sanitation and clean water (other major reasons for reduction in infectious disease mortality over past centuries). However, the ‘community ownership’ wording is interesting (“empower and enable community ownership of, and contribution to, community readiness for and resilience [for PPPR]”), as this directly contradicts much of the rest of the Agreement, including the centralization of control under the Conference of Parties, requirements for countries to allocate resources to pandemic preparedness over other community priorities, and the idea of inspecting and assessing adherence to the centralized requirements of the Agreement. Either much of the rest of the Agreement is redundant, or this wording is purely for appearance and not to be followed (and therefore should be removed). Article 18. Communication and public awareness 1. Each Party shall promote timely access to credible and evidence-based information …with the aim of countering and addressing misinformation or disinformation… 2. The Parties shall, as appropriate, promote and/or conduct research and inform policies on factors that hinder or strengthen adherence to public health and social measures in a pandemic, as well as trust in science and public health institutions and agencies. The key word is as appropriate, given that many agencies, including the WHO, have overseen or aided policies during the Covid-19 response that have greatly increased poverty, child marriage, teenage pregnancy, and education loss. As the WHO has been shown to be significantly misrepresenting pandemic risk in the process of advocating for this Agreement and related instruments, its own communications would also fall outside the provision here related to evidence-based information, and fall within normal understandings of misinformation. It could not therefore be an arbiter of correctness of information here, so the Article is not implementable. Rewritten to recommend accurate evidence-based information being promoted, it would make good sense, but this is not an issue requiring a legally binding international agreement. Article 19. Implementation and support 3. The WHO Secretariat…organize the technical and financial assistance necessary to address such gaps and needs in implementing the commitments agreed upon under the Pandemic Agreement and the International Health Regulations (2005). As the WHO is dependent on donor support, its ability to address gaps in funding within Member States is clearly not something it can guarantee. The purpose of this article is unclear, repeating in paragraphs 1 and 2 the earlier intent for countries to generally support each other. Article 20. Sustainable financing 1. The Parties commit to working together…In this regard, each Party, within the means and resources at its disposal, shall: (a) prioritize and maintain or increase, as necessary, domestic funding for pandemic prevention, preparedness and response, without undermining other domestic public health priorities including for: (i) strengthening and sustaining capacities for the prevention, preparedness and response to health emergencies and pandemics, in particular the core capacities of the International Health Regulations (2005);… This is silly wording, as countries obviously have to prioritize within budgets, so that moving funds to one area means removing from another. The essence of public health policy is weighing and making such decisions; this reality seems to be ignored here through wishful thinking. (a) is clearly redundant, as the IHR (2005) already exists and countries have agreed to support it. 3. A Coordinating Financial Mechanism (the “Mechanism”) is hereby established to support the implementation of both the WHO Pandemic Agreement and the International Health Regulations (2005) This will be in parallel to the Pandemic Fund recently commenced by the World Bank – an issue not lost on INB delegates and so likely to change here in the final version. It will also be additive to the Global Fund to fight AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, and other health financing mechanisms, and so require another parallel international bureaucracy, presumably based in Geneva. It is intended to have its own capacity to “conduct relevant analyses on needs and gaps, in addition to tracking cooperation efforts,” so it will not be a small undertaking. Chapter III. Institutional and final provisions Article 21. Conference of the Parties 1. A Conference of the Parties is hereby established. 2. The Conference of the Parties shall keep under regular review, every three years, the implementation of the WHO Pandemic Agreement and take the decisions necessary to promote its effective implementation. This sets up the governing body to oversee this Agreement (another body requiring a secretariat and support). It is intended to meet within a year of the Agreement coming into force, and then set its own rules on meeting thereafter. It is likely that many provisions outlined in this draft of the Agreement will be deferred to the COP for further discussion. Articles 22 – 37 These articles cover the functioning of the Conference of Parties (COP) and various administrative issues. Of note, ‘block votes’ will be allowed from regional bodies (e.g. the EU). The WHO will provide the secretariat. Under Article 24 is noted: 3. Nothing in the WHO Pandemic Agreement shall be interpreted as providing the Secretariat of the World Health Organization, including the WHO Director-General, any authority to direct, order, alter or otherwise prescribe the domestic laws or policies of any Party, or to mandate or otherwise impose any requirements that Parties take specific actions, such as ban or accept travellers, impose vaccination mandates or therapeutic or diagnostic measures, or implement lockdowns. These provisions are explicitly stated in the proposed amendments to the IHR, to be considered alongside this agreement. Article 26 notes that the IHR is to be interpreted as compatible, thereby confirming that the IHR provisions including border closures and limits on freedom of movement, mandated vaccination, and other lockdown measures are not negated by this statement. As Article 26 states: “The Parties recognize that the WHO Pandemic Agreement and the International Health Regulations should be interpreted so as to be compatible.” Some would consider this subterfuge – The Director-General recently labeled as liars those who claimed the Agreement included these powers, whilst failing to acknowledge the accompanying IHR amendments. The WHO could do better in avoiding misleading messaging, especially when this involves denigration of the public. Article 32 (Withdrawal) requires that, once adopted, Parties cannot withdraw for a total of 3 years (giving notice after a minimum of 2 years). Financial obligations undertaken under the agreement continue beyond that time. Finally, the Agreement will come into force, assuming a two-thirds majority in the WHA is achieved (Article 19, WHO Constitution), 30 days after the fortieth country has ratified it. Further reading: WHO Pandemic Agreement Intergovernmental Negotiating Board website: https://inb.who.int/ International Health Regulations Working Group website: https://apps.who.int/gb/wgihr/index.html On background to the WHO texts: Amendments to WHO’s International Health Regulations: An Annotated Guide An Unofficial Q&A on International Health Regulations On urgency and burden of pandemics: https://essl.leeds.ac.uk/downloads/download/228/rational-policy-over-panic Disease X and Davos: This is Not the Way to Evaluate and Formulate Public Health Policy Before Preparing for Pandemics, We Need Better Evidence of Risk Revised Draft of the negotiating text of the WHO Pandemic Agreement: Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License For reprints, please set the canonical link back to the original Brownstone Institute Article and Author. Authors David Bell David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. He is a former medical officer and scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO), Programme Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland, and Director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in Bellevue, WA, USA. View all posts Thi Thuy Van Dinh Dr. Thi Thuy Van Dinh (LLM, PhD) worked on international law in the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Subsequently, she managed multilateral organization partnerships for Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund and led environmental health technology development efforts for low-resource settings. View all posts Your financial backing of Brownstone Institute goes to support writers, lawyers, scientists, economists, and other people of courage who have been professionally purged and displaced during the upheaval of our times. You can help get the truth out through their ongoing work. https://brownstone.org/articles/the-who-pandemic-agreement-a-guide/ https://www.minds.com/donshafi911/blog/the-who-pandemic-agreement-a-guide-1621719398509187077
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    The WHO Pandemic Agreement: A Guide ⋆ Brownstone Institute
    The commentary below concentrates on selected draft provisions of the latest publicly available version of the draft agreement that seem to be unclear or potentially problematic.
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  • Repugnant Trump PRO-VAX and PRO-ZIONISTS! - VT Foreign Policy
    March 29, 2024
    VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel

    $ 280 BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation; $ 150B direct "aid" and $ 130B in "Offense" contracts
    Source: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State.

    By Fabio Giusepe Carlo Carisio

    VERSIONE IN ITALIANO

    «The Pandemic no longer controls our lives. The Vaccines that saved us from COVID are now being used to help beat Cancer – Turning setback into comeback!” YOU’RE WELCOME, JOE, NINE MONTH APPROVAL TIME VS. 12 YEARS THAT IT WOULD HAVE TAKEN YOU!»

    Trump’s Pro-VAX Propaganda for Big Pharma Money

    This is what we read in a post published in recent days by Donald Trump, the only Republican candidate remaining in the running for the US Presidential Elections of November 2020, relaunched by the attentive analyst of the problems of mRNA genetic serums Igor Chudov who limited himself to a laconic comment.

    «In the TruthSocial post above, Trump mentioned his nine-month approval time for Covid vaccines.I am frankly shocked by the stupidity of both statements.The vaccines did not “save us from the pandemic” – they made the pandemic worse. And being proud that such vaccines were pushed through in just nine months is perhaps a bit misguided».


    Trump’s embarrassing post was immediately contested by one of his followers
    Chudov’s comment was far too pitiful. Trump, who poses as an anti-system fighter, hits the ground running by relaunching propaganda on vaccines while completely ignoring three crucial elements:

    the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic was created in the laboratory in a deal between CHINA and the USA (with the help of the EU and the United Kingdom) as reported by the late biologist Luc Montagnier and his biomathematician friend Jean-Claude Perez, confirmed by dozens of scientific studies and finally also supported by the US Senate Health Committee led by a Republican
    there is evidence that Moderna patented its anti-Covid vaccine 9 months before the discovery of the Wuhan outbreak in collaboration with the virologist Anthony Fauci and with funding from the Pentagon’s DARPA military agency provided by the Obama-Biden administration
    Suspicious Turbo-Cancer from Vaccines for Wales Princess Kate. Devastating Toll of VIPs Ill or Dead from Tumors after Genetic Serums

    mRNA gene sera are causing a myriad of adverse reactions, including serious and lethal ones, precisely because they are based on the artificial manipulation of proteins and molecules that interact in a devastating way with the natural immune system of human beings
    finally, these Covid vaccines have been identified as the main culprits in the degeneration of the Turbo-Cancer phenomenon, so much so that a doctor suffering from a tumor acted as a guinea pig for the new anti-Cancer vaccine in a grotesque spiral with the stench of transhumanism.
    TRANSHUMANIST BIOMEDICINE! World 1st mRNA Cancer Vaccine to treat a Brain Turbo-Cancer from mRNA Covid

    After 4 years and tens of thousands of deaths after reports of unwanted effects related to Covid vaccines, the former president seems not to want to make a “mea culpa” for the management of the pandemic left in the hands of the terrorist Fauci (former NIAID director but also consultant of the White House on the Covid emergency) nor question the work of Moderna (which benefited from the Warp Speed contribution provided by the Trump administration) and Pfizer, which refused the help but in return financed an avalanche of senators and Republican deputies.

    The impression is that he is looking for sponsors among Big Pharma…

    DA PFIZER SOLDI PURE AI PROCURATORI USA! Lobbying da 1milione di Dollari alla Conference Attorneys General. Altri 8 a 1.842 Politici Bipartisan

    Lolling in wavering positions like a drunken elephant, after pretending to ride the battle against Big Pharma of Florida governor Ron DeSantis and surgeon general Joseph A. Ladapo who called for a stop to all mRNA serums precisely because they can cause cancer, now reveals his idolatry towards one of the fundamental components of the global immunization plan launched by Bill Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation way back in 1999 in Italy and then culminated in a pandemic “planned for decades” as declared by Robert F-Kennedy jr and demonstrated by patent expert David Martin but above all detailed by the 74 investigations of the WuhanGates cycle by Gospa News.

    BOMBSHELL! Florida State Surgeon General Calls for Halt of COVID MRNA Vaccines due to Dangerous, Oncogenes DNA Fragments

    Believing that voters are drunk on ignorance like him, however, he is countered by one of his followers who gained 2.59 Likes, 10% of those of Trump’s post.

    This would be enough to make it clear that the former president is hypocrisy personified.

    Donny’s Connections to the Weapons Lobby

    But since we have followed him since he had the US Navy launch 100 Tomahawk missiles on Syria in retaliation for the chemical attack in Douma attributed to Assad’s army but which turned out to be a “false flag” of the jihadists of Al Nusra with the complicity of the White Helmets trained by British intelligence, we know well the international damage it has done.

    Especially in Venezuela, triggering electromagnetic sabotage against President Maduro and consequent lethal blackouts interrupted only by the intervention of Russian experts.


    Il presidente Donald Trump ad un vertice internazionale accanto al ceo di BlackRock Larry Fink
    In the first Weapons Lobby investigation we published a photo of Trump smiling next to Larry Fink, the Zionist financier from New York who founded BlackRock, shareholder of the main warlord corporations but also of Big Pharma.

    Trump’s policy in the Middle East allowed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to build a Zionist dictatorship in his country and lay the foundations for the latest devastating war in Gaza which turned into a systematic and premeditated genocide.

    And in fact the former MAGA president who fell like a fish in a barrel into the Capitol Hill trap on January 6, 2021, never misses an opportunity to reiterate his support for the Zionists.

    Support for the Israeli Zionists of the Gaza Genocide

    Here is what he recently wrote from the international newspaper Politico:

    The Biden campaign and allied Democratic groups swiftly denounced Donald Trump on Monday after the former president told a conservative radio host that Jews who vote Democratic were sacrilegious.

    The comments from Trump came during an interview with Sebastian Gorka, his one time campaign aide, who pressed him on criticism prominent Democrats have had for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during the Israel-Hamas war.

    Paradoxically, at the very moment in which Biden is trying to distance himself from the massacre of Palestinians aimed at depopulating the Gaza Strip, Trump strengthens his extremist positions thus becoming a fan of that New World Order of Masonic and Zionist origin which through Tel Aviv aims to take control of the Mediterranean Sea with the complicity of a NATO that almost seems like a supporting player.

    Toward another Zionist Massacre in Gaza Strip: Netanyahu approves Rafah Operation Plan

    Unfortunately too many people in Italy too are blinded by the image of Donny as the only opponent of NWO and Biden, but they have not understood that he is also the son of that same evil bipartisan alliance of Big Pharma and the Weapons Lobby which has imposition in its sights of military dictatorships for “inevitable wars” and who knows how many new “laboratory” pandemics for other compulsory vaccination campaigns.

    WEAPONS LOBBY – 15. Kiev War: Gold Mine for NATO’s Merchants of Death. German Industry aims New Plants in Ukraine

    Trump is nothing more than the right-wing – almost extreme – counterpart of his rival.

    Indeed, given his different size, he could become a grotesque sarcophagus if, with the help of the Zionist lobbies, he won the challenge for the White House.

    Subscribe to the Gospa News Newsletter to read the news as soon as it is published

    Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio
    © COPYRIGHT GOSPA NEWS
    prohibition of reproduction without authorization
    follow Fabio Carisio Gospa News director on Twitter
    follow Gospa News on Telegram

    MAIN SOURCES

    GOSPA NEWS – COVID-19 DOSSIER

    GOSPA NEWS – WUHAN-GATES DOSSIER

    BLACKROCK “KILLED” CARLSON FOR VACCINES & WEAPONS BUSINESS. The Fund of WEF’s Zionist King owns Big Part of Fox News

    WUHAN-GATES – 62. MANMADE SARS-Cov-2 FOR GOLDEN VACCINES: Metabiota, CIA, Biden, Gates, Rockefeller intrigued in Ukraine, China and Italy

    WUHAN-GATES – 74. The Greatest Story Never Told: German Virology in China and Montana

    “Soros” French Judges want to Arrest Assad for Douma Chemical Attack despite it was White Helmets False-Flag

    Venezuela: Guaido’s Friends ParaMilitary Narcos Tied to Italian Mafia but Trump charges Maduro

    WEAPONS LOBBY – REPORT 1: The Us Corporations shareholders

    Gaza, Donbass, Syria: GENOCIDES of the Zionist, Nazi, Jihadist Regimes is US-NATO’s “New” Geopolitical WEAPON

    UPDATE – Fauci’s Testimony before US Congress: “Pandemic from Lab Leak is not a Conspiracy Theory”.

    Fabio G. C. Carisio
    Fabio is investigative journalist since 1991. Now geopolitics, intelligence, military, SARS-Cov-2 manmade, NWO expert and Director-founder of Gospa News: a Christian Information Journal.

    His articles were published on many international media and website as SouthFront, Reseau International, Sputnik Italia, United Nation Association Westminster, Global Research, Kolozeg and more…

    Most popolar investigation on VT is:

    Rumsfeld Shady Heritage in Pandemic: GILEAD’s Intrigues with WHO & Wuhan Lab. Bio-Weapons’ Tests with CIA & Pentagon

    Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio, born on 24/2/1967 in Borgosesia, started working as a reporter when he was only 19 years old in the alpine area of Valsesia, Piedmont, his birth region in Italy. After studying literature and history at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, he became director of the local newspaper Notizia Oggi Vercelli and specialized in judicial reporting.

    For about 15 years he is a correspondent from Northern Italy for the Italian newspapers Libero and Il Giornale, also writing important revelations on the Ustica massacre, a report on Freemasonry and organized crime.

    With independent investigations, he collaborates with Carabinieri and Guardia di Finanza in important investigations that conclude with the arrest of Camorra entrepreneurs or corrupt politicians.

    In July 2018 he found the counter-information web media Gospa News focused on geopolitics, terrorism, Middle East, and military intelligence.

    In 2020 published the book, in Italian only, WUHAN-GATES – The New World Order Plot on SARS-Cov-2 manmade focused on the cycle of investigations Wuhan-Gates

    His investigations was quoted also by The Gateway Pundit, Tasnim and others

    He worked for many years for the magazine Art & Wine as an art critic and curator.

    VETERANS TODAY OLD POSTS

    www.gospanews.net/

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    https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/03/repugnant-trump-pro-vax-and-pro-zionists/
    Repugnant Trump PRO-VAX and PRO-ZIONISTS! - VT Foreign Policy March 29, 2024 VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel $ 280 BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation; $ 150B direct "aid" and $ 130B in "Offense" contracts Source: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State. By Fabio Giusepe Carlo Carisio VERSIONE IN ITALIANO «The Pandemic no longer controls our lives. The Vaccines that saved us from COVID are now being used to help beat Cancer – Turning setback into comeback!” YOU’RE WELCOME, JOE, NINE MONTH APPROVAL TIME VS. 12 YEARS THAT IT WOULD HAVE TAKEN YOU!» Trump’s Pro-VAX Propaganda for Big Pharma Money This is what we read in a post published in recent days by Donald Trump, the only Republican candidate remaining in the running for the US Presidential Elections of November 2020, relaunched by the attentive analyst of the problems of mRNA genetic serums Igor Chudov who limited himself to a laconic comment. «In the TruthSocial post above, Trump mentioned his nine-month approval time for Covid vaccines.I am frankly shocked by the stupidity of both statements.The vaccines did not “save us from the pandemic” – they made the pandemic worse. And being proud that such vaccines were pushed through in just nine months is perhaps a bit misguided». Trump’s embarrassing post was immediately contested by one of his followers Chudov’s comment was far too pitiful. Trump, who poses as an anti-system fighter, hits the ground running by relaunching propaganda on vaccines while completely ignoring three crucial elements: the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic was created in the laboratory in a deal between CHINA and the USA (with the help of the EU and the United Kingdom) as reported by the late biologist Luc Montagnier and his biomathematician friend Jean-Claude Perez, confirmed by dozens of scientific studies and finally also supported by the US Senate Health Committee led by a Republican there is evidence that Moderna patented its anti-Covid vaccine 9 months before the discovery of the Wuhan outbreak in collaboration with the virologist Anthony Fauci and with funding from the Pentagon’s DARPA military agency provided by the Obama-Biden administration Suspicious Turbo-Cancer from Vaccines for Wales Princess Kate. Devastating Toll of VIPs Ill or Dead from Tumors after Genetic Serums mRNA gene sera are causing a myriad of adverse reactions, including serious and lethal ones, precisely because they are based on the artificial manipulation of proteins and molecules that interact in a devastating way with the natural immune system of human beings finally, these Covid vaccines have been identified as the main culprits in the degeneration of the Turbo-Cancer phenomenon, so much so that a doctor suffering from a tumor acted as a guinea pig for the new anti-Cancer vaccine in a grotesque spiral with the stench of transhumanism. TRANSHUMANIST BIOMEDICINE! World 1st mRNA Cancer Vaccine to treat a Brain Turbo-Cancer from mRNA Covid After 4 years and tens of thousands of deaths after reports of unwanted effects related to Covid vaccines, the former president seems not to want to make a “mea culpa” for the management of the pandemic left in the hands of the terrorist Fauci (former NIAID director but also consultant of the White House on the Covid emergency) nor question the work of Moderna (which benefited from the Warp Speed contribution provided by the Trump administration) and Pfizer, which refused the help but in return financed an avalanche of senators and Republican deputies. The impression is that he is looking for sponsors among Big Pharma… DA PFIZER SOLDI PURE AI PROCURATORI USA! Lobbying da 1milione di Dollari alla Conference Attorneys General. Altri 8 a 1.842 Politici Bipartisan Lolling in wavering positions like a drunken elephant, after pretending to ride the battle against Big Pharma of Florida governor Ron DeSantis and surgeon general Joseph A. Ladapo who called for a stop to all mRNA serums precisely because they can cause cancer, now reveals his idolatry towards one of the fundamental components of the global immunization plan launched by Bill Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation way back in 1999 in Italy and then culminated in a pandemic “planned for decades” as declared by Robert F-Kennedy jr and demonstrated by patent expert David Martin but above all detailed by the 74 investigations of the WuhanGates cycle by Gospa News. BOMBSHELL! Florida State Surgeon General Calls for Halt of COVID MRNA Vaccines due to Dangerous, Oncogenes DNA Fragments Believing that voters are drunk on ignorance like him, however, he is countered by one of his followers who gained 2.59 Likes, 10% of those of Trump’s post. This would be enough to make it clear that the former president is hypocrisy personified. Donny’s Connections to the Weapons Lobby But since we have followed him since he had the US Navy launch 100 Tomahawk missiles on Syria in retaliation for the chemical attack in Douma attributed to Assad’s army but which turned out to be a “false flag” of the jihadists of Al Nusra with the complicity of the White Helmets trained by British intelligence, we know well the international damage it has done. Especially in Venezuela, triggering electromagnetic sabotage against President Maduro and consequent lethal blackouts interrupted only by the intervention of Russian experts. Il presidente Donald Trump ad un vertice internazionale accanto al ceo di BlackRock Larry Fink In the first Weapons Lobby investigation we published a photo of Trump smiling next to Larry Fink, the Zionist financier from New York who founded BlackRock, shareholder of the main warlord corporations but also of Big Pharma. Trump’s policy in the Middle East allowed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to build a Zionist dictatorship in his country and lay the foundations for the latest devastating war in Gaza which turned into a systematic and premeditated genocide. And in fact the former MAGA president who fell like a fish in a barrel into the Capitol Hill trap on January 6, 2021, never misses an opportunity to reiterate his support for the Zionists. Support for the Israeli Zionists of the Gaza Genocide Here is what he recently wrote from the international newspaper Politico: The Biden campaign and allied Democratic groups swiftly denounced Donald Trump on Monday after the former president told a conservative radio host that Jews who vote Democratic were sacrilegious. The comments from Trump came during an interview with Sebastian Gorka, his one time campaign aide, who pressed him on criticism prominent Democrats have had for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during the Israel-Hamas war. Paradoxically, at the very moment in which Biden is trying to distance himself from the massacre of Palestinians aimed at depopulating the Gaza Strip, Trump strengthens his extremist positions thus becoming a fan of that New World Order of Masonic and Zionist origin which through Tel Aviv aims to take control of the Mediterranean Sea with the complicity of a NATO that almost seems like a supporting player. Toward another Zionist Massacre in Gaza Strip: Netanyahu approves Rafah Operation Plan Unfortunately too many people in Italy too are blinded by the image of Donny as the only opponent of NWO and Biden, but they have not understood that he is also the son of that same evil bipartisan alliance of Big Pharma and the Weapons Lobby which has imposition in its sights of military dictatorships for “inevitable wars” and who knows how many new “laboratory” pandemics for other compulsory vaccination campaigns. WEAPONS LOBBY – 15. Kiev War: Gold Mine for NATO’s Merchants of Death. German Industry aims New Plants in Ukraine Trump is nothing more than the right-wing – almost extreme – counterpart of his rival. Indeed, given his different size, he could become a grotesque sarcophagus if, with the help of the Zionist lobbies, he won the challenge for the White House. Subscribe to the Gospa News Newsletter to read the news as soon as it is published Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio © COPYRIGHT GOSPA NEWS prohibition of reproduction without authorization follow Fabio Carisio Gospa News director on Twitter follow Gospa News on Telegram MAIN SOURCES GOSPA NEWS – COVID-19 DOSSIER GOSPA NEWS – WUHAN-GATES DOSSIER BLACKROCK “KILLED” CARLSON FOR VACCINES & WEAPONS BUSINESS. The Fund of WEF’s Zionist King owns Big Part of Fox News WUHAN-GATES – 62. MANMADE SARS-Cov-2 FOR GOLDEN VACCINES: Metabiota, CIA, Biden, Gates, Rockefeller intrigued in Ukraine, China and Italy WUHAN-GATES – 74. The Greatest Story Never Told: German Virology in China and Montana “Soros” French Judges want to Arrest Assad for Douma Chemical Attack despite it was White Helmets False-Flag Venezuela: Guaido’s Friends ParaMilitary Narcos Tied to Italian Mafia but Trump charges Maduro WEAPONS LOBBY – REPORT 1: The Us Corporations shareholders Gaza, Donbass, Syria: GENOCIDES of the Zionist, Nazi, Jihadist Regimes is US-NATO’s “New” Geopolitical WEAPON UPDATE – Fauci’s Testimony before US Congress: “Pandemic from Lab Leak is not a Conspiracy Theory”. Fabio G. C. Carisio Fabio is investigative journalist since 1991. Now geopolitics, intelligence, military, SARS-Cov-2 manmade, NWO expert and Director-founder of Gospa News: a Christian Information Journal. His articles were published on many international media and website as SouthFront, Reseau International, Sputnik Italia, United Nation Association Westminster, Global Research, Kolozeg and more… Most popolar investigation on VT is: Rumsfeld Shady Heritage in Pandemic: GILEAD’s Intrigues with WHO & Wuhan Lab. Bio-Weapons’ Tests with CIA & Pentagon Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio, born on 24/2/1967 in Borgosesia, started working as a reporter when he was only 19 years old in the alpine area of Valsesia, Piedmont, his birth region in Italy. After studying literature and history at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, he became director of the local newspaper Notizia Oggi Vercelli and specialized in judicial reporting. For about 15 years he is a correspondent from Northern Italy for the Italian newspapers Libero and Il Giornale, also writing important revelations on the Ustica massacre, a report on Freemasonry and organized crime. With independent investigations, he collaborates with Carabinieri and Guardia di Finanza in important investigations that conclude with the arrest of Camorra entrepreneurs or corrupt politicians. In July 2018 he found the counter-information web media Gospa News focused on geopolitics, terrorism, Middle East, and military intelligence. In 2020 published the book, in Italian only, WUHAN-GATES – The New World Order Plot on SARS-Cov-2 manmade focused on the cycle of investigations Wuhan-Gates His investigations was quoted also by The Gateway Pundit, Tasnim and others He worked for many years for the magazine Art & Wine as an art critic and curator. VETERANS TODAY OLD POSTS www.gospanews.net/ ATTENTION READERS We See The World From All Sides and Want YOU To Be Fully Informed In fact, intentional disinformation is a disgraceful scourge in media today. So to assuage any possible errant incorrect information posted herein, we strongly encourage you to seek corroboration from other non-VT sources before forming an educated opinion. About VT - Policies & Disclosures - Comment Policy Due to the nature of uncensored content posted by VT's fully independent international writers, VT cannot guarantee absolute validity. All content is owned by the author exclusively. Expressed opinions are NOT necessarily the views of VT, other authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, or technicians. Some content may be satirical in nature. All images are the full responsibility of the article author and NOT VT. https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/03/repugnant-trump-pro-vax-and-pro-zionists/
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    Repugnant Trump PRO-VAX and PRO-ZIONISTS!
    By Fabio Giusepe Carlo Carisio VERSIONE IN ITALIANO «The Pandemic no longer controls our lives. The Vaccines that saved us from COVID are now being used to help beat Cancer – Turning setback into comeback!” YOU’RE WELCOME, JOE, NINE MONTH APPROVAL TIME VS. 12 YEARS THAT IT WOULD HAVE TAKEN YOU!» Trump's Pro-VAX Propaganda for
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  • Israeli General Admits War on Gaza Impossible Without US Support
    Alison Weir March 26, 2024
    Journalist Glenn Greenwald discusses Biden’s support for Israel’s intentional starvation of men, women, and children in Gaza and the killing of 32,000+ Palestinians using US weapons.

