A ruler who lacks understanding is a cruel oppressor, but he who hates unjust gain will prolong his days….If a ruler listens to falsehood, all his officials will be wicked….When the righteous increase, the people rejoice, but when the wicked rule, the people groan. (Proverbs 28:16, Proverbs 29: 2 & 12)
Updated 18 October 2020
Crimes Against Humanity
Crime against humanity, an offense in international criminal law, adopted in the Charter of the International Military Tribunal (Nürnberg Charter), which tried surviving Nazi leaders in 1945, and was, in 1998, incorporated into the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The Nuremberg trials established that all of humanity would be guarded by an international legal shield and that even a Head of State would be held criminally responsible and punished for aggression and Crimes Against Humanity.
Crimes against humanity are grave violations of international law committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack on a civilian population. Crimes against humanity are part of the core crimes against international law and are subject to universal jurisdiction.
A team of worldwide lawyers and scientists are investigating the illegality of the coronavirus pandemic:
Millions of people around the World are victims of the fear campaign. Panic prevails. Day after day, the persistent impact of media disinformation concerning the Killer Virus is overwhelming. Fear and panic, coupled with outright lies prevent people from understanding the logic of these far-reaching economic and social policies. An international network of lawyers is intent upon launching a class action Lawsuit. Dr. Reiner Fuellmich, a prominent lawyer presents the details of this project. (video below). After nine months of research and analysis, we can confirm that the data and concepts have been manipulated with a view to sustaining the fear campaign. The estimates based on the RT-PCR test are meaningless: The RT-PCR test does not identify/detect the Covid-19 virus. What it detects are fragments of several viruses. Confirmed by prominent scientists as well as by official public health bodies Covid-19 is not a dangerous virus. Amply documented, the COVID-19 Pandemic has been used as a pretext to trigger a Worldwide process of economic, social and political restructuring which has resulted in mass poverty and Worldwide unemployment. It is destroying people’s lives. The original source of this article is Global Research. Copyright © Reiner Fuellmich, Global Research, 2020
Dr. Fuellmich provides clear and rational analysis of today's world wide psychological manipulation applications, outlining his reasoning why the "scamdemic" surrounding the lockdown, restrictions, masks and PCR Test represents "Crimes Against Humanity". Dr. Reiner Fuellmich, a top German lawyer, admitted to the bar in Germany and in California for 26 years and known for corruption trials against Deutsche Bank and VW and now a member of German Corona Investigative Committee says those responsible for the COVID fraud scandal should be trialled for probably the greatest crime against humanity in history. He discusses the findings of the Corona Investigative Committee that was formed on July 10, 2020 by four lawyers. The committee is made up of lawyers, doctors, and scientists who together have reached the conclusion that COVID may well be the greatest crime against Humanity in history. In this video he details the legal and medical conclusion, after nine months of research and analysis. It confirms that the data and concepts have been manipulated with a view to sustaining the fear campaign. "The estimates based on the RT-PCR test are meaningless: The RT-PCR test does not identify / detect the Covid-19 virus. What it detects are fragments of several viruses." The full transcript, summary of key points and the video is available here. Lord Jonathan Sumption and Dr Mike Yeadon who are quoted in Dr. Fuellmich’s video, Crimes Against Humanity, are also challenging the UK government.
Former UK Justice of the Supreme Court, barristers, legal professionals have repeatedly been warning the government about using draconian guidelines as law.
Jonathan Sumption wrote a blistering attack on Boris and his ‘strongman’ Government in the Telegraph yesterday.
Behind the spat about Parliamentary control over the Government’s Covid measures, there is an older and more fundamental divide. It is the divide between an authoritarian model of government and a more deliberative and democratic model.
The authoritarians believe in the “strongman”: the boss who gets things done with the aid of a team of technicians, who surmounts crises by intervening swiftly and decisively, without wasting time in argument or debate. The alternative, according to this view of the world, is a bunch of squabbling politicians picking over the entrails while the sand runs through the hourglass.
There has always been a strand of political masochism in Britain which likes this idea: the sort of people who admire dictators because they make the trains run on time. From time to time there is a more widespread move towards authoritarian government. We are experiencing one of those times now.
Commenting on the UK's emergency legislation and why it's time to release democracy from quarantine and resuscitate the rule of law, Lord Sumption said: ''When tyrannies take over it is because people volunteer their liberty voluntarily.” A bold pronouncement, but what we have come to expect from Lord Sumption…in his campaign to defend civil liberties under lockdown.
Dr Mike Yeadon, former CSO and VP, Allergy and Respiratory Research Head with Pfizer Global R&D and co-Founder of Ziarco Pharma Ltd, has published a scientific paper outlining the lies in health statistics and testing. He states in the paper:
"I wish to note that in the last 40 years alone the UK has had seven official epidemics/pandemics; AIDS, Swine flu, CJD, SARS, MERS, Bird flu as well as annual, seasonal flu. All were very worrying but schools remained open and the NHS treated everybody and most of the population were unaffected. The country would rarely have been open if it had been shut down every time. I have explained how a hopelessly-performing diagnostic test has been, and continues to be used, not for diagnosis of disease but, it seems, solely to create fear. This misuse of power must cease."
He challenged Boris and his advisors on talkRADIO "to cite the research literature that underscores their belief in a second wave. There is no science that says [a second wave] will happen". He also said that the 'Government are using a Covid-19 test with undeclared false positive rates.'
The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) published a paper, Ensuring Uptake of Vaccines against SARS-CoV-2”, basically advocating for mandatory vaccines. Dr Mike Yeadon stated that “This document, in my view, represents the kernel of the most severe assault on the rights of individuals to consent, or not, to what are essentially experimental medical interventions… it is a severe assault on the rights of individuals to consent, or not, to what are essentially experimental medical interventions….employment suspension or stay-at-home orders for persons in designated high-priority groups who refuse vaccination”. Basically, if you refuse, on any grounds, you will be subject to indefinite house arrest. I can’t believe I’m reading this in 2020. More like Germany, 1938.”
Similarly, international scientists, medical experts, lawyers and medical practitioners are challenging their governments to oppose national and localised lockdowns, and harsher restrictions for everyone.
A legal challenge to the lockdown being brought by entrepreneur and founder of Keep Britain Free Simon Dolan has been delayed because one of the Government’s 11 lawyers is on holiday. This is despite Lord Justice Hickinbottom, who ordered the appeal, directing that the case needed to be heard quickly.
Carl Heneghan is the Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine, Oxford and a clinical epidemiologist with expertise in evidence-based medicine, research methods, and evidence synthesis. Tom Jefferson is a senior associate tutor and honorary research fellow at the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, University of Oxford.
In response to the "rule of six" and the lockdowns, Prof Carl Heneghan and Dr Tom Jefferson writing for the Mail said:
Today, our bewildered Prime Minister and his platoon of inept advisers might as well be using the planets to guide us through this pandemic, so catastrophic and wildly over-the-top are their decisions… Why is it that the Government is once again in the grip of doom-mongering scientific modellers who specialise in causing panic and little else?
This nonsensical term ‘circuit breaker’ is not the only aspect of the Government’s rhetoric that needs closer scrutiny. Because it is the irrational, unscientific use of language that is partly to blame for driving Ministers into these mistakes.
Take the word ‘trajectory’, something we have heard a great deal of this past week. This is a ballistic term that suggests a degree of certainty. It is claimed our ‘trajectory’ shows Britain following Spain – and we may be only a matter of weeks behind them.
Readers may not be not aware of the pioneering work by Carl Henghan and his colleagues at the Oxford Centre for Evidence Based Medicine, which forced the Government to change its death toll counting method.
In the UK, draconian Coronavirus restrictions that include rule of 6, no dancing, singing, mingling, 10pm curfews for pubs, restaurants, takeaways, mandatory masks, the threat of second lockdown and the rise of similar restrictions globally; three leading infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists with over 30 others have submitted a Declaration to challenge governments. So far, launched on Sunday, the signatures include:
Medical & Public Health Scientists 13,016
Medical Practitioners 6,252
General Public 177,039
On Monday the Declaration’s authors met with Alex Azar, US secretary of health and human services, and Scott Atlas, an adviser to President Trump, for what Kulldorff described as a “very good discussion.”
Pushback also came from Matt Hancock, Boris Johnson and The Lancet, the UK's top medical journal. In a letter to The Lancet, 80 experts on medicine and public health have called for immediate action to stop the disease in its tracks, a politically motivated response:
“This week Matt Hancock condemned experts who dared question lockdown. Now, after two of them embarrassingly exposed his basic errors”, Prof ANGUS DALGLEISH asks... “How IS this petulant, shockingly ignorant minister still in a job?”
Its not surprising that Prof Dalgleish questions Matt Hancock’s suitability to remain in the job as Health Secretary. He has been caught out on number of occasions of giving false and misleading information (lying):
Supermarkets have accused Matt Hancock of lying after the Health Secretary claimed that ministers had been working with them to ensure food will be delivered to people in self-isolation for coronavirus testing.
Mr Hancock said on BBC Question Time on Thursday that the Government was in discussion with supermarkets about the issue. “We are working with the supermarkets to make sure that, if people are self-isolating, then we will be able to get the food and supplies that they need,” he said. But supermarket sources told the BBC they had not discussed delivering food to homes. An executive said: "Matt Hancock has totally made up what he said about working with supermarkets. We haven't heard anything from government directly."
Ministers are said to be reconsidering the use of vitamin D in tackling coronavirus after Matt Hancock wrongly claimed it had been proven to be ineffective in a Government-funded study.
