By Sonia Elijah

A record-breaking convoy of 60,000 truckers from Western Canada and 12,000 truckers from the Eastern region have converged and are heading their way to Parliament Hill in Canada’s capital city, Ottawa, to take part in a peaceful protest. It’s been reported that 12,000 US truckers are crossing the border to join them.

The truckers are primarily protesting the vaccine mandate requiring all truckers entering Canada to be fully vaccinated. This rule came into effect on January 15th. The United States also imposed the same mandate on truckers, on January 22. 

The convoy assembled in British Columbia on Sunday and has grown to nearly 50 miles long! The first several hundred truckers reached Ottawa on Friday and are expected to set up around Parliament Hill.

Since Thursday, hundreds of flag-waving supporters have lined the streets of down-town Ottawa, with many honking their vehicle horns.

One protester captured on video is heard saying:

“You said it was crucial to listen to the people..listen to this Mr Trudeau (sound of loud truck horns) Can you hear us now? Can you hear us now?”

1.4 million people are expected to flood into Ottawa this weekend.

The convoy is due to arrive on Saturday January 29, throwing the entire city into grid-lock. The truckers intend to remain until all Covid restrictions and mandates are lifted.

This unprecedented trucker convoy has become a nation-wide movement for freedom and a powerful form of protest against Covid-19 restrictions and mandates to be lifted for all Canadians.

Thousands of supporters have cheered the #ConvoyForFreedom2022 at bridges and intersections across the TransCanada Highway. Many have greeted the truckers with food and hot drinks at various truck stops along the way.

Massive show of support to the freedom trucker convoy just outside of Quebec City, Quebec, Canada. pic.twitter.com/VQubOqn4JK

— Marie Oakes (@TheMarieOakes) January 28, 2022

Organisers of the group have set up various channels on Zello for the truckers and their supporters to communicate with one another.

Young children can be heard leaving messages such as: “Thank you truckers for fighting for our freedom!”

I recorded a short segment from their Zello channel, Convoy to Ottawa.

Have a listen to the Canadian freedom truckers and their supporters. 👂#ConvoyForFreedom2022#CanadianTruckers pic.twitter.com/A7UxejHwfB

— Sonia Elijah (@sonia_elijah) January 28, 2022

Informative updates and logistical queries; emotional messages of gratitude; honking at the top of the hour and motivational speeches from supporters not just from Canada but all over the world, have been streaming in on these channels, over the past several days. Frequently, the group’s moderaters chime in with strict instructions that the weekend’s protest will be peaceful and anyone causing trouble will be reported to the authorities.

A Go-fund-me page was set up ‘to help with the costs of fuel first, and food and lodgings.’ So far, over 91k donations have rolled in, raising a staggering total of $7 million.

Not everyone has been supportive of the truckers. Much of the mainstream media has so far chosen to ignore this monumental convoy. The outlets that have covered it, have been largely negative, using phrases such as “so-called Freedom Convoy” and “a convoy of anti-vaccine Canadian truckers.” One website ran the headline “The ‘Freedom Convoy’ Is Nothing But A Vehicle For The Far Right.”

When asked a question about the coming protest, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau responded:

“The small fringe minority of people who are on their way to Ottawa who are holding unacceptable views that they are expressing do not represent the views of Canadians who have been there for each other, who know of that following the science and stepping up to protect each other is the best way to continue to ensure our freedoms, our rights, our values, as a country.”

Over a short period of time, this convoy of ‘salt of the earth’ truckers, has not only grown to a nation-wide movement with their potent message of freedom and their oppostion to government over reach but it has spread to other parts of the world, too.

Thousands of Australian truck drivers are assembling to protest vaccine mandates. The truckers are planning to converge on the nation’s capital, Canberra, on January 31. A Facebook page with over 75K members has been set up, along with a Go-Fund-Me page.

Several Telegram channels have been set up across parts of Europe with the aim of truckers to converge on Brussels.

Given the vast number of supporters who have cheered on this convoy en route to Ottawa and those who are expected to descend on the nation’s capital this weekend- one thing is for certain, they are no “fringe minority” and they are being heard, well for those of us who have ears to hear.