    Citing the statement by an Israeli general that US support is what makes Israel’s actions possible, Greenwald concludes: “it’s Biden’s war.”

    (For the full episode on System Update go here.)

    British journalist Owen Jones has stated that Biden’s action – facilitating “some of the worst crimes of our age” – could ultimately cause America’s downfall (see this).

    More information about Biden administration policies is here.

    Glenn Greenwald is a journalist, former constitutional lawyer, and author of four New York Times bestselling books on politics and law. oreign Policy magazine named Greenwald one of the top 100 Global Thinkers for 2013. He was the debut winner, along with “Democracy Now’s” Amy Goodman, of the Park Center I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism in 2008, and also received the 2010 Online Journalism Award for his investigative work. (See more here)

    https://israelpalestinenews.org/israeli-general-admits-war-on-gaza-impossible-without-us-support/
    Israeli General Admits War on Gaza Impossible Without US Support Alison Weir March 26, 2024 Journalist Glenn Greenwald discusses Biden’s support for Israel’s intentional starvation of men, women, and children in Gaza and the killing of 32,000+ Palestinians using US weapons. Citing the statement by an Israeli general that US support is what makes Israel’s actions possible, Greenwald concludes: “it’s Biden’s war.” (For the full episode on System Update go here.) British journalist Owen Jones has stated that Biden’s action – facilitating “some of the worst crimes of our age” – could ultimately cause America’s downfall (see this). More information about Biden administration policies is here. Glenn Greenwald is a journalist, former constitutional lawyer, and author of four New York Times bestselling books on politics and law. oreign Policy magazine named Greenwald one of the top 100 Global Thinkers for 2013. He was the debut winner, along with “Democracy Now’s” Amy Goodman, of the Park Center I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism in 2008, and also received the 2010 Online Journalism Award for his investigative work. (See more here) https://israelpalestinenews.org/israeli-general-admits-war-on-gaza-impossible-without-us-support/
    ISRAELPALESTINENEWS.ORG
    Israeli General Admits War on Gaza Impossible Without US Support
    Glenn Greenwald discusses Biden's support for Israel's intentional starvation of men, women, and children in Gaza, calling it "Biden's war"
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  • The Silent Shame of Health Institutions
    J.R. Bruning
    For how much longer will health policy ignore multimorbidity, that looming, giant elephant in the room, that propagates and amplifies suffering? For how much longer will the ‘trend’ of increasing diagnoses of multiple health conditions, at younger and younger ages be rendered down by government agencies to better and more efficient services, screening modalities, and drug choices?

    Multimorbidity, the presence of many chronic conditions, is the silent shame of health policy.

    All too often chronic conditions overlap and accumulate. From cancer, to diabetes, to digestive system diseases, to high blood pressure, to skin conditions in cascades of suffering. Heartbreakingly, these conditions commonly overlap with mental illnesses or disorders. It’s increasingly common for people to be diagnosed with multiple mental conditions, such as having anxiety and depression, or anxiety and schizophrenia.

    Calls for equity tend to revolve around medical treatment, even as absurdities and injustices accrue.

    Multimorbidity occurs a decade earlier in socioeconomically deprived communities. Doctors are diagnosing multimorbidity at younger and younger ages.

    Treatment regimens for people with multiple conditions necessarily entail a polypharmacy approach – the prescribing of multiple medications. One condition may require multiple medications. Thus, with multimorbidity comes increased risk of adverse outcomes and polyiatrogenesis – ‘medical harm caused by medical treatments on multiple fronts simultaneously and in conjunction with one another.’

    Side effects, whether short-term or patients’ concerns about long-term harm, are the main reason for non-adherence to prescribed medications.

    So ‘equity’ which only implies drug treatment doesn’t involve equity at all.

    Poor diets may be foundational to the Western world’s health crisis. But are governments considering this?

    The antinomies are piling up.

    We are amid a global epidemic of metabolic syndrome. Insulin resistance, obesity, elevated triglyceride levels and low levels of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, and elevated blood pressure haunt the people queuing up to see doctors.

    Research, from individual cases to clinical trials, consistently show that diets containing high levels of ultra-processed foods and carbohydrates amplify inflammation, oxidative stress, and insulin resistance. What researchers and scientists are also identifying, at the cellular level, in clinical and medical practice, and at the global level – is that insulin resistance, inflammation, oxidative stress, and nutrient deficiencies from poor diets not only drive metabolic illness, but mental illnesses, compounding suffering.

    There is also ample evidence that the metabolic and mental health epidemic that is driving years lost due to disease, reducing productivity, and creating mayhem in personal lives – may be preventable and reversible.

    Doctors generally recognise that poor diets are a problem. Ultra-processed foods are strongly associated with adult and childhood ill health. Ultra-processed foods are

    ‘formulations of ingredients, mostly of exclusive industrial use, typically created by series of industrial techniques and processes (hence ‘ultra-processed’).’

    In the USA young people under age 19 consume on average 67% of their diet, while adults consume around 60% of their diet in ultra-processed food. Ultra-processed food contributes 60% of UK children’s calories; 42% of Australian children’s calories and over half the dietary calories for children and adolescents in Canada. In New Zealand in 2009-2010, ultra-processed foods contributed to the 45% (12 months), 42% (24 months), and 51% (60 months) of energy intake to the diets of children.

    All too frequently, doctors are diagnosing both metabolic and mental illnesses.

    What may be predictable is that a person is likely to develop insulin resistance, inflammation, oxidative stress, and nutrient deficiencies from chronic exposure to ultra-processed food. How this will manifest in a disease or syndrome condition is reflective of a human equivalent of quantum entanglement.

    Cascades, feedback loops, and other interdependencies often leave doctors and patients bouncing from one condition to another, and managing medicine side effects and drug-drug relationships as they go.

    In New Zealand it is more common to have multiple conditions than a single condition. The costs of having two NCDs simultaneously is typically superadditive and ‘more so for younger adults.’

    This information is outside the ‘work programme’ of the top echelons in the Ministry of Health:

    Official Information Act (OIA) requests confirm that the Ministries’ Directors General who are responsible for setting policy and long-term strategy aren’t considering these issues. The problem of multimorbidity and the overlapping, entangled relationship with ultra-processed food is outside of the scope of the work programme of the top directorates in our health agency.

    New Zealand’s Ministry of Health’s top deputy directors general might be earning a quarter of a million dollars each, but they are ignorant of the relationship of dietary nutrition and mental health. Nor are they seemingly aware of the extent of multimorbidity and the overlap between metabolic and mental illnesses.

    Neither the Public Health Agency Deputy Director-General – Dr Andrew Old, nor the Deputy Director-General Evidence, Research and Innovation, Dean Rutherford, nor the Deputy Director-General of Strategy Policy and Legislation, Maree Roberts, nor the Clinical, Community and Mental Health Deputy Director-General Robyn Shearer have been briefed on these relationships.

    If they’re not being briefed, policy won’t be developed to address dietary nutrition. Diet will be lower-order.

    The OIA request revealed that New Zealand’s Ministry of Health ‘does not widely use the metabolic syndrome classification.’ When I asked ‘How do you classify, or what term do you use to classify the cluster of symptoms characterised by central obesity, dyslipidemia, hypertension, and insulin resistance?’, they responded:

    ‘The conditions referred to are considered either on their own or as part of a broader cardiovascular disease risk calculation.’

    This is interesting. What if governments should be calculating insulin resistance first, in order to then calculate a broader cardiovascular risk? What if insulin resistance, inflammation, and oxidative stress are appearing at younger and younger ages, and ultra-processed food is the major driver?

    Pre-diabetes and Type 2 diabetes are driven by too much blood glucose. Type 1 diabetics can’t make insulin, while Type 2 diabetics can’t make enough to compensate for their dietary intake of carbohydrates. One of insulin’s (many) jobs is to tuck away that blood glucose into cells (as fat) but when there are too many dietary carbohydrates pumping up blood glucose, the body can’t keep up. New Zealand practitioners use the HbA1c blood test, which measures the average blood glucose level over the past 2-3 months. In New Zealand, doctors diagnose pre-diabetes if HbA1c levels are 41-49 nmol/mol, and diabetes at levels of 50 nmol/mol and above.

    Type 2 diabetes management guidelines recommend that sugar intake should be reduced, while people should aim for consistent carbohydrates across the day. The New Zealand government does not recommend paleo or low-carbohydrate diets.

    If you have diabetes you are twice as likely to have heart disease or a stroke, and at a younger age. Prediabetes, which apparently 20% of Kiwis have, is also high-risk due to, as the Ministry of Health states: ‘increased risk of macrovascular complications and early death.’

    The question might become – should we be looking at insulin levels, to more sensitively gauge risk at an early stage?

    Without more sensitive screens at younger ages these opportunities to repivot to avoid chronic disease are likely to be missed. Currently, Ministry of Health policies are unlikely to justify the funding of tests for insulin resistance by using three simple blood tests: fasting insulin, fasting lipids (cholesterol and triglycerides), and fasting glucose – to estimate where children, young people, and adults stand on the insulin resistance spectrum when other diagnoses pop up.

    Yet insulin plays a powerful role in brain health.

    Insulin supports neurotransmitter function and brain energy, directly impacting mood and behaviours. Insulin resistance might arrive before mental illness. Harvard-based psychiatrist Chris Palmer recounts in the book Brain Energy, a large 15,000-participant study of young people from age 0-24:

    ‘Children who had persistently high insulin levels (a sign of insulin resistance) beginning at age nine were five times more likely to be at risk for psychosis, meaning they were showing at least some worrisome signs, and they were three times for likely to already be diagnosed with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia by the time they turned twenty-four. This study clearly demonstrated that insulin resistance comes first, then psychosis.’

    Psychiatrist Georgia Ede suggests that high blood glucose and high insulin levels act like a ‘deadly one-two punch’ for the brain, triggering waves of inflammation and oxidative stress. The blood-brain barrier becomes increasingly resistant to chronic high insulin levels. Even though the body might have higher blood insulin, the same may not be true for the brain. As Ede maintains, ‘cells deprived of adequate insulin ‘sputter and struggle to maintain normal operations.’

    Looking at the relationship between brain health and high blood glucose and high insulin simply might not be on the programme for strategists looking at long-term planning.

    Nor are Directors General in a position to assess the role of food addiction. Ultra-processed food has addictive qualities designed into the product formulations. Food addiction is increasingly recognised as pervasive and difficult to manage as any substance addiction.

    But how many children and young people have insulin resistance and are showing markers for inflammation and oxidative stress – in the body and in the brain? To what extent do young people have both insulin resistance and depression resistance or ADHD or bipolar disorder?

    This kind of thinking is completely outside the work programme. But insulin levels, inflammation, and oxidative stress may not only be driving chronic illness – but driving the global mental health tsunami.

    Metabolic disorders are involved in complex pathways and feedback loops across body systems, and doctors learn this at medical school. Patterns and relationships between hormones, the brain, the gastrointestinal system, kidneys, and liver; as well as problems with joints and bone health, autoimmunity, nerves, and sensory conditions evolve from and revolve around metabolic health.

    Nutrition and diet are downplayed in medical school. What doctors don’t learn so much – the cognitive dissonance that they must accept throughout their training – is that metabolic health is commonly (except for some instances) shaped by the quality of dietary nutrition. The aetiology of a given condition can be very different, while the evidence that common chronic and mental illnesses are accompanied by oxidative stress, inflammation, and insulin resistance are primarily driven by diet – is growing stronger and stronger.

    But without recognising the overlapping relationships, policy to support healthy diets will remain limp.

    What we witness are notions of equity that support pharmaceutical delivery – not health delivery.

    What also inevitably happens is that ‘equity’ focuses on medical treatment. When the Ministry of Health prefers to atomise the different conditions or associate them with heart disease – they become single conditions to treat with single drugs. They’re lots of small problems, not one big problem, and insulin resistance is downplayed.

    But just as insulin resistance, inflammation, and oxidative stress send cascading impacts across body systems, systemic ignorance sends cascading effects across government departments tasked with ‘improving, promoting, and protecting health.’

    It’s an injustice. The literature solidly points to lower socio-economic status driving much poorer diets and increased exposures to ultra-processed food, but the treatments exclusively involve drugs and therapy.

    Briefings to Incoming Ministers with the election of new Governments show how ignorance cascades across responsible authorities.

    Health New Zealand, Te Whatu Ora’s November 2023 Briefing to the new government outlined the agency’s obligations. However, the ‘health’ targets are medical, and the agency’s focus is on infrastructure, staff, and servicing. The promotion of health, and health equity, which can only be addressed by addressing the determinants of health, is not addressed.

    The Māori Health Authority and Health New Zealand Joint Briefing to the Incoming Minister for Mental Health does not address the role of diet and nutrition as a driver of mental illness and disorder in New Zealand. The issue of multimorbidity, the related problem of commensurate metabolic illness, and diet as a driver is outside scope. When the Briefing states that it is important to address the ‘social, cultural, environmental and economic determinants of mental health,’ without any sound policy footing, real movement to address diet will not happen, or will only happen ad hoc.

    The Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission, Te Hiringa Mahara’s November 2023 Briefing to Incoming Ministers that went to the Ministers for Health and Mental Health might use the term ‘well-being’ over 120 times – but was silent on the related and overlapping drivers of mental illness which include metabolic or multimorbidity, nutrition, or diet.

    Five years earlier, He Ara Ora, New Zealand’s 2018 Mental Health and Addiction enquiry had recognised that tāngata whaiora, people seeking wellness, or service users, also tend to have multiple health conditions. The enquiry recommended that a whole of government approach to well-being, prevention, and social determinants was required. Vague nods were made to diet and nutrition, but this was not sufficiently emphasised as to be a priority.

    He Ara Ora was followed by 2020 Long-term pathway to mental well-being viewed nutrition as being one of a range of factors. No policy framework strategically prioritised diet, nutrition, and healthy food. No governmental obligation or commitment was built into policy to improve access to healthy food or nutrition education.

    Understanding the science, the relationships, and the drivers of the global epidemic, is ‘outside the work programmes’ of New Zealand’s Ministry of Health and outside the scope of all the related authorities. There is an extraordinary amount of data in the scientific literature, so many case studies, cohort studies, and clinical trials. Popular books are being written, however government agencies remain ignorant.

    In the meantime, doctors must deal with the suffering in front of them without an adequate toolkit.

    Doctors and pharmacists are faced with a Hobson’s choice of managing multiple chronic conditions and complex drug cocktails, in patients at younger and younger ages. Ultimately, they are treating a patient whom they recognise will only become sicker, cost the health system more, and suffer more.

    Currently there is little support for New Zealand medical doctors (known as general practitioners, or GPs) in changing practices and recommendations to support non-pharmaceutical drug treatment approaches. Their medical education does not equip them to recognise the extent to which multiple co-existing conditions may be alleviated or reversed. Doctors are paid to prescribe, to inject, and to screen, not to ameliorate or reverse disease and lessen prescribing. The prescribing of nutrients is discouraged and as doctors do not have nutritional training, they hesitate to prescribe nutrients.

    Many do not want to risk going outside treatment guidelines. Recent surges in protocols and guidelines for medical doctors reduce flexibility and narrow treatment choices for doctors. If they were to be reported to the Medical Council of New Zealand, they would risk losing their medical license. They would then be unable to practice.

    Inevitably, without Ministry of Health leadership, medical doctors in New Zealand are unlikely to voluntarily prescribe non-drug modalities such as nutritional options to any meaningful extent, for fear of being reported.

    Yet some doctors are proactive, such as Dr Glen Davies in Taupo, New Zealand. Some doctors are in a better ‘place’ to work to alleviate and reverse long-term conditions. They may be later in their career, with 10-20 years of research into metabolism, dietary nutrition, and patient care, and motivated to guide a patient through a personal care regime which might alleviate or reverse a patient’s suffering.

    Barriers include resourcing. Doctors aren’t paid for reversing disease and taking patients off medications.

    Doctors witness daily the hopelessness felt by their patients in dealing with chronic conditions in their short 15-minute consultations, and the vigilance required for dealing with adverse drug effects. Drug non-compliance is associated with adverse effects suffered by patients. Yet without wrap-around support changing treatments, even if it has potential to alleviate multiple conditions, to reduce symptoms, lower prescribing and therefore lessen side effects, is just too uncertain.

    They saw what happened to disobedient doctors during Covid-19.

    Given such context, what are we to do?

    Have open public discussions about doctor-patient relationships and trust. Inform and overlay such conversations by drawing attention to the foundational Hippocratic Oath made by doctors, to first do no harm.

    Questions can be asked. If patients were to understand that diet may be an underlying driver of multiple conditions, and a change in diet and improvement in micronutrient status might alleviate suffering – would patients be more likely to change?

    Economically, if wrap-around services were provided in clinics to support dietary change, would less harm occur to patients from worsening conditions that accompany many diseases (such as Type 2 diabetes) and the ever-present problem of drug side-effects? Would education and wrap-around services in early childhood and youth delay or prevent the onset of multimorbid diagnoses?

    Is it more ethical to give young people a choice of treatment? Could doctors prescribe dietary changes and multinutrients and support change with wrap-around support when children and young people are first diagnosed with a mental health condition – from the clinic, to school, to after school? If that doesn’t work, then prescribe pharmaceutical drugs.

    Should children and young people be educated to appreciate the extent to which their consumption of ultra-processed food likely drives their metabolic and mental health conditions? Not just in a blithe ‘eat healthy’ fashion that patently avoids discussing addiction. Through deeper policy mechanisms, including cooking classes and nutritional biology by the implementation of nourishing, low-carbohydrate cooked school lunches.

    With officials uninformed, it’s easy to see why funding for Green Prescriptions that would support dietary changes have sputtered out. It’s easy to understand why neither the Ministry of Health nor Pharmac have proactively sourced multi-nutrient treatments that improve resilience to stress and trauma for low-income young people. Why there’s no discussion on a lower side-effect risk for multinutrient treatments. Why are there no policies in the education curriculum diving into the relationship between ultra-processed food and mental and physical health? It’s not in the work programme.

    There’s another surfacing dilemma.

    Currently, if doctors tell their patients that there is very good evidence that their disease or syndrome could be reversed, and this information is not held as factual information by New Zealand’s Ministry of Health – do doctors risk being accused of spreading misinformation?

    Government agencies have pivoted in the past 5 years to focus intensively on the problem of dis- and misinformation. New Zealand’s disinformation project states that

    Disinformation is false or modified information knowingly and deliberately shared to cause harm or achieve a broader aim.
    Misinformation is information that is false or misleading, though not created or shared with the direct intention of causing harm.
    Unfortunately, as we see, there is no division inside the Ministry of Health that reviews the latest evidence in the scientific literature, to ensure that policy decisions correctly reflect the latest evidence.

    There is no scientific agency outside the Ministry of Health that has flexibility and the capacity to undertake autonomous, long-term monitoring and research in nutrition, diet, and health. There is no independent, autonomous, public health research facility with sufficient long-term funding to translate dietary and nutritional evidence into policy, particularly if it contradicted current policy positions.

    Despite excellent research being undertaken, it is highly controlled, ad hoc, and frequently short-term. Problematically, there is no resourcing for those scientists to meaningfully feedback that information to either the Ministry of Health or to Members of Parliament and government Ministers.

    Dietary guidelines can become locked in, and contradictions can fail to be chewed over. Without the capacity to address errors, information can become outdated and misleading. Government agencies and elected members – from local councils all the way up to government Ministers, are dependent on being informed by the Ministry of Health, when it comes to government policy.

    When it comes to complex health conditions, and alleviating and reversing metabolic or mental illness, based on different patient capacity – from socio-economic, to cultural, to social, and taking into account capacity for change, what is sound, evidence-based information and what is misinformation?

    In the impasse, who can we trust?

    Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
    For reprints, please set the canonical link back to the original Brownstone Institute Article and Author.

    Author

    J.R. Bruning is a consultant sociologist (B.Bus.Agribusiness; MA Sociology) based in New Zealand. Her work explores governance cultures, policy and the production of scientific and technical knowledge. Her Master’s thesis explored the ways science policy creates barriers to funding, stymying scientists’ efforts to explore upstream drivers of harm. Bruning is a trustee of Physicians & Scientists for Global Responsibility (PSGR.org.nz). Papers and writing can be found at TalkingRisk.NZ and at JRBruning.Substack.com and at Talking Risk on Rumble.

