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British Origins Of The Coronavirus Further Confirmed

Posted by M. C. on March 14, 2020

Fort Detrick, UK, who knows?

It is not unreasonable to question the Chinese origins of C-virus

https://envirowatchrangitikei.wordpress.com/2020/03/14/british-origins-of-the-coronavirus-further-confirmed/

via British Origins Of The Coronavirus Further Confirmed

Patriots for Truth

When the president announced a National Emergency over coronavirus, we were thrilled because you can’t talk about coronavirus without talking about the Pirbright Institute, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Elizabeth Manningham-Buller, the Wellcome Trust, University of North Carolina, and DARPA.

manningham buller afiShocking Discovery: The British Origins Of The Coronavirus Further Confirmed—ABritish Spy (Manningham-Buller) Runs Wellcome Trust & The Pirbright Institute, inventor of this weaponized Coronavirus. Her MI5 agency was literally created by the Empire Press Union in 1909—whose meetings were literally bankrolled by Henry Wellcome who had just killed 60,000 in South African concentration camps in vaccine experiments in the 2nd Boer War (1899-1902)

Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller, chair of Wellcome Trust—the funder of the  patentee—ran MI5 (2002-2007) during  The Pirbright Institute (Merial Animal Health Institute)’s release of the foot and mouth virus

pirbrigt fig 6Read more

Merial took the decision to “move” its Pirbright operations…

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FLASHBACK 2002: Anthrax, Ebola Missing From US Army Fort ...

Fort Detrick

 

 

 

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More Dying for Nothing in Iraq – The Future of Freedom Foundation

Posted by M. C. on March 14, 2020

That’s how this entire sordid process has turned into a perpetual “war on terrorism,” one that sacrifices U.S. soldiers for nothing and, in the process, ends up destroying our rights and liberties here at home in the name of keeping us “safe” from the enemies that the Pentagon (and the CIA) are producing over there.

https://www.fff.org/2020/03/13/more-dying-for-nothing-in-iraq/

by

Two more U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq. Yes, that Iraq — the Iraq that never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so — the Iraq that the U.S. government invaded and has occupied for umpteen years under the rubric of “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

What did those two soldiers die for? They died for the same thing that 58,000 U.S. soldiers died for in Vietnam — nothing.

They certainly didn’t die for freedom. Just as the North Vietnamese were never threatening the freedom of the American people, neither is anyone in Iraq, including ISIS, the group that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq brought into existence.

The Pentagon announced that it has retaliated for the killings by bombing an “Iranian-backed militia” that the Pentagon is “confident” was responsible for the killing.

And then what? Then that Iranian-backed militia retaliates by killing more U.S. soldiers, which then motivates the Pentagon to retaliate again, which causes the Iranian-backed militia to retaliate again.

That’s how this entire sordid process has turned into a perpetual “war on terrorism,” one that sacrifices U.S. soldiers for nothing and, in the process, ends up destroying our rights and liberties here at home in the name of keeping us “safe” from the enemies that the Pentagon (and the CIA) are producing over there.

What business do U.S. soldiers have in Iraq? No business at all. The longer they are kept there, the greater the chance that more of them will be dying for nothing.

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More Dying for Nothing in Iraq – The Future of Freedom Foundation

Posted by M. C. on March 14, 2020

What did those two soldiers die for? They died for the same thing that 58,000 U.S. soldiers died for in Vietnam — nothing.

https://www.fff.org/2020/03/13/more-dying-for-nothing-in-iraq/

by

Two more U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq. Yes, that Iraq — the Iraq that never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so — the Iraq that the U.S. government invaded and has occupied for umpteen years under the rubric of “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

What did those two soldiers die for? They died for the same thing that 58,000 U.S. soldiers died for in Vietnam — nothing.

They certainly didn’t die for freedom. Just as the North Vietnamese were never threatening the freedom of the American people, neither is anyone in Iraq, including ISIS, the group that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq brought into existence.

The Pentagon announced that it has retaliated for the killings by bombing an “Iranian-backed militia” that the Pentagon is “confident” was responsible for the killing.

And then what? Then that Iranian-backed militia retaliates by killing more U.S. soldiers, which then motivates the Pentagon to retaliate again, which causes the Iranian-backed militia to retaliate again.

That’s how this entire sordid process has turned into a perpetual “war on terrorism,” one that sacrifices U.S. soldiers for nothing and, in the process, ends up destroying our rights and liberties here at home in the name of keeping us “safe” from the enemies that the Pentagon (and the CIA) are producing over there.

What business do U.S. soldiers have in Iraq? No business at all. The longer they are kept there, the greater the chance that more of them will be dying for nothing.

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3 Tallest Biden Tales on Foreign Policy | The American Conservative

Posted by M. C. on March 14, 2020

The Iraq War vote

The raid on Osama bin Laden

An Afghanistan war story

A lying politician. Not fake news, just old news.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/three-of-bidens-all-time-tall-tales-on-foreign-policy/

The former vice president has made a habit of distorting his national security record and telling stories that just aren’t true.

