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

The WHO Wants to Rule the World Ramesh Thakur The World Health Organisation (WHO) will present two new texts for adoption by its governing body, the World Health Assembly comprising delegates from 194 member states, in Geneva on 27 May–1 June. The new pandemic treaty needs a two-thirds majority for approval and, if and once adopted, will come into effect after 40 ratifications. The amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) can be adopted by a simple majority and will be binding on all states unless they recorded reservations by the end of last year. Because they will be changes to an existing agreement that states have already signed, the amendments do not require any follow-up ratification. The WHO describes the IHR as ‘an instrument of international law that is legally-binding’ on its 196 states parties, including the 194 WHO member states, even if they voted against it. Therein lies its promise and its threat. The new regime will change the WHO from a technical advisory organisation into a supra-national public health authority exercising quasi-legislative and executive powers over states; change the nature of the relationship between citizens, business enterprises, and governments domestically, and also between governments and other governments and the WHO internationally; and shift the locus of medical practice from the doctor-patient consultation in the clinic to public health bureaucrats in capital cities and WHO headquarters in Geneva and its six regional offices. From net zero to mass immigration and identity politics, the ‘expertocracy’ elite is in alliance with the global technocratic elite against majority national sentiment. The Covid years gave the elites a valuable lesson in how to exercise effective social control and they mean to apply it across all contentious issues. The changes to global health governance architecture must be understood in this light. It represents the transformation of the national security, administrative, and surveillance state into a globalised biosecurity state. But they are encountering pushback in Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, and most recently Ireland. We can but hope that the resistance will spread to rejecting the WHO power grab. Addressing the World Governments Summit in Dubai on 12 February, WHO Director-General (DG) Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus attacked ‘the litany of lies and conspiracy theories’ about the agreement that ‘are utterly, completely, categorically false. The pandemic agreement will not give WHO any power over any state or any individual, for that matter.’ He insisted that critics are ‘either uninformed or lying.’ Could it be instead that, relying on aides, he himself has either not read or not understood the draft? The alternative explanation for his spray at the critics is that he is gaslighting us all. The Gostin, Klock, and Finch Paper In the Hastings Center Report “Making the World Safer and Fairer in Pandemics,” published on 23 December, Lawrence Gostin, Kevin Klock, and Alexandra Finch attempt to provide the justification to underpin the proposed new IHR and treaty instruments as ‘transformative normative and financial reforms that could reimagine pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response.’ The three authors decry the voluntary compliance under the existing ‘amorphous and unenforceable’ IHR regulations as ‘a critical shortcoming.’ And they concede that ‘While advocates have pressed for health-related human rights to be included in the pandemic agreement, the current draft does not do so.’ Directly contradicting the DG’s denial as quoted above, they describe the new treaty as ‘legally binding’. This is repeated several pages later: …the best way to contain transnational outbreaks is through international cooperation, led multilaterally through the WHO. That may require all states to forgo some level of sovereignty in exchange for enhanced safety and fairness. What gives their analysis significance is that, as explained in the paper itself, Gostin is ‘actively involved in WHO processes for a pandemic agreement and IHR reform’ as the director of the WHO Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law and a member of the WHO Review Committee on IHR amendments. The WHO as the World’s Guidance and Coordinating Authority The IHR amendments will expand the situations that constitute a public health emergency, grant the WHO additional emergency powers, and extend state duties to build ‘core capacities’ of surveillance to detect, assess, notify, and report events that could constitute an emergency. Under the new accords, the WHO would function as the guidance and coordinating authority for the world. The DG will become more powerful than the UN Secretary-General. The existing language of ‘should’ is replaced in many places by the imperative ‘shall,’ of non-binding recommendations with countries will ‘undertake to follow’ the guidance. And ‘full respect for the dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms of persons’ will be changed to principles of ‘equity’ and ‘inclusivity’ with different requirements for rich and poor countries, bleeding financial resources and pharmaceutical products from industrialised to developing countries. The WHO is first of all an international bureaucracy and only secondly a collective body of medical and health experts. Its Covid performance was not among its finest. Its credibility was badly damaged by tardiness in raising the alarm; by its acceptance and then rejection of China’s claim that there was no risk of human-human transmission; by the failure to hold China accountable for destroying evidence of the pandemic’s origins; by the initial investigation that whitewashed the origins of the virus; by flip-flops on masks and lockdowns; by ignoring the counterexample of Sweden that rejected lockdowns with no worse health outcomes and far better economic, social, and educational outcomes; and by the failure to stand up for children’s developmental, educational, social, and mental health rights and welfare. With a funding model where 87 percent of the budget comes from voluntary contributions from the rich countries and private donors like the Gates Foundation, and 77 percent is for activities specified by them, the WHO has effectively ‘become a system of global public health patronage’, write Ben and Molly Kingsley of the UK children’s rights campaign group UsForThem. Human Rights Watch says the process has been ‘disproportionately guided by corporate demands and the policy positions of high-income governments seeking to protect the power of private actors in health including the pharmaceutical industry.’ The victims of this Catch-22 lack of accountability will be the peoples of the world. Much of the new surveillance network in a model divided into pre-, in, and post-pandemic periods will be provided by private and corporate interests that will profit from the mass testing and pharmaceutical interventions. According to Forbes, the net worth of Bill Gates jumped by one-third from $96.5 billion in 2019 to $129 billion in 2022: philanthropy can be profitable. Article 15.2 of the draft pandemic treaty requires states to set up ‘no fault vaccine-injury compensation schemes,’ conferring immunity on Big Pharma against liability, thereby codifying the privatisation of profits and the socialisation of risks. The changes would confer extraordinary new powers on the WHO’s DG and regional directors and mandate governments to implement their recommendations. This will result in a major expansion of the international health bureaucracy under the WHO, for example new implementation and compliance committees; shift the centre of gravity from the common deadliest diseases (discussed below) to relatively rare pandemic outbreaks (five including Covid in the last 120 years); and give the WHO authority to direct resources (money, pharmaceutical products, intellectual property rights) to itself and to other governments in breach of sovereign and copyright rights. Considering the impact of the amendments on national decision-making and mortgaging future generations to internationally determined spending obligations, this calls for an indefinite pause in the process until parliaments have done due diligence and debated the potentially far-reaching obligations. Yet disappointingly, relatively few countries have expressed reservations and few parliamentarians seem at all interested. We may pay a high price for the rise of careerist politicians whose primary interest is self-advancement, ministers who ask bureaucrats to draft replies to constituents expressing concern that they often sign without reading either the original letter or the reply in their name, and officials who disdain the constraints of democratic decision-making and accountability. Ministers relying on technical advice from staffers when officials are engaged in a silent coup against elected representatives give power without responsibility to bureaucrats while relegating ministers to being in office but not in power, with political accountability sans authority. US President Donald Trump and Australian and UK Prime Ministers Scott Morrison and Boris Johnson were representative of national leaders who had lacked the science literacy, intellectual heft, moral clarity, and courage of conviction to stand up to their technocrats. It was a period of Yes, Prime Minister on steroids, with Sir Humphrey Appleby winning most of the guerrilla campaign waged by the permanent civil service against the transient and clueless Prime Minister Jim Hacker. At least some Australian, American, British, and European politicians have recently expressed concern at the WHO-centred ‘command and control’ model of a public health system, and the public spending and redistributive implications of the two proposed international instruments. US Representatives Chris Smith (R-NJ) and Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) warned on 5 February that ‘far too little scrutiny has been given, far too few questions asked as to what this legally binding agreement or treaty means to health policy in the United States and elsewhere.’ Like Smith and Wenstrup, the most common criticism levelled has been that this represents a power grab at the cost of national sovereignty. Speaking in parliament in November, Australia’s Liberal Senator Alex Antic dubbed the effort a ‘WHO d’etat’. A more accurate reading may be that it represents collusion between the WHO and the richest countries, home to the biggest pharmaceutical companies, to dilute accountability for decisions, taken in the name of public health, that profit a narrow elite. The changes will lock in the seamless rule of the technocratic-managerial elite at both the national and the international levels. Yet the WHO edicts, although legally binding in theory, will be unenforceable against the most powerful countries in practice. Moreover, the new regime aims to eliminate transparency and critical scrutiny by criminalising any opinion that questions the official narrative from the WHO and governments, thereby elevating them to the status of dogma. The pandemic treaty calls for governments to tackle the ‘infodemics’ of false information, misinformation, disinformation, and even ‘too much information’ (Article 1c). This is censorship. Authorities have no right to be shielded from critical questioning of official information. Freedom of information is a cornerstone of an open and resilient society and a key means to hold authorities to public scrutiny and accountability. The changes are an effort to entrench and institutionalise the model of political, social, and messaging control trialled with great success during Covid. The foundational document of the international human rights regime is the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Pandemic management during Covid and in future emergencies threaten some of its core provisions regarding privacy, freedom of opinion and expression, and rights to work, education, peaceful assembly, and association. Worst of all, they will create a perverse incentive: the rise of an international bureaucracy whose defining purpose, existence, powers, and budgets will depend on more frequent declarations of actual or anticipated pandemic outbreaks. It is a basic axiom of politics that power that can be abused, will be abused – some day, somewhere, by someone. The corollary holds that power once seized is seldom surrendered back voluntarily to the people. Lockdowns, mask and vaccine mandates, travel restrictions, and all the other shenanigans and theatre of the Covid era will likely be repeated on whim. Professor Angus Dalgliesh of London’s St George’s Medical School warns that the WHO ‘wants to inflict this incompetence on us all over again but this time be in total control.’ Covid in the Context of Africa’s Disease Burden In the Hastings Center report referred to earlier, Gostin, Klock, and Finch claim that ‘lower-income countries experienced larger losses and longer-lasting economic setbacks.’ This is a casual elision that shifts the blame for harmful downstream effects away from lockdowns in the futile quest to eradicate the virus, to the virus itself. The chief damage to developing countries was caused by the worldwide shutdown of social life and economic activities and the drastic reduction in international trade. The discreet elision aroused my curiosity on the authors’ affiliations. It came as no surprise to read that they lead the O’Neill Institute–Foundation for the National Institutes of Health project on an international instrument for pandemic prevention and preparedness. Gostin et al. grounded the urgency for the new accords in the claim that ‘Zoonotic pathogens…are occurring with increasing frequency, enhancing the risk of new pandemics’ and cite research to suggest a threefold increase in ‘extreme pandemics’ over the next decade. In a report entitled “Rational Policy Over Panic,” published by Leeds University in February, a team that included our own David Bell subjected claims of increasing pandemic frequency and disease burden behind the drive to adopt the new treaty and amend the existing IHR to critical scrutiny. Specifically, they examined and found wanting a number of assumptions and several references in eight G20, World Bank, and WHO policy documents. On the one hand, the reported increase in natural outbreaks is best explained by technologically more sophisticated diagnostic testing equipment, while the disease burden has been effectively reduced with improved surveillance, response mechanisms, and other public health interventions. Consequently there is no real urgency to rush into the new accords. Instead, governments should take all the time they need to situate pandemic risk in the wider healthcare context and formulate policy tailored to the more accurate risk and interventions matrix. The lockdowns were responsible for reversals of decades worth of gains in critical childhood immunisations. UNICEF and WHO estimate that 7.6 million African children under 5 missed out on vaccination in 2021 and another 11 million were under-immunised, ‘making up over 40 percent of the under-immunised and missed children globally.’ How many quality adjusted life years does that add up to, I wonder? But don’t hold your breath that anyone will be held accountable for crimes against African children. Earlier this month the Pan-African Epidemic and Pandemic Working Group argued that lockdowns were a ‘class-based and unscientific instrument.’ It accused the WHO of trying to reintroduce ‘classical Western colonialism through the backdoor’ in the form of the new pandemic treaty and the IHR amendments. Medical knowledge and innovations do not come solely from Western capitals and Geneva, but from people and groups who have captured the WHO agenda. Lockdowns had caused significant harm to low-income countries, the group said, yet the WHO wanted legal authority to compel member states to comply with its advice in future pandemics, including with respect to vaccine passports and border closures. Instead of bowing to ‘health imperialism,’ it would be preferable for African countries to set their own priorities in alleviating the disease burden of their major killer diseases like cholera, malaria, and yellow fever. Europe and the US, comprising a little under ten and over four percent of world population, account for nearly 18 and 17 percent, respectively, of all Covid-related deaths in the world. By contrast Asia, with nearly 60 percent of the world’s people, accounts for 23 percent of all Covid-related deaths. Meantime Africa, with more than 17 percent of global population, has recorded less than four percent of global Covid deaths (Table 1). According to a report on the continent’s disease burden published last year by the WHO Regional Office for Africa, Africa’s leading causes of death in 2021 were malaria (593,000 deaths), tuberculosis (501,000), and HIV/AIDS (420,000). The report does not provide the numbers for diarrhoeal deaths for Africa. There are 1.6 million such deaths globally per year, including 440,000 children under 5. And we know that most diarrhoeal deaths occur in Africa and South Asia. If we perform a linear extrapolation of 2021 deaths to estimate ballpark figures for the three years 2020–22 inclusive for numbers of Africans killed by these big three, approximately 1.78 million died from malaria, 1.5 million from TB, and 1.26 million from HIV/AIDS. (I exclude 2023 as Covid had faded by then, as can be seen in Table 1). By comparison, the total number of Covid-related deaths across Africa in the three years was 259,000. Whether or not the WHO is pursuing a policy of health colonialism, therefore, the Pan-African Epidemic and Pandemic Working Group has a point regarding the grossly exaggerated threat of Covid in the total picture of Africa’s disease burden. A shorter version of this was published in The Australian on 11 March 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 Ramesh Thakur, a Brownstone Institute Senior Scholar, is a former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General, and emeritus professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University. 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-wants-to-rule-the-world/