Follow Sonia on Twitter https://twitter.com/sonia_elijah and Substack https://soniaelijah.substack.com/

By HTL

France’s newly minted vaccine pass took effect on Monday, requiring everyone over the age of 16 to be fully vaccinated to get into restaurants, cinemas, museums and so forth, without the possibility of presenting a negative Covid test to enjoy these mainstays of social and cultural life.

One exception as France enters the homestretch to its presidential election in April is attending campaign rallies, with the Constitutional Council saying such a requirement would be unconstitutional. Nonetheless, the so-called ‘Sages’ did not consider the constitutionality of the vaccine pass in view of article R.4127-36 of France’s public health law requiring informed consent:

The consent of the person examined or treated must be sought in every case. When the patient, in a state capable of expressing his wish, refuses proposed tests or treatment(s), the doctor must respect this refusal after informing the patient of its consequences.

Also enshrined in the law and compromised by the vaccine pass are the right to medical confidentiality and the right to privacy.

Controversially, the new law will allow a barman, for example, to ask to see a customer’s ID to check against the vaccine pass, in case of a suspicion of fraud (henceforth punishable by a fine of 1,000 euros).

‘Everyone will check everyone — that’s a totalitarian society!’ thundered presidential candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon, head of the France Insoumise (France Unbowed) party, during the parliamentary debate.

A little advertised loophole is the possibility of providing proof of recovery from Covid – an acknowledgement of natural immunity.

The tightening of the screws in France comes as some of its neighbours are loosening theirs — with British PM Boris Johnson saying mandatory Covid certification would end in England and Spain’s regions opening up one by one. Johnson’s Spanish counterpart Pedro Sánchez urged the EU overall to start treating Covid like the flu, and on Sunday the World Health Organization’s Europe chief said the continent could start envisaging the pandemic’s ‘endgame’ thanks to the takeover of the Omicron variant. The remark came just days after the WHO said airlines’ travel restrictions should be lifted or eased because ‘they do not provide added value and continue to contribute to the economic and social stress’ of some countries.

The vaccine pass’ passage into law was initially expected to be a slam dunk but turned into an embarrassing marathon for the government, with bipartisan pushback as well from people on the streets and online. 

The debate was set under a fast-track mechanism that has been used by President Emmanuel Macron numerous times since he took office in 2017. Even so, MPs in the lower house dominated by Macron’s centrist party found themselves deliberating well into the wee hours on several nights, achieving final passage at 4am on Sunday January 16^th, with a vote of 214 to 93, with 27 abstentions..

Merde!

Early on in the process, Macron scored an own goal with incendiary comments to the Paris daily Le Parisien vowing to ‘hassle’ the unvaccinated ‘to the bitter end’, using a vulgar word, emmerder. Even more shocking was his next remark: ‘If your freedom threatens others’ freedom, you become irresponsible. And irresponsible people are no longer citizens,’ he said. Uproar over the interview led to a new suspension of debate in the early hours of January 12, and the first vote on the bill was not held until 24 hours later.

That weekend, more than 100,000 people (by the media’s typical gross underestimation) took to rainy streets across France to protest the draft law and to vent anger against Macron, many carrying signs reading ‘Manu, je t’emmerde’ – ‘Screw you, Manu’ (the diminutive of Emmanuel).

And while the law eventually passed with a large majority, it had to surmount the challenge posed by 60 opposition MPs – from the far left, centre left and centre right – who took the matter to the Constitutional Council, winning only the concession on entry into election campaign rallies. Clearly, requiring proof of vaccination would be beyond the pale for a number of parties, including Melenchon’s LFI and far-right icon Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National. Both Melenchon and Le Pen have vowed to eliminate the vaccine pass if elected.

Another right-wing candidate, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, has made the same promise. After the vote in parliament, he tweeted: ‘Tonight, I no longer recognise my country. A feeling of disgust over the cowardice of those who voted for this freedom-killing law… I will do all I can to restore FREEDOM to the French on (election day) April 10.’

