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All this was known from the very beginning as several epidemiologists explained that the mRNA vaccines were not ready, most probably offered limited protection at great price eventually which is exactly what we are seeing now.
In fact, a bombshell paper he co-authored last
month suggests ALL vaccines for common respiratory viruses may face
intractable hurdles. And that’s not even the worst news. I’m not
exaggerating.
Last month, three scientists pointed out flu shots barely work and couldn’t be approved based on the standards used for vaccines like measles:
“After more than 60 years of experience with influenza vaccines,
very little improvement in vaccine prevention of infection has been
noted… our best approved influenza vaccines would be inadequate for licensure for most other vaccine-preventable diseases.” [emphasis added]
True. Severalrigorouspapers have proven that flu shots are placebos masquerading as public policy.
But the same scientists then compared our beloved and groundbreaking Covid vaccines to those pointless flu jabs:
As variant SARS-CoV-2 strains have emerged, deficiencies in these
[Covid] vaccines reminiscent of influenza vaccines have become
apparent.
Just who are these vicious anti-vax rebels?
Three researchers at the National Institutes for Health. Including
one whose name may ring a bell: the now-retired Dr. Anthony S. Fauci.
Yet the Covid/flu shot comparison is only one of the article’s bombshells.
At its core, the piece raises the question of whether any vaccines can ever work well enough to matter against bugs like common coronaviruses, influenza, and RSV.
And that question hides an even more troubling one, one the authors
do not ask: have our efforts to beat Sars-Cov-2 by driving our immune
response in ways it was not designed to go caused dangers we are only
beginning to understand?
Long before the coronavirus hit, Fauci and scientists who specialize
in vaccine development knew flu shots hardly worked. They knew they
needed a better vaccine to beat Sars-Cov-2.
As Covid spread around the world in early 2020, they believed they
had found one: jabs that had a completely different mechanism of action
than influenza vaccines.
Flu shots are old-school “inactivated virus” vaccines. They contain
actual influenza viruses grown in chicken eggs and treated with formaldehyde so they cannot reproduce.
Fauci and his colleagues at Warp Speed, the federal program that
developed the Covid shots, decided to focus on mRNA biotechnology to
make a next-generation vaccine.
The Covid vaccines consist of a strand of genetic code – mRNA – that
tells our cells to make a piece of the coronavirus called the spike
protein, along with a tiny fat globe that encases the mRNA and helps
bring it to our cells. (mRNA occurs naturally, but the mRNA in the
vaccines has been subtly modified to make it easier to deliver to our
cells and more potent when it arrives.)
In the most basic way, mRNA vaccines work.
That is, they make our cells produce huge amounts of the spike
protein. They cause a powerful response with high levels of anti-spike
protein antibodies, far more than our immune systems produce in response
to an actual coronavirus infection. Fauci and other scientists hoped
those antibodies would have a strong and lasting protective effect.
—
Only they didn’t.
As Ken Frazier, the then-chief executive of Merck, which is history’s
most successful vaccine company but which rapidly ended its efforts at a
coronavirus vaccine, warned in 2020:
There are a lot of examples of vaccines in the past that have
stimulated the immune system, but ultimately didn’t confer protection.
Frazier was right.
We now have two years of real-world data on the mRNAs, based on
billions of doses. Putting side effects aside, they work extremely well
against Covid – for about four months after the second dose.
After that, their effectiveness rapidly wanes. It falls to zero
against coronavirus infection and transmission within a few months. In
fact, we have increasing evidence that it eventually turns negative –
that vaccinated people are MORE likely to get Covid repeatedly than the
unvaccinated.
What about severe disease and death from Covid? Early on, the mRNAs
prevent those too, because if you don’t get infected with the
coronavirus, you can’t die from it.
What about after they stop working against infection? What about now?
In truth, no one knows. Fauci and vaccine advocates will insist forever
that the mRNAs retain some effectiveness against severe disease and
death.
But their evidence comes almost entirely from epidemiological studies that compare the results in non-random groups
of vaccinated and unvaccinated people. The problem is that these
studies cannot be trusted because vaccinated people are healthier as a
group than unvaccinated people (and the gap has likely increased with
each booster).
This is exactly the same reason that influenza shots seem to work against pneumonia EVEN BEFORE PEOPLE RECEIVE THEM. Flu vaccines are a marker for health, not a driver of health.
—
At the same time, the coronavirus has mutated against the vaccines
exactly as some immunologists predicted. It has changed its spike to
defeat the mRNA-generated antibodies.
Worse, efforts to update the vaccine against the new Omicron variants do not work, probably because the first generation vaccines leave such a powerful imprint on the immune system.
The upshot is that Covid vaccines, like flu vaccines, appear to be – at best – ineffective on a population basis.
Two years after mass mRNA vaccinations began, the wealthy countries
that used them are still having mass Covid waves and significant deaths,
mainly in the same very elderly people who have died from Covid all
along. Poorer countries that used other vaccines are not reporting many
Covid cases or deaths anymore, but whether that’s because they don’t
have them or have just stopped counting is not clear.
So the Covid vaccines work mechanistically as promised. Only they don’t actually do any long-term good.
—
And Fauci and his co-authors know where to lay the blame. On the human immune system.
It’s not me (or my vaccines) – it’s you!
No, seriously.
As the paper explains, we spend our lives breathing an almost infinite variety of threats:
Because humans inhale and ingest enormous quantities of exogenous
proteins with every breath and mouthful, the respiratory and
gastrointestinal immune compartments have evolved to deal with continual
and massive antigenic assaults from the outside world.
Thus our immune systems have learned to make a distinction between
relatively minor respiratory viruses like influenza and RSV – which have
“a short duration of illness and a typically uncomplicated course” –
and far more serious intruders like measles, which replicate
systemically and can kill even young and healthy people.
The serious threats rouse the full complement of our immune defenses.
And if we beat them, we end up with lifetime immunity. The minor
viruses do not:
As a result, the non-systemically replicating respiratory
viruses, apparently including SARS-CoV-2 tend to repeatedly re-infect
people over their lifetimes without ever eliciting complete and durable
protection.
—
Any virologist or immunologist will tell you that – in the words of Science magazine:
For many infectious diseases, naturally acquired immunity is
known to be more powerful than vaccine-induced immunity and it often
lasts a lifetime.
But our immune systems aren’t trying to provide lifetime
protection against the minor respiratory viruses. We’d rather live with
them and the minor threats they represent, instead of blowing up our own
bodies to defeat an infection that will likely last only a few days.
In Fauci’s words, we have made an
immunologic “Faustian bargain” between tolerance versus infection
control [allowing] transient, moderated infection by respiratory agents
of low or intermediate pathogenicity to restrain the destructive forces
of an immune elimination response.
In other words, the natural human response to real coronaviruses is
NOT long-lasting immunity. And vaccines are not as effective as real
viruses in provoking an immune response. How, then, could a coronavirus
vaccine provide such immunity?
—
Two years ago, the geniuses of virology and immunology thought they had the answer.
The mRNA Covid jabs were designed to overcome evolution and
make us do something we had evolved NOT to do. They fooled our immune
systems into a much more powerful response than it would otherwise have
to Sars-Cov-2, producing supra-naturally high levels of IgG antibodies.
Those super-high antibody levels were supposed to be a feature, not a bug. They were the reason that the mRNAs suppressed infection.
But we now know that the body quickly returns those antibody levels to normal.
Worse, if we force them higher again with repeated booster shots, our
immune system will respond by producing a kind of antibody normally
seen primarily as a response to non-replicating allergens, not viruses.
