The Collapse Of U.S. Shale Oil Production Has Now Begun

POSTED BY SRSROCCO IN ENERGY

It’s Official. The collapse of U.S. shale oil production has begun. The mighty Shale Oil BOOM has now finally turned into a BUST. While the pandemic shutdowns sped up the process, the collapse of the U.S. shale industry was going to occur, regardless. According to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, shale oil production will continue to decline below 7.5 million barrels per day in January.

At the peak last year, the top five shale oil fields combined production reached nearly 9.2 million barrels per day. Since the shutdowns during March-April, many of the companies curtailed shale oil production. However, all of these wells have now been brought online, but the massive decline rate is kicking in due to a lack of drilling and completion activity.

As we can see in the chart below, shale oil production in these five fields fell from 9.16 million barrels per day during the peak in 2019 to 7.27 million barrels per day forecasted next month (January).

In a little more than a year, the combined shale production from these five fields declined by 1.9 million barrels. The data in the chart above is shown in thousand barrels per day. According to Shaleprofile.com, these five fields add more than 11,000 new wells in 2019. In looking at the new well trend data for Jan-Oct 2020, I would be surprised to see more than a total of about 5,000 wells added this year.

While the Permian suffered the highest decline in shale oil production, the biggest loser in percentage terms was the Anadarko Field. Oil production from the Anadarko declined from 603,000 barrels per day (b/d) at the peak last year to a forecasted 363,000 bd in January. That’s a stunning 40% decline in a little more than a year.

The Niobrara in Colorado reported the next largest decline at 34%, followed by the Eagle Ford (-30%), Bakken (-22%), and Permian (-18%). The average percentage of production decline from the fields since the peak last year was 21%.

Oil Geologist Art Berman produced this chart showing where he forecasts U.S. oil production by September 2021.

Art believes total U.S. oil production will decline to 7.7 million barrels per day by September 2021. However, I don’t believe this forecast will happen because his chart shows total U.S. oil production will be approximately 10.2 million barrels per day by January 2021. The EIA reports that U.S. oil production is 11.0 million barrels per day on Dec 11th.

It’s probably more realistic to forecast a decline to 9.5-10 million barrels per day by September 2021. We will see. Regardless, the mightily U.S. shale oil Boom has now turned into a Bust. While it will take 5-10 years to collapse by 75%, it’s not ever coming back.

WHO Deletes Naturally Acquired Immunity from Its Website

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The American Institute for Economic Research,

Maybe you have some sense that something fishy is going on? Same. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.

  • Coronavirus lived on surfaces until it didn’t.
  • Masks didn’t work until they did, then they did not.
  • There is asymptomatic transmission, except there isn’t.
  • Lockdowns work to control the virus except they do not.
  • All these people are sick without symptoms until, whoops, PCR tests are wildly inaccurate because they were never intended to be diagnostic tools.
  • Everyone is in danger of the virus except they aren’t.
  • It spreads in schools except it doesn’t.

On it goes. Daily. It’s no wonder that so many people have stopped believing anything that “public health authorities” say. In combination with governors and other autocrats doing their bidding, they set out to take away freedom and human rights and expected us to thank them for saving our lives. At some point this year (for me it was March 12) life began feeling like a dystopian novel of your choice.

Well, now I have another piece of evidence to add to the mile-high pile of fishy mess. The World Health Organization, for reasons unknown, has suddenly changed its definition of a core conception of immunology: herd immunity. Its discovery was one of the major achievements of 20th century science, gradually emerging in the 1920s and then becoming ever more refined throughout the 20th century.

Herd immunity is a fascinating observation that you can trace to biological reality or statistical probability theory, whichever you prefer. (It is certainly not a “strategy” so ignore any media source that describes it that way.) Herd immunity speaks directly, and with explanatory power, to the empirical observation that respiratory viruses are either widespread and mostly mild (common cold) or very severe and short-lived (Ebola).

Why is this? The reason is that when a virus kills its host, it cannot migrate. The more aggressively it does this, the less it spreads. If the virus doesn’t kill its host, it can hop to others through all the usual means. When you get a virus and fight it off, your immune system encodes that information in a way that builds immunity to it. When it happens to enough people (and each case is different so we can’t put a clear number on it) the virus loses its pandemic quality and becomes endemic, which is to say predictable and manageable. Each new generation incorporates that information through more exposure.

This is what one would call Virology/Immunology 101. It’s what you read in every textbook. It’s been taught in 9th grade cell biology for probably 80 years. Observing the operations of this evolutionary phenomenon is pretty wonderful because it increases one’s respect for the way in which human biology has adapted to the presence of pathogens without absolutely freaking out.

And the discovery of this fascinating dynamic in cell biology is a major reason why public health became so smart in the 20th century. We kept calm. We managed viruses with medical professionals: doctor/patient relationships. We avoided the Medieval tendency to run around with hair on fire but rather used rationality and intelligence. Even the New York Times recognizes that natural immunity is powerful with Covid-19, which is not in the least bit surprising.

Until one day, this strange institution called the World Health Organization – once glorious because it was mainly responsible for the eradication of smallpox – has suddenly decided to delete everything I just wrote from cell biology basics. It has literally changed the science in a Soviet-like way. It has removed with the delete key any mention of natural immunities from its website. It has taken the additional step of actually mischaracterizing the structure and functioning of vaccines.

So that you will believe me, I will try to be as precise as possible. Here is the website from June 9, 2020. You can see it here on Archive.org. You have to move down the page and click on the question about herd immunity. You see the following.

That’s pretty darn accurate overall. Even the statement that the threshold is “not yet clear” is correct. There are cross immunities to Covid from other coronaviruses and there is T cell memory that contributes to natural immunity.

Some estimates are as low as 10%, which is a far cry from the modelled 70% estimate of virus immunity that is standard within the pharmaceutical realm. Real life is vastly more complicated than models, in economics or epidemiology. The WHO’s past statement is a solid, if “pop,” description.

However, in a screenshot dated November 13, 2020, we read the following note that somehow pretends as if human beings do not have immune systems at all but rather rely entirely on big pharma to inject things into our blood.

What this note at the World Health Organization has done is deleted what amounts to the entire million-year history of humankind in its delicate dance with pathogens. You could only gather from this that all of us are nothing but blank and unimprovable slates on which the pharmaceutical industry writes its signature.

In effect, this change at WHO ignores and even wipes out 100 years of medical advances in virology, immunology, and epidemiology. It is thoroughly unscientific – shilling for the vaccine industry in exactly the way the conspiracy theorists say that WHO has been doing since the beginning of this pandemic.

What’s even more strange is the claim that a vaccine protects people from a virus rather than exposing them to it. What’s amazing about this claim is that a vaccine works precisely by firing up the immune system through exposure. Why I had to type those words is truly beyond me. This has been known for centuries. There is simply no way for medical science completely to replace the human immune system. It can only game it via what used to be called inoculation.

Take from this what you will. It is a sign of the times. For nearly a full year, the media has been telling us that “science” requires that we comply with their dictates that run contrary to every tenet of liberalism, every expectation we’ve developed in the modern world that we can live freely and with the certainty of rights. Then “science” took over and our human rights were slammed. And now the “science” is actually deleting its own history, airbrushing over what it used to know and replacing it with something misleading at best and patently false at worst.

I cannot say why, exactly, the WHO did this. Given the events of the past nine or ten months, however, it is reasonable to assume that politics are at play. Since the beginning of the pandemic, those who have been pushing lockdowns and hysteria over the coronavirus have resisted the idea of natural herd immunity, instead insisting that we must live in lockdown until a vaccine is developed.

That is why the Great Barrington Declaration, written by three of the world’s preeminent epidemiologists and which advocated embracing the phenomenon of herd immunity as a way of protecting the vulnerable and minimizing harms to society, was met with such venom.

Now we see the WHO, too, succumbing to political pressure. This is the only rational explanation for changing the definition of herd immunity that has existed for the past century.

The science has not changed; only the politics have. And that is precisely why it is so dangerous and deadly to subject virus management to the forces of politics. Eventually the science too bends to the duplicitous character of the political industry.

When the existing textbooks that students use in college contradict the latest official pronouncements from the authorities during a crisis in which the ruling class is clearly attempting to seize permanent power, we’ve got a problem.

China Is Now the World’s Largest Economy. We Shouldn’t Be Shocked.

by Graham Allison via The National Interest Oct. 2020, Excerpt

China has now displaced the U.S. to become the largest economy in the world. Measured by the more refined yardstick that both the IMF and CIA now judge to be the single best metric for comparing national economies, the IMF Report shows that China’s economy is one-sixth larger than America’s ($24.2 trillion versus the U.S.’s $20.8 trillion). Why can’t we admit reality? What does this mean?

This week, the IMF presented its 2020 World Economic Outlook providing an overview of the global economy and the challenges ahead. The most inconvenient fact in the Report is one Americans don’t want to hear—and even when they read it, refuse to accept: China has now displaced the U.S. to become the largest economy in the world. Measured by the more refined yardstick that both the IMF and CIA now judge to be the single best metric for comparing national economies, the IMF Report shows that China’s economy is one-sixth larger than America’s ($24.2 trillion versus the U.S.’s $20.8 trillion).

Despite this unambiguous statement from the two most authoritative sources, most of the mainstream press—with the exception of The Economist—continue reporting that the U.S. economy is No. 1. So, what’s going on?

Obviously, measuring the size of a nation’s economy is more complicated than it might appear. In addition to collecting data, it requires selecting a proper yardstick. Traditionally, economists have used a metric called MER (market exchange rates) to calculate GDP. The U.S. economy is taken as the baseline—reflecting the fact that when this method was developed in the years after World War II, the U.S. accounted for almost half of global GDP. For other nations’ economies, this method adds up all goods and services produced by their economy in their own currency and then converts that total into U.S. dollars at the current “market exchange rate.” For 2020, the value of all goods and services produced in China is projected to be 102 trillion yuan. Converted to U.S. dollars at a market rate of 7 yuan to 1 dollar, China will have an MER GDP of $14.6 trillion versus the U.S. GDP of $20.8 trillion.

[. . . ]

For the U.S. to meet the China challenge, Americans must wake up to the ugly fact: China has already passed us in the race to be the No. 1 economy in the world. Moreover, in 2020, China will be the only major economy that records positive growth: the only economy that will be bigger at the end of the year than it was when the year began. The consequences for American security are not difficult to predict. Diverging economic growth will embolden an ever more assertive geopolitical player on the world stage.

