WHO – Strategic Culture Foundation https://www.strategic-culture.org Strategic Culture Foundation provides a platform for exclusive analysis, research and policy comment on Eurasian and global affairs. We are covering political, economic, social and security issues worldwide. Sun, 10 Apr 2022 20:53:47 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.16 Public Health or Private Wealth? How Digital Vaccine Passports Pave Way for Unprecedented Surveillance Capitalism https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/10/23/public-health-or-private-wealth-how-digital-vaccine-passports-pave-way-for-unprecedented-surveillance-capitalism/ Sat, 23 Oct 2021 19:27:52 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=759461 Public health or private wealth? How digital vaccine passports pave way for unprecedented surveillance capitalism

By Jeremy LOFFREDO, Max BLUMENTHAL

The titans of global capitalism are exploiting the Covid-19 crisis to institute social credit-style digital ID systems across the West.

The death by starvation of Etwariya Devi, a 67-year-old widow from the rural Indian state of Jharkhand, might have passed without notice had it not been part of a more widespread trend.

Like 1.3 billion of her fellow Indians, Devi had been pushed to enroll in a biometric digital ID system called Aadhaar in order to access public services, including her monthly allotment of 25kg of rice. When her fingerprint failed to register with the shoddy system, Devi was denied her food ration. Throughout the course of the following three months in 2017, she was repeatedly refused food until she succumbed to hunger, alone in her home.

Premani Kumar, a 64-year-old woman also from Jharkhand, met the same demise as Devi, dying of hunger and exhaustion the same year after the Aadhaar system transferred her pension payments to another person without her permission, while cutting off her monthly food rations.

A similarly cruel fate was reserved for Santoshi Kumari, an 11-year-old girl, also from Jharkhand, who reportedly died begging for rice after her family’s ration card was canceled because it had not been linked to their Aadhaar digital ID.

These three heart-rending casualties were among a spate of deaths in rural India in 2017 which came as a direct result of the Aadhaar digital ID system.

With over one billion Indians in its database, Aadhaar is the largest biometric digital ID program ever constructed. Besides serving as a portal to government services, it tracks users’ movements between cities, their employment status, and purchasing records. It is a de facto social credit system that serves as the key entry point for accessing services in India.

Having branded Aadhaar’s creator, fellow billionaire Nandan Nilekani, as a “hero,” initiatives backed by tech oligarch Bill Gates have long sought to bring the “Aadhaar approach to other countries.” With the onset of the Covid-19 crisis, Gates and other mavens of the digital ID industry have an unprecedented opportunity to introduce their programs into the wealthy countries of the Global North.

For those yearning for an end to pandemic-related restrictions, credential programs certifying their vaccination against Covid-19 have been marketed as the key to reopening the economy and restoring their personal freedom. But the implementation of immunity passports is also accelerating the establishment of a global digital identity infrastructure.

As the military surveillance firm and NATO contractor Thales recently put it, vaccine passports “are a precursor to digital ID wallets.”

And as the CEO of iProove, a biometric ID company and Homeland Security contractor, emphasized to Forbes, “The evolution of vaccine certificates will actually drive the whole field of digital ID in the future. So, therefore, this is not just about Covid, this is about something even bigger.”

For the national security state, digital immunity passports promise unprecedented control over populations wherever such systems are implemented. Ann Cavoukian, the former privacy commissioner of Ontario, Canada has described the vaccine passport system already active in her province as “a new, inescapable web of surveillance with geolocation data being tracked everywhere.”

For tech oligarchs such Bill Gates and neoliberal institutions such as the World Economic Forum, digital ID and digital currency systems have already enabled the extraction of unbelievable profits in the Global South, where hundreds of millions of people remain “unbanked” and therefore outside the sphere of electronic payments systems.

Now, with grassroots protest building against an exclusionary regime of vaccine passports, the captains of global capitalism are campaigning with more urgency than ever to bring digital ID to the West.

For these elite interests, the digitization of immunity passports represent a critical tool in a long-planned economic and political transformation.

“With no Covid Pass, my wife and I are banished from society”

Across the globe, the certification of vaccination against COVID-19 is already a requirement to participate in daily life.

In Indonesia, COVID-19 vaccines are mandatory, and those who refuse may face fines or be refused access to public services. In Greece, residents must present immunity to work in or enter bars, theaters, and other indoor public spaces.

France has similarly required residents to carry a health pass for access to all restaurants, bars, trains, and any venue accommodating more than 50 people, a decision that has stoked widespread protests throughout the country. The socialist French former presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon has blasted the new restrictions as “absurd, unfair and authoritarian.”

Italy has mandated its Green Pass for all workers, threatening them with termination from jobs and suspension of pay. Italy also requires the pass to use Italian public transit. Scenes of private security over-enforcement of the Green Pass and the exclusion of Italy’s elderly from vital services have already begun to go viral on social media.

Restrictions for Lithuanians who are not double vaccinated or unable to demonstrate recent prior infection from Covid-19 represent some of the harshest in the world. They are banned from restaurants, all non-essential stores, shopping centers, beauty services, libraries, banks or insurance agencies, universities, inpatient medical care, and train travel.

Gluboco Lietuva, a self-described “Lithuanian father” who has refused vaccination, stated on Twitter: “With no Covid Pass, my wife and I are banished from society. We have no income. Banned from most shopping. Can barely exist.”

Four out of ten Canadian provinces currently require citizens to show proof of vaccination against COVID-19 to enter indoor public venues like restaurants and theaters. All federal public servants and some other workers must be vaccinated to keep their jobs.

The government of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also requires all air travelers and interprovincial train travelers to be vaccinated. Canada’s Alberta province took the measures a step further this September when it announced that those who cannot prove full COVID vaccination will no longer be allowed to socialize indoors in groups of more than 12.

In Israel, meanwhile, only those who have received three doses can work or shop indoors and go to restaurants; citizens who received two shots over six months ago are now considered unvaccinated. This rule has consolidated what even the New York Times has deemed a “two-tier system for the vaccinated and unvaccinated … raising legal, moral and ethical questions.”

In the US, President Joe Biden is “moving forward with vaccination requirements wherever [he] can.” Biden, who declared that his “patience is wearing thin” with unvaccinated Americans, recently announced new federal requirements mandating that about 80 million Americans – including all those who work at companies with more than 100 employees – must either be vaccinated or get tested for COVID-19 weekly.

Biden has also mandated that those working at facilities which receive Medicare or Medicaid must show proof of immunity to keep their jobs. According to AP, President Biden is considering proof of immunity for interstate travel, a restriction his former public health advisor, Ezekiel Emanuel, has clamored for.

In the state of Colorado, the UCHealth hospital system has announced that it will not allow organ transplants to be performed on unvaccinated patients, prompting some to travel to Texas for life-saving procedures.

New York City offers a glimpse of the program in store for the rest of the country. The city’s “Key to NYC” requirement, which went into effect September 13, requires proof of vaccination to work at or attend indoor dining, indoor fitness, and entertainment venues like museums, stadiums, arcades, and theaters.

“If you want to participate in our society fully, you’ve got to get vaccinated,” Mayor De Blasio stated. “[New York City] is a miraculous place literally full of wonders … if you’re un-vaccinated, unfortunately, you will not be able to participate.”

COVID-related mandates could be permanent

While outlets like CNN have referred to vaccine passports as a “useful, temporary measure,” it is increasingly evident that the proof of immunity restrictions imposed on Western populations may not go away any time soon.

Australia’s New South Wales Ministry of Health Dr. Kerry Chant has stated that citizens “need to get used to being vaccinated with COVID vaccines for the future… it will be a regular cycle of vaccination and revaccination.”

Albert Bourla, CEO of the Pfizer corporation that has seen its stock skyrocket during the pandemic, remarked that the “most likely scenario” is coronavirus vaccine shots mandated on an annual basis.

As a February Nature headline read, “the coronavirus is here to stay.” Or, as Dr. Mike Ryan, Executive Director of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Health Emergency Program, put it: it is “very, very, unlikely” that COVID-19 will ever go away.

“Eradicating this virus right now from the world is a lot like trying to plan the construction of a stepping-stone pathway to the Moon,” said Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. “It’s unrealistic.”

“This is our life from now, in waves,” Israel’s Coronavirus Czar, Salman Zarka, acknowledged.

Already, Zarka has prepared plans to mandate a fourth dose for Israelis.

COVID mandates to be digitally enforced

While a state-mandated treadmill of boosters may seem unappealing to many, if not outright hellish, for others the nightmare presents the opportunity of a lifetime. As early as May 2020, only seven weeks after the pandemic was declared, US tech billionaire Bill Gates predicted that “eventually we will have some digital certificates to show who has recovered or been tested recently or when we have a vaccine who has received it.”

Now, over a year later, a growing number of local and national governments require some form of digital proof of vaccination or natural immunity against COVID-19.

Those who want to travel to Canada, for example, are required to download an app that verifies the vaccination status of incoming travelers. The government also plans to introduce a federal, Canada-wide digital vaccine passport in the coming months.

When the European Union (EU) opened up to foreign tourists this summer, it introduced a “Digital COVID Certificate” which granted entry to those vaccinated against COVID-19, those who have had a negative test, or those who recently recovered from an infection. Its proposed “Digital Green Certificate” has been branded as a means to facilitate safe free movement inside the EU during the pandemic.

The government of France is partnering with a biometric technology company called IDEMIA to “make it easier for its citizens to prove their identity and complete online transactions using a smartphone.” The new app will “enable French citizens to place their national electronic identification cards [introduced to France as a COVID-19 response in August 2021] …  on the back of their smartphones and have their identity instantly confirmed.” IDEMIA is also helping France certify travelers immunity data with their Health Travel Pass suite.

The US is still accepting paper vaccination records, and President Biden has insisted no national app is in the works. However, seven U.S. states (California, New York, Louisiana, Colorado, Illinois, New Jersey, and Hawaii) have already implemented apps certifying vaccination against COVID-19 and have various degrees of COVID-19 vaccine mandates in place.

ImmunaBand, a wearable wristband, whose company mission is “to bring the world a little closer in a time of the COVID-19 pandemic and for you to demonstrate to the world your vaccination status,” has also been approved by New York City as proof of vaccination.

“In typical American fashion, the US government is relegating the creation of digital vaccination certifications to the private sector,” stated the non-profit Data & Society.

Indeed, behind the push for digital vaccine passports is a coterie of supra-national neoliberal institutions guided by oligarchic tech industry donors.

Elite corporate interests behind digital COVID passports

Mega-corporations, international finance institutions, and billionaire-backed private foundations have played a vital role in lobbying for and implementing digital immunity passports.

The burgeoning global health passport system has been coordinated under the umbrella of the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO). However, this institution is so intertwined with wealthy private interests it can hardly be characterized as a “public” health body.

As former WHO director Margaret Chan told filmmaker Lilian Franck, “only 30 percent of my budget is predictable funds. The other 70 percent, I have to take a hat and go around the world to beg for money. And when they give us the money, [it] is highly linked to their preferences, what they like.”

Chief among those private funders is the second wealthiest man in the world, Bill Gates, and his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which happens to be the second largest donor to the WHO.

Bill Gates with World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom

The Gates Foundation recently helped fund a WHO paper providing “implementation guidance” for proof of vaccination certifications across the world. The authors crafted the paper alongside the Rockefeller Foundation and with guidance from several high-level representatives of the World Bank.
According to Foreign Affairs, “few policy initiatives or normative standards set by the WHO are announced before they have been casually, unofficially vetted by Gates Foundation staff.” Or, as other sources told Politico in 2017, “Gates’ priorities have become the WHO’s.”

Also at the forefront of the shift to digital credentials is the World Economic Forum (WEF). “The Forum is involved in the WHO task force to reflect on those [vaccine credential requirements] standards and think about how they would be used,” reads a May WEF article.

On paper, the WEF (also known as the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation) is an NGO and think tank “committed to improving the state of the world.” In reality, it is an international network of some of the wealthiest and most influential people on the planet. The Forum positions itself as the thought leader of global capitalism.

The organization is best known for its annual gathering of the global ruling class. Each year, hedge fund managers, bankers, CEOs, media representatives, and heads of state gather in Davos to “shape global, regional and industry agendas.” As Foreign Affairs put it, “the WEF has no formal authority, but it has become the major forum for elites to discuss policy ideas and priorities.”

In 2017, German economist and WEF founder Klaus Schwab introduced the concept of “The Fourth Industrial Revolution” with the title of the book he published that year. The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) denotes the current “technological revolution” that is changing the way people “live, work, and relate to one another,” and with implications “unlike anything humankind has experienced,” according to Schwab.

For him, the 4IR is the “merging of the physical, digital and biological worlds.” Schwab has even said that the 4IR will inevitably veer into trans-humanism, or human genome editing.

In January 2021, several WEF partners, including Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, and several other “heavyweights,” announced a partnership to launch the Vaccine Credential Initiative (VCI) to develop digital immunization authentication tools, according to Forbes.

Aiming to institute a single “SMART Health Card” for the world, the VCI intends for its SMART Health Cards to be recognized “across organizational and jurisdictional boundaries.”

In the US, some states are already deploying the SMART Health Cards developed by the VCI. These SMART Health Cards have laid the basis for a de-facto national standard for vaccine credentials.

“If enough states embrace the technology, it could become a de facto nationwide standard and relieve the Biden administration of having to lay out federal requirements for domestic purposes,” Politico noted.

The latest version of Apple’s iOS, iOS 15, even includes SMART Health Card support.

As of today, those who received a vaccine in California, Hawaii, Louisiana, New York, Virginia, or certain counties in Maryland can obtain a SMART Health Card from the state.

In most other states, a SMART Health Card is available to those who were vaccinated at one of more than 17,100 CVS, Walgreen’s, or Rite Aid pharmacy chains nationwide.

“More states, pharmacies, and health systems will begin issuing SMART Health Cards very soon,” promises the site of the Commons Project, one of the founders of the VCI initiative.

Commons Project CEO Paul Meyer happens to be a WEF “young leader.”

Commons Project CEO and World Economic Forum Young Leader Paul Meyer

In India, tech oligarchs use digital ID to force social credit on rural poor, spawning exclusion and even death

In 2015, The Gates Foundation provided seed money to a Yale School of Public Health project that would become known as Khushi Baby. Now a non-profit, Khushi Baby makes microchip-equipped necklaces for a child to wear at all times to track their vaccination status and establish continuous monitoring from their first immunizations through adulthood. The non-profit says it is now using data from over 35,000 villages in India to create algorithms that “predict health outcomes for mothers and children.”

From the website of KhushiBaby.org

In 2016, IDEMIA, the security firm now working with the French government on vaccination and identity verification, designed the microchip-equipped necklaces. The necklaces have been used to track health data for 13 million people in India since the beginning of the pandemic.

These programs have been marketed by corporate consultants as essential tools for improving equality and inclusion in the Global South. “Digital identification is key to inclusive growth,” claimed McKinsey, the global consulting firm, in 2019.

“Something like 1 billion people could be more financially included and participative,” said Mike Kubzansky, managing partner of Ebay founder and media mogul Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Network during a WEF panel exploring how “Digital Identification Provides a Significant Opportunity for Value Creation.”

Like Gates, Omidyar is heavily invested in the advancement of digital ID and currency systems through his Omidyar Network, which collaborates with the World Economic Forum on the Good ID initiative.

A closer look at the push for “inclusion” by corporate behemoths reveals their altruistic language as little more than public relations cover for raw profit motives, resulting in marginalization and even death for many of those roped into their digital ID systems.