Avi Shlaim: ‘Three Worlds – Memoirs of an Arab – Jew’ This beautiful, inspiring, elegiac book is the story of the author’s journey – a journey from Baghdad to Israel in 1950, aged five, and from Israel to England. But Avi Schlaim’s journey was at different levels. It was geographical and it was cultural. It also became a political journey to his own position today. His personal experiences illustrate a bigger story of the Jewish exodus from Iraq to Israel in 1950 following the creation of Israel in 1948. His story and his words speak more eloquently than any reviewer can, and so for the most part, I quote directly from his memoir. The book is “a glimpse into the lost and rich world of the Iraqi-Jewish community”. Perhaps, coming from what he describes as a prosperous, privileged family, he may see the past through rose-tinted glasses. But his memories are precious. “We belonged to a branch of the global Jewish community that is now almost extinct. We were Arab-Jews. We lived in Baghdad and were well integrated into Iraqi society. We spoke Arabic at home, our social customs were Arab, our lifestyle was Arab, our cuisine was exquisitely Middle Eastern and my parents’ music was an attractive blend of Arabic and Jewish…We in the Jewish community had much more in common, linguistically and culturally, with our Iraqi compatriots than with our European co-religionists. Of all the Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire, the one in Mesopotamia was the most integrated into local society, the most Arabised in its culture and the most prosperous… When the British created the Kingdom of Iraq…the Jews were the backbone of the Iraqi economy” Jewish lineage in Mesopotamia stretched as far back as Babylonian times, pre-dating the rise of Islam by a millenium. “Their influence was evident in every branch of Iraqi culture, from literature and music to journalism and banking. Banks – with the exception of government owned banks – and all the big markets remained closed on the Sabbath and the other Jewish holy days.” By the 1880s there were 55 synagogues in Baghdad. He describes how in Iraq there was a long tradition of religious tolerance and harmony. “The Jews were neither newcomers nor aliens in Iraq. They were certainly not intruders”. By the time of the First World War, Jews constituted one third of the population of Baghdad. He contrasts Europe and the Middle East. “Unlike Europe the Middle East did not have a ‘Jewish Question’. “Iraq’s Jews did not live in ghettos, nor did they experience the violent repression, persecution and genocide that marred European history. There were of course exceptions, notably the infamous pogrom against Jews in June 1941, for which the actions of British imperialism must take substantial responsibility. By 1941, antisemitism in Baghdad was on the increase but was more a foreign import than a home grown product. There was a violent pogrom against the Jewish community named the farhud. The Jews were seen as friends of the British. 179 Jews were murdered and several hundred injured. It was completely unexpected and unprecedented. There had been no other attack against the Jews for centuries. Avi gives many examples of Muslims assisting their Jewish neighbours. And yet he writes: “The overall picture, however, was one of religious tolerance, cosmopolitanism, peaceful co-existence and fruitful interaction.” The critical moment was the creation of Israel. “As a result of the Arab defeat, there was a backlash against the Jews throughout the Arab world. “What had been a pillar of Iraqi society was increasingly perceived as a sinister fifth column”, with Islamic fundamentalists and Arab nationalists identifying the Jews in their countries with the hated Zionist enemy. Palestinians “were the main victims of the Zionist project. More than half their number became refugees and the name Palestine was wiped off the map. But there was another category of victims, less well known and much less talked about: the Jews of the Arab lands”. The sub-title of the book refers to ‘Arab-Jews’. “The hyphen is significant. Critics of the term Arab-Jew see it as… conflating two separate identities. As I see it, the hyphen unites: an Arab can also be a Jew and a Jew can also be an Arab…We are told that there is a clash of cultures, an unbridgeable gulf between Muslims and Jews… The story of my family in Iraq -and that of many forgotten families like mine – points to a dramatically different picture. It harks back to an era of a more pluralist Middle East with greater religious tolerance and a political culture of mutual respect and co-operation.” Yet the Zionists portray the Jews as the victims of endemic Arab persecution and this is used to justify the atrocious treatment of the Palestinians. Thus the narrative of the ‘Jewish Nakba’ to create a ‘false symmetry between the fate of two communities. This narrative is not history; it is the propaganda of the victors.” On 29th November 1947 the General Assembly of the United Nations voted for the partition of mandate Palestine into two states: one Arab, one Jewish. The General Council of the Iraqi Jewish community sent a telegram to the UN opposing the partition resolution and the creation of a Jewish state. “Like my family, the majority of Iraqi Jews saw themselves as Iraqi first and Jewish second; they feared that the creation of a Jewish state would undermine their position in Iraq… The distinction between Jews and Zionists, so crucial to interfaith harmony in the Arab world, was rapidly breaking down”. Iraq’s participation in the war for Palestine fuelled tensions between Muslims and Jews. Iraqi Jews were widely suspected of being secret supporters of Israel. With the defeat of Palestine a wave of hostility towards Israel and the Jews living in their midst swept through the Arab world. Demonstrators marched through the streets of Baghdad shouting “Death to the Jews.” And the government needing a scapegoat did not simply respond to public anger but actively whipped up public hysteria and suspicion against the Jews. At this point official persecution against the Jews began. In July 1948 a law was passed making Zionism a criminal offence punishable by death or a minimum sentence of seven years in prison. Jews were fired from government jobs and from the railways, post office and telegraph department, Jewish merchants were denied import and export licences, restrictions placed on Jewish banks to trade in foreign currency, young Jews were barred from admission to colleges of education and the entire community was put under surveillance. The number of Jewish immigrants leaving Iraq to the end of 1953 numbered almost 125,000 out of a total of 135,000. The Jewish presence going back well over 2,000 years was destroyed. And yet for all this the mass exodus did not occur till 1950/1951 in what was known as the ‘Big Aliyah”. The majority of Iraqi Jews did not want to leave Iraq and had no affinity with Zionism. Most who emigrated to Israel did so only after a wave of five bombings of Jewish targets in Baghdad. It has long been argued that the bombings were instigated by Israel and the Zionists to spark a mass flight of Iraqi Jews to Israel, needed as they were to do many of the menial jobs and to boost numbers in the army. The author makes a forensic examination of the evidence – based on examination of documents and on interviews – and concluded that three out of the five bombings were carried out by the Zionist underground in Baghdad, a fourth – the bombing of the Mas’uda Shemtob synagogue, which was the only one that resulted in fatalities – was the result of Zionist bribery and there was one carried out by a far right wing, anti-Jewish Iraqi nationalist group. When the Iraqi Jews arrived in Israel, their experience fell short of the Zionist myth. At the airport in Israel, many were sprayed with DDT pesticides “to disinfect them as if they were animals.” They were then taken to squalid and unsanitary transit camps. Some camps were surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by policemen. The immigration and settlement authorities had no understanding of their customs and culture. “They thought of them as backward and primitive and expected them to take their place at the bottom of the social hierarchy and be grateful for whatever they were given… The lens through which the new immigrants were viewed was the same colonialist lens through which the Ashkenazi establishment viewed the Palestinians.” “We were Jews from an Arab country that was still officially at war with Israel. European Jews.. looked down on us as socially and culturally inferior. They despised the Arabic language…I was an Iraqi boy in a land of Europeans.” For his grandmothers, Iraq was the beloved homeland while Israel was the place of exile. “Migration to Israel is usually described as Aliyah or ascent. For us the move from Iraq to Israel was decidedly a Yeridah, a descent down the economic and social ladder. Not only did we lose our property and possessions; we also our lost our strong sense of identity as proud Iraqi Jews as we were relegated to the margins of Israeli society.” The experience was to break his father. “The unstated aims of the official policy for schools were to undermine our Arab-Jewish identity… A systematic process was at work to delegitimise our heritage and erase our cultural roots” It was a clash of cultures. The Mizrahim were earmarked to be the proletariat – the fodder to support the country’s industrial and agricultural development. As one author put it, “We left Iraq as Jews and arrived in Israel as Iraqis.” They were clearly, to borrow from current jargon, “the wrong kind of Israeli”. His journey was a political one too. His message and his warnings are unequivocally universalist. “The Holocaust stands out as an archetype of a crime against humanity. For me as a Jew and an Israeli therefore the Holocaust teaches us to resist the dehumanising of any people, including the Palestinian ‘victims of victims’, because dehumanising a people can easily result, as it did in Europe in the 1940s, in crimes against humanity.” He had previously argued that it was only after the 1967 war that Israel became a colonial power, oppressing the Palestinians in the occupied territories. However, “a deeper analysis… led me to the conclusion that Israel had been created by a settler-colonial movement. The years 1948 and 1967 were merely milestones in the relentless systematic takeover of the whole of Palestine… Since Zionism was an avowedly settler-colonial movement from the outset, the building of civilian settlements on occupied land was only a new stage in the long march… The most crucial turning point was not the war of 1967 but the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.” And more: “the two-state solution is dead or, to be more accurate, it was never born… The outcome I have come to favour is one democratic state… with equal rights for all its citizens regardless of ethnicity or religion.” He is absolutely right in my view. His family’s story “serves as a corrective to the Zionist narrative which views Arabs and Jews as congenitally incapable of dwelling together in peace and doomed to permanent conflict and discord… My experience as a young boy and that of the whole Jewish community in Iraq, suggests there is nothing inevitable or pre-ordained about Arab-Jewish antagonism… Remembering the past can help us to envisage a better future… Arab-Jewish co-existence is not something that my family imagined in our minds; we experienced it, we touched it.” Optimistic? Yes, perhaps over-optimistic. But towards the end of this masterpiece, Avi Schlaim justifies his message. “Recalling the era of cosmopolitanism and co-existence that some Jews, like my family, enjoyed in Arab countries before 1948 offers a glimmer of hope… It’s the best model we have for a better future.” https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/avi-shlaim-three-worlds-memoirs-of-an-arab-jew/

Avi Shlaim: ‘Three Worlds – Memoirs of an Arab – Jew’ This beautiful, inspiring, elegiac book is the story of the author’s journey – a journey from Baghdad to Israel in 1950, aged five, and from Israel to England. But Avi Schlaim’s journey was at different levels. It was geographical and it was cultural. It also became a political journey to his own position today. His personal experiences illustrate a bigger story of the Jewish exodus from Iraq to Israel in 1950 following the creation of Israel in 1948. His story and his words speak more eloquently than any reviewer can, and so for the most part, I quote directly from his memoir. The book is “a glimpse into the lost and rich world of the Iraqi-Jewish community”. Perhaps, coming from what he describes as a prosperous, privileged family, he may see the past through rose-tinted glasses. But his memories are precious. “We belonged to a branch of the global Jewish community that is now almost extinct. We were Arab-Jews. We lived in Baghdad and were well integrated into Iraqi society. We spoke Arabic at home, our social customs were Arab, our lifestyle was Arab, our cuisine was exquisitely Middle Eastern and my parents’ music was an attractive blend of Arabic and Jewish…We in the Jewish community had much more in common, linguistically and culturally, with our Iraqi compatriots than with our European co-religionists. Of all the Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire, the one in Mesopotamia was the most integrated into local society, the most Arabised in its culture and the most prosperous… When the British created the Kingdom of Iraq…the Jews were the backbone of the Iraqi economy” Jewish lineage in Mesopotamia stretched as far back as Babylonian times, pre-dating the rise of Islam by a millenium. “Their influence was evident in every branch of Iraqi culture, from literature and music to journalism and banking. Banks – with the exception of government owned banks – and all the big markets remained closed on the Sabbath and the other Jewish holy days.” By the 1880s there were 55 synagogues in Baghdad. He describes how in Iraq there was a long tradition of religious tolerance and harmony. “The Jews were neither newcomers nor aliens in Iraq. They were certainly not intruders”. By the time of the First World War, Jews constituted one third of the population of Baghdad. He contrasts Europe and the Middle East. “Unlike Europe the Middle East did not have a ‘Jewish Question’. “Iraq’s Jews did not live in ghettos, nor did they experience the violent repression, persecution and genocide that marred European history. There were of course exceptions, notably the infamous pogrom against Jews in June 1941, for which the actions of British imperialism must take substantial responsibility. By 1941, antisemitism in Baghdad was on the increase but was more a foreign import than a home grown product. There was a violent pogrom against the Jewish community named the farhud. The Jews were seen as friends of the British. 179 Jews were murdered and several hundred injured. It was completely unexpected and unprecedented. There had been no other attack against the Jews for centuries. Avi gives many examples of Muslims assisting their Jewish neighbours. And yet he writes: “The overall picture, however, was one of religious tolerance, cosmopolitanism, peaceful co-existence and fruitful interaction.” The critical moment was the creation of Israel. “As a result of the Arab defeat, there was a backlash against the Jews throughout the Arab world. “What had been a pillar of Iraqi society was increasingly perceived as a sinister fifth column”, with Islamic fundamentalists and Arab nationalists identifying the Jews in their countries with the hated Zionist enemy. Palestinians “were the main victims of the Zionist project. More than half their number became refugees and the name Palestine was wiped off the map. But there was another category of victims, less well known and much less talked about: the Jews of the Arab lands”. The sub-title of the book refers to ‘Arab-Jews’. “The hyphen is significant. Critics of the term Arab-Jew see it as… conflating two separate identities. As I see it, the hyphen unites: an Arab can also be a Jew and a Jew can also be an Arab…We are told that there is a clash of cultures, an unbridgeable gulf between Muslims and Jews… The story of my family in Iraq -and that of many forgotten families like mine – points to a dramatically different picture. It harks back to an era of a more pluralist Middle East with greater religious tolerance and a political culture of mutual respect and co-operation.” Yet the Zionists portray the Jews as the victims of endemic Arab persecution and this is used to justify the atrocious treatment of the Palestinians. Thus the narrative of the ‘Jewish Nakba’ to create a ‘false symmetry between the fate of two communities. This narrative is not history; it is the propaganda of the victors.” On 29th November 1947 the General Assembly of the United Nations voted for the partition of mandate Palestine into two states: one Arab, one Jewish. The General Council of the Iraqi Jewish community sent a telegram to the UN opposing the partition resolution and the creation of a Jewish state. “Like my family, the majority of Iraqi Jews saw themselves as Iraqi first and Jewish second; they feared that the creation of a Jewish state would undermine their position in Iraq… The distinction between Jews and Zionists, so crucial to interfaith harmony in the Arab world, was rapidly breaking down”. Iraq’s participation in the war for Palestine fuelled tensions between Muslims and Jews. Iraqi Jews were widely suspected of being secret supporters of Israel. With the defeat of Palestine a wave of hostility towards Israel and the Jews living in their midst swept through the Arab world. Demonstrators marched through the streets of Baghdad shouting “Death to the Jews.” And the government needing a scapegoat did not simply respond to public anger but actively whipped up public hysteria and suspicion against the Jews. At this point official persecution against the Jews began. In July 1948 a law was passed making Zionism a criminal offence punishable by death or a minimum sentence of seven years in prison. Jews were fired from government jobs and from the railways, post office and telegraph department, Jewish merchants were denied import and export licences, restrictions placed on Jewish banks to trade in foreign currency, young Jews were barred from admission to colleges of education and the entire community was put under surveillance. The number of Jewish immigrants leaving Iraq to the end of 1953 numbered almost 125,000 out of a total of 135,000. The Jewish presence going back well over 2,000 years was destroyed. And yet for all this the mass exodus did not occur till 1950/1951 in what was known as the ‘Big Aliyah”. The majority of Iraqi Jews did not want to leave Iraq and had no affinity with Zionism. Most who emigrated to Israel did so only after a wave of five bombings of Jewish targets in Baghdad. It has long been argued that the bombings were instigated by Israel and the Zionists to spark a mass flight of Iraqi Jews to Israel, needed as they were to do many of the menial jobs and to boost numbers in the army. The author makes a forensic examination of the evidence – based on examination of documents and on interviews – and concluded that three out of the five bombings were carried out by the Zionist underground in Baghdad, a fourth – the bombing of the Mas’uda Shemtob synagogue, which was the only one that resulted in fatalities – was the result of Zionist bribery and there was one carried out by a far right wing, anti-Jewish Iraqi nationalist group. When the Iraqi Jews arrived in Israel, their experience fell short of the Zionist myth. At the airport in Israel, many were sprayed with DDT pesticides “to disinfect them as if they were animals.” They were then taken to squalid and unsanitary transit camps. Some camps were surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by policemen. The immigration and settlement authorities had no understanding of their customs and culture. “They thought of them as backward and primitive and expected them to take their place at the bottom of the social hierarchy and be grateful for whatever they were given… The lens through which the new immigrants were viewed was the same colonialist lens through which the Ashkenazi establishment viewed the Palestinians.” “We were Jews from an Arab country that was still officially at war with Israel. European