Category Archives: Scamdemic – Corona Virus

For those who may be disappointed by some of our postings, those postings that discuss a potential worsening of the Covid scamdemic, one word of clarification. We do not in the least suggest that such a possibility could be a natural development of a virus out of control. Rather, such posts are meant to warn the public of the real possibility of an escalation of the scamdemic by the same means that made it possible in the first place. The same agenda that triggered the phase one of the plandemic continues against the public, only at a more heightened level.

UK: Not Covid but Murder by Midazolam

by Ben Bartee via Armageddon Prose
Excerpt

Australian politician releases evidence of potential government murder of tens of thousands of hospitalized elderly to pad COVID death numbers

National director of the United Australia Party, Craig Kelly, has some shocking, if not surprising, allegations against the NHS in Great Britain.

Via Slay News:

A bombshell new report has sent shockwaves around the world after an investigation into the high numbers of “Covid deaths” during the pandemic uncovered evidence that tens of thousands of elderly people were actually murdered to boost the mortality rates.

The data produced for the report indicated that people were being euthanized using a fatal injection of Midazolam.

The cause of their deaths was then listed as ‘Covid,’ indicating that the virus was killing far more elderly people than it was.

The explosive data from the report was made public by Australian politician Craig Kelly, the national director of the United Australia Party.

The report obtained official UK government data on death rates and causes.

The data appears to show that vast numbers of elderly were murdered with an injection of the end-of-life drug Midazolam.

According to Kelly, the patients were euthanized in order to boost ‘Covid deaths’ and ramp up public fear to garner support for lockdowns and vaccines.

While alerting the public about the data, Kelly declared that it exposes ‘the crime of the century.’”

From the pre-print report, “Excess Deaths in the United Kingdom: Midazolam and Euthanasia in the COVID-19 Pandemic”:

“Macro-data during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom (UK) are shown to have significant data anomalies and inconsistencies with existing explanations. This paper shows that the UK spike in deaths, wrongly attributed to COVID-19 in April 2020, was not due to SARS-CoV-2 virus, which was largely absent, but was due to the widespread use of Midazolam injections which were statistically very highly correlated (coefficient over 90 percent) with excess deaths in all regions of England during 2020…

The widespread and persistent use of Midazolam in UK suggests a possible policy of systemic euthanasia.”

Midazolam, a benzodiazepine (the same class of drugs that includes Xanax and Valium), is often used to sedate hospitalized patients in the ICU. It’s also — and anyone who has extensive firsthand experience with benzos like me can attest to this — extremely hazardous, especially when it’s mainlined directly into the bloodstream, as it alleged to have happened at scale, as standard operating procedure for hospitalized COVID patient, in British hospitals throughout 2020 and 2021.

Via MedicinePlus:

Midazolam injection may cause serious or life-threatening breathing problems such as shallow, slowed, or temporarily stopped breathing that may lead to permanent brain injury or death. You should only receive this medication in a hospital or doctor’s office that has the equipment that is needed to monitor your heart and lungs and to provide life-saving medical treatment quickly if your breathing slows or stops. Your doctor or nurse will watch you closely after you receive this medication to make sure that you are breathing properly. Tell your doctor if you have a severe infection or if you have or have ever had any lung, airway, or breathing problems or heart disease. Tell your doctor and pharmacist if you are taking any of the following medications: antidepressants; barbiturates such as secobarbital (Seconal); droperidol (Inapsine); medications for anxiety, mental illness, or seizures; opiate medications for cough such as codeine (in Triacin-C, in Tuzistra XR) or hydrocodone (in Anexsia, in Norco, in Zyfrel) or for pain such as codeine, fentanyl (Actiq, Duragesic, Subsys, others), hydromorphone (Dilaudid, Exalgo), meperidine (Demerol), methadone (Dolophine, Methadose), morphine (Astramorph, Duramorph PF, Kadian), oxycodone (in Oxycet, in Percocet, in Roxicet, others), and tramadol (Conzip, Ultram, in Ultracet); sedatives; sleeping pills; or tranquilizers.”