Graham T. Allison is the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is the former director of Harvard’s Belfer Center and the author of Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?

Up to 72% of Nursing Assistants Don’t Want to Be Vaccinated

by Anna Wilde Mathews

More nursing homes around the country will start getting a Covid-19 vaccine Monday, but the impact of the massive effort will partly depend on winning over front-line workers like LaShundra Williams, who say they are skeptical of the shots.

Ms. Williams, 40 years old, is a certified nursing assistant at St. James Veterans Home in St. James, Mo., and she says she is unlikely to agree to get the shots, even though her son is currently ill with Covid-19. She recently watched a webcast by nursing-home doctors about the safety and benefits of the vaccines, hoping for reassurance, but came away unconvinced.

She is still worried that a vaccine might make her anemia worse, and she thinks the shots are being authorized for broad usage too quickly.

“It’s too new,” she said. “I’m just not comfortable.”

The federal long-term-care vaccination program, led by CVS Health Corp. and Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc., will begin its broad rollout in a dozen states this week, with hundreds of facilities slated for visits during the next few days. But surveys have signaled that many staffers are reluctant to get the shots, and some already have been declining them in the limited number of facilities where vaccinations have been administered.

At the nursing home at John Knox Village, in Pompano Beach, Fla., which became one of the first U.S. facilities to get the vaccine last Wednesday, about one-third of staffers participated, according to Mark Raynor, director of health-care services. “It comes down to fear of the unknown,” he said.

In Chester, W.Va., the Orchards at Foxcrest, which includes a nursing home, assisted-living center and independent units, had about 65% of eligible staffers agree to get the vaccine Thursday and Friday. Matt Murray, vice president of operations, said the company mounted an extensive information campaign. The community has faced a recent Covid-19 outbreak, including two deaths, he said, and executives hope more staffers will agree to get shots in a later visit.

After its outbreak is over, Mr. Murray said the community plans to start requiring employees who haven’t been vaccinated to wear N95 masks at all times, except while eating or drinking. Those who have received the two required shots will be allowed to use less-restrictive surgical masks, and only in patient areas. “The goal is really to encourage people to get vaccinated,”and also to protect residents and employees, he said.

Genesis Healthcare Inc. and ProMedica Senior Care, major nursing-home operators that had people vaccinated at initial facilities last week, both said they aimed for only about half of their staffers to get shots during the first visit, so their administration could be staggered. They were able to fill all available slots.

Despite efforts to bolster testing and protective equipment in nursing homes, cases and deaths have continued to surge inside the facilities, closely following increases in the virus’s spread outside their walls. In the week ended Dec. 6, there were 4,525 deaths in nursing homes, according to data released Thursday by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. That was a 56% increase from the 2,893 deaths in the week ended Nov. 15.

Researchers say staffers exposed to the virus in their communities are likely unknowingly conveying it to vulnerable nursing-home residents, highlighting the urgent need to vaccinate workers. “If you have enough of your staff that is immune, they will be less likely to introduce it into the building,” said Morgan Katz, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University. Getting half of the staff vaccinated is an absolute minimum, and facilities should aim for everyone to get the shots, she said.

A survey of 1,676 U.S. adults released Dec. 15 by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 71% would definitely or probably get a Covid-19 vaccine if it was found safe by scientists and offered free. Among the groups with the highest levels of vaccine hesitancy were Republicans, people aged 30 to 49, rural residents and Black adults. Also, 29% of those who said they worked in a health-care delivery setting said they would definitely not or probably not get vaccinated.

In a mid-November survey of nursing-home and assisted-living-facility staff in Indiana, by researchers at Indiana University, only 45% of 8,243 respondents said they would consider receiving a Covid-19 vaccine as soon as it was available. Others said they would be willing to take it later. The survey, accepted for publication in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, found that 70% of those unwilling to get the vaccine were concerned about side effects.

“There’s just a great deal of mistrust,” said Lori Porter, chief executive of theNational Association of Health Care Assistants, an advocacy group, which found in its own survey that nearly 72% of certified nursing assistants didn’t want to receive the vaccine. “A lot of my CNAs, their responses have been, ‘No one cares about old people and no one cares about us and we don’t intend to be guinea pigs.’ ”

Nursing assistants are generally paid low wages to work in facilities that are often thinly staffed.

Zenobia Carden is a 35-year-old certified nursing assistant who worked in a nursing home earlier this year and is about to start a new job at a residence for people with developmental disabilities. She said she has seen firsthand the impact of the coronavirus, which killed several residents of the facility where she used to work. She debated what to do, but ultimately decided that getting the vaccine still felt too risky to her.

Ms. Carden, who lives in Bartlesville, Okla., worries about potential long-term side effects, as well as shorter-term ones like headaches, because she already suffers from migraines.

“I’m scared,” she said. “It takes years to come out with a vaccine, and for them to come out with it this quickly—I don’t trust it.”

Nursing-home owners are trying to convince workers that the shots are safe by holding webinars and other sessions to share information, having top executives get publicly vaccinated and highlighting employees who are choosing to get the shots early.

PruittHealth Inc., a Norcross, Ga., company with about 102 nursing homes and assisted-living facilities, said each staffer who receives the vaccine will get a free breakfast at a Waffle House restaurant, and also be entered in a continuing raffle that will deliver prizes such as TVs. “We want to really create some excitement,” said Neil Pruitt, chief executive.

Lawyers have said that employers are generally legally allowed to mandate Covid-19 vaccines for workers, a stance reinforced last week in guidelines released by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. But nursing-home owners have said they don’t plan to require the vaccine. Many facilities are already facing staffing squeezes after months of pandemic challenges.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Nurse collapses on live TV after receiving COVID-19 vaccine

CHATTANOOGA, Tennessee, December 18, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – In a video that’s now gone viral, a nurse collapsed on live television in a Tennessee hospital just minutes after receiving the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.

The live event shows masked doctors administering the jab to five hospital staff of the Chattanooga Heart Institute Memorial Hospital (CHI) in Hamilton County, Tennessee.

Nurse Manager Tiffany Dover was answering questions at a press briefing shortly after receiving the vaccine when she suddenly started to look dizzy before saying “sorry” and subsequently fainting; the event took place about 17 minutes after she was inoculated.

After recovering from her fall, Dover said: “[it] just hit me all of a sudden, I could feel it coming on. I felt a little disoriented, but I feel fine now, and the pain in my arm is gone.”

Staff at CHI were quick to divert any association between Dover’s adverse reaction and the vaccine, with Dr. Jesse Tucker, medical director of critical care medicine, saying “[it] is a reaction that can happen very frequently with any vaccine or shot.” He went on to say that there’s no “reason to suspect that that’s due to the vaccine whatsoever.”

However, this event has not happened in isolation. Just two days ago, two healthcare professionals who received the same Pfizer vaccination developed painful side-effects within minutes of being injected. According to the New York Times, one of the workers “had an anaphylactic reaction that began 10 minutes after receiving the vaccine,” experiencing “a rash over her face and torso, shortness of breath and an elevated heart rate.”

The second worker had an equally shocking reaction, developing “eye puffiness, light-headedness, and a scratchy throat 10 minutes after the injection.” Again, local doctors appeared to be unperturbed by the incidents, with the chief medical officer of Alaska, Dr. Anne Zink, stating that there are “no plans to change our vaccine schedule, dosing[,] or regimen.”

Britain was the first country to authorize the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine for public use. Last week, after beginning a mass rollout program of the vaccine, two British nurses also suffered adverse reactions to the injection. Subsequently, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) delivered an added advisory notice to vaccine distributors that “any person with a history of anaphylaxis to a vaccine, medicine or food should not receive the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine,” adding that a “second dose should not be given to anyone who has experienced anaphylaxis following administration of the first dose of this vaccine.”

Dr. James Lyons-Weiler, President and CEO of The Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge, in a scathing speech delivered to the Pennsylvania Medical Freedom Press Conference, declared that “historically vaccines for coronaviruses have had a terrible safety record.” He also criticized vaccine manufacturers for leapfrogging standard safety procedures, saying “[t]he FDA, absolutely ignoring [the] safety margin, in a stunning decision, decided to allow Moderna and other vaccine manufacturers to skip the most important step in vaccine safety for coronavirus which is the animal trials.”

The Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) report into the safety of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine revealed that 27% of trial participants reported an adverse event within one month of receiving the vaccine. Four participants reported a period of Bell’s palsy, a “temporary weakness or lack of movement affecting one side of your face,” including a drooping of the eyelids and the corners of the mouth.

The FDA recommended an emergency use authorization on the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine on December 10, claiming that the benefits “outweigh its risks for use in individuals 16 years of age and older.” Yesterday, an FDA advisory panel also recommended emergency use authorization of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine.

LifeSiteNews has produced an extensive COVID-19 vaccines resources page. View it here.

Some hours later a fake Tiffany impersonated by a different person pretended to be the real Tiffany was posted by the hospital, only to be removed soon afterwards:

A Coup Against Sweden’s Successful No-Lockdown Policy Just as It Is Validated

 
 
The reason Denmark and Norway entered into a hard lockdown in March but Sweden did not isn’t because Danish and Norwegian authorities recommended that, but because they were overridden by politicians.

Actually, their health authorities had proposed more modest measures. Not quite as liberal as the ones proposed in Sweden but more liberal than what the politicians ordered instead.

In Sweden, you had a similar situation in that the political government was more panicky than the health authorities, but in Sweden uniquely the politicians actually did not have the power to override the civil service. This sounds very technocratic but is actually not a recent invention but a legacy tradition.

 
 

This allowed the PM to hide behind the state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell and so Sweden became (after UK and Netherlands which initially said they would follow the same strategy also gave in to hysteria) the only Western country which did not lock down its people.

In turn, lockdown fanatics screamed that Sweden would see 40,000 Covid deaths by May rising to 100,000 by June. This was the prediction of the Imperial College model (on the basis of which UK and Trump’s USA locked down) when applied to Sweden.

Instead, Sweden had a marginally better COVID outcome than UK, with a near-identical progression of the outbreak, and just 5,000 COVID-related deaths by summer.

 
Lockdown fanatics then moved the goalposts claiming that with a lockdown Sweden may have achieved the same COVID outcome as the lightly affected Denmark and Norway. However if that is so, why wasn’t this outcome achieved by the other lockdowners such as the UK, Belgium, Netherlands, Italy, France and Spain? On evidence a lockdown in Sweden would have been just as in vain as in those countries.