Jews.. looked down on us as socially and culturally inferior. They despised the Arabic language…I was an Iraqi boy in a land of Europeans.” For his grandmothers, Iraq was the beloved homeland while Israel was the place of exile. “Migration to Israel is usually described as Aliyah or ascent. For us the move from Iraq to Israel was decidedly a Yeridah, a descent down the economic and social ladder. Not only did we lose our property and possessions; we also our lost our strong sense of identity as proud Iraqi Jews as we were relegated to the margins of Israeli society.” The experience was to break his father. “The unstated aims of the official policy for schools were to undermine our Arab-Jewish identity… A systematic process was at work to delegitimise our heritage and erase our cultural roots” It was a clash of cultures. The Mizrahim were earmarked to be the proletariat – the fodder to support the country’s industrial and agricultural development. As one author put it, “We left Iraq as Jews and arrived in Israel as Iraqis.” They were clearly, to borrow from current jargon, “the wrong kind of Israeli”. His journey was a political one too. His message and his warnings are unequivocally universalist. “The Holocaust stands out as an archetype of a crime against humanity. For me as a Jew and an Israeli therefore the Holocaust teaches us to resist the dehumanising of any people, including the Palestinian ‘victims of victims’, because dehumanising a people can easily result, as it did in Europe in the 1940s, in crimes against humanity.” He had previously argued that it was only after the 1967 war that Israel became a colonial power, oppressing the Palestinians in the occupied territories. However, “a deeper analysis… led me to the conclusion that Israel had been created by a settler-colonial movement. The years 1948 and 1967 were merely milestones in the relentless systematic takeover of the whole of Palestine… Since Zionism was an avowedly settler-colonial movement from the outset, the building of civilian settlements on occupied land was only a new stage in the long march… The most crucial turning point was not the war of 1967 but the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.” And more: “the two-state solution is dead or, to be more accurate, it was never born… The outcome I have come to favour is one democratic state… with equal rights for all its citizens regardless of ethnicity or religion.” He is absolutely right in my view. His family’s story “serves as a corrective to the Zionist narrative which views Arabs and Jews as congenitally incapable of dwelling together in peace and doomed to permanent conflict and discord… My experience as a young boy and that of the whole Jewish community in Iraq, suggests there is nothing inevitable or pre-ordained about Arab-Jewish antagonism… Remembering the past can help us to envisage a better future… Arab-Jewish co-existence is not something that my family imagined in our minds; we experienced it, we touched it.” Optimistic? Yes, perhaps over-optimistic. But towards the end of this masterpiece, Avi Schlaim justifies his message. “Recalling the era of cosmopolitanism and co-existence that some Jews, like my family, enjoyed in Arab countries before 1948 offers a glimmer of hope… It’s the best model we have for a better future.” https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/avi-shlaim-three-worlds-memoirs-of-an-arab-jew/

US intelligence agencies, the military and Elon Musk have deployed space-based and low-orbit satellite systems to spy on all of humanity, 24/7, turning Earth into a digital surveillance prison. https://karenkingston.substack.com/p/no-one-can-hide-from-elon-musks-satellite

‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 156: Israel deploys 15,000 troops in West Bank as Ramadan starts Ceasefire talks falter as Izz El-Din Al-Qassam Brigades spokesperson says Israel is using “deception and evasion.” Israel deploys thousands of troops in the West Bank and Jerusalem ahead of plans to restrict access to Al-Aqsa Mosque during Ramadan. Mustafa Abu SneinehMarch 10, 2024 Palestinians attempt to collect some personal belongings after returning briefly to check on what remains of their homes in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, on March 9, 2024. (Photo: Saeed Jaras/ APA Images) Palestinians attempt to collect some personal belongings after returning briefly to check on what remains of their homes in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, on March 9, 2024. (Photo: Saeed Jaras/ APA Images) Casualties 31,045+ killed* and at least 72,645 wounded in the Gaza Strip. According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, 25 children in Gaza have died of malnutrition and dehydration since the beginning of March. 423+ 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. 588 Israeli soldiers killed since October 7, and at least 3,221 injured.*** *Gaza’s Ministry of Health confirmed this figure on Telegram channel. Some rights groups put the death toll number closer to 40,000 when accounting for those presumed dead. ** The death toll in West Bank and Jerusalem is not updated regularly. This is the latest figure according to PA’s Ministry of Health as of March 6. *** This figure is released by the Israeli military, showing the soldiers whose names “were allowed to be published.” Advertisement Follow the Mondoweiss channel on WhatsApp! Key Developments Israel deploys 15,000 soldiers and military police in West Bank and Jerusalem ahead of Ramadan, including 5,000 reservists, 24 battalions, 20 Border Police companies, and two special forces units. Hamas’s Izz El-Din Al-Qassam Brigades spokesperson rules out any breakthrough in ceasefire talks, and describes Israel’s position as “deceptive.” Abu Obaida warns that Israel’s campaign of starvation against Palestinians in Gaza is affecting Israeli captives, some of whom “suffer from hunger, malnutrition and dehydration.” Izz El-Din Al-Qassam Brigades announces names of four out of seven Israeli captives who died “due to the aggressive Israeli raids on the Gaza Strip.” 25 Palestinian children have died of malnutrition and dehydration since March. The total death toll in Gaza surpasses 31,000 people, 72 percent of whom are women and children. Gaza City municipality says Israel destroyed a one-million-meter square of roads in the Gaza Strip. Gaza City municipality needs heavy vehicles and fuel supplies to clean rubble and nearly 70,000 tons of rubbish. Rescue teams transfer 37 bodies of Palestinian martyrs and 118 injured people to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir Al-Balah overnight. U.S. to send army vessel to Eastern Mediterranean to deliver aid and supplies to Gaza. Wafa reports that Israeli bombing of tents of displaced Palestinians killed 15 people in Al-Mawasi area, west of Khan Younis. Spain is considering recognizing a Palestinian state by 2027, according to Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. Ceasefire talks falter as Israel braces for Ramadan The meditated talks between Israel and Hamas have faltered after weeks of expectations and efforts to agree on a permanent ceasefire and the release of hostages and prisoners. The month of Ramadan is due to start tomorrow, March 11, and Israel is set to restrict access of Palestinians in occupied Jerusalem and the West Bank to the Al-Aqsa Mosque while it is bombing the Gaza Strip, starving Palestinians, and shunning calls to allow humanitarian supplies into Gaza. Ramadan is a month of fasting, prayer, and contemplation for millions of Muslims. But it has an extra layer of holiness for Palestinians in the West Bank, who are barred from entering Jerusalem all year round without an Israeli permit. Ramadan, hence, is an opportunity to reconnect with their capital city and pray in the Al-Aqsa. Israel’s plan to restrict access to Jerusalem marks an escalation and will likely lead to violence. Knowing this, the Israeli government has already deployed 15,000 soldiers and military police in the West Bank and Jerusalem since Friday. Those include 5,000 reservists, 24 battalions, 20 Border Police companies, and two special forces units. Hamas describes Israel’s position in ceasefire talks as “deceptive” It remains unclear if a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip can be reached on Sunday at the eleventh hour. Some Israeli officials appear to be optimistic that this could be done. According to Ynet, Israel’s external intelligence, the Mossad, involved alongside the CIA with the mediated talks with Hamas, said on Saturday evening that “contacts and cooperation with the mediators [of Qatar and Egypt] continue all the time in an effort to narrow the gaps and reach agreements.” For thousands of families in the Gaza Strip, they will spend Ramadan in tents, shelters, or amid the shattered walls and rubble of what is left of their bombed houses and neighborhoods. The 2.5 million Palestinians in Gaza are also barred entry by Israel to visit Jerusalem without a permit. Some of them, who were displaced from north Gaza since October, are now blocked from going back to their houses by Israeli forces stationed on Salah El-Din Street, which splits Gaza into north and south. The U.S. has exerted pressure on meditators to convince Hamas to agree to a six-week truce, including the month of Ramadan, in which hostages and prisoners would be released, and sufficient aid would be supplied. The U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, said on Saturday that “the ball is in their court,” referring to Hamas. “We’re working intensely on it and we’ll see what they do.” Hamas has been adamant that it will only agree to a permanent truce, which would end Israel’s bombing of Gaza and permit the return of thousands of families to north Gaza. During a speech on Friday evening, Abu Obaida, the spokesperson of Hamas’s Izz El-Din Al-Qassam Brigades, ruled out any breakthrough in the talks of a ceasefire. Abu Obaida said Israel was using “deception and evasion” during the talks, and its position was cloaked with “confusion and inconsistency”. He said that Hamas’s ultimate goal from any truce is “stopping [Israeli] aggression, Gaza’s reconstruction, and the withdrawal of [Israeli] forces” from the Gaza Strip. He warned that the campaign of starvation Israel is launching against the people of Gaza is affecting Israeli captives, some of whom “suffer from hunger and deprivation, lack of food and medicine, and suffer malnutrition, dehydration, and emaciation.” “The ball is in their court to save whoever of them can be saved,” Abu Obaida said, addressing Israelis and adding that the Israeli government “insists on receiving [the captives] in coffins.” Later, Izz El-Din Al-Qassam Brigades announced the names of four out of seven captives who died “due to the aggressive Israeli raids on the Gaza Strip, and we have [previously] disclosed the identities of three of them.” Rescue teams transfer 37 bodies to Al-Aqsa Hospital In the past 24 hours, Israeli forces committed eight “massacres” in various areas of the Gaza Strip, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health on Telegram, killing at least 85 people and injuring 130. The total death toll in Gaza has now surpassed 31,000 people, 72 percent of whom are women and children. The ministry added that 25 children have died of malnutrition and dehydration since March. Assem Nabih, a member of Gaza City’s emergency department, told Al-Jazeera Arabic that since October, Israel has destroyed one-million-meter square of roads in the Gaza Strip. The Gaza City municipality needs heavy vehicles and fuel supplies to clean rubble and nearly 70,000 tons of rubbish. Nabih said that insufficient aid is trickling into Gaza, while water in Gaza’s wells is drying out as summer approaches. On Sunday morning, Dr. Khalil Al-Daqran, the spokesperson of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir Al-Balah told Al-Jazeera Arabic that rescue teams transferred 37 bodies of Palestinian martyrs and 118 injured people to the hospital overnight. “However, we can’t treat all the injured due to the lack of capabilities and medical supplies,” he said, adding that all hospitals close to the Al-Aqsa Hospital are out of service. “What we are offering is modest medical care to the injured as there is not enough operation rooms,” Al-Daqran said, calling international organizations to send medical and fuel supplies urgently. U.S. sending army vessel to deliver aid to Gaza On Saturday evening, the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) said it is sending an army vessel to the Eastern Mediterranean, following President Biden’s State of the Union address on Friday, in which he pledged to build a floating pier near Gaza’s shore to facilitate the delivery of aid and food. “Besson, a logistics support vessel, is carrying the first equipment to establish a temporary pier to deliver vital humanitarian supplies,” CENTCOM wrote on the X platform. The floating pier would take up to 60 days to be built and was proposed by Biden after the U.S. airdropped aid on north Gaza in the past weeks, an expensive and cumbersome method to deliver aid, which killed five Palestinians as the parachutes malfunctioned last week. “There are more efficient and faster ways to get assistance to Gazans: Biden can pressure Israel to allow the entry of hundreds of aid trucks that are needed in the territory each day,” Mohamad Bazzi, the director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, wrote in The Guardian. “Instead, Biden and his administration are complicit in prolonging a war in which a U.S. ally has killed more than 30,000 Palestinians and is intentionally starving the population into submission,” he added. Israeli soldiers cheer killing of Palestinian during home raid The Israeli aggression on Gaza has entered six months. There is plenty of footage documenting Israeli brutality and acts of genocide. Lately, head-cam footage was released of Israeli soldiers cheering the killing of a 72-year-old Palestinian civilian with four bullets when they stormed a home in Gaza. Al-Jazeera Arabic also released Israeli drone footage showing a Palestinian child lying dead on the ground after being shot by Israeli forces near Al-Fakhura School in Jabalia, in north Gaza, in December. On Saturday, an Israeli bombing on a house of the Al-Nuwairi family west of Nuseirat camp in central Gaza killed ten people, Wafa news agency reported. Wafa reported that the Israeli bombing killed 15 displaced Palestinians in the Al-Mawasi area, west of Khan Younis. One Palestinian was killed and three injured when Israel bombed a vehicle driving on Salah El-Din Street near the city of Rafah, south of Gaza. In Gaza City’s Al-Zaytoun neighborhood, Israeli forces killed five Palestinians who were among people waiting for aid trucks to arrive near the Kuwait roundabout on Saturday. In Beit Lahia, an Israeli air raid on the house of the Abu Nasser family killed and injured several people, Wafa reported. Thousands of Palestinian students had attended a makeshift school in Rafah. Since October, students in the Gaza Strip have not attended lessons as their schools have either been bombed by Israel or turned into shelters. Palestinian kids were sitting on the ground in a “classroom” made of groundsheets and without a roof, Wafa reported. On Saturday, millions of people protested worldwide in cities of Hannover, Berlin, Paris, Tunis, Copenhagen, Milan, London, Manchester, Sarajevo, Seoul, and Auckland, among others, in support of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, calling for an immediate ceasefire. Spain to recognize Palestinian state by 2027 Spain is mulling the recognition of a Palestinian state, however, by the year 2027, according to Pedro Sanchez, the Spanish Prime Minister. Sanchez’s mandate ends by 2027. He said on Saturday that he will put the recognition of a Palestinian state to vote by the Spanish parliament’s lower half. “We will do it because of moral conviction, because it’s a just cause, but also because it is the only way that two states – Israel and Palestine – can live together and co-exist in peace and security,” Sanchez wrote on X platform. Spain has been supportive of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip since October, and unlike other European countries who suspended funding to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), Madrid pledged to pay $22m extra to help UNRWA’s aid operations in Gaza. In the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces have arrested 7,505 Palestinians since October. Overnight, 15 Palestinians were detained from Nablus, Tubas, Ramallah, and Hebron, Wafa reported. A recent Israeli soldier’s arrest of a 7-year-old girl in Jenin was described as “kidnapping.” In released video footage, Israeli soldiers appear to drag the girl from her home into a military jeep as she resisted and pushed her into the vehicle. “Israeli army stormed Jenin city, in the West Bank, yesterday and kidnapped a 7 years old girl from her family’s house!” the Palestinian embassy in Romania wrote on X platform on Sunday. “This is not a first, they have long history of kidnapping and arresting Palestinian kids,” it added. Overnight, Israeli forces stormed Silat Al-Dhahr and Al-Fandqumiya villages, south of Jenin, and confiscated surveillance cameras. Wafa reported that Israeli forces raided several houses in the two villages following a shooting and booby trap attack on Israeli soldiers near the illegal settlement of Homesh last week, which injured seven Israeli soldiers. BEFORE YOU GO – At Mondoweiss, we understand the power of telling Palestinian stories. For 17 years, we have pushed back when the mainstream media published lies or echoed politicians’ hateful rhetoric. Now, Palestinian voices are more important than ever. Our traffic has increased ten times since October 7, and we need your help to cover our increased expenses. Support our journalists with a donation today. https://mondoweiss.net/2024/03/operation-al-aqsa-flood-day-156-israel-deploys-15000-troops-in-west-bank-as-ramadan-starts/ https://telegra.ph/Operation-Al-Aqsa-Flood-Day-156-Israel-deploys-15000-troops-in-West-Bank-as-Ramadan-starts-03-11