That’s a lot of fatal contraindications for an older Western population statistically likely to be taking a lot of pharmaceutical drugs.

I’m no doctor — mere “conspiracy theorist,” “domestic terrorist” journalist I am, and proudly so — but one need not have attended medical school to suss out that benzodiazepines are very rarely well-conceived medical interventions, least of all intravenously for an elderly patient already struggling to breathe on a ventilator.

If, indeed, the accusations are true, midazolam would have been a perfect method of execution, as it’s frequently used in such settings (so as not to arouse suspicion) and attributing the cause of death to the midazolam rather than COVID is a difficult task — especially in the context of willful ignorance. In international relations terms, this dilemma is termed “fog of war,” a reference to the difficulty of assigning proper attribution to the source of an attack in real time under battlefield conditions.

Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

Up to 25 Percent Fatalities Caused by Pfizer Jab

Costa Rican Group in Court to Ban Covid Vaccines

via Exposé


On 13 September, a Costa Rican Appellate judge ordered an oral hearing in the case of Interest of Justice vs State of Costa Rica.  In a case originally filed a year ago, Interest of Justice is seeking an injunction to have the covid-19 injections removed from the market in Costa Rica and then through a series of steps, globally. 

Unfortunately, the oral hearing, which was held on 9 November, did not go Interest of Justice’s way and the judge did not grant the precautionary measure or temporary injunction to stop the covid injections.  However, Interest of Justice doesn’t see this as the end but rather the beginning of the legal action they plan to take.

Interest of Justice (“IoJ”) is a private international law and civics institute headquartered in Costa Rica. Through a series of dedicated and strategic actions including Freedom of Information Act requests and court filings, IoJ intends to reform or abolish “The Health Monopoly” as well as hold them all responsible for cessation and reparations for the many, many covid-19 international wrongdoings. “The Health Monopoly” is the UN, WHO, FDA, CDC, EMA, and strict regulatory bodies that corruptly defraud member states and humanity in public health guidance and procurement international investment agreements.

The oral hearing was set for 9 November and, in the words of IoJ, was to determine whether “Costa Rica and their superiors in WHO and FDA lied about safe and effective publicly, whilst knowing it is experimental, known to be harmful and death is common, which maliciously denies the entire international community its right to informed consent and is a Nuremberg Violation which the court must prohibit in the public interest.”

Before the hearing took place, IoJ noted that the hearing would address the following:

Although IoJ had lined up Dr. Mike Yeadon and Dr. Ana Maria Mihalcea as expert witnesses, they were not called to testify.

At the end of the hearing, the judge did not grant the precautionary measure, a temporary injunction to remove the covid injections from the market as hoped.  IoJ reported that their request was denied due to technicalities. This unsuccessful action is far from the end of the story according to IoJ, in fact, it is merely the beginning:  

After the oral hearing, the IoJ team members Dustin and Xylie spoke with Dr. Joseph Sansone to explain how they got to where they are now and what happens next.

The biggest technical problem with the oral hearing, Xylie told Sansone, was that the original paperwork filed in October 2022 focused on mandating covid “vaccines” for children.  At the time this was relevant.  However, by the time of the oral hearing, the mandates for children had been dropped.  IoJ had adjusted its paperwork to include everybody and thought the judge would expand IoJ’s original filings to apply to all ages, however, the judge did not.

IoJ hopes to file their “main case” in the next few months with the Appellate Court.

Joseph Sansone: Interest of Justice Team Interview on Mind Matters and Everything Else, 10 November 2023 (40 mins)

Featured image: Costa Rica receives first batch of covid-19 vaccines through COVAX Mechanism, UNICEF, 7 April 2021

People Were Killed By Ventilators Not COVID-19 Virus

Ventilator-Associated Pneumonia and COVID-19

In the study, investigators found that nearly half of patients with COVID-19 developed a secondary ventilator-associated bacterial pneumonia, which they referred to as “ventilator-associated pneumonia,” or VAP.