The health secretary told the House of Commons last week that a ‘trial’ investigating vitamin D had taken place, and that it did not ‘appear to have any impact’ on the effects of Covid-19. But officials have since admitted that no clinical trials on the vitamin have been carried out at all. Yesterday, Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran said Mr Hancock should ‘get his facts straight’. Experts have pointed to growing evidence suggesting the vitamin could have an impact on how badly people who catch the virus suffer. https://metro.co.uk/2020/10/02/matt-hancock-wrongly-claims-study-said-vitamin-d-had-no-effect-on-coronavirus-13360029/
From Twitter “Matt Hancock told the Commons last week that he had ordered a trial that showed vitamin D did not “appear to have any impact”. Officials now admit that no trials took place. I thought Ministers were not allowed to lie to the House of Commons?
The misleading of parliament is the knowing presentation of false information to parliament, a very serious charge in Westminster system parliamentary assemblies.
In a big boost to the anti-lockdown movement, one of President Donald Trump’s key advisers on coronavirus, Professor Scott Atlas, tweeted yesterday that Trump’s policies align with the anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration.
Atlas told The Hill in an email that he attended the meeting and supports the declaration the group put out endorsing herd immunity.
"Their targeted protection of the vulnerable and opening schools and society policy matches the policy of the President and what I have advised," he wrote.
Immediately a pushback came from Stefan Baral, a physician epidemiologist and associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, said he was concerned that the meeting had taken place.
The mainstream view of epidemiologists and public health experts, including the nation's top infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci and the World Health Organization, is that the best way to get through COVID-19 and protect people who are at risk for serious illness is to not get sick in the first place by wearing masks and practicing social distancing....
But the experts who met with Azar argued that living with those public health measures for the next several months until a vaccine is available is not feasible, given the unintended consequences for mental health, missed childhood vaccinations and the economy.
There is also number of anti-lockdown letters signed by doctors and medical professionals, such as this one in the US and this one in Belgium. Other doctors, some who lost their jobs, have also signed letters. Docs4OpenDebate is collection of healthcare workers based in Belgium. Last month they posted an open letter to the Belgian government demanding an end to lockdown, in that time the letter has accrued over 13,000 signatures – 561 one of whom are medical doctors.
Sixty-six GPs have written to Matt Hancock urging him to consider the collateral damage being done by the ongoing restrictions, listing the tens of thousands of non-Covid excess deaths in private homes since March, the spike in cardiovascular deaths, the rise in child suicides and the problems besetting the elderly – depression, anxiety and loneliness. It’s not as forthrightly sceptical as I’d like – the docs say they supported the first lockdown – but the reasonableness of its tone may end making it more effective. And the message is clear: the harm the restrictions are doing to the public’s health outweighs the harm they are supposedly preventing. full text of the letter below.
“Follow the Science”
The pandemic has exposed many scientists and the scientific community. The public has been shielded for years by the media, and now even more forcibly to enforce the narrative of the biased scientists and their organisations, which are funded by the WHO, Foundations like Bill and Melinda Gates, etc. For instance, this website routinely factchecks research papers that are often from leading journals like the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine, though they occasionally do opinion pieces that come across as “hit piece”. However, it does highlight how, even scientists can get things wrong, the only problem is that it takes a long time, unless it has been exposed, and in some cases years for the scientists to retract the research papers. Another problem with the science community is the centralised power of scientific publishing companies relating to research papers.
In 2017, the Guardian reported that the scientific community is “an industry like no other, with profit margins to rival Google – and it was created by one of Britain’s most notorious tycoons: Robert Maxwell.”
business model seemed a truly puzzling thing. In order to make money, a traditional publisher – say, a magazine – first has to cover a multitude of costs: it pays writers for the articles; it employs editors to commission, shape and check the articles; and it pays to distribute the finished product to subscribers and retailers. All of this is expensive, and successful magazines typically make profits of around 12-15%.
The way to make money from a scientific article looks very similar, except that scientific publishers manage to duck most of the actual costs. Scientists create work under their own direction – funded largely by governments – and give it to publishers for free; the publisher pays scientific editors who judge whether the work is worth publishing and check its grammar, but the bulk of the editorial burden – checking the scientific validity and evaluating the experiments, a process known as peer review – is done by working scientists on a volunteer basis. The publishers then sell the product back to government-funded institutional and university libraries, to be read by scientists – who, in a collective sense, created the product in the first place.
Scientists are well aware that they seem to be getting a bad deal. The publishing business is “perverse and needless”, the Berkeley biologist Michael Eisen wrote in a 2003 article for the Guardian, declaring that it “should be a public scandal”. Adrian Sutton, a physicist at Imperial College, told me that scientists “are all slaves to publishers……
Many scientists also believe that the publishing industry exerts too much influence over what scientists choose to study, which is ultimately bad for science itself. Journals prize new and spectacular results – after all, they are in the business of selling subscriptions – and scientists, knowing exactly what kind of work gets published, align their submissions accordingly. This produces a steady stream of papers, the importance of which is immediately apparent….A 2013 study, for example, reported that half of all clinical trials in the US are never published in a journal.
An academic's career hangs on Citations meaning that other authors referencing that academic's work in their papers. Except that other authors will only reference the work that they have read, so that they are increasingly likely to reference open access publications, or articles that they have been able to obtain by other means, rather than articles that must be paid for. So, having got your paper into an Elsevier journal, how do you get researchers or even your friends in the field to read the paywalled articles in commercial journals? You can’t. Unless your pay the publishers to publish your articles.
The EU has recognised this and eleven European funding organizations, with the support of the European Commission and the European Research Council (ERC), announced in 2018 an open-access initiative, cOAlition S, which requires that scientific publications, that result from research funded by public grants, must be published in compliant Open Access journals or platforms.
I think this is going to be the driver of the future: open access and pre-print servers are much more helpful for researchers and scientists to get their work read than the so-called elite journals, which lacks transparency and exploits governments’ funds and grants that comes from the tax payers, who unable to access it. It's a travesty this has gone on for so long, without any science ministers raising concerns. Could it be because of lobbying? At the start of the covid-19 pandemic the government's mantra was that it would be “led by the science” but these “advisers” are in bed with pharmaceuticals and health providers and the private sector foundations, who masquerade as charities.
“cOAlition S signals the commitment to implement the necessary measures to fulfil its main principle:
“With effect from 2021, all scholarly publications on the results from research funded by public or private grants provided by national, regional and international research councils and funding bodies, must be published in Open Access Journals, on Open Access Platforms, or made immediately available through Open Access Repositories without embargo.”
Never underestimate the power of one determined person. What Carole Cadwalladr has done to Facebook and big data, and Edward Snowden has done to the state security complex, the young Kazakhstani scientist Alexandra Elbakyan has done to the multibillion-dollar industry that traps knowledge behind paywalls. Sci-Hub, her pirate web scraper service, has done more than any government to tackle one of the biggest rip-offs of the modern era: the capture of publicly funded research that should belong to us all. Everyone should be free to learn; knowledge should be disseminated as widely as possible…..Academic publishing might sound like an obscure and fusty affair, but it uses one of the most ruthless and profitable business models of any industry…. The model was pioneered by the notorious conman Robert Maxwell… he sold his company to the Dutch publishing giant Elsevier. Like its major rivals, it has sustained the model to this day, and continues to make spectacular profits. Half the world’s research is published by five companies: Reed Elsevier, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Wiley-Blackwell and the American Chemical Society. Libraries must pay a fortune for their bundled journals, while those outside the university system are asked to pay $20, $30, sometimes $50 to read a single article.
Elbakyan discovered that she could not complete her neuroscience research without pirated articles. Outraged by the journals’ padlock on knowledge, she used her hacking skills to share papers more widely. Sci-Hub allows free access to 70m papers, otherwise locked behind paywalls. She was sued in 2015 by Elsevier, which won $15m in damages for copyright infringement, and in 2017 by the American Chemical Society, resulting in a $4.8m fine.
Alexandra Elbakyan lives in hiding….She is by no means the only person to have challenged the big publishers. The Public Library of Science, founded by researchers who objected not only to the industry’s denial of public access but also its slow, antiquated and clumsy modes of publishing that hold back scientific research, has demonstrated that you don’t need paywalls to produce excellent journals. Advocates like Stevan Harnad, Björn Brembs, Peter Suber and Michael Eisen have changed the public mood. The brilliant online innovator Aaron Swartz sought to release 5m scientific articles into the public domain. Facing the possibility of decades in a US federal prison for this selfless act, he took his life.
Left to Suffer: the travesty of the elderly, care homes and the vulnerable
We should also consider the advice being offered from the science community and remember this as we consider the huge impact of lockdown regime policies on the most vulnerable people in society: those in care and nursing homes, and those who require home care. The world sacrificed its elderly in the race to protect hospitals and the result was a catastrophe in care homes even now there is rising anxiety among care home managers, said Nadra Ahmed, the executive chairman of the National Care Association, which represents independent care homes. Ahmed said that in recent days, many operators had decided to close their homes to visitors to prevent a repeat, and further lockdowns are expected this week, which is likely to cause anguish for families.
“Providers are living under a cloud of fear,” said Ahmed. “In July, we were promised weekly testing, then we were told testing would all be available by 7 September, but people are still waiting for test results and they are still not coming back on time. We had one member who tested staff last Friday. The results came back this Friday and two staff were positive. In that period they were working, which means they could have spread the virus to the residents.”
Covid-19 testing in care homes in England could be de-prioritised to save scarce laboratory capacity for the NHS, public health officials fear. In an email seen by the Guardian, another senior local official urged colleagues to help head off a “concerning” proposal to prioritise NHS testing above care homes. They warned any reduction in care home testing could delay the identification of outbreaks. Concern about a potential move to switch test capacity away from care homes is said to have been raised by several local authorities in England.