In other words, our immune systems appear to respond very unfavorably in the long run to the provocation from the mRNAs.
—
The paper ends on a stunning note:
Past unsuccessful attempts to elicit solid protection against
mucosal respiratory viruses and to control the deadly outbreaks and
pandemics they cause have been a scientific and public health failure…
We are excited and invigorated that many investigators and
collaborative groups are rethinking, from the ground up, all of our past
assumptions and approaches to preventing important respiratory viral
diseases and working to find bold new paths forward.
Wait, what?
Past unsuccessful attempts?
From the ground up?
Fauci just helped spearhead the effort to push a new type of vaccine
on the world. After only a few months of testing, the United States and
other countries injected their citizens with more than 3 billion doses
of mRNA.
Yet with these words, Fauci is admitting that effort has failed
completely. He’s not excluding the mRNAs from “past unsuccessful
attempts” that “have been a public health failure.” He’s not saying they
can form the basis for “bold new paths.”
He’s washing his hands of them – and whatever the long-term
consequences of their failed effort to rewire the immune system may be.
Tony Fauci is lucky.
He’s 82.
It’ll be up to the rest of us to deal with what he’s done.
The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now
“Biden’s decision to sabotage the
pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and
forth debate inside Washington’s national security community . . .”
NORD STREAM
The U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center can be found in a location
as obscure as its name—down what was once a country lane in rural Panama
City, a now-booming resort city in the southwestern panhandle of
Florida, 70 miles south of the Alabama border. The center’s complex is
as nondescript as its location—a drab concrete post-World War II
structure that has the look of a vocational high school on the west side
of Chicago. A coin-operated laundromat and a dance school are across
what is now a four-lane road.
The center has been training highly skilled deep-water divers for
decades who, once assigned to American military units worldwide, are
capable of technical diving to do the good—using C4 explosives to clear
harbors and beaches of debris and unexploded ordinance—as well as the
bad, like blowing up foreign oil rigs, fouling intake valves for
undersea power plants, destroying locks on crucial shipping canals. The
Panama City center, which boasts the second largest indoor pool in
America, was the perfect place to recruit the best, and most taciturn,
graduates of the diving school who successfully did last summer what
they had been authorized to do 260 feet under the surface of the Baltic
Sea.
Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22,
planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later,
destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source
with direct knowledge of the operational planning.
Two of the pipelines, which were known collectively as Nord Stream 1,
had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap
Russian natural gas for more than a decade. A second pair of pipelines,
called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational. Now,
with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border and the bloodiest
war in Europe since 1945 looming, President Joseph Biden saw the
pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for
his political and territorial ambitions.
Asked for comment, Adrienne Watson, a White House spokesperson, said
in an email, “This is false and complete fiction.” Tammy Thorp, a
spokesperson for the Central Intelligence Agency, similarly wrote: “This
claim is completely and utterly false.”
Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine
months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s
national security community about how to best achieve that goal. For
much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how
to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible.
There was a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on the graduates of
the center’s hardcore diving school in Panama City. The divers were
Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Forces Command, whose
covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to
the Senate and House leadership—the so-called Gang of Eight.
The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks
as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of
2022.
President Biden and his foreign policy team—National Security Adviser
Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and Victoria Nuland,
the Undersecretary of State for Policy—had been vocal and consistent in
their hostility to the two pipelines, which ran side by side for 750
miles under the Baltic Sea from two different ports in northeastern
Russia near the Estonian border, passing close to the Danish island of
Bornholm before ending in northern Germany.
The direct route, which bypassed any need to transit Ukraine, had
been a boon for the German economy, which enjoyed an abundance of cheap
Russian natural gas—enough to run its factories and heat its homes while
enabling German distributors to sell excess gas, at a profit,
throughout Western Europe. Action that could be traced to the
administration would violate US promises to minimize direct conflict
with Russia. Secrecy was essential.
From its earliest days, Nord Stream 1 was seen by Washington and its
anti-Russian NATO partners as a threat to western dominance. The holding
company behind it, Nord Stream AG,
was incorporated in Switzerland in 2005 in partnership with Gazprom, a
publicly traded Russian company producing enormous profits for
shareholders which is dominated by oligarchs known to be in the thrall
of Putin. Gazprom controlled 51 percent of the company, with four
European energy firms—one in France, one in the Netherlands and two in
Germany—sharing the remaining 49 percent of stock, and having the right
to control downstream sales of the inexpensive natural gas to local
distributors in Germany and Western Europe. Gazprom’s profits were
shared with the Russian government, and state gas and oil revenues were
estimated in some years to amount to as much as 45 percent of Russia’s annual budget.
America’s political fears were real: Putin would now have an
additional and much-needed major source of income, and Germany and the
rest of Western Europe would become addicted to low-cost natural gas
supplied by Russia—while diminishing European reliance on America. In
fact, that’s exactly what happened. Many Germans saw Nord Stream 1 as
part of the deliverance of former Chancellor Willy Brandt’s famed Ostpolitik theory,
which would enable postwar Germany to rehabilitate itself and other
European nations destroyed in World War II by, among other initiatives,
utilizing cheap Russian gas to fuel a prosperous Western European market
and trading economy.
Nord Stream 1 was dangerous enough, in the view of NATO and Washington, but Nord Stream 2, whose construction was completed in September of 2021,
would, if approved by German regulators, double the amount of cheap gas
that would be available to Germany and Western Europe. The second
pipeline also would provide enough gas for more than 50 percent of
Germany’s annual consumption. Tensions were constantly escalating
between Russia and NATO, backed by the aggressive foreign policy of the
Biden Administration.
Opposition to Nord Stream 2 flared on the eve of the Biden
inauguration in January 2021, when Senate Republicans, led by Ted Cruz
of Texas, repeatedly raised the political threat of cheap Russian
natural gas during the confirmation hearing of Blinken as Secretary of
State. By then a unified Senate had successfully passed a law that, as
Cruz told Blinken, “halted [the pipeline] in its tracks.” There would be
enormous political and economic pressure from the German government,
then headed by Angela Merkel, to get the second pipeline online.
Would Biden stand up to the Germans? Blinken said yes, but added
that he had not discussed the specifics of the incoming President’s
views. “I know his strong conviction that this is a bad idea, the Nord
Stream 2,” he said. “I know that he would have us use every persuasive
tool that we have to convince our friends and partners, including
Germany, not to move forward with it.”
A few months later, as the construction of the second pipeline neared completion, Biden blinked. That May, in a stunning turnaround, the administration waived sanctions against Nord Stream AG, with a State Department official conceding
that trying to stop the pipeline through sanctions and diplomacy had
“always been a long shot.” Behind the scenes, administration officials reportedly urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, by then facing a threat of Russian invasion, not to criticize the move.
There were immediate consequences. Senate Republicans, led by Cruz,
announced an immediate blockade of all of Biden’s foreign policy
nominees and delayed passage of the annual defense bill for months, deep
into the fall. Politico later depicted
Biden’s turnabout on the second Russian pipeline as “the one decision,
arguably more than the chaotic military withdrawal from Afghanistan,
that has imperiled Biden’s agenda.”
The administration was floundering, despite getting a reprieve on the crisis in mid-November, when Germany’s energy regulators suspended approval of the second Nord Stream pipeline. Natural gas prices surged 8% within days,
amid growing fears in Germany and Europe that the pipeline suspension
and the growing possibility of a war between Russia and Ukraine would
lead to a very much unwanted cold winter. It was not clear to Washington
just where Olaf Scholz, Germany’s newly appointed chancellor, stood.
