Tag: covid-19

As Covid Hit, Washington Officials Traded Stocks With Exquisite Timing

In January 2020, the U.S. public was largely unaware of the threat posed by the virus spreading in China, but health officials were on high alert and girding for a crisis.

A deputy to top health official Anthony Fauci reported 10 sales of mutual funds and stocks totaling between $157,000 and $480,000 that month. Collectively, officials at another health agency, Health and Human Services, reported 60% more sales of stocks and funds in January than the average over the previous 12 months, driven by a handful of particularly active traders.

By March, agencies across the government were working on wide-reaching measures to prop the economy and markets. Then-Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao purchased more than $600,000 in two stock funds while her agency was involved in the pandemic response and her husband, Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, was leading negotiations over a giant, market-boosting stimulus bill.

And as the government was devising a loan package aimed specifically at helping companies including Boeing Co. and General Electric Co., a Treasury Department official involved in administering the aid acquired shares of both companies.

Federal officials owned millions of dollars of stock in industries most affected by the pandemic and the government’s response. About 240 officials at health agencies and at the Pentagon, a key player in the vaccine rollout, reported owning a total of between $9 million and $28 million in stocks of drug, manufacturing and biotechnology companies that won federal contracts related to Covid-19 in 2020 and 2021, the Journal’s analysis found.

Nearly 400 officials across 50 agencies reported owning stocks in airline, resort, hotel, restaurant and cruise companies in early 2020, the review found.

By March, every major agency was drawn into the pandemic response. That month was the most active for trading by officials across the federal government, including at HHS, in the Journal’s analysis of financial disclosure forms for about 12,000 officials spanning 2016 to 2021. Federal officials reported more than 11,600 trades that month, 44% more than in any other month in the analysis.

The health agencies didn’t respond to requests for comment. A Pentagon spokeswoman said most defense personnel don’t work on matters affecting large defense contractors or affecting the finances of private companies, and said the department is “committed to preventing conflicts of interest.”

Senior federal officials are required to disclose their financial assets and transactions and those of their spouses and dependent children in annual reports.

Federal employees are barred from working on matters in which they have a significant financial stake, from trading on nonpublic information learned on the job and from taking any official action that creates an appearance of a conflict of interest.

Agency ethics officials rarely have a complete picture of what employees are working on or privy to, especially during a fast-moving, governmentwide mobilization in response to a national emergency.

Most agencies’ ethics rules focus on what kinds of stocks officials can trade, not when they can trade. And there are no restrictions on federal officials’ investing in diversified mutual funds, which were more volatile than usual early in the pandemic. Ethics officials certified that the employees identified by the Journal were in compliance with these rules.

Three days into January 2020, top U.S. health officials were alerted to an unexplained virus sickening people in China.

By late January, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention leaders were rushing to develop accurate tests, National Institutes of Health officials were taking the first steps toward developing a vaccine, and the Food and Drug Administration was racing to facilitate prevention and treatment options for the novel coronavirus.

On Jan. 24, four days after the CDC publicly reported the first confirmed U.S. Covid-19 infection, Hugh Auchincloss, principal deputy director at the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, summed up the state of his agency in an email: “New coronavirus all the time.”

That same day, while the stock market remained lofty, Dr. Auchincloss reported selling $15,001 to $50,000 of a stock mutual fund. Days later he sold two more mutual funds and a stock, Chevron Corp., according to his financial disclosures, which give wide dollar ranges. That was just the beginning.

Dr. Auchincloss was invited to a Jan. 29 meeting of an NIH working group called the International Clinical Research Subcommittee. The top agenda item was “Wuhan coronavirus—plans for a response,” according to emails released in response to public-records requests.

On the last day of January, an email sent to Dr. Auchincloss and his boss, Dr. Fauci, signaled the severity of the threat. Public Health Service officers had been told they could be deployed, a health official wrote, and could assist with “quarantine efforts.”

Dr. Auchincloss disclosed six sales of mutual funds that day, totaling between $111,006 and $315,000 in value.

His January sales amounted to the largest number of transactions he had reported for a single month since 2018, according to his financial disclosures.

Each holding he sold fell sharply in the market downturn that soon followed, as the public and investors started paying attention to the threat posed by Covid-19.