    View all posts
    Your financial backing of Brownstone Institute goes to support writers, lawyers, scientists, economists, and other people of courage who have been professionally purged and displaced during the upheaval of our times. You can help get the truth out through their ongoing work.

    https://brownstone.org/articles/the-silent-shame-of-health-institutions/
    The Silent Shame of Health Institutions J.R. Bruning For how much longer will health policy ignore multimorbidity, that looming, giant elephant in the room, that propagates and amplifies suffering? For how much longer will the ‘trend’ of increasing diagnoses of multiple health conditions, at younger and younger ages be rendered down by government agencies to better and more efficient services, screening modalities, and drug choices? Multimorbidity, the presence of many chronic conditions, is the silent shame of health policy. All too often chronic conditions overlap and accumulate. From cancer, to diabetes, to digestive system diseases, to high blood pressure, to skin conditions in cascades of suffering. Heartbreakingly, these conditions commonly overlap with mental illnesses or disorders. It’s increasingly common for people to be diagnosed with multiple mental conditions, such as having anxiety and depression, or anxiety and schizophrenia. Calls for equity tend to revolve around medical treatment, even as absurdities and injustices accrue. Multimorbidity occurs a decade earlier in socioeconomically deprived communities. Doctors are diagnosing multimorbidity at younger and younger ages. Treatment regimens for people with multiple conditions necessarily entail a polypharmacy approach – the prescribing of multiple medications. One condition may require multiple medications. Thus, with multimorbidity comes increased risk of adverse outcomes and polyiatrogenesis – ‘medical harm caused by medical treatments on multiple fronts simultaneously and in conjunction with one another.’ Side effects, whether short-term or patients’ concerns about long-term harm, are the main reason for non-adherence to prescribed medications. So ‘equity’ which only implies drug treatment doesn’t involve equity at all. Poor diets may be foundational to the Western world’s health crisis. But are governments considering this? The antinomies are piling up. We are amid a global epidemic of metabolic syndrome. Insulin resistance, obesity, elevated triglyceride levels and low levels of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, and elevated blood pressure haunt the people queuing up to see doctors. Research, from individual cases to clinical trials, consistently show that diets containing high levels of ultra-processed foods and carbohydrates amplify inflammation, oxidative stress, and insulin resistance. What researchers and scientists are also identifying, at the cellular level, in clinical and medical practice, and at the global level – is that insulin resistance, inflammation, oxidative stress, and nutrient deficiencies from poor diets not only drive metabolic illness, but mental illnesses, compounding suffering. There is also ample evidence that the metabolic and mental health epidemic that is driving years lost due to disease, reducing productivity, and creating mayhem in personal lives – may be preventable and reversible. Doctors generally recognise that poor diets are a problem. Ultra-processed foods are strongly associated with adult and childhood ill health. Ultra-processed foods are ‘formulations of ingredients, mostly of exclusive industrial use, typically created by series of industrial techniques and processes (hence ‘ultra-processed’).’ In the USA young people under age 19 consume on average 67% of their diet, while adults consume around 60% of their diet in ultra-processed food. Ultra-processed food contributes 60% of UK children’s calories; 42% of Australian children’s calories and over half the dietary calories for children and adolescents in Canada. In New Zealand in 2009-2010, ultra-processed foods contributed to the 45% (12 months), 42% (24 months), and 51% (60 months) of energy intake to the diets of children. All too frequently, doctors are diagnosing both metabolic and mental illnesses. What may be predictable is that a person is likely to develop insulin resistance, inflammation, oxidative stress, and nutrient deficiencies from chronic exposure to ultra-processed food. How this will manifest in a disease or syndrome condition is reflective of a human equivalent of quantum entanglement. Cascades, feedback loops, and other interdependencies often leave doctors and patients bouncing from one condition to another, and managing medicine side effects and drug-drug relationships as they go. In New Zealand it is more common to have multiple conditions than a single condition. The costs of having two NCDs simultaneously is typically superadditive and ‘more so for younger adults.’ This information is outside the ‘work programme’ of the top echelons in the Ministry of Health: Official Information Act (OIA) requests confirm that the Ministries’ Directors General who are responsible for setting policy and long-term strategy aren’t considering these issues. The problem of multimorbidity and the overlapping, entangled relationship with ultra-processed food is outside of the scope of the work programme of the top directorates in our health agency. New Zealand’s Ministry of Health’s top deputy directors general might be earning a quarter of a million dollars each, but they are ignorant of the relationship of dietary nutrition and mental health. Nor are they seemingly aware of the extent of multimorbidity and the overlap between metabolic and mental illnesses. Neither the Public Health Agency Deputy Director-General – Dr Andrew Old, nor the Deputy Director-General Evidence, Research and Innovation, Dean Rutherford, nor the Deputy Director-General of Strategy Policy and Legislation, Maree Roberts, nor the Clinical, Community and Mental Health Deputy Director-General Robyn Shearer have been briefed on these relationships. If they’re not being briefed, policy won’t be developed to address dietary nutrition. Diet will be lower-order. The OIA request revealed that New Zealand’s Ministry of Health ‘does not widely use the metabolic syndrome classification.’ When I asked ‘How do you classify, or what term do you use to classify the cluster of symptoms characterised by central obesity, dyslipidemia, hypertension, and insulin resistance?’, they responded: ‘The conditions referred to are considered either on their own or as part of a broader cardiovascular disease risk calculation.’ This is interesting. What if governments should be calculating insulin resistance first, in order to then calculate a broader cardiovascular risk? What if insulin resistance, inflammation, and oxidative stress are appearing at younger and younger ages, and ultra-processed food is the major driver? Pre-diabetes and Type 2 diabetes are driven by too much blood glucose. Type 1 diabetics can’t make insulin, while Type 2 diabetics can’t make enough to compensate for their dietary intake of carbohydrates. One of insulin’s (many) jobs is to tuck away that blood glucose into cells (as fat) but when there are too many dietary carbohydrates pumping up blood glucose, the body can’t keep up. New Zealand practitioners use the HbA1c blood test, which measures the average blood glucose level over the past 2-3 months. In New Zealand, doctors diagnose pre-diabetes if HbA1c levels are 41-49 nmol/mol, and diabetes at levels of 50 nmol/mol and above. Type 2 diabetes management guidelines recommend that sugar intake should be reduced, while people should aim for consistent carbohydrates across the day. The New Zealand government does not recommend paleo or low-carbohydrate diets. If you have diabetes you are twice as likely to have heart disease or a stroke, and at a younger age. Prediabetes, which apparently 20% of Kiwis have, is also high-risk due to, as the Ministry of Health states: ‘increased risk of macrovascular complications and early death.’ The question might become – should we be looking at insulin levels, to more sensitively gauge risk at an early stage? Without more sensitive screens at younger ages these opportunities to repivot to avoid chronic disease are likely to be missed. Currently, Ministry of Health policies are unlikely to justify the funding of tests for insulin resistance by using three simple blood tests: fasting insulin, fasting lipids (cholesterol and triglycerides), and fasting glucose – to estimate where children, young people, and adults stand on the insulin resistance spectrum when other diagnoses pop up. Yet insulin plays a powerful role in brain health. Insulin supports neurotransmitter function and brain energy, directly impacting mood and behaviours. Insulin resistance might arrive before mental illness. Harvard-based psychiatrist Chris Palmer recounts in the book Brain Energy, a large 15,000-participant study of young people from age 0-24: ‘Children who had persistently high insulin levels (a sign of insulin resistance) beginning at age nine were five times more likely to be at risk for psychosis, meaning they were showing at least some worrisome signs, and they were three times for likely to already be diagnosed with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia by the time they turned twenty-four. This study clearly demonstrated that insulin resistance comes first, then psychosis.’ Psychiatrist Georgia Ede suggests that high blood glucose and high insulin levels act like a ‘deadly one-two punch’ for the brain, triggering waves of inflammation and oxidative stress. The blood-brain barrier becomes increasingly resistant to chronic high insulin levels. Even though the body might have higher blood insulin, the same may not be true for the brain. As Ede maintains, ‘cells deprived of adequate insulin ‘sputter and struggle to maintain normal operations.’ Looking at the relationship between brain health and high blood glucose and high insulin simply might not be on the programme for strategists looking at long-term planning. Nor are Directors General in a position to assess the role of food addiction. Ultra-processed food has addictive qualities designed into the product formulations. Food addiction is increasingly recognised as pervasive and difficult to manage as any substance addiction. But how many children and young people have insulin resistance and are showing markers for inflammation and oxidative stress – in the body and in the brain? To what extent do young people have both insulin resistance and depression resistance or ADHD or bipolar disorder? This kind of thinking is completely outside the work programme. But insulin levels, inflammation, and oxidative stress may not only be driving chronic illness – but driving the global mental health tsunami. Metabolic disorders are involved in complex pathways and feedback loops across body systems, and doctors learn this at medical school. Patterns and relationships between hormones, the brain, the gastrointestinal system, kidneys, and liver; as well as problems with joints and bone health, autoimmunity, nerves, and sensory conditions evolve from and revolve around metabolic health. Nutrition and diet are downplayed in medical school. What doctors don’t learn so much – the cognitive dissonance that they must accept throughout their training – is that metabolic health is commonly (except for some instances) shaped by the quality of dietary nutrition. The aetiology of a given condition can be very different, while the evidence that common chronic and mental illnesses are accompanied by oxidative stress, inflammation, and insulin resistance are primarily driven by diet – is growing stronger and stronger. But without recognising the overlapping relationships, policy to support healthy diets will remain limp. What we witness are notions of equity that support pharmaceutical delivery – not health delivery. What also inevitably happens is that ‘equity’ focuses on medical treatment. When the Ministry of Health prefers to atomise the different conditions or associate them with heart disease – they become single conditions to treat with single drugs. They’re lots of small problems, not one big problem, and insulin resistance is downplayed. But just as insulin resistance, inflammation, and oxidative stress send cascading impacts across body systems, systemic ignorance sends cascading effects across government departments tasked with ‘improving, promoting, and protecting health.’ It’s an injustice. The literature solidly points to lower socio-economic status driving much poorer diets and increased exposures to ultra-processed food, but the treatments exclusively involve drugs and therapy. Briefings to Incoming Ministers with the election of new Governments show how ignorance cascades across responsible authorities. Health New Zealand, Te Whatu Ora’s November 2023 Briefing to the new government outlined the agency’s obligations. However, the ‘health’ targets are medical, and the agency’s focus is on infrastructure, staff, and servicing. The promotion of health, and health equity, which can only be addressed by addressing the determinants of health, is not addressed. The Māori Health Authority and Health New Zealand Joint Briefing to the Incoming Minister for Mental Health does not address the role of diet and nutrition as a driver of mental illness and disorder in New Zealand. The issue of multimorbidity, the related problem of commensurate metabolic illness, and diet as a driver is outside scope. When the Briefing states that it is important to address the ‘social, cultural, environmental and economic determinants of mental health,’ without any sound policy footing, real movement to address diet will not happen, or will only happen ad hoc. The Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission, Te Hiringa Mahara’s November 2023 Briefing to Incoming Ministers that went to the Ministers for Health and Mental Health might use the term ‘well-being’ over 120 times – but was silent on the related and overlapping drivers of mental illness which include metabolic or multimorbidity, nutrition, or diet. Five years earlier, He Ara Ora, New Zealand’s 2018 Mental Health and Addiction enquiry had recognised that tāngata whaiora, people seeking wellness, or service users, also tend to have multiple health conditions. The enquiry recommended that a whole of government approach to well-being, prevention, and social determinants was required. Vague nods were made to diet and nutrition, but this was not sufficiently emphasised as to be a priority. He Ara Ora was followed by 2020 Long-term pathway to mental well-being viewed nutrition as being one of a range of factors. No policy framework strategically prioritised diet, nutrition, and healthy food. No governmental obligation or commitment was built into policy to improve access to healthy food or nutrition education. Understanding the science, the relationships, and the drivers of the global epidemic, is ‘outside the work programmes’ of New Zealand’s Ministry of Health and outside the scope of all the related authorities. There is an extraordinary amount of data in the scientific literature, so many case studies, cohort studies, and clinical trials. Popular books are being written, however government agencies remain ignorant. In the meantime, doctors must deal with the suffering in front of them without an adequate toolkit. Doctors and pharmacists are faced with a Hobson’s choice of managing multiple chronic conditions and complex drug cocktails, in patients at younger and younger ages. Ultimately, they are treating a patient whom they recognise will only become sicker, cost the health system more, and suffer more. Currently there is little support for New Zealand medical doctors (known as general practitioners, or GPs) in changing practices and recommendations to support non-pharmaceutical drug treatment approaches. Their medical education does not equip them to recognise the extent to which multiple co-existing conditions may be alleviated or reversed. Doctors are paid to prescribe, to inject, and to screen, not to ameliorate or reverse disease and lessen prescribing. The prescribing of nutrients is discouraged and as doctors do not have nutritional training, they hesitate to prescribe nutrients. Many do not want to risk going outside treatment guidelines. Recent surges in protocols and guidelines for medical doctors reduce flexibility and narrow treatment choices for doctors. If they were to be reported to the Medical Council of New Zealand, they would risk losing their medical license. They would then be unable to practice. Inevitably, without Ministry of Health leadership, medical doctors in New Zealand are unlikely to voluntarily prescribe non-drug modalities such as nutritional options to any meaningful extent, for fear of being reported. Yet some doctors are proactive, such as Dr Glen Davies in Taupo, New Zealand. Some doctors are in a better ‘place’ to work to alleviate and reverse long-term conditions. They may be later in their career, with 10-20 years of research into metabolism, dietary nutrition, and patient care, and motivated to guide a patient through a personal care regime which might alleviate or reverse a patient’s suffering. Barriers include resourcing. Doctors aren’t paid for reversing disease and taking patients off medications. Doctors witness daily the hopelessness felt by their patients in dealing with chronic conditions in their short 15-minute consultations, and the vigilance required for dealing with adverse drug effects. Drug non-compliance is associated with adverse effects suffered by patients. Yet without wrap-around support changing treatments, even if it has potential to alleviate multiple conditions, to reduce symptoms, lower prescribing and therefore lessen side effects, is just too uncertain. They saw what happened to disobedient doctors during Covid-19. Given such context, what are we to do? Have open public discussions about doctor-patient relationships and trust. Inform and overlay such conversations by drawing attention to the foundational Hippocratic Oath made by doctors, to first do no harm. Questions can be asked. If patients were to understand that diet may be an underlying driver of multiple conditions, and a change in diet and improvement in micronutrient status might alleviate suffering – would patients be more likely to change? Economically, if wrap-around services were provided in clinics to support dietary change, would less harm occur to patients from worsening conditions that accompany many diseases (such as Type 2 diabetes) and the ever-present problem of drug side-effects? Would education and wrap-around services in early childhood and youth delay or prevent the onset of multimorbid diagnoses? Is it more ethical to give young people a choice of treatment? Could doctors prescribe dietary changes and multinutrients and support change with wrap-around support when children and young people are first diagnosed with a mental health condition – from the clinic, to school, to after school? If that doesn’t work, then prescribe pharmaceutical drugs. Should children and young people be educated to appreciate the extent to which their consumption of ultra-processed food likely drives their metabolic and mental health conditions? Not just in a blithe ‘eat healthy’ fashion that patently avoids discussing addiction. Through deeper policy mechanisms, including cooking classes and nutritional biology by the implementation of nourishing, low-carbohydrate cooked school lunches. With officials uninformed, it’s easy to see why funding for Green Prescriptions that would support dietary changes have sputtered out. It’s easy to understand why neither the Ministry of Health nor Pharmac have proactively sourced multi-nutrient treatments that improve resilience to stress and trauma for low-income young people. Why there’s no discussion on a lower side-effect risk for multinutrient treatments. Why are there no policies in the education curriculum diving into the relationship between ultra-processed food and mental and physical health? It’s not in the work programme. There’s another surfacing dilemma. Currently, if doctors tell their patients that there is very good evidence that their disease or syndrome could be reversed, and this information is not held as factual information by New Zealand’s Ministry of Health – do doctors risk being accused of spreading misinformation? Government agencies have pivoted in the past 5 years to focus intensively on the problem of dis- and misinformation. New Zealand’s disinformation project states that Disinformation is false or modified information knowingly and deliberately shared to cause harm or achieve a broader aim. Misinformation is information that is false or misleading, though not created or shared with the direct intention of causing harm. Unfortunately, as we see, there is no division inside the Ministry of Health that reviews the latest evidence in the scientific literature, to ensure that policy decisions correctly reflect the latest evidence. There is no scientific agency outside the Ministry of Health that has flexibility and the capacity to undertake autonomous, long-term monitoring and research in nutrition, diet, and health. There is no independent, autonomous, public health research facility with sufficient long-term funding to translate dietary and nutritional evidence into policy, particularly if it contradicted current policy positions. Despite excellent research being undertaken, it is highly controlled, ad hoc, and frequently short-term. Problematically, there is no resourcing for those scientists to meaningfully feedback that information to either the Ministry of Health or to Members of Parliament and government Ministers. Dietary guidelines can become locked in, and contradictions can fail to be chewed over. Without the capacity to address errors, information can become outdated and misleading. Government agencies and elected members – from local councils all the way up to government Ministers, are dependent on being informed by the Ministry of Health, when it comes to government policy. When it comes to complex health conditions, and alleviating and reversing metabolic or mental illness, based on different patient capacity – from socio-economic, to cultural, to social, and taking into account capacity for change, what is sound, evidence-based information and what is misinformation? In the impasse, who can we trust? Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License For reprints, please set the canonical link back to the original Brownstone Institute Article and Author. Author J.R. Bruning is a consultant sociologist (B.Bus.Agribusiness; MA Sociology) based in New Zealand. Her work explores governance cultures, policy and the production of scientific and technical knowledge. Her Master’s thesis explored the ways science policy creates barriers to funding, stymying scientists’ efforts to explore upstream drivers of harm. Bruning is a trustee of Physicians & Scientists for Global Responsibility (PSGR.org.nz). Papers and writing can be found at TalkingRisk.NZ and at JRBruning.Substack.com and at Talking Risk on Rumble. View all posts Your financial backing of Brownstone Institute goes to support writers, lawyers, scientists, economists, and other people of courage who have been professionally purged and displaced during the upheaval of our times. You can help get the truth out through their ongoing work. https://brownstone.org/articles/the-silent-shame-of-health-institutions/
    BROWNSTONE.ORG
    The Silent Shame of Health Institutions ⋆ Brownstone Institute
    There is no scientific agency outside the Ministry of Health that has flexibility and the capacity to undertake autonomous, long-term monitoring and research in nutrition, diet and health.
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  • Turkey expected to become US’ largest supplier of artillery shells
    Ahmed AdelAhmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher who regularly contributes to InfoBRICS.
    March 29, 2024
    artillery shells
    VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel

    $ 280 BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation; $ 150B direct "aid" and $ 130B in "Offense" contracts
    Source: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State.

    Turkey is set to become the United States’ largest supplier of artillery shells as NATO allies have exhausted their stocks and now struggle to ship ammunition to Ukraine. Turkey’s indirect support for Ukraine is also supplemented by direct support, such as producing drones and warships, yet Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan offers himself as a viable partner in searching for peace between Ukraine and Russia.

    “Turkish supplies of trinitrotoluene, known as TNT, and nitroguanidine, which is used as a propellant, would be crucial in the production of Nato-standard 155mm calibre ammunition — potentially tripling production, according to officials familiar with the discussions,” a Bloomberg report said, adding: “Turkey is already on track to becoming the biggest seller of the artillery shells to the US as early as this year.”

    The surge in demand has delayed global orders and has put pressure on defence supply chains, especially for components such as TNT. According to the outlet, to help alleviate this issue, Turkish defence company Repkon’s production lines are expected to produce about 30% of all US-made 155mm artillery shells by 2025.

    The Pentagon said in a statement about investment in Texas’ defence industry with Turkish counterparts that working with allies “is key to building a global defence industrial base.”

    Additionally, Washington purchased 116,000 rounds of battle-ready ammunition from Turkish company Arca Defense, with delivery expected later this year and further purchases believed to be concluding soon to be ready for delivery in 2025.

    As Bloomberg admitted, “The US and European efforts are part of a race to catch up with Moscow, whose war machine has put it in a position to produce or procure – according to some estimates – 4 million rounds this year, including shipments from North Korea. By contrast, the European Union expects to triple its production of artillery shells this year to around 1.4 million units.”

    It is unsurprising that Turkey has been awarded a lucrative contract, given the recent announcement that Erdogan will visit the White House on May 9, the first time since US President Joe Biden took office.

    The agreement with Ankara also reveals a delicate balance between the NATO allies, whose relations have been strained by the Russian military operation in Ukraine and Turkey’s months-long block on Sweden’s membership in the Atlantic Alliance. However, with Turkey greenlighting Sweden’s accession and plans to contribute to Ukraine’s military-industrial complex, the country is now being rewarded with export contracts and approval to upgrade its aging F-16 fighter jet fleet.

    The Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been used by the Ukrainian military against Russian forces. The drone maker, Baykar, has initiated the construction of a factory in Ukraine, and the company’s CEO said in February that they aim to complete the project within approximately 12 months and produce around 120 units a year.

    At the same time, it is recalled that in February, France, Greece, and Cyprus blocked financing for the supply of Bayraktar drones and artillery shells for Ukraine, which were to be purchased with European funds. Turkey was set to be financed from EU funds for some time, but once the order was confirmed, the three countries swiftly blocked the financing.

    Although the initiative failed, the US recognised Turkey’s rapprochement with the West and is now rewarding the country with imports and exports in the defence sector. This is despite the fact that the issue of the acquisition of the Russian-made S-400 is not resolved, which is the reason Turkey was booted from the F-35 fifth-generation fighter jet program to begin with.

    Erdogan announced his offer to host a peace summit between Ukraine and Russia earlier this month following a meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky.

    “Since the beginning, we have contributed as much as we could toward ending the war through negotiations,” Erdogan said. “We are also ready to host a peace summit in which Russia will also be included.”

    Although Erdogan claims to have contributed as much as possible to ending the war through negotiations, his country has also contributed to prolonging it. It is also recalled that during Zelensky’s visit to Turkey, he visited the shipyard where the two corvettes are being built for the Ukrainian Navy. At the same time, Turkey is providing drones to the Ukrainian military and is now replenishing the US’ artillery stocks. This is even though Ukraine has no chance of winning the war, meaning Turkey is not an honest broker for peace.


    ATTENTION READERS

    We See The World From All Sides and Want YOU To Be Fully Informed
    In fact, intentional disinformation is a disgraceful scourge in media today. So to assuage any possible errant incorrect information posted herein, we strongly encourage you to seek corroboration from other non-VT sources before forming an educated opinion.