The Mail reported recently that Covid-19 restrictions on care homes could mean the elderly don't see their family for a year, a leading charity has warned:
Age UK is worried about the powers given to local health bosses to impose blanket bans on visits, a move to prevent Britain's most vulnerable residents catching the coronavirus.
Although virus control is important, the charity said visiting restrictions undermine the danger of lack of social contact with loved ones.
It warned a number of care home residents have already died prematurely because they 'have gone downhill fast' as a result of being cut off from their loved ones. Experts have previously warned isolation can lead to the deterioration of conditions such as dementia.
Age UK's warning came after Boris Johnson yesterday announced new restrictions in England in response to rising numbers of coronavirus cases.
He said if the situation does not improve, the measures could last for more than six months to March — a year after the initial lockdown when care homes first shut their doors.
Caroline Abrahams, the charity director at Age UK, told The Telegraph restrictions could leave elderly care home residents alone for a year.
She said: 'Given where we are now with Covid-19, we worry that more and more care homes will now shut their doors to visitors, either off their own bat or because their local director of public health instructs them to do so….. 'The other is the risk of undermining older people's mental and physical health by cutting them off from those they love for a long time.
Under the social care winter plan, which came out last week, local directors of public health were given the authority to close care homes if the spread of coronavirus is rising in the community. Sweeping Covid restrictions on care homes could mean elderly residents don't see their loved ones for a YEAR, charity warns
In order to free up space in hospitals, older patients were discharged into care homes without even being tested for the virus. In the two weeks after lockdown, when the risk of infection should have been waning, a further 1,800 homes in England reported outbreaks.
The lockdown regime virtually removed GP support from care settings and the community. People have had to get used to telephone consultations instead of examinations and home visits. Thereby, hugely increasing the risk to the most vulnerable in the middle of an alleged global pandemic.
Care leaders, unions and MPs have rounded on Boris Johnson after he accused care homes of failing to follow proper procedures amid the coronavirus crisis, saying the prime minister appeared to be shifting the blame for the high death toll. In July, he claimed that "too many care homes didn't really follow the procedures in the way that they could have". Carers reacted with anger because the guidance issued until 13 March told them: "It remains very unlikely that people receiving care in a care home or the community will become infected."
The BBC are reporting that a report by Amnesty, founded in the UK, stated that UK Care homes policies violated human rights. Sending thousands of older untested patients into care homes in England at the start of the coronavirus lockdown was a violation of their human rights, Amnesty International has said.
The report says government decisions were "inexplicable" and "disastrous", affecting mental and physical health:
Most shockingly, on 17 March, four days after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, the Government ordered the discharge of 25,000 patients from hospitals into care homes, including those infected or possibly infected with COVID-19.
On 2 April, the same day that the WHO confirmed the existence of pre-symptomatic cases of COVID-19, the Government reiterated its guidance for hospital discharge that ‘Negative tests are not required prior to transfers / admissions into the care home’.
Several care home managers told Amnesty that they had no COVID-19 in their homes until after they received patients discharged from hospital. The manager of a care home in Yorkshire said:
“Because of what we’d witnessed in Spain and Italy, we stopped visitors on 28 February and got PPE. We had no cases until 28 March when a resident was discharged from hospital with COVID.”
These and other decisions taken by the Government led to violations of human rights of older people in care homes during the pandemic - notably their right to life, their right to health and their right to non-discrimination.UK: Older people in care homes abandoned to die amid government failures during COVID-19 pandemic
More than 18,000 people living in care homes died with Covid-19 and Amnesty says the public inquiry promised by the government must begin immediately.
An example of three really disturbing and deeply upsetting cases, where lack of care and empathy elderly people are receiving from authorities, was posted on social media by desperate families:
1/2 "My mum is 82, has lost both her legs, her eyesight bad and she's going deaf, she hasn't been allowed any physical contact for 7 months, Prestons lockdown so we cant visit but I go with my brother twice.." 2/2 "We take her a pie and some fags which we have to put in a box by the main door, then we ring her phone so she can hear, she just wants a day out to Blackpool so I keep telling her its gunna be great when we go, yet the odds of her having her day are not good. Its inhumane". Blackpool is a seaside (beach) town not far from where she lives. https://mobile.twitter.com/shazbat2008/status/1307125824626319362
A son was left "angry and upset" when he was told to move while comforting his mother at his father's funeral, because of social distancing rules. Writing on Facebook Mr Bicknell pointed out the idiocy of the action. “I can sit in a restaurant, I can sit in a pub, I can live at her house, I can travel in a limousine to the crematorium with 6. But when I want to give my mum a cuddle at dads funeral, a man flies out mid service shouting stop the service and makes us split... A devastating day made even worse.”
Another person highlighted that this is not an isolated incident, and that it is deeply affecting people’s mental health. “We went through this in April and I was unable to console my own children with the loss of their beautiful nanna my amazing mum. The effect on us mentally is indescribable the pain is long felt. As a family we feel we have not been able to honour my darling mum,” the commenter urged.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/watch-mourners-admonished-moving-chairs-closer-together-british-funeral
Conflict of Interest: Global Scientists advising governments
In January of 2010, Bill and Melinda Gates announced a $10 billion pledge to usher in a decade of vaccines. But far from an unalloyed good, the truth is that this attempt to reorient the global health economy was part of a much bigger agenda. An agenda that would ultimately lead to greater profits for big pharma companies, greater control for the Gates Foundation over the field of global health, and greater power for Bill Gates to shape the course of the future for billions of people around the planet. Bill Gates and the Population Control Grid – James Corbett
It’s worth reminding people that Gates is the founder, main donor and stakeholder of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), Global Vaccine Action Plan (GVAP) and Grand Challenges in Global Health (GCGH). Grand Challenges, in Global Health awarded 44 grants - totaling over $450 million for research projects involving scientists in 33 countries – and funded an additional supporting project addressing ethical, social, and cultural issues across the initiative. The first decade of progress yielded diverse types of impact. The initiative has since been renamed Grand Challenges to reflect the fact that as new challenges have been added, its scope has expanded to encompass global development as well as global health.
He is the main and most influential funder of WHO via which he implements the vaccination of the global population.
The “Global Vaccine Action Plan” was announced in 2010 as a public-private partnership of the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It is also worth noting that Bill “Gates’ Globalist Vaccine Agenda is a Win-Win for Pharma and Mandatory Vaccination.
The catalyst for GVAP was the call by Bill and Melinda Gates at the 2010 World Economic Forum for the next decade to be the ‘Decade of Vaccines’.
In January 2010, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation pledged US $10 billion over the next 10 years to support vaccine research and the development and delivery of vaccinesexternal icon to the world’s poorest countries. This generous pledge helped initiate the Decade of Vaccines (DoV) Collaboration, whoseexternal icon mission is to extend, by 2020 and beyond, the full benefits of immunization to all people, regardless of where they are born, who they are, or where they live. The ultimate goal of the collaboration is to enhance worldwide vaccine coordination in support of the DoV vision: a world where all individuals and communities enjoy freedom from vaccine-preventable diseases. CDC and Our Global Immunization Partners
The Collaboration assembled working groups to draft the Global Vaccine Action Plan 2011–2020 (GVAP), engaging with stakeholders from more than 140 countries and 290 organizations. An additional working group developed a monitoring, evaluation and accountability (M&E/A) framework.
Ministers of health unanimously endorsed GVAP at the 2012 World Health Assembly (WHA) and took note of the M&E/A framework a year later. In the following years, Regional Vaccine Action Plans and national multi-year plans were developed or updated to align with GVAP. The WHO's Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization (SAGE) functions, is also linked to Bill Gates.
A separate group to the WHO's SAGE group, is the UK's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), which is made up of people who are also connected (funded) by the Gates Foundation, purely a coincidence I'm sure.... but it goes to show how far and wide their influence in all this goes but it is also a conflict of interest as these individuals and the organisations are linked to the vaccine industry, who labels anyone that dares to question them as “vaccine deniers” and "conspiracy theorists". Furthermore, Barry Norris, Fund Manager, CEO, CIO, has raised the problem with pinning all our hopes on a vaccine.
“Economic destruction from needless lockdowns was a direct consequence of the initial misdiagnosis of COVID as a second “Spanish Flu”. Now in the absence of a credible escape route from their COVID infection suppression policy, the same blundering governments - led by the wrong scientific advisors - look to a vaccine as an alluring overnight solution. This is at best naïve, probably preposterous, and in the hands of policy makers - deep in a lockdown hole of their own making - invites further disaster. In short, these great expectations for vaccines threaten more hard times ahead.” The Vaccine Swindle – Part 2
The vaccine that the UK and the Trump Administration wants to use is itself controversial. In August, AstraZeneca and its partner, the University of Oxford, confirmed it had stopped giving patients the experimental shot after a person in the U.K., who was participating in one of their studies, developed a rare spinal disorder. The internal report by AstraZeneca, which owns the rights to the so-called AZD1222 vaccine, also reveals that the trials had been stopped before after another participant developed transverse myelitis.
“The first pause, in July, was not publicly revealed and the trial was restarted after it was determined the volunteer had multiple sclerosis, a condition that can cause the same neurological reaction,” says The Telegraph.
The leading scientists in SAGE, the Government Chief Scientific Adviser (GCSA) are Sir Patrick Vallance, and the Chief Medical Officer for England (CMO), Professor Chris Whitty.
Sir Patrick Vallance, Chief Medical Adviser Prof Chris Whitty UK's chief scientific adviser has already cashed in more than £5 million worth of shares he received from GSK It emerges Chief Scientific Officer Sir Patrick Vallance has £600,000 of shares in vaccine maker contracted to make UK's coronavirus jabs.