Besides serving as the staging ground for the Khushi Baby venture, India has become a laboratory for digital tracking and identity systems. With support from Western capitalist outfits like the Gates Foundation and the World Bank, the country has become the site of the world’s largest digital ID database, known as Aadhaar.

The Aadhaar system is named for a 12 digit number that serves as a proof of identity and address, among other markers, anywhere in India. To date, a whopping 1.3 billion Indians have been enrolled in the system, making it the largest biometric ID database ever constructed. It contains iris scans and fingerprints from both hands of each user. The technology for this system was provided by none other than the French security firm IDEMIA.

Nandan Nilekani, creator of the Aadhar digital ID system, with Bill Gates

Aadhaar was implemented in 2014, the year that the free marketeering, tech-centric Narendra Modi entered the prime minister’s office. Its creator, tech billionaire Nandan Nilekani, has been branded “the Bill Gates of Bangalore,” celebrated by globalization enthusiasts like Thomas Friedman, and hailed by none other than Gates as an altruistic “hero.” Gates’ foundation has collaborated with Nilekani through its “Co-impact” project alongside billionaire eBay co-founder Jeffrey Skoll’s Skoll Foundation.

“Aadhaar is a huge asset for India,” effused Gates in a 2019 interview with the Indian network Times Now. “The fact that you can make digital payments and open a bank account so easily, India is a leader in that. There are huge benefits in being able to get digital government money to the beneficiary.”

But behind the neoliberal spin, Nilekani’s Aadhar digital ID system has wreaked havoc on the lives of India’s most vulnerable and stigmatized populations.

In the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand, a wave of deaths took place in 2017 when impoverished citizens were cut off from government-subsidized food rations by the Aadhaar system. In several cases, aging widows were denied rice for several months because the system rejected their fingerprint scans.

Around the same time, three brothers died of starvation after they failed to properly register with Aadhaar and were subsequently denied rations for six months. The same cruel fate was visited on the Kumari family, which was unable to obtain an electronic Aadhaar ID, lost its ration card, and saw its 11-year-old daughter, Santoshi, die of hunger.

“Many people in Jharkhand have been victims of similar deprivation of food entitlements during the last few months,” reported India’s Scroll. “The main reason is that Aadhaar-based biometric authentication is now compulsory in about 80% of ration shops in the state.”

According to Scroll, a random sample of 18 villages where biometric authentication was compulsory found that a staggering 37% of cardholders were unable to buy their food rations.

Besides making Aadhaar the key to obtaining government services, the Modi government has integrated data collected by Aadhar to establish a “360-degree database” that “automatically track[s] when a citizen moves between cities, changes jobs, or buys a new property,” according to the Huffington Post.

When Covid-19 first reached India in early 2020, Nilekani proposed employing Aadhar as the basis for an anti-Covid vaccination and tracking program. “We must ensure that everybody gets a digital certificate with the date of vaccination, name of the vaccine and through which vendor and at what location,” he declared in 2020.

Unsurprisingly, Nilekani’s system of mass surveillance has proven much more effective at harvesting data than it has been at protecting it. In 2018, the Indian Tribune newspaper was able to purchase the personal information of nearly every Aadhaar user through anonymous sellers over WhatsApp. The process took only 10 minutes and cost about $6 USD, the paper reported.

The system’s serial breaches of privacy even prompted some HIV-positive Indians to drop out of antiretroviral treatment programs that require the Aadhaar card. Though the Aadhaar is said to be voluntary, individuals with HIV have complained to Indian media that they were pressured into enrolling into the ID program, and had been threatened with the loss of medical services.

US privacy advocates have pointed to digital national identity programs like Aadhaar as gargantuan surveillance tools that establish the basis for a social credit system.

Addressing the US House Committee on Financial Services in July 2021, Elizabeth Renieris of Notre-Dame’s Technology Ethics Lab warned, “The Aadhaar number in India is able to track your activity across all facets of your life, from employment to healthcare, to school, to pretty much everything you do. You can’t retain autonomy over specific domains of your life. You can’t separate your personal and professional reputation. You can’t have this kind of contextualized personal identity. I think that’s really problematic.”

“We must avoid building digital identity systems and infrastructure in a way that further expands and entrenches the surveillance state, as does the national identity system in India,” Renieris continued.

But it is the all-encompassing social credit aspect of Aadhaar that has made Gates so fond of the system.

Addressing India’s top policy makers in 2016, the world’s second wealthiest man declared, “Over time, all of these transactions create a footprint and so when you go in for credit, the ability to access the history that you’ve paid your utility bills on time, that you’ve saved up money for your children’s education, all of those things in your digital trail, accessed in an appropriate way allow the credit market to [score the risk properly].“

ID4D expands digital ID to track more human activity than ever

In 2016, the Gates Foundation ponied up funding for a World Bank project called the Identity for Development (ID4D) Initiative for the declared purpose of bringing the “Aadhaar approach to other countries.”

To date, the World Bank has invested $1.2 billion into the ID4D initiative, with the official aim of creating “identification systems using 21st Century solutions.”

Among the four financial partners that established the initiative were two familiar Big Tech-backed operations: The Gates Foundation and The Omidyar Network, along with Australian Aid and UK Aid. According to the World Bank, the Gates Foundation’s “catalytic contributions” in particular transformed the project from an idea to a functional World Bank initiative.

Aadhaar’s Nilekani currently sits on the ID4D Initiative advisory council.

According to the World Bank, ID4D “promote[s] the use of digital ID systems for free movement and service delivery, by creating linkages across systems that allow users to authenticate themselves for key services such as receiving social transfer payments, completing financial transactions, and crossing borders.”

Promotional materials frame this venture as a humanitarian cause centered on helping poor women and making sure ”unbanked” individuals (those without a bank account) such as refugees and migrants are included in the modern economy.

Yet a closer look at the initiative’s backers and their agenda reveals a longstanding goal of the captains of global capitalism: creating a digitally centered identity system that enables powerful public and private institutions to track more human activity than ever.

“Digital ID … can be leveraged by government and commercial platforms to facilitate a variety of digital transactions, including digital payments,” explains the World Bank.

In an August 2021 white paper, the World Bank called on African nations to achieve a “single digital market” and loosen regulations on digital infrastructure to lower the risk for investors. The paper revealed the real intentions behind the World Bank’s push for a closure to the digital divide: opening up the continent for foreign investment. “Government regulation,” the paper declared, “needs to smoothen the path to digital transformation in the region.”

“By accelerating Africa’s digital transformation, businesses can reap the benefits,” the World Economic Forum (WEF) proclaimed in a 2020 article titled, “Africa has the potential to boost global growth.”

“There will […] be lucrative opportunities in Algeria, Angola, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Sudan, and Tunisia … a good bet for companies seeking to enter new markets,” the WEF advised.

As the World Economic Forum recently wrote, “COVID-19 has highlighted the advantages of creating a digital economy.” Yet the advantages the group speaks of will likely fall on the side of its stakeholders.

Partners of the World Economic Forum’s “Platform for a Good Digital Identity ” include the biometric ID firm Accenture, Amazon, Barclays Bank, Deutsche Bank, HSBC Bank, Mastercard, the biometric technology firm Simprints, and the credit giant, Visa.

The initiative’s stakeholders represent the key beneficiaries of a biometric ID system imposed on the Global South, with Western multinational financial firms functioning as the gateway for its inhabitants to participate in the global economy.

The WEF has also made clear that the “end goal” of its agenda is expanding the model it established in India until every person in the world holds a unique digital ID.

In an article titled “Digital ID is the Catalyst of Our Digital Future,” Mohit Joshi, a WEF ‘young leader,’ argued that “governments should use [Aadhaar] to streamline the delivery of services and payments, and massively increase financial inclusion.”

In a separate paper, however, the WEF conceded that the new digital system will not necessarily provide users with the liberation they have been promised: “Fourth Industrial Revolution digital identity will determine what products, services, and information we can access – or, conversely, what is closed off to us,” the WEF stated.

ID2020 leverages vaccinations to push “beyond dystopian” digital ID’s and payments

Back in 2016, Bill Gates’ Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), Microsoft, Accenture and the Rockefeller Foundation established a new consortium to provide digital ID certificates to infants when they receive their routine immunizations. They called it ID2020, incidentally naming it for the year that a global pandemic would be declared.

ID2020 says it is “dedicated to spearheading a global digital biometric identity standard,” and claims Digital IDs will lead to “financial independence.”

Partners in the ID2020 initiative include the credit card giant Mastercard and Simprints, a biometric technology firm supported by the US Agency for International Development, a traditional front organization for US intelligence.

From video of USAID’s May 2018 introduction of biometric data at refugee settlements in Uganda

Mastercard’s ‘community pass’ project aims to capture the biometrics of 30 million individuals in remote parts of Africa over the next three years and issue them a Mastercard Community Pass biometric smart card, which will in turn provide Africans with a digital biometric identity and a digital bank account.

ID2020 is currently operating in Bangladesh, where it administers biometric enrollment and digital ID to infants when they receive routine immunizations. GAVI CEO Seth Berkely has said he plans to expand the program across the underdeveloped world, working with mega-corporations such as Facebook and Mastercard to tie vaccination status to a biometric identification system.

“Eighty-nine percent of children and adolescents without identification live in countries supported by Gavi,” Berkley stated. “We are enthusiastic about the potential impact of this program not just in Bangladesh, but as something we can replicate across Gavi-eligible countries.”

With the WHO’s declaration of a global pandemic in March 2020, an unprecedented opportunity arrived for the forces advancing digital IDs. As Andrew Bud, the CEO of biometric tech company and Department of Homeland Security contractor iProov, enthused, “The evolution of vaccine certificates will actually drive the whole field of digital id in the future. So, therefore, this is not just about Covid, this is about something even bigger.”

By the following year, ID2020 and the USAID-partnered biometric ID firm, Simprints, had leveraged funding from Gates Foundation to publish an article entitled, “COVID-19 Vaccine Delivery: An Opportunity to Set Up Systems for the Future.” The authors argued that COVID-19 vaccines in the Global South could be used as a “potential lever” to deliver digital biometric IDs.

They went on to admit that such digital biometric systems would stay in place long after the COVID-19 pandemic was over, and would be exploited for an array of purposes after the rollout: “Biometrics have the advantage of being agnostic to use case,” the co-authors wrote, “meaning they can connect different systems during or even after rollout.”

From Simprints.com

Elizabeth Renieris of the Notre Dame-IBM Tech Ethics Lab resigned from a technical advisory role on ID2020, citing “risks to civil liberties” after the initiative teamed up with tech giants to design COVID immunity passports backed up by experimental blockchain technology.

Renieris went on to denounce the burgeoning ID system as a civil liberties nightmare: “The prospect of severely curtailing the fundamental rights and freedoms of individuals through ill-thought-out plans for ‘immunity passports’ or similar certificates, particularly ones that would leverage premature standards and a highly experimental and potentially rights-infringing technology like blockchain, is beyond dystopian.”

Digital ID mavens prey on the global poor

While linking a digital biometric ID to individuals’ finances is almost certain to exclude masses of people, and has even killed some by cutting impoverished citizens off from government services, predatory financial and credit institutions see the technology as the perfect means for capitalizing on untapped and developing markets.

A September 2021 report by BankservAfrica, the largest automated digital payments clearinghouse in Africa, which is headed by former executives at MasterCard, VISA, and IBM, urged South Africa to adopt a biometric digital ID system.

The report proclaimed, “The time has come for consumers, investors, and the private and public sectors to work collectively to achieve the common goal of enabling a robust, secure, and trusted digital identity for South Africa.”

BankServAfrica’s digital payment platform is currently being tested in Namibia, Zimbabwe, and Tanzania with financial support from the World Bank, USAID, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has shown just how critical a digital ID is,” BankServAfrica’s Chief Business Officer insisted.

BankservAfrica’s report argued that a robust biometric digital ID system will help South Africa achieve “simpler FICA [credit score] processes” and “a fair, transparent, competitive, sustainable, responsible, efficient and effective consumer credit market.”

But behind the lofty neoliberal rhetoric deployed by the financial industry lies a sordid record of profiteering and privacy invasion on a massive scale.

In 2007, Vodafone and Safaricom launched mPesa, a system that allows users to digitally deposit, withdraw, transfer, and pay with money. The project was “able to make credit and growth capital available to millions of people who have never had access to credit before,” according to Areiel Wolanow, who led the team that designed and built the credit scoring engine for mPesa in Kenya.

But a study by economist Alan Gibson revealed that it was the financial sector – not the rural population of the Global South – that truly benefited from mPesa. Meanwhile, the living conditions of the system’s mostly impoverished participants failed to improve at all:

“What is indisputable is that the supply-side of the finance market has benefited greatly from the last ten years. Banks’ sales have increased by 2.5 times and profits by 3.5 times, with profit margins also increased; the inclusion years have undoubtedly been good years for the banks. This apparent contrast between conspicuous supply-side success and a still-poor economy … raises questions on the role of the finance sector. In particular, it begs questions on who/what it is there to serve, and on the incentives that drive behavior.”

In a further indictment of supposedly “inclusive” digital payment schemes, the Review of African Political Economy found that “the bulk of this [mPesa] value does not go to the poor. Rather, such fintech is very clearly designed to hoover up value and deposit it into the hands of a narrow global digital-financial elite that are the main forces behind the fintech revolution.”

Despite the evidence of widening inequality, Bill Gates – whose foundation spends hundreds of billions of dollars promoting digital financial services for the poor – gushed praise for mPesa.

“M-Pesa is an excellent program,” Gates effused on Twitter in one of several tweets hailing the digital payments system.

Gates linked to an article promoting the program by NPR, the US public broadcaster which has received upwards of $17.5 million from Gates while producing hundreds of articles praising the tech billionaire and his initiatives around the world.

Back in the US, meanwhile, Gates’ ID2020 campaign has collaborated with the forces advancing a system that registers Americans’ vaccination status with the same corporation that calculates their financial credit score.

The US credit industry and digital immunity ID outfits collaborate on “huge opportunities for the commercial sector”

In Illinois, residents are currently required to verify that they have received the COVID-19 vaccine through an online portal called Vax Verify which will work in concert with Chicago’s soon-to-be-implemented vaccine passport.

To register their proof of vaccination, Illinois residents must turn to Experian, the world’s leading credit score service.

Already, the Vax Verify portal is facing backlash for providing inaccurate vaccine status information. It is also the subject of serious security concerns given Experian’s record of breaches that leaked the personal data of millions of citizens from Brazil to South Africa.

Further, the online portal requires that any resident with a freeze on their credit must unfreeze it with Experian before registering a vaccination.

“Using Experian is definitely one of the worst [vaccine passports] I’ve seen yet,” Electronic Frontier Foundation Director of Engineering Alexis Hancock commented to Yahoo News.

After Illinois became the first US state to forge a formal relationship between vaccine certifications and Experian, Illinois Congressman and financial industry darling Bill Foster introduced legislation that would foist a digital biometric ID onto the entire American population.

The Improving Digital Identity Act of 2021, introduced by Foster in July, calls for the public sector, and particularly the Department of Homeland Security, to work with the private sector to develop a new biometric digital ID infrastructure for the United States.

In November 2020, the Gates-sponsored ID2020 provided an online forum for Foster to promote his bill. During the event, the congressman advocated for a “trusted biometric digital immunity certificate system” while explaining that his bill would obtain biometrics from every citizen so private corporations could then “leverage” it to generate enormous profits.

Rep. Bill Foster headlined the Gates-backed ID2020’s November 2020 webinar

“Once the government has [taken] those fairly serious biometrics from you – there will be huge opportunities for the commercial sector to leverage that,” he said. “And to try to get this all started, I introduced the ‘Improving Digital ID Act.’”