 

In reality, while Sweden, Norway and Denmark are linguistic relatives, that does not mean they are hugely interconnected. Denmark is on the other side of the Baltic Sea, and most of Norway is separated by a frozen mountain range. The idea the three must be thought of as Siamese triplets and can only be compared to each other is bizarre. The truth is that we simply don’t know precisely why some areas are hit harder and sooner than others; why northern Italy was hit harder than southern Italy (and that’s the same country!) or why eastern EU wasn’t hit until fall. That said the fact Sweden had far more dry tinder explains a lot.

Anyhow, over the summer and fall Sweden’s no lockdown policy became even more vindicated. Where at one point Sweden was number 8 by COVID-related deaths per capita it started to slide down that list as deaths piled up in lockdown-fanatic Latin America over the summer, and in equally pro-lockdown eastern-central Europe in the fall.

Eastern Europeans escaped almost unscathed by the first March-April wave and attributed that to their lockdowns. But the very same lockdowns failed to have an impact when traditional flu season returned in the fall, and they started to climb up the COVID death ladder, causing Sweden to slide down to 23rd. (In reality, the failure of the lockdowns to have any impact in the fall shows they would have escaped the spring wave regardless of what they did.)

Similarly to the UK and other Western European countries, Sweden is experiencing a 2nd fall wave of its own, but it’s nothing too dramatic. Daily deaths are lower than they were in the spring wave and the outbreak is once again following a Gompertz curve and is by no means “exponential”. There is no realistic danger of hospital space running out, as it also did not happen in the 1st wave.

 

 

Appropriately the Swedish health authorities headed by Anders Tegnell who has steered the ship so far advise to stay the course. Take precautions but continue to live a largely normal life.

However even as Tegnell’s model — which is simply the model every single healthy authority planned for before the March 2020 collective psychosis — has become more vindicated, and is looking more correct and easier to defend than ever, something all too predictable is happening. The political government egged on by the virtue-signaling king is in the process of carrying out a coup against Tegnell’s control of epidemic policy.

Under constant barrage by the international media and the opposition, the PM has started to pass down orders that are starting to amount to a soft lockdown.

Albeit Sweden has done well not to pile unnecessary human-caused cardio, cancer, and poverty deaths on top of virus deaths, there is nonetheless raised mortality and older people are dying and that is a sad thing. This leads to the temptation of virtue signaling and “do something-ism”. It is engrained deep in the human psyche that to achieve results one must sacrifice, and that sacrifice leads to good results. But when the mechanics of this process are messed up that simply isn’t true. Sacrifice will make you feel good but it doesn’t mean it’s actually helping. Performing a ritual with dancing does not bring rain, and human sacrifice does not keep the Sun moving across the sky. Sacrificing the heart and cancer patients and the poor does not bring down COVID deaths. But it does allow bleeding-hearts to tap themselves on the back over how compassionate they are as they make things WORSE than they need to be, and therefore it makes sense for the PM’s personal political calculation and ultimately that is what really matters (you didn’t think they were actually making decisions based on what’s good for mortality, rather than for their own political fortune in the very short term?):

Why the change in tone from the Swedish government during November and December?

If one were cynical, one might think it was due to the fact that the governing Social Democrats received a big boost to their opinion ratings in April and May, in the usual “rally around the flag” fashion seen when a nation faces some type of crisis, but since then they have been polling worse month on month. Maybe they saw their polling numbers, panicked, and hoped that they would get a boost in the polls if they could appear more assertive. Or maybe they’ve just capitulated to international pressure to “get in line”.

That is unfortunate but it does not mean that there will no longer be a single no-lockdown country in the West. Actually, since June the other Scandinavian countries and Switzerland have actually been more liberal than Sweden. Indeed the very fact that Switzerland is handling the 2nd wave which for it has been much deadliner than the first with a lighter touch is a de facto admissionthat they never should have locked down during the first one either.

In reality, lockdowns do nothing COVID-wise because asymptomatic infections do not contribute to driving outbreaks, just as they did not for any other respiratory virus epidemic. (No we do not live in the special times where the first-ever virus in the history of viruses to be driven by asymptomatic spread has evolved. We’re not that special.)

 

COVID-19 Un-Explained

LARRY ROMANOFF via unz

Waves, Ripples and Surges

Let’s examine the normal pattern for an outbreak of a typical infectious disease. According to the US CDC:[1]

“A common-source outbreak is one in which a group of persons are all exposed to an infectious agent or a toxin from the same source. If the number of cases during an epidemic were plotted over time, the resulting graph . . . would typically have a steep upslope and a more gradual downslope (a so-called “log-normal distribution”). A propagated outbreak results from transmission from one person to another [usually] by direct person-to-person contact . . .” Propagated outbreaks typically exhibit several peaks one or two weeks apart, the epidemic normally dying out after several of these generations.

“Some epidemics have features of both common-source epidemics and propagated epidemics. The pattern of a common-source outbreak followed by secondary person-to-person spread is not uncommon.” The CDC states these also can produce several generations or peaks during the following few weeks. But in all of these instances of natural infectious agent outbreaks, the spread and timing follow essentially the same typical pattern, perhaps elongated but still with close timing of the peaks. Here are three graphs from the CDC to illustrate. You can see clearly that we have a rise (rapid if single-source, slow if propagated or mixed), then a peak, a gradual tapering-off, and a cessation.

The Dreaded “Second Wave”

While the literature on this point is confusing from a multiplicity of factors, there is no evidence to support the assertion of a natural “second wave” for infections. An epidemic or pandemic manifests itself by starting slowly, increasing exponentially, peaking, then slowly tapering off and disappearing. There may be isolated infections popping up later, but they don’t start a new epidemic. One of the major unexplained curiosities with COVID-19 is that from early on in the process the US mass media were fervently preparing us for a ‘second wave’. To enhance the plausibility of their tale, they linked it to the natural emergence of influenza that normally occurs when the weather turns cold in the Autumn and Winter, but that was deliberately misleading, a patently dishonest ‘guilt by association’ for the majority who don’t think. Let’s remember this is not a flu virus; this is a SARS virus, a different strain to be sure, but it wasn’t originally called SARS-CoV-2 for nothing, and there was no reason to expect it to behave like, or act in concert with, the common flu. And in fact, all nations experienced their COVID-19 outbreaks in March or April and, long prior to the outbreak of cold weather, the virus had already peaked and tapered in many countries to the point where it had died out or nearly so.

When researching other recent epidemics or pandemics such as the 1968 H3N2 or the 2009 H1N1, we find no evidence of any ‘second waves’. The 2009 H1N1 was typical, though prolonged, lasting from April 2009 to February 2010, but it peaked in May or June and slowly tapered until year-end. Others are similar. Here are a few examples of typical distribution patterns. The virus’ tail in China is truncated due to the strong containment measures implemented; the spike is from a data update since not all infections had yet been collated. You can see that China had reached the end, Saudi Arabia and Bolivia nearly there, India and Argentina tailing off. All graphs are courtesy of Worldometer. (The ‘Spanish flu’ of 1918 was an anomaly. See note (1) in the End Notes.)

Western Europe

Note that there are no ‘normal distribution’ cases for Western Europe, where every nation was hit with a “second wave”. Switzerland, Spain, the UK, and many others went sharply from essentially zero to 20,000 or 30,000 new infections per day, a pattern lacking any historical or epidemiological explanation. It almost seemed that someone hadn’t done their job properly the first time, and returned to try again. Let’s look at some examples.

Turning to Eastern Europe

Little Latvia is typical of many countries. The initial outbreak in March was so small as to be almost invisible, then tapered off and died. There were a few scattered infections, but nothing to cause a resurgence. Then suddenly and inexplicably a huge explosion at the beginning of October . Almost all of Eastern Europe followed this patternwith Russia and Belarus being two notable exceptions. Let’s look at Russia:

I watched Russia very closely from early in 2020. For about two months, infections were stable at only a few hundred per day. Russia had implemented many containment measures and it began to appear that the virus would be a non-event. Then suddenly an explosion in April with new infections quickly rising to more than 10,000 per day, and occurring simultaneously in almost every area of the country. It was painful watching Russia for four months attempting to lower the daily infection rate below 5,000, but finally 4,900, 4,800, and it appeared the tail was nearing, then suddenly another explosive jump to nearly 30,000, again simultaneously in all regions, and still increasing. There is no infection that manifests in this manner without human assistance.

Still with Russia, the country experienced high infections but a comparatively low death rate, to the dismay of many in the West, so much so that Reuters published an astonishingly-stupid article titled “Experts Want to Know Why Coronavirus Hasn’t Killed More Russians”.[2] “Tasteless” and “deplorable” were two of the kinder adjectives used on Reuters in the instant public backlash, so they amended it to “Experts question why coronavirus hasn’t killed more Russians”, but no improvement in public censure so a third incarnation, “Experts Question Russian Data on Covid-19 Death Toll”. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg joined in to support Reuters by stating that Russia was “spreading . . . disinformation . . . trying to change the world order”. “Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova drily observed in a Facebook post that a ‘world order’ in which it’s considered acceptable to lament why a virus didn’t kill more Russian people could probably use a change.” Helen Buyniski covered this in a charming article in RT; I recommend you read it.[3]

Turkey

Then we have the strange case of Turkey. New daily infections had been at around 1,000, followed by a quick increase to around 5,000, then suddenly exploding to 30,000 – in one day – and increasing. As with Russia, there is no known natural pathogen outbreak that manifests itself in such a manner. This is just a thought, but if I wanted to punish someone for buying and activating Russian S-400 missiles, this might be a good method.

The Blessed Triumvirate

It is further worthy of note that while most nations received only a second wave, the US, Japan and South Korea were blessed with a third wave, apparently having been given Most-Favored-Nation status by COVID-19. (I copied this term from an article in Counterpunch by Paul Street.[4])

Another Curious “Two Waves” Manifestation

As I noted above, there is no such thing as a natural ‘second wave’ for an epidemic, much less of this next kind: No one has yet addressed the fact that virtually all countries in the world were hit with COVID-19 virtually at the same time, in two blasts.[5] There were two waves – the first hit 25 countries on all continents, where medical practitioners confirmed their first domestic infection all within three days of each other. In the second wave, almost exactly one month later, 85 countries confirmed their first domestic infection, again almost all within three days of each other, and all in multiple locations. It shouldn’t be necessary to point out that no natural epidemic can manifest itself this way without human assistance.