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., D-Del., ranking Democrat on Senate Foreign Relations, during an interview in his office about the possibility of war with Iraq, and Secretary of State Colin Powell’s intelligence briefing of the United Nations Security Council earlier today. (Photo by Scott J. Ferrell/Congressional Quarterly/Getty Images)

Former vice president Joe Biden has spun his foreign policy bona fides for the better part of two decades in order to make them fit with the political zeitgeist. Now, as he nears the Democratic nomination, it’s time for the media to take a closer look.

With that in mind, here are three of Biden’s most outrageous distortions of his national security record.

The Iraq War vote

Biden was chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when he voted to give President George W. Bush the broad authority to go to war in Iraq. But he didn’t just vote for the war—he helped sell it to the American public, even though the majority at the time did not support taking immediate military action.

As Tara Golshan and Alex Ward explain:

Biden bought into the Bush administration’s argument. He elevated the administration’s concerns about Hussein in the press. And in the months leading up to the vote authorizing war, he organized a series of Senate hearings, in close coordination with the White House, during which he echoed the administration’s talking points about weapons of mass destruction.

Biden even praised Colin Powell’s notorious United Nations Security Council speech, saying, “I think Secretary Powell made a very powerful, and I think irrefutable, case today.”

“President Bush did not lash out precipitously at Iraq after 9/11,” Biden said in a 2002 floor speech. “He did not snub the U.N. or our allies. He did not dismiss new inspection regimes. He did not ignore Congress. At each pivotal moment, he has chosen a course of moderation and deliberation…in each case in my view he has made the right rational calm deliberate decision.”

On October 11, 2002, the Democratic Senate passed the resolution for authorization of use of military force in Iraq by a vote of 77 to 23, with Biden voting yes.

Just hours before the invasion, on March 19, 2003, Biden told CNN, “I support the president. I support the troops. We should make no distinction. …Let’s get this war done.”

“We voted to give [Bush] the authority to wage that war. We should step back and be supportive,” he said.

But when asked about his Iraq vote during the July 2019 Democratic debate, Biden stated: “From the moment ‘shock and awe’ [the invasion of Iraq] started, from that moment, I was opposed to the effort, and I was outspoken as much as anyone at all in the Congress.”

Biden repeated the claim that he was against the war “immediately, the moment [shock and awe] started” again during an interview on NPR on September 3, 2019.

Biden didn’t actually call the war a “mistake” until 2005—not because he thought his vote for it was wrong, but because in his estimation we should have sent more troops: “We went too soon. We went without sufficient force. And we went without a plan.” Of course by that time, American support for the invasion had also dropped off precipitously.

Now, in his 2020 bid for the presidency, Biden continues to offer “jumbled Iraq war revisionism.” “Yes, I did oppose the war before it began,” Biden said at a September 6 campaign event. During the Democrats’ September debate, he claimed he only voted for the war authorization “to allow inspectors to go in to determine whether or not anything was being done with chemical weapons or nuclear weapons.”

Biden frequently conflates his Iraq vote with the issue of inspections, as if it was necessary to approve the AUMF in order to guarantee those inspections. It was not, and the timeline bears that out. Almost a month before Biden’s pro-war vote, in September 2002, Iraq said it was willing to allow in inspectors without conditions. Those inspections began in November. There were several senators who, unlike Biden, voted against the Iraq war while also arguing for the return of United Nations weapons inspectors to Iraq.

The raid on Osama bin Laden

When President Barack Obama sought advice on whether to carry out the raid that ultimately found and killed terrorist leader Osama bin Laden in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, Biden advised him not to strike because he felt the U.S. needed more information.

Vouching for Obama’s stellar “instincts” when he retold the moment to Democratic colleagues at their congressional retreat in 2012, Biden said:

[When he] got to me, he said, “Joe, what do you think?” And I said, “You know, I didn’t know we had so many economists around the table.” I said, “We owe the man a direct answer. Mr. President, my suggestion is don’t go. We have to do two more things to see if he’s there.”

Obama’s then-White House press secretary Jay Carney said that Biden was “speaking accurately” at the retreat about what had taken place in 2011.

By 2015, Biden had changed his story about that fateful 2011 meeting, claiming that “it would have been a mistake” to offer an opinion in front of the group, and that instead of saying to go or not go, he privately advised Obama to “go.”

Biden has continued to proffer this revised account, as recently as January of this year, despite the fact that it is contradicted by senior Obama officials, including none other than Hillary Clinton in her book Hard Choices and former CIA director Leon Panetta in his book Worthy Fights.

In January, Biden was asked by Fox News: “As commander in chief, if you were ever handed a piece of intelligence that said you could stop an imminent attack on Americans—but you have to use an airstrike to take out a terrorist leader—would you pull the trigger?”

Biden replied: “Well we did—the guy’s name was Osama bin Laden.”

“Didn’t you tell President Obama not to go after bin Laden that day?” Fox News asked.