“Recent data suggest that secondary pneumonia is present in up to 40% and pneumonia or diffuse alveolar damage is present in over 90% of autopsy specimens obtained from patients with acute SARS-CoV-2 infection,” the authors of the study wrote, referring to the scientific name for the virus that causes COVID-19.

“Consistent with these observations, we and others found high rates of ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) in patients with SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia requiring mechanical ventilation, suggesting that bacterial superinfections such as VAP may contribute to mortality in patients with COVID-19,” they continued.

These findings prompt an alternative hypothesis that a relatively low mortality rate directly attributable to primary SARS-CoV-2 infection is offset by a greater risk of death attributable to unresolving VAP,” they continued.

Out of 601 mechanically ventilated patients enrolled in the study, 585 had some form of severe pneumonia and respiratory failure. Of the ones with severe pneumonia and respiratory failure, 190 had COVID-19, 50 had pneumonia related to other viruses, 252 had bacterial pneumonia, and 93 had respiratory failure unrelated to pneumonia.

The numbers indicate that perhaps 59 percent of the cases were respiratory issues other than COVID-19 or other viruses (43 percent bacterial pneumonia, 16 percent respiratory failure unrelated to pneumonia).

The senior author of the study, Dr. Benjamin Singer, a pulmonary and critical care physician, told the Northwestern Medicine Feinberg School of Medicine news center that “our data suggested that the mortality related to the [COVID-19] virus itself is relatively low, but other things that happen during the ICU stay, like secondary bacterial pneumonia, offset that.”

[ . . . ] here is the causal chain,” Dr. Stupak said of the claim that around 80 percent of ventilated COVID-19 patients died.

He explained that it’s not the ventilators themselves that killed the patients but “the application of sedation for intubation,” which he said reduces the excursion of the chest wall muscles and causes parts of the lung to fill with fluid “appearing to be pneumonia itself.”

Dr. Stupak said that there was a push to sedate and intubate COVID-19 patients due to a “panic” among hospital staff that feared COVID-19 contagion and so rushed to put patients on ventilators to protect themselves from infection.

Mass sedation of the elderly was the primary weapon, ventilator and ICU mismanagement only a secondary factor that is a result of the first,” Dr. Stupak said in a follow-up post.

Watch: Musk Tells Rogan People Were Killed By Ventilators Not COVID-19 Virus
zerohedge.com

Cancers Appearing In Ways Never Before Seen After COVID Vaccinations

Authored by Efthymis Oraiopoulos and Jan Jekielek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

There is evidence that cancers are occurring in excess after people receive COVID-19 vaccinations, according to Dr. Harvey Risch.

Dr. Harvey Risch, professor emeritus of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, in New York on July 7, 2022. (Bao Qiu/The Epoch Times)

Dr. Risch is professor emeritus of epidemiology in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at the Yale School of Public Health and Yale School of Medicine. His research has focused extensively on the causes of cancer as well as prevention and early diagnosis.

In an interview for EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders,” Dr. Risch said patients must now wait months, not weeks, to get an appointment at an oncology clinic in New York.

There is difficulty in observing whether a vaccine can cause cancer, because cancer usually takes time to develop, Dr. Risch said. It can take anywhere from two years to 30 years, depending on the different types of cancer, from leukemia to colon cancer.

What clinicians have been seeing,” said Dr. Risch, “is very strange things: For example, 25-year-olds with colon cancer, who don’t have family histories of the disease—that’s basically impossible along the known paradigm for how colon cancer works—and other long-latency cancers that they’re seeing in very young people.”

He said this is not how cancer normally develops.

“There has to be some initiating stimulus to why this happens,” he said.