A natural virus simply hasn’t the ability to simultaneously infect 85 different countries on all continents of the world, with outbreaks in multiple locations in each country – and all on the same day. Perhaps even more curious is that these countries were not all infected with the same variety of the virus, and each country experienced so many multiple infections in different provinces that none were able to definitively identify all their several ‘patients zero’. Considering the above information in light of the known basic facts of virus transmission, intuition suggests at least the possibility of there having been many people carrying a pail of live viruses. All of this constitutes prima facie evidence of a bio-weapons attack. I wrote an earlier article titled, “COVID-19 Needs a Criminal Investigation“.[6] And it still does.

Search for the Origin

A high-level Italian virologist, Giuseppe Remuzzi, published papers in the Lancet and elsewhere in which he states that Italian physicians now recall having seen “a very strange and very severe pneumonia, particularly in old people in December and even November [2019].[7] This suggests that the virus was circulating, at least in Lombardy, and before we were aware of this outbreak occurring in China.”

Italy detected traces of the virus in wastewater from the summer of 2019, and France, Spain, the Netherlands and other nations have made the same discoveries. I detailed these in a prior article.[8] In Brazil, researchers found COVID-19 samples in wastewater from late 2019. France showed chest scans indicating COVID-19 from early November of 2019. Blood samples in Italy showed the virus present in September. In Spain, researchers found the virus in wastewater collected in March of 2019. The Irish Mirror reported that “many countries are beginning to use wastewater sampling to track the spread of the disease”, scientists claiming these detections were “consistent with evidence emerging in other countries” that COVID-19 was circulating around the world long before China reported its first cases, all of which would of necessity have had to have originated in the US and transported around the world because only the US had all the different types, meaning the virus had been circulating (and mutating) there for months before contaminating the world.

The Italians have “unequivocally” demonstrated the presence of the virus in many individuals from 2019, in frozen medical samples taken during other examinations and now tested for COVID-19. Many of these have resulted from cancer screening, from chest X-rays, and from blood donations. Non-American media have covered these discoveries in some detail[9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16], but while the Chinese and Europeans know, Americans and Canadians don’t know because the owners of their major newspapers and TV networks don’t want them to know.

French researchers obtained evidence of Covid-19 from frozen samples, where these are kept at –80°C for years, the same method that allows anti-doping laboratories to keep athlete samples for years when new methods arise for detecting illegal drugs. For the virus, they use two distinct methods: a serological test which searches for antibodies in the blood, and a virological test, RT-PCR, a very sensitive technique that searches for the actual genome of the virus, its specific genetic information.”[17][18]

French virologists have now concluded “The coronavirus outbreak in France was not caused by cases imported from China, but from a locally circulating strain of unknown origin . . .”,[19] and, from other studies, that strain existed only in the US. My information is that Italy, Spain and Portugal have come to the same conclusion. The data also show that Canada’s early COVID-19 cases came from the U.S. not China.[20]

A number of American cities made the same discoveries of the virus in their wastewater samples from 2019. The US mass media didn’t pick up the stories, but the local papers did. It was at that point that Pompeo issued another gag order that hospitals and labs were forbidden from disclosing any virus information directly to the CDC or the media but that all must be passed through the White House. That killed all further reports of COVID-19 in America’s wastewater in the second and third quarters of 2019.

With the accumulated volume of evidence, it now seems a certainty that COVID-19 was circulating in the US since June or July of 2019, far earlier than admitted, and that the CDC’s prevention (and forbidding) of testing was to bury this evidence. One example was headlines in the US media on June 21, 2020, stating, “Over 40 mysterious respiratory deaths in California could dramatically rewrite narrative of COVID-19” in the US.[21] The LA Times reported on “a cluster of mysterious respiratory deaths” beginning in December of 2019. The local news website www.bakersfield.com stated this meant that COVID-19 was circulating in California “way earlier than we knew”. Evidence of COVID-19 was also found in many blood donations collected from residents in nine states across the US as early as mid-December, according to a study published on Nov 30 in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. And let’s not forget too quickly that Japanese tourists were infected in Hawaii in September of 2019.

The internet has seen many posts by Americans – including many physicians – claiming infections from September, 2019 onward, all describing similar symptoms consistent with COVID-19. I have many received messages from Americans in Washington, New York, California, Maryland, Virginia, and other states, as well as from Germany and Italy, claiming similar infections as early as late September, claims too numerous, too detailed, and too similar to be ignored.

New York’s Governor Cuomo still claims the “Coronavirus came to New York from Europe, not China“, but this is more a pre-emptive move to deflect the blame which is certain to follow the inescapable conclusion that Europe was seeded from the US. The basis for their claim appears to be solely that the virus strain affecting New York and Italy are identical, the blame attributed to travelers from Italy infecting Americans in New York, ignoring the fact that the airplanes, people – and viruses – travel in both directions with equal ease and all evidence is that the infection occurred in the other direction.[22][23] Since only the US contained all varieties of this virus, the most logical assumption is that the travel path was from the US to Italy.

Others in the US have used the same directional reasoning, still without justification. American researchers tracked the start of the COVID-19 outbreak in LA and found most of the early cases may track back to Europe. They examined around 200 patients with reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test results positive for SARS-CoV-2, and found that 82% of the cases shared closest similarity to those originating in Europe while only 15% from Asia. This suggests that SARS-CoV-2 genomes in Los Angeles were predominantly related to the viral strain in New York City, and unrelated to Wuhan or China. In July of 2020, the US CDC released a report saying SARS-CoV-2 specimens in NYC resembled those circulating in Europe, suggesting probable introductions of the virus from Europe, other US locations, and local introductions from within New York.[24] Again, they ignore the inescapable fact that travel is a two-way street.

Japan, South Korea, Italy and Iran reported that their domestic outbreaks of COVID-19 were not from China but instead showing connection to the US. Japan and Taiwan have documented proof that several Japanese became infected in Hawaii in late September of 2019. As well, the huge pent-up eruptions in Washington and New York were domestic in origin, having no proven connection with China.[25] Australia’s Prime Minister stated that 80% or more of all infections in his country came from the US,[26] while Iceland confirmed that some of their coronavirus infections have been traced to Denver.[27][28] The mayor of Belleville, New Jersey, Michael Melham said he has tested positive for coronavirus antibodies, adding that he contracted it in November, over two months before the first confirmed case was reported in the U.S.[29] Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s chief epidemiologist, said the coronavirus may have been circulating in the country since November.[30]

There was also independent research by a Cambridge geneticist suggesting the coronavirus may have been circulating much earlier than previously believed, also claiming powerful circumstantial evidence that the virus did not originate in Wuhan.[31] In a paper published in May of 2020 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he reported three main strains of the virus that he labeled A, B and C. His research determined that A was the founding variant because it was the version most similar to the type of SARS-Cov-2 discovered in bats. But the A strain was non-existent in China, with only a handful of samples discovered in the entire country, and those in American nationals. Wuhan was infected with type B, a version two mutations from A, meaning it could not have originated in China because it had no prior source from which to mutate.

Further, a German scientist has recently assembled a volume of evidence that the virus in Europe spread from (but not necessarily originated in) Northern Italy.[32]Germany’s top virologist Alexander Kekule said “[the COVID-19] rampant around the world is not from the central Chinese city of Wuhan, but a mutation from northern Italy.” The Italian strain is called “G” mutant, which has genetic mutations, and is likely to be more contagious than the variant found in Wuhan. He said that over 99% of the COVID-19 cases can be genetically traced back to the Italian variant, and even the current cases in China are re-imported from Europe and the rest of the world. He noted that for at least the European pandemic, “the starting shot was fired in northern Italy.”

There is more. Recent research conducted jointly by British and German experts, testified the variant of novel coronavirus that is closest to that discovered in bats was actually found mainly among cases from the US, rather than in Wuhan. Experts from the University of Cambridge and their peers from Germany analyzed 160 virus genomes that were extracted from human patients around the world and found the coronavirus mutated into three distinct strains. They found that most cases carried type A virus – the ancestral type of virus, which is bat coronavirus, with 96 percent sequence similarity to the human virus – were mostly seen only in patients from the US and Australia. And of the five individuals with type A detected in Wuhan, all were American patients who had resided there.[33] Type C is a variant of type B, seen most commonly in European countries and also evident in Singapore and South Korea as well as China’s Hong Kong and Taiwan. Their other conclusion was that because the virus mutates significantly faster outside China, the European spread likely occurred between September 13, 2019 to December 7, 2019.

Zeng Guang, the chief epidemiologist at China’s CDC said one reason China identified the virus and the dangers of an epidemic was from its experience with SARS, and from that the nation established a reporting system for pneumonia with unknown causes. But he said that also made China easily misunderstood. Other nations including the US experienced respiratory illnesses that were almost certainly COVID-19 but weren’t looking for an external pathogen and thus didn’t find it, as with the US vaping-death epidemic and similar.[34] He also said studies show “a very high possibility” that COVID-19 first emerged outside China.

The evidence is now accepted more or less universally that the Huanan Market in Wuhan was a victim of COVID-19 rather than the origin. And in fact, the first person in China proven to have been infected by the virus, had had no contact whatever with that market, nor did about 30% of the first victims. Further, the virus strains in Italy, Iran, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, are different from the one that contaminated Wuhan. Since only the US has all the various strains, it would seem those infections must have originated there.[35] Chinese scientists are certain the origin and distribution of the virus can be found if all nations cooperate. Unfortunately, the US refuses to do so, blocking all attempts at cooperation on this matter – while demanding that China be investigated.

Prior Knowledge – Who knew What and When?

Todas Philipson, an economist who was acting Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) said his team alerted the White House about the dangers of a looming pandemic outbreak about three months before Covid-19 erupted in the US. In an interview with CNN’s Poppy Harlow he said he co-authored and published a CEA report titled “Mitigating the Impact of Pandemic Influenza through Vaccine Innovation” that warned a pandemic disease could kill as many as half a million Americans and cause up to $3.79 trillion in damage to the US economy, stating the report was presented to President Trump or his top officials and that “The White House is fully aware of what CEA puts out.”[36]

A bit more to the point, an ABC News Report stated, “Concerns about [COVID-19] were detailed in a November intelligence report by the military’s National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), according to two officials familiar with the document’s contents. The timeline of the intel side of this may be [even] further back than we’re discussing,” the source said of preliminary reports from Wuhan.” The intelligence source quoted by ABC said further, “Analysts concluded it could be a cataclysmic event”. And the Washington Post wrote that “. . . reports from US intelligence agencies starting in January that warned of the scale and intensity of the coronavirus outbreak in China, [in Wuhan] could develop into a “full-blown pandemic”.”