“No, I didn’t,” Biden said.

An Afghanistan war story

Biden has misstated multiple key facts in a war story that he’s repeated on several occasions, according to The Washington Post:

Joe Biden painted a vivid scene for the 400 people packed into a college meeting hall. A four-star general had asked the then-vice president to travel to Konar province in Afghanistan, a dangerous foray into “godforsaken country” to recognize the remarkable heroism of a Navy captain.

Some told him it was too risky, but Biden said he brushed off their concerns.

“We can lose a vice president,” he said. “We can’t lose many more of these kids. Not a joke.”

The Navy captain…had rappelled down a 60-foot ravine under fire and retrieved the body of an American comrade, carrying him on his back. Now the general wanted Biden to pin a Silver Star on the American hero who, despite his bravery, felt like a failure. He said, “Sir, I don’t want the damn thing!” Biden said, his jaw clenched and his voice rising to a shout. “Do not pin it on me, Sir! Please, Sir. Do not do that! He died. He died!” …”This is the God’s honest truth,” Biden had said as he told the story. “My word as a Biden.”

The problem with Biden’s moving account is that, as the Post puts it, “almost every detail in the story appears to be false” and that Biden seems to have “jumbled elements of at least three actual events into one story of bravery, compassion and regret that never happened.”

Biden did visit Kunar province in 2008, but as a senator, not as vice president. Twenty-year-old Army specialist Kyle J. White, not a Navy captain, performed the rescue. And Biden did not pin the medal on White; then-president Obama did six years after Biden’s trip.

In one short story, Biden managed to be wrong on the time the event took place, the location, the person being honored, the rank and branch of the military the honoree belonged to, the type of medal awarded, the heroic act itself, and his own role in the event.

Unlike Brian Williams’ “I was there” Iraq account and Hillary Clinton’s claim to have “landed under sniper fire” in Bosnia, both tales that exaggerate the tellers’ heroism, it is muddier what Biden’s mixed-up, mish-mashed Afghanistan account was supposed to achieve. The most charitable take may be that it is simply a result of his alleged cognitive decline.

The same cannot be said for his record, however. Unlike his plagiarism, Biden’s foreign policy decisions had far-reaching, devastating, international consequences. If he becomes president, that will be doubly true.

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COVID-19: Further Evidence that the Virus Originated in the US – Global ResearchGlobal Research

Posted by M. C. on March 14, 2020

There has been much public speculation that the coronavirus had been deliberately transmitted to China but, according to the Chinese article, a less sinister alternative is possible.

If some members of the US team at the World Military Games (18-27 October) had become infected by the virus from an accidental outbreak at Fort Detrick it is possible that, with a long initial incubation period, their symptoms might have been minor, and those individuals could easily have ‘toured’ the city of Wuhan during their stay, infecting potentially thousands of local residents in various locations, many of whom would later travel to the seafood market from which the virus would spread like wildfire  (as it did).

It is beginning to look more like the virus originated in a lab, not in a bat.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/covid-19-further-evidence-virus-originated-us/5706078

It would be useful to read this prior article for background:

China’s Coronavirus: A Shocking Update. Did The Virus Originate in the US?

By Larry Romanoff, March 04, 2020

 

As readers will recall from the earlier article (above), Japanese and Taiwanese epidemiologists and pharmacologists have determined that the new coronavirus could have originated in the US since that country is the only one known to have all five types – from which all others must have descended. Wuhan in China has only one of those types, rendering it in analogy as a kind of “branch” which cannot exist by itself but must have grown from a “tree”.

The Taiwanese physician noted that in August of 2019 the US had a flurry of lung pneumonias or similar, which the Americans blamed on ‘vaping’ from e-cigarettes, but which, according to the scientist, the symptoms and conditions could not be explained by e-cigarettes. He said he wrote to the US officials telling them he suspected those deaths were likely due to the coronavirus. He claims his warnings were ignored.

Immediately prior to that, the CDC totally shut down the US Military’s main bio-lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland, due to an absence of safeguards against pathogen leakages, issuing a complete “cease and desist” order to the military. It was immediately after this event that the ‘e-cigarette’ epidemic arose.

Screenshot from The New York Times August 08, 2019

We also had the Japanese citizens infected in September of 2019, in Hawaii, people who had never been to China, these infections occurring on US soil long before the outbreak in Wuhan but only shortly after the locking down of Fort Detrick.

Then, on Chinese social media, another article appeared, aware of the above but presenting further details. It stated in part that five “foreign” athletes or other personnel visiting Wuhan for the World Military Games (October 18-27, 2019) were hospitalised in Wuhan for an undetermined infection.

The article explains more clearly that the Wuhan version of the virus could have come only from the US because it is what they call a “branch” which could not have been created first because it would have no ‘seed’. It would have to have been a new variety spun off the original ‘trunk’, and that trunk exists only in the US. (1)

There has been much public speculation that the coronavirus had been deliberately transmitted to China but, according to the Chinese article, a less sinister alternative is possible.