Months earlier, after the fall of Afghanistan, Scholtz had publicly
endorsed French President Emmanuel Macron’s call for a more autonomous
European foreign policy in a speech in Prague—clearly suggesting less
reliance on Washington and its mercurial actions.
Throughout all of this, Russian troops had been steadily and
ominously building up on the borders of Ukraine, and by the end of
December more than 100,000 soldiers were in position to strike from
Belarus and Crimea. Alarm was growing in Washington, including an
assessment from Blinken that those troop numbers could be “doubled in
short order.”
The administration’s attention once again was focused on Nord Stream.
As long as Europe remained dependent on the pipelines for cheap natural
gas, Washington was afraid that countries like Germany would be
reluctant to supply Ukraine with the money and weapons it needed to
defeat Russia.
It was at this unsettled moment that Biden authorized Jake Sullivan
to bring together an interagency group to come up with a plan.
All options were to be on the table. But only one would emerge.
PLANNING
In December of 2021, two months before the first Russian tanks rolled
into Ukraine, Jake Sullivan convened a meeting of a newly formed task
force—men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the
State and Treasury Departments—and asked for recommendations about how
to respond to Putin’s impending invasion.
It would be the first of a series of top-secret meetings, in a secure
room on a top floor of the Old Executive Office Building, adjacent to
the White House, that was also the home of the President’s Foreign
Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). There was the usual back and forth
chatter that eventually led to a crucial preliminary question: Would the
recommendation forwarded by the group to the President be
reversible—such as another layer of sanctions and currency
restrictions—or irreversible—that is, kinetic actions, which could not
be undone?
What became clear to participants, according to the source with
direct knowledge of the process, is that Sullivan intended for the group
to come up with a plan for the destruction of the two Nord Stream
pipelines—and that he was delivering on the desires of the President.
THE PLAYERS Left to right: Victoria Nuland, Anthony Blinken, and Jake Sullivan.
Over the next several meetings, the participants debated options for
an attack. The Navy proposed using a newly commissioned submarine to
assault the pipeline directly. The Air Force discussed dropping bombs
with delayed fuses that could be set off remotely. The CIA argued that
whatever was done, it would have to be covert. Everyone involved
understood the stakes. “This is not kiddie stuff,” the source said. If
the attack were traceable to the United States, “It’s an act of war.”
At the time, the CIA was directed by William Burns, a mild-mannered
former ambassador to Russia who had served as deputy secretary of state
in the Obama Administration. Burns quickly authorized an Agency working
group whose ad hoc members included—by chance—someone who was familiar
with the capabilities of the Navy’s deep-sea divers in Panama City. Over
the next few weeks, members of the CIA’s working group began to craft a
plan for a covert operation that would use deep-sea divers to trigger
an explosion along the pipeline.
Something like this had been done before. In 1971, the American intelligence community learned
from still undisclosed sources that two important units of the Russian
Navy were communicating via an undersea cable buried in the Sea of
Okhotsk, on Russia’s Far East Coast. The cable linked a regional Navy
command to the mainland headquarters at Vladivostok.
A hand-picked team of Central Intelligence Agency and National
Security Agency operatives was assembled somewhere in the Washington
area, under deep cover, and worked out a plan, using Navy divers,
modified submarines and a deep-submarine rescue vehicle, that succeeded,
after much trial and error, in locating the Russian cable. The divers
planted a sophisticated listening device on the cable that successfully
intercepted the Russian traffic and recorded it on a taping system.
The NSA learned that senior Russian navy officers, convinced of the
security of their communication link, chatted away with their peers
without encryption. The recording device and its tape had to be replaced
monthly and the project rolled on merrily for a decade until it was
compromised by a forty-four-year-old civilian NSA technician named Ronald Pelton
who was fluent in Russian. Pelton was betrayed by a Russian defector in
1985 and sentenced to prison. He was paid just $5,000 by the Russians
for his revelations about the operation, along with $35,000 for other Russian operational data he provided that was never made public.
That underwater success, codenamed Ivy Bells, was innovative and
risky, and produced invaluable intelligence about the Russian Navy’s
intentions and planning.
Still, the interagency group was initially skeptical of the CIA’s
enthusiasm for a covert deep-sea attack. There were too many unanswered
questions. The waters of the Baltic Sea were heavily patrolled by the
Russian navy, and there were no oil rigs that could be used as cover for
a diving operation. Would the divers have to go to Estonia, right
across the border from Russia’s natural gas loading docks, to train for
the mission? “It would be a goat fuck,” the Agency was told.
Throughout “all of this scheming,” the source said, “some working
guys in the CIA and the State Department were saying, ‘Don’t do this.
It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.’”
Nevertheless, in early 2022, the CIA working group reported back to
Sullivan’s interagency group: “We have a way to blow up the pipelines.”
What came next was stunning. On February 7, less than three weeks
before the seemingly inevitable Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden met
in his White House office with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who, after
some wobbling, was now firmly on the American team. At the press
briefing that followed, Biden defiantly said, “If Russia invades . . . there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”
Twenty days earlier, Undersecretary Nuland had delivered essentially
the same message at a State Department briefing, with little press
coverage. “I want to be very clear to you today,” she said in response
to a question. “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”
Several of those involved in planning the pipeline mission were
dismayed by what they viewed as indirect references to the attack.
“It was like putting an atomic bomb on the ground in Tokyo and
telling the Japanese that we are going to detonate it,” the source said.
“The plan was for the options to be executed post invasion and not
advertised publicly. Biden simply didn’t get it or ignored it.”
Biden’s and Nuland’s indiscretion, if that is what it was, might have
frustrated some of the planners. But it also created an opportunity.
According to the source, some of the senior officials of the CIA
determined that blowing up the pipeline “no longer could be considered a
covert option because the President just announced that we knew how to
do it.”
The plan to blow up Nord Stream 1 and 2 was suddenly downgraded from a
covert operation requiring that Congress be informed to one that was
deemed as a highly classified intelligence operation with U.S. military
support. Under the law, the source explained, “There was no longer a
legal requirement to report the operation to Congress. All they had to
do now is just do it—but it still had to be secret. The Russians have
superlative surveillance of the Baltic Sea.”
The Agency working group members had no direct contact with the White
House, and were eager to find out if the President meant what he’d
said—that is, if the mission was now a go. The source recalled, “Bill
Burns comes back and says, ‘Do it.’”
“The Norwegian navy was quick to find the right spot, in the shallow water a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island . . .”
THE OPERATION
Norway was the perfect place to base the mission.
In the past few years of East-West crisis, the U.S. military has
vastly expanded its presence inside Norway, whose western border runs
1,400 miles along the north Atlantic Ocean and merges above the Arctic
Circle with Russia. The Pentagon has created high paying jobs and
contracts, amid some local controversy, by investing hundreds of
millions of dollars to upgrade and expand American Navy and Air Force
facilities in Norway. The new works included, most importantly, an
advanced synthetic aperture radar far up north that was capable of
penetrating deep into Russia and came online just as the American
intelligence community lost access to a series of long-range listening
sites inside China.
In return, the Norwegian government angered liberals and some
moderates in its parliament last November by passing the Supplementary
Defense Cooperation Agreement (SDCA). Under the new deal, the U.S. legal system would have jurisdiction in certain “agreed areas”
in the North over American soldiers accused of crimes off base, as well
as over those Norwegian citizens accused or suspected of interfering
with the work at the base.
Norway was one of the original signatories of the NATO Treaty in
1949, in the early days of the Cold War. Today, the supreme commander of
NATO is Jens Stoltenberg, a committed anti-communist, who served as
Norway’s prime minister for eight years before moving to his high NATO
post, with American backing, in 2014. He was a hardliner on all things
Putin and Russia who had cooperated with the American intelligence
community since the Vietnam War. He has been trusted completely since.
