Tag: emergency powers

The Pandemic Plan Needs to be Torn Up

The closest thing we have in this country to a pandemic plan is called the Pandemic Action Crisis Plan or PanCap. It remains the prevailing unclassified document. It posits stay-at-home orders, school closures, business shutdowns, office closures, travel restrictions, testing, track-and-trace, and the creation and distribution of countermeasures called vaccines. 

So far as anyone knows, it is still the prevailing document. It’s one of many. Nothing has changed about any of them in light of what we learned from Covid. The CDC currently hosts all these documents:

This approach has no precedent in the long history of public health. The old way was to keep calm, understand the illness, treat those affected, and use rational approaches to mitigate the impacts. The new way invented in 2005 is about command and control, pretending to manage the microbial kingdom like an engineering project. 

This is still the operational manual. If a pathogen should leak and the machine clicks into gear, this is what will happen. It will be profoundly disturbing to civil society. Like last time, the results will not be good. The medicine will be worse than the disease. We can say this based on the experience from 2020 to 2023. And yet the plan survives. 

The existing plan is PanCap-Adapted. It is still not posted on any government website. It was leaked to the New York Times and, again, so far as anyone knows, this remains the architecture of control. Why the latest is not posted is unclear. Don’t the American people deserve to know what their government plans for them? 

It is supplemented by dozens of other documents that pertain to nearly every federal government agency and are expected to be followed by downstream agencies in states, counties, cities, and towns. This is what is called an all-of-government response. 

This is not some conspiracy theory. We need only look at one related document, the Biological Incident Annex to the Response and Recovery Federal, Interagency Operational Plan as produced by FEMA. It is out of classification and available for anyone to observe. It comes into operation with any pathogen that is new, perhaps manufactured in a lab as many of them are. 

Halfway through this document you find a presumption of business closures, transportation restrictions and disruptions, widespread commodities hoarding by the public, stay-at-home orders, workforce shift to virtual environment, school and childcare closures, restaurant closures, hotel closures, reduced workforce, and plant closures. 

This plan is still out there, waiting to be implemented under the right circumstances. The US Constitution does not pertain. American expectations of liberty do not pertain. Law does not pertain. Even now, the idea that an emergency requires the end of all normal expectations for freedom is baked into all pandemic protocols. 

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Kennedy Ends Covid EUA Declarations, but PREP Act Shield Remains

Seven years after Washington rushed poorly tested drugs, shots, and devices into the fight against a new coronavirus — spending billions and killing and injuring millions in the process — it has finally discovered that the emergency is over.

Well … mostly.

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has now moved to terminate the Covid-19 emergency use authorization (EUA) declarations for drugs, biological products, and medical devices.

But as long as the PREP Act shield remains in place, the move looks less like accountability and more like a marketing exercise dressed up as a ceremonial retirement of paperwork.

Terminating EUAs

HHS described the move as a return to normal order.

The agency said the circumstances that justified those emergency authorities for Covid products “no longer exist.”

It also said the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved, cleared, and licensed products are now widely available through ordinary regulatory channels.

Kennedy stated:

By ending these COVID-19 emergency use authorization declarations, we’re reinforcing public confidence that emergency authorities are temporary and targeted.

That sounds like a clean break. It is not.

The termination does not take effect immediately. The declaration for drugs and biological products will terminate 12 months after Kennedy’s determination. The medical device declarations will terminate after 180 days. HHS said the delay will allow manufacturers, healthcare systems, distributors, and patients to move away from products authorized solely under Covid EUA declarations.

In other words, the emergency is over, but only after a courtesy period for the industries that built businesses around it.

The FDA, the agency within HHS responsible for reviewing and regulating drugs, vaccines, biological products, and medical devices, has long treated the Covid EUA structure as separate from the formal public health emergency. When the Covid public health emergency ended in May 2023, FDA said that step did not end existing EUAs. It also said the agency could continue issuing new EUAs if the legal criteria were met.

Kennedy’s action now starts the clock on that separate authority. To understand what that means, it helps to separate the headline from the legal machinery underneath it.

What HHS Actually Terminated

The key phrase is “EUA declarations.”

Kennedy did not simply revoke every Covid product authorization. He terminated the underlying emergency declarations that allowed FDA to issue and maintain EUAs for broad categories of Covid products.

Under federal law, HHS first makes an EUA declaration. FDA then uses that declaration to authorize specific products for emergency use. Those products can include unapproved drugs, biological products, devices, or unapproved uses of approved products. FDA describes EUA authority as a tool for making medical countermeasures available during “chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) threats including infectious diseases.”