If some members of the US team at the World Military Games (18-27 October) had become infected by the virus from an accidental outbreak at Fort Detrick it is possible that, with a long initial incubation period, their symptoms might have been minor, and those individuals could easily have ‘toured’ the city of Wuhan during their stay, infecting potentially thousands of local residents in various locations, many of whom would later travel to the seafood market from which the virus would spread like wildfire  (as it did).

That would account also for the practical impossibility of locating the legendary “patient zero” – which in this case has never been found since there would have been many of them.

Next, Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease expert at Georgetown University in Washington, said in an article in Science magazine that the first human infection has been confirmed as occurring in November 2019, (not in Wuhan), suggesting the virus originated elsewhere and then spread to the seafood markets. “One group put the origin of the outbreak as early as 18 September 2019.” (2) (3)

Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally.

Description of earliest cases suggests the outbreak began elsewhere.

The article states:

“As confirmed cases of a novel virus surge around the world with worrisome speed, all eyes have so far focused on a seafood market in Wuhan, China, as the origin of the outbreak. But a description of the first clinical cases published in The Lancet on Friday challenges that hypothesis.” (4) (5)

The paper, written by a group of Chinese researchers from several institutions, offers details about the first 41 hospitalized patients who had confirmed infections with what has been dubbed 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV).

In the earliest case, the patient became ill on 1 December 2019 and had no reported link to the seafood market, the authors report. “No epidemiological link was found between the first patient and later cases”, they state. Their data also show that, in total, 13 of the 41 cases had no link to the marketplace. “That’s a big number, 13, with no link”, says Daniel Lucey . . . (6)

Earlier reports from Chinese health authorities and the World Health Organization had said the first patient had onset of symptoms on 8 December 2019 – and those reports simply said “most” cases had links to the seafood market, which was closed on 1 January. (7)

“Lucey says if the new data are accurate, the first human infections must have occurred in November 2019 – if not earlier – because there is an incubation time between infection and symptoms surfacing. If so, the virus possibly spread silently between people in Wuhan – and perhaps elsewhere – before the cluster of cases from the city’s now-infamous Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was discovered in late December. “The virus came into that marketplace before it came out of that marketplace”, Lucey asserts.

“China must have realized the epidemic did not originate in that Wuhan Huanan seafood market”, Lucey told Science Insider. (8)

Kristian Andersen is an evolutionary biologist at the Scripps Research Institute who has analyzed sequences of 2019-nCoV to try to clarify its origin. He said the scenario was “entirely plausible” of infected persons bringing the virus into the seafood market from somewhere outside. According to the Science article,

“Andersen posted his analysis of 27 available genomes of 2019-nCoV on 25 January on a virology research website. It suggests they had a “most recent common ancestor” – meaning a common source – as early as 1 October 2019.” (9)

It was interesting that Lucey also noted that MERS was originally believed to have come from a patient in Saudi Arabia in June of 2012, but later and more thorough studies traced it back to an earlier hospital outbreak of unexplained pneumonia in Jordan in April of that year. Lucey said that from stored samples from people who died in Jordan, medical authorities confirmed they had been infected with the MERS virus. (10)

This would provide impetus for caution among the public in accepting the “official standard narrative” that the Western media are always so eager to provide – as they did with SARS, MERS, and ZIKA, all of which ‘official narratives’ were later proven to have been wrong.

In this case, the Western media flooded their pages for months about the COVID-19 virus originating in the Wuhan seafood market, caused by people eating bats and wild animals. All of this has been proven wrong.

Not only did the virus not originate at the seafood market, it did not originate in Wuhan at all, and it has now been proven that it did not originate in China but was brought to China from another country. Part of the proof of this assertion is that the genome varieties of the virus in Iran and Italy have been sequenced and declared to have no part of the variety that infected China and must, by definition, have originated elsewhere.

It would seem the only possibility for origination would be the US because only that country has the “tree trunk” of all the varieties. And it may therefore be true that the original source of the COVID-19 virus was the US military bio-warfare lab at Fort Detrick. This would not be a surprise, given that the CDC completely shut down Fort Detrick, but also because, as I related in an earlier article, between 2005 and 2012 the US had experienced 1,059 events where pathogens had been either stolen or escaped from American bio-labs during the prior ten years.

*

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The Putin Stimulus: $30 Oil Will Be Great for the Global Economy

Posted by M. C. on March 14, 2020

https://www.anti-empire.com/the-putin-stimulus-30-oil-will-be-great-for-the-global-economy/

The world should be mailing thank-you letters to Moscow right about now

$30 dollar oil will be great for the global economy (and in turn, a good global economy is good for oil). At a time when the global economy is visibly losing steam, when we’re overdue for another business cycle recession, and when nobody seems to have an answer, Moscow delivered what nobody else could — a massive economic boost for the whole world.

Sure there will be losers, chief among them US shale and the Saudis who need far higher prices to make their budgets work.