“He is the glove that fits the American hand,” the source said.
Back in Washington, planners knew they had to go to Norway. “They
hated the Russians, and the Norwegian navy was full of superb sailors
and divers who had generations of experience in highly profitable
deep-sea oil and gas exploration,” the source said. They also could be
trusted to keep the mission secret. (The Norwegians may have had other
interests as well. The destruction of Nord Stream—if the Americans could
pull it off—would allow Norway to sell vastly more of its own natural
gas to Europe.)
Sometime in March, a few members of the team flew to Norway to meet
with the Norwegian Secret Service and Navy. One of the key questions was
where exactly in the Baltic Sea was the best place to plant the
explosives. Nord Stream 1 and 2, each with two sets of pipelines, were
separated much of the way by little more than a mile as they made their
run to the port of Greifswald in the far northeast of Germany.
The Norwegian navy was quick to find the right spot, in the shallow
waters of the Baltic sea a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island. The
pipelines ran more than a mile apart along a seafloor that was only 260
feet deep. That would be well within the range of the divers, who,
operating from a Norwegian Alta class mine hunter, would dive with a
mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and helium streaming from their tanks, and
plant shaped C4 charges on the four pipelines with concrete protective
covers. It would be tedious, time consuming and dangerous work, but the
waters off Bornholm had another advantage: there were no major tidal
currents, which would have made the task of diving much more difficult.
After a bit of research, the Americans were all in.
At this point, the Navy’s obscure deep-diving group in Panama City
once again came into play. The deep-sea schools at Panama City, whose
trainees participated in Ivy Bells, are seen as an unwanted backwater by
the elite graduates of the Naval Academy in Annapolis, who typically
seek the glory of being assigned as a Seal, fighter pilot, or
submariner. If one must become a “Black Shoe”—that is, a member of the
less desirable surface ship command—there is always at least duty on a
destroyer, cruiser or amphibious ship. The least glamorous of all is
mine warfare. Its divers never appear in Hollywood movies, or on the
cover of popular magazines.
“The best divers with deep diving qualifications are a tight
community, and only the very best are recruited for the operation and
told to be prepared to be summoned to the CIA in Washington,” the source
said.
The Norwegians and Americans had a location and the operatives, but
there was another concern: any unusual underwater activity in the waters
off Bornholm might draw the attention of the Swedish or Danish navies,
which could report it.
Denmark had also been one of the original NATO signatories and was
known in the intelligence community for its special ties to the United
Kingdom. Sweden had applied for membership into NATO, and had
demonstrated its great skill in managing its underwater sound and
magnetic sensor systems that successfully tracked Russian submarines
that would occasionally show up in remote waters of the Swedish
archipelago and be forced to the surface.
The Norwegians joined the Americans in insisting that some senior
officials in Denmark and Sweden had to be briefed in general terms about
possible diving activity in the area. In that way, someone higher up
could intervene and keep a report out of the chain of command, thus
insulating the pipeline operation. “What they were told and what they
knew were purposely different,” the source told me. (The Norwegian
embassy, asked to comment on this story, did not respond.)
The Norwegians were key to solving other hurdles. The Russian navy
was known to possess surveillance technology capable of spotting, and
triggering, underwater mines. The American explosive devices needed to
be camouflaged in a way that would make them appear to the Russian
system as part of the natural background—something that required
adapting to the specific salinity of the water. The Norwegians had a
fix.
The Norwegians also had a solution to the crucial question of when
the operation should take place. Every June, for the past 21 years, the
American Sixth Fleet, whose flagship is based in Gaeta, Italy, south of
Rome, has sponsored a major NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea involving
scores of allied ships throughout the region. The current exercise, held
in June, would be known as Baltic Operations 22, or BALTOPS 22. The Norwegians proposed this would be the ideal cover to plant the mines.
The Americans provided one vital element: they convinced the Sixth
Fleet planners to add a research and development exercise to the
program. The exercise, as made public by the Navy,
involved the Sixth Fleet in collaboration with the Navy’s “research and
warfare centers.” The at-sea event would be held off the coast of
Bornholm Island and involve NATO teams of divers planting mines, with
competing teams using the latest underwater technology to find and
destroy them.
It was both a useful exercise and ingenious cover. The Panama City
boys would do their thing and the C4 explosives would be in place by the
end of BALTOPS22, with a 48-hour timer attached. All of the Americans
and Norwegians would be long gone by the first explosion.
The days were counting down. “The clock was ticking, and we were nearing mission accomplished,” the source said.
And then: Washington had second thoughts. The bombs would still be
planted during BALTOPS, but the White House worried that a two-day
window for their detonation would be too close to the end of the
exercise, and it would be obvious that America had been involved.
Instead, the White House had a new request: “Can the guys in the
field come up with some way to blow the pipelines later on command?”
Some members of the planning team were angered and frustrated by the
President’s seeming indecision. The Panama City divers had repeatedly
practiced planting the C4 on pipelines, as they would during BALTOPS,
but now the team in Norway had to come up with a way to give Biden what
he wanted—the ability to issue a successful execution order at a time of
his choosing.
Being tasked with an arbitrary, last-minute change was something the
CIA was accustomed to managing. But it also renewed the concerns some
shared over the necessity, and legality, of the entire operation.
The President’s secret orders also evoked the CIA’s dilemma in the
Vietnam War days, when President Johnson, confronted by growing
anti-Vietnam War sentiment, ordered the Agency to violate its
charter—which specifically barred it from operating inside America—by
spying on antiwar leaders to determine whether they were being
controlled by Communist Russia.
The agency ultimately acquiesced, and throughout the 1970s it became
clear just how far it had been willing to go. There were subsequent
newspaper revelations in the aftermath of the Watergate scandals about
the Agency’s spying on American citizens, its involvement in the
assassination of foreign leaders and its undermining of the socialist
government of Salvador Allende.
Those revelations led to a dramatic series of hearings in the
mid-1970s in the Senate, led by Frank Church of Idaho, that made it
clear that Richard Helms, the Agency director at the time, accepted that
he had an obligation to do what the President wanted, even if it meant
violating the law.
In unpublished, closed-door testimony, Helms ruefully explained that
“you almost have an Immaculate Conception when you do something” under
secret orders from a President. “Whether it’s right that you should have
it, or wrong that you shall have it, [the CIA] works under different
rules and ground rules than any other part of the government.” He was
essentially telling the Senators that he, as head of the CIA, understood
that he had been working for the Crown, and not the Constitution.
The Americans at work in Norway operated under the same dynamic, and
dutifully began working on the new problem—how to remotely detonate the
C4 explosives on Biden’s order. It was a much more demanding assignment
than those in Washington understood. There was no way for the team in
Norway to know when the President might push the button. Would it be in a
few weeks, in many months or in half a year or longer?
The C4 attached to the pipelines would be triggered by a sonar buoy
dropped by a plane on short notice, but the procedure involved the most
advanced signal processing technology. Once in place, the delayed timing
devices attached to any of the four pipelines could be accidentally
triggered by the complex mix of ocean background noises throughout the
heavily trafficked Baltic Sea—from near and distant ships, underwater
drilling, seismic events, waves and even sea creatures. To avoid this,
the sonar buoy, once in place, would emit a sequence of unique low
frequency tonal sounds—much like those emitted by a flute or a
piano—that would be recognized by the timing device and, after a pre-set
hours of delay, trigger the explosives. (“You want a signal that is
robust enough so that no other signal could accidentally send a pulse
that detonated the explosives,” I was told by Dr. Theodore Postol,
professor emeritus of science, technology and national security policy
at MIT. Postol, who has served as the science adviser to the Pentagon’s
Chief of Naval Operations, said the issue facing the group in Norway
because of Biden’s delay was one of chance: “The longer the explosives
are in the water the greater risk there would be of a random signal that
would launch the bombs.”)