BIDEN ADMIN DEPLOYED AIR FORCE TEAM TO ISRAEL TO ASSIST WITH TARGETS, DOCUMENT SUGGESTS Biden Admin Deployed Air Force Team to Israel to Assist With Targets, Document Suggests Ken Klippenstein, Matthew Petti January 11 2024, 3:33 p.m. A picture taken from Rafah shows smoke billowing over Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip during Israeli bombardment on January 11, 2024, amid ongoing battles between Israel and Palestinian Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip. (Photo by AFP) (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images) Targeting intelligence — the information used to conduct airstrikes and fire long-range artillery weapons — has played a central role in Israel’s siege of Gaza. A document obtained through the Freedom of Information Act suggests that the U.S. Air Force sent officers specializing in this exact form of intelligence to Israel in late November. Since the start of Israel’s bombardment in retaliation for Hamas’s strike on October 7, Israel has dropped more than 29,000 bombs on the tiny Gaza Strip, according to a U.S. intelligence report last month. And for the first time in U.S. history, the Biden administration has been flying surveillance drone missions over Gaza since at least early November, ostensibly for hostage recovery by special forces. At the time the drones were revealed, U.S. Gen. Pat Ryder insisted that the special operations forces deployed to Israel to advise on hostage rescue were “not participating in [Israel Defense Forces] target development.” “I’ve directed my team to share intelligence and deploy additional experts from across the United States government to consult with and advise the Israeli counterparts on hostage recovery efforts,” said President Joe Biden three days after the Hamas attack. But several weeks later, on November 21, the U.S. Air Force issued deployment guidelines for officers, including intelligence engagement officers, headed to Israel. Experts say that a team of targeting officers like this would be used to provide satellite intelligence to the Israelis for the purpose of offensive targeting. “They’re probably targeting people, targeting officers,” Lawrence Cline, who served as an intelligence engagement officer in Iraq before retirement, told The Intercept. Targeting intelligence refers to the identification and characterization of enemy activities including missile and artillery launches, location of leadership and command and control centers, and key facilities. “What I can see is we’ve got a lot of global assets in terms of satellites and the like and the Israelis have a lot in terms of more localized radar coverage.” The deployment guidelines were issued by the Pentagon’s Air Force component command for the Middle East, Air Forces Central, on November 21. The document provides deployment instructions to air personnel sent to the country, including an “Air Defense Liaison Team” as well as “airmen assigned as the Intelligence Engagement Officer (IEO).” Intelligence engagement officers, Cline explained, coordinate intelligence between the U.S. and partner militaries. When deployed in Iraq, Cline, who now works as an instructor for the Defense Department Counterterrorism Fellowship Program, recalled that he and other IEOs comprised a small team who spent “probably three quarters of our time working with the Iraqis, the other quarter checking in with headquarters,” adding that “it was sort of half and half a liaison and advising.” Asked about the airmen’s mission, the Defense Intelligence Agency referred questions to the Air Forces Central, which did not respond to a request for comment. Neither the Office of the Secretary of Defense nor Central Command responded to requests for comment. Most Read The intelligence engagement process provides a low-profile mechanism through which the U.S. can coordinate with the Israeli military, a valuable tool amid the political sensitivity of the conflict. A U.S. Army primer defines intelligence engagement as a “powerful” tool that is useful “especially when U.S. policy might restrict our interaction,” as it “often does not require large budgets or footprints.” Experts say that may be the case here. Tyler McBrien, managing editor of Lawfare, a website specializing in national security law, said that there seems to be an “Israel exception” to the U.S. rules around military assistance. Past presidents have issued several executive orders banning the U.S. government from carrying out or sponsoring assassinations abroad. This ban has been interpreted to include wartime targeting of civilians, according to a recent Foreign Affairs article by Brian Finucane, a former legal adviser for the State Department who now works for Crisis Group. And the so-called Leahy law, a set of budget amendments named for Sen. Patrick Leahy, requires the U.S. government to vet foreign military units for “gross violations of human rights” when providing training or aid to those units. Several progressive members of Congress have raised concerns that U.S. aid to Israel — both before and during the present war — violates that requirement. “For air advisory missions, which I imagine involve intelligence sharing and training, specific domestic legal restrictions such as the Leahy law and the assassination ban would likely come into play,” McBrien said. But the Leahy vetting process is “reversed” for Israel; rather than vetting Israeli military units beforehand, the U.S. State Department sends aid and then waits for reports of violations, according to a recent article by Josh Paul, who resigned from his post as a State Department political-military officer over his concerns with U.S. support for Israel. “As a general matter, U.S. officials who are providing support to another country during armed conflict would want to make sure they are not aiding and abetting war crimes,” Finucane told The Intercept. He emphasized that the same principle applies to weapons transfers and intelligence sharing. The Israeli military intentionally strikes Palestinian civilian infrastructure, known as “power targets,” in order to “create a shock,” according to an investigation by the Israeli news website +972 Magazine. Targets are generated using an artificial intelligence system known as “Habsora,” Hebrew for “gospel.” “Nothing happens by accident,” an Israeli military intelligence source told +972 Magazine. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.” The Biden administration has gone to great lengths to conceal the nature of its support for the Israeli military. The Pentagon quietly tapped a so-called Tiger Team to facilitate weapons assistance to Israel, as The Intercept has previously reported. The administration has also declined to reveal which weapons systems it’s providing Israel and at which quantities, insisting that the secrecy is necessary for security reasons. “We’re being careful not to quantify or get into too much detail about what they’re getting — for their own operational security purposes, of course,” White House spokesperson John Kirby told reporters during a press briefing in October. This contrasts with its support for Ukraine, about which it has been far more transparent. The administration has provided an itemized list of its weapons assistance to Ukraine, a country facing at least as much of a threat amid the invasion of Russia. The White House has never addressed the incongruity. Past administrations have also provided detailed public information about U.S. targeting support for the Saudi and Emirati military campaigns in Yemen, which U.S. officials claim was meant to reduce civilian casualties. The secrecy “may reflect the fact that the U.S. has interests that are in tension, the Biden administration has interests that are in tension,” Finucane said. “On the one hand, they want to publicly embrace Israel and support Israel, providing what seems to be unconditional support. On the other hand, they don’t want to be perceived as taking the country into another war in the Middle East.” https://theintercept.com/2024/01/11/israel-air-force-targeting-intelligence/

‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 143: Gaza famine is ‘man-made,’ says UNRWA Chief UNRWA says that the famine in northern Gaza can be avoided if more food convoys are allowed in, but Israel continues to hold up over 2000 aid trucks. Meanwhile, Netanyahu reaffirms plans to invade Rafah, where 1.5 million Gazans have sought shelter. Leila WarahFebruary 26, 2024 Palestinians stand in line for food aid, Deir al-Balah, February 2, 2024. (Photo: Omar Ashtawy/APA Images) Palestinians stand in line for food aid, Deir al-Balah, February 2, 2024. (Photo: Omar Ashtawy/APA Images) Casualties 29,782+ killed* and at least 70,043 wounded in the Gaza Strip. 380+ 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. 579 Israeli soldiers killed since October 7, and at least 3,221 injured.** *This figure was confirmed by Gaza’s Ministry of Health on Telegram channel on February 24. Some rights groups put the death toll number at more than 38,000 when accounting for those presumed dead. ** This figure is released by the Israeli military, showing the soldiers whose names “were allowed to be published.” Key Developments Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stresses that the assault on the crowded city of Rafah will take place but may be delayed by captive exchange deal. UNRWA: Famine in northern Gaza can be avoided if more food convoys are allowed in. Orthodox Jews take over Muslim shrine, vandalize graves in West Jerusalem. WFP: Enough food is waiting across Gaza’s borders to feed entire population. Aerial photos show over 2,000 aid trucks on Egyptian side of Rafah crossing. Renowned Gazan artist Fat’hi Ghabin dies after being denied treatment abroad. Gaza Ministry of Health: Dialysis and intensive care patients facing death in northern Gaza as hospitals run out of fuel. 18-year-old Israeli woman jailed for refusing to serve in army over war on Gaza. UNRWA: Report of two-month-old baby dying in Gaza from hunger “horrific.” Israeli defense minister vows to continue targeting Hezbollah regardless of the situation in Gaza. Israeli forces partially withdraw from Nasser Hospital on Sunday, reports Al Jazeera. Israeli military erects watchtower with surveillance cameras at Al-Aqsa Mosque. Israeli forces kill at least 10 people waiting for aid in Gaza City, reports Wafa. U.S. airman sets self on fire in protest over Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Israel advances construction of 3,344 new illegal housing units in the occupied West Bank. Gaza Media Office: Israeli forces have taken Palestinian civilians hostage and used them as human shields in several military operations. ‘One in six children in northern Gaza is malnourished’ While Israel’s violent aggression on Gaza approaches the five-month mark, the situation in the besieged enclave deteriorates by the day as the population undergoes an Israeli-imposed famine as a result of the blockade. Following reports of a two-month-old baby starving to death on Friday, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) has said the high risk of malnutrition continues to increase, with one in six children in northern Gaza “severely malnourished.” “We continue to appeal for regular humanitarian access,” UNRWA said in a post on X. Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian physician and humanitarian advocate, says infant death from starvation is a direct consequence of Israeli restrictions on aid entering the coastal enclave. “This is not a tragedy; it is man-made. Starvation is being forced upon the people of Gaza by the Israeli occupation forces,” Gilbert, who has more than 30 years of experience working in Gaza hospitals, told Al Jazeera. “Just two days ago, the international nutrition cluster came out with a very alarming report … that there is a sharp increase in the drivers of malnutrition in Gaza — food insecurity, a lack of diversity in the diet and decreasing infant and young child feeding possibilities.” Gilbert said Israel’s restriction of food and water in the enclave was a “huge war crime.” “How can the world just sit idly by and watch children die from starvation?” The situation is the worst in the north of Gaza, where UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini says Israel has not allowed food to be delivered since January 25 and that the U.N.’s calls to send food aid have been denied and fallen on deaf ears. Since then, Lazzarini said, UNRWA and other UN agencies “have warned against looming famine, appealed for regular humanitarian access, and stated that famine can be averted if more food convoys are allowed into northern Gaza on a regular basis.” “This is a man-made disaster. The world committed to never let famine happen again. Famine can still be avoided, through genuine political will to grant access and protection to meaningful assistance. The days to come will once again test our common humanity and values,” he said. Similarly, Samer Abdeljaber, the World Food Programme’s (WFP’s) director for emergencies, says enough food is stocked up across Gaza’s borders to feed the entire population. However, it cannot safely reach the war-torn population due to the ongoing violence and extensive Israeli security checks. Ariel photos posted by Al Jazeera Arabic show over 2,000 aid trucks piled up on the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing in the southern Gaza Strip. “We have enough food across the borders, even from Jordan and Egypt, to be able to support 2.2 million people,” said Abdeljaber, as cited by Al Jazeera. “But we need to make sure we have the right access to Gaza from different crossings so that we can actually reach the people — whether they are in the north or the south or in the central areas.” “Safe routes is one of our requirements to continue assistance to the north and that can only be guaranteed if that is a speedy process,” Abdelkader said. “Delays at the checkpoints are making it impossible for us to reach deeper into the north.” Nada Tarbush, a diplomat at the Palestine Mission to the U.N., has urged world governments to intervene and ensure the “urgent delivery of food, clean water and medicine via airdrops in Gaza.” “Blocking the delivery of humanitarian aid is a war crime. Using starvation as a means of warfare is a war crime. Collective punishment is a war crime,” she said in a post on X. On Monday afternoon, Israel allowed the entry of 10 aid trucks into the northern part of the Gaza Strip amid reports of starvation, according to Al Jazeera correspondents. However, it is likely to be only a trickle compared to the needs of the desperate population. “Clean water is scarce. Solid waste is accumulating. The spread of diseases is on the rise,” UNRWA has said. “The situation is catastrophic, but UNRWA teams continue working to provide critical aid.” Israeli forces kill Palestinians waiting for aid…again Meanwhile, when humanitarian aid is allowed into the besieged enclave, the safety of civilians collecting the assistance is not protected or assured. Several reports continue to surface of Israeli forces targeting Palestinians waiting for humanitarian aid. Most recently, on Sunday evening, Israeli forces killed at least ten people waiting for aid in Gaza City by shelling and firing on the crowds of Palestinians waiting for food aid trucks to arrive, reported Wafa. At least 15 people were injured in the attack, and they have been transferred to the nearby al-Shifa Hospital. According to Al Jazeera, two fishermen were also shot dead at the shore of Khan Younis. Israel: Invasion of Rafah will happen no matter what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has continued planning the Israeli assault on Rafah. Approximately 1.5 million Palestinians are seeking shelter in the southernmost city after being forcibly displaced, many of them several times, from other areas of Gaza. Netanyahu has said if Israel and Hamas reach a deal, that it will delay a military operation in Rafah, but stressed to CBS News that Israel would have to invade at a certain point later. “If we have a deal, it will be delayed somewhat, but it will happen. If we don’t have a deal, we’ll do it anyway,” Netanyahu said. Senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri has said that Netanyahu’s remarks have cast doubt over Israel’s willingness to secure a deal. “Netanyahu’s comments show he is not concerned about reaching an agreement,” Abu Zuhri told Reuters, accusing the Israeli leader of wanting “to pursue negotiation under bombardment and the bloodshed [of Palestinians].” As Israel’s plans advance, global concern has increased over the human cost of the operation. The U.S. has called on Israel to present a “credible” plan for protecting civilians crammed into the city before launching the assault. At the same time, Israel’s European allies have warned against the offensive altogether. “If the Israeli army were to launch an offensive on Rafah under these conditions, it would be a humanitarian catastrophe,” German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock has said. “We think it is impossible to see how you can fight a war amongst these people. There’s nowhere for them to go,” said U.K. Foreign Secretary David Cameron UNICEF has also warned that an attack on Rafah would be catastrophic, with more than 600,000 children sheltering in the path of an assault and a severely limited humanitarian lifeline already on the brink of collapse. “Thousands more could die in the violence or by lack of essential services, and further disruption of humanitarian assistance. We need Gaza’s last remaining hospitals, shelters, markets and water systems to stay functional. Without them, hunger and disease will skyrocket, taking more child lives,” UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said in a statement. Meanwhile, Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant has vowed to continue targeting Hezbollah regardless of the situation in Gaza. “If anyone thinks that when we get a hostage release deal and pause in Gaza, it will alleviate what is going on here — they’re wrong,” Gallant said, according to Haaretz. He added that Israel would push Hezbollah to retreat from its northern border “either by agreement or by force.” Hezbollah and Israel have been exchanging fire since October, and the Lebanese group says it will not stop its attacks until the war on Gaza ends. Netanyahu’s office issued a brief statement on Monday morning stating that they presented the War Cabinet with a “plan for evacuating the population from the areas of fighting in the Gaza Strip.” It is unclear what those plans are. However, there are fears that Israel plans on forcibly expelling Gaza’s population to Egypt. Gaza’s hospitals are still under attack Hospitals across the Gaza Strip continue to struggle under Israel’s attacks, making it extremely difficult for Palestinian civilians to receive adequate medical care. In Northern Gaza, the Palestinian Ministry of Health has said the situation is “beyond description,” as hospitals run out of fuel. Medical refrigerators have run out of electricity, which risks the destruction of large quantities of sensitive medication. The lack of fuel has also had devastating consequences for rescue missions in the war-torn area, as dozens of ambulances and medical services have been taken out of service. The effects of this shortage have also left dialysis and intensive care patients facing death due to the lack of basic supplies. In Khan Younis, southern Gaza, a UN delegation observed “catastrophic conditions” during a visit to the besieged al-Amal Hospital in the city. “The delegation witnessed the extent of the damage caused by Israeli occupation artillery shelling to several floors of the hospital, as well as the catastrophic conditions inside due to severe shortages in food, drinkable water, medical supplies, and medication,” the Palestinian Red Cresent said. Meanwhile, at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, “snipers are still in the vicinity of the hospital and, tragically, are still shooting at anything moving near it,” Al Jazeera correspondent Hani Mahmoud reported from Gaza. “Despite the Israeli military’s statement that it has completed operations inside Nasser Hospital.” Occupied West Bank: Illegal settlement construction While the world’s eyes are on Gaza, Israel is taking the chance to advance the construction of 3,344 new housing units in the occupied West Bank, 2,350 units in the settlement of Maale Adumim, 694 in Efrat, and 300 in Kedar, according to Peace Now. “They are significant and expansive projects that will greatly impact the possibility of reaching a two-state solution, especially the plans in Efrat and Kedar,” the Israeli nonprofit said in a statement. “The decision to promote thousands of unnecessary and harmful housing units in settlements is a hasty and irresponsible decision by an extremist government that has long lost the trust of the people,” it added. Palestinian Prime Minister Muhammad Shtayyeh resigns Palestinian Prime Minister Muhammad Shtayyeh handed in his resignation to President Mahmoud Abbas at the opening of Monday’s government meeting in Ramallah, reports Reuters. Shtayyeh said he was moved to step down due to the “unprecedented escalation” in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem and the “war, genocide and starvation in the Gaza Strip,” as cited by Al Jazeera. Shtayyeh noted there are “efforts to make the [Palestinian Authority] an administrative and security authority without political influence, and the PA will continue to struggle to embody the state on the land of Palestine despite the occupation.” “I see that the next stage and its challenges require new governmental and political arrangements that take into account the new reality in Gaza and the need for a Palestinian-Palestinian consensus based on Palestinian unity,” he added. U.S. military member self-immolation A U.S. military service member set himself on fire in an act of protest against the war in Gaza outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington. According to Reuters, an Air Force spokesperson confirmed that the incident, which occurred on Sunday afternoon and was live-streamed on Twitch, involved an active-duty airman. “I will no longer be complicit in genocide,” said the man, wearing military fatigues, in the live video as he approached the embassy. He then doused himself in a clear liquid and set himself on fire, repeatedly screaming, “Free Palestine,” in the viral footage. NBC News has reported that the man, identified by social media as Aaron Bushnell, has succumbed to his wounds. Similarly, in December 2023, CNN reported a person set themselves on fire outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta. https://mondoweiss.net/2024/02/operation-al-aqsa-flood-day-143-gaza-famine-is-man-made-says-unrwa-chief/