But then as a whole, the US shale has always been a loss-making enterprise for America. The scaling-down of shale is not bearish for the US at all. It’s bullish. If Putin can make Americans stop throwing more good money down the shale pit that’s not a bad thing, that’s a giant favor to the US and the health of its economy right there.

To say nothing of the effect of cheap energy itself. Personally I don’t think even $30 oil will be enough to avert a crash but if anything could, it would be that.

Similar story with the Saudis, if they have less money to throw around backing Salafists and bribing Washington, that’s not a bad thing. That’s a great thing for the world.

Some of Russia’s friends like Venezuela and Iran will be hurt as well, but ironically the fact the US has already cut down their imports to a fraction of their capacity means they have a lot less left to lose.

It certainly will kill the Trump administration’s fantasy of the US displacing Russia as the energy supplier to Europe.

Finally, unlike money printing, Putin’s cheap oil stimulus is not redistributive and is not inflationary. And unlike a low-interest rate stimulus, it doesn’t throw economic calculation off balance by falsifying the price of credit and conjuring up a false abundance of real-world capital.

For three years Russia went along with OPECE energy price-fixing because it represented the quickest way to replenish its FX reserves. Those reserves have now been rebuilt. In the meantime, Russia developed a number of new oil fields but couldn’t move on with exploiting them which made its effort rather pointless.

This is a classical win-win. Rather than looking to squeeze every last dime from the consumers in the short term, the oil producers will be helping them to thrive which in turn will make sure the demand keeps growing.

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Socialism Would Have Solved This Problem – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on March 14, 2020

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/03/thomas-woods/socialism-would-have-solved-this-problem/

By

Everything about this virus situation is making me crazy.

Including this kind of thing, from socialists:

So it’s “capitalism” that makes people fight over toilet paper at a time when toilet paper isn’t a product they particularly need.

Socialism, they tell us, is “a system in which scarcity is no longer an issue.”

So when there’s an unanticipated pandemic, socialism will evidently have huge warehouses of toilet paper sitting there for no reason, waiting for consumers who don’t actually need it to get all they need.

Well, that seems like a rational approach to production.

How about the fact that it’s capitalism itself that’s made it seem normal and unremarkable that everybody you know readily purchases and uses soap, disinfectants, and sanitizers?

Which European king had all of these?

Scarcity is always an issue. If we produce A with resources B, C, and D, we cannot simultaneously produce F with B, C, and D. If we employ labor in the service of one line of production, we cannot simultaneously employ it in the service of another.

Here is the situation we face:

Billions of people have an enormous number of conflicting preferences.

We have to figure out a way to satisfy as many of those preferences as possible, but arrange the means of production in such a way that in satisfying one preference we are not inadvertently depriving more urgent preferences of the resources necessary for them to be satisfied.

The market economy, with its price system, accomplishes this seemingly impossible task — or at least approaches it as closely as mankind is capable of — without coercion or central direction.

It does it so well that people consider it automatic, like a spontaneously occurring feature of human existence.

Instead of marveling at it, they complain — and risk destroying the very thing that in all likelihood makes their own existences possible.

I might add, incidentally, that one thing the market provides that socialism surely would not, is home education.

The kind of system being described above would place indoctrination of the young fairly high on its list of goals, so good luck homeschooling.

Meanwhile, we’ve created the Ron Paul Curriculum, which — gasp — presents students with more than one point of view, while at the same time giving them a top-notch education in all the major subjects, plus others: like how to speak effectively, how to run a small business, how to operate a blog, or how to manage money.

There’s going to be more demand for it in the coming weeks, for obvious reasons.

Curious? Join through my link and I throw in three bonuses I created myself:

http://www.RonPaulHomeschool.com

http://www.LibertyClassroom.com

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US Intel Agencies Played Unsettling Role in Classified Coronavirus Response Plan

Posted by M. C. on March 14, 2020

The CBP’s pandemic response document, obtained by The Nation, reveals that the CBP’s pandemic directive “allows the agency to actively surveil and detain individuals suspected of carrying the illness indefinitely.” The Nation further notes that the plan was drafted during the George W. Bush administration, but is the agency’s most recent pandemic response plan and remains in effect.

The health department or national spy (on us) agencies-who would you have lead the coronavirus response?

Does it make a difference?

https://www.mintpressnews.com/us-intelligence-unsettling-role-classified-9-11-like-coronavirus-response/265687/

by Whitney Webb

As the COVID-19 coronavirus crisis comes to dominate headlines, little media attention has been given to the federal government’s decision to classify top-level meetings on domestic coronavirus response and lean heavily “behind the scenes” on U.S. intelligence and the Pentagon in planning for an allegedly imminent explosion of cases.

The classification of coronavirus planning meetings was first covered by Reuters, which noted that the decision to classify was “an unusual step that has restricted information and hampered the U.S. government’s response to the contagion.” Reuters further noted that the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Alex Azar, and his chief of staff had “resisted” the classification order, which was made in mid-January by the National Security Council (NSC), led by Robert O’Brien — a longtime friend and colleague of his predecessor John Bolton.