Once the HHS secretary terminates the declaration, EUAs based on that declaration generally cease to be in effect. FDA also loses the ability to issue new EUAs under that terminated declaration. The law, however, allows transition periods and certain continued use of products already distributed.

That is the actual legal effect.

It winds down the emergency authorization lane. But it has limits. It does not automatically punish anyone for using that lane. It neither creates liability for injuries nor compensates the injured. And it does not remove products that already moved into traditional approval, clearance, or licensure.

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HHS Terminates the COVID-19 Emergency Use Authorization Declarations Covering mRNA Shots, Drugs, and Biologics

Today, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services finally moved to terminate the COVID-19 Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) declarations that have been in place since the early months of the pandemic.

The termination is not immediate. HHS has established a transition period of up to 12 months for EUA drugs and biologics and 180 days for EUA medical devices. According to the agency, the phased wind-down is intended to avoid disruptions and allow manufacturers and healthcare systems time to transition away from the emergency framework.

These declarations formed the legal foundation for the authorization of COVID-19 mRNA injections, monoclonal antibodies, antiviral drugs, diagnostic tests, ventilators, personal protective equipment, and numerous other medical products deployed during the pandemic response.

Unfortunately, the deadly Pfizer and Moderna mRNA injections are already fully FDA approved, meaning this action will have little practical effect on their continued use. The emergency framework that enabled their rapid rollout is finally being dismantled, but the products themselves have already moved beyond it.

While today’s announcement marks the formal beginning of the end of the COVID EUA era, it does not produce the outcome many of us had hoped for, including but not limited to the removal of mRNA products from the market.

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Officials urge WHO to declare climate change a global health emergency

Climate change should now be treated as a global health emergency comparable to Ebola and mpox, European ministers and health officials have told the WHO. 

The Pan-European Commission on Climate and Health, an independent group of experts convened by former Icelandic Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir and WHO Europe chief Hans Kluge, urged governments to speed the shift to clean renewables to help avert millions of deaths in a new report.

The group said the WHO should declare the climate crisis a “public health emergency of international concern” (PHEIC), a high-level alert most recently activated for the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as for mpox.

The experts said the move was critical since even temperate European countries are warming rapidly, driven largely by fossil fuel combustion. According to the report, fossil fuel subsidies in 12 European countries amounted to more than 10% of their public health budgets.

Kluge, who supported the call, said that “climate change is a security threat, a health emergency and an economic time bomb, all rolled into one.” 

He previously told Euractiv that climate change will have to become a much bigger priority for the European region, explaining that “for the first time in history, Iceland has mosquitoes.”

The experts pointed to several health concerns linked to climate change in the report: extreme heat, vector-borne diseases such as dengue and chikungunya, air pollution-related deaths, and water contamination from flooding. 

The experts’ prognosis was not entirely grim, however, adding that there’s still a window of time to act.

For healthcare systems, they suggested setting up greener procurement standards to reduce the sector’s carbon footprint, creating more resilient systems to shocks like floods, as well as training staff around climate awareness.  

EU governments, on top of phasing out fossil fuel use, should invest in public transit, create more low-emission zones, and switch away from resource-heavy red meat consumption, they added. 

The bloc’s recent progress has fallen short of both UN climate targets and its own ambitions. Most countries are still far from reaching tougher pollution targets by 2030 under the bloc’s revised air quality rules.

The European Environment Agency (EEA) estimates that air pollution is behind around 350,000 deaths in Europe every year.

EU officials are currently in Geneva for the WHO’s annual assembly, where the commission launched its report. 

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MINISTRY OF TRUTH: Government To BLOCK ‘False Information’ During ‘Crisis Events’

Vague new rules will allow UK regulators to pressure platforms over “legal but harmful” content whenever government ministers declare a crisis, while the same government ploughs ahead with mandatory phone scanning, digital ID lockdowns, and jail threats for tech bosses who refuse to spy on every device.

The latest move from Northern Ireland Secretary Hilary Benn makes explicit what privacy campaigners have long warned: the Online Safety Act is being weaponised far beyond any child-protection claim.

Benn confirmed that the internet regulator will now wield enhanced powers to tackle “false information” online during “times of crisis,” directly tying the recent Belfast unrest to this framework. The regulator has already contacted platforms, with ministers asserting that violence “appears to have been incited online.”

Benn stated that if people put online ‘false information,’ “it is not acceptable and it may well be a criminal offence depending on the circumstances as the chief constable made clear yesterday.”

When asked how a “time of crisis” would be defined, Benn said it “will be set out in due course.”

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The evidence for a planned covid pandemic starts in the UK in 1966

In 2023, Dr. David Martin presented evidence to UK Parliamentarians that the covid pandemic was a 56-year plan in development, starting in the UK in 1966 when the Wellcome Trust decided to use the coronavirus as a method of human manipulation.