In 2008, Chief Medical Adviser Prof Chris Whitty, accepted, $40 million from Bill Gates to control British vaccine promulgation: and he stated “COVID-19 vaccines and drugs would need to be in place before measures could be lifted … " According to the BBC and local media, doctors in Birmingham have been told to plan mass Coronavirus vaccinations before Christmas. Drive-through vaccination centres are being planned to cope with the huge logistical challenge of giving vaccines to tens of millions of people. The armed forces are also likely to be called in to help.
Whilst speaking in the Commons yesterday, Matt Hancock warned cancer patients will only be treated if Covid-19 stays 'under control'. The government's scientific advisory, many who are linked to pharmaceuticals are the ones who have pushed harsher restrictions and are now pushing for two weeks national lockdown. We are promised by the government and his advisers, that the previous lockdown, will include review of in three weeks, and relax them if the evidence shows this is possible. It lasted until the end of July.
Professor Angus Dalgleish, a professor of oncology at St George's, University of London, best known for his contributions to HIV/AIDS research, published an article in The Mail in which he asked the question “Is the 'cure' worse than Covid?”. Driven to despair by lockdown, two of Professor Angus Dalgleish's colleagues took their own lives… and compelled him to join a growing rebellion against Cromwellian restrictions:
Cancer specialist says he has been lost two colleagues to suicide in two weeks
One 'killed himself as result of profound despair at loneliness created by Covid'
Prof Angus Dalgleish says focus on Covid-19 is 'distorting healthcare priorities'
The Prime Minister has vowed to end social distancing by October 2021; he previously promised relative ‘normality’ by November 2020.
In a Conservative Party conference speech delivered to a nearly empty room, Boris Johnson said he expected people to meet ‘face-to-face and cheek-by-jowl,’ at next autumn’s event, thanks to ‘almost daily improvements in the medicine and the science’. He told colleagues he had ‘more than enough’ of Covid-19, which he described as a ‘plague’ and an ‘alien invader’.
A number of regional and nation governments are defying their own governments’ policies on second lockdowns and harsher restrictions amid test results, which are incorrectly labelled as cases.
These include:
Leicester - Leicester city in the UK, although not defying the company, they were left confused by a bizarre lockdown rule, enforced by the government. A pair of neighbours have been baffled by Leicester's new lockdown rules as half their street is required to isolate.
The residents of Scraptoft, Leicestershire, say they are "totally confused" as half of their street are allowed to head off to the pub, but the others have to stay home. This is either bureaucracy gone mad, incompetence or some social engineering experiment, but either way it is cruel.
Middlesbrough, UK - Andy Preston, the mayor of Middlesbrough, is refusing to lockdown his city in direct defiance of the Government's new coronavirus restrictions. In a Facebook video, Mr Preston said: "I have to tell you, I think this measure has been introduced based on factual inaccuracies, a monstrous and frightening lack of communication and ignorance…..They are now imposing restrictions that will kill viable jobs and damage mental health. Right now I do not accept the government’s intended restrictions because they are based on ignorance."
Ireland - the Irish PM has disagreed with his scientific advisers but he is facing mounting pressure from the media and others. These demands are also been made internationally, again by advisers connected to pharmaceuticals, WHO and Bill Gates.
Madrid - Madrid court rejects government orders to lockdown the Spanish capital - preventing cops from issuing fines: Coronavirus measures 'impacted on fundamental freedoms', judge rules. However, the government decided to override the court ruling and use its emergency powers to lock down Madrid, for two weeks, after suffering a major legal defeat
Pennsylvania - A federal judge has struck down Pennsylvania’s coronavirus pandemic restrictions calling them unconstitutional. Governor Tom Wolf had implemented limits on the size of gatherings and ordered people to stay home and for “non-life-sustaining” businesses to close in an attempt to stem the spread of Covid-19 infections. However, on Monday US District Judge William Stickman IV sided with plaintiffs that included hair salons, drive-in movie theatres, a farmer’s market vendor, a horse trainer, and several Republican officeholders who sued as individuals. Stickman wrote. “The Constitution cannot accept the concept of a ‘new normal’ where the basic liberties of the people can be subordinated to open-ended emergency mitigation measures.”
Michigan - The Michigan Supreme Court on Friday rejected Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s unilateral control over the state’s response to COVID-19. The governor overstepped and acted illegally, the court said, and the state law she tried to use to maintain emergency powers indefinitely is unconstitutional. With this ruling, the court reinforced important safeguards to protect Michigan residents from abuse of executive authority, attempting to restore a balance of power in government.
All seven justices agreed that Whitmer acted illegally by continuing a state of emergency without legislative approval, as is required by a 1976 law meant to guide the state’s response to epidemics. The Legislature had given approval for an extended state of emergency in the early days of the pandemic, but only until April 30. The governor ignored this statutory requirement, refused to work with the Legislature and plowed ahead anyway, continuing to unilaterally declare emergencies under the 1976 law. Opinion: Whitmer's orders are unconstitutional no matter how she frames it
The government’s treatment of the churches as equivalent to restaurants, bars and cinemas has been wildly condemned by church leaders, as churches have been catergorised as "non-essential". Some ‘essential’ services have been allowed to open throughout. These include off-licences, bicycle shops, and DIY homeware shops. The government’s published plan to exit the lockdown, Our Plan to Rebuild, published on 11 May, fails to mention ‘church’ even once. In France, the supreme court recently ruled that a blanket ban on meetings at places of worship was “manifestly illegal.” In Florida, church services were ruled to be an “essential activity” as far back as 7 April. In Ontario, Canada, over 400 churches have signed a letter which complains about church ministry being restricted.
Religious Services (UK) - Mr Justice Lewis declared that "banning religious services may have been illegal but other restrictions imposed by the government in England during the coronavirus lockdown were legitimate, a high court judge has ruled.....While it was similarly arguable that the restriction on communal worship in Roman Catholic churches may involve an unjustifiable interference with freedom of religion, that issue may have become academic in the light of amendments to the regulations which came into force with effect from 4 July. The parties were therefore invited to make further submissions on that issue.”
UK Pastors - Church Leaders continue plans to sue government over church lockdown despite reopenings. A group of UK church leaders are launching a legal challenge against the government over its decision to prevent worshippers from gathering in churches during the Covid-19 lockdown.
US Churches - Faith leaders in Oregon, Michigan, California, Maine, Illinois, and Virginia are asserting that lockdown orders imposed by the governors are a violation of the First Amendment and that places of worship must be allowed to reopen as essential services.
Churches are also accusing their states of discrimination, as businesses such as liquor stores and box stores are allowed to remain open while houses of worship are forced by law to shutter.
Grace Community Church (US) - California’s Grace Community Church, pastored by well-known Bible teacher John MacArthur, has to stop holding indoor services, following a court ruling. The church has been defying a Los Angeles public health officials ruling since early August.
"Millions more are going to die before the covid-19 pandemic is over." That is the fearmongering message been delivered by Bill Gates. In his interview with the Economist, he predicts that by the "end of 2021 a reasonably effective vaccine would be in mass production." This is clearly agenda. It is why these false positive PCR tests results is the pretext by the media and others, to promote and enforce more restrictions and lockdowns in anticipation for a vaccine.
In May, Boris Johnson co-hosted the virtual Coronavirus Global Response International Pledging Conference. Boris Johnson told world leaders: ONLY a vaccine will enable the world to defeat the pandemic in a “humanity against the virus” battle.
In an online speech to the Coronavirus Global Response International Pledging Conference, which is seeking to raise £6 billion to find a vaccine, the Prime Minister said each country fighting Covid-19 was taking extraordinary steps, including sweeping social restrictions, to form a human shield around their health systems.
Despite slim chances that its coronavirus vaccine will be ready by October 2020, Albert Bourla, chief executive of Pfizer, by repeating a date that flies in the face of most scientific predictions, Bourla is making a high-stakes gamble. If Pfizer puts out a vaccine before it has been thoroughly tested — something the company has pledged it will not do — it could pose a major threat to public safety. Bourla’s statements have put his company squarely in the sights of President Donald Trump, who has made no secret of his desire for positive vaccine news to boost his chances on Election Day, Nov. 3. “We’re going to have a vaccine very soon. Maybe even before a very special date,” Trump said recently.
Trump administration is also considering bypassing normal US regulatory standards to fast-track an experimental coronavirus vaccine from the UK, for use in America, ahead of the presidential election. One option being explored to speed up the availability of a vaccine would involve the US Food and Drug Administration awarding “emergency use authorisation” (EUA) in October to a vaccine being developed in a partnership between AstraZeneca and Oxford university.
In May, Trump announced that the United States will terminate its relationship with the World Health Organization and officially withdraw funding for WHO, but funds billions to Gates' GAVI. If such a halt on U.S. funding to the WHO becomes permanent, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation would become the top donor to the international agency, above any government in the world.
Professor Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College
Prof Neil Morris Ferguson is a British epidemiologist and professor of mathematical biology at Imperial College, London. He specialises in the patterns of spread of infectious disease in humans and animals. Until May 2020, he was the government advisor on the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) committee, until he resigned for "undermining" the government's messages on social distancing by meeting up with his mistress (both are married) during the national lockdown.
Ferguson is acting director of the Vaccine Impact Modelling Consortium (VIMC). Bill Gates is also linked to many of these scientists through regional governments’ under SAGE, CDC and their equivalents in Europe and the US, particularly Dr Anthony Fauci.
The VIMC is hosted by the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Imperial College. VIMC is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and by "GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance" (formerly the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation,) also founded and funded (BMGF).