🚨 Study Claims COVID Caused More Heart Damage Than Vaccines — Here’s What the Authors Got Wrong Rainer Johannes Klement, Ph.D + Harald Walach reanalyzed data and found that while coronaviruses might cause myocarditis, the COVID-19 vaccines cause at least as much or more. Study Claims COVID Caused More Heart Damage Than Vaccines — Here’s What the Authors Got Wrong A 2023 study admitted that the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines cause myocarditis, but claimed the COVID-19 virus was even more damaging than the vaccine. A recent, more detailed review of their data, however, showed the opposite is likely true. Angelo DePalma, Ph.D. human heart with covid vaccine Miss a day, miss a lot. Subscribe to The Defender's Top News of the Day. It's free. Despite the known side effects of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, some studies (here, here and here) and health websites (here, here and here) argue that whatever vaccination’s adverse outcomes, being unvaccinated is worse. In one such study, Dr. Christian Mueller and his co-authors concluded the COVID-19 virus — not the vaccine — was responsible for more myocarditis, or heart muscle damage, than the vaccine. However, when Rainer Johannes Klement, Ph.D., a physicist at Leopoldina Hospital in Schweinfurt, Germany, and Harald Walach, a clinical psychologist and head of the Change Health Institute in Basel, Switzerland, reanalyzed Mueller’s data they found that while coronaviruses might cause myocarditis, the COVID-19 vaccines cause at least as much or more. The Klement paper appeared in the Feb. 1 edition of The Egyptian Health Journal. Mueller’s study Mueller set out to quantify and compare myocarditis in vaxed versus unvaxed subjects and to explain possible mechanisms. To explore these mechanisms, the researchers tested subjects for antibodies against interleukin-1 receptor antagonist (IL-1RA), the SARS-CoV-2-nucleoprotein, the viral spike protein and 14 inflammatory cytokines. Since none of these measures differed between study groups, the “mechanism” issue was unresolved. To assess myocarditis investigators tested 777 hospital workers (median age 37, 69.5% women) for cardiac troponin T one and three days after they received an mRNA-1273 booster. Cardiologists typically prescribe this test after a suspected heart attack to quantify the extent and duration of heart damage. Of the 40 subjects (5.1%) with elevated troponin on Day 3, 22 (2.8%) were diagnosed with myocarditis, with 20 cases occurring in women and two in men. The researchers reported that among these subjects troponin elevations were mild and temporary and did not involve abnormalities as determined by electrocardiogram. No patients experienced “major adverse cardiac events” within 30 days of receiving the shot. Mueller’s team concluded: COVID-19 associates with a substantially higher risk for myocarditis that [sic] mRNA vaccination … Myocarditis related to COVID-19 infection has shown a higher mortality than myocarditis related to mRNA vaccination. Before the COVID-19 vaccine were [sic] available, the incidence and extent of myocardial injury associated with COVID-19 infection was [sic] much higher than observed in this active surveillance study after booster vaccination. One of the Mueller co-authors had commercial ties to diagnostics companies. Another had previously been compensated by diagnostics and vaccine manufacturers. Mueller had relationships with diagnostics, pharmaceutical and vaccine companies at the time he wrote the paper. Where did Mueller go wrong? One way to measure treatment effects is to compare an outcome, for example, blood pressure, in the same subjects before and after the treatment and report before-and-after results. Although this option was known to medical researchers and available to him, Mueller did not take advantage of it — either because he did not think to measure pre-booster troponin levels or chose not to report them for some reason, perhaps because they did not align with his other results. Instead, his team took an approach that required two well-matched study groups. Although Mueller claimed placebos and controls met this requirement they differed on the feature that mattered most: heart health. Vaccinated subjects with current or recent heart issues were excluded from the study, while all control subjects had just entered the hospital with heart symptoms and were therefore already at greater risk for myocarditis. Klement and Walach found more anomalies in the Mueller paper. RFK Jr. and Brian Hooker Vax-Unvax RFK Jr. and Brian Hooker’s New Book: “Vax-Unvax” Order Now They began their critique by citing three 2021 studies on COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis (here, here and here). All three studies showed myocarditis became a concern shortly after the COVID-19 vaccine introductions. They discussed three papers in some detail: A 2023 German autopsy study on 25 unexpected deaths within 20 days of COVID-19 vaccination identified acute myocarditis as the most probable cause of death in four cases. A 2023 report on myocarditis in 303 non-vaccinated and 700 vaccinated asymptomatic subjects found significantly higher damage in the vaccinated persisting for up to 180 days post-vaccination. One of the first autopsy papers, an Indian-led study based on World Health Organization pharmacovigilance data reported 2.1 times the risk for cardiac arrest, 2.7 times the risk for acute heart attack, 2.6 times the risk for elevated troponin, and 7.3-fold higher levels of D-dimer for COVID-19 vaccinations compared with the use of other medications. These studies strongly suggest that myocarditis became an issue only after the mRNA vaccine rollouts. They contradict Mueller’s statement that the “extent of myocardial injury associated with COVID-19 infection was much higher than observed in this active surveillance study after booster vaccination.” According to Klement and Walach, this statement is wrong for two reasons. First, in addition to the non-equivalence of controls’ and subjects’ heart-health status, Mueller ignored the much larger number of COVID-19-infected, unhospitalized, unvaccinated individuals with (presumably) much lower troponin levels compared with patients entering the hospital with heart symptoms. Second, Klement and Walach argued that the public health impact of myocarditis depends not only on the incidence or rate among study groups but the size of those groups. The significance is that a lower incidence in a very large group (vaccinated) is more meaningful than a slightly higher rate in a very small group (individuals infected with COVID-19). scales of justice Your support helps fund this work, and CHD’s related advocacy, education and scientific research. Donate Now On that basis, Klement and Walach estimated the number of myocarditis cases among all German COVID-19 hospitalizations at 27,467, and among those who were vaccinated at 1.97 million. As a result, regardless of myocarditis severity, there were 71.7 times as many myocarditis cases among the vaccinated as among those hospitalized for COVID-19. A similar analysis for Switzerland estimated 169,960 cases of myocarditis among vaccinated compared with 8,179 among those hospitalized for COVID-19. Although not as dramatic as the German estimates this still shows a much higher occurrence of heart damage among vaccinated versus hospitalized. In a June 2021 paper, Walach, Klement and Dutch data analyst Wouter Aukema concluded that based on 700 adverse reactions, 16 serious side effects and 4.11 deaths for every 100,000 vaccinations, COVID-19 vaccines were released with insufficient safety data. The authors said the risk-benefit ratio for mRNA vaccines did not add up because “for three deaths prevented by vaccination we have to accept two inflicted by vaccination.” Mueller told The Defender via email: “Our study reveals an important lack of prospective safety data concerning COVID-19 vaccines. Given the magnitude of the vaccinated population compared to the much smaller proportion of the population that became infected and developed symptoms, including a small percentage with possible heart damage, our findings should remain qualitatively robust.” LEARN MORE ⬇️ https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/covid-study-myocarditis-vaccines/ Join ➡️ @ShankaraChetty

The Rothschild Deep State Cabal Is Imploding Jonas E. Alexis, Senior EditorFebruary 23, 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. Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends [life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness], it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence, 1776 That same momentous year that kicked off the American Revolution, 1776 was also the year that ex-Jesuit Adam Weishaupt in Bavaria founded his Illuminati Order, sponsored by Mayer Amschel Rothschild as House of Rothschild patriarch in nearby Frankfurt, Germany. And it was America’s third US President Thomas Jefferson, who refused renewal of the Rothschild controlled First Bank of America’s charter in 1811. The American Revolution may have been fought for independence from King George’s British monarchy, but not independence from the Rothschild central banking cartel, whose controlling 70% foreign interests in First Bank of America indebted America’s earliest citizens. At the end of George Washington’s eight years as first US president, in 1791 the federalist Rothschild agent Alexander Hamilton installed for the Rothschilds their First Bank of America. Not renewing its charter, Jefferson kicked the Rothschild owned bank out of the US, which became the basis for America’s first war as a sovereign independent country, once again facing the same British enemy in the War of 1812. This war fought over financial independence from Britain’s City of London, only caused young America to drown further in war debt, as Nathan Rothschild backing both sides to every conflict he creates was determined to bankrupt the US to force it into recolonization. Despite the hard-fought American military victory, by 1815 with the US war debt nearly tripled at $119.2 million in the red, America financially was already a major debtor nation owing the infamous bloodline banking dynasty. That same year, making a colossal fortune over the Battle of Waterloo outcome by pre-rigging his investment, the gloating crook Nathan Rothschild proclaimed: I care not what puppet is placed upon the throne of England to rule the Empire on which the sun never sets. The man who controls Britain’s money supply controls the British Empire, and I control the British money supply. Sadly, America’s War of 1812 struggle for financial independence from the Rothschild controllers was lost. A brief excerpt from my Pedophilia & Empire series, Book 3, chapter one on the Rothschild family: In 1816 with yet a Second Bank of the United States foisted on American citizens for the next 20 years, in effect, Rothschild was simply seizing his predatory ownership of the United States. And once again, private control over the US money supply tacking on parasitic interest went into the coffers of as many as 1000 foreign investors, with [Nathan’s younger brother] Baron James de Rothschild in Paris holding the controlling shares. When the Second Bank of America’s charter was up for renewal 20 years later in 1836, that year Nathan Rothschild died. But France’s James de Rothschild assuming control over both the London and Paris banking branches, battled playing dirty as usual for charter renewal. He met his match as the resolute, feisty President Andrew Jackson was up for the challenge, declaring war on the House of Rothschild: You are a den of vipers. I intend to rout you out and by eternal God, I will rout you out. President Jackson’s turn to oppose the centralized moneychangers ultimately proved successful, kicking the Rothschilds out of America yet again, and the second British dynasty US takeover was again foiled, at least temporarily. However, the year prior in 1835, amidst the battle over the US private central bank, Jackson barely dodged a bullet to literally escape an assassination attempt attributed to Rothschild wrath. From 1836 to 1913, the US was largely free of the treacherous Rothschild leeches from Europe, signifying America’s longest period of foremost economic growth and prosperity in its entire history. Having acquired central banking control over Europe and through Nathan Rothschild’s ownership of the Bank of England by early 19th century, the British East India Company monopoly over international trade, including both the drug and slave trade, spanned the globe from Africa, the Indian and Pacific Oceans to North America and Europe, the flourishing international banking cartel consolidated its growing global money lending power over every commercial trade on every continent. But one vast sprawling nation covering two continents over the centuries resisted and eluded the Rothschild clutches. As a result, Russia was repeatedly targeted, as its ruling Romanov monarchy managed to successfully evade the Rothschild predatory conquest, but not without murderous retribution. From author Eustice Mullens’ New World Order: After the fall of Napoleon, the Rothschilds turned all their hatred against the Romanovs. In 1825, they poisoned Alexander I; in 1855, they poisoned Nicholas I. Other assassinations followed, culminating on the night of November 6, 1917, when a dozen Red Guards drove a truck up to the Imperial Bank Building in Moscow. They loaded the Imperial jewel collection and $700 million gold, loot totaling more than a billion dollars. The new regime also confiscated the 150 million acres in Russia personally owned by the Czar. In addition to a century of assassinating Romanov czars by poison, when Czar Alexander II came to the aid of Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, which by many accounts attribute Russian support to preserving the Union, the vindictive Rothschild cartel as primary backer of the Confederacy, vowed eternal revenge against the Russia and its royal family. The Rothschilds et al’s war at all cost against Russia today in Ukraine is merely this same long legacy’s outcome. Just prior to the Rothschilds’ planned First World War in 1914, a few months earlier in late 1913, they deceptively snuck through Congress their Federal Reserve Act on December 23rd, after most members had already left on Christmas break. The Jekyll Island rendezvous of the Fed Reserve architects included Paul Warburg, the German born chief central banking Rothschild agent moved to the US, ending up the second Vice Fed chairman. Continuity of one thought mind pervades the Warburg clan as Paul’s son James Paul Warburg before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1950 emphatically declared: We shall have world government, whether or not we like it. The question is only whether world government will be achieved by consent or by conquest. Thus, the third Rothschild central private bank in America was established to take permanent full usury-debtor system control over the US money supply, through bribery of Washington’s political puppet class, and the American people through their engineered debtor system. 