    About VT - Policies & Disclosures - Comment Policy
    Due to the nature of uncensored content posted by VT's fully independent international writers, VT cannot guarantee absolute validity. All content is owned by the author exclusively. Expressed opinions are NOT necessarily the views of VT, other authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, or technicians. Some content may be satirical in nature. All images are the full responsibility of the article author and NOT VT.

    https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/03/turkey-expected-to-become-us-largest-supplier-of-artillery-shells/
    Turkey expected to become US’ largest supplier of artillery shells Ahmed AdelAhmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher who regularly contributes to InfoBRICS. March 29, 2024 artillery shells VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel $ 280 BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation; $ 150B direct "aid" and $ 130B in "Offense" contracts Source: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State. Turkey is set to become the United States’ largest supplier of artillery shells as NATO allies have exhausted their stocks and now struggle to ship ammunition to Ukraine. Turkey’s indirect support for Ukraine is also supplemented by direct support, such as producing drones and warships, yet Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan offers himself as a viable partner in searching for peace between Ukraine and Russia. “Turkish supplies of trinitrotoluene, known as TNT, and nitroguanidine, which is used as a propellant, would be crucial in the production of Nato-standard 155mm calibre ammunition — potentially tripling production, according to officials familiar with the discussions,” a Bloomberg report said, adding: “Turkey is already on track to becoming the biggest seller of the artillery shells to the US as early as this year.” The surge in demand has delayed global orders and has put pressure on defence supply chains, especially for components such as TNT. According to the outlet, to help alleviate this issue, Turkish defence company Repkon’s production lines are expected to produce about 30% of all US-made 155mm artillery shells by 2025. The Pentagon said in a statement about investment in Texas’ defence industry with Turkish counterparts that working with allies “is key to building a global defence industrial base.” Additionally, Washington purchased 116,000 rounds of battle-ready ammunition from Turkish company Arca Defense, with delivery expected later this year and further purchases believed to be concluding soon to be ready for delivery in 2025. As Bloomberg admitted, “The US and European efforts are part of a race to catch up with Moscow, whose war machine has put it in a position to produce or procure – according to some estimates – 4 million rounds this year, including shipments from North Korea. By contrast, the European Union expects to triple its production of artillery shells this year to around 1.4 million units.” It is unsurprising that Turkey has been awarded a lucrative contract, given the recent announcement that Erdogan will visit the White House on May 9, the first time since US President Joe Biden took office. The agreement with Ankara also reveals a delicate balance between the NATO allies, whose relations have been strained by the Russian military operation in Ukraine and Turkey’s months-long block on Sweden’s membership in the Atlantic Alliance. However, with Turkey greenlighting Sweden’s accession and plans to contribute to Ukraine’s military-industrial complex, the country is now being rewarded with export contracts and approval to upgrade its aging F-16 fighter jet fleet. The Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been used by the Ukrainian military against Russian forces. The drone maker, Baykar, has initiated the construction of a factory in Ukraine, and the company’s CEO said in February that they aim to complete the project within approximately 12 months and produce around 120 units a year. At the same time, it is recalled that in February, France, Greece, and Cyprus blocked financing for the supply of Bayraktar drones and artillery shells for Ukraine, which were to be purchased with European funds. Turkey was set to be financed from EU funds for some time, but once the order was confirmed, the three countries swiftly blocked the financing. Although the initiative failed, the US recognised Turkey’s rapprochement with the West and is now rewarding the country with imports and exports in the defence sector. This is despite the fact that the issue of the acquisition of the Russian-made S-400 is not resolved, which is the reason Turkey was booted from the F-35 fifth-generation fighter jet program to begin with. Erdogan announced his offer to host a peace summit between Ukraine and Russia earlier this month following a meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky. “Since the beginning, we have contributed as much as we could toward ending the war through negotiations,” Erdogan said. “We are also ready to host a peace summit in which Russia will also be included.” Although Erdogan claims to have contributed as much as possible to ending the war through negotiations, his country has also contributed to prolonging it. It is also recalled that during Zelensky’s visit to Turkey, he visited the shipyard where the two corvettes are being built for the Ukrainian Navy. At the same time, Turkey is providing drones to the Ukrainian military and is now replenishing the US’ artillery stocks. This is even though Ukraine has no chance of winning the war, meaning Turkey is not an honest broker for peace. ATTENTION READERS We See The World From All Sides and Want YOU To Be Fully Informed In fact, intentional disinformation is a disgraceful scourge in media today. So to assuage any possible errant incorrect information posted herein, we strongly encourage you to seek corroboration from other non-VT sources before forming an educated opinion. About VT - Policies & Disclosures - Comment Policy Due to the nature of uncensored content posted by VT's fully independent international writers, VT cannot guarantee absolute validity. All content is owned by the author exclusively. Expressed opinions are NOT necessarily the views of VT, other authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, or technicians. Some content may be satirical in nature. All images are the full responsibility of the article author and NOT VT. https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/03/turkey-expected-to-become-us-largest-supplier-of-artillery-shells/
    WWW.VTFOREIGNPOLICY.COM
    Turkey expected to become US’ largest supplier of artillery shells
    Turkey is set to become the United States’ largest supplier of artillery shells as NATO allies have exhausted their stocks and now struggle to ship ammunition to Ukraine. Turkey’s indirect support for Ukraine is also supplemented by direct support, such as producing drones and warships, yet Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan offers himself as a
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  • Ignorance, Stupidity, or Malice?
    Rob Jenkins
    A major topic of conversation at the recent Brownstone retreat was whether the people who locked us down and then mandated an experimental gene therapy, along with their supporters and enablers, were motivated primarily by stupidity or malice. I’d like to propose a third option: ignorance. In my view, all three played a part in the Covid debacle.

    I believe—I choose to believe—that many of the people who are to some degree responsible for the devastation of the last four years—particularly the millions of Americans who allowed it to happen because they docilely went along—were simply ignorant. They accepted what they were told in March 2020 about the virulence and lethality of the virus. They fell for the fake videos of Chinese citizens keeling over in the streets. They watched in horror as what appeared to be freezer trucks sat parked outside New York hospitals. They assumed the government wouldn’t be sending military hospital ships to New York and Los Angeles if the disease wasn’t ravaging those cities. And they eagerly embraced the notion that, if we all just stayed home for two weeks, we could actually “flatten the curve.”

    I confess: I fell into this category initially, for about those first two weeks. I’m blessed (or maybe cursed) with a natural skepticism and fortunate to have found, early on, alternative news sources that were reporting the truth—or at least trying to get at it. So I began to suspect, as “two weeks” stretched to infinity, that we were being had. But most Westerners have been conditioned to believe whatever the government and the media tell them, without questioning. Those people bought into the indefinite forced isolation and the social distancing and the Zoom school and the grocery delivery because they were ignorant. They didn’t really understand what was happening.

    That includes, by the way, many in positions of authority and responsibility, like medical doctors and nurses, teachers and administrators, religious leaders, and local elected officials. Maybe even some elected officials at the national level. They swallowed the official narrative, too. I’m convinced most of these people honestly believed they were doing the right thing, saving lives, when in fact they were doing nothing of the sort because, as we now know, none of those “mitigation strategies” had any effect on the virus. But to be completely fair to them—and I think it’s important to be fair, however angry we might be at the consequences of their behavior—they were acting out of ignorance.

    Of course, at some point, ignorance begins to bleed over into stupidity—perhaps at the point where people could have known better, and maybe even should have known better. Then their ignorance, which is a legitimate excuse for bad behavior, becomes willful. And willful ignorance is a form of stupidity, which is not an excuse, especially not for those we entrust with important decisions that affect all our lives.

    The definition of stupidity proposed by UC Berkeley economist Carlo Cipolla in 1976 seems relevant in this context: “A stupid person is one who causes losses to another person or group while deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.” (You can find a nice summary of Cipolla’s theory here.) In other words, stupid people do stupid things for no reason. They harm other people, and they don’t even get anything out of it. They might even harm themselves in the process—“shooting themselves in the foot,” as we sometimes say, or “cutting off their nose to spite their face.” That is indeed the height of stupidity.

    This definition certainly applies to many, many of the Covidians, including quite a few who (if we want to be generous) started out as merely ignorant. Over time, their perhaps understandable ignorance morphed into stupidity as they held on stubbornly to masking, distancing, and school closures despite literal mountains of evidence that none of those had any salutary effect. And most of them didn’t even benefit from their stubborn, stupid refusal to acknowledge reality. Yes, some did, and we’ll get to them in a moment. But most didn’t. In many cases, they embarrassed themselves, damaged their careers, lost businesses and personal relationships, and for what? So they could yell at the rest of us about masks? That’s pretty stupid.

    Also instructive here is Cipolla’s Second Law of Stupidity: “The probability that a certain person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.” In other words, stupidity, as he defines it, is more or less evenly distributed throughout the population. It has nothing to do with intelligence, education, or income level. There are stupid doctors, lawyers, and college professors, just as there are stupid plumbers and ditch diggers. If anything, the former groups are somewhat more likely to contain stupid people. It all comes down to a person’s willingness to do things that make no sense, things that harm others—aka, stupid things—despite not getting anything out of it and perhaps even losing in the bargain.

    And then there are the people who actually DO benefit from the harm they cause to others. They exhibit many of the same behaviors as the stupid people, except that they actually get something out of it—money, fame, power. Cipolla refers to these people—those who harm others for their own benefit—as “bandits.” Most of the best-known Covidians, the biggest names in media, government, “public health,” and the pharmaceuticals industry, fall into this category. They initiated, enforced, and supported policies that seemingly made no sense, and they came away smelling like roses. They became the toast of the media circuit, earned cushy sinecures, and expanded their bank accounts by millions.

    The main difference between stupid people and bandits, according to Cipolla, is that the latter’s actions actually make sense, once you understand what they’re trying to accomplish. If a person knocks you down for no reason—well, that’s just stupid. But if they knock you down and then take your wallet, that makes sense. You understand why they knocked you down, even if you don’t like it any better. Moreover, you can to some degree adjust for the actions of “bandits”—for instance, by staying out of the bad part of town, where someone might knock you down and take your wallet. But if you’re at a mall in a nice suburb, and people are just knocking you down for no apparent reason, there’s no way to plan for that.

    The problem with stupidity, says Cipolla, is two-fold. First, we consistently “underestimate the number of stupid people in circulation.” We assume the vast majority of people will act rationally under most circumstances, but—as we’ve seen plainly over the last four years—that turns out not to be true. Many behave irrationally much of the time, and it appears that a majority will do so in a time of crisis.

    Second, as Cipolla points out, the stupid people are if anything more dangerous than the bandits, mostly for the reasons cited above: There are a lot more of them, and it’s nearly impossible to account for them. You can have a perfectly good plan to address some emergency—like, say, a pandemic—and the stupid people will blow it up for no good reason. Sure, malicious bad actors will make off with the treasury, if they can, but that has always been the case. I mean, is anybody really surprised that Albert Bourla added millions to his net worth? Or that Anthony Fauci now has a cushy job teaching at Georgetown? Yes, it’s frustrating and disgusting. There’s no doubt they were among the main architects of this disaster, as well as its main beneficiaries. But none of that is, or was, completely unexpected. Bandits gonna bandit.

    What has been most frustrating to me over the past couple of years has been the way that millions of otherwise normal people—including friends, relatives and colleagues, as well as store clerks, flight attendants, and random people on the streets—have behaved so stupidly. A surprising number continue to do so, embarrassing themselves by haranguing the rest of us about masks and “vaccines,” alienating everyone in sight, making life more difficult for themselves and others even though they gain nothing by it.

    So yes, the four-year debacle that is our collective Covid response is attributable in part to ignorance and in part to malice. But worse than either of those, and far more damaging to society in the long term, has been the sheer stupidity—humanity’s capacity for which I will never again underestimate.

    Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
    For reprints, please set the canonical link back to the original Brownstone Institute Article and Author.

    Author

    Rob Jenkins is an associate professor of English at Georgia State University – Perimeter College and a Higher Education Fellow at Campus Reform. He is the author or co-author of six books, including Think Better, Write Better, Welcome to My Classroom, and The 9 Virtues of Exceptional Leaders. In addition to Brownstone and Campus Reform, he has written for Townhall, The Daily Wire, American Thinker, PJ Media, The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. The opinions expressed here are his own.

    View all posts
    Your financial backing of Brownstone Institute goes to support writers, lawyers, scientists, economists, and other people of courage who have been professionally purged and displaced during the upheaval of our times. You can help get the truth out through their ongoing work.

    https://brownstone.org/articles/ignorance-stupidity-or-malice/
    Ignorance, Stupidity, or Malice? Rob Jenkins A major topic of conversation at the recent Brownstone retreat was whether the people who locked us down and then mandated an experimental gene therapy, along with their supporters and enablers, were motivated primarily by stupidity or malice. I’d like to propose a third option: ignorance. In my view, all three played a part in the Covid debacle. I believe—I choose to believe—that many of the people who are to some degree responsible for the devastation of the last four years—particularly the millions of Americans who allowed it to happen because they docilely went along—were simply ignorant. They accepted what they were told in March 2020 about the virulence and lethality of the virus. They fell for the fake videos of Chinese citizens keeling over in the streets. They watched in horror as what appeared to be freezer trucks sat parked outside New York hospitals. They assumed the government wouldn’t be sending military hospital ships to New York and Los Angeles if the disease wasn’t ravaging those cities. And they eagerly embraced the notion that, if we all just stayed home for two weeks, we could actually “flatten the curve.” I confess: I fell into this category initially, for about those first two weeks. I’m blessed (or maybe cursed) with a natural skepticism and fortunate to have found, early on, alternative news sources that were reporting the truth—or at least trying to get at it. So I began to suspect, as “two weeks” stretched to infinity, that we were being had. But most Westerners have been conditioned to believe whatever the government and the media tell them, without questioning. Those people bought into the indefinite forced isolation and the social distancing and the Zoom school and the grocery delivery because they were ignorant. They didn’t really understand what was happening. That includes, by the way, many in positions of authority and responsibility, like medical doctors and nurses, teachers and administrators, religious leaders, and local elected officials. Maybe even some elected officials at the national level. They swallowed the official narrative, too. I’m convinced most of these people honestly believed they were doing the right thing, saving lives, when in fact they were doing nothing of the sort because, as we now know, none of those “mitigation strategies” had any effect on the virus. But to be completely fair to them—and I think it’s important to be fair, however angry we might be at the consequences of their behavior—they were acting out of ignorance. Of course, at some point, ignorance begins to bleed over into stupidity—perhaps at the point where people could have known better, and maybe even should have known better. Then their ignorance, which is a legitimate excuse for bad behavior, becomes willful. And willful ignorance is a form of stupidity, which is not an excuse, especially not for those we entrust with important decisions that affect all our lives. The definition of stupidity proposed by UC Berkeley economist Carlo Cipolla in 1976 seems relevant in this context: “A stupid person is one who causes losses to another person or group while deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.” (You can find a nice summary of Cipolla’s theory here.) In other words, stupid people do stupid things for no reason. They harm other people, and they don’t even get anything out of it. They might even harm themselves in the process—“shooting themselves in the foot,” as we sometimes say, or “cutting off their nose to spite their face.” That is indeed the height of stupidity. This definition certainly applies to many, many of the Covidians, including quite a few who (if we want to be generous) started out as merely ignorant. Over time, their perhaps understandable ignorance morphed into stupidity as they held on stubbornly to masking, distancing, and school closures despite literal mountains of evidence that none of those had any salutary effect. And most of them didn’t even benefit from their stubborn, stupid refusal to acknowledge reality. Yes, some did, and we’ll get to them in a moment. But most didn’t. In many cases, they embarrassed themselves, damaged their careers, lost businesses and personal relationships, and for what? So they could yell at the rest of us about masks? That’s pretty stupid. Also instructive here is Cipolla’s Second Law of Stupidity: “The probability that a certain person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.” In other words, stupidity, as he defines it, is more or less evenly distributed throughout the population. It has nothing to do with intelligence, education, or income level. There are stupid doctors, lawyers, and college professors, just as there are stupid plumbers and ditch diggers. If anything, the former groups are somewhat more likely to contain stupid people. It all comes down to a person’s willingness to do things that make no sense, things that harm others—aka, stupid things—despite not getting anything out of it and perhaps even losing in the bargain. And then there are the people who actually DO benefit from the harm they cause to others. They exhibit many of the same behaviors as the stupid people, except that they actually get something out of it—money, fame, power. Cipolla refers to these people—those who harm others for their own benefit—as “bandits.” Most of the best-known Covidians, the biggest names in media, government, “public health,” and the pharmaceuticals industry, fall into this category. They initiated, enforced, and supported policies that seemingly made no sense, and they came away smelling like roses. They became the toast of the media circuit, earned cushy sinecures, and expanded their bank accounts by millions. The main difference between stupid people and bandits, according to Cipolla, is that the latter’s actions actually make sense, once you understand what they’re trying to accomplish. If a person knocks you down for no reason—well, that’s just stupid. But if they knock you down and then take your wallet, that makes sense. You understand why they knocked you down, even if you don’t like it any better. Moreover, you can to some degree adjust for the actions of “bandits”—for instance, by staying out of the bad part of town, where someone might knock you down and take your wallet. But if you’re at a mall in a nice suburb, and people are just knocking you down for no apparent reason, there’s no way to plan for that. The problem with stupidity, says Cipolla, is two-fold. First, we consistently “underestimate the number of stupid people in circulation.” We assume the vast majority of people will act rationally under most circumstances, but—as we’ve seen plainly over the last four years—that turns out not to be true. Many behave irrationally much of the time, and it appears that a majority will do so in a time of crisis. Second, as Cipolla points out, the stupid people are if anything more dangerous than the bandits, mostly for the reasons cited above: There are a lot more of them, and it’s nearly impossible to account for them. You can have a perfectly good plan to address some emergency—like, say, a pandemic—and the stupid people will blow it up for no good reason. Sure, malicious bad actors will make off with the treasury, if they can, but that has always been the case. I mean, is anybody really surprised that Albert Bourla added millions to his net worth? Or that Anthony Fauci now has a cushy job teaching at Georgetown? Yes, it’s frustrating and disgusting. There’s no doubt they were among the main architects of this disaster, as well as its main beneficiaries. But none of that is, or was, completely unexpected. Bandits gonna bandit. What has been most frustrating to me over the past couple of years has been the way that millions of otherwise normal people—including friends, relatives and colleagues, as well as store clerks, flight attendants, and random people on the streets—have behaved so stupidly. A surprising number continue to do so, embarrassing themselves by haranguing the rest of us about masks and “vaccines,” alienating everyone in sight, making life more difficult for themselves and others even though they gain nothing by it. So yes, the four-year debacle that is our collective Covid response is attributable in part to ignorance and in part to malice. But worse than either of those, and far more damaging to society in the long term, has been the sheer stupidity—humanity’s capacity for which I will never again underestimate. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License For reprints, please set the canonical link back to the original Brownstone Institute Article and Author. Author Rob Jenkins is an associate professor of English at Georgia State University – Perimeter College and a Higher Education Fellow at Campus Reform. He is the author or co-author of six books, including Think Better, Write Better, Welcome to My Classroom, and The 9 Virtues of Exceptional Leaders. In addition to Brownstone and Campus Reform, he has written for Townhall, The Daily Wire, American Thinker, PJ Media, The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. The opinions expressed here are his own. View all posts Your financial backing of Brownstone Institute goes to support writers, lawyers, scientists, economists, and other people of courage who have been professionally purged and displaced during the upheaval of our times. You can help get the truth out through their ongoing work. https://brownstone.org/articles/ignorance-stupidity-or-malice/
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    Ignorance, Stupidity, or Malice? ⋆ Brownstone Institute
    So yes, the four-year debacle that is our collective Covid response is attributable in part to ignorance and in part to malice.
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  • Ukrainian ‘Caliphate’: What the West prefers not to notice when blaming ISIS for the terrorist attack in Moscow
    Kiev’s connections with terrorist groups and Islamists are recognized even in the West. Could Ukrainians be behind the massacre in Crocus City Hall?

    Jonas E. Alexis, Senior EditorMarch 27, 2024

    VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel

    $ 280 BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation; $ 150B direct "aid" and $ 130B in "Offense" contracts
    Source: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State.

    On March 22, Russia suffered one of the worst terrorist attacks in recent history, in the course of which 137 people were killed and 182 others were injured. The four terrorists who carried out the attack chose one of the largest exhibition and concert venues in the country, Crocus City Hall, in the city of Krasnogorsk on the outskirts of Moscow, which hosts large events every day.

    Even though the investigation is still ongoing, the West has already claimed that the Islamic State (IS) is responsible for the tragedy. This was first reported by some media outlets, including Reuters and CNN, and was later picked up by Western officials. For example, on Monday, this was stated by White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.

    However, when we compare this terrorist attack with other IS attacks, we notice more differences than similarities.

    How IS kills

    On that fateful Friday night, a concert by Picnic, a St. Petersburg rock band, was supposed to take place in Crocus City Hall. This fact gave rise to comparisons with the horrible terrorist attack in France in November 2015. Back then, terrorists broke into the Bataclan Theater in Paris, where a concert of the US band Eagles of Death Metal was taking place. IS claimed responsibility for the crime, which left 89 people dead.

    Weapon of mass distraction: Is the West scapegoating Islamic State over Moscow attack?

    Read more

    Weapon of mass distraction: Is the West scapegoating Islamic State over Moscow attack?

    In those years, IS became increasingly active throughout the world – but this was actually a sign of its decline. In its heyday, IS didn’t urge its supporters to carry out terrorist attacks, but instead called on them to “fulfill the hijrah” – i.e., move to the territories controlled by the organization. Over ten years ago, this was quite easy to do, since part of the Syrian border with Turkey was controlled by the jihadists, which allowed people to freely cross it and join their ranks.

    However, as the terrorists lost many of their territories, their rhetoric changed. Through its information resources, IS urged its followers to commit terrorist acts in places where they lived. This caused an upsurge in violence in Europe: a wave of terror swept through France, Belgium, Germany, the UK, and other countries. In Russia, the North Caucasus became a point of tension.

    The strategy was simple – anyone who supported the jihadists, wherever they lived, could record a video with an oath of allegiance to the “caliph,” send it via an automated feedback bot, and then commit a terrorist act. Often it was only the perpetrator who died, but for IS, this didn’t matter – it only cared about being mentioned in connection with the terrorist activity, which is why the organization occasionally took responsibility for crimes that it had nothing to do with.

    The terrorist attack in Krasnogorsk, however, doesn’t match this straightforward strategy usually adopted by IS. In fact, the choice of a rock concert as the site of the terrorist attack is almost the only common feature between this attack and other acts of terror it has committed.

    What preceded the events at Crocus City Hall

    Four people who had not previously known each other were recruited to carry out the terrorist attack. One of them, Shamsidin Fariduni, was in Türkiye in February, and from there he flew to Russia on March 4. He spent at least ten days in Türkiye and investigators are currently determining who he communicated with while there.

    According to unofficial information, he met with a certain “Islamic preacher” in Istanbul. However, it is also known that the terrorists corresponded with the “preacher’s assistant.” According to Fariduni, this anonymous person sponsored and organized the terrorist attack.

    RT

    After arriving in Russia, Fariduni visited Crocus City Hall on March 7 in order to see the site where the crime was to be committed. From this, we may conclude that the attack was to take place soon after his arrival from Türkiye. On the same day, the US embassy in Russia warned its citizens to avoid large gatherings “over the next 48 hours” due to possible attacks by extremists.

    The next concert at Crocus City Hall was given by the singer Shaman, who is known for his patriotism. However, his concert on Saturday, March 9 passed without incident. In the following days, there were other performances at the venue, but apparently the terrorists were forced to adjust their plans.

    As a result, they chose the concert by the band Picnic, scheduled for March 22. Although this band is not as popular as Shaman, it is also known for its patriotic stance and for donating funds for the needs of the Russian Armed Forces in Ukraine.

    ‘The Moscow terror attack was an inside job!’ The strange and twisted world of the West’s political and media Russia haters

    Read more

    ‘The Moscow terror attack was an inside job!’ The strange and twisted world of the West’s political and media Russia haters

    What happened afterwards

    None of the terrorists planned to “join the Houris in paradise,” as is usual for IS followers. After shooting people in Crocus City Hall and setting the building on fire, they did not attack the special forces which arrived at the scene and instead got in a car and fled from Moscow. Neither did they wear “suicide belts” – a characteristic detail of IS followers who are ready to die after committing their crime.

    Another detail which is uncharacteristic for IS is the monetary reward promised to the terrorists. The payment was supposed to be made in two installments – before and after the attack. The terrorists had already received the first payment, amounting to 250,000 rubles ($2,700).

    The most important detail is the location where the terrorists were detained. Traffic cameras allowed intelligence services to monitor where they were headed. They were eventually detained on the federal highway M-3 Ukraine – a route which used to connect Russia and Ukraine but lost much of its international importance after the deterioration of relations between the two countries in 2014, and particularly after the start of Russia’s military operation in 2022.

    The terrorists were detained after passing the turn to route A240, which leads to Belarus. At that moment, it became obvious that there was only one place where they could be headed: Ukraine.

    Despite the fact that the terrorists were armed, only one of them, Mukhammadsobir Fayzov, put up resistance. All of the terrorists were detained alive, which was most likely an order given to the security forces involved in the operation. However, as we mentioned above, the terrorists themselves did not want to die.

    RT

    Moreover, they knew where to go to save their lives: to the Ukrainian border. Later, in his address to the nation, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that a “window” for passage had been opened for them on the Ukrainian side.

    This, too, is uncharacteristic for IS, since someone who carries out a terrorist act, especially an outsider, is always considered “disposable.” Even if he makes it out alive, no one will help him. Moreover, in earlier years, IS usually didn’t take responsibility for an attack if the perpetrator remained alive, as this could harm him during the investigation. However, later the organization no longer cared about this due to the deplorable state in which it found itself.

    All this comes down to the fact that compared to other attacks carried out by IS in the past few years, this one is strikingly different when it comes to the level of preparation, detailed planning, and financial compensation.

    Dmitry Trenin: The American explanation for the Moscow terror attack doesn’t add up

    Read more

    Dmitry Trenin: The American explanation for the Moscow terror attack doesn’t add up

    What does Ukraine have to do with it?