On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a
seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread
underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A
few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three
of the four pipelines were put out of commission. Within a few minutes,
pools of methane gas that remained in the shuttered pipelines could be
seen spreading on the water’s surface and the world learned that
something irreversible had taken place.
FALLOUT
In the immediate aftermath of the pipeline bombing, the American media treated it like an unsolved mystery. Russia was repeatedly cited as a likely culprit,
spurred on by calculated leaks from the White House—but without ever
establishing a clear motive for such an act of self-sabotage, beyond
simple retribution. A few months later, when it emerged that Russian
authorities had been quietly getting estimates for the cost to repair
the pipelines, the New York Times described
the news as “complicating theories about who was behind” the attack. No
major American newspaper dug into the earlier threats to the pipelines
made by Biden and Undersecretary of State Nuland.
While it was never clear why Russia would seek to destroy its own
lucrative pipeline, a more telling rationale for the President’s action
came from Secretary of State Blinken.
Asked at a press conference last September about the consequences of the worsening energy crisis in Western Europe, Blinken described the moment as a potentially good one:
“It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all
remove the dependence on Russian energy and thus to take away from
Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his
imperial designs. That’s very significant and that offers tremendous
strategic opportunity for the years to come, but meanwhile we’re
determined to do everything we possibly can to make sure the
consequences of all of this are not borne by citizens in our countries
or, for that matter, around the world.”
More recently, Victoria Nuland expressed satisfaction at the demise
of the newest of the pipelines. Testifying at a Senate Foreign Relations
Committee hearing in late January she told Senator Ted Cruz, “Like
you, I am, and I think the Administration is, very gratified to know
that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the
bottom of the sea.”
The source had a much more streetwise view of Biden’s decision to
sabotage more than 1500 miles of Gazprom pipeline as winter approached.
“Well,” he said, speaking of the President, “I gotta admit the guy has a
pair of balls. He said he was going to do it, and he did.”
Asked why he thought the Russians failed to respond, he said
cynically, “Maybe they want the capability to do the same things the
U.S. did.
“It was a beautiful cover story,” he went on. “Behind it was a covert
operation that placed experts in the field and equipment that operated
on a covert signal.
Ideology consists in imposing the wrong solutions while ignoring market forces.
EV is an ideology. While they make sense in dense city cores, they make none in the countryside where ICE vehicles are more efficient and hybrids would be perfect.
Wind energy is another ideology with even less reasons to exist. Its cost ratio efficiency is abysmal as it could not even exist without subsidies. Its real ecological footprint is questionable. As for its long term prospects, they are to the opinion of experts doubtful...
The
greenies’ dream of “clean” (except for millions of dead birds) energy
from wind farms is dying in the face of the poor economics (even with
tax subsidies) and unreliable technology. The big players in
constructing wind turbines are facing massive losses and write-downs and
cancelling big offshore wind projects. Brace yourself for demands for
even more subsides to the failing industry.
The green energy
subsidiary of German electrical equipment giant Siemens just reported
Thursday that it lost nearly a billion dollars in the last quarter. Via Fox News (Hat tip: Beege Welborn, Hot Air):
Global
green energy company Siemens Gamesa reported Thursday that it had lost a
staggering $967 million during the three-month period from between
October to December.
The Germany-based company, which dubs itself
as "the global leader in offshore power generation," noted the wind
industry has faced various unfavorable pressures leading
to negative growth in recent months and years, in its earnings report
for the first quarter of fiscal year 2023 released Thursday morning. The
company added that governments would need to further assist the industry to ensure future positive growth.
"The
negative development in our service business underscores that we have
much work ahead of us to stabilize our business and return to
profitability," Siemens Gamesa CEO Jochen Eickholt said in a statement.
"The
beginning of fiscal year 2023 saw a further increase in global wind
demand prospects for the next ten years, but further governmental action
is needed to close the gap between ambitious targets and actual
installations," the company added in its release.
The
translation of “further government action” is increased subsidies,
beyond those already offered in the misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act,”
which mostly subsidizes green energy. Think Solyndra-like loan
guarantees beyond those already available.
The
big problem for Siemens and other makers (see below) is equipment
failure and the need to lay out huge warranty expenditures. Reuters:
One
fundamental problem with wind energy (aside from the meager amount of
power delivered compared to coal and natural gas fired generators) is
the variability of the wind. It changes both intensity (speed)
and direction unpredictably. I know from work in my consulting career
long ago (which I can’t discuss in detail owing to confidentiality
agreements) that incredible stresses are placed on the generators,
blades, and transmissions (akin to a car’s drive train) when the wind
abruptly changes speed or direction. In order to get a meaningful amount
of power, the blades have to be BIG, which is why the towers of major
wind farms are very tall).
But long blades spinning rapidly can have the tips break the sound
barrier, and the stresses on the materials used in the blades (often
carbon fiber because the blades have to be light weight) are intense.
And changeable rapidly.
As a result, the order books of the major manufacturers are drying up:
Interesting slide from Siemens Gamesa, the 2nd world's largest manufacturer of wind turbines.
As Beege Wellborn reports, another major player, General Electric, is also facing losses and is cutting back:
Here in the U.S., General Electric was humming along in its financials except…*sad trombone*…when it got to their turbine business. Ooo, they took a hit, too. Really fugly numbers.
…The company’s renewable energy business has been facing challenges due to inflation and supply chain pressures. The unit reported a loss of $2.2 billion in 2022.
GE is reducing global headcount at the onshore wind unit by about 20% as part of a plan to restructure and resize the business.
What a surprise. Look who GE is counting on to save the windy day! Tax credit bailout.
…Culp said the onshore business is expected to get a boost following the restoration of the tax credit for wind projects.
At least one major project faces abandonment, as Wellborn points out:
In
an interesting turn of events in New Hampshire, a company contracted
with the state for an offshore wind farm is embroiled in a major tussle
with the state’s department of utilities. Avangrid has told the state
they can’t afford to move forward, so “we’re not building it anymore.”
The
developer behind the largest single offshore wind farm in the state’s
pipeline on Thursday filed a formal notice of appeal to contest the
Department of Public Utilities’ approval of contracts that the developer
agreed to but says will no longer allow its project to be financed or
built.
The DPU last month determined that the contracts, which the
wind developers and utility companies agreed to in May, “are in the
public interest” and approved them over the developer’s objections.
Commonwealth Wind parent company Avangrid has said for months that increases
in commodity prices, rising interest rates and supply shortages mean
that its 1,200 megawatt renewable energy project “cannot be financed and built” under the terms of those power purchase agreements (PPAs).
With
wind power, Kenny Roger's song provides wise advice. “You’ve got to
know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em.” It’s time to walk away
from wind power subsidies.
It is beyond the time to end subsidies
for wind power. Not only has atmospheric CO2 risen without serious
consequence, the doomsaying models proven consistently wrong, but the
financial thumb on the scale via subsidies has encouraged development of
a technology that is still immature, if it ever will be viable.
Remember the Repo market crisis of late 2019? Everything was on the verge of exploding... Then magically the Corona virus appeared and suddenly monetary constrains were not a problem anymore. Trillions of Dollars, Euros and Yens were suddenly available and a crisis replaced another one.