Banking and credit card companies are among the many “commercial sectors” that Foster’s bill will benefit through digital biometric IDs. The bill plainly states that the corporate ID system will give “under-banked and unbanked individuals better access to digital financial services,” cloaking the opening of markets for finance giants in the same woke language that ID4D and ID2020 employ.

But as tech oligarchs and their partners in the financial and national security industries leverage the coronavirus epidemic to institute a lucrative apparatus of digital monitoring, dissent is erupting in the countries where vaccine passports have begun to exclude millions.

Protests erupt against vaccine passports and “people who have very little to do with parliament”

In New York City – ground zero of the US vaccination passport roll-out – where over 80 percent of all Covid social distancing arrests were conducted against Black residents in 2020, simmering tensions boiled over when three Black diners initiated a brawl with staff at Carmine’s, an Upper West Side restaurant that prevented them from dining without their vaccination proof.

The incident spurred condemnation from a local Black Lives Matter chapter, which accused city authorities of exploiting mask mandates and vaccine passports to exclude and incarcerate Black residents. “What we are seeing here is the NYPD and restaurants using vaccination proof as a reason to discriminate against Black people,” declared BLM activist Kimberly Bernard.

France has been the site of some of the world’s largest protests against the vaccine passport system imposed under the watch of former banker and President Emanuel Macron. On August 14, over 210,000 people took to the streets in over 200 protests across France against the nascent biomedical security regime.

Puncturing the corporate media’s pigeonholing of the demonstrators as far-right shock troops, France’s Le Monde described them as “alone, coupled up, here with their family or friends, of all ages, white, Black, employed, retired, some vaccinated, others who refuse to get the shot.”

French journalist Pauline Bock noted that in her country, “the only trade that’s exempt from mandatory vaccination — the police — will be the one to make sure everyone else obeys. The policy is ripe for authoritarian misuse.”

In Italy, meanwhile, Italian Prime Minister and former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi has mandated that all employees of both public and private businesses produce a Green Pass proving vaccination in order to enter their place of work.

The Green Pass vaccine passport system has already excluded unvaccinated individuals from restaurants, gyms, as well as trains, buses and domestic flights across the country. Official government numbers show the pass has failed to increase vaccine uptake.

With the expansion of the Green Pass to places of work, Italians have risen up in some of the largest protests the world has seen against the nascent biosecurity regime.

On October 9, hundreds of thousands of protesters poured into Italian streets from Rome to Trento to voice their rejection of Draghi’s policy. In Rome, where police repressed peaceful demonstrators with batons and riot shields, a group of about 20 far-right hooligans attacked a local union office while police stood by. Interior Minister Carlo Sibilia exploited the incident to claim that “neo-fascist groups hide behind the so-called anti-vaxxers.”

The secretary of a faction of Italy’s Communist Party, Marco Rizzo, who has condemned the passport system as “a discriminatory, divisive tool that pits one against the other,” cast suspicion on the incident.

In an October 10 statement, Rizzo warned that the incident of “fascist violence” the day before played directly into the hands of the neoliberal government, and questioned whether a new “strategy of tension” was in play. The communist leader was referring to the Italian state’s covert weaponization of far-right militants during the 1970’s “years of lead” to foment violence and neutralize Marxist organizations.

The demonstrations have now spread to the port city of Trieste, where union dock workers have refused to offload goods until the Green Pass is revoked. On October 18, Italian police attempted to break the workers’ strike with water cannons, tear gas, and heavy repression.

Two days before anti-Green Pass protests exploded across Italy, the renowned philosopher Giorgio Agamben appeared before the Italian Senate’s Constitutional Affairs Commission to issue a dramatic statement of opposition to the Green Pass.

Agamben is most famous for his concept of Homo Sacer, or bare life, in which an individual is stripped of rights and reduced to their biological essence in an extra-legal regime justified by war or other emergencies. When Italian authorities declared the first lockdown in March 2020, the philosopher applied the theory to his own country’s heavy-handed restrictions.

“The defining feature…of this great transformation that they are attempting to impose is that the mechanism which renders it formally possible is not a new body of laws, but a state of exception – in other words, not an affirmation of, but the suspension of constitutional guarantees,” the philosopher explained in the foreword to his collection of 2020 writings on Covid-19, “Where Are We Now: The Epidemic As Politics,”

In his remarks before the Italian Senate, Agamben pointed to a sinister agenda behind the official rationale for vaccine passports: “It has been said by scientists and doctors that the Green Pass has no medical significance in itself but serves to force people to get vaccinated. Instead, I think we must say the opposite: that the vaccine is a means of forcing people to have the Green Pass. That is, a device that allows individuals to be monitored and tracked, an unprecedented measure.”

The philosopher concluded his address by taking aim at the supra-national forces – Bill Gates, the World Economic Forum, and Rockefeller Foundation, among others – determined to impose a system of digital identification and high-tech social credit as much of the human population as possible.

“I believe that in this perspective,” Agamben warned, “it is more urgent than ever for parliamentarians to consider the political transformation underway, which in the long run is destined to empty parliament of its powers, reducing it to simply approving – in the name of bio-security – decrees emanating from organizations and people who have very little to do with parliament.”

thegrayzone.com

]]> Do The Global Managers Want The Pandemic To End? https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/09/18/do-the-global-managers-want-the-pandemic-to-end/ Sat, 18 Sep 2021 19:56:18 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=753577

Early treatment of symptoms is the last remaining enemy of the global Covid consensus.

By Brian JONES

In his March 17, 2020, article in Stat, Stanford epidemiologist Dr. John Ioannidis argued for a vast reconsideration of the societal response to the emerging SARS-COV-2 pandemic, commonly called Covid-19. For unknown reasons, the scientific and medical tradition forming the foundation for how to respond to pandemics was being quickly disbanded. Abandoning such previously established traditions entailed filling the void with the appearance of a new global consensus: The combination of unending non-pharmaceutical interventions (masks, social distancing, etc.) and universal vaccination was the key that would end the pandemic.

The totalizing power of this new global pandemic consensus has certainly been effective over the last year and a half. However, the last month and a half has brought about a palatable instability to this apparently once-certain agreement.

As one writer observes,

Until now, Corona policy in every western country has unfolded more or less according to the same script, devised by the World Health Organization at the end of February 2020. The final act was supposed to be the wide-scale eradication of Corona after mass vaccination. It is now clear that this will never happen. For the first time since March 2020, there is no obvious international consensus on the way forward.

The global political and health managers of Western nations and their media allies increasingly seem uncertain as to where to go next. Lurking behind the uncertainty of how to respond to the variants, however, is the last remaining consensus. And while it is the last remaining consensus, it has been a little-known, yet real, part of the script from the beginning. It is as simple as it is all-encompassing: Use every available means possible to assault early treatment of the virus. 

Consider one of the latest displays of this charade. Many have now seen, or heard about, the American podcaster Joe Rogan’s recent experience with Covid-19. After recognizing some of the common symptoms of Covid-19, Rogan decided to “throw the kitchen sink at it.” Following the insights offered by Dr. Peter McCullough and his multi-drug treatment protocol, Rogan pursued infusion of monoclonal antibodies. Along with antibody infusion, Rogan took a cocktail that consisted of ivermectin, Azithromyicin, the corticosteriod Predinsone, and high doses of vitamin D (through drip line). Within 72 hours after beginning the treatment regimen, Rogan declared that he felt great, and had practically recovered from the virus.

We would not have needed the gift of prophecy to have predicted what followed: The Covid machine was deployed to attack Rogan. The inspiration for the assault has been helped by a recent tweet from the FDA, which read: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.” Moving on from its initial onslaught against the effective early use of hydroxychloroquine, the global consensus has now overwhelmingly shifted its ire to ivermectin. Coinciding with the attack on Rogan was a supposed news story from Rolling Stone, which claimed that access to emergency care for gunshot victims at an Oklahoma hospital was threatened due to the number of patients who had been poisoned by overdosing on ivermectin. The hospital offered a clarification that denied the claims, which had been made by a former employee. And yet, only updates have been added; thus far, the story has not been retracted.

This widespread jettisoning of the principle and effectiveness of preventative and early treatment has been described as “therapeutic nihilism.” Nearly two years into this pandemic, getting early treatment for Covid-19 that can prevent hospitalization and death is still extremely difficult. Continued attempts to undermine early treatment protocols, as well as frequented campaigns against those who are skeptical of the prevailing narrative, give the impression that certain interested parties are hesitant to bring the pandemic to an end.

The global managers writing and executing the Covid script are using it to manipulate the populace. I am reminded of the Polish philosopher and statesman Ryszard Legutko’s 2016 book The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies. Following the collapse of totalitarianism regimes in 1989, Legutko began noticing something that was as confusing as it was unsettling. Supporters of communism appeared to find a somewhat comfortable home in liberal democratic societies. In an attempt to parse out and understand this political phenomenon, Legutko came to realize some shared similarities between the principles of communism and modern liberal democratic regimes:

Communism and liberal democracy proved to be all-unifying entities compelling their followers how to think, what to do, how to evaluate events, what to dream, and what language to use. They both had their orthodoxies and their models of an ideal citizen. [Emphasis added]

What Legutko’s diagnosis reveals is that the global response to the pandemic has been utilized to accelerate the conditions whereby rigorous and independent thinking may be snuffed out. The pandemic seems to have accelerated the project of Western nations transmuting into large, mechanizing systems oriented towards uniformity of thought and practice.

Here is Stanford’s Ioannidis commenting upon this disturbing integration of rapidly declining transparency and collectivism:

The retraction of a highly visible hydroxychloroquine paper from the The Lancet was a startling example: A lack of sharing and openness allowed a top medical journal to publish an article in which 671 hospitals allegedly contributed data that did not exist, and no one noticed this outright fabrication before publication. The New England Journal of Medicine, another top medical journal, managed to publish a similar paper; many scientists continue to heavily cite it long after its retraction.

Such a situation reveals the emptiness of supposed concerns about “evidence.” Abused tropes such as “follow the science” are revealing themselves to be nefarious power grabs seeking to destroy nuance. “Good” citizens should not even consider the possibility of calling into question the prevailing narrative regarding Covid. More specifically, it is anathema to even fathom the thought that preventative and early treatment should be a fundamental pillar of the response to a pandemic.

As the consensus equating vaccination with the elimination of the virus continues to weaken, Ioannidis’s original prediction continues to be persuasive: The response to SARS-COV-2 will eventually be seen as a “once in a century evidence fiasco.” But the citizens of Western nations must think critically for themselves if the coils of the Covid machine have a chance of being loosened.

theamericanconservative.com

]]> Sputnik V Anniversary… Russophobia Endangers Global Fight Against Pandemic https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/08/13/sputnik-v-anniversary-russophobia-endangers-global-fight-against-pandemic/ Fri, 13 Aug 2021 15:50:52 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=747692 A major factor in impeding a global program of vaccination is the Russophobia (and Sinophobia) of Western governments. The fate of millions of lives is hanging in the balance because of offensive political prejudice.

One year ago this week, Sputnik V became the world’s first officially registered vaccine against the Covid-19 disease. It was a remarkable achievement by the world-renowned Gamaleya institute of epidemiology and microbiology in Moscow.

The development and registration of the Russian-made vaccine took place within eight months of the first officially reported outbreak of the disease in China and within five months of the World Health Organization declaring a global pandemic from the SARS-CoV-2 novel coronavirus and its potentially lethal Covid-19 respiratory symptoms.

Sputnik V’s name is a nod of gratitude to an earlier breakthrough achievement when the Soviet Union became the first nation to launch a satellite into space orbit in 1957.

The rapid pace of developing Sputnik V reflected the international alarm about the threat to human health from the new coronavirus. A year and half on from the declared pandemic, some 4.4 million people around the world have died from infection, and millions of others have been stricken infirm. The global impact on societies and economies has been devastating. It is doubly concerning that the pandemic shows no sign of being brought under control. Infections and deaths across the globe are on the rise again mainly as a result of new and more transmissible variants of the virus mutating.

There are at least 13 other vaccines against Covid-19 being administered around the world. The WHO has approved the use of five: Pfizer/BioNtech, Astrazeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Moderna and Sinopharm. The latter is a Chinese-made vaccine, the rest are developed by the U.S. or Europe.

In the European Union, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) has approved four vaccines: Astrazeneca, Moderna, Pfizer/BioNtech and J&J.

The question is: why has the Russian vaccine not yet been approved by these leading organizations? Approval would amplify the global uptake of the Russian vaccine which has already met with widespread appreciation by many nations in spite of the tardy response by certain authorities. The WHO states that authorization of Sputnik V is on the way. While the European regulator says it still has the Russian jab under review – seven months after the Russian authorities formally applied for registration with the EMA.

The delay in officially recommending the Russian vaccine becomes all the more conspicuous when its excellent medical performance is evaluated. Sputnik V has the efficacy of providing 91-97 percent protection against symptomatic Covid-19 cases. This is comparable if not superior to the best performance of Western pharmaceutical counterparts.

In addition, the Russian treatment is entirely safe with no reported harmful side effects on patients’ health. It is also relatively economical to produce, store and transport. That makes the Russian jab a feasible treatment for many poorer nations.

Furthermore, Sputnik V is shown to offer immunization against new variants of the coronavirus.

While the Russian-made inoculation has not yet been approved by the WHO, the European Union, or the Food and Drug Administration in the United States, nevertheless it has been embraced by many nations as providing effective protection against the disease.

To date, some 69 nations or territories have given approval for administering Sputnik V. Russia has also negotiated bilateral agreements for the local production of the vaccine in dozens of countries.

Most tellingly, several European countries (EU and non-EU) are administering Sputnik V regardless of the bloc’s regulatory authority’s lack of endorsement.

There can be only one conclusion from this anomalous situation. That is, the international fight against the pandemic has been hampered by the politicization of vaccines by Western nations.

The ideological antagonism of the United States and its NATO allies against Russia and China – an odious Cold War mindset – is a barrier to cooperation at a global level to defeat the pandemic. How damnable is that mentality whereby political objectives are put above human health and indeed the lives of millions of people?

Respected U.S. epidemiologist Larry Brilliant, who helped UN efforts to eradicate smallpox several years ago, this week said that the only solution for the Covid-19 pandemic is global vaccination. That means all immunological tools must be deployed in a cooperative, international effort. In theory, there is the existing United Nations’ COVAX facility, but the global reach remains abjectly low – only about 16 percent of the world’s population is protected so far. In many low-income countries, only about 1.2 percent of the population has received immunization.

In this situation, no nation is safe from the pandemic even for those nations with high rates of administered vaccine, such as the United States and Britain. With the Covid-19 virus rampant in most of the world’s population, the danger of new variants evolving will be a continual threat. What happens if existing vaccines become ineffective?

A major factor in impeding a global program of vaccination is the Russophobia (and Sinophobia) of Western governments. This ideological prejudice is reprehensible, if not criminal. The fate of millions of lives is hanging in the balance because of offensive political prejudice.

Deplorably, the political establishments of some Western states have not moved on from the depths of the Cold War. When the Sputnik satellite was launched successfully 64 years ago that undoubted scientific achievement was smeared by Western propaganda and twisted into a sinister anti-Soviet narrative. Not much has changed judging by the irrational, begrudging reaction to the Sputnik V vaccine even when humanity’s survival is at stake. That’s a political virus that poses an existential danger to the world.

]]> U.S. Politicizing Covid Pandemic to Incriminate China Is Self-Defeating https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/07/28/us-politicizing-covid-pandemic-incriminate-china-self-defeating/ Wed, 28 Jul 2021 17:30:02 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=745956 The United States is losing the ability for rational political debate and respect for science. Politicians, media and public discourse have been infected by lies, conspiracies, racial stereotyping of nations like China, and rampant hostility.