    Having already mentioned Ukraine several times, we must note its links with terrorists. Since 2015, it has been known that the Security Service of Ukraine tried to recruit radical Islamists with the goal of carrying out sabotage and terrorist attacks, etc. on Russian territory. Ukraine’s intelligence services were also active among the terrorists in Syria. This cooperation was marked in particular by the arrival in Ukraine of Chechen terrorist Rustam Azhiev, who served in the International Legion controlled by the Main Directorate of Intelligence of Ukraine’s Defense Ministry.

    Azhiev participated in the second Chechen campaign against the Russian Armed Forces and eventually fled to Türkiye. In 2011, he moved to Syria, where he headed the terrorist group Ajnad Al-Kavkaz. Under his command, the militants participated in hostilities against the Syrian Armed Forces and were noted for terrorist attacks directed against civilians. Azhiev operated side-by-side with groups that are recognized as terrorist organizations not only in the United States, but throughout the world. The main ally of Ajnad Al-Kavkaz was Jabhat Al-Nusra in Syria.

    Over time, the Russian Armed Forces and Syrian Armed Forces liberated territories from terrorists and significantly reduced their supply base. As a result, Azhiev and his associates became involved in contract killings, extortion, torture, and racketeering. In 2019, Azhiev even had to publicly apologize for the actions of his associates, who kidnapped the wrong person.

    The terrorists had been “unemployed” for several years when in 2022, Azhiev and his associates were approached by Ukrainian intelligence services through an intermediary – field commander Akhmed Zakayev. Azhiev and his associates took part in combat operations against the Russian Armed Forces and as a reward, Azhiev was given a Ukrainian passport.

    RT

    In 2024, led by Azhiev, the terrorists participated in an attack on border settlements in Belgorod Region. In a video, Azhiev publicly admitted that the purpose of the operation was to destabilize the situation in Russia before and during the presidential elections. This was confirmed by the fact that the attacks stopped right after the elections.

    After the terrorist attack in Crocus City Hall, the Austrian newspaper Heute discovered another link between Ukraine and radical Islamists. According to the publication, which cites information from intelligence services, many suspected terrorists had entered the EU from Ukraine. For example, in December 2023, a Tajik citizen and his wife, along with an accomplice, were detained in Vienna. They were preparing an attack on St. Stephen’s Cathedral. The couple had come to the EU from Ukraine in February 2022.

    ***

    Ukraine is the place of residence not only for many terrorists, but also IS administrators and those who sympathize with the terrorists. Some of these people are actively involved in raising funds for imprisoned IS fighters in Syria and Iraq. Some of this money goes to purchasing food and medicines. But quite often, it is spent on buying weapons to carry out attacks inside prisons, and for bribing guards. Since some of the terrorists are officially “employed” in Ukraine’s Defense Ministry and others work for the Security Service of Ukraine, they can both push their employers to organize a terrorist attack or do so on their own, without formally consulting the authorities. Currently, one of the versions is that an employee of the Ukrainian intelligence services could’ve been hiding under the guise of the “preacher’s assistant.”



    Moreover, Kiev has prior experience in carrying out terrorist acts on Russian territory – both directly, as in the case of Daria Dugina, and through intermediaries, as in the case of Vladlen Tatarsky. Therefore, using radical Islamists, such as IS followers, to carry out terrorist attacks fully corresponds to Ukraine’s strategy, which comes down to inflicting maximum damage on Russia and its residents.


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    https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/03/krainian-caliphate-what-the-west-prefers-not-to-notice-when-blaming-isis-for-the-terrorist-attack-in-moscow/
    Ukrainian ‘Caliphate’: What the West prefers not to notice when blaming ISIS for the terrorist attack in Moscow Kiev’s connections with terrorist groups and Islamists are recognized even in the West. Could Ukrainians be behind the massacre in Crocus City Hall? Jonas E. Alexis, Senior EditorMarch 27, 2024 VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel $ 280 BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation; $ 150B direct "aid" and $ 130B in "Offense" contracts Source: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State. On March 22, Russia suffered one of the worst terrorist attacks in recent history, in the course of which 137 people were killed and 182 others were injured. The four terrorists who carried out the attack chose one of the largest exhibition and concert venues in the country, Crocus City Hall, in the city of Krasnogorsk on the outskirts of Moscow, which hosts large events every day. Even though the investigation is still ongoing, the West has already claimed that the Islamic State (IS) is responsible for the tragedy. This was first reported by some media outlets, including Reuters and CNN, and was later picked up by Western officials. For example, on Monday, this was stated by White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. However, when we compare this terrorist attack with other IS attacks, we notice more differences than similarities. How IS kills On that fateful Friday night, a concert by Picnic, a St. Petersburg rock band, was supposed to take place in Crocus City Hall. This fact gave rise to comparisons with the horrible terrorist attack in France in November 2015. Back then, terrorists broke into the Bataclan Theater in Paris, where a concert of the US band Eagles of Death Metal was taking place. IS claimed responsibility for the crime, which left 89 people dead. Weapon of mass distraction: Is the West scapegoating Islamic State over Moscow attack? Read more Weapon of mass distraction: Is the West scapegoating Islamic State over Moscow attack? In those years, IS became increasingly active throughout the world – but this was actually a sign of its decline. In its heyday, IS didn’t urge its supporters to carry out terrorist attacks, but instead called on them to “fulfill the hijrah” – i.e., move to the territories controlled by the organization. Over ten years ago, this was quite easy to do, since part of the Syrian border with Turkey was controlled by the jihadists, which allowed people to freely cross it and join their ranks. However, as the terrorists lost many of their territories, their rhetoric changed. Through its information resources, IS urged its followers to commit terrorist acts in places where they lived. This caused an upsurge in violence in Europe: a wave of terror swept through France, Belgium, Germany, the UK, and other countries. In Russia, the North Caucasus became a point of tension. The strategy was simple – anyone who supported the jihadists, wherever they lived, could record a video with an oath of allegiance to the “caliph,” send it via an automated feedback bot, and then commit a terrorist act. Often it was only the perpetrator who died, but for IS, this didn’t matter – it only cared about being mentioned in connection with the terrorist activity, which is why the organization occasionally took responsibility for crimes that it had nothing to do with. The terrorist attack in Krasnogorsk, however, doesn’t match this straightforward strategy usually adopted by IS. In fact, the choice of a rock concert as the site of the terrorist attack is almost the only common feature between this attack and other acts of terror it has committed. What preceded the events at Crocus City Hall Four people who had not previously known each other were recruited to carry out the terrorist attack. One of them, Shamsidin Fariduni, was in Türkiye in February, and from there he flew to Russia on March 4. He spent at least ten days in Türkiye and investigators are currently determining who he communicated with while there. According to unofficial information, he met with a certain “Islamic preacher” in Istanbul. However, it is also known that the terrorists corresponded with the “preacher’s assistant.” According to Fariduni, this anonymous person sponsored and organized the terrorist attack. RT After arriving in Russia, Fariduni visited Crocus City Hall on March 7 in order to see the site where the crime was to be committed. From this, we may conclude that the attack was to take place soon after his arrival from Türkiye. On the same day, the US embassy in Russia warned its citizens to avoid large gatherings “over the next 48 hours” due to possible attacks by extremists. The next concert at Crocus City Hall was given by the singer Shaman, who is known for his patriotism. However, his concert on Saturday, March 9 passed without incident. In the following days, there were other performances at the venue, but apparently the terrorists were forced to adjust their plans. As a result, they chose the concert by the band Picnic, scheduled for March 22. Although this band is not as popular as Shaman, it is also known for its patriotic stance and for donating funds for the needs of the Russian Armed Forces in Ukraine. ‘The Moscow terror attack was an inside job!’ The strange and twisted world of the West’s political and media Russia haters Read more ‘The Moscow terror attack was an inside job!’ The strange and twisted world of the West’s political and media Russia haters What happened afterwards None of the terrorists planned to “join the Houris in paradise,” as is usual for IS followers. After shooting people in Crocus City Hall and setting the building on fire, they did not attack the special forces which arrived at the scene and instead got in a car and fled from Moscow. Neither did they wear “suicide belts” – a characteristic detail of IS followers who are ready to die after committing their crime. Another detail which is uncharacteristic for IS is the monetary reward promised to the terrorists. The payment was supposed to be made in two installments – before and after the attack. The terrorists had already received the first payment, amounting to 250,000 rubles ($2,700). The most important detail is the location where the terrorists were detained. Traffic cameras allowed intelligence services to monitor where they were headed. They were eventually detained on the federal highway M-3 Ukraine – a route which used to connect Russia and Ukraine but lost much of its international importance after the deterioration of relations between the two countries in 2014, and particularly after the start of Russia’s military operation in 2022. The terrorists were detained after passing the turn to route A240, which leads to Belarus. At that moment, it became obvious that there was only one place where they could be headed: Ukraine. Despite the fact that the terrorists were armed, only one of them, Mukhammadsobir Fayzov, put up resistance. All of the terrorists were detained alive, which was most likely an order given to the security forces involved in the operation. However, as we mentioned above, the terrorists themselves did not want to die. RT Moreover, they knew where to go to save their lives: to the Ukrainian border. Later, in his address to the nation, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that a “window” for passage had been opened for them on the Ukrainian side. This, too, is uncharacteristic for IS, since someone who carries out a terrorist act, especially an outsider, is always considered “disposable.” Even if he makes it out alive, no one will help him. Moreover, in earlier years, IS usually didn’t take responsibility for an attack if the perpetrator remained alive, as this could harm him during the investigation. However, later the organization no longer cared about this due to the deplorable state in which it found itself. All this comes down to the fact that compared to other attacks carried out by IS in the past few years, this one is strikingly different when it comes to the level of preparation, detailed planning, and financial compensation. Dmitry Trenin: The American explanation for the Moscow terror attack doesn’t add up Read more Dmitry Trenin: The American explanation for the Moscow terror attack doesn’t add up What does Ukraine have to do with it? Having already mentioned Ukraine several times, we must note its links with terrorists. Since 2015, it has been known that the Security Service of Ukraine tried to recruit radical Islamists with the goal of carrying out sabotage and terrorist attacks, etc. on Russian territory. Ukraine’s intelligence services were also active among the terrorists in Syria. This cooperation was marked in particular by the arrival in Ukraine of Chechen terrorist Rustam Azhiev, who served in the International Legion controlled by the Main Directorate of Intelligence of Ukraine’s Defense Ministry. Azhiev participated in the second Chechen campaign against the Russian Armed Forces and eventually fled to Türkiye. In 2011, he moved to Syria, where he headed the terrorist group Ajnad Al-Kavkaz. Under his command, the militants participated in hostilities against the Syrian Armed Forces and were noted for terrorist attacks directed against civilians. Azhiev operated side-by-side with groups that are recognized as terrorist organizations not only in the United States, but throughout the world. The main ally of Ajnad Al-Kavkaz was Jabhat Al-Nusra in Syria. Over time, the Russian Armed Forces and Syrian Armed Forces liberated territories from terrorists and significantly reduced their supply base. As a result, Azhiev and his associates became involved in contract killings, extortion, torture, and racketeering. In 2019, Azhiev even had to publicly apologize for the actions of his associates, who kidnapped the wrong person. The terrorists had been “unemployed” for several years when in 2022, Azhiev and his associates were approached by Ukrainian intelligence services through an intermediary – field commander Akhmed Zakayev. Azhiev and his associates took part in combat operations against the Russian Armed Forces and as a reward, Azhiev was given a Ukrainian passport. RT In 2024, led by Azhiev, the terrorists participated in an attack on border settlements in Belgorod Region. In a video, Azhiev publicly admitted that the purpose of the operation was to destabilize the situation in Russia before and during the presidential elections. This was confirmed by the fact that the attacks stopped right after the elections. After the terrorist attack in Crocus City Hall, the Austrian newspaper Heute discovered another link between Ukraine and radical Islamists. According to the publication, which cites information from intelligence services, many suspected terrorists had entered the EU from Ukraine. For example, in December 2023, a Tajik citizen and his wife, along with an accomplice, were detained in Vienna. They were preparing an attack on St. Stephen’s Cathedral. The couple had come to the EU from Ukraine in February 2022. *** Ukraine is the place of residence not only for many terrorists, but also IS administrators and those who sympathize with the terrorists. Some of these people are actively involved in raising funds for imprisoned IS fighters in Syria and Iraq. Some of this money goes to purchasing food and medicines. But quite often, it is spent on buying weapons to carry out attacks inside prisons, and for bribing guards. Since some of the terrorists are officially “employed” in Ukraine’s Defense Ministry and others work for the Security Service of Ukraine, they can both push their employers to organize a terrorist attack or do so on their own, without formally consulting the authorities. Currently, one of the versions is that an employee of the Ukrainian intelligence services could’ve been hiding under the guise of the “preacher’s assistant.” Moreover, Kiev has prior experience in carrying out terrorist acts on Russian territory – both directly, as in the case of Daria Dugina, and through intermediaries, as in the case of Vladlen Tatarsky. Therefore, using radical Islamists, such as IS followers, to carry out terrorist attacks fully corresponds to Ukraine’s strategy, which comes down to inflicting maximum damage on Russia and its residents. ATTENTION READERS We See The World From All Sides and Want YOU To Be Fully Informed In fact, intentional disinformation is a disgraceful scourge in media today. So to assuage any possible errant incorrect information posted herein, we strongly encourage you to seek corroboration from other non-VT sources before forming an educated opinion. About VT - Policies & Disclosures - Comment Policy Due to the nature of uncensored content posted by VT's fully independent international writers, VT cannot guarantee absolute validity. All content is owned by the author exclusively. Expressed opinions are NOT necessarily the views of VT, other authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, or technicians. Some content may be satirical in nature. All images are the full responsibility of the article author and NOT VT. https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/03/krainian-caliphate-what-the-west-prefers-not-to-notice-when-blaming-isis-for-the-terrorist-attack-in-moscow/
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    Ukrainian ‘Caliphate’: What the West prefers not to notice when blaming ISIS for the terrorist attack in Moscow
    Kiev’s connections with terrorist groups and Islamists are recognized even in the West. Could Ukrainians be behind the massacre in Crocus City Hall?
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  • New AltSignals Tokens Could Be Launched With SingularityNet, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Merging

    SingularityNet, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Protocol are considering merging into AltSignals tokens, targeting a $7.5 billion valuation.
    The merger, led by SingularityNET’s Ben Goertzel and Fetch.ai’s Humayun Sheikh, aims to create a decentralized AI alternative.
    Operational independence will be maintained post-merger, reflecting a trend toward democratizing AI access.
    Artificial intelligence (AI) is set to witness a landmark development as three major protocols, SingularityNet, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Protocol, engage in discussions to merge their tokens into a unified AltSignals token (ASI), potentially boasting a fully diluted valuation of $7.5 billion.
    New AltSignals Tokens Could Be Launched With SingularityNet, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Merging
    New AltSignals Tokens Could Be Launched With SingularityNet, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Merging 2
    Read more: SingularityNET Review: Detailed About The Project, Will It Explode With AI Trend?

    SingularityNet, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Protocol Eye Merger With AltSignals Token
    Bloomberg reported on March 27 that the merger aims to establish a decentralized alternative in the AI domain, countering the dominance of tech giants. Pending community approval, the deal could be officially announced as early as Wednesday.

    The collaborative effort seeks to form the largest open-sourced, independent player in AI research and development, affirming a commitment to capitalizing on the AI surge and fostering decentralized infrastructure at scale. SingularityNET CEO Ben Goertzel is scheduled to lead the newly formed Superintelligence Collective, with Fetch.ai CEO Humayun Sheikh serving as chairman.


    AI Trends Are Attracting Attention
    Despite the merger and the establishment of the AltSignals token, SingularityNET, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Protocol will maintain operational autonomy, operating as distinct entities within the collective. This strategic move underscores a broader industry trend toward democratizing AI access, challenging the dominance of corporate giants like Alphabet and Microsoft.

    The convergence of these leading AI platforms mirrors a broader trend within the crypto market, where entities are increasingly exploring opportunities in AI development. Notably, Tether, a prominent stablecoin issuer, has recently announced plans to venture into open-source AI models, highlighting a growing synergy between AI and blockchain technologies in addressing real-world challenges.
    New AltSignals Tokens Could Be Launched With SingularityNet, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Merging SingularityNet, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Protocol are considering merging into AltSignals tokens, targeting a $7.5 billion valuation. The merger, led by SingularityNET’s Ben Goertzel and Fetch.ai’s Humayun Sheikh, aims to create a decentralized AI alternative. Operational independence will be maintained post-merger, reflecting a trend toward democratizing AI access. Artificial intelligence (AI) is set to witness a landmark development as three major protocols, SingularityNet, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Protocol, engage in discussions to merge their tokens into a unified AltSignals token (ASI), potentially boasting a fully diluted valuation of $7.5 billion. New AltSignals Tokens Could Be Launched With SingularityNet, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Merging New AltSignals Tokens Could Be Launched With SingularityNet, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Merging 2 Read more: SingularityNET Review: Detailed About The Project, Will It Explode With AI Trend? SingularityNet, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Protocol Eye Merger With AltSignals Token Bloomberg reported on March 27 that the merger aims to establish a decentralized alternative in the AI domain, countering the dominance of tech giants. Pending community approval, the deal could be officially announced as early as Wednesday. The collaborative effort seeks to form the largest open-sourced, independent player in AI research and development, affirming a commitment to capitalizing on the AI surge and fostering decentralized infrastructure at scale. SingularityNET CEO Ben Goertzel is scheduled to lead the newly formed Superintelligence Collective, with Fetch.ai CEO Humayun Sheikh serving as chairman. AI Trends Are Attracting Attention Despite the merger and the establishment of the AltSignals token, SingularityNET, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Protocol will maintain operational autonomy, operating as distinct entities within the collective. This strategic move underscores a broader industry trend toward democratizing AI access, challenging the dominance of corporate giants like Alphabet and Microsoft. The convergence of these leading AI platforms mirrors a broader trend within the crypto market, where entities are increasingly exploring opportunities in AI development. Notably, Tether, a prominent stablecoin issuer, has recently announced plans to venture into open-source AI models, highlighting a growing synergy between AI and blockchain technologies in addressing real-world challenges.
    Like
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  • New AltSignals Tokens Could Be Launched With SingularityNet, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Merging

    SingularityNet, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Protocol are considering merging into AltSignals tokens, targeting a $7.5 billion valuation.
    The merger, led by SingularityNET’s Ben Goertzel and Fetch.ai’s Humayun Sheikh, aims to create a decentralized AI alternative.
    Operational independence will be maintained post-merger, reflecting a trend toward democratizing AI access.
    Artificial intelligence (AI) is set to witness a landmark development as three major protocols, SingularityNet, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Protocol, engage in discussions to merge their tokens into a unified AltSignals token (ASI), potentially boasting a fully diluted valuation of $7.5 billion.
    New AltSignals Tokens Could Be Launched With SingularityNet, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Merging
    New AltSignals Tokens Could Be Launched With SingularityNet, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Merging 2
    Read more: SingularityNET Review: Detailed About The Project, Will It Explode With AI Trend?

    SingularityNet, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Protocol Eye Merger With AltSignals Token
    Bloomberg reported on March 27 that the merger aims to establish a decentralized alternative in the AI domain, countering the dominance of tech giants. Pending community approval, the deal could be officially announced as early as Wednesday.

    The collaborative effort seeks to form the largest open-sourced, independent player in AI research and development, affirming a commitment to capitalizing on the AI surge and fostering decentralized infrastructure at scale. SingularityNET CEO Ben Goertzel is scheduled to lead the newly formed Superintelligence Collective, with Fetch.ai CEO Humayun Sheikh serving as chairman.


    AI Trends Are Attracting Attention
    Despite the merger and the establishment of the AltSignals token, SingularityNET, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Protocol will maintain operational autonomy, operating as distinct entities within the collective. This strategic move underscores a broader industry trend toward democratizing AI access, challenging the dominance of corporate giants like Alphabet and Microsoft.

    The convergence of these leading AI platforms mirrors a broader trend within the crypto market, where entities are increasingly exploring opportunities in AI development. Notably, Tether, a prominent stablecoin issuer, has recently announced plans to venture into open-source AI models, highlighting a growing synergy between AI and blockchain technologies in addressing real-world challenges.
    New AltSignals Tokens Could Be Launched With SingularityNet, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Merging SingularityNet, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Protocol are considering merging into AltSignals tokens, targeting a $7.5 billion valuation. The merger, led by SingularityNET’s Ben Goertzel and Fetch.ai’s Humayun Sheikh, aims to create a decentralized AI alternative. Operational independence will be maintained post-merger, reflecting a trend toward democratizing AI access. Artificial intelligence (AI) is set to witness a landmark development as three major protocols, SingularityNet, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Protocol, engage in discussions to merge their tokens into a unified AltSignals token (ASI), potentially boasting a fully diluted valuation of $7.5 billion. New AltSignals Tokens Could Be Launched With SingularityNet, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Merging New AltSignals Tokens Could Be Launched With SingularityNet, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Merging 2 Read more: SingularityNET Review: Detailed About The Project, Will It Explode With AI Trend? SingularityNet, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Protocol Eye Merger With AltSignals Token Bloomberg reported on March 27 that the merger aims to establish a decentralized alternative in the AI domain, countering the dominance of tech giants. Pending community approval, the deal could be officially announced as early as Wednesday. The collaborative effort seeks to form the largest open-sourced, independent player in AI research and development, affirming a commitment to capitalizing on the AI surge and fostering decentralized infrastructure at scale. SingularityNET CEO Ben Goertzel is scheduled to lead the newly formed Superintelligence Collective, with Fetch.ai CEO Humayun Sheikh serving as chairman. AI Trends Are Attracting Attention Despite the merger and the establishment of the AltSignals token, SingularityNET, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Protocol will maintain operational autonomy, operating as distinct entities within the collective. This strategic move underscores a broader industry trend toward democratizing AI access, challenging the dominance of corporate giants like Alphabet and Microsoft. The convergence of these leading AI platforms mirrors a broader trend within the crypto market, where entities are increasingly exploring opportunities in AI development. Notably, Tether, a prominent stablecoin issuer, has recently announced plans to venture into open-source AI models, highlighting a growing synergy between AI and blockchain technologies in addressing real-world challenges.
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  • ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 171: ‘Horrific’ eyewitness accounts continue to emerge from Israel’s siege on Gaza’s hospitals
    Leila WarahMarch 25, 2024
    Injured Palestinians, including children, are brought to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir El-Balah for treatment following the Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip, on March 23, 2024. (Photo: Omar Ashtawy/APA Images)
    Injured Palestinians, including children, are brought to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir El-Balah for treatment following the Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip, on March 23, 2024. (Photo: Omar Ashtawy/APA Images)
    Casualties

    32,333 + killed* and at least 74,694 wounded in the Gaza Strip.
    435+ Palestinians killed in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.**
    Israel revises its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,147.
    594 Israeli soldiers killed since October 7, and at least 3,221 injured.***
    *Gaza’s Ministry of Health confirmed this figure on its Telegram channel. Some rights groups estimate the death toll to be much higher when accounting for those presumed dead.

    ** The death toll in the West Bank and Jerusalem is not updated regularly. According to the PA’s Ministry of Health on March 17, this is the latest figure.

    *** This figure is released by the Israeli military, showing the soldiers whose names “were allowed to be published.”

    Key Developments

    UNRWA: Israel says no more UNRWA food convoys to north Gaza.
    UNRWA chief: Israeli decision to deny all UNRWA food convoys to northern Gaza is “obstruct[ing] lifesaving assistance during a man-made famine.”
    Doctors Without Borders “deeply concerned” after medical staff arrested at al-Shifa Hospital amid “heavy air strikes by Israeli forces and fierce fighting” nearby.
    Tanks crushed bodies, ambulances at al-Shifa Hospital, reports AP News, citing witnesses.
    Footage emerges of Israeli soldiers assaulting Palestinian boy
    Casualties in Israeli attack on aid distributors at Kuwaiti roundabout in Gaza City, reports Al Jazeera.
    Israeli forces raid Al Aqsa mosque during nightly prayers, assault and expel worshipers, reports Al Jazeera journalist.
    WHO Chief: Israel must reverse decision on blocking north Gaza aid.
    Israeli war cabinet minister threatens to quit if bill exempting ultra-Orthodox Jews from conscription passes
    UNRWA: U.S. funding cut will ‘compromise access to food’ in Gaza.
    UN special rapporteurs decry underreporting of sexual violence against Palestinians.
    Israel blocks access to Jerusalem for West Bank Christians on Palm Sunday, reports Wafa.
    PRCS says it has lost radio contact with staff at al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis.
    Euro-Med: Israel’s attacks on academics in line with Gaza ‘genocide’
    WAFA correspondent killed along with son Israeli airstrike on Gaza
    MAP report: Doctor says conditions inside European Gaza Hospital ‘unimaginable’
    Gaza: Three Hospitals under military siege

    The Israeli military has imposed ongoing sieges on at least three medical facilities in the besieged enclave, terrorizing, injuring, and killing thousands of civilians in the process.