CNN had this report: “The US military’s National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI) compiled a November intelligence report in which “analysts concluded it could be a cataclysmic event”, one of the sources of the NCMI’s report told ABC News. The source told ABC News that the intelligence report was then briefed “multiple times” to the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff and the White House. The Pentagon, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and White House National Security Council, originally declined to comment.” They later denied knowledge of the report, but ABC was sufficiently secure in the reliability of its four unrelated sources that they repeatedly republished the article for days after the NCMI disavowal.

Perhaps most startling of all, Israeli television and other news media claimed that US intelligence agencies alerted Israel to the coronavirus outbreak in China in November – long before the Chinese had any idea the game was afoot.[37]According to Israel’s Channel 12 news, the US intelligence community became aware of the emerging disease in Wuhan in the second week of that month and drew up a classified document. They claimed Trump “did not deem it of interest”, but the Americans delivered their classified document to both NATO and Israel’s IDF – who informed the government, who then leaked it to the media. They claimed it wasn’t clear if the NMCI report was the same one sent to NATO and the IDF. US authorities disclaimed this, but the Israeli media were firm in their assertion that the information was valid and followed the path they stated. The Times of Israel has a good reputation for factual reporting and cannot be dismissed as easily as can CNN or Fox News. Or the NYT and WSJ, for that matter.

The Wuhan Military Games

An American, George Webb, published some videos where he claimed he had identified “patient zero”, a US soldier who had participated in the Wuhan Games and who had exhibited COVID-19 symptoms and later tested positive for the virus. The woman’s name was Mattje Benassi, who understandably did not benefit from the adverse publicity. She and her husband claim they have received hateful messages and even death threats from this. I genuinely sympathise with the woman and I deplore the fact that she was personally identified. I do not know if she had or did not have the virus infection in Wuhan but, if she did, she was certainly a victim and not a perpetrator. However, I would say that she now knows how China feels at having been lambasted incessantly in the US media, when China was also an innocent victim and not a perpetrator. Benassi should take her problem to Mike Pompeo, which is where it belongs. In any case, Benassi should be left alone because the preponderance of evidence is that the virus was circulating in both the US and Europe long before the Military Games.

Nevertheless, there were indeed a number of Americans who were hospitalised in Wuhan during the Games for a strange and unidentified illness. One hospital spokesman attempted to cover up the story by claiming the Americans were suffering from Malaria, a claim which could not possibly be true. I have no further details, but if the virus were in fact transmitted to China during the Military Games, it would not have been done by first infecting all the American soldiers, then setting them loose onto the Chinese, any military infections likely being accidental. My information is that it was the civilian hangers-on who would have been responsible for the virus distribution – assuming the Americans were behind it, of course.

There was initial speculation that the virus had come to China (and spread around the world) from the US during the Games, but this died from a lack of hard evidence – prematurely, as it turns out . Not only were many US troops infected, but it is now apparent that a great many soldiers from different countries did in fact return home from the Games infected with COVID-19. The respective governments have downplayed the matter and the US media have totally censored it, so almost no one outside Europe has any knowledge of this. I would note here that I am in contact with a group of about 200 scientists, primarily but not exclusively European, who have informally banded together to investigate the origins of COVID-19 and to share information. They have identified many countries whose soldiers returned home infected from Wuhan, France perhaps being the most notable with half the crew of the Charles de Gaulle (the flagship of the French navy) being infected and a large concentration of infections (and the first death) occurring at the airport where the French soldiers made their transit on their return.

The Italian Gazetta Dello Sport wrote that Wuhan “became a hotbed of the pandemic” and that there were emerging testimonies of many Italian athletes who, on those dates or after returning home, were all similarly affected by typical COVID-19 symptoms including coughing, breathing difficulties, weakness and a persistent fever. Athletes from many countries returned home ill from Wuhan, and it wasn’t the food. France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Italy, Germany, Saudi Arabia, the US, and others. There was a great deal of media coverage, but none of that reached the US or Canada; the information was totally censored.

According to Matteo Tagliariol, a star fencing member of the Italian delegation, “When we arrived in Wuhan, almost everyone got sick. I had a heavy cough. (…) Many had a fever, even though their temperature was not very high” adding that one of his teammates had to be bedridden for most of the stay. A week after returning home, Tagliariol became seriously ill. “I have mild asthma, but this was different. I felt like I couldn’t breathe anymore.” His partner and two-year-old son also became ill. “When we started talking about coronavirus, without any medical skills, I thought I’d caught it. I’m 37 years old, I’m a sportsman and I was really bad.”[38]

French pentathlete Élodie Clouvel stated (for herself and her husband Valentin Belaud, also a pentathlete), “we have already had the coronavirus. We were in Wuhan for the World Military Games and then we all got sick. Valentin missed three days of training. I also had stuff I hadn’t had before. We didn’t worry more than that because we weren’t talking about [the virus] yet. There were a lot of athletes at the World Military Games who have been very sick.” Clouvel stated that a military doctor confirmed that they had been infected by the coronavirus, and repeated the physician’s evidence that “many people in [the French] delegation were sick”.[39]

In May of 2020, the French media group RTL published a report which said in part, “In the search for the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, suspicions are growing, as well as testimonies about the World Military Games held in Wuhan, the epicentre of the epidemic, at the end of last October. French pentathlete Élodie Clouvel has already assured that she was most certainly infected, as was her husband Valentin Belaud, when she was there. Italian and Spanish athletes have made similar statements, and now we learn that the luggage of French athletes has passed through the military base of Creil, in the Oise, where the virus circulated very early in France . . . This new element shines a little more spotlight on these military Games, with always so many questions and few answers.”[40]

“Scores of athletes from other nations, including France and Italy, who participated in the games reported symptoms consistent with COVID-19 upon their return to their home countries. In retrospect, some doctors said those athletes suffered from COVID-19 and in some cases infected others, according to news reports.”[41] “French athletes’ concerns that they were infected by COVID-19 while participating in the games have been called “completely plausible” by Eric Caumes, an infectious and tropical disease specialist at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris.”[42]

It was amusing that the French DGSI, France’s intelligence service, were also affected, the symptoms apparently including massive diarrhea, but as one French news medium reported, “How many are there? What is their state of health? It’s impossible to know. The country’s most secretive institution does not disclose anything, much less when it is hit within it. At the Ministry of the Interior, it is motus and mouth sewn: no confirmation, no information, the secret remains well guarded.”

Still with France, the Oise region in the North was one of the epicenters of COVID-19, with local officials convinced the Creil airbase was “the source of contamination” of the entire area which had several serious infection clusters. This was the airbase used to return soldiers from the Games as well as to repatriate French nationals from Wuhan. Military officials first claimed that all arrivals had been tested, but later during a parliamentary grilling confessed to misunderstanding because of “not being doctors” and not actually having tested anyone.

One portion of France’s Defense Ministry was honest and forthcoming: “The spread of the virus by the military is not to be excluded, more than 9000 participants for 110 states [during the Military Games], which explains the global contamination. On their return, the representatives (in France 415 including 58 gendarmes) infected family, relatives and colleagues. . . . at that time nothing was known, it was “unbeknownst to them . . .”[43] But then, the French Ministry of Armies was less forthcoming: “There were no cases reported within the French delegation to the Influenza Or Hospital Army Health Service during and on the return of the military Games, which could be akin to cases of Covid-19. To date, and to our knowledge, no other country represented in Wuhan has reported such cases.”[44] But then a third military official settled the matter with a typically French finality of phrase: “No, definitely no, the military base in Creil is not the source of a cluster in the Oise . . . I think I can tell you . . . probably not . . .”

It is a bit maddening that in each case in Europe, as with the US, the authorities either disclaim any knowledge of, or deny outright, any COVID-19 infections among their troops. According to Le Parisien, the French delegation’s cargo (and personnel) passed through the Creil airbase, which was one of the major COVID-19 flash-points in France, with infections actually beginning in November of 2019, more than three months before the first “officially-confirmed” case. But the version of the French officials is that the virus was unknown at the time so that no testing was done although general medical attention was delivered. Officials from several European militaries and Defense Ministries made essentially this claim: “We contacted the athletes to ask if any had had any symptoms. None of them came forward, so we assumed that no one had been infected.” Nothing more to see here. The Swiss military believed it was “unlikely” that its 121-member delegation was affected, even though a handful of Swiss athletes had to be hospitalized in Wuhan, while the military health services of several countries say they “cannot recall” any cases of illness on the return from Wuhan. All this while the same troops are giving media interviews describing this same illness.

In the US, after the Games about 300 US military personnel returned home to nearly 250 bases in 25 states, without ever being screened for possible COVID-19 infection. “According to the Pentagon, there was no reason to do so then, or subsequently. A spokesperson issued a terse email response to the question, saying there was no screening because the event—held from October 18 to 27, 2019 – “was prior to the reported outbreak “. Since that email, Pentagon officials have repeatedly declined to speak on or off the record regarding the subject.”[45]

This report in Prospect.org claims that “Contrary to the Pentagon’s insistence, however, an investigation of COVID-19 cases in the military from official and public source materials shows that a strong correlation exists in COVID-19 cases reported at U.S. military facilities that are home bases of members of the U.S. team that went to Wuhan . . . infections occurred at a minimum of 63 military facilities where team members returned after the Wuhan games.” It states that this information was emerging but on March 31, 2020 the Pentagon restricted the release of information about COVID-19 cases at installations “for security reasons”. As of June 5, there were 10,462 COVID-19 cases in the Department of Defense in the military, civilian, dependent, and contractor categories.

