Tag: covid-19

COVID Vaccine Creator Found Strangled to Death in His Apartment

ARussian virologist who helped develop the country’s COVID vaccine has been found dead after an altercation with an intruder in his Moscow apartment, according to reports in local media.

Andrey Botikov, one of 18 scientists who developed the Sputnik V vaccine at the Gamaleya National Research Center, was identified as the man who had been discovered strangled in his Rogova Street home on March 2, Regnum reported, citing official sources. It previously reported that he had survived the attack.

The Investigative Committee of Russia (ICR) has now opened a murder investigation, believing that a 29-year-old man strangled the scientist with a belt during a disagreement before fleeing the scene.

While official accounts point towards a burglary gone wrong, the 47-year-old’s death comes amid a string of members of the Russian elite being found dead in mysterious circumstances over the past year, including scientists and businessmen.

In a statement, the ICR’s Moscow division didn’t name Botikov, but said investigators had identified and located the assailant “in the shortest possible time.”

“During the interrogation, he admitted his guilt, he was charged,” it added. “Previously, the defendant was prosecuted for committing a serious crime.” The ICR said the criminal investigation was ongoing.

Newsweek has reached out to the ICR to confirm the victim’s identity.

Keep reading

BLM Rioters Get $6M Because Cops Didn’t Wear Face Masks

The Black Lives Matter race riots in New York City were among the worst in the country. Racist mobs injured hundreds of police officers, started fires, looted stores and vandalized parks and statues. At least 450 businesses, many of them small and family owned, were damaged or looted by the rioters who claimed to be angry over the drug overdose death of George Floyd: a vicious career criminal who had previously robbed a woman by putting a gun to her stomach.

While Black Lives Matter was swimming in hundreds of millions of dollars, funneled to it by radical nonprofits, major corporations and Hollywood celebrities, family businesses in New York City looted by those rioters were offered a maximum of $10,000 to rebuild their shattered lives.

One small business owner in the Bronx complained that it would hardly even begin to cover the $200,000 in damages to her store after rioters “smashed glass display cases and medical equipment”. But participants in an extremist group’s Bronx protest are getting a much better deal. New York City will be paying $21,500 to each of the “protesters” in the Bronx for a total of as much as $6 million. And none of that money will be going to the looted businesses.

This has been described as the largest payout for mass arrests in American history.

The BLM riot era class action lawsuit claimed, among other things that the, “police officers responding to protests frequently failed to wear masks or to assist detained protesters in covering their noses and mouths, and on occasion even forcibly removed protesters’ masks, exposing protesters to a heightened risk of contracting COVID-19.”

Family businesses lost everything and cops and civilians were badly wounded during the BLM riots, but the police officers didn’t always wear masks when trying to control those riots.

Keep reading

Senate unanimously votes to declassify Wuhan lab leak intelligence

The Senate on Wednesday unanimously voted in favor of a bill mandating that the Biden administration declassify intelligence materials involving the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Republican Sens. Mike Braun, Ind., and Josh Hawley, Mo., reintroduced the measure following a report from the Department of Energy concluding that the virus was likely the result of a lab leak, the Epoch Times reported.

Hawley celebrated the measure’s passage in a Tweet, saying “Tonight the Senate UNANIMOUSLY passed my bill to declassify all the intelligence the government has on #covid origins. Let the people see the truth!”

Formerly maligned as a conspiracy, the notion that the virus spread by way of a leak has increasingly gained traction among major federal agencies, including the DOE and FBI.

Keep reading

UK Considered Mandating Killing of All Pet Cats to Stop COVID

UK health authorities considered ordering the euthanization of all pet cats in the country during the first COVID outbreak, it has been revealed.

Ex-Deputy Health Minister Lord James Bethell made the admission while trying to argue that governments were caught unawares in how to respond to the virus, remarking, “We shouldn’t forget… how little we understood about this disease.”

“There was a moment we were very unclear about whether domestic pets could transmit the disease,” he said. “In fact, there was an idea at one moment that we might have to ask the public to exterminate all the cats in Britain. Can you imagine what would have happened if we had wanted to do that?”

Bethell claimed that “for a moment” there was “a bit of evidence around” the idea after a Siamese cat became the first in Britain to contract COVID-19, but that the plan was “closed down” fairly quickly.