Fighting Cancer

Dr. Risch said that in his opinion, cancer is something a healthy human body can fight and disable, as the non-normal cancerous cells are gobbled up when detected in a body with a functional immune system. If the immune system is compromised, however, it cannot cope with the task of neutralizing cancerous cells, and cancerous cells are left to multiply and grow, leading to symptoms of cancer.

“That’s the mechanism I think is most likely here,” Dr. Risch said. “We know that the COVID vaccines have done various degrees of damage to the immune system in a fraction of people who have taken them.”

That damage could translate to getting COVID more often, getting other infectious diseases, or getting cancer.

Another example Dr. Risch gave was breast cancer, which normally, if there is a remanifestation after surgical removal, the remanifestation occurs after two decades. However, vaccinated women are now seen to remanifest breast cancers in much shorter periods of time.

“Those are the initial signals that we’ve been seeing, and because these cancers have been occurring to people who were too young to get them, basically, compared to the normal way it works, they’ve been designated as turbo cancers,” Dr. Risch said.

“Some of these cancers are so aggressive that between the time that they’re first seen and when they come back for treatment after a few weeks, they’ve grown dramatically compared to what oncologists would have expected for the way cancer normally progresses,” he added.

“Be attuned to your body,” Dr. Risch recommended, for noticing any new signals the body might give.

Adverse Events After Vaccination

Dr. Risch also talked about the aspect of official medical agencies not recognizing someone as being vaccinated inside the first two weeks of vaccination. This happens, he said, because the medical agencies say that the effects of the vaccine need two weeks to start manifesting. Adverse effects occurring a few days after vaccinations were officially counted as health conditions manifesting in unvaccinated people, he said.

However, serious adverse events after receiving the vaccine have occurred within the first four days, Dr. Risch said. He said three-quarters of adverse effects are being recorded as happening to unvaccinated people.

The decision makers who were in charge during the pandemic “threw out the principles of public health six days into the pandemic and did the opposite of everything that we knew should be done for respiratory viruses,” he said.

One example was the denial of effective early treatment and unnecessary vaccinations, which show a “colossal failure of public health through this period,” he said.

Dr. Risch said that a lot of people are now less likely to be “propagandized” regarding COVID, and that news reports about a new variant that is going to take over the world in the next month are “propaganda to sell the next batch of vaccines coming out in a few weeks.”

People are fed up with this and it’s going to be a lot more pushback,” he said.

Risks to Society

Dr. Risch said that while the individual risk of an adverse reaction to the vaccine is relatively low, once that risk manifests itself at a greater scale, when millions of people have received the vaccine, the result is that hundreds of thousands of people are left with injuries and serious adverse events that are often worse than the virus itself.

Dr. Risch’s opinion is that nobody should get vaccinated with an mRNA vaccine, as the new variants are mild and not life threatening. He has heard of a few hospitalizations that lasted for some days, but as most people had COVID in the past, they have some immunity to these new variants as well.

There is no reason for people to be vaccinated now, to any degree,” he said.

He said COVID has become an illness similar to the flu in its degree of severity, and that propaganda to scare people is being pushed by the government on behalf of pharmaceutical companies to sell more vaccines.

“We live in social contact with each other and therefore spread low-level infections. This is part of human life that we take for granted and we try to treat it the best we can,” he said. “That’s how we should be managing this.”

Washington Wants to Create Biological Crises When Needed – Moscow

The US bioweapon warmongering pursued.

The US wants to harness the power of dangerous biological agents and manage artificial epidemics by conducting illegal research in biolabs across the globe, the Russian embassy in Washington has said.

In a statement on Thursday, the embassy recalled that Moscow has repeatedly sounded the alarm about what it called “gross violations by the United States of its obligations” under the Biological Weapons Convention which bans this type of armament, and has been signed by virtually all countries in the world, including Russia and the US.

However, “Washington ignores the claims, justifying itself by some humanitarian component of its programs,” the embassy said, claiming that such excuses have nothing to do with reality.