But monetary crisis never go away. They can be delayed but then come back with a vengeance. And here we are 3 years later, with giant deficits and rising interest rates...
Gold
bugs and other long-suffering critics of fiat currency and endless
credit expansion have for decades been predicting that soaring debt
would eventually blow up the financial world.
As the
story went, governments with unlimited printing presses would spend and
borrow too much, forcing their central banks to keep interest rates
unnaturally low to make interest costs manageable, which would encourage
even more credit growth, causing inflation to spike, and so on, until everyone loses faith in fiat currencies and the misbegotten things fall to their intrinsic value of zero.
That’s
a bit hard to visualize when it’s explained in long, convoluted
sentences. But it’s a lot clearer when you line up the relevant charts.
So let’s start with US government debt, which has gone parabolic.
Ever-increasing
debt is manageable if interest rates fall concurrently so the interest
on that debt doesn’t change. And that’s what happened between 1980 and
2021. The Fed pushed down interest rates, which minimized
interest costs, which lulled a shockingly gullible investment community
and political class into the belief that this process could continue
forever.
But of course it couldn’t continue forever.
As
the critics predicted, soaring debt required ever greater currency
creation which eventually caused the cost of living to jump by 10% in
2022, leading regular people to demand that it stop. So the Fed now has
to raise interest rates to counter inflation. You can see this happening
on the far right of the above chart.
Here’s where the death spiral kicks in
As
the US borrows more money and its existing debts roll over at higher
rates, the cost of that debt is soaring. This year the government’s
annual interest bill will break $1 trillion. Combine that with the
soaring cost of Medicare and Social Security as millions of Baby Boomers
retire, and Washington is looking at $2 trillion a year just in just
interest and entitlements, which it will have to borrow to fund, which
will send interest costs even higher, which will require more borrowing, and so on, until it all comes crashing down.
Here’s another useful way of visualizing the problem. As
debt rises, the interest rate required to keep debt service costs from
eating all of a government’s tax receipts falls. In the US case, those
two lines are in danger of crossing in the next few years. No society
has ever survived that kind of fiscal crisis.
To
the extent that the Fed knows anything, it knows this, and really,
really wants to force that blue line down into negative territory if
possible. But it also knows that doing so will send prices spiraling out
of control – which is another way of saying the dollar will crash (not
necessarily against the euro and the yen, which have similar problems,
but against oil, lumber, eggs, milk, cars, and all the other things
voters buy regularly). The result? Political and financial chaos.
And
there’s nothing that the monetary authorities can do to stop it,
because either choice – keep interest rates high or push them back down –
leads to the same place, which is a currency crisis.
Meanwhile, each turn of the wheel makes the problem more intractable and
the collapse more imminent. That’s what the term “death spiral” refers
to: a process that feeds on itself until the system implodes.
Scott Adams is the creator of the famous cartoon strip, Dilbert.
It is a strip whose brilliance derives from close observation and
understanding of human behavior. Some time ago, Scott turned those
skills to commenting insightfully and with notable intellectual humility
on the politics and culture of our country.
Like many other commentators, and based on his own analysis of evidence available to him, he opted to take the Covid “vaccine.”
Recently, however, he posted a video on the topic that has been circulating on social media. It was a mea culpa in
which he declared, “The unvaccinated were the winners,” and, to his
great credit, “I want to find out how so many of [my viewers] got the
right answer about the “vaccine” and I didn’t.”
“Winners”
was perhaps a little tongue-in-cheek: he seemingly means that the
“unvaccinated” do not have to worry about the long-term consequences of
having the “vaccine” in their bodies since enough data concerning the
lack of safety of the “vaccines” have now appeared to demonstrate that,
on the balance of risks, the choice not to be “vaccinated” has been
vindicated for individuals without comorbidities.
What follows is a personal response to Scott, which explains how consideration of the information that was available at the time led one person – me – to decline the “vaccine.”
It is not meant to imply that all who accepted the “vaccine” made the
wrong decision or, indeed, that everyone who declined it did so for good
reasons.
Some people have said that the “vaccine” was
created in a hurry. That may or may not be true. Much of the research
for mRNA “vaccines” had already been done over many years, and
corona-viruses as a class are well understood so it was at least
feasible that only a small fraction of the “vaccine” development had
been hurried.
The much more important point was that the “vaccine” was rolled out without long-term testing.
Therefore one of two conditions applied. Either no claim could be made
with confidence about the long-term safety of the “vaccine” or there was
some amazing scientific argument for a once-in-a-lifetime theoretical
certainty concerning the long-term safety of this “vaccine.” The latter
would be so extraordinary that it might (for all I know) even be a first
in the history of medicine. If that were the case, it would have been
all that was being talked about by the scientists; it was not.
Therefore, the more obvious, first state of affairs, obtained: nothing
could be claimed with confidence about the long-term safety of the
“vaccine.”
Given, then, that the long-term safety of the “vaccine” was a
theoretical crapshoot, the unquantifiable long-term risk of taking it
could only be justified by an extremely high certain risk of not taking
it. Accordingly, a moral and scientific argument could only be made for its use by those at high risk of severe illness if exposed to COVID. Even the very earliest data immediately showed that I (and the overwhelming majority of the population) was not in the group.
The continued insistence on rolling out the “vaccine” to the entire
population when the data revealed that those with no comorbidities were
at low risk of severe illness or death from COVID was therefore immoral
and ascientific on its face. The argument that reduced transmission from
the non-vulnerable to the vulnerable as a result of mass “vaccination”
could only stand if the long-term safety of the “vaccine” had been established, which it had not.
Given the lack of proof of long-term safety, the mass-“vaccination”
policy was clearly putting at risk young or healthy lives to save old
and unhealthy ones. The policy makers did not even acknowledge
this, express any concern about the grave responsibility they were
taking on for knowingly putting people at risk, or indicate how they had
weighed the risks before reaching their policy positions. Altogether, this was a very strong reason not to trust the policy or the people setting it.
At the very least, if the gamble with people’s health and lives
represented by the coercive “vaccination” policy had been taken
following an adequate cost-benefit benefit, that decision would have
been a tough judgment call. Any honest presentation of it would have
involved the equivocal language of risk-balancing and the public
availability of information about how the risks were weighed and the
decision was made. In fact, the language of policy-makers was dishonestly unequivocal and the advice they offered suggested no risk whatsoever of taking the “vaccine.” This advice was simply false (or if you prefer, misleading,) on the evidence of the time inasmuch as it was unqualified.
Data that did not support COVID policies were actively and massively suppressed.
This raised the bar of sufficient evidence for certainty that the
“vaccine” was safe and efficacious. Per the foregoing, the bar was not
met.
Simple analyses of even the early available data showed that the
establishment was prepared to do much more harm in terms of human
rights and spending public resources to prevent a COVID death than any
other kind of death. Why this disproportionality?
An explanation of this overreaction was required. The kindest guess as
to what was driving it was “good-old, honest panic.” But if a policy is
being driven by panic, then the bar for going along with it moves up
even higher. A less kind guess is that there were undeclared reasons for
the policy, in which case, obviously, the “vaccine” could not be
trusted.