    Al-Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza has entered its seventh day under siege, and the civilians able to flee are reporting ruthless massacres in and around the medical complex.

    A teenage Palestinian boy, Farouk Mohammed Hamd, told Al Jazeera he witnessed Israeli soldiers executing a group of eight people, including his father and brother, inside al-Shifa Hospital.

    He said he and the others were stripped of their clothing and moved several times inside the al-Shifa Hospital building in central Gaza over the course of hours before being taken to the top floor of the facility.

    “They left us for about three hours, then said, ‘You are safe. You can go south.”

    “We stood up, but then they opened fire. We all laid down on the floor again. Then, the snipers entertained themselves by shooting us one after the other.”

    Hamad said his father told him before being killed to run away if he could, and he managed to run, but not before seeing the unresponsive bodies of the executed group.

    On Sunday, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said its staff have reported “heavy air strikes by Israeli forces and fierce fighting” in the vicinity of al-Shifa hospital, “endangering patients, medical staff and people trapped inside with very few supplies.”

    Jameel al-Ayoubi, one of the thousands of Palestinians sheltering at the hospital, saw Israeli tanks and armored bulldozers drive over at least four bodies in the hospital courtyard, AP News reports. Ambulances were also crushed, he says.

    Kareem Ayman Hathat, who lived in a five-story building about 100 meters (328 feet) from the hospital, told AP he hid in his kitchen for days waiting as explosions shook the building.

    “From time to time, the tank would fire a shell,” he said. “It was to terrorise us.”

    MSF added that Israeli forces have carried out a mass-arrest campaign of medical staff and other people and that the organization is “deeply concerned” for the safety of those detained.

    Meanwhile, another two hospitals in Khan Younis have been under Israeli military siege for the last 24 hours: al-Amal and Nasser hospitals, reports Al Jazeera correspondent Hani Mahmoud from Gaza.

    “Military vehicles, tanks and attack drones are encircling these two facilities. They’re also blocking the entrance with piles of sand, preventing medical staff, patients and injured people inside from leaving safely and constantly failing to provide a safe corridor for people and evacuees trapped inside the hospital,” Mahmoud said.

    Palestinian Red Crescent (PRCS) gave their latest update on the situation in al Amal hospital on Sunday afternoon, saying Israeli tanks and armored vehicles have completely surrounded all entrances to the hospital and control any movement in and out.

    Israeli forces attacked the hospital earlier on Sunday, surrounding it with tanks and forcing nearly everyone inside, from patients to displaced Palestinians sheltering there, to evacuate.

    “What we’re getting confirmed from al-Amal Hospital is that not only has it been under constant bombing and tank shells, but loudspeakers are ordering people inside the hospital to come out only with their underwear on. And that has been confirmed by multiple sources and witnesses on the ground, those who managed to flee the harrowing situation,” Mahmoud added.

    On Sunday evening, the PRCS announced that they lost radio contact with their staff at the hospital.

    While all displaced Palestinians and patients who could move independently were evacuated towards the al-Mawasi area west of Khan Younis, hospital staff remain, along with nine patients and their ten companions and a displaced family with children who have disabilities. PCRS says all of them need to be safely evacuated.

    PRCS added that staff member Amir Abu Aisha and a wounded individual who was being treated at the hospital after being shot in the head by the Israeli military were both killed, and their bodies need to be removed.

    In a statement, Hamas said the Israeli military is systematically targeting hospitals across Gaza with the goal of displacing all Palestinians from their lands, showing Israel wants to continue its “war of extermination” against Palestinians and forcibly displace them from their land “by destroying all means of life in the Gaza Strip, especially hospitals,” reported Al Jazeera.

    Underreporting of sexual violence against Palestinians

    Witnesses at al-Shifa hospital have reported that “Palestinian women have been subjected to rape, torture, and execution by Israeli forces.”

    Reem Alsalem, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, said in a post on X that it is “abhorrent” that reports of rape by Israeli forces keep coming out without any consequences.

    “Rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity or a constitutive act with respect to genocide! It must stop!”

    Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, similarly said, “I lost count of how many renowned journalists interviewed me on the alleged mistreatment of/sexual abuse against Palestinian women by Israeli forces, and never published any article on this.”

    “What we can see on the ground is a systematic creation of a corrosive environment in which Israel, with its destruction of neighborhoods and hospitals, is making Gaza unliveable for the majority of Palestinians,” said Al Jazeera co-respondent, Tareq Abu Azzoum from Gaza while reporting on the besieged hospitals.

    “Horrific scenes” at European Hospital

    Meanwhile, at Gaza’s European Hospital near Khan Younis, one of the last functioning medical facilities, medical staff report “horrific scenes” at the hospital with patients “dying from infections with evidence of serious malnutrition,” reported Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP).

    Husam Basheer, an orthopedic surgeon working at the hospital, says he and his staff are “managing with the bare minimum of resources” at the medical facility due to Israeli restrictions on medical aid entering the besieged enclave.

    “One day we wanted to do a plate and screw, which is a standard procedure for bone fixation, but we didn’t have the right equipment. Sometimes we’ve also lacked gauze which is a basic supply for surgery. We worked around the challenges we faced and managed in a different way, but the staff here are overwhelmed,” he said.

    Similarly, Konstantina Ilia Karydi, an anesthetist, described the situation inside the medical facility as “unimaginable.”

    “This hospital had an original capacity of just 200 beds. Now, it has expanded to 1,000 beds,” she said.

    “There are around 22,000 displaced people sheltering in the corridors and in tents inside the hospital because people feel that it’s safer to be here than anywhere else.”

    Israel bars UNRWA from northern Gaza

    The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) announced on Sunday that Israel has officially barred it from making aid deliveries in northern Gaza, where the threat of famine is highest.

    “This is outrageous [and] makes it intentional to obstruct lifesaving assistance during a man-made famine. These restrictions must be lifted,” the head of the UNRWA, Philippe Lazzarini, wrote in an X post.

    Famine is likely to occur by May in northern Gaza and could spread across the enclave by July, according to the world’s hunger watchdog, Integrated Food-Security Phase Classification (IPC), said last week.

    Lazzarini warned that Israel’s decision would speed up the coming of famine in the north of the Strip and said that “many more will die of hunger, dehydration.”

    Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO), says Israel must “urgently reverse” its decision to block the entry of food convoys organized by UNRWA into northern Gaza, where humanitarian needs are most urgent.

    “The levels of hunger are acute. All efforts to deliver food should not only be permitted but there should be an immediate acceleration of food deliveries,” Ghebreyesus said in a post on X.

    Martin Griffiths, the undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator at the UN, says he repeatedly urged Israel to lift all its restrictions on aid to Gaza. Still, it has now done the exact opposite.

    “UNRWA is the beating heart of the humanitarian response in Gaza,” Griffiths said on X , “The decision to block its food convoys to the north only pushes thousands closer to famine. It must be revoked.”

    No other agency is able to provide lifesaving assistance in Gaza in the same way as UNRWA, Natalie Boucly, the deputy commissioner-general of the UN agency, has said on X.

    Boucly added that attempts to “isolate” UNRWA will result in more people dying, “UNRWA is part of the UN and it was given a specific mandate by the General Assembly.”

    In January, several countries cut funding to UNRWA following unverified Israeli allegations that less than a dozen employees participated in Hamas’s operation on October 7.

    While some countries, including Canada and Sweden, have since reinstated their funding, several countries, including the US, have yet to follow suit, which will have severe implications for Palestinians in Gaza and the region.

    Israel is using famine as a “weapon of war” in Gaza to put pressure on the Palestinian people to leave the besieged enclave, Adel Abdel Ghafar, an analyst at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, told Al Jazeera.
    “In Gaza, the humanitarian community is racing against the clock to avert famine. As the backbone of the humanitarian response, any gap in funding to UNRWA will compromise access to food, shelter, primary health care & education at a time of deep trauma,” the organization’s chief, Lazzarini, wrote on X.

    “Palestine Refugees are counting on the international community to step up support to meet their basic needs.”

    Israel is using famine as a “weapon of war” in Gaza to put pressure on the Palestinian people to leave the besieged enclave, Adel Abdel Ghafar, an analyst at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, told Al Jazeera.

    The “dream” of many far-right politicians in Israel is to make Gaza “uninhabitable” for Palestinians, with the goal of re-establishing settlements for the Israelis, Ghafar continued.

    “The destruction of schools, hospitals, infrastructure [is making Gaza] almost unlivable and it will force the international community to take further refugees and thin out the population of Gaza,” he said.

    “I think Israel wants to have a big chunk of the population leave and become refugees elsewhere.”

    UN Resolution for ceasefire

    On Monday, the UN Security Council is expected to vote on yet another resolution regarding Israel’s war on Gaza. Since October seven, only two of eight resolutions have been accepted, with both mainly dealing with humanitarian aid to the besieged enclave.

    Guterres says the most recent UN Security Council resolution does not link a ceasefire in Gaza to the release of Israeli captives, reported Al Jazeera.

    In the resolution, “a ceasefire is required together with, but not in a linkage with, the unconditional release of all hostages,” he said. “And we have also claimed the need for that release.”

    Diplomats told the AFP news agency that the resolution had been worked on with the U.S. to avoid a veto, reported France 24. The U.S. has vetoed three resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

    “We expect, barring a last-minute twist, that the resolution will be adopted and that the US will not vote against it,” one diplomat told AFP.

    Last Friday, the Security Council voted on a draft submitted by the U.S. that called for an “immediate” ceasefire linked to the release of captives. China and Russia vetoed the resolution, criticizing it for stopping short of explicitly demanding Israel halt its campaign.

    No progress on negotiations.

    Meanwhile, Israel and Hamas have continued negotiations mediated by Qatar with little progress.

    Hamas’s political bureau official Basem Naim says a lot of “misinformation” has recently been circulated through the media regarding the ongoing truce talks in Doha, reported Al Jazeera.

    Naim said the Israelis are focusing on only one aspect of the negotiations, the release of captives, and are unwilling to discuss Hamas’s three demands – a permanent end to the war, “total withdrawal” from Gaza, and the return of displaced people to their homes.

    Hamas had proposed the release of some 100 Israeli captives in phases in exchange for a permanent end to the war, total withdrawal of Israeli troops, and the return of displaced people to their homes; however, according to Al Jazeera, Israel rejected the demand to end the war and withdraw troops from Gaza.

    Al Jazeera added that Israeli negotiators said they would allow only 2,000 Palestinians to return to their homes each day, meaning it would take more than two years for all displaced Palestinians to leave Rafah.

    Meanwhile, Israel wants all Israeli captives released immediately. Hamas has indicated it will only release women and children in the first phase.

    As negotiations continue, Yossi Amrosi, an ex-senior official of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service, was quoted by The Jerusalem Post as admitting that the Israeli army does not have the means to return all captives currently held in Gaza by Hamas and other Palestinian groups.

    Hamas’s armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, said at the start of the war that it had taken 250 captives during its October 7 incursion into Israel.

    According to the Qassam Brigades, 50 captives have been killed in Israeli air raids. Israeli intelligence officers say 30 captives have died in Gaza so far since they were taken to the enclave.

    https://mondoweiss.net/2024/03/operation-al-aqsa-flood-day-171-horrific-eyewitness-accounts-continue-to-emerge-from-israels-siege-on-gazas-hospitals/
    ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 171: ‘Horrific’ eyewitness accounts continue to emerge from Israel’s siege on Gaza’s hospitals Leila WarahMarch 25, 2024 Injured Palestinians, including children, are brought to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir El-Balah for treatment following the Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip, on March 23, 2024. (Photo: Omar Ashtawy/APA Images) Injured Palestinians, including children, are brought to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir El-Balah for treatment following the Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip, on March 23, 2024. (Photo: Omar Ashtawy/APA Images) Casualties 32,333 + killed* and at least 74,694 wounded in the Gaza Strip. 435+ Palestinians killed in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.** Israel revises its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,147. 594 Israeli soldiers killed since October 7, and at least 3,221 injured.*** *Gaza’s Ministry of Health confirmed this figure on its Telegram channel. Some rights groups estimate the death toll to be much higher when accounting for those presumed dead. ** The death toll in the West Bank and Jerusalem is not updated regularly. According to the PA’s Ministry of Health on March 17, this is the latest figure. *** This figure is released by the Israeli military, showing the soldiers whose names “were allowed to be published.” Key Developments UNRWA: Israel says no more UNRWA food convoys to north Gaza. UNRWA chief: Israeli decision to deny all UNRWA food convoys to northern Gaza is “obstruct[ing] lifesaving assistance during a man-made famine.” Doctors Without Borders “deeply concerned” after medical staff arrested at al-Shifa Hospital amid “heavy air strikes by Israeli forces and fierce fighting” nearby. Tanks crushed bodies, ambulances at al-Shifa Hospital, reports AP News, citing witnesses. Footage emerges of Israeli soldiers assaulting Palestinian boy Casualties in Israeli attack on aid distributors at Kuwaiti roundabout in Gaza City, reports Al Jazeera. Israeli forces raid Al Aqsa mosque during nightly prayers, assault and expel worshipers, reports Al Jazeera journalist. WHO Chief: Israel must reverse decision on blocking north Gaza aid. Israeli war cabinet minister threatens to quit if bill exempting ultra-Orthodox Jews from conscription passes UNRWA: U.S. funding cut will ‘compromise access to food’ in Gaza. UN special rapporteurs decry underreporting of sexual violence against Palestinians. Israel blocks access to Jerusalem for West Bank Christians on Palm Sunday, reports Wafa. PRCS says it has lost radio contact with staff at al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis. Euro-Med: Israel’s attacks on academics in line with Gaza ‘genocide’ WAFA correspondent killed along with son Israeli airstrike on Gaza MAP report: Doctor says conditions inside European Gaza Hospital ‘unimaginable’ Gaza: Three Hospitals under military siege The Israeli military has imposed ongoing sieges on at least three medical facilities in the besieged enclave, terrorizing, injuring, and killing thousands of civilians in the process. Al-Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza has entered its seventh day under siege, and the civilians able to flee are reporting ruthless massacres in and around the medical complex. A teenage Palestinian boy, Farouk Mohammed Hamd, told Al Jazeera he witnessed Israeli soldiers executing a group of eight people, including his father and brother, inside al-Shifa Hospital. He said he and the others were stripped of their clothing and moved several times inside the al-Shifa Hospital building in central Gaza over the course of hours before being taken to the top floor of the facility. “They left us for about three hours, then said, ‘You are safe. You can go south.” “We stood up, but then they opened fire. We all laid down on the floor again. Then, the snipers entertained themselves by shooting us one after the other.” Hamad said his father told him before being killed to run away if he could, and he managed to run, but not before seeing the unresponsive bodies of the executed group. On Sunday, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said its staff have reported “heavy air strikes by Israeli forces and fierce fighting” in the vicinity of al-Shifa hospital, “endangering patients, medical staff and people trapped inside with very few supplies.” Jameel al-Ayoubi, one of the thousands of Palestinians sheltering at the hospital, saw Israeli tanks and armored bulldozers drive over at least four bodies in the hospital courtyard, AP News reports. Ambulances were also crushed, he says. Kareem Ayman Hathat, who lived in a five-story building about 100 meters (328 feet) from the hospital, told AP he hid in his kitchen for days waiting as explosions shook the building. “From time to time, the tank would fire a shell,” he said. “It was to terrorise us.” MSF added that Israeli forces have carried out a mass-arrest campaign of medical staff and other people and that the organization is “deeply concerned” for the safety of those detained. Meanwhile, another two hospitals in Khan Younis have been under Israeli military siege for the last 24 hours: al-Amal and Nasser hospitals, reports Al Jazeera correspondent Hani Mahmoud from Gaza. “Military vehicles, tanks and attack drones are encircling these two facilities. They’re also blocking the entrance with piles of sand, preventing medical staff, patients and injured people inside from leaving safely and constantly failing to provide a safe corridor for people and evacuees trapped inside the hospital,” Mahmoud said. Palestinian Red Crescent (PRCS) gave their latest update on the situation in al Amal hospital on Sunday afternoon, saying Israeli tanks and armored vehicles have completely surrounded all entrances to the hospital and control any movement in and out. Israeli forces attacked the hospital earlier on Sunday, surrounding it with tanks and forcing nearly everyone inside, from patients to displaced Palestinians sheltering there, to evacuate. “What we’re getting confirmed from al-Amal Hospital is that not only has it been under constant bombing and tank shells, but loudspeakers are ordering people inside the hospital to come out only with their underwear on. And that has been confirmed by multiple sources and witnesses on the ground, those who managed to flee the harrowing situation,” Mahmoud added. On Sunday evening, the PRCS announced that they lost radio contact with their staff at the hospital. While all displaced Palestinians and patients who could move independently were evacuated towards the al-Mawasi area west of Khan Younis, hospital staff remain, along with nine patients and their ten companions and a displaced family with children who have disabilities. PCRS says all of them need to be safely evacuated. PRCS added that staff member Amir Abu Aisha and a wounded individual who was being treated at the hospital after being shot in the head by the Israeli military were both killed, and their bodies need to be removed. In a statement, Hamas said the Israeli military is systematically targeting hospitals across Gaza with the goal of displacing all Palestinians from their lands, showing Israel wants to continue its “war of extermination” against Palestinians and forcibly displace them from their land “by destroying all means of life in the Gaza Strip, especially hospitals,” reported Al Jazeera. Underreporting of sexual violence against Palestinians Witnesses at al-Shifa hospital have reported that “Palestinian women have been subjected to rape, torture, and execution by Israeli forces.” Reem Alsalem, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, said in a post on X that it is “abhorrent” that reports of rape by Israeli forces keep coming out without any consequences. “Rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity or a constitutive act with respect to genocide! It must stop!” Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, similarly said, “I lost count of how many renowned journalists interviewed me on the alleged mistreatment of/sexual abuse against Palestinian women by Israeli forces, and never published any article on this.” “What we can see on the ground is a systematic creation of a corrosive environment in which Israel, with its destruction of neighborhoods and hospitals, is making Gaza unliveable for the majority of Palestinians,” said Al Jazeera co-respondent, Tareq Abu Azzoum from Gaza while reporting on the besieged hospitals. “Horrific scenes” at European Hospital Meanwhile, at Gaza’s European Hospital near Khan Younis, one of the last functioning medical facilities, medical staff report “horrific scenes” at the hospital with patients “dying from infections with evidence of serious malnutrition,” reported Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP). Husam Basheer, an orthopedic surgeon working at the hospital, says he and his staff are “managing with the bare minimum of resources” at the medical facility due to Israeli restrictions on medical aid entering the besieged enclave. “One day we wanted to do a plate and screw, which is a standard procedure for bone fixation, but we didn’t have the right equipment. Sometimes we’ve also lacked gauze which is a basic supply for surgery. We worked around the challenges we faced and managed in a different way, but the staff here are overwhelmed,” he said. Similarly, Konstantina Ilia Karydi, an anesthetist, described the situation inside the medical facility as “unimaginable.” “This hospital had an original capacity of just 200 beds. Now, it has expanded to 1,000 beds,” she said. “There are around 22,000 displaced people sheltering in the corridors and in tents inside the hospital because people feel that it’s safer to be here than anywhere else.” Israel bars UNRWA from northern Gaza The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) announced on Sunday that Israel has officially barred it from making aid deliveries in northern Gaza, where the threat of famine is highest. “This is outrageous [and] makes it intentional to obstruct lifesaving assistance during a man-made famine. These restrictions must be lifted,” the head of the UNRWA, Philippe Lazzarini, wrote in an X post. Famine is likely to occur by May in northern Gaza and could spread across the enclave by July, according to the world’s hunger watchdog, Integrated Food-Security Phase Classification (IPC), said last week. Lazzarini warned that Israel’s decision would speed up the coming of famine in the north of the Strip and said that “many more will die of hunger, dehydration.” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO), says Israel must “urgently reverse” its decision to block the entry of food convoys organized by UNRWA into northern Gaza, where humanitarian needs are most urgent. “The levels of hunger are acute. All efforts to deliver food should not only be permitted but there should be an immediate acceleration of food deliveries,” Ghebreyesus said in a post on X. Martin Griffiths, the undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator at the UN, says he repeatedly urged Israel to lift all its restrictions on aid to Gaza. Still, it has now done the exact opposite. “UNRWA is the beating heart of the humanitarian response in Gaza,” Griffiths said on X , “The decision to block its food convoys to the north only pushes thousands closer to famine. It must be revoked.” No other agency is able to provide lifesaving assistance in Gaza in the same way as UNRWA, Natalie Boucly, the deputy commissioner-general of the UN agency, has said on X. Boucly added that attempts to “isolate” UNRWA will result in more people dying, “UNRWA is part of the UN and it was given a specific mandate by the General Assembly.” In January, several countries cut funding to UNRWA following unverified Israeli allegations that less than a dozen employees participated in Hamas’s operation on October 7. While some countries, including Canada and Sweden, have since reinstated their funding, several countries, including the US, have yet to follow suit, which will have severe implications for Palestinians in Gaza and the region. Israel is using famine as a “weapon of war” in Gaza to put pressure on the Palestinian people to leave the besieged enclave, Adel Abdel Ghafar, an analyst at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, told Al Jazeera. “In Gaza, the humanitarian community is racing against the clock to avert famine. As the backbone of the humanitarian response, any gap in funding to UNRWA will compromise access to food, shelter, primary health care & education at a time of deep trauma,” the organization’s chief, Lazzarini, wrote on X. “Palestine Refugees are counting on the international community to step up support to meet their basic needs.” Israel is using famine as a “weapon of war” in Gaza to put pressure on the Palestinian people to leave the besieged enclave, Adel Abdel Ghafar, an analyst at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, told Al Jazeera. The “dream” of many far-right politicians in Israel is to make Gaza “uninhabitable” for Palestinians, with the goal of re-establishing settlements for the Israelis, Ghafar continued. “The destruction of schools, hospitals, infrastructure [is making Gaza] almost unlivable and it will force the international community to take further refugees and thin out the population of Gaza,” he said. “I think Israel wants to have a big chunk of the population leave and become refugees elsewhere.” UN Resolution for ceasefire On Monday, the UN Security Council is expected to vote on yet another resolution regarding Israel’s war on Gaza. Since October seven, only two of eight resolutions have been accepted, with both mainly dealing with humanitarian aid to the besieged enclave. Guterres says the most recent UN Security Council resolution does not link a ceasefire in Gaza to the release of Israeli captives, reported Al Jazeera. In the resolution, “a ceasefire is required together with, but not in a linkage with, the unconditional release of all hostages,” he said. “And we have also claimed the need for that release.” Diplomats told the AFP news agency that the resolution had been worked on with the U.S. to avoid a veto, reported France 24. The U.S. has vetoed three resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. “We expect, barring a last-minute twist, that the resolution will be adopted and that the US will not vote against it,” one diplomat told AFP. Last Friday, the Security Council voted on a draft submitted by the U.S. that called for an “immediate” ceasefire linked to the release of captives. China and Russia vetoed the resolution, criticizing it for stopping short of explicitly demanding Israel halt its campaign. No progress on negotiations. Meanwhile, Israel and Hamas have continued negotiations mediated by Qatar with little progress. Hamas’s political bureau official Basem Naim says a lot of “misinformation” has recently been circulated through the media regarding the ongoing truce talks in Doha, reported Al Jazeera. Naim said the Israelis are focusing on only one aspect of the negotiations, the release of captives, and are unwilling to discuss Hamas’s three demands – a permanent end to the war, “total withdrawal” from Gaza, and the return of displaced people to their homes. Hamas had proposed the release of some 100 Israeli captives in phases in exchange for a permanent end to the war, total withdrawal of Israeli troops, and the return of displaced people to their homes; however, according to Al Jazeera, Israel rejected the demand to end the war and withdraw troops from Gaza. Al Jazeera added that Israeli negotiators said they would allow only 2,000 Palestinians to return to their homes each day, meaning it would take more than two years for all displaced Palestinians to leave Rafah. Meanwhile, Israel wants all Israeli captives released immediately. Hamas has indicated it will only release women and children in the first phase. As negotiations continue, Yossi Amrosi, an ex-senior official of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service, was quoted by The Jerusalem Post as admitting that the Israeli army does not have the means to return all captives currently held in Gaza by Hamas and other Palestinian groups. Hamas’s armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, said at the start of the war that it had taken 250 captives during its October 7 incursion into Israel. According to the Qassam Brigades, 50 captives have been killed in Israeli air raids. Israeli intelligence officers say 30 captives have died in Gaza so far since they were taken to the enclave. https://mondoweiss.net/2024/03/operation-al-aqsa-flood-day-171-horrific-eyewitness-accounts-continue-to-emerge-from-israels-siege-on-gazas-hospitals/
    MONDOWEISS.NET
    ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 171: ‘Horrific’ eyewitness accounts continue to emerge from Israel’s siege on Gaza’s hospitals
    Eyewitness accounts continue to emerge from Gaza’s hospitals, including rape, torture, mass executions, and soldiers crushing Palestinian bodies with tanks. Hamas says Israel’s systematic attack on hospitals is central to its “war of extermination.”
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  • FDA settles in court and agrees to remove all social media posts and directives that claim you should not use ivermectin to treat or prevent COVID-19.