Dr. Auchincloss, who retained some other holdings, didn’t respond to requests for comment. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases declined to make him available for an interview.

The agency said that financial disclosure reports are routinely reviewed by NIH ethics officials to ensure compliance with reporting requirements and resolve potential conflicts of interest. It declined to say whether Dr. Auchincloss made the trades himself or had a managed account.

“As a matter of employee privacy, we will not disclose the additional information requested because it is beyond the public financial disclosure reporting requirements,” the agency said.

Among officials involved in the CDC’s early pandemic response was Stephen Redd, a veteran epidemiologist serving as deputy director for Public Health Service and Implementation Science at the agency. His role involved collecting information about the state of the virus and the federal response in order to brief lawmakers.

The CDC had a clear view of the virus’s threat by the end of January, Dr. Redd later told a student interviewer in Atlanta. “It was easy to see it was going to be a really big problem,” he said.

Dr. Redd disclosed sales of between $95,004 and $250,000 in stocks and bonds in January. He reported the sale in February of $100,001 to $250,000 of bonds, along with purchases of between $2,002 and $30,000 of short-term bond funds, a low-risk investment.

Dr. Redd said he had no advance knowledge of these trades, which he said were in his wife’s retirement account and made by a financial adviser. He said he didn’t learn of them until that summer, although he was required by law to report any trades made in his or his wife’s accounts within 30 days.

He acknowledged that federal officials are “responsible for knowing” about their financial transactions. He said neither he nor his wife knew why the adviser made the trades.

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Military whistleblowers say cancer, miscarriages and heart disease all up 300% following covid injection mandates

Three doctors in the armed forces have decided to blow the lid on the United States military’s open deception concerning the negative outcome of Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) “vaccination” on American troops.

According to the three whistleblowers, medical billing code data captured by the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED), which is run by the Department of Defense (DoD), shows that rates of miscarriage, myocarditis, cancer, Bell’s palsy, female infertility, and many other health conditions are up big time.

Cancer rates are particularly concerning, they say, as the normal average number of new cases per year is about 38,700, based on the time period from 2016-2020. In 2021 after Operation Warp Speed was launched, however, the number of new cancer cases that year rose to 114,645.

The Armed Forces Health Surveillance Branch (AFHSB) runs the DMED, which it describes as a “web-based tool to remotely query de-identified active component personnel and medical event data contained within the Defense Medical Surveillance System (DMSS).”

“The database contains every International Classification of Diseases (ICD) medical billing code for all medical diagnoses submitted by the military for medical insurance billing,” reports explain. (Related: Remember at the launch of Operation Warp Speed when Dr. Sara Beltrán Ponce, MD, suffered a horrific miscarriage right after getting jabbed for the Chinese Flu?)

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Scientists worldwide claim all Covid-19 Vaccines contain Nanotechnology & Graphene Oxide

Nanoscience and nanotechnology involve the ability to see and control individual atoms and molecules. Everything on Earth is made up of atoms—the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the buildings and houses we live in, and our own bodies.

But something as small as an atom is impossible to see with the naked eye. In fact, it’s impossible to see with the microscopes typically used in high school science classes. The microscopes needed to see things at the nanoscale were invented in the early 1980s.

Once scientists had the right tools, such as the scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) and the atomic force microscope (AFM), the age of nanotechnology was born.

And now scientists from Spain, have declared that nanotechnology, which has the ability to control atoms in your body, has been found in all of the Covid-19 injections alongside Graphene Oxide.

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Judge Rejects Biden Administration’s Attempt to Block Depositions in Big Tech-Government Censorship Case

The Biden administration’s attempt to block depositions of several key officials was turned down Nov. 2 by a U.S. judge.

U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee, rejected a request for a partial stay of his Oct. 21 order authorizing the depositions of eight officials, including President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Government lawyers asked the judge to impose the partial stay as an appeals court weighs a request to vacate the part of his order that enables the depositions of Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, a Biden appointee; Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Jen Easterly, a Biden appointee; and Rob Flaherty, a deputy assistant to the president.

Absent a stay, “high-ranking governmental officials would be diverted from their significant duties and burdened in both preparing and sitting for a deposition, all of which may ultimately prove to be unnecessary if the Court of Appeals grants” their request, the government said.