“When asked why the athletes and support staff who had been in China were not screened as a precaution once the COVID-19 threat was known in January , Defense Secretary Mark Esper said at an April 14 press conference: “I am not aware of what you are talking about.” The question and response were not included in the Pentagon’s official written transcript of the briefing, as is the normal procedure. The official video of the briefing goes silent when the question is asked and Esper can be seen – but not heard – reacting to the question. The full audio and video exchange remains on the C-SPAN video of the event.”[46]

The Vaccination Twilight Zone

There is something potentially much more sinister here, detailed by two medical specialists: Dr. Michael Yeadon, a former V-P of Pfizer and the head of their respiratory research, and Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, a German physician, pulmonary specialist, and epidemiologist, and former Public Health Department head. Dr. Yeadon states that Pfizer’s vaccine [and possibly others] contains a spike protein called syncytin-1, which is vital for the formation of the placenta in pregnant women. He states that if the vaccine works as intended and forms an immune response against the spike protein, the female body will then also attack syncytin-1, which could cause infertility in women that might (or might not) be permanent. His public statement was basically that Covid-19 vaccines were effectively a female sterilisation program. On December 1, 2020, Drs. Yeadon and Wodarg filed an application with the EMA, the European Medicine Agency, for the immediate suspension of all SARS CoV 2 vaccine studies, in particular the BioNtech/Pfizer variants.

This would seem bizarre at first glance, except for the knowledge that this precise protocol has been executed before. Some years ago, the WHO, in conjunction with Rothschild, Sanofi and Connaught Labs and the US CDC, sterilised about 150 million women in undeveloped countries, without their knowledge or consent. This is not conspiracy theory, but documented fact.The WHO’s own website covers in detail how they spent 20 years and more than $400 million developing a “fertility-regulating” vaccine that was intended to cause permanent sterilisation. They utilised the female hCg hormone – which is vital for the implantation of the placenta in the uterus wall – combined with tetanus toxoid, and launched massive international campaigns ostensibly to vaccinate females against tetanus. But they conducted this campaign only among females of child-bearing age (roughly 14 to 40). The intent, and the result, was that when a woman’s body recognised the hCg hormone, it would attack and destroy it as an invader and thus prevent any pregnancy from coming to term. There were massive lawsuits and recriminations when this was discovered, and today there are many nations that will not permit entry to the WHO, UNICEF, or other UN bodies. When Bill Gates was speaking of the world population increasing to perhaps 9 billion and that, with effective planning, he could reduce this increase by “maybe 1.5 billion births”, this is almost certainly what he had in mind, and Gates is the largest financial supporter of the WHO. I won’t dwell further on this here, but I did research the topic thoroughly and wrote an article which is available on this site.[47] If you haven’t read it, I strongly recommend that you do so. It will give you a powerful insight into the criminality of these international organisations.

With reference to the COVID-19 vaccines being promoted by Pfizer and others, I have received communication from medical scientists in two European countries claiming the vaccinations may indeed be intended primarily for sterilisation, perhaps not meant for Western nations, but for all the others. They are similarly concerned about the sudden campaign by the WHO and US CDC for cervical cancer shots for teenagers.

Media Censorship

We have already read much here from Ron Unz and others about Google suppressing websites, articles and authors which conflict with the official story on any matter, with Twitter and Facebook doing the same, either through an open policy of controlling “fake news” or surreptitiously by other means. But there are many more, and more pointed, censorship attempts occurring well beyond Google, Facebook and Twitter. As one example, I knew my email was being monitored so I obtained an encrypted Proton Mail account. Following this, certain (non-China) acquaintances informed me that all mail from this account was automatically directed to their spam folders, a fault they are helpless to rectify. In addition, they inform me that attempting to send email to this same account (or reply to it) is rejected by their either their ISP or email program as “spam”, and are thus forced to communicate with me only through my public email address – which can be monitored. Another European friend now sends her emails with topic headings like ‘What are you doing this weekend?’ She discovered that any attempts to send a message with either my name or the titles of any of my articles in the subject line, will result in Google’s Gmail categorising the messages as spam, and not only refusing to send the messages but deleting the list of intended recipients.

A Few Ponderables

1. Prior to the COVID-19 outbreaks, why was the US military advertising for Russian DNA from the fluid of specific body joints, insisting the sources had to be entirely ethnic Russian and not Ukrainian or similar?

2. Why did the US CDC suddenly shut down Fort Detrick entirely, for about 6 months? Why, immediately following this shutdown were there persistent reports of strange pneumonia infections (and deaths) affecting the elderly, especially in nursing homes, in the area surrounding Fort Detrick?

3. What was the cause of the severe pneumonias and deaths of the young people that were originally attributed to vaping? All attending physicians claimed the vaping itself was not the prime cause, that there was another pathogen at work but they had no idea what it was at the time, stating now that the combination with COVID-19 could indeed be deadly even to young otherwise-healthy individuals.

4. Why did Pompeo suddenly mandate that all COVID-19 information be classified and run through the NSC? Why did he further mandate that all hospitals, clinics and labs remit all COVID-19 information to the White House and bypass both the CDC and the media? When reports began surfacing of COVID-19 being found in US wastewater samples from 2019, why were they subject to a gag order?

5. Why was the US the only significant country that refused to conduct any search for a patient zero?

6. Why did the CDC specifically forbid testing for the coronavirus, except in severe cases already in the ICU?

7. Why was Dr. Helen Chu given a formal and legal “cease and desist” order preventing her from testing the thousands of flu samples in Washington State from 2019?

8. Why were FEMA and Israel’s Mossad hijacking planeloads of face masks, respirators and other vital protective equipment from airports in China, and shipping them to Israel instead of the US where they were badly needed?[48] Why was FEMA confiscating these materials and equipment from suppliers and hospitals all across the US, and refusing information about their disposition?[48]

9. How was Pompeo able to notify NATO commanders and Israel’s IDF – in November – about a mysterious virus that would be circulating in China two or three months later?

10. Why did John Bolton eliminate the entire executive group responsible for pandemic response coordination in the US, eviscerating the nation’s infectious disease defense infrastructure, and eliminating 80% of the department that could have helped other nations detect and control the epidemics they later suffered?

A Few Comments on China

China has accumulated much experience in dealing with US bio-pathogens, seven or eight in the last two years alone. When the Chinese authorities learned that the new pathogen was SARS-2, they already knew the source, the intent, and the potential effects. That was why Xi Jinping said “This is a demon, and we cannot let this demon hide.” When they knew what it was, they knew what had to be done.

China has had virtually no domestic infections since Wuhan was unlocked. There have been occasional ones and twos in scattered locations, but all others have been imported by foreign nationals. Many want to say that China handled the virus badly, but look at the results. China’s economy is booming. GDP is well in positive territory, projected at 7.5% for 2021, foreign trade is up around 15% over 2019, with exports rising sharply and domestic consumption doing the same. Unemployment is not an issue in China; I speak to factories that have to offer a 30% premium to obtain sufficient workers. All the kindergartens, schools and universities, and restaurants are open, domestic train and plane travel have recovered to 95% or more of normal in most cases, and life is essentially back to normal. Life in Wuhan is as alive and active today as before the epidemic, with few remaining hints of its early suffering. China is developing vaccines against the virus, but I haven’t met anyone who wants one or who thinks they need it. We have no intrusive measures, no “contact-tracing” software, and no RFID chips implanted in the backs of our necks. We still wear face masks on the subway and our temperature is taken as we enter travel venues like airports and train stations, so vigilance is still there, but without effect on anyone’s daily life.

American politicians and the major US media still claim that China badly understated its numbers and that the country really had 50 million infections and 5 million dead. If this were true, that makes the country’s recovery even more dramatic, doesn’t it?

Epilogue

I would like to end this essay on a note of cheer, but no encouragement exists for such a sentiment. From the earliest days, when it became apparent this virus would spread, I researched daily the progress of infections and deaths for every country and all indications are that we are still very far from the end. There are almost no nations that appear to be tailing off and almost all major countries are still increasing, the US most notably but it isn’t alone. Worse, whenever a nation does taper off, it is hit harder. China was one case, with the release in Beijing’s Xinfadi Market and then in Xinjiang, but most every other nation has received the same treatment. Most economies, certainly the West, are in free-fall with the end not yet in sight. In the contrived financial crisis of 2007 – the one the FED pretended to end in 2009 but that never actually ended – the US saw about a full half of its middle class descend into the lower class. I wrote then that they would never recover because that was only the first step of a deliberate process, and I believe subsequent events have vindicated my position. Before this crisis ends, another full half of the remaining American middle class will disappear, and this will now never be recoverable. Americans need to believe their leaders who tell them life will never return to ‘normal’. It will not.

For COVID-19, I am 100% convinced that some part of the American government, perhaps acting independently on behalf of the Deep State, created and deliberately released the coronavirus upon the world. With everything I know, the alternative of a natural outbreak is almost an impossibility. There is still new information escaping confinement and I am hopeful we will find sufficient evidence to justify an international criminal tribunal to unearth all the facts and perhaps undo some of the damage. Those responsible will escape, as always.

Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 28 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English-language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’.

End Notes

(1) The 1918 influenza pandemic that we now call the ‘Spanish Flu’ had three waves, but I am ignoring this example because (a) it appears unique, (b) the mass movement of troops during the war contributed to and greatly affected the spread and, (c) there are disturbing reports with credible documentation that this deadly pandemic may not have been a natural disaster but the result of human tinkering, an experimental bacterial meningitis vaccine cultured by the Rockefeller Institute and tested at Fort Riley which is where the pandemic began. To tell the truth, the mere fact that Reuters did a “fact-check” on this topic and declared the claim false (a), is enough to make anyone damned suspicious since Reuters have the same credibility in these matters as do the NYT and WSJ. I don’t want to dwell on this here, but suffice to say it doesn’t qualify as a template for multiple waves of an infection. You can read more here, if you’re interested. (b) (c) (d)

(a) False claim: the 1918 influenza pandemic was caused by a vaccine; https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-vaccines-caused-1918-influe-idUSKBN21J6X2

(b) https://freepress.org/article/did-vaccine-experiment-us-soldiers-cause-%E2%80%9Cspanish-flu%E2%80%9D

(c) https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/03/no_author/did-a-vaccine-experiment-on-u-s-soldiers-cause-the-spanish-flu/

(d) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2126288/pdf/449.pdf

(2) China had its own ‘second wave’ in the outbreak at the Xinfadi Market in Beijing. I wrote an article on this, (e) providing much of the background detail, but let me cover a few points here. Xinfadi is the largest fruit and vegetable market in Asia, covering millions of square feet and with thousands of shops. The authorities discovered that the entire market “from head to foot” had been infected with what I am calling “COVID-20” to differentiate it from the initial outbreak in Wuhan. The reason is that this was an entirely new version of the virus (Type A) that had not been in China before, a much more virulent strain (at least to ethnic Chinese) and one which, had it escaped confinement, would have created a humanitarian disaster of enormous proportion. Fortunately, the authorities had not at all relaxed their vigilance and discovered the infections almost immediately, shutting down the market, locking down the neighborhood, tracing all the contacts, and killing it dead within two weeks and with only a handful of infections. Pompeo must have been livid.