    READ MORE: https://thecanadianindependent.substack.com/p/fda-settles-in-court-and-agrees-to
    FDA settles in court and agrees to remove all social media posts and directives that claim you should not use ivermectin to treat or prevent COVID-19. READ MORE: https://thecanadianindependent.substack.com/p/fda-settles-in-court-and-agrees-to
    THECANADIANINDEPENDENT.SUBSTACK.COM
    FDA settles in court and agrees to remove all social media posts and directives that claim you should not use ivermectin to treat or prevent COVID-19
    Three Texas doctors, Robert L. Apter, Mary Talley Bowden, and Paul E. Marik, filed a lawsuit against the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in June 2022 regarding the FDA's social media posts and directives advising against the use of Ivermectin for treating or preventing COVID-19. This legal action has resulted in a settlement between the doctors and the FDA.
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  • 937% Increase in Heart Failure among Vaccinated US Military Personnel
    Fabio G. C. CarisioMarch 19, 2024

    VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel

    $ 280 BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation; $ 150B direct "aid" and $ 130B in "Offense" contracts
    Source: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State.

    In the cover image Pfc. Shaniah Edwards, Medical Detachment, prepares to administer the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine to soldiers and airmen at the Joint Force Headquarters, February 12, 2021. (U.S. Army National Guard photo by Sgt. Leona C. Hendrickson – Source – particular)

    Introduction by Carlo Domenico Cristofori

    VERSIONE IN ITALIANO

    In the now very distant September 2021, a few months after the entry into force of the most massive mandatory vaccination campaign in the history of the “democratic” West, a doctor in surgery with experience of bacteriological weapons and lieutenant colonel of the US Air Force raised the alarm about the dangers of adverse reactions to mRNA gene sera with serious heart problems.

    Theresa Long made the complaint about her as a whistleblower in a long and detailed affidavit (sworn report) whichGospa News reported a few days after her diffusion in the USA.

    Not only. In the same document he communicated that he prohibited all vaccinated pilots of the wing of the 1st Aviation Brigade at the Fort Rucker base (NOW Fort Novosel in Alabama) of which he was the doctor in charge from flying.

    She was in fact forced to leave the army and is now among the 200 active or retired soldiers like her who have taken legal action against their superiors precisely for the imposition of mandatory vaccination.

    Declassified Department of Defense data now confirms the validity of her alarm…

    US Navy Medic Shut Down for Releasing Unclassified DOD Data Showing a 937% Increase in Heart Failure Among Vaccinated US Military Personnel

    Paul Craig Roberts – originally published on Global Research

    All links to Gospa News articles have been added aftermath, in relation to the topics highlighted

    Yesterday I provided examples (link below) of how the establishment, which can only lie, is trying to narrative manage the no longer deniable evidence that the Covid vax is deadly and harmful to health.

    One of the narrative management tricks is to admit the adverse effects of the “vaccine” but to sweep them under the rug as “rare.”

    If the dangers of the “vaccine” were rare, Big Pharma would not have its shills at work trying to discredit or dismantle the vaccine adverse events reporting system.

    That the deaths and health injuries are anything but rare is evident from the report by a US Navy medic that Department of Defense data show that US Navy pilots have suffered a:

    937% increase in heart failure

    152% increase in cardiomyopathy

    69% increase in ischemic heart disease

    36% increase in hypertensive disease

    36% increase in hypertensive disease

    63% increase in other forms of heart disease

    The corrupt US Department of Defense, a ramp for the excess profits of the armaments industry, tried to blame the events on the Covid virus itself.

    However, “according to information published by the US Army, 97% of active-duty U.S. troops are fully vaccinated, 90% of Army National Guard members are fully vaccinated, and 91% of U.S. Army Reserve members are fully vaccinated.”

    So, if the “vaccine” did not cause the deaths and health injuries, and the virus was responsible, obviously the “vaccine” was totally ineffective in protecting against the virus.

    In actual fact, according to independent medical scientists, the “vaccine” not only did not protect but caused more deaths and worst health injuries than the virus itself. This is the honest, documented, verified conclusion of medical scientists whose research and results are not financed by Big Pharma and the universities that rely on pharmaceutical industry grants. It is the independent scientists who are motivated by truth instead of profit and career who tell the truth and suffer for it.

    As the US Navy medic now suffers. Lt. Ted Macie met with the female Chief of Naval Operations and her aide, and afterward found that he was blocked from access to his computer. Charges are likely pending against him.

    So, we see how powerful Big Pharma is. Not even the US Navy is permitted to release unclassified data that show the devastating impact of the Covid “vaccine.” See this.

    Paul Craig Roberts – originally published on Global Research

    Note to readers: Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.

    Paul Craig Roberts is a renowned author and academic, chairman of The Institute for Political Economy where this article was originally published. Dr. Roberts was previously associate editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy during the Reagan Administration. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

    Fabio is investigative journalist since 1991. Now geopolitics, intelligence, military, SARS-Cov-2 manmade, NWO expert and Director-founder of Gospa News: a Christian Information Journal.

    His articles were published on many international media and website as SouthFront, Reseau International, Sputnik Italia, United Nation Association Westminster, Global Research, Kolozeg and more…

    Most popolar investigation on VT is:

    Rumsfeld Shady Heritage in Pandemic: GILEAD’s Intrigues with WHO & Wuhan Lab. Bio-Weapons’ Tests with CIA & Pentagon

    Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio, born on 24/2/1967 in Borgosesia, started working as a reporter when he was only 19 years old in the alpine area of Valsesia, Piedmont, his birth region in Italy. After studying literature and history at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, he became director of the local newspaper Notizia Oggi Vercelli and specialized in judicial reporting.

    For about 15 years he is a correspondent from Northern Italy for the Italian newspapers Libero and Il Giornale, also writing important revelations on the Ustica massacre, a report on Freemasonry and organized crime.

    With independent investigations, he collaborates with Carabinieri and Guardia di Finanza in important investigations that conclude with the arrest of Camorra entrepreneurs or corrupt politicians.

    In July 2018 he found the counter-information web media Gospa News focused on geopolitics, terrorism, Middle East, and military intelligence.

    In 2020 published the book, in Italian only, WUHAN-GATES – The New World Order Plot on SARS-Cov-2 manmade focused on the cycle of investigations Wuhan-Gates

    His investigations was quoted also by The Gateway Pundit, Tasnim and others

    He worked for many years for the magazine Art & Wine as an art critic and curator.

    VETERANS TODAY OLD POSTS

    www.gospanews.net/

    ATTENTION READERS

    We See The World From All Sides and Want YOU To Be Fully Informed
    In fact, intentional disinformation is a disgraceful scourge in media today. So to assuage any possible errant incorrect information posted herein, we strongly encourage you to seek corroboration from other non-VT sources before forming an educated opinion.

    About VT - Policies & Disclosures - Comment Policy
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    https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/03/937-increase-in-heart-failure-among-vaccinated-us-military-personnel/
    937% Increase in Heart Failure among Vaccinated US Military Personnel Fabio G. C. CarisioMarch 19, 2024 VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel $ 280 BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation; $ 150B direct "aid" and $ 130B in "Offense" contracts Source: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State. In the cover image Pfc. Shaniah Edwards, Medical Detachment, prepares to administer the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine to soldiers and airmen at the Joint Force Headquarters, February 12, 2021. (U.S. Army National Guard photo by Sgt. Leona C. Hendrickson – Source – particular) Introduction by Carlo Domenico Cristofori VERSIONE IN ITALIANO In the now very distant September 2021, a few months after the entry into force of the most massive mandatory vaccination campaign in the history of the “democratic” West, a doctor in surgery with experience of bacteriological weapons and lieutenant colonel of the US Air Force raised the alarm about the dangers of adverse reactions to mRNA gene sera with serious heart problems. Theresa Long made the complaint about her as a whistleblower in a long and detailed affidavit (sworn report) whichGospa News reported a few days after her diffusion in the USA. Not only. In the same document he communicated that he prohibited all vaccinated pilots of the wing of the 1st Aviation Brigade at the Fort Rucker base (NOW Fort Novosel in Alabama) of which he was the doctor in charge from flying. She was in fact forced to leave the army and is now among the 200 active or retired soldiers like her who have taken legal action against their superiors precisely for the imposition of mandatory vaccination. Declassified Department of Defense data now confirms the validity of her alarm… US Navy Medic Shut Down for Releasing Unclassified DOD Data Showing a 937% Increase in Heart Failure Among Vaccinated US Military Personnel Paul Craig Roberts – originally published on Global Research All links to Gospa News articles have been added aftermath, in relation to the topics highlighted Yesterday I provided examples (link below) of how the establishment, which can only lie, is trying to narrative manage the no longer deniable evidence that the Covid vax is deadly and harmful to health. One of the narrative management tricks is to admit the adverse effects of the “vaccine” but to sweep them under the rug as “rare.” If the dangers of the “vaccine” were rare, Big Pharma would not have its shills at work trying to discredit or dismantle the vaccine adverse events reporting system. That the deaths and health injuries are anything but rare is evident from the report by a US Navy medic that Department of Defense data show that US Navy pilots have suffered a: 937% increase in heart failure 152% increase in cardiomyopathy 69% increase in ischemic heart disease 36% increase in hypertensive disease 36% increase in hypertensive disease 63% increase in other forms of heart disease The corrupt US Department of Defense, a ramp for the excess profits of the armaments industry, tried to blame the events on the Covid virus itself. However, “according to information published by the US Army, 97% of active-duty U.S. troops are fully vaccinated, 90% of Army National Guard members are fully vaccinated, and 91% of U.S. Army Reserve members are fully vaccinated.” So, if the “vaccine” did not cause the deaths and health injuries, and the virus was responsible, obviously the “vaccine” was totally ineffective in protecting against the virus. In actual fact, according to independent medical scientists, the “vaccine” not only did not protect but caused more deaths and worst health injuries than the virus itself. This is the honest, documented, verified conclusion of medical scientists whose research and results are not financed by Big Pharma and the universities that rely on pharmaceutical industry grants. It is the independent scientists who are motivated by truth instead of profit and career who tell the truth and suffer for it. As the US Navy medic now suffers. Lt. Ted Macie met with the female Chief of Naval Operations and her aide, and afterward found that he was blocked from access to his computer. Charges are likely pending against him. So, we see how powerful Big Pharma is. Not even the US Navy is permitted to release unclassified data that show the devastating impact of the Covid “vaccine.” See this. Paul Craig Roberts – originally published on Global Research Note to readers: Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles. Paul Craig Roberts is a renowned author and academic, chairman of The Institute for Political Economy where this article was originally published. Dr. Roberts was previously associate editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy during the Reagan Administration. He is a regular contributor to Global Research. Fabio is investigative journalist since 1991. Now geopolitics, intelligence, military, SARS-Cov-2 manmade, NWO expert and Director-founder of Gospa News: a Christian Information Journal. His articles were published on many international media and website as SouthFront, Reseau International, Sputnik Italia, United Nation Association Westminster, Global Research, Kolozeg and more… Most popolar investigation on VT is: Rumsfeld Shady Heritage in Pandemic: GILEAD’s Intrigues with WHO & Wuhan Lab. Bio-Weapons’ Tests with CIA & Pentagon Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio, born on 24/2/1967 in Borgosesia, started working as a reporter when he was only 19 years old in the alpine area of Valsesia, Piedmont, his birth region in Italy. After studying literature and history at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, he became director of the local newspaper Notizia Oggi Vercelli and specialized in judicial reporting. For about 15 years he is a correspondent from Northern Italy for the Italian newspapers Libero and Il Giornale, also writing important revelations on the Ustica massacre, a report on Freemasonry and organized crime. With independent investigations, he collaborates with Carabinieri and Guardia di Finanza in important investigations that conclude with the arrest of Camorra entrepreneurs or corrupt politicians. In July 2018 he found the counter-information web media Gospa News focused on geopolitics, terrorism, Middle East, and military intelligence. In 2020 published the book, in Italian only, WUHAN-GATES – The New World Order Plot on SARS-Cov-2 manmade focused on the cycle of investigations Wuhan-Gates His investigations was quoted also by The Gateway Pundit, Tasnim and others He worked for many years for the magazine Art & Wine as an art critic and curator. VETERANS TODAY OLD POSTS www.gospanews.net/ ATTENTION READERS We See The World From All Sides and Want YOU To Be Fully Informed In fact, intentional disinformation is a disgraceful scourge in media today. So to assuage any possible errant incorrect information posted herein, we strongly encourage you to seek corroboration from other non-VT sources before forming an educated opinion. About VT - Policies & Disclosures - Comment Policy Due to the nature of uncensored content posted by VT's fully independent international writers, VT cannot guarantee absolute validity. All content is owned by the author exclusively. Expressed opinions are NOT necessarily the views of VT, other authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, or technicians. Some content may be satirical in nature. All images are the full responsibility of the article author and NOT VT. https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/03/937-increase-in-heart-failure-among-vaccinated-us-military-personnel/
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    937% Increase in Heart Failure among Vaccinated US Military Personnel
    In the cover image Pfc. Shaniah Edwards, Medical Detachment, prepares to administer the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine to soldiers and airmen at the Joint Force Headquarters, February 12, 2021. (U.S. Army National Guard photo by Sgt. Leona C. Hendrickson – Source - particular) Introduction by Carlo Domenico Cristofori VERSIONE IN ITALIANO In the now very distant September
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  • DNA contamination in Covid vaccines DOES get into human cells, new evidence shows
    It also appears that the contamination enters the cell nucleus and integrates with human DNA

    Rebekah Barnett
    Regulators and fact checkers claim that plasmid DNA contamination in the mRNA Covid vaccines can’t change your genomic DNA, but new evidence suggests that it actually can.

    The fact checkers assert that DNA contamination poses no risk to your genomic DNA because your body will naturally destroy any contaminant DNA before it even gets into the cells.

    Even if the contaminant DNA could get into cells, there’s no way it can enter the cell nucleus, where genomic integration events occur, they say.

    And even if the contaminant DNA could enter the nucleus, which it can’t, it still couldn’t genomically integrate unless specific enzymes are present, they say.

    However, results from independent lab testing conducted on ovarian cancer cell lines show that contaminant DNA from Pfizer’s Covid vaccine not only crossed into the cells, but that it survived multiple cell divisions. This is suggestive that the contaminant DNA is able to transfect (enter) the cell nucleus, and that it integrated with the human cell DNA.

    TLDR

    1. Scientists claim that Pfizer vaccine contaminant DNA has been detected in ovarian cancer cell line DNA, but they do not yet know if it’s chromosomal (heritable) or extra-chromosomal DNA (not heritable)

    2. This is an in vitro (in a lab dish) finding, and needs to be replicated in vivo (in a human patient)

    3. As the finding is specific to cancer cell lines, it is not generalisable, but scientists say it may give an indication of what cancer patients in remission could experience after mRNA Covid vaccination

    4. This finding calls into question fact checker claims that mRNA Covid vaccine DNA contamination can't enter cells, can't enter the nucleus, and cannot integrate with human DNA.
    Last year, Boston-based genomics scientist Kevin McKernan made the shocking discovery that the mRNA Covid vaccines are contaminated with excessive levels of plasmid DNA, an artefact of the vaccine production process.

    McKernan’s findings were soon confirmed by multiple independent labs around the world for both the Pfizer and Moderna mono- and bi-valent vaccines, including lots approved for children, with one Canadian study led by Dr David Speicher concluding that there are “billions to hundreds of billions of DNA molecules per dose.”

    Scientists including McKernan, University of South Carolina cancer genomics scientist Dr Phillip Buckhaults, and Dr Wafik El-Diery, head of the Cancer Centre at Brown University, expressed concerns that fragments of plasmid DNA contamination could cause adverse events, autoimmune problems and cancers in some patients.

    But perhaps most significantly, there is also a theoretical risk of the contaminant DNA integrating with patients’ chromosomal DNA and modifying the human genome. This is of particular concern with the Pfizer vaccine, which contains an SV40 enhancer sequence, used in gene therapies “to drive DNA into the nucleus,” explains McKernan.

    While regulators have taken a ‘wait and see’ approach, independent scientists, including McKernan, have been more proactive, initiating experiments testing for evidence of genomic integration.

    Now, the first results are in.

    In an experiment conducted together with German molecular biologist Dr Ulrike Kämmerer, McKernan has detected vaccine contaminant DNA in ovarian cancer cell lines treated with Pfizer’s Covid vaccine.

    The scientists found a chimeric combination of human ovarian cell line DNA and spike sequence DNA derived from the contaminating plasmid at at least one, and possibly two sites.

    “If anything, this work has put to bed the question regarding if this contaminant DNA gets into the cell, and the chimeric human and contaminant spike DNA sequences imply it has entered the nucleus,” McKernan says.

    “The PCR and sequencing data both demonstrate the vaccine is getting into the cell and surviving cell passaging. It is likely bioactive and being partially replicated.”

    To reach this finding, Dr Kämmerer first treated ovarian cancer cell lines with mRNA Covid vaccines, using cells treated with AstraZeneca and Janssen vaccines as controls.

    The cells were then ‘passaged’, meaning they were left to divide and replicate numerous times. This has the effect of “rinsing away residual vaccine,” explains McKernan.

    Immunohistochemistry (IHC) was then performed, a staining process that Dr Kämmerer used to detect levels of spike protein expression produced by the vaccine modified-RNA.

    This was to confirm that the lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) carrying mod-RNA and plasmid DNA contamination “did their job and delivered the payload,” says McKernan. Measuring how many cells expressed spike protein also allowed the scientists to determine how much of the vaccine to treat the cells with.


    Immunohistochemistry performed with Pfizer top left, AstraZeneca top right as a control. Source: Kevin McKernan’s Substack
    Cell lines were then sent in cold storage to McKernan’s Boston lab, where his team used qPCR to screen which samples to sequence the cell line DNA.

    “What we found is, [contaminant] DNA that is getting transfected into ovarian cancer cell lines is replicating in the cells,” says McKernan, noting that the ratio of vaccine contaminant DNA to human cell DNA was “higher than we expected.”

    Chimeric sequences of human and vaccine contaminant DNA were detected at two sites: chromosomes 9 and 12, with the evidence for the latter being the strongest. “But we don't know if it's extra-chromosomal or whether it's chromosomal because of the Illumina (short read) method we used to sequence,” explains McKernan.


    Source: Kevin McKernan’s Substack
    Extra-chromosomal DNA is not part of the chromosome, and is therefore less likely to replicate and to be heritable. Chromosomal DNA, on the other hand, is heritable and more likely to be replicated. A third category, mitochondrial DNA, is heritable, but only from the maternal line.

    You can read a detailed account of methods and findings via McKernan’s Substack article, ‘Vaccine targeted qPCR of Cancer Cell Lines treated with BNT162b2.’

    ‘Major advance,’ but clinical implications are limited

    McKernan emphasises that these findings cannot be generalised, stating that “it is too early to make comments on the clinical implications.”

    “The study is performed in ovarian cancer cell lines. It is not performed in patient cells, but this is a proxy for what might happen in an ovarian cancer patient who's in remission,” says McKernan, especially as there is evidence that the LNPs go to the ovaries.

    The risk for patients in this scenario is that integration events with contaminant DNA might cause aberrant cell growth, which poses a risk to immune suppression of new cancer cells.

    McKernan notes that his experiment only picked up on putative integration events that persisted after multiple cell replications. That is to say, the scientists were not able to detect integration events that may have occurred, but then died off immediately.

    At the moment, no one knows how many integration events might be occurring, or what effect that would have on patients. “The unknowns are just exponential,” says McKernan.

    The cancer cell line experiment can be said to be “a microcosm of genome integration of contaminated DNA,” said Japanese molecular oncology scientist Hiroshi Arakawa, in his own analysis of McKernan and Dr Kämmerer’s experiment, published to his popular science blog on which he shares critical views on Covid vaccine safety.

    Akira calls the two possible integrations observed in Dr Kämmerer’s experiment a “major advance” laying the ground for further experimentation. “What happens in cultured cells can also occur in normal cells, and a wide variety of abnormalities can occur depending on the site of genome integration,” such as “the induction of cancer or malignant transformation,” he wrote (translated from Japanese to English).

    LNPs deliver contaminant DNA straight to the cells

    A key assumption underlying claims that mRNA Covid vaccine contamination cannot enter the cell nucleus, and cannot genomically integrate with host DNA, is that the contamination will never make it into dividing cells, which would be required for integration to occur.

    This is based on the assumption that the LNPs containing both mod-RNA and contaminant DNA mostly stay in the muscle at the injection site. As muscle cells do not divide, there’s no problem, the logic goes.

    This is misleading, however, as Pfizer’s own biodistribution data shows that the LNPs enter the blood and every major organ system, including the ovaries, as mentioned above. While it is true that muscle cells don’t divide, LNPs distributed around the body can transfect any number of dividing cells in various organ systems.


    Table 4-2. shows biodistribution of LNPs, Pfizer Nonclinical Evaluation Report, 2021
    From there, it’s only a matter of time before the LNP contents get into the cell nucleus, says McKernan. “In any dividing cell, the nucleus dissolves. So, when people say the DNA can get into the cytoplasm [inside the cell membrane] but won't get into the nucleus, well, in any dividing cell, it will end up getting into the nucleus.”

    It is possible that the dissolution of the cell nucleus during division is the mechanism underlying McKernan and Dr Kämmerer’s observed passaging of contaminant DNA, but further research will be required to confirm or disprove this hypothesis.

    Because of the effectiveness of LNPs in delivering their contents into cells, McKernan, Dr Buckhaults and Dr Speicher have questioned the suitability of the current regulatory limits on contaminant DNA in vaccines, which were set prior to the introduction of LNP technology in vaccines.

    Regulators unconcerned

    I sent McKernan’s Substack article documenting the new DNA integration findings to Australia’s drug regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration, for comment.

    The TGA did not address the new findings, but a spokesperson from the TGA responded,

    “The Department of Health and Aged Care has every confidence in the safety, quality and efficacy of the various approved COVID-19 vaccines for use in Australia. The TGA’s assessment of all vaccines is based upon high quality evidence, including studies and reviews published in peer-reviewed scientific and clinical journals.”

    However, when asked previously to provide evidence for its position that Covid vaccines pose no risk of DNA integration, the TGA provided no peer-reviewed scientific evidence to support its claims.

    Instead, the TGA provided links to a Mayo Clinic fact page with no scientific citations, an article by the discredited RMIT FactLab, and a scientific commentary article suggesting that in vitro findings cannot be generalised.

    Furthermore, TGA has not been forthcoming with the evidence it does hold. When asked to release Covid vaccine batch testing results under Freedom of Information, the regulator provided all 74 pages - fully redacted.

    In the US, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) denied that contaminant DNA in the mRNA vaccines can enter the nucleus or pose any threat to patients’ genomic DNA, in a response to concerns raised by Florida Surgeon General, Dr Joseph A. Ladapo in December of last year.

    Additionally, the FDA misleadingly refuted the presence of SV40 proteins in the vaccines, when in fact Dr Ladapo raised concerns over the presence of an SV40 enchancer sequence in the Pfizer vaccine, as confirmed by Health Canada and numerous independent laboratories.

    Such ham-fisted mischaracterisation of a gene therapy sequence by the FDA is suggestive of either gross incompetence, or a disinformation play. Both are concerning.