Omicron to the fore

The growing dominance of the Omicron variant is helping to shatter the illusion that the vaccine pass will further help protect people. Indeed, Health Minister Olivier Veran admitted in mid-December that the primary goal is to induce the last five million French people to get the jab. Asked about the difference between the health pass in use since May 2021 and the new vaccine pass, he told the online news site Brut: ‘The vaccine pass is a disguised form of requiring vaccination, but more effective than requiring vaccination.’

He added: ‘The idea is not to punish, to sanction, to ostracise, but to say, “now you don’t have a choice anymore”, you don’t hesitate anymore.’

But people are hesitating, becoming increasingly aware of the incongruity of using coercive tactics to persuade people to accept a vaccine that fails to prevent infection at a time when the extremely mild Omicron variant of Covid is becoming dominant.

A poll commissioned by the conservative daily Le Figaro found that nearly two-thirds of respondents — 62 percent — are in favour of the vaccine pass. But 71 percent want it to be ‘automatically suspended as soon as the health situation improves’ — and Le Figaro said the government ‘has declined to detail the conditions’ for such a suspension.

Pollster Véronique Reille-Soult of Backbone Consulting, which conducted the survey along with Odoxa, concluded: ‘If the constraints are no longer justified on health grounds, the French will no longer accept them.’ She notes that on social media, commentators ‘are also beginning to wonder why our country is not following the example of Spain, which is scrapping constraints in view of Omicron’s much less dangerous impact on (public) health.’

Among those who may begin asking such questions are the estimated 560,000 people who already stand to lose their ticket to normal life because they haven’t had their latest jab in time.

This number can only increase as the days go by, and catch many people by surprise.

As for Macron, he may rue the day he used the ‘M’ word. An IFOP poll out Sunday found his approval rating down four points in a month, to thirty-seven per cent.

Propagandists have been working overtime to dominate your cognitive world.

From https://www.thelookingglass.co.nz/

The covid era has bought to light an information war. One that was always there but operating at a more subtle level. Now, those in charge barely hide their attempts at seeking what communications and propaganda expert Greg Simons refers to as “total information domain dominance”.

Have you ever stopped to wonder how almost overnight, the populations of nearly 200 countries accepted the removal of basic civil and political rights and the imposition of extended lockdowns, masks and social distancing? And on the basis of really very flimsy evidence of a health crisis purported to be of globally catastrophic proportions?

Just as one example, the World Health Organisation declared a global Public Health Emergency on 30 January 2020, when there were just 82 confirmed cases of covid-19 outside of China.

Have you wondered how the leader of a ‘democratic’ country can declare themselves the “single source of truth”, reminiscent of the totalitarian regimes of the 20^th century, and not be challenged on it by the fourth estate?

And how nearly two years later, after the destruction of hundreds of thousands of ‘mom and pop’ businesses globally, the loss of large parts of two school-years for children and university students, the long-term separation of family due to border closures, an exponentially increased mental health burden, massive indebtedness, the destruction of medical privacy, and the creation of an underclass of people in previously free and democratic countries, the public is still putting up with it?

It comes down in large part to propaganda and information management, says the associate professor and researcher at Uppsala University, a Kiwi now resident in Sweden.

“Lies do not like being questioned,” he tells me.

Information that is there to protect and defend a political narrative falls apart under questioning, and this is why the west is now seeing widespread censorship of academics, dissident experts and media figures who dare to offer a different take on the events of the last two years, or the science underpinning it, Simons explains.

Missing context

“This is about the first time in human history when they have used ‘infection rate’ (how quickly the pathogen spreads) as the standard of measuring the hazard, not the ‘infection fatality rate’ (how many people infected by the pathogen die of it). Because the infection rate is quite high but the infection fatality rate is really low … All they needed to do was scare people with the numbers of cases of covid.”

The median infection fatality rate globally was calculated to be 0.23 per cent by John Ioannides in this paper last year, using seroprevalence studies.

British doctor John Campbell recently reported on a freedom of information request that showed the number of deaths solely attributed to covid in England and Wales since 2020 may be much lower than previously thought, about, 17, 371 deaths at an average age of 82.5 years.