(e) https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/china-reseeded-with-covid-20/

China also had a ‘third wave’, a spike of COVID-19 cases in Xinjiang that were similar or the same variety introduced into Beijing. (f) But once again, the Chinese government was unquestionably expecting further attempts to infect the nation, Xinjiang almost certainly being a favored location. Thus, the medical authorities never relaxed their vigilance so the cases were caught quickly and the new virus stamped out within two or three weeks after only a few dozen cases. Pompeo must have been livid.

(f) https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1195811.shtml

References

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dsepd/ss1978/lesson1/section11.html

[2] https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/world/experts-want-to-know-why-coronavirus-hasnt-killed-more-russians/ar-BB142pz3

[3] https://www.rt.com/usa/488690-western-media-russia-coronavirus-numbers/

[4] https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/11/27/why-covid-19-granted-the-u-s-most-favored-nation-status/

[5] https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/covid-19-two-major-waves-of-global-infection-towards-global-contamination/

[6] https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/part-2-a-paradigm-shift-covid-19-needs-a-criminal-investigation/

[7] https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/covid-19-targeting-italy-and-south-korea-the-chain-of-transmission-of-infection/

[8] https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/china-reseeded-with-covid-20/

[9] https://www.news.com.au/world/coronavirus/global/italy-sewage-study-suggests-covid19-was-there-in-december-2019/news-story/2fd865f7b12a33698f3e9ab2f15a35e3

[10] https://sputniknews.com/europe/202006191079667103-scientists-find-traces-of-sars-cov-2-in-italian-wastewater-predating-2019-wuhan-outbreak/

[11] https://www.chinadailyhk.com/article/152038#Italy-traces-virus-back-to-December-2019-study-finds

[12] http://en.people.cn/n3/2020/1211/c90000-9798189.html

[13] https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-timing/coronavirus-emerged-in-italy-earlier-than-thought-italian-study-shows-idINKBN27V0KH

[14] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/coronavirus-italy-anitbodies-covid-study-b1723243.html

[15] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-science-idUSKBN23X2HQ

[16] https://www.rt.com/news/506796-coronavirus-italy-blood-september/

[17] https://www.leparisien.fr/societe/covid-19-comment-des-chercheurs-ont-retrouve-des-traces-de-la-maladie-quatre-mois-apres-04-05-2020-8310726.php

[18] https://www.leparisien.fr/societe/patient-infecte-par-le-coronavirus-en-decembre-comme-des-coups-de-couteau-en-plein-thorax-05-05-2020-8311272.php

[19] https://www.msn.com/en-sg/news/world/coronavirus-outbreak-in-france-did-not-come-directly-from-china-gene-tracing-scientists-say/ar-BB13kun3

[20] https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-05-01/Data-shows-Canada-s-early-COVID-19-cases-came-from-the-U-S-not-China-Q8jSdpazo4/index.html

[21] https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1192389.shtml

[22] https://newsaf.cgtn.com/news/2020-04-25/Coronavirus-came-to-New-York-from-Europe-not-China-Governor-PXHsqNUTHG/index.html

[23] http://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/ct-nw-nyt-new-york-coronavirus-europe-genomes-20200409-iti55bz5crbatn2xo5a56sdzda-story.html

[24] http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-10/11/c_139431301.htm

[25]https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202004/30/WS5eaa39a6a310a8b241152e71.html

[26] https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-03-22/PM-Morrison-80-percent-Australia-cases-are-imported-mostly-from-U-S–P41uG3CfWU/index.html

[27] https://www.denverpost.com/2020/03/13/iceland-coronavirus-traced-denver/

[28]https://icelandmonitor.mbl.is/news/news/2020/03/13/three_covid_19_cases_in_iceland_traced_to_denver/

[29] https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-05-05/U-S-Belleville-mayor-claims-that-he-had-coronavirus-in-November-2019-Qfq40LrHlC/index.html

[30] https://www.ft.com/content/aba67162-9129-41b9-b82b-d61a890e6589

[31] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-05-13/scientist-suggests-coronavirus-originated-outside-of-wuhan

[32] https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-11-28/Novel-coronavirus-not-from-Wuhan-says-top-German-virologist-VMzm7Cj6ZW/index.html

[33] https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1185291.shtml

[34] https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-11-10/Expert-Spotting-COVID-19-first-doesn-t-make-China-origin-of-virus-VjaqEE3Mre/index.html

[35] https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/part-2-a-paradigm-shift-covid-19-needs-a-criminal-investigation/

[36] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/17/business/pandemic-warning-tomas-philipson/index.html

[37] https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-alerted-israel-nato-to-disease-outbreak-in-china-in-november-report/

[38] https://www.gazzetta.it/Sport-Vari/06-05-2020/coronavirus-mondiali-militari-wuhan-ottobre-tagliariol-370755837301.shtml

[39] https://lecourrierdesstrateges.fr/2020/05/19/covid19-laffaire-des-jeux-mondiaux-militaires-de-wuhan/

[40] https://www.rtl.fr/actu/bien-etre/coronavirus-les-bagages-des-athletes-des-jeux-militaires-wuhan-ont-transite-a-creil-7800496768

[41] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8291755/Did-European-athletes-catch-coronavirus-competing-World-Military-Games-Wuhan-OCTOBER.html

[42] https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/french-army-returned-wuhan-military-21988912

[43] https://www.defense.gouv.fr/terre/actu-terre/jeux-mondiaux-militaire-d-ete-de-wuhan

[44] https://www.lematin.ch/story/des-athletes-infectes-a-wuhan-en-octobre-deja-990586772177

[45] https://prospect.org/coronavirus/did-the-military-world-games-spread-covid-19/

[46] https://www.c-span.org/video/?471201-1/defense-secretary-esper-general-milley-coronavirus-news-conference

[47] https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/a-cautionary-tale-about-the-who/

[48] https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/covid-19-fema-and-mossad-stealing-from-peter-to-pay-paul/

Creator of Messenger RNA Vaccine

Issam AHMED / AFP
Hungarian-born scientist Katalin Kariko’s obsession with researching a substance called mRNA to fight disease once cost her a faculty position at a prestigious US university, which dismissed the idea as a dead end.

Now, her pioneering work — which paved the way for the Pfizer and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines — could be what saves the world from a 100-year pandemic.

“This is just kind of unbelievable,” she told AFP in a video call from her home in Philadelphia, adding she was unused to the attention after toiling for years in obscurity.

It shows why “it’s important science should be supported on many levels.”

Kariko, 65, spent much of the 1990s writing grant applications to fund her investigations into “messenger ribonucleic acid” — genetic molecules that tell cells what proteins to make, essential to keeping our bodies alive and healthy.

She believed mRNA held the key to treating diseases where having more of the right kind of protein can help — like repairing the brain after a stroke.

But the University of Pennsylvania, where Kariko was on track for a professorship, decided to pull the plug after the grant rejections piled up.

“I was up for promotion, and then they just demoted me and expected that I would walk out the door,” she said.

Kariko didn’t yet have a green card and needed a job to renew her visa. She also knew she wouldn’t be able to put her daughter through college without the hefty staff discount.

She decided to persist as a lower-rung researcher, scraping by on a meager salary.

It was a low point in her life and career, but “I just thought…you know, the (lab) bench is here, I just have to do better experiments,” she said.

The experience shaped her philosophy for dealing with adversity in every aspect of life.

“Think through and then at the end of it, you have to say ‘What can I do?’

“Because then you don’t waste your life.”

The determination runs in the family — her daughter Susan Francia did go to Penn, where she earned a Master’s degree, and won gold medals with the US Olympic rowing team in 2008 and 2012.

Twin breakthroughs

Inside the body, mRNA delivers to cells the instructions stored in DNA, the molecules that carry all our genetic code.

By the late 1980s, much of the scientific community was focused on using DNA to deliver gene therapy, but Kariko believed that mRNA was also promising since most diseases are not hereditary and don’t need solutions that permanently alter our genetics.

First though, she had to overcome a major problem: in animal experiments, synthetic mRNA was causing a massive inflammatory response as the immune system sensed an invader and rushed to fight it.

Kariko, together with her main collaborator Drew Weissman, discovered that one of the four building blocks of the synthetic mRNA was at fault — and they could overcome the problem by swapping it out with a modified version.

They published a paper on the breakthrough in 2005. Then, in 2015, they found a new way to deliver mRNA into mice, using a fatty coating called “lipid nanoparticles” that prevent the mRNA from degrading, and help place it inside the right part of cells.

Both these innovations were key to the Covid-19 vaccines developed by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, where Kariko is now a senior vice president, as well as the shots produced by Moderna.

Both work by giving human cells the instructions to make a surface protein of the coronavirus, which simulates an infection and trains the immune system for when it encounters the real virus.

New treatments

The mRNA quickly degrades and the instructions it gives the body aren’t permanent, making the technology an ideal platform for a variety of applications, said Kariko.

These could range from new vaccines for influenza, faster to develop and more effective than the current generation, to new disease treatments.

For example, AstraZeneca is currently working on an mRNA treatment for heart failure patients, which delivers signaling proteins that stimulate the production of new blood vessels.

Though she does not want to make too much of it, as a foreign-born woman in a male-dominated field, she occasionally felt under-estimated — saying people would approach after lectures and ask “Who’s your supervisor?”

“They were always thinking, ‘That woman with the accent, there must be somebody behind her who is smarter or something,’” she said.

Now, should everything go well with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, it is not hard to imagine the Nobel Prize committee rewarding Kariko and fellow mRNA researchers.

That would be bittersweet for Kariko, whose late mother would call her every year after the announcements to ask why she hadn’t been chosen.

“‘I never in my life get (federal) grants, I am nobody, not even faculty’” she would laugh. To which her mother would reply: “But you work so hard!”

Year Zero

Authored by CJ Hopkins via The Consent Factory,

2020 was GloboCap Year Zero. The year when the global capitalist ruling classes did away with the illusion of democracy and reminded everyone who is actually in charge, and exactly what happens when anyone challenges them.

In the relatively short span of the last ten months, societies throughout the world have been transformed beyond recognition. Constitutional rights have been suspended. Protest has been banned. Dissent is being censored. Government officials are issuing edicts restricting the most basic aspects of our lives … where we can go, when we can go there, how long we are allowed to spend there, how many friends we are allowed to meet there, whether and when we can spend time with our families, what we are allowed to say to each other, who we can have sex with, where we have to stand, how we are allowed to eat and drink, etc. The list goes on and on.