Bill and Melinda Gates began funding Imperial College in 2006, four years before the Gates Foundation launched the Global Health Leaders Launch Decade of Vaccines Collaboration (GHLLDVC) and one year after Ferguson had demonstrated his penchant for overblown projections on mortality numbers from H5N1.
Up to the end of 2018, the Gates Foundation has sponsored Imperial College with a whopping $185 million. That makes Gates the second largest sponsor, beaten to the top spot on the podium by the Wellcome Trust, a British research charity which began funding Imperial College prior to Ferguson's FMD débâcle and which, by the end of 2018, had already provided Imperial with over $400 million in funding. I will examine the Wellcome Trust's connections in part two of this series. Who controls the British Government response to Covid–19?
In 2001, he predicted that foot and mouth disease could kill up to 50,000 people. It ended up killing less than 200. Tony Blair’s government adopted a strategy of pre-emptive culling which led to the death of more than six million cattle, sheep and pigs, with an estimated cost to the UK economy of £9 billion. That strategy was informed by predictive modelling produced by a team at Imperial College led by, among others, Professor Ferguson. Like today, there wasn’t much appetite for questioning his predictions.
In 2005, he told the Guardian that up to 200 million people could die from bird flu. The final death toll from avian flu strain A/H5N1 was 440. And in 2009, a Government estimate based on one of Ferguson’s models estimated the likely death toll from swine flu at 65,000. In fact, it was 457.
Anyone questioning Professor Ferguson’s analysis is likely to be met with howls of disdain. Witness the furious reaction provoked by Professor Sunetra Gupta and her team at Oxford when they published a paper suggesting that the Imperial model might have underestimated the percentage of the population that has already been infected. The Financial Times printed a critical letter co-signed by a group of scientists that was reminiscent of left-wing academics denouncing one of their colleagues for dissenting from woke orthodoxy. They used the word “dangerous” in their description of the Oxford research, as if merely challenging Imperial’s model would cost lives, and Professor Ferguson has made the same argument to condemn other critics of his work. “It is ludicrous, frankly, to suggest that the severity of this virus is comparable to seasonal flu – ludicrous and dangerous,” he said….. One person who’s sceptical of Professor Ferguson’s modelling is Anders Tegnell, the epidemiologist who’s been advising the Swedish Government. “It’s not a peer-reviewed paper,” he said, referring to the Imperial College March 16th paper. “It might be right, but it might also be terribly wrong. In Sweden, we are a bit surprised that it’s had such an impact.” How Reliable is Imperial College’s Modelling?
Boris was panicked into imposing a full national lockdown
The Mail on Sunday is serialising an explosive new biography of Boris by Tom Bower that claims Boris was panicked into imposing a full national lockdown after Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance were presented with Neil Ferguson’s apocalyptic predictions at a meeting of SAGE.
Bower tells how a critical meeting of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) on February 25th was presented with the ‘reasonable worst-case scenario’ from Professor Ferguson under which 80% of Britons would be infected and the death-toll would be 510,000 people.
The author writes: “This was an improvement on Ferguson’s earlier assessment that between 2% and 3% would die – up to 1.5 million deaths. Even with mitigation measures, he said, the death toll could be 250,000 and the existing intensive care units would be overwhelmed eight times over.
“Neither Vallance nor Whitty outrightly challenged Ferguson’s model or predictions. By contrast, in a series of messages from Michael Levitt, a Stanford University professor who would correctly predict the pandemic’s initial trajectory, Ferguson was warned that he had overestimated the potential death toll by ‘ten to 12 times’….
The book reveals how shortly before the national lockdown, on March 16th, Ferguson forecast that one third of the over-80s who were infected would be hospitalised, of which 71% would need intensive care using ventilators.
This exaggerated prediction – that hospitals would be overwhelmed by at least eight times the usual admittance rate – made the lockdown all but inevitable.
Bill and Melinda Gates’ Foundation
Who is Bill Gates?
This question, once merely academic, is becoming a very real question for those who are beginning to realize that Gates’ unimaginable wealth has been used to gain control over every corner of the fields of public health, medical research and vaccine development. And now that we are presented with the very problem that Gates has been talking about for years, we will soon find that this software developer with no medical training is going to leverage that wealth into control over the fates of billions of people. James Corbett: Who is Bill Gates?
Bill Gates’ Plan to Vaccinate the World: Gates’ decisions have controlled the flows of billions of dollars, formed international partnerships pursuing wide-ranging agendas, ensured the creation of “healthy markets” for Big Pharma vaccine manufacturers. And now, as we are seeing, his decisions are shaping the entire global response to the coronavirus pandemic.
How Bill Gates Monopolized Global Health: Bill Gates is no public health expert. He is not a doctor, an epidemiologist or an infectious disease researcher. Yet somehow he has become a central figure in the lives of billions of people, presuming to dictate the medical actions that will be required for the world to go “back to normal.”
There is a saying that “money makes the world go round” and that is true in the case of Bill Gates and his foundation. In 2016, following a report by Jens Martens and Karolin Seitz of Global Policy Forum, titled: “Philanthropic Power and Development - Who shapes the agenda?”, the Guardian reported that: Ultra-rich philanthropists and their foundations have increasing influence on decision-making and are setting the global health and agriculture agenda in developing countries, according to a major study (pdf).
Using their immense wealth and influence with political and scientific elites, organisations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and others are promoting solutions to global problems that may undermine the UN and other international organisations, says the report by the independent Global Policy Forum, which monitors the work of UN bodies and global policymaking.
With assets of more than $360bn (£250bn), the world’s 27 largest foundations give roughly $15bn annually to charitable causes. Nineteen of the 27 are American and many are now looking to extend their influence to poorer countries, say the report’s authors…..The report also questions why the Gates foundation invests heavily in companies like Monsanto and Bayer. “In addition to its grant-making activities, the Gates foundation has recently stepped up its support for the biotechnological industry directly.” In February, it took a $52m equity stake in CureVac, a German bio-pharmaceutical company.
“There is a revolving door between the Gates foundation and pharmaceutical corporations. Many of the foundation’s staff had held positions at pharmaceutical companies,” the report adds.
The study says: “Both Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation regard technological innovation and close cooperation with the food and agricultural industries as key to overcoming hunger … In 2006 they together launched the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (Agra), based on the premise that hunger in Africa is mainly the result of a lack of technology and functioning markets. [This] changed the farming agenda in Africa,” say the authors.
Since then Gates has given more than $3bn to support 660 agricultural projects as well as several hundred million dollars for nutrition. “The vast majority of grants focus on Africa. However, more than 80% of the $669m to NGOs went to organisations based in the US and Europe, with only 4% going to Africa-based NGOs.”
The report claims Agra has been intervening directly in the formulation of African governments’ agricultural policies on issues like seeds and land.
Are Gates and Rockefeller using their influence to set agenda in poor states? Study identifies Bill and Melinda Gates and Rockefeller foundations among rich donors that are close to government and may be skewing priorities
Farming, Agriculture, “Smart Meat” and GMO Crops
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation wants to feed the world; unfortunately it believes that Genetically Modified Organisms is the way.
Critics are voicing skepticism about the motives behind this recent announcement, however.
In 2010, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation bought 500,000 shares of Monsanto, a leading producer of GMOs, worth a total of $23 billion. In 2011, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation donated $20 million to the development of "Golden Rice," a genetically-modified rice strain high in beta-carotene.
Monsanto is a major patent-holder for the technology required to produce Golden Rice.
In 2010, the Guardian report that “The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is sponsoring the Guardian's Global development site is being heavily criticised in Africa and the US for getting into bed not just with notorious GM company Monsanto, but also with agribusiness commodity giant Cargill……The fact is that Cargill is a faceless agri-giant that controls most of the world's food commodities and Monsanto has been blundering around poor Asian countries for a decade giving itself and the US a lousy name for corporate bullying.”
Bill Gates has used his wealth as a platform for “charitable works” to influence the world, not just in global health, but also farming, agriculture, alternative meat and GMO crops.
That’s not the only questionable donation on record. The Nation found “close to $250 million in charitable grants from the Gates Foundation to companies in which the foundation holds corporate stocks and bonds.” In other words, the Gates Foundation is giving money to companies that it owns stocks in and will benefit financially from.
As a result, the Foundation and Gates himself continue to increase their wealth. Part of this growth in wealth also appears to be due to the tax breaks given for charitable donations. In short, it’s a perfect money-shuffling scheme that limits taxes while maximizing income generation. Companies that have received donations that in turn made money for the Gates Foundation include Merck, Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline, Vodafone, Sanofi, Ericsson, LG, Medtronic, Teva and “numerous startups,” The Nation writes, adding: “A foundation giving a charitable grant to a company that it partly owns — and stands to benefit from financially — would seem like an obvious conflict of interest … Bill Gates — Most Dangerous Philanthropist in Modern History? By Joseph Mercola - Mercola.com
For example, Gates-led Alliance for a Green Revolution (AGRA) collected nearly $1 billion in donations and disbursed $524 million, primarily in 13 African countries, on programs promoting the use of commercial seeds, chemical fertilizers and pesticides. This “Green Revolution” technology package is further supported by subsidies; while African national governments have spent roughly $1 billion per year in the target countries subsidizing the purchase of seeds and agrichemicals.
Though he had invested $10m, the African governments gave over $1billion annually for subsidies. This is how his foundation works: "the Gates Foundation is giving money to companies that it owns stocks in and will benefit financially from. As a result, the Foundation and Gates himself continue to increase their wealth. Part of this growth in wealth also appears to be due to the tax breaks given for charitable donations."