Cat owners were told not to kiss their pets and to observe “observe very careful hygiene” around them while keeping them indoors if a member of the household caught COVID.

Keep reading

Gaslighting: “Conspiracy Theories” Already Proven True in 2023

Preppers get called conspiracy theorists a lot.  It’s supposed to be demeaning, but considering how many conspiracy theories have been proven correct lately, I no longer consider it an insult.  The more time goes by, the more “conspiracy theorists” just seem ahead of the game.

Quite a few “conspiracy theories” have recently come to light as actual facts in 2023 already. And it’s only the beginning of March.

Let’s look at a recent batch of “conspiracy theories” that aren’t really theories any more.

Keep reading

Faced With Their Own Idiocy On The Lab Leak, Media Double Down On Calling You A Racist Rube

This week, two government agencies — the Department of Energy and the FBI — announced that they had concluded the most likely origin of the Covid virus, which has killed 6 million people worldwide, was that it leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The reaction to this news, which at this point was hardly an earth-shattering conclusion, is more interesting for the question it prompts about the state of American discourse: How do you have an argument with people who will never admit when they’re wrong?

Not coincidentally, if you’re interested in checking out the state of late-night “comedy” — I have to explain to my kids that this used to be a sector of popular entertainment that people actually watched and enjoyed — here’s “Daily Show” guest host Hasan Minhaj weighing in on the matter: “By the way, [the Department of Energy’s] conclusion with ‘low confidence’ is such a f-ckboy move,” he said, adding, “And now, every f-cking idiot I went to high school with is like, ‘Apologize to me right now, Hasan! I told you I was right, and if your hand is bigger than your face, you’re gay.’”

I haven’t laughed that hard since Minhaj hosted the White House correspondents’ dinner. Which is to say I will also tell my kids that the correspondents’ dinner was a decadent self-congratulatory exercise in speaking power to truth that no respectable person didn’t revile.

Anyway, to paraphrase a comedic maxim, what Minhaj is saying is not funny because it’s not true. Perhaps Minhaj gets a pass here because he’s a comedian, right? And to be fair, if you watch the whole clip Minhaj does say he doesn’t know what to think about the virus’ origins. However, his bit does reveal a deeper, if unintentional, truth — he’s channeling a concise distillation of the textbook two-step that was broadly and institutionally adopted to downplay the significance of the DOE and FBI coming out and admitting they think the lab leak is the most likely explanation for the origin of the virus.

The first move was to throw cold water on the certainty of the Energy Department and FBI’s conclusions. Yes, other government agencies have concluded that a “zoonotic” origin — that the virus jumped from animals to humans — is more likely. Are the agencies that came to the opposite conclusions as qualified in making their determinations as the DOE or FBI? Who knows? More importantly, who cares? Because the fact there’s disagreement here is entirely beside the point.

The second part of the process was to deliberately revise history to completely misrepresent the nature of the original debate over the virus’ origin, to dismiss the real reason people now feel vindicated. It’s not because the DOE or FBI has settled the debate. It’s because we were never allowed to have a debate over the virus’ origins in the first place.

The media consensus on the lab-leak theory congealed so rapidly that it completely distorted the debate in two more distinct ways. First, it viciously and dishonestly conflated anyone who espoused the possibility of the lab leak with the fringe Alex Jones crowd who was speculating that China had deliberately released an engineered bioweapon against the West. The Washington Post more or less libeled Sen. Tom Cotton for fanning “the embers of a coronavirus theory that has been repeatedly debunked by experts,” when the experts quoted by the Post later admitted they misunderstood his remarks.

Second, media “fact-checkers” all weighed in against the lab leak, and for some reason, these incompetent journalistic meter maids are deferred to by Big Tech companies to make rulings about complex political and scientific issues that ultimately determine what you can and can’t say online. The result is that for a year or so you were censored on Facebook for discussing even the possibility of the lab leak.  

Keep reading

US Gov’t Was The ‘Greatest Perpetrator Of Misinformation’ During COVID-19 Pandemic, Johns Hopkins Doctor Says

Johns Hopkins professor Dr. Marty Makary gave an impassioned speech Tuesday about how the United States government was the “greatest perpetrator of misinformation” during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Makary was testifying before the House COVID subcommittee alongside other top medical experts.