The World Health Organization seems to have succumbed to U.S. pressure to falsely incriminate China over the Covid-19 global pandemic.

The United Nations-affiliated body has called for a Phase Two study of laboratories and markets in the Chinese city of Wuhan where early Covid-19 cases were detected in December 2019. Beijing has rebuffed the call, saying that the proposed investigation is a cover for politicizing the pandemic along the lines pushed by Washington.

What has happened at the WHO? An earlier survey by WHO and Chinese scientists published in February this year concluded it was “extremely unlikely” that the novel coronavirus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But now the WHO is recommending a follow-up study as if casting doubt on its previous findings. Beijing says this is an undue sole focus on China.

Two factors seem relevant here. Under President Joe Biden’s administration, the United States has rejoined membership of the WHO. His predecessor Donald Trump had pulled the U.S. out of the international body, claiming that it was too close to China and was concealing the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. The United States is the main source of funding for the WHO, so its return will be a welcome move and no doubt has influenced the executive to be more favorable to American claims about the pandemic.

Biden and the U.S. media have remarkably revived the baseless conspiracy theory instigated by Trump and his rightwing Republicans that China was the origin of Covid-19 through a “leak” of the virus from the Wuhan institute. Biden has tasked U.S. intelligence agencies to report back in the coming weeks. It’s not hard to imagine how the intelligence will be made to fit the political agenda of smearing China.

Beijing says, with fair reason, that the Americans are putting politics above science in order to undermine China in the greater scheme of geopolitical rivalry. The Chinese are calling for an international and cooperative investigation to objectively determine the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic which has resulted in over four millions deaths worldwide over the past year.

Washington is coming from the premise that the disease is China’s fault, and so it is pushing the focus of investigation entirely on China and locations in Wuhan. This prejudice is unscientific and seems geared to consolidate the conspiracy theory that the Wuhan laboratory was the source of the pandemic through a release of the virus.

The political atmosphere in the U.S. has become extremely toxic. Last week during Senate hearings, the top American expert on infectious diseases Anthony Fauci was assailed by reckless accusations that he was complicit in the alleged Wuhan “lab leak” and responsible for all deaths.

The United States is losing the ability for rational political debate and respect for science. Politicians, media and public discourse have been infected by lies, conspiracies, racial stereotyping of nations like China (Russia, Iran and others), and rampant hostility. America’s much-vaunted democracy is a scrap heap of seething enmity which blocks any reasonable solutions to its many domestic social challenges as well as the conduct of civil international relations.

Obscene social inequality, lack of political leadership and lack of public trust in governance have resulted in the most shameful record. The U.S. death toll from the pandemic is over 620,000 – way above any other nation. That is an indictment of the failure of “American democracy” and its capitalist-oligarchic society.

Yet the Americans keep pushing the conspiracy that it’s all China’s fault. That country with nearly four times the U.S. population has incurred a tiny fraction (less than 1 percent ) of the American death toll from Covid-19. That success is down to good centrally planned governance of China’s socialist system and national unity of purpose to contain the disease. Chinese people don’t question basic science such as efficacy of wearing face masks in public spaces or availing of vaccines. By contrast, American society is riven and racked by ignorance, selfishness and loony irrationality about so-called “freedoms”.

A productive, genuinely international effort to locate the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic would be open to all leads for inquiry.

The unilateral demands by Washington to limit the investigation to the facilities in Wuhan are based on conspiratorial thinking and motivated by an effort to incriminate China.

Admittedly, the first reported cases of Covid-19 were detected in Wuhan in December 2019. But that does necessarily mean the pandemic originated there. There are reports of the disease emerging weeks before that date in North America and Europe. But these cases were either misdiagnosed or under-reported. During 2019 there was a surge in seasonal influenza deaths in the United States. Perhaps some of these cases were not due to the normal flu virus but rather to Covid-19 which has similar symptoms.

China is calling for a wider investigation in which biomedical samples in the U.S. and Europe are retrospectively analyzed for possible infection with Covid-19.

Another major factor deserving international scrutiny is Fort Detrick, the U.S. military biowarfare laboratory in Maryland. This facility is believed to experiment with lethal pathogens, including novel coronaviruses.

Fort Detrick has a notorious record for safety failures going back to the Cold War decades. In August 2019, the laboratory was forced to shut down for several months after it was discovered its waste disposal processes had been compromised by failure. It is still not clear what that failure was due to exactly or what pathogens may have escaped.

But think about that. Such a grave breakdown in one of the most toxic centers on the planet preceded by only a few months the global pandemic. To a rational mind, that fact merits an international investigation for possible role in the origin of Covid-19. China’s government and many other nations have called on the WHO to open a probe into Fort Detrick. But the Americans point-blank refuse.

American arrogance and provocative politicization over the pandemic is endangering international relations and preventing an effective scientific approach towards eradicating a disease that has wrought so much misery on its own nation. The ultimate downfall from such hubris is the self-inflicted damage.

]]> Was There a Wuhan Lab Leak? https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/06/04/was-there-wuhan-lab-leak/ Fri, 04 Jun 2021 15:30:32 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=740061 By Jonathan COOK

A year ago, the idea that Covid-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan – a short distance from the wet market that is usually claimed to be the source of the virus – was dismissed as a crackpot theory, supported only by then President Donald Trump, QAnon and hawks on the right looking to escalate tensions dangerously with China.

Now, after what has been effectively a year-long blackout of the lab-leak theory by the corporate media and the scientific establishment, President Joe Biden has announced an investigation to assess its credibility. And as a consequence, what was treated until a few weeks ago as an unhinged, rightwing conspiracy is suddenly being widely aired and seriously considered by liberals.

Every media outlet is running prominent stories wondering whether a pandemic that has killed so many people and destroyed the lives of so many more can be blamed on human hubris and meddling rather than on a natural cause.

For many years, scientists at labs like Wuhan’s have conducted Frankenstein-type experiments on viruses. They have modified naturally occurring infective agents — often found in animals such as bats — to try to predict the worst-case scenarios for how viruses, especially coronaviruses, might evolve. The claimed purpose has been to ensure humankind gets a head start on any new pandemic, preparing strategies and vaccines in advance to cope.

Viruses are known to have escaped from labs like Wuhan’s many times before. And there are now reports, rejected by China, that several staff at Wuhan got sick in late 2019, shortly before Covid-19 exploded on to the world stage. Did a human-manipulated novel coronavirus escape from the lab and spread around the world?

No Interest in Truth

Here we get to the tricky bit. Because nobody in a position to answer that question appears to have any interest in finding out the truth — or at least, they have no interest in the rest of us learning the truth. Not China. Not U.S. policy-makers. Not the World Health Organization. And not the corporate media.

The only thing we can state with certainty is this: our understanding of the origins of Covid has been narratively managed over the past 15 months and is still being narratively managed. We are being told only what suits powerful political, scientific and commercial interests.

We now know that we were misdirected a year ago into believing that a lab leak was either fanciful nonsense or evidence of Sinophobia — when it was very obviously neither. And we should understand now, even though the story has switched 180 degrees, that we are still being misdirected. Nothing that the U.S.  administration or the corporate media have told us, or are now telling us, about the origins of the virus can be trusted.

No one in power truly wants to get to the bottom of this story. In fact, quite the reverse. Were we to truly understand its implications, this story might have the potential not only to hugely discredit Western political, media and scientific elites but even to challenge the whole ideological basis on which their power rests.

Which is why what we are seeing is not an effort to grapple with the truth of the past year, but a desperate bid by those same elites to continue controlling our understanding of it. Western publics are being subjected to a continuous psy-op by their own officials.

Virus Experiments

Last year, the safest story for the Western political and scientific establishments to promote was the idea that a wild animal like a bat introduced Covid-19 to the human population. In other words, no one was to blame. The alternative was to hold China responsible for a lab leak, as Trump tried to do.

But there was a very good reason why most U.S. policy-makers did not want to go down that latter path. And it had little to do with a concern either to refrain from conspiracy theories or to avoid provoking unnecessary tension with a nuclear-armed China.

Nicholas Wade, a former New York Times science writer, set out in May, in an in-depth investigation, why the case for a lab leak was scientifically strong, citing some of the world’s leading virologists.

But Wade also highlighted a much deeper problem for U.S. elites:  just before the first outbreak of Covid, the Wuhan lab was, it seems, cooperating with the U.S. scientific establishment and WHO officials on its virus experiments — what is known, in scientific parlance, as “gain-of-function” research.

Gain-of-function experiments had been paused during the second Obama administration, precisely because of concerns about the danger of a human-engineered virus mutation escaping and creating a pandemic. But under Trump, U.S. officials restarted the program and were reportedly funding work at the Wuhan lab through a U.S.-based medical organization called the EcoHealth Alliance.

The U.S. official who pushed this agenda hardest is reported to have been Dr. Anthony Fauci – yes, the U.S. president’s chief medical adviser and the official widely credited with curbing Trump’s reckless approach to the pandemic. If the lab leak theory is right, the pandemic’s savior in the U.S. might actually have been one of its chief instigators.

And to top it off, senior officials at the WHO have been implicated too, for being closely involved with gain-of-function research through groups like EcoHealth.

Colluding in Deceit

This seems to be the real reason why the lab-leak theory was quashed so aggressively last year by Western political, medical and media establishments without any effort to seriously assess the claims or investigate them. Not out of any sense of obligation towards the truth or concern about racist incitement against the Chinese. It was done out of naked self-interest.

If anyone doubts that, consider this: the WHO appointed Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, the very group that reportedly funded gain-of-function research at Wuhan on behalf of the U.S., to investigate the lab-leak theory and effectively become the WHO’s spokesman on the matter. To say that Daszak had a conflict of interest is to massively understate the problem.

He, of course, has loudly discounted any possibility of a leak and, perhaps not surprisingly, continues to direct the media’s attention to Wuhan’s wet market.

The extent to which major media are not only negligently failing to cover the story with any seriousness but are also actively continuing to collude in deceiving their audiences — and sweeping these egregious conflicts of interest under the carpet — is illustrated by this article published by the BBC at the weekend.

The BBC ostensibly weighs the two possible narratives about Covid’s origins. But it mentions none of Wade’s explosive findings, including the potential U.S. role in funding gain-of-function research at Wuhan. Both Fauci and Daszak are cited as trusted and dispassionate commentators rather than as figures who have the most to lose from a serious investigation into what happened at the Wuhan lab.

Given this context, the events of the past 15 months look much more like a pre-emptive cover-up: a desire to stop the truth from ever emerging because, if a lab leak did occur, it would threaten the credibility of the very structures of authority on which the power of western elites rests.

Media Blackout

So why, after the strenuously enforced blackout of the past year, are Biden, the corporate media and the scientific establishment suddenly going public with the possibility of a China lab leak?

The answer to that seems clear: because Nicholas Wade’s article, in particular, blew open the doors that had been kept tightly shut on the lab-leak hypothesis. Scientists who had formerly feared being associated with Trump or a “conspiracy theory” have belatedly spoken up. The cat is out of the bag.

Or as The Financial Times reported of the new official narrative, “the driving factor was a shift among scientists who had been wary of helping Trump before the election or angering influential scientists who had dismissed the theory.”

The journal Science recently upped the stakes by publishing a letter from 18 prominent scientists stating that the lab-leak and animal-origin theories were equally “viable” and that the WHO’s earlier investigation had not given “balanced consideration” to both — a polite way of suggesting that the WHO investigation was a fix.

WHO headquarters in Geneva.  (I, Yann, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

And so we are now being subjected by the Biden administration to Plan B: damage limitation. The U.S. president, the medical establishment and the corporate media are raising the possibility of a Wuhan lab leak, but are excluding all the evidence unearthed by Wade and others that would implicate Fauci and the U.S. policy elite in such a leak, if it occurred. (Meanwhile, Fauci and his supporters have been preemptively muddying the waters by trying to redefine what constitutes gain-of-function.)

The growing clamor on social media, much of it provoked by Wade’s research, is one of the main reasons Biden and the media are being forced to address the lab-leak theory, having previously discounted it. And yet Wade’s revelations of U.S. and WHO involvement in gain-of-function research, and of potential complicity in a lab leak and a subsequent cover-up are missing from almost all corporate media reporting.

Evasion Tactic

Biden’s so-called investigation is intended to be cynically evasive. It makes the administration look serious about getting to the truth when it is nothing of the sort. It eases pressure on the corporate media that might otherwise be expected to dig out the truth themselves. The narrow focus on the lab leak theory displaces the wider story of potential U.S. and WHO complicity in such a leak and overshadows efforts by outside critics to highlight that very point. And the inevitable delay while the investigation is carried out readily exploits Covid news fatigue as Western publics start to emerge from under the pandemic’s shadow.

The Biden administration will hope the public’s interest rapidly wanes on this story so that the corporate media can let it drop off their radar. In any case, the investigation’s findings will most likely be inconclusive, to avoid a war of dueling narratives with China.

But even if the investigation is forced to point the finger at the Chinese, the Biden administration knows that the Western corporate media will loyally report its accusations against China as fact —  just as they loyally blacked out any consideration of a lab leak until they were forced to do so over the past few days.

Illusion of Trut

Wuhan Institute of Virology is a research institute by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Jiangxia District, south of the Wuhan city, Hubei province, China. (Ureem2805/Wikimedia Commons)

The Wuhan story provides a chance to understand more deeply how elites wield their narrative power over us — to control what we think, or are even capable of thinking. They can twist any narrative to their advantage.

In the calculations of Western elites, the truth is largely irrelevant. What is of utmost importance is maintaining the illusion of truth. It is vital to keep us believing that our leaders rule in our best interests; that the Western system — despite all its flaws — is the best possible one for arranging our political and economic lives; and that we are on a steady, if sometimes rocky, path towards progress.

The job of sustaining the illusion of truth falls to the corporate media. It will be their role now to expose us to a potentially lengthy, certainly lively — but carefully ring-fenced and ultimately inconclusive — debate about whether Covid emerged naturally or leaked from the Wuhan lab.

The media’s task is to manage smoothly the transition from last year’s unquestionable certainty — that the pandemic had an animal origin — to a more hesitant, confusing picture that includes the possibility of a human, but very much Chinese, role in the virus’ emergence. It is to ensure we do not feel any cognitive dissonance as a theory we were assured was impossible by the experts only weeks ago suddenly becomes only too possible, even though nothing has materially changed in the meantime.

What is essential for the political, media and scientific establishments is that we do not ponder deeper questions:

  • How is it that the supposedly skeptical, disputatious, raucous media once again spoke mostly with a single and uncritical voice on such a vitally important matter — in this case, for more than a year on the origins of Covid?
  • Why was that media consensus broken not by a large, well-resourced media organization, but by a lone, former science writer working independently and publishing in a relatively obscure science magazine?
  • Why did the many leading scientists who are now ready to question the imposed narrative of Covid’s animal origin remain silent for so long about the apparently equally credible hypothesis of a lab leak?
  • And most importantly, why should we believe that the political, media and scientific establishments have on this occasion any interest in telling us the truth, or in ensuring our welfare, after they have been shown to have repeatedly lied or stayed silent on even graver matters and over much longer periods, such as about the various ecological catastrophes that have been looming since the 1950s?

Class Interests

Those questions, let alone the answers, will be avoided by anyone who needs to believe that our rulers are competent and moral and that they pursue the public good rather than their own individual, narrow, selfish interests — or those of their class or professional group.

Scientists defer slavishly to the scientific establishment because that same establishment oversees a system in which scientists are rewarded with research funding, employment opportunities and promotions. And because scientists have little incentive to question or expose their own professional community’s failings, or increase public skepticism towards science and scientists.