In a bid to enhance the pathogenic capabilities of infections, the US “brazenly and with complete impunity scatters its illegal laboratories all over the world”under the guise of “epidemiological monitoring,” with many of those facilities located in Russia’s neighborhood, the statement charged.

The task is obvious – to be able to create biological crises when needed. To form artificial centers of infections. In other words, to manage epidemics, putting them at the service of [Washington’s] own interests.

The embassy specifically highlighted American biological activities in Ukraine, where it said Washington “has drawn dozens of country’s state institutions and private companies into its projects,” with civilians and military personnel alike being used as donors of biomaterial and as test subjects.

“There is no doubt that such actions require appropriate legal assessment, including by competent international institutions,” it added.

Russia has repeatedly raised concerns about US biological research, with Moscow’s Defense Ministry suggesting earlier this week that Washington was working with highly contagious and dangerous pathogens to prepare for a potential new pandemic. Last autumn, Russia floated a resolution in the UN calling for a probe into the activities of American laboratories in Ukraine, which was vetoed by the US and its NATO allies Britain and France.

Last March, responding to the accusations of biological weapons development in Ukraine, the White House dismissed Moscow’s claims as “classic Russian propaganda.” However, a few months later, the Pentagon admitted that it had been supporting 46 Ukrainian laboratories, while insisting that all its joint programs “focused on improving public health and agricultural safety.”

via RT

“We Will Bring You Down” – 7 MEP to WHO

German MEP Christine Anderson last week shredded the World Health Organization, calling it a group of “globalitarian misanthropists” who she – and a group of seven other MEPs, have vowed to dismantle in order to oppose the WHO supplanting democratically elected governments.

In the front row: Christine Anderson (Germany) and Cristian Vasile Terhes (Romania).

“An unelected body like who is controlled and run by multi-billionaires should never be allowed to act in place of a democratically elected government,” she said during the Citizen’s Initiative conference in Brussels.

Anderson says she’ll expose and name any individuals, including government officials and parliamentarians, who support the WHO ‘power grab’ and disrespect democracy.

“It is you [WHO] that is the small fringe minority,” she continued. “You are the ones who do not have the right to dictate to the people what they want and what they don’t want.”

“So take it from me … take it from the millions and millions of people around the world. We will bring you down,and we will not tire until we have done just that. So brace yourselves. We are here, and the fight is on. So let’s have the fight.”

Watch:

WHO, EU Launch New Global Vaccine Passport Initiative

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. via Childrens Health Defense

The World Health Organization (WHO) and the European Commission — the executive branch of the European Union (EU) — on Monday launched a “landmark digital health partnership” marking the beginning of the WHO Global Digital Health Certification Network (GDHCN) to promote a global interoperable digital vaccine passport. [category scamdemic – corona virus]
Beginning this month, the WHO will adopt the EU’s system of digital COVID-19certification “to establish a global system that will help facilitate global mobility and protect citizens across the world from on-going and future health threats, including pandemics,” according to Monday’s announcements by the WHO and the European Commission.