Doughty ruled that the government failed to show how the officials would be irreparably harmed apart from referencing a diversion from “significant duties.” That didn’t meet the standard for showing irreparable harm, he said.

On the other hand, the plaintiffs, including the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, would be irreparably harmed by a partial stay because they’ve alleged a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment and ‘The loss of First Amendment freedoms, even for minimal periods of time, unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury,’” Doughty said, quoting from a ruling in a separate case.

“The Court finds that both the public interest and the interest of the other parties in preserving free speech significantly outweighs the inconvenience the three deponents will have in preparing for and giving their depositions,” he added.

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Lockdowns: The Great Gaslighting

More than two years since the lockdowns of 2020, the political mainstream, particularly on the left, is just beginning to realize that the response to Covid was an unprecedented catastrophe.

But that realization hasn’t taken the form of a mea culpa. Far from it. On the contrary, in order to see that reality is starting to dawn on the mainstream left, one must read between the lines of how their narrative on the response to Covid has evolved over the past two years.

The narrative now goes something like this: Lockdowns never really happened, because governments never actually locked people in their homes; but if there were lockdowns, then they saved millions of lives and would have saved even more if only they’d been stricter; but if there were any collateral damage, then that damage was an inevitable consequence of the fear from the virus independent of the lockdowns; and even when things were shut down, the rules weren’t very strict; but even when the rules were strict, we didn’t really support them.

Put simply, the prevailing narrative of the mainstream left is that any upside from the response to Covid is attributable to the state-ordered closures and mandates that they supported, while any downside was an inevitable consequence of the virus independent of any state-ordered closures and mandates which never happened and which anyway they never supported. Got it? Good.

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Scottish Government Finally Admits That Mask-Wearing is Harmful

Scotland was slow to remove mask mandates in the general population. The legal requirement to wear a mask in public spaces became ‘guidance’ on April 18th 2022 but continued as a strong recommendation in health and social care settings. This policy was again reviewed in June but mask-wearing continued to be strongly recommended, meaning that many residents in care homes possibly never saw an unmasked face for over two years. However, a concerted campaign has – finally – achieved a change in policy that should end routine mask wearing in social care settings.

Prompted by the disappointing review in June, and after two years of frustrating and fruitless communication with health and social care organisations in Scotland on the subject of harms caused by mask-wearing, I reluctantly sent an open letter to CEOs of Scottish health and social care organisations on July 19th, imploring them to urgently challenge the Scottish Government to end illogical and harmful mask-wearing policies.

I received non-committal responses from statutory organisations but one CEO was honest enough to tell me he had neither the “authority nor governance” to challenge Government policy. This was surely the fundamental source of the problem and the reason why my communications had been received with resistance or silence (but, rarely disagreement). This CEO promised to communicate my concerns with the Scottish Government but was clearly unable to include a personal opinion or to dissent from the organisation’s position. Indeed, two other CEOs stated they had neither the time nor resources to engage in this debate but wished me well in “my campaign” and asked to be kept informed of progress.

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“You Murderous Hypocrites”: Outrage Ensues After The Atlantic Suggests ‘Amnesty’ For Pandemic Authoritarians

The Atlantic has come under fire for suggesting that all the terrible pandemic-era decisions over lockdowns, school closures, masking, and punishing an entire class of people who questioned the efficacy and wisdom of taking a rushed, experimental vaccine – for a virus with a 99% survival rate in most, should all be water under the bridge.

“We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID,” writes Brown Professor Emily Oster – a huge lockdown proponent, who now pleads from mercy from the once-shunned.

“Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward,” she continues.

Except, they weren’t “in the dark” about Covid.  There were numerous sources pointing out the actual science that ran contrary to the mandate claims, and they were deliberately silenced by a vast media campaign.  Evidence suggests that media platforms worked in tandem with Big Tech, the CDC and the Biden Administration.  It was not a simple matter of overreaction, there was collusion to remove all counter-information.  

Nice try, Emily.

As the Daily Sceptic‘s Michael P. Senger puts it: “There’s a lot wrong here. First, no, you don’t get to advocate policies that do extraordinary harm to others, against their wishes, then say, “We didn’t know any better at the time!” Ignorance doesn’t work as an excuse when the policies involved abrogating your fellow citizens’ rights under an indefinite state of emergency, while censoring and cancelling those who weren’t as ignorant. The inevitable result would be a society in which ignorance and obedience to the opinion of the mob would be the only safe position.”