Fear had clearly generated a health panic and a moral panic, or mass formation psychosis. That brought into play many very strong cognitive biases and natural human tendencies against rationality and proportionality. Evidence of those biases was everywhere;
it included the severing of close kin and kith relationships, the
ill-treatment of people by others who used to be perfectly decent, the
willingness of parents to cause developmental harm to their children,
calls for large-scale rights violations that were made by large numbers
of citizens of previously free countries without any apparent concern
for the horrific implications of those calls, and the straight-faced,
even anxious, compliance with policies that should have warranted
responses of laughter from psychologically healthy individuals (even if they
had been necessary or just helpful). In the grip of such panic or mass
formation psychosis the evidential bar for extreme claims (such as the
safety and moral necessity of injecting oneself with a form of gene
therapy that has not undergone long-term testing) rises yet further.
The companies responsible for manufacturing and ultimately profiting from the “vaccination” were given legal immunity.
Why would a government do that if it really believed that the “vaccine”
was safe and wanted to instill confidence in it? And why would I put
something in my body that the government has decided can harm me without
my having any legal redress?
If the
“vaccine”-sceptical were wrong, there would still have been two good
reasons not to suppress their data or views. First, we are a liberal
democracy that values free speech as a fundamental right and second,
their data and arguments could be shown to be fallacious. The fact that
the powers-that-be decided to violate our fundamental values and
suppress discussion invites the question of “Why?” That was not
satisfactorily answered beyond, “It’s easier for them to impose their
mandates in a world where people do not dissent:” but that is an
argument against compliance, rather than for it. Suppressing
information a priori suggests that the information has
persuasive force. I distrust anyone who distrusts me to determine which
information and arguments are good and which are bad when it is my health that
is at stake – especially when the people who are promoting censorship
are hypocritically acting against their declared beliefs in informed consent and bodily autonomy.
The PCR test was held up as the “gold standard” diagnostic test for COVID. A moment’s reading about how the PCR test works indicates that it is no such thing.
Its use for diagnostic purposes is more of an art than a science, to
put it kindly. Kary Mullis, who in 1993 won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
for inventing the PCR technique risked his career to say as much when
people tried to use it as a diagnostic test for HIV to justify a mass
program of pushing experimental anti-retroviral drugs on early AIDS
patients, which ultimately killed tens of thousands of people. This
raises the question, “How do the people who are generating the data that
we saw on the news every night and were being used to justify the mass
“vaccination” policy handle the uncertainty around PCR-based diagnoses?”
If you don’t have a satisfactory answer to this question, your bar for
taking the risk of “vaccination” should once again go up. (On a personal
note, to get the answer before making my decision about whether to
undergo “vaccination,” I sent exactly this question, via a friend, to an
epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins. That epidemiologist, who was
personally involved in generating the up-to-date data on the spread of
pandemic globally, replied merely that s/he works with the data s/he’s
given and does not question its accuracy or means of generation. In
other words, the pandemic response was largely based on data generated
by processes that were not understood or even questioned by the
generators of that data.)
To generalize the last point, a supposedly conclusive claim by someone who demonstrably cannot justify their claim should be discounted.
In the case of the COVID pandemic, almost all people who acted as if
the “vaccine” was safe and effective had no physical or informational
evidence for the claims of safety and efficacy beyond the supposed
authority of other people who made them. This includes many medical
professionals – a problem that was being raised by some of their number
(who, in many cases, were censored on social media and even lost their
jobs or licenses). Anyone could read the CDC infographics on mRNA
“vaccines” and, without being a scientist, generate obvious “But what
if..?” questions that could be asked of experts to check for themselves
whether the pushers of the “vaccines” would personally vouch for their
safety. For example, the CDC put out an infographic that stated the
following.
“How does the vaccine work?
The mRNA in the vaccine teaches your cells how to make copies of the
spike protein. If you are exposed to the real virus later, your body
will recognize it and know how to fight it off. After the mRNA delivers
the instructions, your cells break it down and get rid of it.”
All right. Here are some obvious questions to ask, then. “What happens
if the instructions delivered to cells to generate the spike protein are
not eliminated from the body as intended? How can we be sure that such a
situation will never arise?” If someone cannot answer those questions,
and he is in a position of political or medical authority, then he shows
himself to be willing to push potentially harmful policies without
considering the risks involved.
Given all of the above, a
serious person at least had to keep an eye out for published safety and
efficacy data as the pandemic proceeded. Pfizer’s Six-month Safety and
Efficacy Study was notable. The very large number of its authors was
remarkable and their summary claim was that the tested vaccine was
effective and safe. The data in the paper showed more deaths per head in
the “vaccinated” group than “unvaccinated” group.
While
this difference does not statistically establish that the shot is
dangerous or ineffective, the generated data were clearly compatible
with (let us put it kindly) the incomplete safety of the “vaccine” – at
odds with the front-page summary. (It’s almost as if even professional
scientists and clinicians exhibit bias and motivated reasoning when
their work becomes politicized.) At the very least, a lay reader could
see that the “summary findings” stretched, or at least showed a remarkable lack of curiosity about, the data –
especially given what was at stake and the awesome responsibility of
getting someone to put something untested inside their body.
As time went on, it
became very clear that some of the informational claims that had been
made to convince people to get “vaccinated,” especially by politicians
and media commentators, were false. If those policies had been
genuinely justified by the previously claimed “facts,” then
determination of the falsity of those “facts” should have resulted in a
change in policy or, at the very least, expressions of clarification and
regret by people who had previously made those incorrect but pivotal
claims. Basic moral and scientific standards demand that
individuals put clearly on the record the requisite corrections and
retractions of statements that might influence decisions that affect
health. If they don’t, they should not be trusted – especially
given the huge potential consequences of their informational errors for
an increasingly “vaccinated” population. That, however, never happened.
If the “vaccine”-pushers had acted in good faith, then in the wake of
the publication of new data throughout the pandemic, we would have been
hearing (and perhaps even accepting) multiple mea culpas. We
heard no such thing from political officials, revealing an almost
across-the-board lack of integrity, moral seriousness, or concern with
accuracy. The consequently necessary discounting of the claims
previously made by officials left no trustworthy case on the
pro-lockdown, pro-“vaccine” side at all.
To offer some examples of statements that were proven false by data but not explicitly walked back:
“You’re not going to get COVID if you get these vaccinations… We are in a pandemic of the unvaccinated.” – Joe Biden;
“The vaccines are safe. I promise you…” – Joe Biden;
“The vaccines are safe and effective.” – Anthony Fauci.
“Our data from the CDC suggest that vaccinated people do not carry the
virus, do not get sick – and it’s not just in the clinical trials but
it’s also in real world data.” – Dr. Rochelle Walensky.
“We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in… in
serious condition and many on ventilators.” – Justice Sotomayer (during a
case to determine legality of Federal “vaccine” mandates)…
… and so on and so on.
The last one is particularly interesting because it was made by a judge
in a Supreme Court case to determine the legality of the federal
mandates. Subsequently, the aforementioned Dr. Walensky, head of the
CDC, who had previously made a false statement about the efficacy of the
“vaccine,” confirmed under questioning that the number of children in
hospital was only 3,500 – not 100,000.
To make more strongly the point about prior claims and policies’ being
contradicted by subsequent findings but not, as a result, being
reversed, the same Dr. Walensky, head of the CDC, said, “the
overwhelming number of deaths – over 75% – occurred in people that had
at least four comorbidities. So really these were people who were unwell
to begin with.” That statement so completely undermined the
entire justification for the policies of mass-“vaccination” and
lockdowns that any intellectually honest person who supported them would
at that point have to reassess their position. Whereas the average Joe
might well have missed that piece of information from the CDC, it was
the government’s own information so the presidential Joe (and
his agents) certainly could not have missed it. Where was the sea change
in policy to match the sea change in our understanding of the risks
associated with COVID, and therefore the cost-benefit balance of the
untested (long-term) “vaccine” vs. the risk associated with being
infected with COVID? It never came. Clearly, neither the policy
positions nor their supposed factual basis could be trusted.