The WHO and European Commission claim the GDHCN initiative, which has been in the works since 2021, “will develop a wide range of digital products to deliver better health for all.”
The organizations said the WHO will not collect individuals’ personal data via these digital passports — stating that such data collection “would continue to be the exclusive domain of governments.”
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus lauded the new agreement:
“Building on the EU’s highly successful digital certification network, WHO aims to offer all WHO Member States access to an open-source digital health tool, which is based on the principles of equity, innovation, transparency and data protection and privacy.
“New digital health products in development aim to help people everywhere receive quality health services quickly and more effectively.”
However, experts who spoke with The Defender said the ramifications of such a system for human liberty and freedom of movement raised concerns.
Independent journalist James Roguski told The Defender the WHO is not waiting for a successful conclusion of these negotiations in order to implement initiatives such as a global digital vaccine passport. He said:
“The announcement by the WHO and the European Commission regarding the launch of their digital health partnership was hardly a surprise. Over a month ago, the WHO quietly published that they were working on ‘operationalizing’ the very things that were being ‘negotiated.’
“This is just one example that clearly shows that the super-secret ‘negotiations’ regarding the International Health Regulations (IHR) are a charade.”
Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D., author of “Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom,” told The Defender that, under the guise of preserving freedom, a digital passport system “means restraints on movement and living for the unvaccinated and forced vaccination to participate in life.”
The announcement of the WHO-European Commission collaboration came just days after the conclusion of the WHO’s annual World Health Assembly (WHA).
While the pandemic treaty and IHR amendments were not finalized at this year’s meeting, high-level WHO officials warned of the risk of a future pandemic and spread of a deadly “Disease X,” and expressed the need to “restrict personal liberties” during a future health emergency.
The EU has been a strong proponent of digital vaccine passports, first launched for its member states in late 2020 — concurrent with the introduction of the COVID-19 vaccines — under the name “Green Pass.” The EU’s experience with the digital passes is noted in Monday’s announcement, which states:
“One of the key elements in the European Union’s work against the COVID-19 pandemic has been digital COVID-19 certificates. To facilitate free movement within its borders, the EU swiftly established interoperable COVID-19 certificates.
“Based on open-source technologies and standards it allowed also for the connection of non-EU countries that issue certificates … becoming the most widely used solution around the world.”
Roguski told The Defender the EU also was among the strongest proponents of vaccine passports during ongoing negotiations for the WHO’s “pandemic treaty” and amendments to the IHR.
“They really want the global digital health certificate,” Roguski told The Defender in March. “Primarily, that’s coming from the European Union.”
‘Pandemic passports a death sentence for millions’
According to Roguski, the EU, during negotiations for the IHR amendments, put forth proposals that seek to “‘normalize’ the implementation of a global digital health certificate.”
The Czech Republic called for Passenger Locator Forms “containing information concerning traveller’s destination,” preferably in digital form, for the purpose of contact tracing.
They also proposed that the WHO’s Health Assembly “may adopt, in cooperation with the International Civil Aviation Organization [ICAO] … and other relevant organisations, the requirements that documents in digital or paper form shall fulfill with regard to interoperability of information technology platforms, technical requirements of health documents, as well as safeguards to reduce the risk of abuse and falsification.”
The WHO lists ICAO as an officially recognized “stakeholder.”
The Czech Republic and the EU proposed documentation not just for vaccination, but “test certificates and recovery certificates” in cases “where a vaccine or prophylaxis has not yet been made available for a disease in respect of which a public health emergency of international concern has been declared.”
Plans for the WHO’s GDHCN have been in the works since at least August 2021, when the WHO released a document titled “Digital documentation of COVID-19 certificates: vaccination status: technical specifications and implementation guidance, 27 August 2021.”
The GDHCN framework made its way onto the agenda of this year’s WHA, which stated:
“The Secretariat has developed SMART (Standards-based, Machine-readable, Adaptive, Requirements-based, and Testable) Guidelines on the digital documentation of COVID-19 certificates, comprising recommendations on the data, digital functionality, ethics, and trust architecture needed to ensure the interoperability of immunization and health records globally.”
The WHO also announced the successful completion of a “technical feasibility study for establishing a federated global trust network, which tested the ability to interoperate the health content and trust networks across existing regional efforts.”
EU officials have frequently praised themselves over the launch of the bloc’s “Green Pass,” touting how individuals’ privacy would be protected on the app. The introduction of the “Green Pass” was accompanied by statements by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen calling for a “discussion” on mandatory vaccinations in the EU.
One of the EU’s stated priorities as part of its 2019-2024 five-year plan is to create a “Digital Identity for all Europeans.” Namely, each EU citizen and resident would have access to a “personal digital wallet,” which would include national ID cards, birth and medical certificates, and drivers’ licenses.
These proposals and initiatives appear to be closely aligned with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and in particular, Target 16.9, which calls for the provision of a digital legal identity for all, including newborns, by 2030.
Tedros said the SDGs are “our north star,” while addressing this year’s WHA.
Rectenwald called “pandemic passports” a “death sentence for millions.” He told The Defender:
“Despite the studies demonstrating that vaccines to curb pandemics have been deadly and useless, the WHO is doubling down on vaccine mandates.
“Pandemic passports equal a death sentence for millions and the abrogation of rights for the non-compliant. The WHO should be stopped before it completes the construction of a global totalitarian system.”