In 1967, the US and UK agreed to modify and manipulate coronavirus, and by 2011, a document showed an anti-trust collusion between the Wellcome Trust, Rockefeller Foundation, Gates Foundation and others to establish a universal vaccine by 2020.

The covid pandemic was not a public health emergency, but rather an orchestrated assault on liberties.  And the evidence points to a conspiracy to commit acts of terror, with key players including Peter Daszak and the World Health Organisation.

On 4 December 2023, Andrew Bridgen, then a Member of the UK Parliament (“MP”), hosted an event in the Wilson Room of Portcullis House, a building opposite the Houses of Parliament which provides offices for 210 MPs and their staff, supplementing the limited space in the Palace of Westminster and surrounding buildings.

16 MPs attended the event titled ‘For Democracy, Truth, and Freedom’ when Dr. David E. Martin said: “Covid was a 56-year plan in development that began in the UK when Wellcome Trust decided to use the coronavirus as the ‘preferred method of human manipulation’.”

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EU Wants Crisis Powers To Seize Control Of Chip Supplies, Seeks Restrictions On Chinese Imports

The EU – which is badly lagging the rest of the world when it comes to AI development – is preparing sweeping emergency powers to intervene in Europe’s semiconductor supply chains during shortages, including by forcing chipmakers to override existing contracts, the FT reported. So much for the sanctity of those “contract-backed” backlogs… 

The draft law also enables common purchasing to boost the bloc’s negotiating power, and would mark a clear expansion of the EU’s powers to intervene directly in industrial supply chains.

Amid tensions between Beijing and Washington, there are growing fears in Europe that semiconductors can become a tool of economic coercion, heightened by European reliance on Taiwan for high-performance chips.

The clearest example of Europe’s heavy hand was laid bare last year when the Dutch government took control of chipmaker Nexperia from its Chinese owner over concerns that it was moving production and assets out of Europe. The flow of chips from Nexperia’s China arm slowed dramatically, forcing some European car companies to reduce production.

The draft law, which is still subject to change ahead of its expected publication next week, would allow the European Commission far-reaching powers in the event of semiconductor shortages that threaten supplies of weapons, medical devices, digital infrastructure and other key categories of goods. In such a crisis, the Commission could impose fines of up to €300,000 on companies that fail to provide requested information on their supply-chain capacity. It could also “force semiconductor manufacturers to prioritize orders for crisis-critical products, overriding existing contracts”, the draft reads.

Brussels could also enable common purchasing to “strengthen negotiating power and prevent competition between EU countries for limited supplies”. The Commission would then act as a central buyer for multiple EU countries, as it did to acquire vaccines during the pandemic.

According to the FT, the so-called Chips Act forms part of a wider push from the bloc to reduce its dependence on US technology by backing European alternatives in sectors from semiconductors and cloud computing to AI. In the document, Brussels acknowledges that the bloc is “almost entirely dependent on the US and Asia” for the most advanced chips.

Semiconductor supply chains are vast and complex, with a typical Nvidia system tapping thousands of suppliers in dozens of countries. And yet, the EU currently produces less than 10% of global semiconductors. Earlier plans to double the EU’s global market share in semiconductors by 2030 are far behind schedule.

The bloc, like the rest of the world, is overwhelmingly dependent on Taiwan for its supply of high-performance chips, with the home of semiconductor company TSMC accounting for more than 90 per cent of leading-edge chip manufacturing. China has made repeated threats to use force against Taiwan if Taipei continues to resist its sovereignty claims. Any conflict in the region could cause global shortages of components critical to electronics from smartphones and AI data centres to cars and medical gear. 

Separately, the Guardian reports that EU commissioners will meet on Friday for talks aimed at imposing new restrictions on imports from China amid growing concern that Beijing is fuelling conditions for US-style rust belt towns in Europe.

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The Elites And Their Contempt

Last week, I was unexpectedly hit with a post-lockdown trauma response. While driving to a baseball game days before the NFL Draft came to Pittsburgh, I passed a digital highway sign instructing me to avoid nonessential travel.

Suddenly, memories of empty highways with signs instructing drivers to “Stay Safe and Stay Home” came flooding back to me.

As the week developed, it began to occur to me that the parallels were deeper than my subjective emotional response. Road closures intensified, rendering my beloved city of Pittsburgh less and less functional. Even sidewalks were closed. 

Entire parking garages were emptied and abandoned. Pittsburgh’s “most visited museum,” the Kamin Science Center, has been closed to the public for weeks because it was within the footprint of the upcoming event. For the actual days of the draft, Pittsburgh Public Schools were shuttered as if a blizzard had rendered travel impossible.