Similarly, journalists work for a handful of billionaire-owned media corporations that want to maintain the public’s faith in the “benevolence” of the power structures that reward billionaires for their supposed genius and ability to improve the lives of the rest of us. The corporate media has no interest in encouraging the public to question whether it can really operate as a neutral conduit that channels information to ordinary people rather than preserves a status quo that benefits a tiny wealth-elite.

And politicians have every reason to continue to persuade us that they represent our interests rather than the billionaire donors whose corporations and media outlets can so easily destroy their careers.

What we are dealing with here is a set of professional classes doing everything in their power to preserve their own interests and the interests of the system that rewards them. And that requires strenuous efforts on their part to make sure we do not understand that policy is driven chiefly by greed and a craving for status, not by the common good or by a concern for truth and transparency.

Which is why no meaningful lessons will be learnt about what really happened in Wuhan. Maintaining the illusion of truth will continue to take precedence over uncovering the truth. And for that reason we are doomed to keep making the same screw-ups. As the next pandemic will doubtless attest.

Jonathan Cook.net via consortiumnews.com

]]> How the Unthinkable Became Thinkable: Eric Lander, Julian Huxley and the Awakening of Sleeping Monsters https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/05/24/how-the-unthinkable-became-thinkable-eric-lander-julian-huxley-and-the-awakening-of-sleeping-monsters/ Mon, 24 May 2021 17:00:26 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=739394 Will we see biotechnology serve the interests of humanity under a multipolar paradigm that cherishes national sovereignty, human life, family, and faith?

As much as it might cause us a fair deal of displeasure and even an upset stomach to consider such ideas as the hold eugenics has on our presently troubled era, I believe that ignoring such a topic really does no one any favors in the long run.

This is especially serious, as leading World Economic Forum darlings like Yuval Harari flaunt such concepts as “the new global useless class” which Artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, automation and the Fourth Industrial Revolution is supposedly ushering in. Other Davos creatures like Klaus Schwab call openly for a microchipped global citizenry capable of interfacing with a global web with a single thought while Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg promote ‘neuralinks’ to “keep humanity relevant” by merging with computers in a new epoch of evolutionary biology.

Leading Darwinian geneticists like Sir James Watson and Sir Richard Dawkins openly defend eugenics while a technocracy consolidates itself in a governing station using a “Great Reset” as an excuse to usher in a new post-nation state era.

If there is something fundamentally evil lurking behind these processes which has any connection to the Anglo-American rise of fascism and eugenics nearly a century ago, then let’s at least have the courage to explore that possibility. It was after all, only by looking at this ugliness 80 years ago, that patriots were able to take appropriate measures to prevent a bankers’ technocratic dictatorship in 1933 and again during WW2.. so perhaps a similar display of courage to think the unthinkable might be worth the effort for those who might find themselves in a similar situation today.

What Didn’t Happen at Nuremburg?

Seventy six years ago, as the allies were consolidating their victory over the Nazi machine and as the “Nuremburg Tribunals” were quickly being arranged, a new strategy was set into motion by the very same forces that had put vast energy, money and resources into the rise of fascism as “the miracle solution” of post-WWI economic chaos that had spread across Europe and the USA.

It is among the greatest scandals of our age that the Wall Street- City of London machine that financed Hitler and Mussolini as battering rams for a new world order were never actually brought to justice. Although Franklin Roosevelt managed to put a leash on Wall Street between 1933-1945, while setting the world stage for a beautiful post-war vision of win-win cooperation, the darker forces of the financier oligarchy who wanted only to establish a global unipolar system of governance not only avoided punishment, but wasted no time to regain their lost hegemony before the war had come to a close.

The Role of Sir Julian Huxley

One of the conceptual grand strategists of this process was a man named Julian Sorrel Huxley (1887-1975). Celebrated as a biologist, and social reformer, Julian was a devout life-long member of the British Eugenics Society serving alongside John Maynard Keynes as secretary and later as its president.

Julian was a busy man, who along with his brother Aldous, worked hard to fill the very large shoes of their grandfather Thomas (aka: Darwin’s bulldog). While simultaneously managing the post-WW2 eugenics movement, Julian found himself setting into motion the modern environmental movement as founder of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature in 1948, co-founding the World Wildlife Fund in 1961, created the term “transhumanism” and also founding an immensely influential United Nations body called UNESCO (abbreviated for the United Nations Education, Science and Cultural Organization) in 1946 which he ran as Director General from 1946-1948.

The mandate for the new organization was set out clearly in Huxley’s 1946 UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy:

“The moral for UNESCO is clear. The task laid upon it of promoting peace and security can never be wholly realised through the means assigned to it- education, science and culture. It must envisage some form of world political unity, whether through a single world government or otherwise, as the only certain means of avoiding war… in its educational programme it can stress the ultimate need for a world political unity and familiarize all peoples with the implications of the transfer of full sovereignty from separate nations to a world organization.”

To what end would this “world political unity” be aimed? Several pages later, Huxley’s vision is laid out in all of its twisted detail:

“At the moment, it is probable that the indirect effect of civilization is dysgenic instead of eugenic, and in any case it seems likely that the dead weight of genetic stupidity, physical weakness, mental instability and disease proneness, which already exist in the human species will prove too great a burden for real progress to be achieved. Thus even though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that is now unthinkable may at least become thinkable.”

After the world got the chance to see what a eugenics program looked like under the full support of a fascist social engineer, it would be no exaggeration to say that it lost a good deal of popularity in the eyes of a world population still very much connected to traditional cultural institutions like Christianity, patriotism and respect for sacredness of life.

Even though thirty U.S. States and two Canadian provinces had legalized eugenics policies (including forced sterilization of the unfit) between 1907-1945, the statistical science and political application of eugenics ground to a screeching halt by the end of World War 2 and as Huxley iterated in his manifesto, something new had to be done.

A Word on Tavistock

Huxley also worked very closely with London’s Tavistock Clinic that received funding from both Rockefeller and Macy Foundations throughout the 1930s-1950s. Led by a psychiatrist named Brigadier General John Rawlings Rees, Tavistock can be best understood as the “psychiatric branch of the British Empire” established in 1921 which innovated psychiatric techniques using mixtures of Pavlovian behaviorism and Freudian theories to influence group behavior in a variety of ways.

Early on, the clinic explored the extreme mental conditions of shell shock victims who suffered cases of psychological deconstruction during the terrors of trench warfare recognizing the high degree of malleability in these subjects. As outlined by a brilliant 1996 EIR report by L. Wolfe, the idea behind Tavistock’s was always driven by a goal to figure out how the brain might be “depatterned” and deconstructed in order to be reconstructed anew like a blank slate with the hopes that this insight into individuals might be replicated later among broader social groups, and even whole nations. Many of this research was applied in the form of MK Ultra within the USA and will be the subject of a future report.

G. Brock Chrisholm: Tavistockian Czar of World Health

One prominent psychiatrist who spent years working with Rees at Tavistock was a Canadian named G. Brock Chrisolm.

In 1948, Christolm founded a UN-affiliated body called the World Health Organization (WHO) with the aim of promoting mental and physical health of the world. A noble endeavor carrying much responsibility and power requiring a leader with exceptional insight into the nature of sickness and health. Sadly, based upon his own sick views of the nature of mankind and society, Chrisholm was certainly the wrong man for the job.

Among the greatest causes of war and mental sickness in Chrisholm’s mind were not to be found in imperialism or economic injustice, but rather in society’s belief in right and wrong. Writing in 1946 Chrisholm laid out the purpose of “good” psychotherapy and education saying: “the reinterpretation and eventual eradication of the concept of right and wrong which has been the basis of child training, the substitution of intelligent and rational thinking for faith in the certainties of old people- these are the belated objectives of practically all effective psychotherapy”.

But it wasn’t simply the “concept of right and wrong” or “faith in the certainties of old people” which had to be eradicated, but monotheistic religion, family, and patriotism. Speaking eight years later, Chrisholm said: “To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family tradition, national patriotism and religious dogmas”.

The World Goes Mental

Once UNESCO and the WHO were firmly in place, a third organization was created to drive the funding, and the practice of global mental health.

As outlined by historian Anton Chaitkin, funded primarily by the Macy Foundation, the World Federation of Mental Health (WFMH) was created in 1948. The Macy Foundation itself which was created in 1930 under the leadership of General Marlborough Churchill (cousin to Winston) who had been in charge of covert military intelligence from 1919-1929 in the form of the “Black Chamber”. His new foundation was a part of the Rockefeller machine and used as a conduit to pour money into “health sciences” with a focus on eugenics.

The U.S. technical coordinator to the conference that created the WFMH made the new organization’s origins clearly known. Nina Ridnour wrote “the World Federation for Mental Health… had been created upon the recommendation of the United Nations World Health Organization and UNESCO because they needed a non-governmental mental health organization with which they could cooperate.”

And just who would become the first Director General of the WFMH?

While still acting as the head of London’s Tavistock Clinic, Brigadier General John Rawlings Rees was put in charge of the new body by none other than arch-racist Montagu Norman (head of the Bank of England) who had created the operation out of his National Association for Mental Health run out of his London Thorpe Lodge home.

Describing this strategic battle plan to reform society, Rees said:

“If we prepare to come out into the open and to attack the social and national problems of our day, then we must have the shock troops, and these cannot be provided by psychiatry based wholly in institutions. We must have mobile teams of psychiatrists who are free to move around and make contacts with the local area.”

The idea of mobile teams of psychiatric shock troops was an idea advanced by leading grand strategist Lord Bertrand Russell who had written in 1952’s “Impact of Science on Society”:

“I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology…. Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called “education.” Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one; the press, the cinema, and the radio play an increasing part…. It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment.”

The Bi-Polar Cold War and a New Global Paradigm

Over the ensuing years, UNESCO, the WHO and WFMH worked in tandem to coordinate hundreds of influential sub organizations, universities, research labs, and covert science including the CIA’s MK Ultra in order to bring about the desired “mentally healthy” society cleansed of its connections to Christianity, faith in truthfulness, national patriotism or family.

By 1971, the world was ripe for a big change.

The baby boomer targets of this vast social engineering experiment had been inundated by a vast arsenal of cultural warfare on every level. While LSD was spread across campuses of America, and assassinations of western leaders who resisted the new age of wars in Southwest Asia became the norm, the baby boomers watched as their loved ones returned from Vietnam in body bags. “Not trusting anyone over 30” became the new wisdom as love of country was suffocated under the unnatural spread of Anglo-American imperialism abroad and COINTEL PRO-style operations at home.

When the CFR and Trilateral Commission unpegged the U.S. dollar from the gold reserve, a new age of deregulation, consumerism and radical materialism was ushered in causing the baby boomer generation to quickly transmogrify into the 1980s hyper-materialist “me” generation.

On an ecological level, a new ethic of “conservationism” had begun to move from the fringes into the mainstream replacing the former pro-industrial ethic of the producer-creator society that had historically governed the best of western civilization.

Chief among the creators of this new conservation ethic which replaced the idea of “protecting humanity from empire” with “protecting nature from mankind”, was none other than Julian Huxley himself. During the same year that he co-founded the World Wildlife Foundation, Huxley drafted the Morges Manifesto (1961) as the organizing manifesto for the modern ecology movement pitting human civilization in stark contrast to the supposedly closed, mathematical equilibrium of nature. Huxley co-founded the WWF with arch Malthusians Prince Philip “I want to be reincarnated as a deadly virus” Mountbatten and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands.

Holdren’s Planetary Regime

By the mid-1970s, one of the leading neo-Malthusians of that era, Paul Ehrlich mentored a young protégé named John Holdren and together they produced a stomach-turning manual called Ecoscience in 1977 where the pair wrote:

“Perhaps those agencies, combined with UNEP and the United Nations population agencies, might eventually be developed into a Planetary Regime- sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment. Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all-natural resources, renewable or non-renewable, at least insofar as international implications exist. Thus, the Regime could have the power to control pollution not only in the atmosphere and oceans, but also in such freshwater bodies as rivers and lakes that cross international boundaries or that discharge into the oceans. The Regime might also be a logical central agency for regulating all international trade, perhaps including assistance from DCs to LDCs, and including all food on the international market. The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.”

Considering that these words were written just three years after Henry Kissinger’s NSSM-200 report that transformed U.S. foreign policy doctrine from pro-development to pro-population reduction, Holdren’s 1977 words should not be taken lightly.

The Human Genome Project Revives Sleeping Monsters

During the ensuing decades Holdren became close friends with a Harvard-based Rhodes Scholar and mathematician named Eric Lander who led the Human Genome Project from 1995-2002. Lander announced the success of the unveiling of the fully sequenced human genome in 2003 saying: “The Human Genome Project represents one of the remarkable achievements in the history of science. Its culmination this month signals the beginning of a new era in biomedical research. Biology is being transformed into an information science”.

Commenting on the potential for steering human evolution made possible by Lander’s Human Genome Project and the new developments in mRNA CRISPR technology then unfolding, Sir Richard Dawkins wrote in 2006:

“IN THE 1920s and 1930s, scientists from both the political left and right would not have found the idea of designer babies particularly dangerous – though of course they would not have used that phrase. Today, I suspect that the idea is too dangerous for comfortable discussion, and my conjecture is that Adolf Hitler is responsible for the change… I wonder whether, some 60 years after Hitler’s death, we might at least venture to ask what the moral difference is between breeding for musical ability and forcing a child to take music lessons. Or why it is acceptable to train fast runners and high jumpers but not to breed them. I can think of some answers, and they are good ones, which would probably end up persuading me. But hasn’t the time come when we should stop being frightened even to put the question?”

It wasn’t long before Holdren found himself enjoying greater power than he had ever imagined as science czar and architect of Obama’s “evidence-based” program of governance which involved maximizing funding for green tech to decarbonize humanity under new systems of global governance. Lander worked closely with Holdren as the co-chair of Obama’s science council and also with Whitehead Institute President David Baltimore on the creation of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Together Lander and Baltimore oversaw a major 2015 conference on the “new era of biomedical research” that unveiled a new gene modification technology known as CRISPR involving the use of enzymes and RNA found in ecoli which were discovered to have the ability to target DNA sequences and induce various mutations. While it is obvious that this powerful technology offers potential good to humanity as a tool to eliminate hereditary diseases in humans and in crops, CRISPR’s incredible power to fundamentally alter human DNA forever can do unimaginable harm if put into the wrong hands.

At the “historic” international summit on human gene editing in December 2015, conference chairman David Baltimore echoed the creepy words of Julian Huxley during his keynote speech: “over the years, the unthinkable has become conceivable. We’re on the cusp of a new era in human history.”

In January 2021, John Holdren congratulated Erik Lander for being appointed Joe Biden’s Science Czar (Director of White House Science and Technology Policy)- the position formerly held by Holdren. In this position, Lander has overseen the re-activation of every Obama-era science policy as part of a technocratic overhaul of the U.S. government in conformity with the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset agenda. Using the vast power of the Emergency Authorization Act to bypass the FDA and steamroll gene therapy technologies passing themselves off as “vaccines”, a new social experiment has begun. CRISPR technology is already being hailed as a key to solving the new mutating strains of COVID-19 and is being used as a “vaccine” for certain tropical diseases as of this writing. The obvious connection between eugenics organizations of yesterday and the rise of modern mRNA operations associated with GAVI and Oxford’s Astra Zeneca unveiled by investigative journalist Whitney Webb earlier this year should be kept firmly in mind.