1913 also saw the passage of the Federal Income Tax Act, illegally squeezing tax dollars to rip off hardworking US citizens just to pay off debt interests from all the bankers’ war loans. This vicious control cycle is how Khazarian mafia swindlers have cunningly operated since their identity snatching days of their ancient Khazar kingdom over a millennium ago. The Rothschild central banking controllers hired one of their own, distant cousin Karl Marx to write his Marxist Communist Manifesto in 1848. And it was the Rothschild cartel money along with Rothschild agent Jacob Schiff in America that financed his fellow Jews’ Bolshevik Revolution and their plotted murder and theft of Russian Czar Nicholas II’s family in 1917. And that billion plus of stolen Russian gold is said to have wound up stored in Rothschild’s underground chambers at City of London’s Bank of England. A centuries long pattern of covert deception, murder, war, corruption and insatiable appetite for greed and increasing power characterize all that is behind today’s still operating Khazarian mafia bankster dynasty rooted in ancient Khazar more than a millennium ago. Closer to this century historically, one world government tyranny and depopulation eugenics have both reflected the elites’ obsession. Rothschild crimes funded all three of the most bloodthirsty dictators in all of human history. The 1917 Russian Revolution spawned the rise of the Lenin-Stalin Communist Soviet Union democide, killing 66 million mostly Christian Russians. Then, since the early 1930s, in addition to Bush, Rothschild and Rockefeller bloodlines also funded the rise of Adolph Hitler. His alleged sacrifice of 6 million Jews in WWII was used coldheartedly as Zionist bargaining chips for the non-Hebrew Ashkenazim false claim of “Israelite birthright” to a homeland in Palestine, promised to Lord Lionel Rothschild in the 1917 Balfour Declaration. Three decades later, the pledge was fulfilled with the establishment of the Jewish State. Despite a non-Hebrew heritage, Ashkenazi [non]Jews that trace back originally to nomadic Turkic tribes, comprise 90% of today’s Israeli population. The Balfour Declaration also made another pledge: …Nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine. The Jewish State since its 1948 inception, that’s the last three quarters of a century now, has brutally pushed out the true Semite Arabs living in Palestine, their rightful ancient homeland, yet they’ve been systematically destroyed by Israel’s official genocidal apartheid policy. This fact is neither anti-Semitic nor what should be allowed or tolerated by rest of the world, yet with impunity, it has for far too long. This shameful reality is largely due to the Zionist House of Rothschild’s influence and control over Israel. Also in the 1930s, the Rothschilds groomed and backed yet another notorious Yale educated dictator Mao Zedong, also covertly supporting his democide against 65 million of his own sacrificed fellow Chinese. Over the centuries, you can recognize a pattern, that these Luciferian bloodline controllers led by the likes of the Rothschild and Rockefeller dynasties, have had ample practice committing genocides, financing the rise to power of all three dictators responsible for the deadliest genocides in all of history on this planet… that is, until the current unprecedented genocide against today’s human race. In 1933 the globalists of the day attempted the first major coup against the United States government in a failed attempt to overthrew the Franklin Delano Roosevelt, singlehandedly prevented by the Medal of Honor and most decorated war hero US Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler. His intervention stopped the plotted criminal takeover, exposing it publicly in the press in 1934 as well as in his book. And though his courageous actions successfully averted the treasonous subversion committed by some of America’s wealthiest, most powerful conspiratorial traitors as captains of industry, bankers and politicians, among them heir to the Singer Sewing fortune Robert Sterling Clark and George HW Bush’s father, Prescott Bush, during WWII as a Union Banking Corp. director, Bush’s company was linked to financing, aiding and abetting the US Nazi enemy Adolph Hitler, yet his shockingly treasonous past was covered up and he was sent to the US Senate from Connecticut. Of course, the Bush-Clinton crime families are notorious for getting away with multiple felonies of high treason. Pedophile George Bush senior was implicated in America’s largest publicly exposed child sex trafficking network, tagged the “Franklin scandal” involving Nebraska children some from Catholic Boys Town directly trafficked to the White House during the Reagan-Bush administrations. While the Bush crime family are Satanists, their fellow Satanist arrested in this scandal coverup was fall guy Lawrence E. King, though the entire operation was quickly swept under the carpet as ringleader King aided by the likes of Satanist Lt. Col. Michael Aquino hotel drop-off of a cash filled suitcase to King. Like Epstein, Lawrence King was also handed a sweetheart deal with next to no jailtime considering his ungodly crimes. Of course, Aquino always walked free despite being linked to multiple pedo-scandals, protected by his military status high up in America’s MK mind control operation, identified by a number of child victims at the Presidio daycare scandal as well as implicated by Cathy O’Brien as a MK-ultra top programmer. America’s highest-profile pedophile-child sex trafficker is supposedly deceased, Jeffrey Epstein, while his gal pal partner-in-crime Guislaine Maxwell serves her 20-year sentence in a Florida federal penitentiary. Whereas the Franklin scandal incriminates the Bush crime family, both the Epstein-Maxwell operation and Pizzagate scandal expose the Rothschild, Clinton, Podesta, Obama, Biden crime families, including Donald Trump touting what “a terrific guy” Epstein was to 2004 New York Magazine, adding how he loves “the young ones,” wink, wink. The fact is, America’s uniparty is infested with hundreds of compromised famous pedophiles and gatekeeping enablers still walking free, despite the tons of cameras capturing the crimes as evidence. Outside of King, Epstein and Maxwell, zero arrests and prosecutions of any prominent guilty pedo-criminals including British, Belgian, and Dutch royalty, prime ministers and presidents, as well as billionaire criminals like Bill Gates, hundreds, perhaps thousands of these blackmailed VIP politicians, judges, police chiefs, generals, CEOs, bankers and entertainers, all guilty of horrific child sex abuse crimes have yet to face their unholiest of unholy karma. Multiple chapters in Pedophilia & Empire Book 4 unravel the US pedo-scourge and other scandals throughout the world in the other books. The New World Order, secret societies and the global pedophilia network generating enormous black ops revenue involving colossal amounts of money laundering by all Rothschild private central banks, are explicitly intertwined and fully documented in the five volume series with access to all 50 plus chapters here. Because so much accelerated shocking truth is coming out weekly, with a one in 6 billion chance of so many disastrous chemical spill derailments all at once, manmade earthquakes punishing nations aligned with Russia, all are only further incriminating the bloodline controllers and their puppet minions at the highest echelons of Western power. The reason why the Ukraine war is so huge right now, carrying so much at stake, is because the entire New World Order’s one world government scheme is riding on the bloodline controllers’ defeat by Russia in Ukraine as their longtime “devil’s playground” hub gets further exposed to the global public. With all these bloodline criminals vis-à-vis the Rothschild dynasty atop this predatory food chain, busily bribing, blackmailing, and silencing facts and truthtellers through any and all means necessary, it’s to ensure that their psychopathic club of elites remains unreachable and immune from all prosecution and long overdue justice. They know more than enough criminal evidence is out there in the public domain to convict these genocidal killers for their unending crimes and they know that We the People are closing in on them. And because of this, the monstrous beasts are willing to unleash nuclear Armageddon. We are living through epic times, and though millions have already perished and perhaps billions more will follow, in this war between good and evil, we have them on the run, rushing like cockroaches for the cover of darkness. But armed and united by the truth, justice will be done. As a consequence of the covert subversive overthrow of the United States government taking place in recent years, both the complete absence of rule of law and rampant treasonous failure to uphold the US Constitution, currently has Americans and people around the world waking up in righteous anger by the thousands every single day. Our founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson bestowed fundamental rights of liberty and freedom to every citizen, granting us clear-cut legal justification and guidelines to, in his words, “abolish” the illegitimate treasonous regime occupying Washington today. Taking into account the US government’s repeated terrorist acts constituting democide against its own American citizenry as well as having committed acts of war against US closest allies like Germany via the Nord Stream sabotage, the Biden regime’s intent to destroy both America and West must be opposed immediately. A growing majority of Americans disapprove of Biden’s job performance as imposter president, more so than any previous president in US modern history during the entire 78 years of presidential poll ratings. After the US Supreme Court declined the Brunson case out of Utah last month for a second time this year, the longshot effort to hold the vast majority of Congress accountable for illegally ratifying a fraudulent, rigged 2020 election has been thwarted. All three branches of government – the executive, legislative and judiciary, have systemically failed Americans by repeatedly violating the US Constitution in clear breech of their sworn oaths to uphold and defend. All three branches have committed treason for destroying our nation through reckless, willful crimes endangering both the American as well as global population, targeted for extermination by the elites. Nuremberg 2.0 needs to immediately be invoked for mass tribunal trials of multitudes of genocidal traitors determined to impose their diabolical, exposed depopulation agenda on humanity. The assassination of John F. Kennedy, the president that vowed to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces,” reduce the power of the Federal Reserve and avert a decade long costly war in Vietnam, set the stage for the Deep State to fester and thrive ever since November 22, 1963. Every US president ever since has been a mere puppet for bloodline controllers to rape the earth and humanity in the name of the military industrial security Big Pharma complex. In this century the Khazarian mafia infested and controlled international criminal cabal manufactured their “new Pearl Harbor” 9/11, an Israeli-neocon grand Satanic blood sacrifice after the prewritten Patriot Act straight out of the dialectical “problem, reaction, solution” con-game playbook intended to strip away all Americans’ constitutional rights, a lose-lose our less freedom for less security and win-win for the Satanists, thinly disguised as collateral damage behind their fabricated war on terror against Muslim terrorists they create, train and finance as fake proxy war US enemies, supplementing their ongoing “war on drugs” to destroy African American families for the prison security complex, then when convenient again switch the revolving “enemy” back to the Russians and Chinese in Cold War #2 to drive humanity off the Armageddon cliff with today’s nuclear World War III countdown. And now along with the threat of a mushroom cloud, their enemy target today expands to a genocidal war against the entire human species with their fake pandemic/killer jab’s malevolent agenda to destroy national sovereignty via the United Nations’ World Health Organization, subversively imposing more fake or deadly health emergencies possessing an unlimited bioweapon arsenal bringing more draconian lockdowns, more killer mandates, along with their 15-minute smart cities control grid prison enslavement, planetwide mass surveillance, Chinese modeled social credit scores freezing dissidents’ bank accounts requiring digital ID approval and cashless World Bank Digital Currency, all part of their “Great Reset.” The globalists’ wet dream is our never-ending nightmare of absolute myopic control over the culled down, beaten down, traumatized, lobotomized population of jabbed, DNA altered, group hived, AI mind-controlled cyborg survivors. This is our bleak Lucifer controlled future if we remain weak, passive, defeated and ignorant. Activism is growing in a planetwide movement protesting against the Ukraine debacle along with the price inflation, smart cities and World Economic Forum’s enslavement. Legal challenges against the technocratic tyranny, the genocide, the wokist insanity. Our enemy is on notice and no doubt will be unleashing more false flags and WMDs at us, but the momentum of growing resistance and opposition is mobilizing for the long war. Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate, former Army officer and author of “Don’t Let the Bastards Getcha Down,” exposing a faulty US military leadership system based on ticket punching up the seniority ladder, invariably weeding out the best and brightest, leaving mediocrity and order followers rising to the top as politician-bureaucrat generals designated to lose every modern US war by elite design. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field with abused youth and adolescents for more than a quarter century. In Los Angeles he found himself battling the largest county child protective services in the nation within America’s thoroughly broken and corrupt child welfare system. The experience in both the military and child welfare system prepared him well as a researcher and independent journalist, exposing the evils of Big Pharma and how the Rockefeller controlled medical and psychiatric system inflict more harm than good, case in point the current diabolical pandemic hoax and genocide. As an independent journalist for the last decade, Joachim has written hundreds of articles for many news sites, like Global Research, lewrockwell.com and currently https://jameshfetzer.org. As a published bestselling author on Amazon of a 5-book volume series entitled Pedophilia & Empire: Satan, Sodomy & the Deep State, his A-Z sourcebook series exposes the global pedophilia scourge is available free at https://pedoempire.org/contents/. Joachim also hosts the Revolution Radio weekly broadcast “Cabal Empire Exposed,” every Friday morning at 6AM EST (ID: revradio, password: rocks!). 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/2024/02/the-rothschild-deep-state-cabal-is-imploding/

What the Sustainable Development Goals really mean for humanity -PART 2 OF 2 1. Zero Poverty UBI's, Centralised Banking, IMF / World Bank, CBDC's 2. Zero Hunger Fake Meat, GMO's, Eat Insects 3. Good Health/Well-being Mass Injections, "Vaccine Passports" , Codex Alimentarius, Masks, State monitoring, Limit or eliminate access to natural remedies 4. Good Education State controlled propaganda from birth. Ignorance of basic information to support independence from the system 5. Gender Equality Transgenderism, Population Control, Breakdown of the family 6. Clean Water and Sanitation State control of water supply and chemicals added (e.g. fluoride) 7. Affordable and Clean Energy SMART grid, SMART metres, Peak Pricing, Electric Cars, raising gas/ energy prices, Green Taxes 8. Decent Work and Economic Growth Mega-corporations, Crash Economies, Control of means of production , Destroy small businesses-PART 4 9. Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure Restrictions on travel,closure of airports, 15 min cities 10. Reduce Inequality within and between countries Crash economies, CBDC'S, UBI 11. Safe + Sustainable Human Settlements + Cities 15 mins cities, ULEZ, Big Brother surveillance, Digital ID's, 5g 12. Responsible Consumption and Production Limits on consumption (including via CBDC's), Taxes 13. Stop Climate Change Climate Lockdowns, carbon taxes, control via CBDC'S, control on travel 14. Sustainable Use of Life Below Water Control of oceans + mineral rights, GMO'S 15. Sustainable Use of Life On Land Control of land + mineral rights, GMO'S 16. Peace, Justice, Inclusion and Strong Institutions Remove rights of individual, use of CBDC's, "Online Safety Bills", Hate Speech Laws, Social isolation 17. Global Partnerships Remove national sovereignty, WEF, Civil Society, Corporatocracy, NGO's

MORE evidence of Barack Obama committing Treason. Obama implemented ‘Project Fulsome’ through U.K. Intelligence to SPY on The Trump Organization and President Trump. Boris Johnson document below shows Susan Rice requested the ‘continued surveillance’ aka SPYING. Join the https://t.me/trump_donald Telegram channel

12 Israeli sensor technologies that will rock your world No more canaries in mines: Today’s sensors provide key information on everything from digital health to airport safety. By Brian Blum Sensors translate physical phenomena to a measurable signal. Photo courtesy of Consumer Physics/SCiO Sensors are the hidden brain in everything from precision agriculture to connected cars, home appliances to security systems, smart cities to digital health. “A sensor is anything that translates a physical phenomenon to a measurable signal or other information. For example, in the past they used canaries as sensors for poisonous gas in mines,” explains Amichai Yifrach, an Israeli expert in military and civilian sensor development and currently the CTO of ag-tech startup Flux. “Using that definition, Israel is on the cutting edge of technology in all aspects of sensors,” he tells ISRAEL21c. “A lot of it is related to our capabilities in sensing things that others cannot, especially in relation to border security and airport control.” Historically, Israel’s edge in sensor technology comes from defense needs and much of the sector is still focused on military applications, with companies such as Elbit Systems, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and Seraphim Optronics in the lead. YOU CAN GET ISRAEL21c NEWS DELIVERED STRAIGHT TO YOUR INBOX. But as in many other fields, knowhow from the military gave a huge boost to Israel’s civilian sensor industry. “On the consumer side, we’re strong in image processing and algorithms. We have very good chemists, too,” says Yifrach. “Sensors will be more and more important in water quality, air quality and even food quality, like for makers of wine, beer or balsamic vinegar,” Yifrach predicts. “Processes that follow chemical or physical properties need sensing to deduct valuable information for future quality or efficiency of the process. It all comes down to monitoring and controlling processes for quality.” ISRAEL21c chose a dozen Israeli sensor pioneers to illustrate the country’s strength in this powerful sector. Sensifree Sensifree specializes in low-power, contact-free, electromagnetic sensors that accurately collect a range of continuous biometric data without the need to touch the human body. Its first product, a contactless heartrate sensor for wearable devices such as watches, fitness trackers and smart clothing, will be followed by a cuff-free blood-pressure sensor. Based in California with R&D in Petah Tikva, Sensifree recently won $5 million in Series A financing, bringing its total funding since launching its revolutionary RF-based biometric sensor technology to $7 million. MS Technologies Based in Herzliya Pituah, MS Tech designs and manufactures nanotechnology detection and diagnostic sensors. Major airlines use its hand-held, non-radioactive explosives and narcotics detectors for carry-on baggage inspection, air-cargo screening and passenger security checks in several airports. Other industries that use MS Tech sensor technologies include food safety and product inspection, biomedical diagnostics, fire and smoke detection, water and air monitoring and aerospace. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id4Q4SIYmRs ContinUse Biometrics ContinUse of Tel Aviv received a strategic investment from the multinational corporation Tyco to develop nanotechnology sensors that will be embedded into a range of construction and smart-home solutions. ContinUse Biometrics’ biometric no-contact sensor — based on technology developed over a decade by Bar-Ilan and Valencia universities — can detect heartbeat, blood pressure, breathing pace, glucose level, oxygen saturation and alcohol levels in the blood of a fully dressed person without touching the person. This data can be used to authenticate identity and manage access for security and smart-home applications, workplaces and sensitive facilities. Vayyar Vayyar sensors could make every cellphone or tablet a full 3D imaging system. Based in Yehud, Vayyar uses low-power radio transmissions to scan objects in a fraction of a second and create an enhanced imaging experience. One of the applications is better detection of irregularities in an object being examined, for example to detect tumors on mammograms or bacteria in milk bottling. The company recently won the Fast Pitch Contest sponsored by the Global Electronics Industry Association in Tel Aviv. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLjUK-teB8o Elfi-Tech Elfi-Tech of Rehovot has introduced several sensor products for noninvasive measurements of physiological and blood parameters for use in fitness, wellness and first-line diagnostics apps. Its proprietary mDLS sensor module was integrated into Samsung’s Simband wearable open platform, and now the company is collaborating with pharma and medical-device industry to integrate mDLS into patient-monitoring devices. Elfi-Tech also is working with companies in the big-data analytics space on its new Data Logger device, which collects and analyzes mass amounts of cardiovascular health data from a single wearable. Accurate Sensors Technologies Started in 1994 as 3T, Accurate Sensors Technologies manufactures no-contact temperature-measurement solutions for extreme conditions, such as digital infrared thermometers. Headquartered in Misgav, the company also makes plug-and-play pyrometers — instruments for measuring high temperatures in furnaces and kilns – for the aluminum industry. Neteera Technologies Founded in January 2015 in partnership with Yissum Research Development Company of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Neteera is developing novel Terahertz imaging and sensing devices, of unprecedented resolution, size, cost-effectiveness and reliability. Neteera’s technology is revolutionary as it allows for multiple applications such as all-weather and night imaging for automotive and surveillance applications; weapons, explosives and contraband detection; medical imaging; manufacturing and quality control; monitoring of human physiological and biometric indicators and more. Occipital Occipital’s Structure Sensor is touted as the world’s first 3D sensor for mobile devices, adding 3D scanning, large-scale reconstruction and augmented-reality (AR) capabilities to new or existing iOS devices. Named a Popular Science “Best of What’s New” gadget for 2013, and recognized with a 2014 CES Innovations award, the Structure Sensor hardware platform gives developers the ability to easily create applications such as 3D mapping of indoor spaces, AR games, body scanning for fitness tracking and virtual clothes fitting, and 3D object scanning for easy 3D content creation. Occipital’s Structure Sensor can be used for object and body scans. Photo: courtesy Occipital’s Structure Sensor can be used for object and body scans. Photo: courtesy Consumer Physics Consumer Physics’ soon-to-be-released SCiO device uses optical sensors to read the chemical makeup of just about anything without touching it: for example, the fat in a piece of cake, the ripeness of fruit, the ingredients in medicines, the properties of cosmetics and precious stones. Nexense Ramat Gan-based Nexense makes a sensor system worn as a chest strap or wristwatch to monitor various physical parameters during sleep for the treatment of snoring and sleep apnea. The product, already approved in Europe and Israel, counts GE Healthcare among its investors and is expected to go public in 2017. EarlySense EarlySense uses an under-bed sensor system for continuous monitoring of patient vital signs and movement in hospitals and other healthcare settings. Without ever touching the patient, EarlySense helps the clinical team manage early detection of patient deterioration, fall prevention and prevention of bedsores. EarlySense goes under the patient’s bed. Photo: courtesy EarlySense goes under the patient’s bed. Photo: courtesy Saturas Saturas, founded in 2013 in the Trendlines incubator program, has developed a system of miniature implanted sensors and wireless transponders for determining the water status of fruit trees easily and inexpensively. According to CEO Anat Halgoa Solomon, the system (to be available in 2018) could save farmers up to 20 percent on water usage. Among many other sensor-based ag-tech companies in Israel are Phytech, AutoAgronom, CropX, GreenIQ and Flux. ISRAEL'S CIVILIAN BIOSENSOR INDUSTRY "Sensors are the hidden brain in everything from precision agriculture to connected cars, home appliances to security systems, smart cities to digital health." “Sensors will be more and more important in water quality, air quality and even food quality, like for makers of wine, beer or balsamic vinegar" https://www.israel21c.org/12-israeli-sensor-technologies-that-will-rock-your-world/ https://donshafi911.blogspot.com/2024/02/12-israeli-sensor-technologies-that.html

Hypothetical “Disease X”: The WHO Pandemic Treaty Is a Fraud. Demands Compliance for “Next Pandemic” “Very narrow national interests should not come in the way” Michel Chossudovsky [This article was originally published by Global Research. Click here to read this article on Global Research.] Introduction WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus continues to mislead public opinion worldwide. There is no such thing as “Disease X”. It’s a hypothetical construct by a WHO expert committee (2017-2018) of virologists and disease analysts. It was then envisaged in the Clade X Simulation (May 2018) and Event 201 Simulation of a Pandemic (October 2019). Both events were held under the auspices of the John Hopkins Center for Heath Security with the support of the Gates Foundation. It was then announced by Bill Gates at the Munich Security Conference in February 2022: “The risks of severe disease from Covid-19 have “dramatically reduced” but another pandemic is all but certain,” says Bill Gates. “A potential new pandemic would likely stem from a different pathogen to that of the coronavirus family” (CNBC). “We’ll have another pandemic. It will be a different pathogen next time,” Gates said. How could he know this in advance? “Predicting” and “Preparing” for “Disease X”, an Unknown Threat In his presentation at the Davos24 WEF, the WHO Director General Dr. Tedros recanted Bill Gates’s premonition, pointing to the alleged severity of the Covid-19 crisis initiated in early 2020, in blatant contradiction with official WHO data. Bill Gates is Tedros’s mentor. They have a close personal relationship, which occasionally borders on “conflict of interest”. Bill Gates, Tedros et al. (supported by the WHO “committee of experts”) are now predicting “Disease X” which stems from a hypothetical pathogen which is allegedly 20 times more deadly than SARS-CoV-2. What absolute nonsense. “Aside from the fact that it will wreak havoc on humanity, the research team has no idea about the nature of the pathogen.” According to Forbes: Disease X, a hypothetical unknown threat, is the name used among scientists to encourage the development of countermeasures, including vaccines and tests, to deploy in the case of a future outbreak—the WHO convened a group of over 300 scientists in November 2022 to study the “unknown pathogen that could cause a serious international epidemic,” positing a mortality rate 20 times that of Covid-19″ 300 scientists to study something which is unknown and hypothetical? The media propaganda buzz, quoting “scientific opinion” is “Disease X 20 times more dangerous than Covid.” A renewed fear campaign 24/7 has been launched, consisting of reports of an alleged new wave of Covid deaths, while totally ignoring the tide of excess mortality and morbidity resulting from the Covid-19 “vaccine”. Video: A Vaccine for a Hypothetical “Disease X” Pandemic. Produced by Lux Media. Michel Chossudovsky and Caroline Mailloux Click here to watch the interview. “Disease X” Alleged Pathogen “Identified” by WHO Expert Committee Two Years Prior to the Covid-19 Crisis In early February 2018, a WHO expert committee convened behind closed doors in Geneva “to consider the unthinkable”. “The goal was to identify pathogens with the potential to spread and kill millions but for which there are currently no, or insufficient, countermeasures available.” The Expert Committee had met on two previous occasions, most probably in 2017: “It was the third time the committee, consisting of leading virologists, bacteriologists and infectious disease experts, had met to consider diseases with epidemic or pandemic potential. But when the 2018 list was released two weeks ago [mid February 2018] it included an entry not seen in previous years. In addition to eight frightening but familiar diseases including Ebola, Zika, and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), the list included a ninth global threat: Disease X.” (Daily Telegraph, emphasis added) It all sounds very scientific based on experts contracted and rewarded by the WHO, under the advice of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: “Disease X represents the knowledge [what knowledge?] that a serious international epidemic could be caused by a pathogen currently unknown to cause human disease”. Experts on the WHO panel say Disease X could emerge from a variety of sources and strike at any time. “History tells us that it is likely the next big outbreak will be something we have not seen before”, said John-Arne Rottingen, chief executive of the Research Council of Norway and a scientific adviser to the WHO committee. “It may seem strange to be adding an ‘X’ but the point is to make sure we prepare and plan flexibly in terms of vaccines and diagnostic tests. “We want to see ‘plug and play’ platforms developed which will work for any, or a wide number of diseases; systems that will allow us to create countermeasures at speed.” (Telegraph) The work of the “expert committee” was followed by two table top simulations respectively in May 2018 and October 2019. The Clade X Simulation: “Parainfluenza Clade X” A few months following the WHO experts’ meeting in Geneva in early 2018, at which a hypothetical Disease X was categorized as a “global threat’, the Clade X table top simulation was conducted Washington D.C. (May 2018) under the auspices of The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “The scenario begins with an outbreak of novel parainfluenza virus that is moderately contagious and moderately lethal and for which there are no effective medical countermeasures”. The virus is called: “Parainfluenza Clade X” “Disease X” and the 201 Global Pandemic Simulation The Hypothetical Disease X Concept developed in 2017-2018 by a WHO Expert Committee of leading virologists and disease experts was simulated in the Event 201 Table Top Simulation of a deadly corona virus pandemic. The Global Pandemic Exercise was held in New York under the auspices of the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health, Centre for Heath Security (which hosted the May 2018 Clade X Simulation). The event was sponsored by the Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum. (Event 201) An October 21, 2019 report “Disease X dummy run: World health experts prepare for a deadly pandemic and its fallout confirms that Disease X was part of the 201 Global Pandemic Simulation: On Friday a panel of 15 high-powered international figures gathered in the ballroom of a New York hotel to “game” a scenario in which a pandemic is raging across the world, killing millions. Health experts fully expect the world to be confronted by a fast-moving global pandemic. The updates were coming into the situation room thick and fast – and the news was not good. The virus was spreading… The former deputy director of the CIA took off her glasses, rubbed her eyes, and addressed the panel. “We also have to consider that terrorists could take advantage of this situation,” she said. “We’re looking at the possibility of famine. There is the potential for outbreaks of secondary diseases.” “I fully expect that we will be confronted by a fast-moving global pandemic,” said Dr Mike Ryan, executive director of the World Health Organisation (WHO) health emergencies programme. Addressing participants – and the 150 observers – before the scenario began, he said that the WHO deals with 200 epidemics every year. It’s only a matter of time before one of those becomes a pandemic – defined as a disease prevalent over a whole country or the world.” (Telegraph, emphasis added) Video: Tedros Stated that Covid was “The First Disease X” Click here to watch the video. Evidence: No Pandemic in Early 2020. Misleading Statements by Dr. Tedros, Fraudulent Decisions In a factual nutshell: WHO Director General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus launched a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) on January 30th 2020. There was 83 “confirmed cases” outside China for a population of 6.4 billion people. There was no “scientific basis” to justify the launching of a Worldwide Public Health Emergency. On February 20th, 2020: At a briefing in Geneva, the WHO Director General Dr Tedros said that he was “concerned that the chance to contain the coronavirus outbreak was “closing” …“I believe the window of opportunity is still there, but that the window is narrowing.” Those statements were based on 1076 “confirmed cases” outside China. The WHO officially declared a Worldwide pandemic on March 11, 2020 at a time when the number of PCR cases outside China (6.4 billion population) was of the order of 44,279 cumulative confirmed cases. All so-called confirmed cases are the result of the PCR test, which does not detect the virus. In the US on March 9, 2020, there were 3,457 “confirmed cases” out of a population of 329.5 million people. In Canada on March 9, 2020, there were 125 “confirmed cases” out of a population of 38.5 million people. In Germany on March 9, 2020, there were 2948 “confirmed cases” out of a population of 83.2 million people. The above is a summary. Click here and scroll down for references and analysis. The “Disease X” Fear Campaign and the Pandemic Treaty There is vast literature on the Pandemic Treaty and its likely consequences. The Pandemic Treaty consists in creating a global health entity under WHO auspices. It’s the avenue towards “Global Governance” whereby the entire world population of 8 billion would be digitized, integrated into a global digital data bank. All your personal information would be contained in this data bank, leading to the derogation of fundamental human rights as well as the subordination of national governments to dominant financial establishment. The Pandemic Treaty would be tied into the creation of a worldwide digital ID system. According to David Skripac: “A worldwide digital ID system is in the making. [The aim] of the WEF—and of all the central banks [is] to implement a global system in which everyone’s personal data will be incorporated into the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) network.” Peter Koenig describes the underlying process as: “an all-electronic ID – linking everything to everything of each individual (records of health, banking, personal and private, etc.).” Bombshell: A Vaccine for a Hypothetical “Disease X” Pandemic “with an Unknown Pathogen” Announced by Dr. Tedros at Davos24, not to mention Bill Gates’s numerous authoritative statements, governments must prepare for the outbreak of “Disease X”. A State of the Art “Vaccine” allegedly to “Build our Immunity” against “Disease X” (which is a hypothetical construct based on an unknown pathogen) is slated to be developed at Britain’s “Vaccine Development and Evaluation Centre” (UK Health and Security Agency’s (UKHSA) Porton Down campus in Wiltshire, inaugurated in August 2023. “Ministers have opened a new vaccine research centre in the UK where scientists will work on preparing for “disease X”, the next potential pandemic pathogen. Prof Dame Jenny Harries said: “What we’re trying to do now is capture that really excellent work from Covid and make sure we’re using that as we go forward for any new pandemic threats.” She added: “What we try to do here is keep an eye on the ones that we do know. For example, with Covid, we are still here testing all the new variants with the vaccines that have been provided to check they are still effective. “But we are also looking at how quickly we can develop a new test that would be used if a brand new virus popped up somewhere.” … “This state-of-the-art complex will also help us deliver on our commitment to produce new vaccines within 100 days of a new threat being identified.” (The Guardian, emphasis added) The “Disease X” “Vaccine” Is to be Developed at the U.K. Ministry of Defense Science and Technology Porter Down Campus “The Vaccine Development and Evaluation Centre” (VDEC) –which has a mandate to develop “The Disease X” Vaccine– is a civilian research entity under Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) managed by the UK Health and Security Agency (UKHSA) headed by Dame Jennifer Harries (DBE). Of significance VDEC which was inaugurated in August 2023 is located in: The “Defence Science and Technology Laboratory” [Dstl] at Porton Down, Wiltshire, which is one of the U.K.’s Ministry of Defense’s most secretive and controversial military research facilities specializing in the testing of biological and chemical weapons. The UK Health and Security Agency (UKHSA) has initiated a project in global and country-level “Integrated Disease Surveillance” funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. A representative of the Gates Foundation is a member of UKHSA’s Advisory Board. What is required is a mass movement to oppose the adoption of the Pandemic Treaty at the World Health Assembly (May 27, 2024). We also call for the immediate cancellation of the Covid-19 “Killer Vaccine.” Ironically to say the least, the WHO Director General Tedros admits that “the momentum had been slowed down by entrenched positions and “a torrent of fake news, lies, and conspiracy theories”. Click here to read Steve Watson’s article titled World Health Organisation Head: Global Compliance Needed For Next Pandemic. https://open.substack.com/pub/michelchossudovsky/p/hypothetical-disease-x-who-pandemic-treaty-fraud It is surely obvious to any dispassionate observer that this coalition of the powerful intends to spring some health crisis upon the people of the world. When have the rich and powerful given a care about the health of poor people? That’ll be never. Pandemics are not a thing. Think back through your life. How many pandemics have there been? Covid wasn’t one. The Spanish flu nonsense wasn’t one. None of the flu like illnesses reported in the 1960s were one. I don’t believe there has ever been even one. Scary infectious diseases are only scary until you stumble across medical research literature going back as far a century and more, in which numerous, serious clinical research studies were set up to detect and measure symptomatic transmission (causing a well person to fall ill with similar symptoms to those of the donor person). Try as they might, that didn’t happen. Contagion in this specific scenario (acute respiratory diseases) does not happen. So when they come at you with the next bunch of lies, try to spot the lies as the mealy mouthed, wet, TV presenters talk nonsense! Then to this “100 day vaccine” idiocy. As you really going to roll your sleeve up and receive an injection of mRNA wrapped in lipid nanoparticles? They will be toxic. Do note that Porton Down, the government’s own formerly named Chemical Defence Establishment, has been tapped as the people to do it! Wouldn’t you want to work with the people who claimed to have whipped up by far the world record speed of vaccine R&D & product delivery? They cut down the time needed by 90%. Surely you’d give the task to those people? So they’re giving it to a military group who haven’t ever done anything like this before? You don’t need a vaccine. Even if everything else was true, it’s out of the question to rustle up a jab in 100 days. Impossible to do it in under several yearrs which, by the way, is FAR FAR longer than the length of time that it’s claimed for the longest lasting pandemic, ever. I hope this helps you to respond appropriately, before the next nonsense arrives! Best wishes Mike 👉 https://t.me/DrMikeYeadon https://donshafi911.blogspot.com/2024/02/hypothetical-disease-x-who-pandemic.html