Following this order, HHS officials with the appropriate security clearances held meetings on coronavirus response at the department’s Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility (SCIF), which are facilities “usually reserved for intelligence and military operations” and — in HHS’ case — for responses to “biowarfare or chemical attacks.” Several officials who spoke to Reuters noted that the classification decision prevented key experts from participating in meetings and slowed down the ability of HHS and the agencies it oversees, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), to respond to the crisis by limiting participation and information sharing.

It has since been speculated that the decision was made to prevent potential leaks of information by stifling participation and that aspects of the planned response would cause controversy if made public, especially given that the decision to classify government meetings on coronavirus response negatively impacted HHS’ ability to respond to the crisis.

After the classification decision was made public, a subsequent report in Politico revealed that not only is the National Security Council managing the federal government’s overall response but that they are doing so in close coordination with the U.S. intelligence community and the U.S. military. It states specifically that “NSC officials have been coordinating behind the scenes with the intelligence and defense communities to gauge the threat and prepare for the possibility that the U.S. government will have to respond to much bigger numbers—and soon.”

Little attention was given to the fact that the response to this apparently imminent jump in cases was being coordinated largely between elements of the national security state (i.e. the NSC, Pentagon, and intelligence), as opposed to civilian agencies or those focused on public health issues, and in a classified manner.

The Politico article also noted that the intelligence community is set to play a “key role” in a pandemic situation, but did not specify what the role would specifically entail. However, it did note that intelligence agencies would “almost certainly see an opportunity to exploit the crisis” given that international “epicenters of coronavirus [are] in high-priority counterintelligence targets like China and Iran.” It further added, citing former intelligence officials, that efforts would be made to recruit new human sources in those countries.

Politico cited the official explanation for intelligence’s interest in “exploiting the crisis” as merely being aimed at determining accurate statistics of coronavirus cases in “closed societies,” i.e. nations that do not readily cooperate or share intelligence with the U.S. government. Yet, Politico fails to note that Iran has long been targeted for CIA-driven U.S. regime change, specifically under the Trump administration, and that China had been fingered as the top threat to U.S. global hegemony by military officials well before the coronavirus outbreak.

 

A potential  “9/11-like” response

The decision to classify government coronavirus preparations in mid-January, followed by the decision to coordinate the domestic response with the military and with intelligence deserves considerable scrutiny, particularly given that at least one federal agency, Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), will be given broad, sweeping powers and will work closely with unspecified intelligence “partners” as part of its response to a pandemics like COVID-19.

The CBP’s pandemic response document, obtained by The Nation, reveals that the CBP’s pandemic directive “allows the agency to actively surveil and detain individuals suspected of carrying the illness indefinitely.” The Nation further notes that the plan was drafted during the George W. Bush administration, but is the agency’s most recent pandemic response plan and remains in effect.

Though only CBP’s pandemic response plan has now been made public, those of other agencies are likely to be similar, particularly on their emphasis on surveillance, given past precedent following the September 11 attacks and other times of national panic. Notably, several recent media reports have likened coronavirus to 9/11 and broached the possibility of a “9/11-like” response to coronavirus, suggestions that should concern critics of the post-9/11 “Patriot Act” and other controversial laws, executive orders and policies that followed.

While the plans of the federal government remain classified, recent reports have revealed that the military and intelligence communities — now working with the NSC to develop the government’s coronavirus response — have anticipated a massive explosion in cases for weeks. U.S. military intelligence came to the conclusion over a month ago that coronavirus cases would reach “pandemic proportions” domestically by the end of March. That military intelligence agency, known as the National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), coordinates closely with the National Security Agency (NSA) to conduct “medical SIGINT [signals intelligence].”

The coming government response, the agencies largely responsible for crafting it and its classified nature deserve public scrutiny now, particularly given the federal government’s tendency to not let “a serious crisis to go to waste,” as former President Obama’s then-chief of staff Rahm Emanuel infamously said during the 2008 financial crisis. Indeed, during a time of panic — over a pandemic and over a simultaneous major economic downturn — concern over government overreach is warranted, particularly now given the involvement of intelligence agencies and the classification of planning for an explosion of domestic cases that the government believes is only weeks away.

Feature photo | A Medical University of South Carolina public safety officer walks by the hospital’s drive-through tent for patients who are being tested for the COVID-19 coronavirus at the Citadel Mall parking lot, March 13, 2020, in Charleston, S.C. Mic Smith | AP

Whitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist based in Chile. She has contributed to several independent media outlets including Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has made several radio and television appearances and is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism.

 

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Would It Be Unamerican To Refuse a Coronavirus Vaccination? – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on March 14, 2020

Protect yourself or let the government do it?

I know which way I am going.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/03/no_author/would-it-be-unamerican-to-refuse-coronavirus-vaccination/

By Bill Sardi

The day is going to come when the long-awaited coronavirus vaccine becomes available.  Will it be your civic duty to submit to vaccination?