Looking Back On The Sadism Of The COVID-19 Shaming Campaign

Authored by Matt Taibbi and Matt Orfalea via Racket News,

There’s a scene in videographer Matt Orfalea’s arresting new “Nobody is Safe!” compilation in which Jeff Van Gundy — one of the sharpest basketball announcers alive, and one of my favorites to watch — leans back and says, “I don’t even understand what means, ‘I’m doing my own research.’”

The whole quote, from a preseason Heat-Rockets game Van Gundy called in October of 2021:

What does that look like, you doing your own research? Are you doing studies yourself? Are you in a lab on a nightly basis? What are you doing? I don’t understand what that means, ‘I’m doing my own research.’
How about this: we’ve got really smart people… who’ve already done the research.

The subtext of Van Gundy’s quote was one of the many stages of the Covid-19 messaging campaign, a collective roar against “asking questions” or “doing your own research.” Just a few weeks earlier, Brian Stelter on CNN hosted a panel about “four little words that are hurting America’s pandemic response.” He showed evil always-villain Sean Hannity repeatedly uttering the “seemingly innocent” phrase, “Do your own research.” He then rolled tape of comic Trevor Noah saying, “Nobody who’s saying that is getting in a lab and doing tests.”

In hindsight, who knows, that might have been where Van Gundy got the idea. Make no mistake, however, there was and is an active campaign against people who do their “own research.” This was a mostly unexplored theme in the #TwitterFiles material, as we did repeatedly see anti-disinformation “experts” identifying people who didn’t quickly accept official messaging without question as already, in a way, spreaders of mis- or disinformation.

We touched on this a little in a report about the Stanford Virality Project, which advised that “just asking questions” was a tactic “commonly used by spreaders of misinformation.” We also saw it in an Aspen Institute report on misinformation, which recommended “strikes” against people they called “savvy spreaders,” i.e. those who used phrases like “just asking questions,” evading censors by “couching” misinformation as mere “uncertainty”:

I got the shot and never advised people not to get vaccinated. I couldn’t imagine an area where I was less qualified to give advice. But this is the point: the same people Orf shows picking up torches and railing with bloodcurdling certainty against “the unvaccinated” are nearly all people who knew as little as me, and whose beliefs about the vaccine were at best secondhand.

You’re disgusted at those who “do their own research”? What do you think journalism is? None of us do lab experiments. The job is always an imperfect effort to figure out which sources are most trustworthy, and because even the most credentialed often screw up, we always need to leave room for consensus proving wrong.

In this case one didn’t need a microbiology degree to recognize something about Covid-19 messaging was off. From flip-flops about masks (an “evolving situation,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said) to unwillingness to be frank in discussing natural immunity or risks to children, even casual news-readers saw confusion in the ranks of senior officials. Later, a series of reversals on key questions — first about whether the vaccine prevented contraction, then about whether it prevented transmission — left even people who wanted to follow official advice unsure of what to do.

I hope Matt’s video survives as a warning. There is still a lot of investigation to be done, in particular about the origins of the pandemic — certain segments of the national audience may still be in for a shock or two there — but as Matt shows, we already see a cautionary tale about faulty information being used to gin up real hatred.

Subscribers to Racket News can read the rest here…