Will this technology be used by modern day heirs of Nazi-sponsoring eugenicists in an effort to pick up where Dr. Mengele left off OR will we see this biotechnology serve the interests of humanity under a multipolar paradigm that cherishes national sovereignty, human life, family, and faith?

Future installments in this series will explore the eugenic roots of Transhumanism, Artificial Intelligence, and the Great Reset. We will also tackle the Frankfurt School, the rise of Wiener’s Cybernetics and the program outlined by Bertrand Russell and David Hilbert in 1900 to stuff the entire universe into a stagnant dead cage.

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

]]> The Eruption of the Refugee Crisis and the Global Push for Vaccine Passports https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/04/20/the-eruption-of-the-refugee-crisis-and-the-global-push-for-vaccine-passports/ Tue, 20 Apr 2021 18:30:46 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=737165 The eruption of St. Vincent’s La Soufrière (Sulphur) has provided a unique opportunity to push the envelope in matters of mandatory public health policy, notably mandatory vaccination, vaccine passports, and the mass gathering of biometric data.

By Raul DIEGO

The controversy erupted on Twitter even as the 32,000-foot-high plume of smoke from Saint Vincent’s La Soufrière volcano was still rising in the sky. The firestorm on American social media platforms over reports that only those vaccinated against COVID-19 would be allowed to evacuate the eastern Caribbean island sheds light on the architects of the biosecurity state who have descended on Saint Vincent & the Grenadines (SVG) to explore the limits of mandatory public health protocols in the midst of a natural disaster now projected to “last months.”

Global organizations, NGOs, and members of the scientific community are coordinating emergency response efforts in Saint Vincent. Power outages, no clean water, and continued volcanic eruptions have rendered parts of the island virtually uninhabitable, plunging Vincentians who have managed to escape into a condition of quasi-statelessness where notions of human rights and civil liberties become malleable.

“Refugees are in a position of complete vulnerability,” says Dr. Diego Garcia Ricci, from the Ibero-American University in Mexico City, speaking to MintPress. The constitutional law professor and data privacy expert addressed some of the issues surrounding the plight of refugees as biometric data like retinal scans, fingerprinting and even gender, become a pillar of identity documentation and incipient travel requirements in the wake of the pandemic. “While biometrics can be useful for identification purposes, mistakes do happen,” Garcia Ricci warns.

Most at risk from these mistakes, abuse and racial profiling arising out of biometric digital identity systems are those whose need for the ‘state’ is made indispensable by virtue of being rendered stateless. Free agents with no agency are prime targets for global entities like the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), which claims to speak for close to 80 million forcibly displaced people.

Vincentians who are unable or refuse to leave the island are likely to be reclassified as “internally displaced persons” or IDPs, another kind of refugee as defined by the UNHCR. Such classifications are part of a vast structure of laws and guidelines enshrined in the archives of supranational state entities like the European Commission and the United Nations, based on the Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, which establishes international rules governing the treatment and rights of refugees, whose numbers have nearly doubled since 2012, ballooning from 45.2 million “displaced” to 79.5 million as of the last count.

UNHCR Refugee Data

Source | UNHCR

Economic sanctions, the war on terror, and other policies imposed by the very interests represented in New York and Brussels are causing a human tsunami emanating from places like Venezuela and Yemen, to name just two of the most salient examples. A natural disaster has conferred instant refugee status on the citizens of Saint Vincent, who join their number as the incipient biosecurity apparatus secures its grip on border control technology and as health-based digital identity systems can be glimpsed on the horizon.

A roadmap

In the spring of 2018, the European Commission (EC) revealed its intention to create a “vaccination card/passport” in a proposal titled “Strengthened Cooperation Against Vaccine-Preventable Diseases,” which touches on many of the topics making the rounds today, such as ways to address vaccine hesitancy and “the safety and potential side effects of different vaccines.”

A year later, the EC unveiled a “roadmap” that projected the “common EU vaccination card” to be fully implemented by 2021. As a result, the EU is right on schedule to become the first region of the world to adopt a full-fledged medical credentialing border policy for its 27 member states.

With the EU’s 27 member states launched on this trajectory, leading health credentialing developers like The Commons Project, Pathcheck and IBM’s Digital Health Pass have formed their own policy recommendation club, with the bioinformatics and life sciences industries finding a nexus under one roof created by the ID2020 Digital Identity Alliance called the Good Health Pass Collaborative (GHPC).

GHPC seeks to influence policy decisions around the technology’s implementation in border control situations specifically. While many of its members offer credentialing apps for uses outside of these scenarios, GHPC makes clear that its mission is exclusively to establish the correct border policy frameworks that will maximize the return for its “core partners” as they go about developing “an interoperable, trusted framework and ecosystem for the issuance, use, and management of COVID-19 test and vaccination credentials for international travel,” per the GHPC whitepaper.

Garcia Ricci describes the problem. “We don’t really know how they’re going to work,” he states, adding that as mechanisms to control border entry, “the policies regarding their use are still not very clear or defined. Every country is implementing its own policy.”

Dakota Gruener, GHPC executive director and executive officer for private sector engagement of Bill Gates’s GAVI (officially “Gavi – The Vaccine Alliance”), is tasked with making sure such policies bend to the will of the broader biosecurity state in order to overcome the risk of “fragmentation” and keep their options open while the smart infrastructure required to scale up is put in place.

Gruener even doesn’t rule out using paper in the meantime, insisting that “to be valuable to users, credentials need to be accepted at check-in, upon arrival by border control agencies, and more,” adding that eventually a “common governance framework” would solve the problems presented by the surfeit of vaccine credential apps and cards in development.

The Queen’s Subject

The eruption of La Soufrière (Sulphur) has provided a unique opportunity to push the envelope in matters of mandatory public health policy, which Saint Vincent Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves had taken the initiative to begin implementing in March, ordering mandatory vaccinations for the island’s minibus operators and calling for teachers to get the jab in a radio interview the day before the volcanic disaster hit.

Mandatory vaccination protocols have now been extended for anyone wishing to leave the island, breaking with standard procedures that place the onus of status verification on the port of entry. Gonsalves issued the directive at a press conference the day before the eruption, calling for mandatory vaccinations for those living near the volcano. In February, Gonsalves signed emergency legislation authorizing the use of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine along with Pfizer’s, Johnson & Johnson’s, Moderna’s and three others.

The first shipment of vaccines arrived just two days before the volcanic eruption, courtesy of COVAX – a global consortium distributing vaccines throughout global south countries comprised of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI); Bill & Melinda Gates-funded GAVI; UNICEF; the World Health Organization (WHO); and its credit vehicle, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), which operates a revolving fund comprised of more than 200 donor partners to purchase vaccines for COVAX.

WHO personell stationed on St. Vincent and the Grenadines pose next to one the first COVAX shipments to arrive on the islands. Photo | WHO

Some 24,000 doses of the highly problematic AstraZeneca vaccine arrived in the Caribbean nation as part of a larger vaccine distribution operation in the region by COVAX, which commenced delivery of 728,000 doses to five countries in the region in March. The so-called “Oxford” vaccine has been discontinued in many countries due to serious blood clotting issues, which in some cases have led to death.

By virtue of their newfound refugee status, Vincentians are left with little protection against the emergency measures currently enforced by their prime minister, who is a subject of the Crown serving under the Queen’s representative, Governor-General Susan Dougan.

Fish in a barrel

The nexus between Big Pharma, Big Tech, and the national security state is revealed in the health-credentialing industry, where major players from each sector and their partners tackle the different tasks required to build the biosecurity state. Vaccinating even half of the 80 million forcibly displaced people protected under the UNHCR’s official charter, collecting their biometric data, and creating digital identity cards or apps to store and retrieve that data would be a significant step in that direction

The UNHCR has assumed the role of a diplomatic outreach operation on behalf of COVAX to persuade countries to include refugees in their national inoculation strategies. Serbia, Nepal and Rwanda are among the countries that have vaccinated asylum seekers and refugees as a result of UNHCR’s campaigns, which touts refugee vaccination against COVID-19 as “key” to ending the pandemic.

Meanwhile, Northrop Grumman is building the largest biometric and biographical database of foreigners and citizens in the U.S., called the Biometric Identification Transnational Migration Alert Program, or BITMAP, as reported by MintPress in March. Operated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 14 countries, including the three Central American countries whose drug war refugees are currently flooding the border, BITMAP is only one of several biometric capture operations targeting refugees.

“The extraction of any type of biometric data represents an intrusion into your privacy,” explains Garcia Ricci, adding that, though such intrusions are not necessarily prohibited, they must not be “arbitrary or illegal. In other words, there must be a legal basis for the collection of such data and that the legal basis itself be in pursuit of a legitimate purpose.”

It’s unclear if the purposes of the GHPC’s core partners, like Mastercard, fit this juridical framework. The credit card behemoth has been working with the UNHCR and tech companies, who are also part of GHPC, to test their novel biometric ID cards on refugee populations such as the Rohingya. Described as ID2020’s most ambitious project yet, GHPC is focused on “delivering a global, interoperable health pass system can only happen if we come together in a way that meets the needs of everyone involved,” asserts Ajay Bhalla, president of Cyber & Intelligence at Mastercard.

Ann Cavoukian, executive director of the Global Privacy & Security by Design Centre, poses as the organization’s watchdog but seems to have capitulated early to the idea of health passports, which she claims to personally oppose. However, “having acknowledged that they will be used,” as she told Biometric Update, Cavoukian concedes that “biometric technology seems likely to be a necessary component of Good Health Passes to bind the credential to the individual.”

‘Binding’ people to credentials can prove problematic. Garcia Ricci uncovers the principle of proportionality in the question of biometric data collection, citing fingerprints, which “are a biometric marker that has been used to identify people and can be said to exhibit an adequate level of proportionality,” in terms of invasiveness.

But what happens, he asks, “when the United States or any other country” crosses the line from ink on the fingers to DNA extraction? “That’s where the questions arise regarding legitimate purposes,” Garcia Ricci contends, “since DNA contains the most intimate information about a human being and can be used to derive many other kinds of information, such as a propensity for certain diseases or genetic defects.

“While biometrics can be useful for identification purposes,” he continues, “mistakes do happen and we must be vigilant to make sure that any errors that might lead to the misidentification of an individual through faulty biometric data are able to be corrected in the system.”

If the Global Privacy & Security by Design Centre is the designated protector of civil liberties and human rights at the dawn of vaccine passports, a closer look at the organization does not inspire much confidence. Sitting on its board of directors is none other than former U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, who is also on the advisory board of Carbyne – a cybersecurity “emergency management” company with ties to Israel’s notorious human rights-abusing Unit 8200. Carbyne also has direct business ties with Peter Thiel, who runs his own health data management and pre-crime analytics company called Palantir and has operated a joint research center with Carbyne in Israel since 2013.

Despite her questionable alliances, Cavoukian is confident that her “endorsement” of Global Health Pass and health credentialing, in general, will assuage the fears of privacy and data-integrity advocates. In March, the newly-formed non-profit “urged” the White House to “establish official guidance on the development and deployment of health passes” in a letter signed by its 80 signatories.

Refugees are the “first-to-market,” so to speak, for the digital identification cards with biometric features. But, as so-called vaccine passports and similar health data apps get closer to becoming a reality for regular, already-documented citizens, it should be clear to those willing to look beyond the façade of public health that the implementation of the biosecurity state is only part of a longer-term project intended to reshape the global economy to run on data.

Early warning

Vincentians were given relatively ample warning after scientists at the Seismic Research Center at the University of the West Indies (UWI-SRC) made a 3 a.m. phone call on April 8 to the prime minister’s office alerting officials to a pending volcanic event.

The island had been under an “Orange Level” alert since December 2020. The color-coded volcanic activity monitoring system is managed by the regional Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDMEA), headquartered in Barbados, with data provided by the UWI-SRC in coordination with the National Emergency Management Organization (NEMO).

Ash rises into the air as La Soufriere volcano erupts on St. Vincent, seen from Chateaubelair, April 9, 2021. Orvil Samuel | AP

NEMO came into existence in 2002, one year after USAID organized a workshop at the University of the West Indies (UWI) on Volcanic and Seismic Hazards in the Eastern Caribbean, which produced the “Volcanic Hazard Atlas,” designed “to provide an essential blueprint for planners and public officials with responsibility for managing the economic infrastructure of Eastern Caribbean islands.”

The original Early Warning System (EWS) project was funded by Brussels through the office of the General Directorate of Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid of the EU and its European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (ECHO) financing vehicle. Original program partners in Saint Vincent included the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO/WHO) and The Red Cross.

The volcanologist

On April 7, the same day COVAX delivered the first batch of vaccines to Saint Vincent, an article appeared in the Hawaii Tribune Herald showcasing a “new” study to predict the impact of future volcanic eruptions. Led by Prof. Bruce F. Houghton from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, the researchers posited that the damage caused by volcanic eruptions could be predicted “weeks” in advance through careful analysis of lava-flow geologic “signatures.”

Comparing census data to the median cost of land and household income among three areas located in Hawaii’s lava hazard zones, Houghton marries economic indicators to maps of geological disruptions caused by the Kilauea event of 2018 in order to produce what is, in essence, a financial projection tool masquerading as a scientific paper.

Houghton’s idea to mitigate damage from volcanic eruptions is to curb population growth in lava hazard zones. The Malthusian focus is striking and perhaps tacitly admitted by the author himself when he chose to include the words “social dilemma” as part of the study’s title.

While Houghton’s work shows that seismic traces and lava flows leave enough scorching data of its own behind to allow for a detailed analysis of the social and economic implications of a volcanic event, that information may or may not help to prevent any actual damage from a volcanic eruption. But it will suit just fine the needs of World Bank and IMF reps, who often carry studies like these in their leather briefcases when they pitch the latest debt-financing scheme to a “developing” country, like Saint Vincent.

The bankers

As the Covid crisis raged on in the summer of 2020, SVG Prime Minister Gonsalves was confronted over a Facebook post in which he stated quite clearly that he’d secured financing from the World Bank to build “a 140-bed modern acute referral hospital.” After denying he had ever made such a claim, political opponents tore into the man who has ruled Saint Vincent and the Grenadines for almost half of its independent existence.

“The World Bank advises that the funding they provided is only for the design,” Gonsalves countered his critics, asserting that the global financing organization “provided no funds for the construction of that hospital.” The issue remains in the hands of his finance minister, Camillo Gonsalves — also his son.

Gonsalves

SVG Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves arrives for a summit in Brussels aimed at relations with Europe. Francois Walschaerts | AP

It is a recurring game throughout Latin America and the Caribbean when international debt-peddling consortiums like the World Bank approach governments in the region to propose all kinds of infrastructure projects, which they offer to finance and then pay the foreign contractors to build while collecting interest and fees from the target country’s taxpayers in set-ups that allow creatures like Gonsalves to take all the credit.

Saint Vincent’s emergency warning system (EWS) was one of these types of projects brought to the shores of the “exotic” Caribbean island nation by large foreign agencies like the UNDP and the EC. The “Sulphur’s” first volcanic eruption since the year SVG ceased to be a Royal colony in 1979 provided a rare chance to put recent changes made to the EWS to the test.

New York, Brussels and NGOs proffered their advice on population crisis management and other SDG-based recommendations to upgrade the system after an 18-month-long reappraisal, carried out by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and partners, in line with its Strategic Plan 2018-2021 to “help countries achieve the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.”

The resulting reports identified failures and suggested corrective action, as well as multiple changes and additions to the system itself. Some of the details are laid out in “Roadmap to Strengthening Multi-Hazard Early Warning Systems for Saint Vincent & the Grenadines,” published in 2018. The report focuses heavily on gender-differentiated risk analysis and the creation of databases for this purpose.