What was the new science that explained why, for the first time in history, a “vaccine” would be more effective than natural exposure and consequent immunity? Why the urgency to get a person who has had COVID and now has some immunity to get “vaccinated” after the fact?
The overall political and cultural context in
which the entire discourse on “vaccination” was being conducted was
such that the evidential bar for the safety and efficacy of the
“vaccine” was raised yet further while our ability to determine whether
that bar had been met was reduced. Any conversation with an
“unvaccinated” person (and as an educator and teacher, I was involved in
very many), always involved the “unvaccinated” person being
put into a defensive posture of having to justify himself to the
“vaccine”-supporter as if his position was de facto more harmful than the contrary one. In such a context, accurate determination of facts is almost impossible: moral judgment always inhibits objective empirical analysis. When dispassionate discussion of an issue is impossible because judgment has saturated discourse,
drawing conclusions of sufficient accuracy and with sufficient
certainty to promote rights violations and the coercion of medical
treatment, is next to impossible.
Regarding analytics (and Scott’s point about “our” heuristics beating “their” analytics), precision is not accuracy. Indeed, in contexts of great uncertainty and complexity, precision is negatively correlated with accuracy.
(A more precise claim is less likely to be correct.) Much of the COVID
panic began with modeling. Modeling is dangerous inasmuch as it puts
numbers on things; numbers are precise; and precision gives an illusion
of accuracy – but under great uncertainty and complexity, model outputs
are dominated by the uncertainties on the input variables that have very
wide (and unknown) ranges and the multiple assumptions that themselves
warrant only low confidence. Therefore, any claimed precision of a
model’s output is bogus and the apparent accuracy is only and entirely
that – apparent.
We saw the same thing with HIV in the ‘80s
and ‘90s. Models at that time determined that up to one-third of the
heterosexual population could contract HIV. Oprah Winfrey offered that
statistic on one of her shows, alarming a nation. The first industry to
know that this was absurdly wide of the mark was the insurance industry
when all of the bankruptcies that they were expecting on account of
payouts on life insurance policies did not happen. When the reality did
not match the outputs of their models, they knew that the assumptions on
which those models were based were false – and that the pattern of the
disease was very different from what had been declared.
For
reasons beyond the scope of this article, the falseness of those
assumptions could have been determined at the time. Of relevance to us
today, however, is the fact that those models helped to create an entire
AIDS industry, which pushed experimental antiretroviral drugs on people
with HIV no doubt in the sincere belief that the drugs might help them.
Those drugs killed hundreds of thousands of people.
(By the way,
the man who announced the “discovery” of HIV from the White House – not
in a peer-reviewed journal – and then pioneered the huge and deadly
reaction to it was the very same Anthony Fauci who has been gracing our
television screens over the last few years.)
An
honest approach to data on COVID and policy development would have
driven the urgent development of a system to collect accurate data on
COVID infections and the outcomes of COVID patients. Instead, the powers
that be did the very opposite, making policy decisions that knowingly reduced the accuracy of collected data in a way that would serve their political purposes. Specifically, they 1) stopped distinguishing between dying of COVID and dying with COVID and 2) incentivized
medical institutions to identify deaths as caused by COVID when there
was no clinical data to support that conclusion. (This also happened during the aforementioned HIV panic three decades ago.)
The
dishonesty of the pro-“vaccine” side was revealed by the repeated
changes of official definitions of clinical terms like “vaccine” whose
(scientific) definitions have been fixed for generations (as they must
be if science is to do its work accurately: definitions of scientific
terms can change, but only when our understanding of their referents
changes). Why was the government changing the meanings of words rather
than simply telling the truth using the same words they had been using
from the beginning? Their actions in this regard were entirely
disingenuous and anti-science. The evidential bar moves up again and our
ability to trust the evidence slides down.
In his video
(which I mentioned at the top of this article), Scott Adams asked, “How
could I have determined that the data that [“vaccine”-sceptics] sent me
was the good data?” He did not have to. Those of us who got it right or
“won” (to use his word) needed only to accept the data of those who were
pushing the “vaccination” mandates. Since they had the greatest
interest in the data pointing their way, we could put an upper bound of
confidence in their claims by testing those claims against their own
data. For someone without comorbidities, that upper bound was still too
low to take the risk of “vaccination” given the very low risk of severe
harm from contracting COVID-19.
In this relation, it is also worth mentioning that under the right contextual conditions, absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
Those conditions definitely applied in the pandemic: there was a
massive incentive for all of the outlets who were pushing the “vaccine”
to provide sufficient evidence to support their unequivocal claims for
the vaccine and lockdown policies and to denigrate, as they did, those
who disagreed. They simply did not provide that evidence, obviously
because it did not exist. Given that they would have provided it if it
had existed, the lack of evidence presented was evidence of its absence.
For
all of the above reasons, I moved from initially considering enrolling
in a vaccine trial to doing some open-minded due diligence to becoming
COVID-“vaccine”-sceptical. I generally believe in never saying “never”
so I was waiting until such time as the questions and issues raised
above were answered and resolved. Then, I would be potentially willing
to get “vaccinated,” at least in principle. Fortunately, not subjecting
oneself to a treatment leaves one with the option to do so in the
future. (Since the reverse is not the case, by the way, the option value
of “not acting yet” weighs somewhat in favor of the cautious approach.)
However,
I remember the day when my decision not to take the “vaccine” became a
firm one. A conclusive point brought me to deciding that I would not be
taking the “vaccine” under prevailing conditions. A few days later, I
told my mother on a phone call, “They will have to strap me to a
table.”
Whatever the risks associated with a COVID infection on the one hand, and the “vaccine” on the other, the “vaccination” policy enabled massive human rights violations.
Those who were “vaccinated” were happy to see the “unvaccinated” have
basic freedoms removed (the freedom to speak freely, work, travel, be
with loved ones at important moments such as births, deaths, funerals
etc.) because their status as “vaccinated” allowed them to accept back
as privileges-for-the-“vaccinated” the rights that had been removed from
everyone else. Indeed, many people grudgingly admitted that they got
“vaccinated” for that very reason, e.g. to keep their job or go out with their friends. For me, that would have been to be complicit in the destruction, by precedent and participation, of the most basic rights on which our peaceful society depends.
People have died to secure those rights for me and my compatriots. As a
teenager, my Austrian grandfather fled to England from Vienna and
promptly joined Churchill’s army to defeat Hitler. Hitler was the man
who murdered his father, my great-grandfather, in Dachau for being a
Jew. The camps began as a way to quarantine the Jews who were regarded
as vectors of disease that had to have their rights removed for the
protection of the wider population. In 2020, all I had to do in defense
of such rights was to put up with limited travel and being barred from
my favorite restaurants, etc., for a few months.
Even if I
were some weird statistical outlier such that COVID might hospitalize me
despite my age and good health, then so be it: if it were going to take
me, I would not let it take my principles and rights in the meanwhile.
And
what if I were wrong? What if the massive abrogation of rights that was
the response of governments around the world to a pandemic with a tiny
fatality rate among those who were not “unwell to begin with” (to use
the expression of the Director of the CDC) was not going to end in a few
months?
What if it were going to go on forever? In that case,
the risk to my life from COVID would be nothing next to the risk to all
of our lives as we take to the streets in the last, desperate hope of
wresting back the most basic freedoms of all from a State that has long
forgotten that it legitimately exists only to protect them and, instead,
sees them now as inconvenient obstacles to be worked around or even
destroyed.