Bill Gates has a terse response to criticism that the high-tech solutions he advocates for world hunger are too expensive or bad for the environment: Countries can embrace modern seed technology and genetic modification or their citizens will starve. The World Food Programme is the world's single largest purchaser of food for humanitarian operations that include relief and safety net programs such as school feeding. The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Howard G. Buffett Foundation…unveiled a groundbreaking initiative to help poor farmers across the developing world significantly increase their incomes.
The new initiative, Purchase for Progress (P4P), is expected to help hundreds of thousands of small farmers access reliable markets so they can sell their surplus crops at competitive prices, bolstering fragile local economies.
But can the World Richest man feed the World? One of the main concerns about the use of GM crops in developing countries is that farmers will be locked into a 'poverty trap', where they are forced to pay more for seed price hikes and expensive chemicals as herbicide-tolerant superweeds or resistant pests develop, or as new pests move in.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded another $10 million last week to the controversial Cornell Alliance for Science, a communications campaign housed at Cornell that trains fellows in Africa and elsewhere to promote and defend genetically engineered foods, crops and agrichemicals. The new grant brings BMGF grants to the group to $22 million. The PR investment comes at a time when the Gates Foundation is under fire for spending billions of dollars on agricultural development schemes in Africa that critics say are entrenching farming methods that benefit corporations over people.
Faith leaders appeal to Gates Foundation
On September 10, faith leaders in Africa posted an open letter to the Gates Foundation asking it to reassess its grant-making strategies for Africa. “While we are grateful to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for its commitment to overcoming food insecurity, and acknowledging the humanitarian and infrastructural aid provided to the governments of our continent, we write out of grave concern that the Gates Foundation’s support for the expansion of intensive industrial scale agriculture is deepening the humanitarian crisis,” says the sign-on letter coordinated by the Southern African Faith Communities’ Environment Institute (SAFCEI). The letter cites the Gates-led Alliance for a Green Revolution (AGRA) for its “highly problematic” support of commercial seed systems controlled by large companies, its support of restructuring seed laws to protect certified seeds and criminalize non-certified seed, and its support of seed dealers who offer narrow advice about corporate products over much-needed public sector extension services. “We appeal to the Gates Foundation and AGRA to stop promoting failed technologies and outdated extension methods and start listening to the farmers who are developing appropriate solutions for their contexts,” the faith leaders said. Despite billions of dollars spent and 14 years of promises, AGRA has failed to achieve its goals of reducing poverty and raising incomes for small farmers, according to a July report False Promises. The research was conducted by a coalition of African and German groups and includes data from a recent white paper published by Tufts Global Development and Environment Institute...... Launched in 2006 by the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations, AGRA has long promised to double yields and incomes for 30 million farming households in Africa by 2020. But the group quietly removed those goals from its website sometime in the past year. AGRA declined to provide data or answer substantive questions from researchers of the False Promises report, its authors say. Representatives from BIBA Kenya, PELUM Zambia and HOMEF Nigeria sent a letter to Cox Sept. 7 asking for a response to their research findings. Cox responded Sept. 15 with what one researcher described as “basically three pages of PR.” “African farmers deserve a substantive response from AGRA,” said the letter to Cox from Anne Maina, Mutketoi Wamunyima and Ngimmo Bassay. “So do AGRA’s public sector donors, who would seem to be getting a very poor return on their investments. African governments also need to provide a clear accounting for the impacts of their own budget outlays that support Green Revolution programs.” African governments spend about $1 billion per year on subsidies to support commercial seeds and agrichemicals. Despite the large investments in agricultural productivity gains, hunger has increased thirty percent during the AGRA years, according to the False Promises report. Against this backdrop, the Gates Foundation is doubling down on its investment in the Cornell Alliance for Science (CAS), a public relations campaign launched in 2014 with a Gates grant and promises to “depolarize the debate” around GMOs. With the new $10 million, CAS plans to widen its focus “to counter conspiracy theories and disinformation campaigns that hinder progress in climate change, synthetic biology, agricultural innovations.” But the Cornell Alliance for Science has become a polarizing force and a source of misinformation as it trains fellows around the world to promote and lobby for genetically engineered crops in their home countries, many of them in Africa. Numerous academics, food groups and policy experts have called out the group’s inaccurate and misleading messaging. Community groups working to regulate pesticides and biosafety have accused CAS of using bully tactics in Hawaii and exploiting farmers in Africa in its aggressive promotional and lobby campaigns......
In another article, it reports on the loss, debt and suffering experienced by the farmers because of this "Green Farming Revolution" that promises to deliver high-yield intensive agriculture to Africa via access to markets and credit, high quality seeds, and better soil health and agricultural policies.
“So not only do farmers have to pay for the new seeds, they have to do so every year,” he tells SciDev.Net. “They often buy such inputs on credit and if they get a bad harvest they have no money to pay off the loans.”
A range of critical voices have spoken out against the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), an organisation launched in 2006 with the aim of delivering high-yield intensive agriculture to Africa via access to markets and credit, high quality seeds, and better soil health and agricultural policies.
Gates is among those who believe another, similar revolution is needed now. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has spent about $2 billion in the past five years to fight poverty and hunger in Africa and Asia, and much of that money has gone toward improving agricultural productivity.
Gates doesn't apologize for his endorsement of modern agriculture or sidestep criticism of genetic modification. He told the Associated Press that he finds it ironic that most people who oppose genetic engineering in plant breeding live in rich nations that he believes are responsible for global climate change that will lead to more starvation and malnutrition for the poor. In his 24-page letter, the Microsoft Corp. chairman lamented that more money isn't spent on agriculture research and noted that of the $3 billion spent each year on work on the seven most important crops, only 10 percent focuses on problems in poor countries. “Given the central role that food plays in human welfare and national stability, it is shocking – not to mention short-sighted and potentially dangerous – how little money is spent on agricultural research,” he wrote in his letter, calling for wealthier nations to step up. Bill Gates: Embrace Genetic Modification or Starve
In some cases, researchers have inserted foreign genes, such as with cassava, a plant that when processed makes tapioca. It is a stable in Africa, but has been stricken by two diseases, causing more widespread hunger. Scientists injected genes from the disease-causing viruses into the plant’s DNA to create a vaccine-like effect.
Bill Gates is funding genetic research into how to create the perfect cow. Research that could lead to cows producing more milk, chickens laying better-quality eggs and crops being able to withstand droughts or disease received a funding injection of about $174 million from Britain’s Department for International Development and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Gates wants to help create the perfect cow that will produce as much milk as a European cow but be able to withstand heat as well as an African cow, according to the Times newspaper.
He said: 'The impact per dollar we spend is super-high in this area. You can have a cow that is four times as productive with the same survivability.'
The research is part of a £28 million ($40 million) investment by the entrepreneur in the Global Alliance for Livestock Veterinary Medicines (GALVmed), which is a non-profit organisation based in Edinburgh.
When Hamidou Bandé was growing up in rural Burkina Faso in the late 1970s, the idea of drinking foreign milk was unheard of. School children would gulp down the fresh produce of nomadic herders during their mid-morning break. His father sold milk from the family herd to local creameries at a fast clip.
Today, not a single drop from his stock of more than 300 cows is consumed locally. His animals are sold for meat to neighboring countries and sometimes he pours his milk into the soil.
Bandé's experience is far from unique. The local industry says that European producers use West African markets to offload gallons of a lower quality product derived from constituents of cow's milk that they are unable to sell in the EU. This cheap milk lookalike is bulked up with vegetable fats including palm oil. Its low cost and ubiquity make it impossible to compete, say local livestock farmers, leading to a spiral of economic decline.
“I’ve tried selling my milk, but most of the time it goes to waste and ends up being poured away,” said Bandé, a towering man in long white robes who is president of Burkina Faso's National Herders' Union. “It hurts. The milk we throw away could have been for the calves or our children”…. West African milk producers see the hybrid product as the driving force behind their dairy sector’s woes. What's more, government officials, small-scale dairy owners and livestock farmers in West Africa argue the ersatz product is nutritionally inferior and environmentally damaging. The palm oil it contains comes typically from plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia — the root cause of deforestation and species loss there.
The EU milk lookalike that is devastating West Africa’s dairy sector - POLITICO Europe
The Impact of Covid-19 on Farming
We are all aware of the global intentions to transform the world and society thanks to World Economic Forum new initiative "Reset", but what many are not aware are the proposals been discussed by Bill Gates and others to revolutionise the food supply industry, to make it more "sustainable".
The Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is having a wide-ranging impact, even affecting planting decisions this year. The COVID-19 shutdowns severely disrupted many of our vital sectors as well large number of meat factories closing due to the lockdown and the “spread” of infections among the workers. According to a report produced by FAIRR nearly three-quarters of the world’s largest meat, fish and dairy companies have been graded as a ‘high’ pandemic risk and criticised for their inability to prevent the emergence of new zoonotic diseases in a new report released on Wednesday (3 June). It concludes that the sector is struggling post-COVID-19, and that the pandemic could be the “straw that breaks the meat industry’s back,” concluding that this “demonstrates that intensive animal production is at serious risk of creating and spreading a future pandemic.”
Several coronavirus outbreaks among meat factory employees, has forced factories into quarantine, forcing many of these and the restaurant industry to close down; in many cases leading to bankruptcies, while unemployment soars.
But it seems that the COVID crisis is set to accelerate the push for digitalisation and alternative food supply.
We have also seen for years the promotion of alternative meat and other food, made more urgent, like everything else, but according to the Financial Times the pandemic has accelerated the push for Plant based products. Even before Covid-19, the “disruptive technology” was creating a new market to disrupt an existing market, which in itself creates the added problem of mass unemployment as AI and digitalisation takes over, and the “future of farming is becoming more sophisticated” and data driven, meaning less manual workers.