“The greatest perpetrator of misinformation during the pandemic has been the United States government,” Makary said. “Misinformation that COVID was spread through surface transmission, that vaccinated immunity was far greater than natural immunity, that masks were effective, now we have the definitive Cochran review, what do you do with that review? Cochran is the most authoritative evidence body in all of medicine, it has been for decades. Do you just ignore it? Not talk about it?”

“… that myocarditis was more common after the infection than the vaccine. Not true. It’s 4-28 times more common after the vaccine. That young people benefit from a booster, misinformation. Our two top experts on vaccines quit the FDA in protest over this particular issue — using boosters in young, healthy people. The data was never there, that’s why the CDC never disclosed hospitalization rates among boosted Americans under age 50.”

Keep reading

Wall Street, the Nazis, and the Crimes of the Deep State

The response to the “Covid-19 pandemic” has much in common with the birth of the Third Reich. Agamben (2021, 8), for example, likens the emergency legislation passed in 2020 to the suspension of the Weimar Constitution in 1933, and Davis (2021b) explains how, through a raft of legislation being rammed through Parliament while the population’s attention is focused elsewhere, the UK is being turned into a constitutional dictatorship. UK government agencies now have the mandates to commit crimes with impunity; protests will be effectively criminalized or shut down under extraordinary police powers; online dissent will be censored; and journalists will no longer be allowed to report any information deemed contrary to the “national interest” (Davis 2021b).

The “Covid-19 pandemic” functions as the Big Lie on which this is all premised, i.e. a lie so huge that ordinary people would not imagine it to be possible. To quote Mein Kampf:

“Because the […] masses […] are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.”(Hitler 1969, 134)

As Rancourt et al. (2021) demonstrate scientifically, there was no viral pandemic, only what Davis (2021a), based on several hundred pages of argumentation, calls a “pseudopandemic,” modelled on the fake “swine flu pandemic” of 2009 (Fumento 2010). Yet, because of the propaganda and the applied behavioural psychology deployed as part of the psychological warfare targeting the unconscious mind, cognitive dissonance prevents many people from seeing or admitting this, even when presented with the evidence. Propaganda specialist Mark Crispin Miller reflects: “I used to think it tasteless to compare our system to Nazi Germany. I no longer think so” (2021, 30 mins).

Hitler was, perhaps, the first to see that liberal democracy can be subverted by playing on the unconscious fears of the masses. If an existential threat is presented, the masses can be induced to sacrifice liberty for the promise of security. At a visceral level, they are

“far more satisfied by a doctrine which tolerates no rival [promises security] than by the grant of liberal freedom. They neither realize the impudence with which they are […] terrorized, nor the outrageous curtailment of their human liberties, for in no way does the delusion of this doctrine dawn on them.”(cited in Fromm 1942, 191)

This is the model of imposing authority in a climate of terror. The masses can be terrorized into surrendering their liberties, and it will never occur to them that they have been lied to on a monumental scale — that the threat was fictitious. Thus, for example, while Hitler lambasted international bankers and reparation payments for bringing Germany to its knees, the truth was that German reparations payments fell to around one eighth of previous levels following the Hoover Moratorium (1931) and Lausanne Agreement (1932), the Bank for International Settlements managed Nazi gold, and the Nazis continued to honour their Young Plan obligations even during World War II.

The same playbook of using a Big Lie to generate mass fear for authoritarian purposes has been evident in “Covid-19.” Klaus Schwab practically announced as much in June 2020:

“Most people, fearful of the danger posed by COVID-19 [in a] a life-or-death kind of situation […] will agree that in such circumstances public power can rightfully override individual rights. Then, when the crisis is over, some may realize that their country has suddenly been transformed into a place where they no longer wish to live.”(Schwab and Malleret 2020, 117)

By the time the lie is exposed, it is too late, “for the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying” (Hitler 1969, 134). Again, Schwab seems familiar with this principle: there will be no going back to how things were, because “the cut which we have now is much too strong in order not to leave traces” (cited in Clark 2020). Schwab’s protégé, Yuval Noah Harari, also belongs to the conspiracy of expert liars: “If you repeat a lie often enough,” he claims, “people will think it’s the truth. And the bigger the lie, the better, because people won’t even think about how something so big can be a lie.”