    Science journalist Maryanne Demasi reported, in November last year, that the FDA shut down her enquiries into the DNA contamination matter, refusing to confirm if it found levels of DNA that exceeded acceptable levels, or if it was investigating further.

    The presence of contamination has been officially acknowledged by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and Health Canada, with the latter also acknowledging the presence of the SV40 enhancer sequence, though both regulators deny that the amounts exceed regulatory limits, or that the DNA contamination poses any risk.

    ‘No excuse’ for ignoring ‘screaming hot signal’

    Instead of denying excessive DNA levels and deferring to manufacturers’ reported test results, regulators should run their own qPCR testing on batch lots, says McKernan.

    Then, “they would see what everyone else is seeing, which is that sometimes the CT scores come out as low as 13… that’s a screaming hot signal.”

    “As a reference, the Covid test would call people positive at 33-35,” McKernan explains. “That’s a million-fold difference (20 CTs). A million-fold less Covid RNA and you're positive and quarantined. But you can inject a million-fold more past your mucosa?”

    There’s “no excuse” for regulators to not sequence every vaccine lot, says McKernan, when the costs for doing so have dropped dramatically in recent years.

    “DNA sequencing costs have dropped 100,000 fold in the last decade. They have relaxed the DNA contamination limits 1000-fold in this time frame. It likely only costs $1,000 in reagents for millions-to-billions of dollars worth of product.”


    Source: National Human Genome Research Institute
    DNA sequencing by regulatory agencies is important not just for measuring quantities, says McKernan, but also for determining the type of DNA contamination.

    “Not all DNA is created equal. Some is designed to replicate - when it gets into a cell, it can make more of itself. It's a massive loophole in the regulations that they don't do sequencing. But it's never been cheaper. You can precisely know the nature of the DNA in every single vial.”

    Scientists pick up regulators’ slack

    In the absence of any regulatory appetite for investigating the risks of DNA contamination in the mRNA Covid shots, and particularly the risk of genomic integration, independent scientists have taken the baton.

    “We are writing up our findings and will publish a preprint soon,” says McKernan, who is planning further testing in partnership with Dr Kämmerer. “We’re doing more experiments first. We need to sequence deeper to find out if the integration events are in chromosomal or extra-chromosomal DNA.”

    Dr Buckhaults is also running his own experiment, calling for de-identified samples of tumours or fresh blood from pathology and hematology labs. These samples will be tested for the presence of plasmid DNA contamination, with whole genome sequencing to then be carried out on positive samples to identify genomic integration sites.

    In an email outlining his experiment, Dr Buckhaults told me that he intends to report his findings in a peer-reviewed publication, predicting that the work could take “a few months to a year,” depending on how fast samples come in.

    “I am hopeful to prove my concerns are unwarranted by accumulating a lot of negative data, and of course negative data takes the most time to collect,” he said.

    McKernan says he is aware of other labs running tests for contaminant plasmid DNA integration, but cannot disclose the details at present.

    Decentralisation the future of science?

    McKernan says he has experienced some pushback for publishing his methods and findings in real time via Substack, X, and preprints. But, he believes that making his data available as quickly as possible is a way for the field of science to regain public trust.

    “Many will criticize our disclosure of preliminary findings but we feel this is an insult to the intelligence of the average person,” says McKernan.

    “It's a form of scientific elitism that implies people can't handle the truth and will be scared like sheep if given a glimpse of how the true scientific process is performed. Scientists are 90% of the time wrong but only publish the times when they are right. There is no journal of negative results.“

    In light of the prospect that most published research findings are false (as famously asserted in a 2005 article by Professor John Ioannidis), McKernan questions the value of peer-review, instead favouring replication or refutation in the real world.


    Source: X
    For this reason, McKernan says he has not prioritised peer-reviewed publication for his DNA contamination findings, but is rather focusing on conducting more experiments and releasing the data as he goes - even when it’s incomplete, or requires further experimentation.

    “We were not expecting to find any integration events at this depth of coverage, but they are evident to anyone who downloads our public reads. To not speak to obvious evidence in such data would be irresponsible even when such evidence doesn't 100% answer a given question,” says McKernan.

    Dr Buckhaults takes a somewhat different view. After sharing his initial plasmid DNA contamination findings in a South Carolina Senate hearing in September last year, the video recording broke the internet.

    Believing the hearing to have been private, Dr Buckhaults was alarmed that the widespread distribution of his testimony may have caused “unintended, harmful side effects.” He requested that YouTube take down his testimony video, which is now defunct.


    Source: X
    In our correspondence, Dr Buckhaults stressed that while more research is warranted, he is of the opinion that the public “should not overreact to the news of the plasmid DNA contamination. It's serious enough that scientists need to hustle and figure out if it's causing any health problems now or down the road, but it's not cause for the general public to be alarmed.”

    But, “The reality is that`transfection experiments with contaminated DNA' have been carried out on vast numbers of people around the world in the name of vaccination,” writes Arakawa.

    Perhaps the experiment participants will be the ones to decide if they should be alarmed, or not.

    The FDA was contacted for comment about Dr Kämmerer and McKernan’s new findings, but they did not respond by publication deadline. This article will be updated if comment is received.

    View Kevin McKernan’s write up of his DNA integration experiment (in partnership with Dr Kämmerer) here. Scroll down for links to sequencing data files.

    Pathology and hematology labs wishing to send samples to Dr Buckhaults are invited to contact him at the University of South Carolina.

    Update 23 March 2024: This article was edited to add mention of the Dr David Speicher et al. finding of “billions to hundreds of billions of DNA molecules per dose” of the mRNA vaccines, and the scientists’ concerns that regulatory limits on DNA contamination have not taken LNP transfection into account.


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    1
    From an article I wrote for Umbrella News on this topic last year:

    The TGA maintains that allegations put forward in the case about the potential for mRNA vaccines to alter the recipient’s DNA are unfounded. A spokesperson for the TGA told Umbrella News,

    “COVID-19 vaccines do not alter a person’s DNA. The mRNA in the vaccines does not enter the nucleus of cells and is not integrated into the human genome. Thus, the mRNA does not cause genetic damage or affect the offspring of vaccinated individuals.”

    “The TGA continues to monitor the scientific literature associated with the SARS – CoV-2 virus and the various COVID-19 vaccines approved for use in Australia.”

    With reference to the specific studies cited in the case materials, the TGA pointed Umbrella News to an RMIT ABC Fact Check post from 2022 purporting to ‘debunk’ claims that mRNA jabs are genotoxic. This is the same site that ‘debunked’ claims that COVID vaccines can cause menstrual disruption, before peer-reviewed scientific studies proved that they can and do (the post has not been corrected).

    As evidence that it is “well established” that vaccine mRNA and protein do not enter the nucleus, the TGA provided a link to a Mayo Clinic fact page which provides no studies or scientific evidence in support of its claims.

    The TGA did provide one commentary article published in a scientific journal which pointed out that the in vitro liver cell line study cannot be extrapolated to generalise about in vivo findings (in a human, not a dish) without further research being undertaken.

    Additionally, RMIT FactLab was suspended by Facebook in August 2023 after an uproar over its blatantly biased and factually dubious ‘fact checking’ of media articles relating to the Voice referendum campaign. It also transpired that RMIT FactLab had falsely represented its accreditation with the International Fact-Checking Network as current, when it had in fact lapsed.


    https://news.rebekahbarnett.com.au/p/dna-contamination-in-covid-vaccines
    DNA contamination in Covid vaccines DOES get into human cells, new evidence shows It also appears that the contamination enters the cell nucleus and integrates with human DNA Rebekah Barnett Regulators and fact checkers claim that plasmid DNA contamination in the mRNA Covid vaccines can’t change your genomic DNA, but new evidence suggests that it actually can. The fact checkers assert that DNA contamination poses no risk to your genomic DNA because your body will naturally destroy any contaminant DNA before it even gets into the cells. Even if the contaminant DNA could get into cells, there’s no way it can enter the cell nucleus, where genomic integration events occur, they say. And even if the contaminant DNA could enter the nucleus, which it can’t, it still couldn’t genomically integrate unless specific enzymes are present, they say. However, results from independent lab testing conducted on ovarian cancer cell lines show that contaminant DNA from Pfizer’s Covid vaccine not only crossed into the cells, but that it survived multiple cell divisions. This is suggestive that the contaminant DNA is able to transfect (enter) the cell nucleus, and that it integrated with the human cell DNA. TLDR 1. Scientists claim that Pfizer vaccine contaminant DNA has been detected in ovarian cancer cell line DNA, but they do not yet know if it’s chromosomal (heritable) or extra-chromosomal DNA (not heritable) 2. This is an in vitro (in a lab dish) finding, and needs to be replicated in vivo (in a human patient) 3. As the finding is specific to cancer cell lines, it is not generalisable, but scientists say it may give an indication of what cancer patients in remission could experience after mRNA Covid vaccination 4. This finding calls into question fact checker claims that mRNA Covid vaccine DNA contamination can't enter cells, can't enter the nucleus, and cannot integrate with human DNA. Last year, Boston-based genomics scientist Kevin McKernan made the shocking discovery that the mRNA Covid vaccines are contaminated with excessive levels of plasmid DNA, an artefact of the vaccine production process. McKernan’s findings were soon confirmed by multiple independent labs around the world for both the Pfizer and Moderna mono- and bi-valent vaccines, including lots approved for children, with one Canadian study led by Dr David Speicher concluding that there are “billions to hundreds of billions of DNA molecules per dose.” Scientists including McKernan, University of South Carolina cancer genomics scientist Dr Phillip Buckhaults, and Dr Wafik El-Diery, head of the Cancer Centre at Brown University, expressed concerns that fragments of plasmid DNA contamination could cause adverse events, autoimmune problems and cancers in some patients. But perhaps most significantly, there is also a theoretical risk of the contaminant DNA integrating with patients’ chromosomal DNA and modifying the human genome. This is of particular concern with the Pfizer vaccine, which contains an SV40 enhancer sequence, used in gene therapies “to drive DNA into the nucleus,” explains McKernan. While regulators have taken a ‘wait and see’ approach, independent scientists, including McKernan, have been more proactive, initiating experiments testing for evidence of genomic integration. Now, the first results are in. In an experiment conducted together with German molecular biologist Dr Ulrike Kämmerer, McKernan has detected vaccine contaminant DNA in ovarian cancer cell lines treated with Pfizer’s Covid vaccine. The scientists found a chimeric combination of human ovarian cell line DNA and spike sequence DNA derived from the contaminating plasmid at at least one, and possibly two sites. “If anything, this work has put to bed the question regarding if this contaminant DNA gets into the cell, and the chimeric human and contaminant spike DNA sequences imply it has entered the nucleus,” McKernan says. “The PCR and sequencing data both demonstrate the vaccine is getting into the cell and surviving cell passaging. It is likely bioactive and being partially replicated.” To reach this finding, Dr Kämmerer first treated ovarian cancer cell lines with mRNA Covid vaccines, using cells treated with AstraZeneca and Janssen vaccines as controls. The cells were then ‘passaged’, meaning they were left to divide and replicate numerous times. This has the effect of “rinsing away residual vaccine,” explains McKernan. Immunohistochemistry (IHC) was then performed, a staining process that Dr Kämmerer used to detect levels of spike protein expression produced by the vaccine modified-RNA. This was to confirm that the lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) carrying mod-RNA and plasmid DNA contamination “did their job and delivered the payload,” says McKernan. Measuring how many cells expressed spike protein also allowed the scientists to determine how much of the vaccine to treat the cells with. Immunohistochemistry performed with Pfizer top left, AstraZeneca top right as a control. Source: Kevin McKernan’s Substack Cell lines were then sent in cold storage to McKernan’s Boston lab, where his team used qPCR to screen which samples to sequence the cell line DNA. “What we found is, [contaminant] DNA that is getting transfected into ovarian cancer cell lines is replicating in the cells,” says McKernan, noting that the ratio of vaccine contaminant DNA to human cell DNA was “higher than we expected.” Chimeric sequences of human and vaccine contaminant DNA were detected at two sites: chromosomes 9 and 12, with the evidence for the latter being the strongest. “But we don't know if it's extra-chromosomal or whether it's chromosomal because of the Illumina (short read) method we used to sequence,” explains McKernan. Source: Kevin McKernan’s Substack Extra-chromosomal DNA is not part of the chromosome, and is therefore less likely to replicate and to be heritable. Chromosomal DNA, on the other hand, is heritable and more likely to be replicated. A third category, mitochondrial DNA, is heritable, but only from the maternal line. You can read a detailed account of methods and findings via McKernan’s Substack article, ‘Vaccine targeted qPCR of Cancer Cell Lines treated with BNT162b2.’ ‘Major advance,’ but clinical implications are limited McKernan emphasises that these findings cannot be generalised, stating that “it is too early to make comments on the clinical implications.” “The study is performed in ovarian cancer cell lines. It is not performed in patient cells, but this is a proxy for what might happen in an ovarian cancer patient who's in remission,” says McKernan, especially as there is evidence that the LNPs go to the ovaries. The risk for patients in this scenario is that integration events with contaminant DNA might cause aberrant cell growth, which poses a risk to immune suppression of new cancer cells. McKernan notes that his experiment only picked up on putative integration events that persisted after multiple cell replications. That is to say, the scientists were not able to detect integration events that may have occurred, but then died off immediately. At the moment, no one knows how many integration events might be occurring, or what effect that would have on patients. “The unknowns are just exponential,” says McKernan. The cancer cell line experiment can be said to be “a microcosm of genome integration of contaminated DNA,” said Japanese molecular oncology scientist Hiroshi Arakawa, in his own analysis of McKernan and Dr Kämmerer’s experiment, published to his popular science blog on which he shares critical views on Covid vaccine safety. Akira calls the two possible integrations observed in Dr Kämmerer’s experiment a “major advance” laying the ground for further experimentation. “What happens in cultured cells can also occur in normal cells, and a wide variety of abnormalities can occur depending on the site of genome integration,” such as “the induction of cancer or malignant transformation,” he wrote (translated from Japanese to English). LNPs deliver contaminant DNA straight to the cells A key assumption underlying claims that mRNA Covid vaccine contamination cannot enter the cell nucleus, and cannot genomically integrate with host DNA, is that the contamination will never make it into dividing cells, which would be required for integration to occur. This is based on the assumption that the LNPs containing both mod-RNA and contaminant DNA mostly stay in the muscle at the injection site. As muscle cells do not divide, there’s no problem, the logic goes. This is misleading, however, as Pfizer’s own biodistribution data shows that the LNPs enter the blood and every major organ system, including the ovaries, as mentioned above. While it is true that muscle cells don’t divide, LNPs distributed around the body can transfect any number of dividing cells in various organ systems. Table 4-2. shows biodistribution of LNPs, Pfizer Nonclinical Evaluation Report, 2021 From there, it’s only a matter of time before the LNP contents get into the cell nucleus, says McKernan. “In any dividing cell, the nucleus dissolves. So, when people say the DNA can get into the cytoplasm [inside the cell membrane] but won't get into the nucleus, well, in any dividing cell, it will end up getting into the nucleus.” It is possible that the dissolution of the cell nucleus during division is the mechanism underlying McKernan and Dr Kämmerer’s observed passaging of contaminant DNA, but further research will be required to confirm or disprove this hypothesis. Because of the effectiveness of LNPs in delivering their contents into cells, McKernan, Dr Buckhaults and Dr Speicher have questioned the suitability of the current regulatory limits on contaminant DNA in vaccines, which were set prior to the introduction of LNP technology in vaccines. Regulators unconcerned I sent McKernan’s Substack article documenting the new DNA integration findings to Australia’s drug regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration, for comment. The TGA did not address the new findings, but a spokesperson from the TGA responded, “The Department of Health and Aged Care has every confidence in the safety, quality and efficacy of the various approved COVID-19 vaccines for use in Australia. The TGA’s assessment of all vaccines is based upon high quality evidence, including studies and reviews published in peer-reviewed scientific and clinical journals.” However, when asked previously to provide evidence for its position that Covid vaccines pose no risk of DNA integration, the TGA provided no peer-reviewed scientific evidence to support its claims. Instead, the TGA provided links to a Mayo Clinic fact page with no scientific citations, an article by the discredited RMIT FactLab, and a scientific commentary article suggesting that in vitro findings cannot be generalised. Furthermore, TGA has not been forthcoming with the evidence it does hold. When asked to release Covid vaccine batch testing results under Freedom of Information, the regulator provided all 74 pages - fully redacted. In the US, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) denied that contaminant DNA in the mRNA vaccines can enter the nucleus or pose any threat to patients’ genomic DNA, in a response to concerns raised by Florida Surgeon General, Dr Joseph A. Ladapo in December of last year. Additionally, the FDA misleadingly refuted the presence of SV40 proteins in the vaccines, when in fact Dr Ladapo raised concerns over the presence of an SV40 enchancer sequence in the Pfizer vaccine, as confirmed by Health Canada and numerous independent laboratories. Such ham-fisted mischaracterisation of a gene therapy sequence by the FDA is suggestive of either gross incompetence, or a disinformation play. Both are concerning. Science journalist Maryanne Demasi reported, in November last year, that the FDA shut down her enquiries into the DNA contamination matter, refusing to confirm if it found levels of DNA that exceeded acceptable levels, or if it was investigating further. The presence of contamination has been officially acknowledged by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and Health Canada, with the latter also acknowledging the presence of the SV40 enhancer sequence, though both regulators deny that the amounts exceed regulatory limits, or that the DNA contamination poses any risk. ‘No excuse’ for ignoring ‘screaming hot signal’ Instead of denying excessive DNA levels and deferring to manufacturers’ reported test results, regulators should run their own qPCR testing on batch lots, says McKernan. Then, “they would see what everyone else is seeing, which is that sometimes the CT scores come out as low as 13… that’s a screaming hot signal.” “As a reference, the Covid test would call people positive at 33-35,” McKernan explains. “That’s a million-fold difference (20 CTs). A million-fold less Covid RNA and you're positive and quarantined. But you can inject a million-fold more past your mucosa?” There’s “no excuse” for regulators to not sequence every vaccine lot, says McKernan, when the costs for doing so have dropped dramatically in recent years. “DNA sequencing costs have dropped 100,000 fold in the last decade. They have relaxed the DNA contamination limits 1000-fold in this time frame. It likely only costs $1,000 in reagents for millions-to-billions of dollars worth of product.” Source: National Human Genome Research Institute DNA sequencing by regulatory agencies is important not just for measuring quantities, says McKernan, but also for determining the type of DNA contamination. “Not all DNA is created equal. Some is designed to replicate - when it gets into a cell, it can make more of itself. It's a massive loophole in the regulations that they don't do sequencing. But it's never been cheaper. You can precisely know the nature of the DNA in every single vial.” Scientists pick up regulators’ slack In the absence of any regulatory appetite for investigating the risks of DNA contamination in the mRNA Covid shots, and particularly the risk of genomic integration, independent scientists have taken the baton. “We are writing up our findings and will publish a preprint soon,” says McKernan, who is planning further testing in partnership with Dr Kämmerer. “We’re doing more experiments first. We need to sequence deeper to find out if the integration events are in chromosomal or extra-chromosomal DNA.” Dr Buckhaults is also running his own experiment, calling for de-identified samples of tumours or fresh blood from pathology and hematology labs. These samples will be tested for the presence of plasmid DNA contamination, with whole genome sequencing to then be carried out on positive samples to identify genomic integration sites. In an email outlining his experiment, Dr Buckhaults told me that he intends to report his findings in a peer-reviewed publication, predicting that the work could take “a few months to a year,” depending on how fast samples come in. “I am hopeful to prove my concerns are unwarranted by accumulating a lot of negative data, and of course negative data takes the most time to collect,” he said. McKernan says he is aware of other labs running tests for contaminant plasmid DNA integration, but cannot disclose the details at present. Decentralisation the future of science? McKernan says he has experienced some pushback for publishing his methods and findings in real time via Substack, X, and preprints. But, he believes that making his data available as quickly as possible is a way for the field of science to regain public trust. “Many will criticize our disclosure of preliminary findings but we feel this is an insult to the intelligence of the average person,” says McKernan. “It's a form of scientific elitism that implies people can't handle the truth and will be scared like sheep if given a glimpse of how the true scientific process is performed. Scientists are 90% of the time wrong but only publish the times when they are right. There is no journal of negative results.“ In light of the prospect that most published research findings are false (as famously asserted in a 2005 article by Professor John Ioannidis), McKernan questions the value of peer-review, instead favouring replication or refutation in the real world. Source: X For this reason, McKernan says he has not prioritised peer-reviewed publication for his DNA contamination findings, but is rather focusing on conducting more experiments and releasing the data as he goes - even when it’s incomplete, or requires further experimentation. “We were not expecting to find any integration events at this depth of coverage, but they are evident to anyone who downloads our public reads. To not speak to obvious evidence in such data would be irresponsible even when such evidence doesn't 100% answer a given question,” says McKernan. Dr Buckhaults takes a somewhat different view. After sharing his initial plasmid DNA contamination findings in a South Carolina Senate hearing in September last year, the video recording broke the internet. Believing the hearing to have been private, Dr Buckhaults was alarmed that the widespread distribution of his testimony may have caused “unintended, harmful side effects.” He requested that YouTube take down his testimony video, which is now defunct. Source: X In our correspondence, Dr Buckhaults stressed that while more research is warranted, he is of the opinion that the public “should not overreact to the news of the plasmid DNA contamination. It's serious enough that scientists need to hustle and figure out if it's causing any health problems now or down the road, but it's not cause for the general public to be alarmed.” But, “The reality is that`transfection experiments with contaminated DNA' have been carried out on vast numbers of people around the world in the name of vaccination,” writes Arakawa. Perhaps the experiment participants will be the ones to decide if they should be alarmed, or not. The FDA was contacted for comment about Dr Kämmerer and McKernan’s new findings, but they did not respond by publication deadline. This article will be updated if comment is received. View Kevin McKernan’s write up of his DNA integration experiment (in partnership with Dr Kämmerer) here. Scroll down for links to sequencing data files. Pathology and hematology labs wishing to send samples to Dr Buckhaults are invited to contact him at the University of South Carolina. Update 23 March 2024: This article was edited to add mention of the Dr David Speicher et al. finding of “billions to hundreds of billions of DNA molecules per dose” of the mRNA vaccines, and the scientists’ concerns that regulatory limits on DNA contamination have not taken LNP transfection into account. To support my work, make a one-off contribution to DDU via my Kofi account and/or subscribe. Thanks! Follow me on X Follow me on Instagram 1 From an article I wrote for Umbrella News on this topic last year: The TGA maintains that allegations put forward in the case about the potential for mRNA vaccines to alter the recipient’s DNA are unfounded. A spokesperson for the TGA told Umbrella News, “COVID-19 vaccines do not alter a person’s DNA. The mRNA in the vaccines does not enter the nucleus of cells and is not integrated into the human genome. Thus, the mRNA does not cause genetic damage or affect the offspring of vaccinated individuals.” “The TGA continues to monitor the scientific literature associated with the SARS – CoV-2 virus and the various COVID-19 vaccines approved for use in Australia.” With reference to the specific studies cited in the case materials, the TGA pointed Umbrella News to an RMIT ABC Fact Check post from 2022 purporting to ‘debunk’ claims that mRNA jabs are genotoxic. This is the same site that ‘debunked’ claims that COVID vaccines can cause menstrual disruption, before peer-reviewed scientific studies proved that they can and do (the post has not been corrected). As evidence that it is “well established” that vaccine mRNA and protein do not enter the nucleus, the TGA provided a link to a Mayo Clinic fact page which provides no studies or scientific evidence in support of its claims. The TGA did provide one commentary article published in a scientific journal which pointed out that the in vitro liver cell line study cannot be extrapolated to generalise about in vivo findings (in a human, not a dish) without further research being undertaken. Additionally, RMIT FactLab was suspended by Facebook in August 2023 after an uproar over its blatantly biased and factually dubious ‘fact checking’ of media articles relating to the Voice referendum campaign. It also transpired that RMIT FactLab had falsely represented its accreditation with the International Fact-Checking Network as current, when it had in fact lapsed. https://news.rebekahbarnett.com.au/p/dna-contamination-in-covid-vaccines
    NEWS.REBEKAHBARNETT.COM.AU
    DNA contamination in Covid vaccines DOES get into human cells, new evidence shows
    It also appears that the contamination enters the cell nucleus and integrates with human DNA
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