But a recent report from Friends of the Earth Europe states that there has been “very little critical attention paid to the economic interests behind digital farming solutions, or even whether they are actually appropriate for the contemporary challenges we face,” highlighting data ownership and control as a major cause for concern.
The report adds that when farmers lose ownership rights over their data once it is aggregated, corporations alone reap the profits.
It adds that there is a “danger” of such unprecedented market power, which they say could leave producers with weak bargaining power and severely curtailed decision-making autonomy.
However, this technology is now disrupting the food supply system resulting in companies funding by largely funded by Bill Gates in developing alternative meat supply chain, plant-based meat now is mainstream due to climate change and more recently Covid-19:
Covid-19 shows factory food production is dangerous for animals and humans alike To anyone who has breathed country air thick with aerosolised manure or learned how the global expansion of pasture for feed crops drives deforestation, it might seem obvious that capitalism is unable to sustainably manage animal life. Yet the meat industry struggles to handle human life too. Beyond Meat builds China presence with new production facility - Beyond Meat is increasing its presence in China, becoming the first foreign company specialising in plant-based meat to build production. President Trump Readies Bailout For Nation's Food Suppliers President Trump's comments come as the starkest warning yet that high food prices could last for a long time, Tyson Foods warned in a full-page ad in the New York Times on Sunday that the "food supply chain is breaking."
In April, one of America's biggest meat processors was warning that: "As pork, beef and chicken plants are being forced to close, even for short periods of time, millions of pounds of meat will disappear from the supply chain," wrote Tyson Chairman John Tyson, patriarch of the company's founding family, in a Tyson Foods website post that also ran as a full-page ad in several newspapers. But back in 2018, Tyson was investing in a new venture. In 2018, Tyson Foods and Cargill have invested in clean-meat company Memphis Meats, alongside billionaires Gates and Branson, who are betting lab-grown meat might be the food of the future. Although the initial start-up, in 2017, to grow meat in a lab were Richard Branson, Bill Gates, “General Electric CEO Jack Welch. Elon Musk’s brother Kimbal is too. Then there’s the venture capital firm DFJ, which invested in Tesla, SpaceX and Skype, and food and agriculture behemoth Cargill” but not Tyson. This new food is known as clean meat, cultured meat, cultivated meat or lab-grown, it’s meat made from stem cells harvested via biopsy from living livestock, which are then grown in a lab over a number of weeks. Clean meat will grow in factories that will resemble a sort of meat brewery, it will not require the land, water or crops of traditional meat production.
Christian Westbrook, "The Ice Age Farmer", on Geopolitics and Empire, discussed “the engineered and deliberate destruction of our food supply. Pretexts cited to shut down farms and cull livestock include the spread of "coronavirus" between humans on farms, transmission from animals to humans, as well as outright sabotage of food storehouses. He describes the move to tax and eliminate meat and replace it with fake, synthetic, lab-grown foodstuffs. Power elites seeks to track and trace all food through artificial intelligence and the blockchain. He suggests everyone begin to grow their own food.” Christian Westbrook: Food Wars...the Engineered Destruction of Our Food Supply
The latest Gates-backed venture to attract attention is an artificial breast milk start-up that offers an environmentally-friendly alternative to baby formula.
The $1 billion (£800 million) fund, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, was established to help prevent the worst effects of climate change arising from carbon emissions.
Alongside Mr Gates, the group's other members include Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Virgin group founder Sir Richard Branson and Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg.
Bio-surveillance and Global Digital Identity
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 16.9 states "By 2030, provide legal identity for all, including birth registration." Target 16.9 also targets universal legal identity and birth registration, ensuring the right to a name and nationality, civil rights, recognition before the law, and access to justice and social services. With more than a quarter of children under 5 unregistered worldwide as of 2015, about 1 in 5 countries will need to accelerate progress to achieve universal birth registration by 2030. It has one indicator, 16.9.1, the "Proportion of children under 5 years of age whose births have been registered with a civil authority, by age".
Biometric Update is taking a special in-depth focus on digital ID projects in developing countries including daily coverage of biometrics-based national digital identity projects. A list of the top 10 digital identity influencing organizations has been announced by Goode Intelligence, according to their influence in promoting the global use of inclusive, diverse, secure, and privacy-aware digital identity in systems with or without biometrics.
Most consider bio-surveillance the bane of democracy and do not completely grasp the impact it can have on the war against any pandemic, including Covid-19. Historically, the biosurveillance strategy of the US was motivated by the military’s concern for the threat of pathogens, but the scope has increasingly broadened to include identification of emerging infectious diseases, including H1N1, the SARS coronavirus, and the West Nile virus. Early identification of disease outbreaks and understanding the mechanism of transmission and the speed of infection are all critical components of an effective bio-surveillance system. Coupled with contract-tracing, the approach can enable the US to effectively flatten the curve.
The organizers of the Seattle Coronavirus Assessment Network, a virus-tracking project supported by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, say their efforts are being paused while they deal with concerns raised by the Food and Drug Administration.
The project had been operating under an arrangement by which the FDA let state public health officials issue Emergency Use Authorizations for coronavirus tests developed within their states. Today, SCAN said it was notified that separate federal authorization is now required to return test results, due to revisions in the guidance that were issued last week.
In his personal blog, GatesNotes, he wrote: “SCAN is a partnership between Public Health—Seattle & King County, the Brotman Baty Institute, University of Washington Medicine, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and Seattle Children’s Hospital. It relies on data modeling support from the Institute for Disease Modeling (IDM) and receives support from my private office, Gates Ventures, and our foundation.”
In an article titled, How a secretive Pentagon agency seeded the ground for a rapid coronavirus cure, the Washington Post, reported that the “first company in the United States to enter clinical trials with a vaccine for the virus was funded by DARPA. So was the second company. And the P3 program has already led to the world’s first study in humans of a potential covid-19 antibody treatment. If successful, antibody treatments would offer up to three months of immunity against covid-19. Unlike vaccines, they could also help heal people already infected with the virus.” DARPA-partnered companies include Bill Gates and the company the pharmaceutical company Moderna, which he funds.
Most of these technologies garnering positive media coverage thanks to Covid-19 were developed several years ago. They include the DARPA-funded platforms used to produce DNA and RNA vaccines, classes of vaccine that has never been approved for human use in the U.S. and involve injecting foreign genetic material into the human body.
In January, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) announced it would begin funding vaccine candidates for the coronavirus outbreak, long before it became a major global issue.…. That month, CEPI only chose two pharmaceutical companies to receive funding for their efforts to develop a vaccine for Covid-19 – Moderna and Inovio Pharmaceuticals.
….. these two companies are DARPA-backed firms that frequently tout their “strategic alliance” with DARPA in press releases and on their websites. DARPA has also provided these companies with significant amounts of funding. For instance, the top funders behind Inovio Pharmaceuticals include both DARPA and the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) and the company has received millions in dollars in grants from DARPA, including a $45 million grant to develop a vaccine for Ebola. They were also recently awarded over $8 million from the U.S. military to develop a small, portable intradermal device for delivering DNA vaccines, which was jointly developed by Inovio and the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), which also manages the “biodefense” lab at Fort Detrick.
In addition, the German company CureVac, which is also developing a CEPI-backed RNA vaccine for Covid-19, is another long-time recipient of DARPA funding. They were one of DARPA’s earliest investments in the technology, winning a $33.1 million DARPA contract to develop their “RNActive” vaccine platform in 2011…..
Gates’ backing of DNA and RNA vaccines is significant, given that Gates – a billionaire with unparalleled influence and control over global healthcare policy – recently asserted that the best options for a Covid-19 vaccine are these same vaccines, despite the fact that they have never before been approved for use in humans. Yet, thanks to the emergency authorizations activated due to the current crisis, both Moderna’s and Inovio’s testing for these vaccines has skipped animal trials and gone straight to human testing. They are also set to be fast-tracked for widespread use in a matter of months….
DARPA’s antibody treatment for Covid-19 is pursuing two routes, including the “human body as bio-reactor” approach that would involve synthetic DNA or RNA being injected in order to prompt the body to produce the necessary antibodies. Defense One notes that DARPA’s Covid-19 treatment would utilize techniques that had resulted from the agency’s investments in microfluidics (the manipulation of liquids at the sub-millimeter range), nanotechnology fabrication and “new approaches to gene sequencing.”
In this video and article, Dr. Carrie Madaj questions what “it is to be human”. In 2010, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) admitted that this type of technology can be used to “enhance and subvert” humans at a genetic level. Hydrogel nanotechnology is injected beneath the skin. It can interface with cell phones and Artificial Intelligence to monitor basically everything within the body, including anxieties, emotions, ovulations, vitamins etc. etc. Once implanted, the technology spreads throughout the body. Scientists do not know how this affects our DNA.
But, while Gates’ role in funding the global health field is by now well known, his role in funding other technologies that will shape the post-COVID world is not.
The Gates Foundation is tied to ID2020 through Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. Also known as the “Digital Identity Alliance,” ID2020 brings Gavi and Gates’ old company Microsoft and other corporate partners together to create a global digital ID system. This has led the Gates-tied Gavi alliance to focus increasingly on tying vaccine recipients with governmental digital health records and, ultimately, with biometric ID databases. Meanwhile, Gates himself has been a vocal advocate of India’s Aadhaar system, the ambitious project to enroll a billion Indian citizens in the largest biometric database ever constructed.
Gates is also interested in advancing the digitization of the economy. For example, he has addressed government fora in both India and the US about the benefits of digital payment systems. Also, the Gates Foundation helped co-found the Better Than Cash Alliance, a consortium of governmental and non-governmental organizations whose members are committed to creating a digital payment infrastructure for development programs and aid for the poor. This infrastructure, Gates and his cohorts argue, will help governments and aid groups to more effectively target and manage their aid.