Disaster simulations are also encouraged in the report and, despite a paltry budget allocation of $40,000 dollars, implementation of NEWS got going with workshops organized by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) and the National Emergency Management Organization (NEMO), to assure the incorporation of “gender considerations” into all aspects of the EWS, according to NEMO Director Michelle Forbes.

The question of where all this gender and any other such biometric data collected during the project is going and who will have access to those databases is not addressed directly in any of the materials examined by MintPress. Most countries have laws that govern who can access private data but, as Garcia Ricci explained:

Even within national data privacy laws, certain kinds of cooperation between countries is typically embedded in the legislation itself. This is what’s known as data transfer and obliges nation states to share the data with other countries in cases where it is deemed necessary.”

SVG’s current data privacy laws were fashioned by many of the same global organizations cited in the preceding paragraphs, organizing workshops and seminars that would eventually lead to the Harmonization of ICT Policies, Legislation and Regulatory Procedures in the Caribbean HIPCAR, governed by the Caribbean Community CARICOM and enforced through the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court.

UNDRR Caribbean Advisor Maria Kontro clarifies the use for all this data by framing it in her terms: “Every dollar invested in risk reduction and prevention can save anywhere up to 15 dollars in post-disaster recovery,” Kontro said during a consultation and training session for Gender and Vulnerable In Early Warning Systems in SVG back in 2019.

Black Caribs

Vincentians come from a long line of people forced to resettle, move and escape. Nearly seven-tenths of the island’s population are directly descended from West African slaves. Before their arrival, the native Ciboney, Arawak and Caribs spent generations fighting a protracted war against the Western European invaders and found common ground with self-liberated Africans.

Centuries later, Vincentians must call on the strength of their forcibly displaced and enslaved ancestors to endure another colonial assault on their freedom as they suddenly find themselves in a de facto testing ground for mandatory vaccination procedures, health status documentation, and pandemic evacuation protocols.

A UN spokesman has declared that the eruptive crisis will “last more than six months” and looks for it to extend to Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda. Most Vincentians are choosing to stick close to home and forgo the even more uncertain scenario of evacuation, that requires an injection that just might kill them anyway.

Either way, Vincentians are in the eye of the biosecurity storm that is traversing the world in search of easy data to plug into its burgeoning human capital market toys. Chances of escape from the encroaching health surveillance and data mining operations currently unfolding around the world are getting slimmer.

But — just like the Dutch slave ship that sank off the coast of Saint Vincent in 1635, freeing hundreds of Africans who swam ashore and made new families with the native Carib people — the fate of this new form of digital servitude is foreshadowed by the resilience of the Saint Vincentians.

“They said they want to stay at home,” Gonsalves told the BBC. “I have been around several of the camps and that’s the message.”

mintpressnews.com

]]> How Conspiracy Theorizing May Soon Get You Labelled a ‘Domestic Terrorist’ https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/02/15/how-conspiracy-theorizing-may-soon-get-you-labelled-a-domestic-terrorist/ Mon, 15 Feb 2021 19:00:08 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=694764 Conspiracies for good and for evil do exist now, as they have from time immemorial, Matthew Ehret writes. The only question is which intention do you want to devote your life towards?

If you are starting to feel like forces controlling the governments of the west are out to get you, then it is likely that you are either a paranoid nut job, or a stubborn realist.

Either way, it means that you have some major problems on your hands.

If you don’t happen to find yourself among the tinfoil hat-wearing strata of conspiracy theorists waiting in a bunker for aliens to either strike down or save society from the shape shifting lizard people, but are rather contemplating how, in the 1960s, a shadow government took control of society over the dead bodies of many assassinated patriots, then certain conclusions tend to arise.

Three Elementary Realizations for Thinking People

The first conclusion you would likely arrive at is that the United States government was just put through the first coup in over 58 years (yes, what happened in 1963 was a coup). Although it is becoming a bit prohibitive to speak such words aloud in polite society, Nancy Pelosi’s official biographer Molly Ball, recently penned a scandalous Time Magazine article entitled ‘The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that Saved the 2020 Elections’ which admitted to this conspiracy saying:

“Even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream- a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.” (Lest you think that this was a subversion of democracy, Ball informs us that “they were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.”)

Another conclusion you might come to is that many of the political figures whom you believed were serving those who elected them into office, actually serve the interests of a clique of technocrats and billionaires lusting over the deconstruction of western civilization under something called “a Great Reset”. Where this was brushed off as an unfounded conspiracy theory not long ago, even Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister (and neo-Nazi supporting Rhodes Scholar) Chrystia Freeland decided to become a Trustee of the World Economic Forum just weeks ago. In this role, Freeland joins fellow Oxford technocrat Mark Carney in their mutual endeavor to be a part of the new movement to decarbonize civilization and make feudalism cool again.

Lastly, you might notice that your having arrived at these conclusions is itself increasingly becoming a form of thought-crime punishable in a variety of distasteful ways elaborated by a series of unprecedented new emergency regulations that propose extending the definition of “terrorism”. Those implicated under the new definition will be those broad swaths of citizens of western nations who don’t agree with the operating beliefs of the ruling oligarchy.

Already a 60 day review of the U.S. military is underway to purge the armed forces of all such “thought criminals” while McCarthyite legislation has been drafted to cleanse all government jobs of “conspiracy theorists”.

Another startling announcement from the National Terrorism Advisory Bulletin that domestic terrorists include: “ideologically-motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority [and] perceived grievances fueled by false narratives.”

While not yet fully codified into law (though it will be if not nipped in the bud soon), you can be sure that things are certainly moving fast as, before our very eyes, the right to free speech is being torn to shreds by means of censorship across social media and the internet, cancelling all opinions deemed unacceptable to the ruling class.

The Conspiracy to Subvert Conspiracy Theorizing

This should not come as a surprise, as Biden’s new addition to the Department of Homeland Security is a bizarre figure named Cass Sunstein who famously described exactly what this was going to look like in his infamous 2008 report ‘Conspiracy Theories’ (co-authored with Harvard Law School’s Adrien Vermeule). In this under-appreciated study, the duo foresaw the greatest threat to the ruling elite took the form of “conspiracy theorizing” within the American population using as examples of this delusion: the idea that the government had anything to do with the murders of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr, or the planning and execution of 9-11.

Just to be clear, conspiracy literally means ‘two or more people acting together in accord with an agreed upon idea and intention’.

The fact that Vermeule has made a legal career arguing that laws should be interpreted not by the “intentions” of lawgivers, but rather according to cost-benefit analysis gives us a useful insight into the deranged mind of a technocrat and the delusional reasoning that denies the very thing which has shaped literally ALL of human history.

In their “scholarly” essay, the authors wrote “the existence of both domestic and foreign conspiracy theories, we suggest, is no trivial matter, posing real risks to the government’s antiterrorism policies, whatever the latter may be.” After establishing his case for the threat of conspiracies, Sunstein says that “the best response consists in cognitive infiltration of extremist groups”.

Not one to simply draw criticisms, the pro-active Sunstein laid out five possible strategies which the social engineers managing the population could deploy to defuse this growing threat saying:

“(1) Government might ban conspiracy theorizing. (2) Government might impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories. (3) Government might itself engage in counter speech, marshaling arguments to discredit conspiracy theories. (4) Government might formally hire credible private parties to engage in counter speech. (5) Government might engage in informal communication with such parties, encouraging them to help”.

(I’ll let you think about which of these prescriptions were put into action over the ensuing 12 years.)

Cass Sunstein was particularly sensitive to this danger largely because: 1) he was a part of a very ugly conspiracy himself and 2) he is a world-renowned behaviorist.

The Problem of Reality for Behaviorists

As an economic behaviorist and lawyer arguing that all “human rights” should be extended to animals (blurring the line separating human dynamics from the law of the jungle as any fascist must), Sunstein has spent decades trying to model human behavior with computer simulations in an effort to “scientifically manage” such behavior.

As outlined in his book Nudge (co-authored with Nobel Prize winning behaviorist Richard Thaler), Sunstein “discovered” that people tend to organize their behavioral patterns around certain fundamental drives, such as the pursuit of pleasure, avoidance of pain, and certain Darwinian drives for sex, popularity, desire for conformity, desire for novelty, and greed.

One of the key principles of economic behaviorism which is seen repeated in such popular manuals as Freakonomics, Nudge, Predictably Irrational, The Wisdom of Crowds, and Animal Spirits, is that humans are both biologically determined due to their Darwinian impulses, but, unlike other animals, have the fatal flaw of being fundamentally irrational at their core. Since humans are fundamentally irrational, says the behaviorist, it is requisite that an enlightened elite impose “order” upon society while maintaining the illusion of freedom of choice from below. This is the underlying assumption of Karl Popper’s Open Society doctrine, which was fed to Popper’s protégé George Soros and which animates Soros’ General Theory of Reflexivity and his Oxford-based Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET).

This was at the heart of Obama’s science Czar John Holdren’s call for world government in his 1977 Ecoscience (co-written with his mentor Paul Ehrlich) where the young misanthrope envisioned a future utopic world governed by a scientifically managed master-class saying:

“Perhaps those agencies, combined with UNEP and the United Nations population agencies, might eventually be developed into a Planetary Regime- sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment. Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable”.

The caveat: If Darwinian impulses mixed with irrational “animal spirits” were truly all that animated those systems which behaviorists wish to map and manipulate (aka: “nudge” with rewards, punishments), then a scientific priesthood would indeed be a viable and perhaps necessary way to organize the world.

Fortunately, reality is a bit more elegant and dignified than behaviorists wish to admit.

Why Computer Modellers Hate Metaphysics

On a closer inspection of history, we find countless instances where people shape their individual and group behavior around sets of ideas that transcend controllable material impulses. When this happens, those individuals or groups tend to resist adapting to environments created for them. This incredible phenomenon is witnessed empirically in the form of the American Revolution, Warsaw Ghetto Uprisings, Civil Rights movements, and even some bold manifestations of anti-lockdown protests now underway around the world.

Among the most troublesome of those variables which upset computer models are: “Conscience”, “Truth”, “Intentions”, “Soul”, “Honor”, “God”, “Justice”, “Patriotism”, “Dignity”, and “Freedom”.

Whenever individuals shape their identities around these very real, though immaterial (aka: “metaphysical”) principles, they cannot be “nudged” towards pre-determined decisions that defy reason and morality. Adherence to these principles also tends to afford thinking people an important additional edge of creative insight necessary to cut through false explanatory narratives that attempt to hide lies behind the appearance of truth (aka: sophistry).

As witnessed on multiple occasions throughout history, such individuals who value the health of their souls over the intimidating (and extremely malleable) force of popular opinion, will often decide to sacrifice personal comfort and even their lives in order to defend those values which their minds and consciences deem important.

These rare, but invaluable outliers will often resist policies that threaten to undo their freedoms or undermine the basis of their society’s capacity to produce food, and energy for their children and grandchildren. What is worse, is that their example is often extremely contagious causing other members of the sheep class to believe that they too are human and endowed with unalienable rights which should be defended.

The Intentions Ordering World History

Perhaps, most “destructive” of all is that these outlier people tend to look for abstract things like “causes” in historical dynamics shaping the context of their present age, as well as their current geopolitical environment.

Whenever this type of thinking is done, carefully crafted narratives fed to the masses by an enlightened elite will often fail in their powers to persuade, since seekers after truth soon come to realize that IDEAS and intentions (aka: conspiracies) shape our past, present and future. When the dominating intentions shaping society’s trajectory is in conformity with Natural Law, humanity tends to improve, freedoms increase, culture matures and evil loses its hold. Inversely, when the intentions animating history are out of conformity with Natural Law, the opposite happens as societies lose their moral and material fitness to survive and slip ever more quickly into dark ages.

While sitting in a jail in Birmingham Alabama in 1963, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. described this reality eloquently when he said:

“A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust… One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws”

From Plato’s organization of his Academy and efforts to shape a Philosopher King to beat the forces of the Persian Empire, to Cicero’s efforts to save the Roman Republic, to Augustine’s battles to save the soul of Christianity all the way to our present age, conspiracies for the good and counter-conspiracies for evil have shaped history. If one were to begin an investigation into history without an understanding that ideas and intentions caused the trajectory of history, as is the standard practice among history professors dominant in todays world, then one would become incapable of understanding anything essential about one’s own reality.

It is irrelevant that behaviorists and other fascists wish their victims to believe that history just happens simply because random short-sighted impulses kinetically drive events on a timeline- the truth of my claim exists for any serious truth seeker to discover it for themselves.

Back to our Present Sad State of Affairs

Now we all know that Sunstein spent the following years working as Obama’s Regulatory Czar alongside an army of fellow behaviorists who took control of all levers of policy making as outlined by Time Magazine’s April 13, 2009 article ‘How Obama is Using the Science of Change’. As the fabric of western civilization, and traditional values of family, gender, and even macro economic concepts like “development” were degraded during this period, the military industrial complex had a field day as Sunstein’s wife Samantha Power worked closely with Susan Rice in the promotion of “humanitarian bombings” of small nations under Soros’ Responsibility to Protect doctrine.

After the Great Reset Agenda was announced in June 2020, Sunstein was recruited to head the propaganda wing of the World Health Organization known as the WHO Technical Advisory Group where his skills in mass behavior modification was put to use in order to counteract the dangerous spread of conspiracy theories that persuaded large chunks of the world population that COVID-19 was part of a larger conspiracy to undermine national sovereignty and impose world government.

The head of WHO described Sunstein’s mandate in the following terms:

“In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, countries are using a range of tools to influence behavior: Information campaigns are one tool, but so are laws, regulations, guidelines and even fines…That’s why behavioral science is so important.”

Today, hundreds of Obama-era behaviorists have streamed back into influential positions of government under the new “scientifically managed”, evidence-based governance coming back to life under Biden promising to undo the dark days of President Trump.

Ideologues who have been on record calling for world government, the elimination of the sick and elderly (see Obamacare architect Ezekiel Emmanuel’s Why I Hope to Die At 75), and population control are streaming back into positions of influence. If you think that anything they have done to return to power is unlawful, or antithetical to the principles of the Constitution, then these technocrats want you to know that you are a delusional conspiracy theorist and as such, represent a potential threat to yourself and the society of which you are but a part.

If you question World Health Organization narratives on COVID-19, or doubt the use of vaccines produced by organizations like Astra Zeneca due to their ties to eugenics organizations then you are a delusional conspiracy theorist.

If you doubt that global warming is caused by carbon dioxide or that implementing the Paris Climate accords may cause more damage to humanity than climate change ever could, then you must be a conspiracy theorist.

If you believe that the U.S. government just went through a regime change coordinated by something called “the deep state”, then you run the risk of being labelled a delusional threat to “the general welfare” deserving of the sort of treatment dolled out to any typical terrorist.

It appears that the many comforts we have taken for granted over the past 50-year drunken stupor called “globalization” are quickly coming to an end, and thankfully not one but two opposing intentions for what the new operating system will be are actively vying for control. This clash was witnessed in stark terms during the January 2021 Davos Summit, where Xi Jinping and Putin’s call for a new system of win-win cooperation, multipolarity and long-term development offset the unipolar zero-sum ideologues of the west seeking to undo the foundations of industrial civilization.

Either way you look at it, conspiracies for good and for evil do exist now, as they have from time immemorial. The only question is which intention do you want to devote your life towards?

The author can be reached at canadianpatriot1776@tutanota.com

]]> America and Britain Are the Big Losers on the World Stage https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/11/24/america-and-britain-big-losers-world-stage/ Tue, 24 Nov 2020 18:00:14 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=598024 Patrick COCKBURN

Lockdowns are unnecessary if the use of masks is practiced by 95 per cent of the population, says Dr Hans Kluge, the World Health Organisation’s European chief. This is good to know, though it is a pity that the WHO did not make the point more forcefully in March as the pandemic was exploding across Europe and the world.