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COVID-19: A Universe Of Questions In A Time Of Universal Deceit

“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act”

-George Orwell

As we approach the third year of the ‘Covid Crisis’, the once unassailable Covid Story – reported and repeated by politicians, public health mandarins and all mainstream media – has been replaced by contradictions and inconsistencies.

The original Covid Story narrated by health ‘experts’ and government officials told of a particularly virulent pathogen which besieged the planet in 2020 and spread like wildfire– terrorizing, infecting, and killing people en masse. 

It was the story of a “pandemic level event” in which people were told to stay indoors, entire sectors of society were forced to shut down and humans were told to do everything possible to avoid contact with one another. 

It was a story of closed down schools, closed down businesses, closed down churches and soon-to-be overwhelmed hospitals.

In later chapters the Covid Story morphed from ironclad truths, “Follow the science”, to ever changing definitions, “The science evolves.” Countless aspects of the “official” narrative changed overnight. Gradually the tale became fraught with pages of questionable statistics and ever shifting storylines.

What was one to make of all of these contradictions and ministerial mutations? 

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A Closer Look At The COVID Mortality Rate

One of the most consistent efforts made by “experts” during the early stages of the pandemic was to attempt to impress on the public that COVID was an extremely deadly disease.

While it’s clear that for the extremely elderly and severely immunocompromised, COVID does present significant and serious health concerns, the “experts” did their best to convince people of all age groups that they were in danger.

Initially the World Health Organization (WHO), in their infinite incompetence, made a substantial contribution to this perception by claiming that the mortality rate from COVID was shockingly high.

In March 2020, with precious little data, the WHO made the alarming claim that 3.4 percent of people who got COVID had died.

CNBC reported that an early press conference by WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus compared that expected mortality of COVID-19 to the flu:

“‘Globally, about 3.4 percent of reported COVID-19 cases have died,’ WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a press briefing at the agency’s headquarters in Geneva. In comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1 percent of those infected, he said.”

This stood in contrast to previous estimates, which were also above 2 percent:

“Early in the outbreak, scientists had concluded the death rate was around 2.3 percent.”

While “experts” could be forgiven for being unsure about the death rate of a brand new illness with very little data available, the fear-mongering and world-altering policy enacted based on these estimates has caused incalculable damage.

It’s now widely known and accepted that these estimates were wildly incorrect, off by orders of magnitude.

But a new paper out from one of the world’s leading experts confirms that they were off even more than we previously realized.

John Ioannidis is one of the nation’s leading public health experts, employed at Stanford University as Professor of Medicine in Stanford Prevention Research, of Epidemiology and Population Health,” as well as “of Statistics and Biomedical Data Science.”

You’d think that those impeccable qualifications and a track record of being one of the most published and cited scientists in the modern world would insulate him from criticism, but unfortunately that’s no longer how The Science™ works.

Ioannidis first drew the ire of The Keepers of The Science™ early in the outbreak, when he cautioned that society might be making tremendous decisions based on limited data that was of poor quality.

He also took part in the infamous seroprevalence study conducted in Santa Clara County, led by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.

That examination, which looked at antibody prevalence in the San Jose area, came to the conclusion that COVID was already significantly more widespread by March and April 2020 than most people realized.

This had wide-ranging implications, but the most important revelation was that the estimates of COVID’s mortality rate used by “scientists” and the WHO were almost certainly much too high.

Those estimates were created under the assumption that COVID cases were overwhelmingly detectable; that cases were captured by testing and thus tracking deaths could be achieved with a “case fatality rate,” instead of “infection fatality rate.”

That was the mistake Tedros and the WHO made two and a half years ago.

Of course, for providing substantial evidence and data that COVID was less deadly than initially feared, Ioannidis (and Bhattacharya) was attacked from within the “expert community.”

In what has now become a familiar insult, those behind the study were vilified as COVID minimizers and dangerous conspiracy theorists who would get people killed by not taking the virus seriously enough.

But Ioannidis remained undeterred, and with several authors, he recently released another review of the infection fatality rate of COVID. Importantly, the paper looks at the pre-vaccination time period and covers the non-elderly age groups; those who were most affected by COVID restrictions and endless mandates.

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