The attempt by local officials to trigger hysteria in the populace worked, maybe too well. People traveling to Pittsburgh for the event heeded the instructions to use the special free public transit to make their way in. Parking operators, expecting a huge windfall, saw themselves lower their exorbitant prices midday. For example, the Rivers Casino quickly abandoned their plan to charge $250 per day, lowering their rate to $100 for the first day of the draft and then abandoning charging altogether for subsequent days.

Local businesses outside the official footprint of the event were told to prepare for heavy crowds, but instead experienced a weekend worse than anything they had seen since the Covid hysteria. Those who didn’t want to go to the draft were terrified to go anywhere near the city.

In summary, children were deprived of education, small business owners were drastically harmed, public spaces which exist for the common good were shuttered, and normal life ceased for those who actually live in the City of Pittsburgh. While all of this was happening, local politicians were patting themselves on the back for how well everything was pulled off, taking pride that this draft broke attendance records for the NFL and that their plans of getting people in and out of the city were effective. It was our own personal Operation Warp Speed.

I think there’s a lesson here that applies not merely to Pittsburgh politics but also to the wider dysfunction we see in elected officials throughout what used to be Western Civilization.

Our political leaders view their own constituents with a sort of boredom or indifference. In the leadup to the draft, Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania engaged in a number of public works projects designed to improve the area in preparation for the draft. 

Suddenly, our governments remembered that potholes aren’t supposed to be allowed to exist and that crime isn’t supposed to be allowed to happen. For three days, Pittsburgh had a heavily subsidized and highly functional public transit system, something that hasn’t existed the entirety of my lifetime.

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US Fast-Tracks Billions In ‘Emergency’ Arms Sales To Gulf, Bypassing Congress

On the one hand President Trump and Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth have declared that America is ‘winning’ against Iran, having destroyed its navy and air defenses, and having seriously degraded its missiles – but on the other the admin has put in for a more than $200 billion supplemental request to Congress to fund the war.

It seems Congress will likely eventually sign off on this gargantuan figure – for an ‘excursion’ which should end ‘soon’ we are told by Trump – given that even the effort to pass so much as a War Powers resolution gets repeatedly stymied. 

Still, the US administration is busy bypassing standard congressional review requirements, on Thursday approving a series of emergency arms sales across the Middle East, at a moment US regional allies are being pummeled by Iranian drones and ballistic missiles.

The argument is that Washington’s allies are in imminent danger, and given that indeed vital Gulf infrastructure is getting hit quite seriously – new arms have to be rushed over there on an emergency basis.

According to details in Saudi-owned Al Arabiya:

The largest package was approved for the United Arab Emirates, totaling more than $8 billion. It includes the $4.5 billion sale of a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), $2.10 billion for FS-LIDS counter-drone systems, $1.22 billion in Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missiles (AMRAAMs), and $644 million in F-16 munitions, including GBU-39 small diameter bombs and Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs).

In parallel, Washington approved an $8 billion deal for Kuwait to buy Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor Radars, significantly enhancing the country’s missile detection and tracking capabilities.

Jordan was also included in the emergency approvals, with a $70.5 million package covering aircraft support and munitions to sustain operational readiness.

Notably, a US base all the way over in Jordan, the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, was struck by Iran in the opening days of the war, satellite imagery showed.

This development of all these newly approved ’emergency’ arms and weapons shipments begs the question: is this more evidence that Washington is settling in for a ‘long war’?

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Greenwald: 9/11-Like Mass Casualty Attacks Could Trigger Permanent Emergency Measures

Tucker Carlson sat down with independent journalist Glenn Greenwald for a pointed exchange that cut straight to concerns over free speech limits and the risk of domestic fallout from the ongoing Iran conflict.

Greenwald laid out a sobering scenario: mass casualty attacks on U.S. soil could trigger sweeping “emergency measures” that, once imposed, become fixtures of American life—just as the Patriot Act did after 9/11.

The conversation opened with Greenwald addressing a noticeable imbalance in what passes for acceptable criticism in public life.

“It’s interesting that there’s no criticism of our country that is banned or even discouraged — only of a foreign country,” Carlson observed.

Carlson pressed further: “If you can’t criticize a foreign country, then that country’s in charge, right? What other conclusion should I draw?”

Greenwald responded: “I can’t really provide you with a cogent one.”

The discussion then turned to security threats inside the United States.

“Are you concerned that there could be attacks here in the United States?” Carlson asked.

Greenwald answered directly: “I feel like there was already an attack in the United States. That Austin shooting. We haven’t heard much about it, but it seemed pretty clearly linked to the Iran war.”

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