The necessity for face masks had been expressed at the time, but the advice to use them came from a source that European and American leaders dismissed as politically unacceptable. As Britain and other European states were going into lockdown, Dr George Gao, director-general of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention – the main Chinese public health body – was asked in an interview on 27 March about what he believed were the mistakes being made by other countries trying to control the epidemic. He replied that “the big mistake in the US and Europe, in my opinion, is that people aren’t wearing masks”.

His opinion should have been taken seriously since China, notwithstanding the suppression of the Uighurs and democracy in Hong Kong, along with other east Asian countries, were succeeding in bringing the coronavirus epidemic under control. But instead of drawing on this experience, the new cold war against China ensured that any positive news from there was ignored, disbelieved or derided. China’s initial concealment of the epidemic was highlighted, and its success in containing it was disregarded. When China’s return to normality was mentioned, it was attributed to autocratic rule that could not and should not be emulated elsewhere. In point of fact, the Chinese achievement resulted largely from old-fashioned public health measures, with a heavy emphasis on test-and-trace and travel bans, pursued with great energy and with the mobilisation of vast resources.

Refusal to learn from a successful campaign against the coronavirus because it was carried out by a political rival was self-destructive for Europe and the US, but their response should not have been unexpected. Before the pandemic, we were already living in a deglobalising world where individual nation states jostle to enhance their power. Rule-based international institutions and coalitions from the WHO and WTO to the EU and NATO were ebbing in influence. The epidemic has only flood-lit the fact that re-energised nationalism is the spirit of the age from America to the Philippines and from China to Brazil.

The dominance of this trend has become clear since 2016, the decisive year that saw the UK voting to leave the EU, the US choosing Donald Trump as president, and Turkey transforming itself into a full-blown autocracy in the wake of a failed military coup.

But Covid-19 has given history a powerful nudge down the roads it was already taking. If a global threat like a deadly virus that knows no borders had emerged a decade earlier, it would probably have provoked a global response under the aegis of the US. But after the coronavirus emerged in Wuhan at the end of 2019, the opposite happened and it speeded up deglobalisation – and not just because of xenophobic rants by Trump or the mini-Trumps that have been popping up around the world.

Nor was it solely among populist nationalist regimes and autocracies that “health nationalism” has become the order of the day. A study, called “Geopolitical Europe in Times of Covid-19” by Mark Leonard of the European Council on Foreign Relations, notes that the shock of the epidemic provoked the same response by nation states within the EU as it did among those outside it: “It was clear that none of the great powers were looking to the multilateral system to provide an answer [to the epidemic]. As the death count rose, every country acted as if it was on its own, closing borders, stockpiling medical equipment, and introducing export controls.” This pushback against political and commercial globalisation continues, affecting everything from cross border migration, international travel and tourism to global supply chains and the distribution of vaccines.

Another nudge to history delivered by Covid-19 is the shift of the crucial arena of world politics from Europe to Asia. The EU is stumbling politically, displaying once again the weaknesses it showed during the 2008 financial crisis and the refugee crisis sparked by the Middle East wars. Brussels may appear like a behemoth to a self-marginalised Britain as it negotiates the terms of its exit from the EU, but the EU is itself becoming more marginal in the world.

Can any rough guide to winners and losers in the year of Covid-19 be drawn up at this stage? America and Britain are both bad losers: Trump and Johnson had been divisive and demagogic before the epidemic struck, but when it did strike it dramatically exposed the dysfunctional nature of their governments and their personal inability to deal with a real crisis. This sense of chronic breakdown is exacerbated in the US by Trump’s fraudulent claims to have won the presidential election, giving a toxic foretaste of a permanently divided and destabilised America.

For Britain the post-Covid-19 and post-Brexit future looks even bleaker than in the US. The latter is a superpower that can make gross mistakes in a way that Britain, as a smaller player, cannot afford to do.

Britain’s final exit from the EU was always going to be difficult, but coronavirus means that it is entering a particularly forbidding political landscape. Brexit in itself is not so peculiar: many nations have sought self-determination, propelled by dreams of getting back control, but Britain has traditionally relied on foreign alliances in war and peace. It has stood alone, notably against Napoleon and Hitler, only because its allies had been defeated and it had no other option.

Britain will try to re-glue its relationship with the US and Europe by becoming a doughty spear carrier for both in the deepening cold war against Russia and China. This explains Johnson’s £16bn increase in the defence budget over the next four years, despite the calamitous damage inflicted on the economy by the epidemic. Gestures like this and a bit of threat-inflation solidify alliances, but they are scarcely an original strategy: Tony Blair tried a similar approach with disastrous results by joining US military ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Britain is facing one of the most serious crises in its history under the least serious leadership it has ever known. The Brexiteers turned out to be a bigger danger than Brexit. Every week brings fresh evidence of their blunders, shady dealings and blindness to the dangers of a deglobalising world in which Britain will be a small fish trying to navigate the political oceans.

counterpunch.org

]]> COVID-19: The Case Against Herd Immunity https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/10/17/covid-19-the-case-against-herd-immunity/ Sat, 17 Oct 2020 15:15:18 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=559192 Marcello Ferrada de Noli has studied Sweden’s response to the virus and advises countries elsewhere to reject the neoliberal model and survive instead. 

Marcello FERRADA DE NOLI

The elderly have comprised the vast majority of Covid-19 fatalities in Sweden, either dying in care homes or their own residence, often alone.

By mid-May 2020, only 13 percent of the care home victims had received treatment at Swedish hospitals.  In August 2020, only five percent of the Covid-19 patients admitted for treatment at Swedish hospitals came from care home facilities.

Sweden has by far the highest proportion of deaths among confirmed Corona cases in the Nordic countries.  Let’s look into the possible reasons.

Herd Immunity

International comparisons of the Covid-19 situation may help to assess the efficacy of the different strategies used by developed countries’ health authorities.

Such strategies may have been assimilated by some countries formerly known as “Third World” because of continued economic dependency; the praxis of attributing superior technical know-how in matters of public health to countries seen as more economically developed still exists in some governing circles.

For this reason, populations in Latin America and Africa and other regions have been ruthlessly targeted with propaganda by developed countries promoting their epidemiological methods.

In Europe, Italy was the first country to apply the “lockdown” approach.  At the start of the “second wave” it had one of the lowest incidences of new Covid-19 cases.

The model presented as alternative is “herd immunity,” most associated with  Sweden’s neoliberal interpretation of it.

Economy First

The idea here is to prioritize the economy: no closing factories, schools, or restaurants.  Sweden’s Public Health Agency’s chief epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell said, “if we close the schools we would lose 25 percent of the labour force” (parents would have to stay at home).

He has also stated, “herd immunity is the one thing which eventually will stop the spread of this virus.” In the words of Johan Giesecke, the agency’s senior adviser, herd immunity strategy would consist of “letting the virus pass through the population.”

In response to the international criticism that ensued, the Swedish government tried to distance itself from the term but in practice the strategy has not changed.

Sweden’s ambassador to the U.S. declared that “Stockholm could reach herd immunity by May.” However, five months’ later this has not been achieved, and Sweden’s economy has suffered just as much, if not more, than its neighbors who used lockdown measures.

The epidemiological indicators I present below expose the flawed, not to say macabre, effects of the Swedish exporting model.

The message to other nations is: Don’t buy it. Survive instead.

Case Fatality Rate in Sweden & Nordic
Neighbors: Denmark, Finland, Norway

Based on current international data, I have carried out a comparison of mortality indicators among Nordic countries that applied forms of lockdown, and Sweden.

There certainly are multiple models for such international epidemiological comparisons. However, I start with the simple method to determine whether there is a statistical significance in the reported differences regarding total number, number per capita, etc.

(As we know, not all differences in mortality rates are epidemiologically/statistically significant, although they can appear as such in media reports).

Results found through comparisons between the number of Covid-19 deaths in Sweden (n = 5,883) and ditto the total numbers in Denmark, Finland and Norway (n = 1,284), give a significant overrepresentation of the Swedish deaths (X2 = 3023.3239, p = <0.00001). The difference is thus highly statistically significant.

Another method is the Case Fatality Rate (hereinafter referred to as CFR). CFR intends to estimate the proportion of deaths among confirmed cases. It shows the proportion of those who were ill and who eventually died; the World Health Organization considers it “a measure of severity among detected cases.”

Among more than 200 countries included in the international tables on Coronavirus, Sweden is currently ranked 14th out of the 15 countries with the highest Covid-19 death rate per 1 M population.

However, when CFR is taken into account, Sweden increases to sixth place in that group, illustrating the significance of the CFR method.  This ranking position has remained rather even for Sweden. My calculation (as of Oct. 7 , 2020) indicates the same results established in a research paper from May 2020.

Regarding the comparison among the said Nordic countries, I have used two CFR calculation models. One is the usual CFR, which only needs the death toll and the number of reported Covid-19 patients.

The second consists of a more refined method, also recently described by the WHO, which in addition requires the number of cases that have recovered from the disease.

With the first method, the current CFR calculation results in: Denmark 2.18, Finland 3.16, Norway 1.8, and Sweden 6.11 percent.

Table 1: Case Fatality Ratio in Denmark, Finland, Norway & Sweden

Covid-19 confirmed cases Covid-19 deaths CFR in percent

 
Denmark
30,379
663
2.18
Finland
10,929
346 3.16
Norway
14,669
275 1.8
Sweden 96,145
5,883
6.11

(Data for the CFR calculation: Worldometer, Oct. 6,  2020.)

Furthermore, according to the WHO, the CFR result may be underestimated when delays in reporting deaths occur,  which is the case for Sweden, as demonstrated by a recent  article authored by nine Swedish researchers.

So, even if  Sweden’s above-mentioned CFR appears definitely higher than that of neighboring countries, it could be even higher when considering the bias mentioned by WHO.

The second CFR model consists of a calculation which also includes the number of recovered cases. The question is, could that calculation accurately be applied in the international comparison that includes Sweden?

The answer would be no. At least not officially. This is because Sweden does not report data regarding such cases internationally. Why not? Because in the first place – according to the explanation given by Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen) – they do not even keep a record of the total number of the country’s recovered cases.

This was the reply I received from the statistic coordinator at Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsens Statisksamordnade), who emailed me on Oct. 6, 2020: “Socialstyrelsen does not have an estimate of the overall number of recovered cases of Covid-19.”

However, there are two findings that would help to approximately estimate Sweden’s  missing (or unreported) number of recovered cases.

First is the percentage of cases confirmed world-wide that have recovered, which is 75 percent, thus providing a 75 percent average.

The second finding shows that the number of recovered from confirmed cases in the Nordic countries neighboring Sweden also gives an average of 75 percent.

Table 2: Covid-19 recovered cases, percent of confirmed cases

Covid-19 confirmed cases Recovered cases Percent
Denmark
30,379
23,655 77 %
Finland
10,929
8,100 74 %
Norway
14,669
11,190 76 %

Therefore, I would estimate the number of recovered cases in Sweden to be 75 percent of the total confirmed cases in the country  (n= 96,145), which gives n= 72,109.

Table 3: Case Fatality Ratio in Denmark, Finland, Norway & Sweden

Covid-19 cases Covid-19 deaths Recovered cases Recovered + death cases Case Fatality Ratio Case Fatality Rate in %
Denmark
30,379
663
23,655 24,318 0.02 2.7
Finland
10,929
346 8,100 8,445 0.04 4.1
Norway
14,669
275 11,190 11,465 0.02 2.4
Sweden
96,145
5,883
72,109* 77,992* 0.076 7.54

(*Estimated Sweden’s recovered cases would be 75 percent of confirmed cases.)

 Sweden’s High Covid-19 CFR

In Sweden, most of the Covid-19 victims were 70 years or older. By June 2020, half of those individuals (n=2036) were known to be living in nursing homes, with a further number (n= 1062) in the home-care system, or in residences where many victims lived alone.

Only 13 percent of the care home victims had received treatment at Swedish hospitals by mid-May. By August, Covid-19 care-home residents made up only a 5 percent of such patients treated at hospitals.

While in Denmark, half of Covid-19 patients over 70 were admitted to intensive care, and in Norway 30 percent were admitted, in Sweden only 21 percent of the same age group received access.

Health authorities in Sweden issued a directive stipulating certain groups of patients should be left out of intensive care. These included: those over 80 years of age, those over 70 years of age with one significant illness and those between 60 and 70 years of age with at least two organ diseases including heart, lung and kidney.

Ensuing, in May 2020, Karolinska Hospital reported that only 80 percent of IVA places at Karolinska Hospital were occupied.  This prompted Swedish TV to broadcast it as “very positive,” while Aftonbladet wondered whether “we are making it better than in other countries.”  Meanwhile scores of Swedish elderly had been denied treatment at those intensive care facilities.

In its definition, epidemiology strives to identify both the risk factors that can lead to the morbidity/mortality of the disease and the population groups that are particularly exposed.

As an explanation for Sweden’s disproportionate Covid-19 mortality among the elderly, the Swedish Public Health Agency’s General Director Johan Carlson declared that chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell has no responsibility in “what has happened in elderly care” in Sweden, which [instead] “is a consequence of a neglected structure and preparedness.”

Thus, the elderly were a known risk group, including for the spread of the virus. Why then was that “structural” problem not taken into account in the architecture of the Swedish Covid-19 strategy from the beginning?

For example, why was the national directive on nursing homes (from April 1, 2020) so delayed? A few weeks later, it became known that nursing homes in 81 percent of Sweden’s municipalities  “had confirmed or suspected cases of Covid-19.”

Are Sweden’s Mortality Statistics Comparable?

Swedish epidemiologists would try to explain that Covid-19 mortality statistics for Sweden are difficult or not accurate, for international comparisons because the number of actual individuals with the disease should be estimated higher that the confirmed cases, like in the case of Infection Mortality Rate (IMR).

But then, why has Sweden’s testing for Covid-19 been the lowest among its Nordic neighboring countries, and also low in comparison with European countries?  Is Covid-19 testing in Sweden incompatible with other countries?

Nevertheless, regarding testing, logic’s answer is simple: Reducing the number of tests means fewer opportunities to detect those with the disease. Which is not the same as assuming that those diseased individuals do not exist.

Indeed they do exist, and they are contagious. However, the ‘gain’ here about this is that we had a smaller number of new cases to report. Hence, a real public health problem is turned into a tool to cover a flawed  epidemiological strategy.

What Do We Need?

Don’t follow the herd immunity model. To decimate SARS-cov-2 what we do need is a vaccine. What countries in disarray need is to start with available vaccination programs.

By adopting a Swedish public-health model you may be serving a political establishment whose remits are greed, corporate economic power and adherence to its own interpretation of what democracy should mean.

For what is democracy in the context of this debate? Who shall ultimately decide the domestic strategy of a problem threatening the life of every single citizen of a country?

Democratic decisions are built on the participation of all, and in the interests of all, ensuring all voices are heard. In my experience, this is not the case in Sweden.

The findings of this work were refused publication by Swedish mainstream newspapers.   They prefer, instead, to control discourse, permitting only mild criticism, which serves the authorities in the current Covid-19 debate.

This new Ikea-wrapped neoliberal concept of democracy, should not be unpacked by countries in Latin-America, Africa and other latitudes.  There, a dignified formula for democracy should preclude the Swedish praxis of how – without the participation of the demos (Greek for “people”), those in power exercise the kratos (“rule”) to politically benefit themselves.

The Indicter via consortiumnews.com

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