I’m asking you why you are believing the scare tactics of the virologists, in particular that everyone will get infected with coronavirus.  Great!  Then nobody will need to get vaccinated!!  Because they will have already developed antibodies on their own.  This is the great ruse of the coronavirus.  Manipulation of the population by health authorities.

A few may be sickened – – smokers, diabetics, obese, the aged, etc.  The very weak may succumb to a viral infection that would otherwise cause only mild symptoms.  The healthy will either experience a mild fever or no symptoms at all.

A clinic in China reports 80% of infected individuals experienced no symptoms whatsoever.  The fearmongering virologists are frightening the public, urging people to self-quarantine, and not clueing in the public that vaccines will not be necessary for those who test positive for coronavirus but have developed antibodies on their own and have mild or no symptoms.   Don’t fall for the coronavirus con game.

But on a future trip to the doctor’s office, you are going to be confronted with the option to inoculate with a coronavirus vaccine.  Presume you will have a choice to get vaccinated against coronavirus.  How will you go about making that decision?  Do you have the gumption to say no to the doctor?

If you are like many others, you don’t want to get into any arguments (i.e. you don’t want to risk losing friendship over this, and you don’t want to alienate your doctor) and may not have time to read this entire report.  If you just want instruction about what to do to avoid the coronavirus and forget about the vaccine for now, skip forward to the last page of this report.

Better safe than sorry you say to yourself.  Better to get vaccinated.  I offer contrarian thoughts about vaccination against coronavirus.  But, “what if?… you ask.  I know that is what you are thinking.  Deep down there is fear.  And fear breeds poor decision making.  But you may already have antibodies to coronaviruses.  But only the vaccine gives peace of mind.

Little do we know, the problem is right there in your home – it’s your immune system.  And maintaining your immune system is much more powerful than vaccines.  In fact, vaccines don’t work without certain nutrients.

What is fear after all? It is indecision.

In light of the news reports surrounding the coronavirus epidemic, I now must ask: just how gullible are you?

How can a naïve public that believes almost everything it hears and sees on evening TV network news is the truth, in any way question the prevailing fear that coronavirus kills?  You don’t understand, after watching hours of network evening TV news over your lifetime, that the pharmaceutical companies and vaccine makers “own” TV news?  That what you are hearing is propaganda?

You mean to tell me, that after the CDC said that thousands more Americans (not really) died of the flu last year than this year, yet no panic resulted, no quarantines were called for, no hand-washing habits recommended or withdrawal from offering a handshake to friends?

“Evil draws its power from indecision and concern
for what other people think.”

Last year was worse than this year.  Why didn’t TV reporters run around and report each and every case of the flu last year as they are doing now with coronavirus?  The flu is just as deadly to older Americans as coronavirus.  So why have public health authorities and news media chosen to frighten the public and suggest the public begin self-quarantining themselves because of this newly mutated pathogen?

Do you think what you have been told about vaccines is true?  Do you think the American population is being set up, driven by fear, to clamor for a new vaccine?

You had better hope, in the rush to market, the new vaccine doesn’t have another hidden virus in it like the polio shot did, which increased the risk for cancer.

This coronavirus panic is fostered by self-interested parties who can’t even make enough people die to
totally convince you to vaccinate
.

You are/aren’t being lied to about vaccines?

What is the Centers for Disease Control’s history with regard to transparency and truthfulness regarding vaccination?

What if I showed you convincing evidence that Americans are being lied to about vaccines?  Over 9 in 10 school-age kids are vaccinated.  Dutiful Americans see that their kids get the shots because that is the American way.  I think there is too much fear-based pressure for parents to withhold their school-age children from being vaccinated, particularly in light of recent outbreaks of infectious diseases that are being blamed on anti-vaxxers (actually being caused by synthetic vaccines not providing life-long immunity like old-fashioned vaccines once did).  That’s social pressure.  But there is also legal pressure.  In fact, failure to vaccinate your children is now considered child neglect these days.

Did you know that many physicians don’t vaccinate their own kids like they recommend to parents? (That’s another lie, if not a betrayal of trust.)

So, let me throw some additional evidence in front of you.  Below is a chart showing the flu vaccine ineffectiveness for 15 consecutive years.

It’s what the above chart doesn’t reveal that is most troubling.  The data above does not reveal that every year the flu vaccine was almost worthless among the very young (under age 6) and the very old (over age 70), the highest risk groups for death from the flu.  That is because these two age groups are not able to produce sufficient antibodies after inoculation.  It is the immune system, not the vaccines, that is failing.

Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Reports (Feb 16, 2018), a federal publication, noted that 43% of the 100+ million Americans vaccinated against the flu in 2018 actually got the flu (maybe even from the vaccine itself).  The flu vaccine that year was barely effective for children and adults up to 49 years old, but “no statistically significant protection was observed in other age groups,” including people over age 65.