Will Disease X be Leaked in 2025? All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name (only available in desktop version). To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here. Click the share button above to email/forward this article to your friends and colleagues. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles. New Year Donation Drive: Global Research Is Committed to the “Unspoken Truth” *** The WHO’s pandemic treaty is the gateway to a global, top-down totalitarian regime, a one world government. The reason we can be sure there will be additional pandemics, whether manufactured using either fear and hype alone or an actual bioweapon created for this very purpose, is because the takeover plan, aka The Great Reset, is based on the premise that we need global biosecurity surveillance and centralized response A new contagion will likely be born in 2025, and media are already preparing us for it January 15-19, 2024, global leaders met at the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Davos summit where the key topic of discussion was “Preparing for Disease X,” a hypothetical new pandemic predicted to kill 20 times more people than COVID-19 In August 2023, a new vaccine research facility was set up in Wiltshire, England, to begin work on a vaccine against the unknown “Disease X” The U.S. Congress introduced the “Disease X Act of 2023” (H.R.3832) in June 2023. The bill calls for the establishment of a BARDA program to develop “medical countermeasures for viral threats with pandemic potential.” The bill was referred to the Subcommittee on Health in early June 2023 but has not yet been passed * The COVID-19 pandemic allowed for an unprecedented shift in power and wealth distribution across the world and, as predicted, it was not to be a one-off event. A new contagion will likely be born in 2025, and media are already preparing us for it. January 15-19, 2024, global leaders met at the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Davos summit where the key topic of discussion was “Preparing for Disease X,”1 a hypothetical new pandemic predicted to emerge in 2025 and kill 20 times more people than COVID-19.2 As reported by the Mirror:3 “The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned of a potential Disease X since 2017, a term indicating an unknown pathogen that could cause a serious international epidemic … Public speakers at the ‘Preparing for Disease X’ event next Wednesday [January 17, 2024] include Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the WHO, Brazilian minister of health Nisia Trindade Lima, and Michel Demaré, chair of the board at AstraZeneca. In their first post-pandemic meeting held in November 2022, the WHO brought over 300 scientists to consider which of over 25 virus families and bacteria could potentially create another pandemic. The list the team came up with included: the Ebola virus, the Marburg virus disease, Covid-19, SARS, and the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV). Others included lassa fever, nipah and henipaviral diseases, zift Valley fever, and zika — as well as the unknown pathogen that would cause ‘Disease X.’” I’ve interviewed Meryl Nass about how the WHO is trying to take over aspects of everyone’s lives. She just published an important piece over the weekend, Why Is Davos So Interested in Disease? about how the WEF and the WHO have become partners to terrify the world. Alexis Baden-Mayer, Esq., political director for the Organic Consumers Association, did some digging into the participants of this WEF event, and the two things they all have in common are 1) dumping the AstraZeneca COVID shot on the developing world (primarily India and Brazil) after rich countries rejected it due to its admitted blood clotting risk, and 2) pushing for the implementation of medical AI systems that will eliminate doctors along with patient choice and privacy. Practice Runs or Responsible Planning? In a January 11, 2024, tweet, Fox News analyst and former assistant secretary for public affairs for the U.S. Treasury Department, Monica Crowley, wrote:4 “From the same people who brought you COVID-19 now comes Disease X: Next week in Davos, the unelected globalists at the World Economic Forum will hold a panel on a future pandemic 20x deadlier than COVID … Just in time for the election, a new contagion to allow them to implement a new WHO treaty, lock down again, restrict free speech and destroy more freedoms. Sound far-fetched? So did what happened in 2020. When your enemies tell you what they’re planning and what they’re planning FOR, believe them. And get ready.” Dr. Stuart Ray, vice chair of medicine for data integrity and analytics at Johns Hopkins’ Department of Medicine, dismissed such warnings, telling Fortune magazine5 that “Coordination of public health response is not conspiracy, it’s simply responsible planning.” I’d be willing to believe him if it wasn’t for a now-obvious trend: Whatever the globalists claim will happen actually does happen at a remarkable frequency, and their prognostic capabilities become easier to explain when you consider that most lethal pandemics have been caused by manmade viruses, the products of gain-of-function research. It’s pretty easy to predict a new viral outbreak if you have said virus waiting in the wings. With that in mind, recent research from China certainly raises concern, to say the least. According to a January 3, 2024, preprint,6 a SARS-CoV-2-related pangolin coronavirus — described as a “cell culture-adapted mutant” called GX_P2V that was first cultured in 2017 — was found to kill 100% of the humanized mice (ACE2-transgenic mice) infected with it.7 The primary cause of death was brain inflammation. According to the authors, “this is the first report showing that a SARS-CoV-2-related pangolin coronavirus can cause 100% mortality in hACE2 mice, suggesting a risk for GX_P2V to spill over into humans.” However, if this virus mutated as a result of passaging through cell cultures, then it’s not likely to emerge in the wild. It’s another unnatural lab creation, so rather than saying it may spill over from pangolins to humans, it would be more accurate to admit that it may pose a (rather serious) risk to humans were a lab escape to occur. COVID Dress Rehearsals In 2017, Johns Hopkins Center of Health Security held a coronavirus pandemic simulation called the SPARS Pandemic 2025-2028 scenario.8 Importantly, the exercise stressed “communication dilemmas concerning medical countermeasures that could plausibly emerge” in a pandemic scenario. Then, in October 2019, less than three months before the COVID-19 outbreak, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in collaboration with Johns Hopkins and the World Economic Forum hosted Event 201. The name itself suggests it may have been a continuation of the SPARS Pandemic exercise. College courses are numbered based on their prerequisites. A 101 course does not require any prior knowledge whereas 201 courses require prior familiarity with the topic at hand. As in the SPARS Pandemic scenario, Event 201 involved an outbreak of a highly infectious coronavirus, and the primary (if not sole) focus of the exercise was, again, how to control information and keep “misinformation” in check, not how to effectively discover and share remedies. Social media censorship played a prominent role in the Event 201 plan, and in the real-world events of 2020 through the present, accurate information about vaccine development, production and injury has indeed been effectively suppressed around the world, thanks to social media companies and Google’s censoring of opposing viewpoints. In March 2021, an outbreak of “an unusual strain of monkeypox virus” was simulated.9 In late July the following year, the WHO director-general declared that a multi-country outbreak of monkeypox constituted a public health emergency of international concern,10 against his own advisory group. ‘Catastrophic Contagion’ Exercise Considering both of these simulations, SPARS (“Event 101”?) and Event 201, foreshadowed what eventually occurred in real life during COVID, when Gates hosts yet another pandemic exercise, it’s worth paying attention to the details. October 23, 2022, Gates, Johns Hopkins and the WHO cohosted “a global challenge exercise” dubbed “Catastrophic Contagion,”11,12 involving a fictional pathogen called “severe epidemic enterovirus respiratory syndrome 2025” (SEERS-25). Enterovirus D6813 is typically associated with cold and flu-like illness in infants, children and teens. In rare cases, it’s also been known to cause viral meningitis and acute flaccid myelitis, a neurological condition resulting in muscle weakness and loss of reflexes in one or more extremities. Enteroviruses A71 and A6 are known to cause hand, foot and mouth disease,14 while poliovirus, the prototypical enterovirus, causes polio (poliomyelitis), a potentially life-threatening type of paralysis that primarily affects children under age 5. So, the virus they modeled in this simulation appears to be something similar to enterovirus D68, but worse. Vaccine Drug Trials Begin for Deadly Nipah Virus One known virus that bears some resemblance to the fictional SEERS-25 is the Nipah virus. This virus has a kill rate of about 75%,15 and survivors oftentimes face long-term neurological issues stemming from the infection. Nipah is also said to affect children to a greater degree than adults.16 Incidentally, human trials for a vaccine against the deadly Nipah virus were recently launched.17Volunteers received their first shots in early January 2024. The experimental injection uses the same viral vector technology used to produce AstraZeneca’s COVID shot. The trial is reportedly being carried out by the University of Oxford in an undisclosed area where Nipah is actively infecting victims. (India seems to be indicated, as an outbreak in Kerala killed two people and hospitalized three in September 2023.18) The disease is thought to spread via interaction with infected animals such as goats, pigs, cats and horses. It may also spread via tainted blood products and food. Symptoms can emerge anywhere from a few days after exposure to as long as 45 days. Initial symptoms include fever, headache and respiratory illness, which can rapidly progress to encephalitis (brain swelling), seizures and coma within just a couple of days. According to the WHO, pigs are known to be “highly contagious” during the incubation period, and it’s possible that humans may be as well, although that has yet to be confirmed. Training African Leaders to Go Along with the Narrative Tellingly, the Catastrophic Contagion exercise focused on getting leadership in African countries involved and trained in following the script. African nations went “off script” more often than others during the COVID pandemic, and didn’t follow in the footsteps of developed nations when it came to pushing the jabs. As a result, vaccine makers now face the problem of having a huge control group, as the COVID jab uptake on the African continent was only 6%,19 yet it fared far better than developed nations in terms of COVID-19 infections and related deaths.20 The Catastrophic Contagion exercise predicts SEERS-25 will kill 20 million people worldwide, including 15 million children, and many who survive the infection will be left with paralysis and/or brain damage. In other words, the “cue” given is that the next pandemic may target children rather than the elderly, as was the case with COVID-19. Vaccine Against Unknown ‘X’ Pathogen Is Already in the Works In August 2023, a new vaccine research facility was set up in Wiltshire, England, fully staffed with more 200 scientists, to begin work on a vaccine against the unknown “Disease X.” As reported by Metro:21 “It took 362 days to develop the Covid-19 vaccine. But the Vaccine Development and Evaluation Centre team wants to reduce that time to 100 days. Scientists at the facility will develop a range of prototype vaccines and tests. The new lab is a part of a global effort to respond to global health threats. The UK and other G7 countries signed up to the ‘100 Days Mission’ in 2021. The government has invested £65 million into the lab. Professor Dame Jenny Harries, the head of the UK Health Security Agency, said the new facility would ‘ensure that we prepare so that if we have a new Disease X, a new pathogen, we have as much of that work in advance as possible.’” In the U.S., Congress also introduced the “Disease X Act of 2023” (H.R.383222) back in June 2023. The bill calls for the establishment of a BARDA program to develop “medical countermeasures for viral threats with pandemic potential.” The bill was referred to the Subcommittee on Health in early June 2023 but has not yet been passed. The Disease X Act amends a section of the Public Health Service Act with two new clauses that call for “the identification and development of platform manufacturing technologies needed for advanced development and manufacturing of medical countermeasures for viral families which have significant potential to cause a pandemic,” and “advanced research and development of flexible medical countermeasures against priority respiratory virus families and other respiratory viral pathogens with a significant potential to cause a pandemic, with both pathogen-specific and pathogen-agnostic approaches …” Needless to say, since it’s impossible to customize vaccines using the conventional method of growing viruses in eggs or some other cell media in 100 days, it seems inevitable that all these efforts are about the expansion of gene-based technologies. This, despite the fact that the mRNA technology used for the COVID jabs has proven to be disastrous from a safety standpoint, and ineffective to boot. Why Manufactured Pandemics Will Continue At this point, it’s quite clear that “biosecurity” is the chosen means by which the globalist cabal intends to seize power over the world. The WHO is working on securing sole power over pandemic response globally through its international pandemic treaty which, if implemented, will eradicate the sovereignty of all member nations. The WHO’s pandemic treaty is the gateway to a global, top-down totalitarian regime, a one world government. Ultimately, the WHO intends to dictate all health care. But to secure that power, they will need more pandemics. COVID-19 alone was not enough to get everyone onboard with a centralized pandemic response unit, and they probably knew that from the start. So, the reason we can be sure there will be additional pandemics, whether manufactured using either fear and hype alone or an actual bioweapon created for this very purpose, is because the takeover plan, aka The Great Reset, is based on the premise that we need global biosecurity surveillance and centralized response. Biosecurity, in turn, is the justification for an international vaccine passport, which the G20 has signed on to, and that passport will also be your digital identification. That digital ID, then, will be tied to your social credit score, personal carbon footprint tracker, medical records, educational records, work records, social media presence, purchase records, your bank accounts and a programmable central bank digital currency (CBDC). Once all these pieces are fully connected, you’ll be in a digital prison, and the ruling cabal — whether officially a one world government by then or not — will have total control over your life from cradle to grave. We’re Already Suffering Under a Pseudo-One World Government We actually already have a pseudo-one world government, in the form of Bill Gates’ nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). They are making health care decisions that should be left to individual nations and/or states, and they’re making decisions that will line their own pockets, regardless of what happens to the public health-wise. They coordinate and synchronize pandemic communication during simulated practice runs, and then, when the real-world situation emerges that fits the bill, the preplanned script is played out more or less verbatim. Between the G20 declaration to implement an international vaccine passport under the auspice of the WHO, and the WHO’s pandemic treaty, everything is lined up to take control of the next pandemic, and in so doing, further securing the foundation for a one world government. As discussed in my 2021 article, “COVID-19 Dress Rehearsals and Proof of the Plan,” the pandemic measures rolled out for COVID-19 were the culmination of decades of careful planning to radically and permanently alter the governance and social structures of the world. The medical system has been used in the past to drive forward a New World Order agenda — now rebranded as “The Great Reset” — and it’s now being used to implement the final stages of that longstanding plan. COVID-19 was a real-world practice run, and showed just how effectively a pandemic can be used to shift the balance of power, and strip the global population of its wealth and individual freedoms. So, there’s no doubt in my mind that additional pandemics will be declared, because they’re the means to the globalists’ ends. To prevent this global coup, we need everyone to speak and share the truth to the point that you’re able. Only then will our voices outnumber the voices of the propaganda machine. Door To Freedom (doortofreedom.org), an organization founded by Dr. Meryl Nass, has a poster that explains how the pandemic treaty and International Health Regulations (IHR) amendments will change life as we know it and strip us of every vestige of freedom. Please download this poster and share it with everyone you know. Also put it up on public billboards and places where communities share information. * Note to readers: Please click the share button above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles. Notes 1, 21 Metro January 15, 2024 2, 3 Mirror January 13, 2024 4 Twitter/X Monica Crowley January 11, 2024 5 Fortune January 12, 2024 6 ResearchGate January 2024 DOI: 10.1101/2024.01.03.574008 7 MSN January 15, 2024 8 SPARS Pandemic Scenario 9 NTI Paper November 2021 10 UN News July 23, 2022 11 Catastrophic Contagion 12 Catastrophic Contagion Videos 13 CDC Enterovirus D68 14 CDC Enteroviruses 15 Forbes September 15, 2023 16 Intractable & Rare Diseases Research February 2019; 8(1): 1-8 17 Forbes January 11, 2024 18 BBC September 14, 2023 19 First Post November 19, 2021 20 Yahoo News November 19, 2021 22 HR 3832 The Disease X Act of 2023 Featured image source https://www.globalresearch.ca/will-disease-x-leaked-2025/5847210 https://donshafi911.blogspot.com/2024/01/will-disease-x-be-leaked-in-2025-all.html