But while the fields of global health, biometric identification and digital payments may seem distinct, they have begun to converge as governments and intergovernmental bodies start to imagine the “Great Reset” of the post-COVID “new normal.” Gates has argued that digital immunity certificates—combining the medical diagnostic field with the biometric identification field—will be necessary if life is to return to normal. That convergence is already reflected in the World Economic Forum-promoted “CovidPass” vision of a “health passport,” which would allow people to travel or prevent them from traveling based on their health status and proof of immunity or vaccination.
It does not take a great deal of imagination to see how such a health passport could be tied into the digital payment structure to prevent unvaccinated people from transacting in any number of situations that the authorities might frown upon. After all, Gates himself has touted the ability of governments to block transactions they disapprove of as a key part of the digital payments systems of the future.
Why We Must #ExposeBillGates - James Corbett
He is also involved in surveillance, EarthNow, via a constellation of advanced imaging satellites. It will essentially act as a form of Big Brother surveillance, the project will primarily serve governments and individuals. The company was founded in 2017 by Russell Hannigan. Notable investors are: Airbus, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and SoftBank Group chief executive Masayoshi Son. Satellite entrepreneur Greg Wyler, who has also partnered with Airbus and SoftBank on OneWeb, another satellite Internet project.
EarthNow plans to use a large constellation of satellites to provide “live and unfiltered” footage of almost anywhere on earth. The footage would be accessible from smartphones and tablets and available for app makers, a “dramatic leap forward” from today’s systems, which transmit video clips at slower speeds. The footage could be used for projects like tracking illegal fishing, tracking animal migration patterns and monitoring forest fires. The venture could launch its first experimental “pathfinder” satellites by the end of 2020, setting the stage for a wave of operational satellites in 2022.
It isn’t only Bill Gates but also liked minded wealthy individuals and their powerful influential foundations that has helped to form their agendas in the world stage through the United Nations, European Union, World, IMF, national governments, and Silicon Valley’s big techs that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Now, the billionaire Microsoft founder says he has a plan to stop hurricanes in their tracks - sort of. This Bill Gates-funded chemical cloud could help stop global warming. Gates filed five patent and in the patent applications, the method is "not limited to atmospheric management, weather management, hurricane suppression, hurricane prevention, hurricane intensity modulation [or] hurricane deflection."
The Media’s Response and Bill Gates
The pressure for scientists and the medical professions to produce and share their findings during the pandemic undermine the quality of scientific research and limits. Furthermore, those that have been “approved” or recommended as a resource for information have been retracted due to unreliable data sources including articles in peer-reviewed journals. Even the World Health Organization (WHO) has changed its position on the transmission and prevention of the disease. For example, it didn’t begin recommending that healthy people wear face masks in public until June 5, “based on new scientific findings”. Yet the major social media companies have pledged to remove claims that contradict guidance from the WHO. As a result, they could remove content that later turns out to be accurate.
The “infodemic” of misinformation about coronavirus has made it difficult to distinguish accurate information from false and misleading advice. The major technology companies have responded to this challenge by taking the unprecedented move of working together to combat misinformation about COVID-19. Part of this initiative involves promoting content from government healthcare agencies and other authoritative sources, and introducing measures to identify and remove content that could cause harm.
Over the last decade, a small group of billionaire philanthropists have quietly moved into to seize control of key nodes of media, government policy, and education. They claim that they are merely trying to ‘fill in the funding gaps at struggling news organizations’ – especially in the wake of the coronavirus ‘pandemic.’ By far, the biggest player in this network is the Gates Foundation.
In short, Gates has long used his foundation’s charitable veneer to steer and shape the public discourse on global health. In the case of COVID and vaccines, it is believed that Gates is using his billions to parlay both access and favorable news coverage.
These mainstream outlets claim there are no strings attached to this ‘free money’ from Gates, but upon closer examination, this relationship appears to be fraught with influence peddling and obvious conflicts of interest.
When one considers how intimately involved the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is with multiple global stakeholders in the much-hyped impending roll-out COVID vaccines – namely, through GAVI, and partnering with transnational pharmaceutical giants like AstraZeneca, Sanofi, Pfizer, Merck, J&J, Eli Lilly, Novartis, and others. This is in addition to Gates funding of key ‘global health’ policy players like the Wellcome Trust, and the World Health Organization, as well as various government agencies – the likelihood of conflicts of interest is enormous. Not least of all is the fact that many of these same pharmaceutical firms are also the top advertising buyers on all of the major mainstream media outlets globally.
It’s also been revealed how Gates is funding the supposed ‘fact checkers’ currently being used by Facebook and other social media firms – which are aggressively censoring any information on their platforms which is critical of Gates and pharmaceutical firms, particularly in relation to COVID and vaccines. How Bill Gates Buys Mainstream Outlets, Journalists and ‘Fact-Checkers’
Since the pandemic we have been inundated with fact-checkers on anything concerning Bill Gates, vaccines and opposing views from medical and scientific experts have been banned on all the major social media platforms. And those who are brave enough to offer alternative view publicly are called "quacks", and/or are discredited usually through a weak and pathetic attempt at a hit piece.
Pressure has mounted for news outfits and big tech companies – including Google, Facebook, and Twitter – to police Covid-19 misinformation: “We’re not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic.” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus Munich Security Conference, 15 February 2020
Over the last few months, tech companies working with the W.H.O. have been prominently posting links to W.H.O. content, making falsehoods harder to find in searches or on news streams, and sometimes removing content altogether.
Facebook has hired extra fact-checking services to remove misinformation that could lead to imminent physical harm. YouTube has published a COVID-19 Medical Misinformation Policy that disallows “content about COVID-19 that poses a serious risk of egregious harm”.
The groundwork for the coordination around the coronavirus was laid two years ago, when Andrew Pattison, manager of digital solutions at the W.H.O., went to the W.H.O. general director, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, and suggested a full-blown effort to connect with social media titans to combat health misinformation. Now about a half-dozen W.H.O. staffers in Geneva are working on the issue, building relationships with digital and social media sites. Over time, the cooperative efforts have grown. For instance, last August, Pinterest teamed up with the W.H.O. to link to accurate information about vaccines when people search the service for that topic.
We’ve all come across online fact checkers that purport to warn us away from independent media sites under the guise of protecting us from fake news. But who is behind these fact check sites? How do they operate? And if these ham-fisted attempts at soft censorship aren’t the solution to online misinformation, what is? Join James for this week’s important edition of The Corbett Report podcast, where we explore the murky world of information gatekeeping and ask “Who will fact check the fact checkers?” Who Will Fact Check the Fact Checkers?
Tim Schwab of Columbia Journalism, wrote an article, Journalism’s Gates keepers, and discovered how much the media is influenced by Bill Gates and “that every quoted expert is connected to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which helps fund the project.”
I recently examined nearly twenty thousand charitable grants the Gates Foundation had made through the end of June and found more than $250 million going toward journalism. Recipients included news operations like the BBC, NBC, Al Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, The Guardian, Univision, Medium, the Financial Times, The Atlantic, the Texas Tribune, Gannett, Washington Monthly, Le Monde, and the Center for Investigative Reporting; charitable organizations affiliated with news outlets, like BBC Media Action and the New York Times’ Neediest Cases Fund; media companies such as Participant, whose documentary Waiting for “Superman” supports Gates’s agenda on charter schools; journalistic organizations such as the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the National Press Foundation, and the International Center for Journalists; and a variety of other groups creating news content or working on journalism, such as the Leo Burnett Company, an ad agency that Gates commissioned to create a “news site” to promote the success of aid groups. In some cases, recipients say they distributed part of the funding as subgrants to other journalistic organizations—which makes it difficult to see the full picture of Gates’s funding into the fourth estate.
The foundation even helped fund a 2016 report from the American Press Institute that was used to develop guidelines on how newsrooms can maintain editorial independence from philanthropic funders. A top-level finding: “There is little evidence that funders insist on or have any editorial review.” Notably, the study’s underlying survey data showed that nearly a third of funders reported having seen at least some content they funded before publication.
Lockdown sceptic Matthew Parris has written an excellent column in the Times in which he berates the BBC for not doing its job properly in covering the coronavirus crisis.
Coronavirus: GP letter was like a ‘death warrant from grim reaper’ ” (BBC News); “One death every 80 seconds: Brazil reaches a grim milestone as it becomes the third worst-hit country…” (BBC News); “Grim milestone as virus cases top 25m globally” (BBC News).
Grim, grim, grim. There has been a lip-smacking quality, not only in headlines but in the reports that follow from the world’s news media. All of us should be more rigorous in resisting the appeal of a ghoulish turn of phrase. But the BBC has been a serial offender.
In what follows I’m aware that, when it comes to panic-spreading, our state broadcasting corporation is only one of many miscreants among print and broadcast media. But that’s because I look to the BBC to help set standards. The corporation has a particular duty to stand a little back from the noise and introduce a note of quiet balance into the national conversation.
When our politicians try to use science as propaganda, broadcasters should be rock-solid in resisting the hype. Instead, they’ve swallowed the government’s line that “the science” is clear and unquestioned, and that the prospects, should we fail to “follow” the science, are apocalyptic.
Both are highly disputable. Science is divided. The most apocalyptic, however, are getting the loudest shout. Neither on how, nor where, nor when the virus spreads most virulently is there consensus among epidemiologists; and even if that consensus existed, broadcasters and journalists would still have a duty to remind politicians and the public that combating an illness should not elbow from national attention the equally honourable goal of saving livelihoods as well as lives.
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