Keep reading

Of Course That’s How the Liberal Media Reacted to the Latest COVID Origin News

It was never a conspiracy theory. This narrative isn’t plotline fodder for the X-Files or filled with unsubstantiated material. The coronavirus leaking from a lab in Wuhan, China, had plenty of preliminary evidence. No one had to pick unlikely events or hypotheses to string this along; the blood trail went right to the facility’s door. It wasn’t wet markets or bat soup. It was crappy containment policies at a research facility in a secretive, authoritarian regime that let it get out. Even worse, the Chinese government wasn’t transparent—shocker— about this lab leak, and we might have financed some of the research that led to the pandemic. Spencer wrote about how the Energy Department came to that determination over the weekend.

Yet, those who uttered it for months were banned, silenced, and smeared as paranoid racists. We have the receipts of the liberal media once again placing feelings over facts and making themselves look like idiots. If it made Donald Trump or the Republicans look good and the Democrats wrong, then you were a racist. The best was how the media said this theory was used to gin up anti-Asian hate; COVID didn’t birth racial prejudice against Asians. It’s always been around, but it was another liberal media attempt to control the flow of information when everyone and their mother knew months ago that the Fruit Roll-Ups lab probably had better security protocols—and that place isn’t even real. Even now, some outlets are still holding out hope that this wasn’t a lab leak (via The Hill):

Republicans are seizing on a new Energy Department conclusion pointing to a “lab leak” as causing the COVID-19 outbreak to call for swift action against the Chinese government, which has refused to cooperate with global probes into the pandemic’s origin. 

The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times reported Sunday that the Energy Department had determined with “low confidence” that the virus was leaked from a lab, though it is unclear what new intelligence that was based on.

Keep reading

Surprise: More Right-Wing ‘Conspiracies’ and ‘Misinformation’ Now Confirmed

Let’s begin with the important point that dangerous misinformation and conspiracy theories are, in fact, real problems that seem to be gaining momentum in American politics.  The Left flatters itself by pretending this phenomenon is, more or less, the sole or overwhelming province of the Right, all while indulging or embracing their own falsehoods.  But these things do exist, on both sides, and they really do threaten to warp our collective sense of reality by injecting poisonous forms of paranoia into our discourse and polity.  But here’s what also erodes trust in institutions, and degrades the importance of truth, within American society: Partisans and ideologues, posing as neutral arbiters, arrogantly declaring ideas or allegations with which they disagree to be “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories” — not just debatable or controversial, mind you, but factually wrong, and dangerously so.  This goes beyond dishonesty; it’s irresponsible.  

When the official Narrative shapers have aggressively attempted to disqualify something as crazy and beyond the pale, and then reality intervenes and disproves their spin, people are much less likely to believe them next time they fire up their warning sirens.  Some toxic claims truly need to be debunked and discarded, but when would-be gatekeepers’ credibility has sustained one self-inflicted blow after another, the ability for truth to win out over perilous and inaccurate nonsense is diminished.  Let’s walk through just a handful of examples that have come to light within the last few days.  First, one “conspiracy theory,” for which some on the Right were roundly denounced and ridiculed by the bien pensant ‘Consensus’ crowd, was the idea that COVID-19 escaped from a Chinese laboratory.  At some point, this possibility morphed from unspeakable, to potentially viable, to perhaps probable, including among some of the very people who’d lectured anyone who’d whispered about it even months earlier.  Over the weekend, we saw this report, as the reality trajectory continues to bend toward erstwhile right-wing “misinformation:”

The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress. The shift by the Energy Department, which previously was undecided on how the virus emerged, is noted in an update to a 2021 document by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines’s office…The Energy Department now joins the Federal Bureau of Investigation in saying the virus likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese laboratory. Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that it was likely the result of a natural transmission, and two are undecided. The Energy Department’s conclusion is the result of new intelligence and is significant because the agency has considerable scientific expertise and oversees a network of U.S. national laboratories, some of which conduct advanced biological research…The FBI previously came to the conclusion that the pandemic was likely the result of a lab leak in 2021 with “moderate confidence” and still holds to this view.

Keep reading