The authorities have assumed control of the most intimate aspects of our daily lives. We are being managed like inmates in a prison, told when to eat, sleep, exercise, granted privileges for good behavior, punished for the slightest infractions of an ever-changing set of arbitrary rules, forced to wear identical, demeaning uniforms (albeit only on our faces), and otherwise relentlessly bullied, abused, and humiliated to keep us compliant.

None of which is accidental, or has anything to do with any actual virus, or any other type of public health threat.

Yes, before some of you go ballistic, I do believe there is an actual virus, which a number of people have actually died from, or which at least has contributed to their deaths … butthere is absolutely no evidence whatsoever of any authentic public health threat that remotely justifies the totalitarian emergency measures we are being subjected to or the damage that is being done to society. Whatever you believe about the so-called “pandemic,” it really is as simple as that. Even if one accepts the official “science,” you do not transform the entire planet into a pathologized-totalitarian nightmare in response to a health threat of this nature.

The notion is quite literally insane.

GloboCap is not insane, however. They know exactly what they are doing … which is teaching us a lesson, a lesson about power. A lesson about who has it and who doesn’t. For students of history it’s a familiar lesson, a standard in the repertoire of empires, not to mention the repertoire of penal institutions.

The name of the lesson is “Look What We Can Do to You Any Time We Want.” The point of the lesson is self-explanatory. The USA taught the world this lesson when it nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki. GloboCap (and the US military) taught it again when they invaded Iraq and destabilized the entire Greater Middle East. It is regularly taught in penitentiaries when the prisoners start to get a little too unruly and remember that they outnumber the guards. That’s where the “lockdown” concept originated. It isn’t medical terminology. It is penal institution terminology.

As we have been experiencing throughout 2020, the global capitalist ruling classes have no qualms about teaching us this lesson. It’s just that they would rather not to have to unless it’s absolutely necessary. They would prefer that we believe we are living in “democracies,” governed by the “rule of law,” where everyone is “free,” and so on. It’s much more efficient and much less dangerous than having to repeatedly remind us that they can take away our “democratic rights” in a heartbeat, unleash armed goon squads to enforce their edicts, and otherwise control us with sheer brute force.

People who have spent time in prison, or who have lived in openly totalitarian societies, are familiar with being ruled by brute force. Most Westerners are not, so it has come as a shock. The majority of them still can’t process it. They cannot see what is staring them in the face. They cannot see it because they can’t afford to see it. If they did, it would completely short-circuit their brains. They would suffer massive psychotic breakdowns, and become entirely unable to function, so their psyches will not allow them to see it.

Others, who see it, can’t quite accept the simplicity of it (i.e., the lesson being taught), so they are proposing assorted complicated theories about what it is and who is behind it … the Great Reset, China, the Illuminati, Transhumanism, Satanism, Communism, whatever. Some of these theories are at least partially accurate. Others are utter bull-goose lunacy.

They all obscure the basic point of the lesson.

The point of the lesson is that GloboCap – the entire global-capitalist system acting as a single global entity – can, virtually any time it wants, suspend the Simulation of Democracy, and crack down on us with despotic force. It can (a) declare a “global pandemic” or some other type of “global emergency,” (b) cancel our so-called “rights,” (c) have the corporate media bombard us with lies and propaganda for months, (d) have the Internet companies censor any and all forms of dissent and evidence challenging said propaganda, (e) implement all kinds of new intrusive “safety” and “security” measures, including but not limited to the physical violation of our bodies … and so on. I think you get the picture. (The violation of our bodies is important, which is why they love “cavity searches” in prison, and why the torture-happy troops at Abu Ghraib were obsessed with sexually violating their victims.)

And the “pandemic” is only one part of the lesson. The other part is being forced to watch (or permitted to watch, depending on your perspective) as GloboCap makes an example of Trump, as they made examples of Corbyn and Sanders, as they made examples of Saddam and Gaddafi, and other “uncooperative” foreign leaders, as they will make an example of any political figurehead that challenges their power. It does not matter to GloboCap that such political figureheads pose no real threat. The people who rally around them do. Nor does it make the slightest difference whether these figureheads or the folks who support them identify as “left” or “right.” GloboCap could not possibly care less. The figureheads are just the teaching materials in the lesson that they are teaching us.

And now, here we are, at the end of the lesson … not the end of the War on Populism, just the end of this critical Trumpian part of it. Once the usurper has been driven out of office, the War on Populism will be folded back into the War on Terror, or the War on Extremism, or whatever GloboCap decides to call it … the name hardly matters. It is all the same war.

Whatever they decide to call it, this is GloboCap Year Zero. It is time for reeducation, my friends. It is time for cultural revolution. No, not communist cultural revolution … global capitalist cultural revolution. It is time to flush the aberration of the last four years down the memory hole, and implement global “New Normal” Gleichschaltung, to make sure that this never happens again.

Oh, yes, things are about to get “normal.” Extremely “normal.” Suffocatingly “normal.” Unimaginably oppressively “normal.” And I’m not just talking about the “Coronavirus measures.” This has been in the works for the last four years.

Remember, back in 2016, when everyone was so concerned about “normality,” and how Trump was “not normal,” and must never be “normalized?” Well, here we are. This is it. This is the part where GloboCap restores “normality,” a “new normality,” a pathologized-totalitarian “normality,” a “normality” which tolerates no dissent and demands complete ideological conformity.

From now on, when the GloboCap Intelligence Community and their mouthpieces in the corporate media tell you something happened, that thing will have happened, exactly as they say it happened, regardless of whether it actually happened, and anyone who says it didn’t will be labeled an “extremist,” a “conspiracy theorist,” a “denier,” or some other meaningless epithet. Such un-persons will be dealt with ruthlessly. They will be censored, deplatformed, demonetized, decertified, rendered unemployable, banned from traveling, socially ostracized, hospitalized, imprisoned, or otherwise erased from “normal” society.

You will do what you are told. You will not ask questions. You will believe whatever they tell you to believe. You will believe it, not because it makes any sense, but simply because you have been ordered to believe it. They aren’t trying to trick or deceive anybody. They know their lies don’t make any sense. And they know that you know they don’t make any sense. They want you to know it. That is the point. They want you to know they are lying to you, manipulating you, openly mocking you, and that they can say and do anything they want to you, and you will go along with it, no matter how insane.

If they order you to take a vaccine, you will not ask what is in the vaccine, or start whining about the “potential side effects.” You will shut up and take the vaccine.

If they tell you to put a mask on your kid, you will put a mask on your kid. You will not go digging up Danish studies proving the pointlessness of putting masks on kids.

If they tell you the Russians rigged the election, then the Russians rigged the election.

And, if, four years later, they turn around and tell you that rigging an election is impossible, then rigging an election is impossible.

It isn’t an invitation to debate. It is a GloboCap-verified fact-checked fact.

You will stand (or kneel) in your designated, color-coded, social-distancing box and repeat this verified fact-checked fact, over and over, like a parrot, or they will discover some new mutant variant of virus and put you back in “lockdown.” They will do this until you get your mind right, or you can live the rest of your life on Zoom, or tweeting content that no one but the Internet censors will ever see into the digital void in your pajamas. The choice is yours … it’s is all up to you!

Or … I don’t know, this is just a crazy idea, you could turn off the corporate media, do a little research on your own, grow a backbone and some guts, and join the rest of us “dangerous extremists” who are trying to fight back against the New Normal. Yes, it will cost you, and we probably won’t win, but you won’t have to torture your kids on airplanes, and you don’t even have to “deny” the virus!

That’s it … my last column of 2020. Happy totalitarian holidays!

Election Fraud? Yes – The oligarchy WANTS a Biden presidency but a Republican-controlled Senate

By Kevin Barrett, Veterans Today Editor

Excerpt.

So…Was the election rigged against Trump? Possibly. The oligarchy that rules the West and routinely rigs US elections may have used Trump up, squeezed him dry, and decided that he is bad for business and has to go.

There may be some evidence behind Trump’s claim that he was robbed. But it is hard to discern whatever actual evidence may be out there amidst the sea of nonsensical claims and hysterical exaggerations. (Hugo Chavez’s voting machine company stole the election?!)

There is much better evidence showing that massive wholesale voting machine fraud favored Republicans, especially in tight Senate races.

Theodore de Macedo Soares writes (supporting Jonathan Simon’s analysis and this Sunday’s Stolen Election Seminar):

“Exit polls and pre-election polls, projected the Democratic Party to gain control of the Senate on election day 2020. The computerized vote counts has the Republican Party with a two seat advantage. Like the 2020 and 2016 presidential elections and the 2016 U.S. Senate elections the 2020 US Senate races show almost all discrepancies, between the exit polls and the unverified computer counts, favored the Republican Party candidate. Most discrepancies were large and beyond the margin of error for the exit poll. See tables below.

“Edison Research conducted exit polls on the U.S. Senate races in 16 states. In this election, exit polls projected the Democratic Party to gain control of the Senate with 51 seats to 49 for the Republican Party. The pre-election polls projected 52 seats for the Democratic party and 48 seats for the Republicans. As Georgia’s two Senate contest did not result in any candidate achieving 50% of the vote, the runoff elections on January 5, 2021 will determine the final Senate seat apportionment between the two main political parties. The computerized vote counts, however, currently show the Republican Party with 50 seats to 48 for the Democratic Party.

“As previously noted, the wholesale one-way variances between the exit and pre-election polls with the computerized vote counts, all favoring the Republican candidate, are a near statistical impossibility. As the source of the problem is not due to random variations its origin must be systemic. Either exit polls and pre-election polls are improperly, election after election, conducted or the computerized vote counts corrupt.”

Trump can’t believe he underperformed relative to Republican Senate candidates. I don’t blame him. The obvious explanation is that the voting machines were rigged for Republican Senate candidates but not so much for Trump.

The oligarchy WANTS a Biden presidency but a Republican-controlled Senate. That way the pesky left wing of the Democratic Party won’t be able to redistribute much if any of their ill-gotten wealth, including their $7 trillion COVID heist.

But not enough of us will figure this out, because the oligarchs and their brainwashed hordes of Trump kool-aid-drinking zombie dupes have succeeded in making election fraud allegations in general look too confusing and stupid to be worth checking out.