But the CDC had early data in its hands and its minions, pediatricians and pharmacists at drug stores that offer flu shots, were still urging folks to get vaccinated!  How’s that for deception?

Back to the coronavirus circus Read the rest of this entry »

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Coronavirus vs. Constitution: What can government stop you from doing in a pandemic?

Posted by M. C. on March 13, 2020

Apparently pretty much anything it wants.

Precedents are set.

People are trained to obey…or else.

Laws do not go away. Income tax, social security, tax withholding are a few that come to mind.

https://www.sacbee.com/news/nation-world/national/article241106636.html

By Hayley Fowler

Public closures, a ban on gatherings, quarantine notices and orders for isolation have become increasingly common as the coronavirus continues to spread across the United States.

Officials in Washington state and San Francisco are limiting the number of people allowed to attend public gatherings. The governor of California joined them on Thursday in urging the cancellation of all events with more than 250 people in attendance.

The governor of Kentucky, a Bible belt state, has asked churches and other religious institutions to temporarily cancel services.

But if it seems these actions are infringing on individual freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, think again.

“You don’t have a right to assemble against the backdrop of known public health risk,” James G. Hodge told McClatchy News.

Hodge is the director of the Center for Public Health Law and Policy at Arizona State University, an affiliate of the Network for Public Health Law. As the number of COVID-19 cases climbs, he said, the types of “aggressive measures” taking place in some parts of the country will be used elsewhere.

As of Thursday, more than a dozen states from California to North Carolina have declared a state of emergency to try and stop the spread of the coronavirus.

Hodge said those declarations help shape how public health officials can respond at the state and local level, enabling them to act fast while instituting forms of social distancing — “which is one of the only tools we have available to us” during a public health crisis like the coronavirus pandemic, he said.

Officials typically have to go through legal processes to close an establishment or shut down public gatherings, Hodge said. But under a state of emergency, everything is expedited.

“It’s not that we don’t have time for First Amendment interests, it’s that we must act fast,” he said. “What was opened today can be closed tomorrow.”

Getting the courts involved

That doesn’t mean communities in the U.S. will see the kind of large-scale lock-downs happening in Italy and China, Hodge added.

But there are circumstances under which a voluntary recommendation can become involuntary.

A man in Missouri left quarantine to attend a father-daughter dance at a nearby hotel, McClatchy reported, prompting county health officials to warn “he must remain in his home or they will issue a formal quarantine that will require him and the rest of his family to stay in their home by the force of law.”

When someone opts to evade such recommendations, Hodge said, public health authorities can seek a court order mandating their compliance.

“Some of those basic liberties are going to be truncated for a brief period,” he said. “Most Americans understand the need for that.”

But these types of public closures and requests for self-quarantine aren’t without good reason — it’s “flattening the curve,” Vox reported.

If officials don’t stop the rapid spread of coronavirus, or at least slow it down, epidemiologists have said the health care system could be “overwhelmed by a sudden explosion of illness that requires more people to be hospitalized than it can handle,” according to Vox.

Our #FlattenTheCurve graphic is now up on @Wikipedia with proper attribution & a CC-BY-SA licence. Please share far & wide and translate it into any language you can! Details in the thread below. #Covid_19 #COVID2019 #COVID19 #coronavirus Thanks to @XTOTL & @TheSpinoffTV pic.twitter.com/BQop7yWu1Q

— Dr Siouxsie Wiles (@SiouxsieW) March 10, 2020

Least intrusive means

Still, these measures aren’t undertaken without due process.

“The government does have sweeping powers to combat communicable disease but there are limits,” said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Stanley told McClatchy News officials have a set of guidelines to follow when it comes to making these decisions — it has to be overwhelmingly in the public interest, rooted in rational, scientific ends and done by the least intrusive means possible. There must also be a mechanism to challenge it.

Officials can’t, for example, use COVID-19 as an excuse or pretext “to achieve illegitimate ends” like shutting down a protest or discriminating against certain groups, he said.

Hodge said these types of measures aren’t designed to be punitive, they’re protective — and they don’t “trip any constitutional safeguards when done right.”

He pointed to a case from the 1980s in West Virginia where a man who officials suspected had tuberculosis was involuntarily confined in quarantine. The man argued he was denied due process when the trial court delayed appointing him an attorney, and judges agreed.

That, Hodge said, is an example of what not to do in a public health emergency.

“There really are definitive checklists of things you have to show to utilize quarantine and isolation powers at the level we’re going to see,” he told McClatchy.

‘Not guesswork’

But he said state and local health authorities know that — “this is not guesswork.”

The coronavirus hasn’t caught the public health system off guard so much as prompted them to operate on a much larger scale than usual, Hodge said.

“It gets a lot easier when Americans act on their own volition and self-quarantine pursuant to public health directives,” he said. “Most Americans will respond that way.”

The CDC has guidelines on legal authorities governing isolation and quarantine as well as the types of laws and regulations that come into play during a pandemic.

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I Make No Predictions, But Evil Takeover Is Imminent!

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