“But a slight point of order: there are 7 billion people on this planet,” Simons points out.

The media has never provided this context for the public, along with many other basic but important distinctions, including differentiating between those who die with or of covid, or how the definition of a ‘case’ has been turned on its head, in a departure from traditional medical diagnosis to become a meaningless positive PCR test.

The lack of context has been one of the hallmarks of media coverage these last many months.

As Dr Sam Bailey notes in this interview (at the 25 minute mark):

“The cases that we hear in the news … of an eight-year-old or nine-year-old dying of covid-19 – well what happened with that child? Tell us more. You can’t just accept these things at face value.

“You want to know what was their background, what was their past medical history. Were they … in hospital for something else? To me it just doesn’t make sense. Eight or nine-year-olds don’t just die like that,” Bailey says.

Censorship goes into overdrive

The covid-era has also seen the acceleration of ad-hominem attacks on personalities presenting inconvenient analysis and facts, increased use of behavioural science (‘nudge units’) by governments to influence people’s behaviour and an explosion of accusations of mis-and-dis-information from the orthodoxy against anyone that threatens the official story.

After Dr Robert Malone, one of the people who invented the MrNA technology used in the covid jabs, was interviewed by Joe Rogan on his podcast (incidentally this was on the same day as Twitter killed his account), a virtual angry mob of 270 ‘experts’ demanded that Spotify, which hosts Rogan’s show, censor him.

A Rolling Stone article quoted a ‘misinformation specialist’, Abbie Richards (emphasis mine):

“Any podcast that platforms dangerous people, people spreading dangerous ideas and misinformation, should not be allowed to go unchecked on the Spotify platform.”

However, only one third of the signatories turned out to be doctors, one reporter found. Despite this, the episode was reportedly scrapped after the backlash.

According to Simons, the aim was likely to be to deter other potential guests from appearing on the show by attacking Rogan, the messenger.

Misinformation misnomer
The use of the terms ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ have increased significantly, he says.

I ask Simons if these terms, along with ‘conspiracy theory’ are deployed to encourage the public to accept, and even demand, censorship.

“The first term to really gain coinage was fake news, and that was 10-15 years ago. And then you have this disinformation /misinformation and this whole industry of fact checkers – this is part of the narrative defence, nothing about [actual] misinformation and disinformation.”

A piece of research from Auckland University last year, from something called “the disinformation project”, in which researchers categorise ‘dangerous speech’, was widely reported in the legacy media when it was published.

The paper pointed out the obvious – that groups circulating sceptical information about the covid jab increased during last year’s August lockdown. The paper made this out to be something threatening rather than a justifiably suspicious portion of the public trying to establish the facts of what was really behind all the draconian covid policies (because the media refuse to), it also relied on dubious claims of ‘extremism’ made by a shady trans-Atlantic outfit called the Centre for Countering Digital Hate.

The paper states: “The study of Aotearoa New Zealand’s mis- and disinformation ecologies mirrors the work by the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), and their consequential
Disinformation Dozen report.”

The CCDH is a UK based group that popped up out of nowhere a couple of years ago, with obscure funding sources. Some alternative media reporters have speculated it is funded by “dark money” and has links to intelligence agencies, and was formed as a front group to launch political attacks on the vaccine sceptic movement.

However, the Disinformation Dozen report, which accused 12 people of being vaccine misinformation super-spreaders on Facebook, and was adopted by US President Joe Biden (leader of the ‘free world’) who touted the censorship list publicly, was later discredited by Facebook itself.

“There isn’t any evidence to support this claim … In fact, these 12 people are responsible for about just 0.05% of all views of vaccine-related content on Facebook. This includes all vaccine-related posts they’ve shared, whether true or false, as well as URLs associated with these people.

“They are in no way representative of the hundreds of millions of posts that people have shared about covid-19 vaccines in the past months on Facebook,” Facebook vice president of content policy, Monica Bikert said.

Despite this, legacy media and academics continue to use CHDC’s report uncritically as a source.

None of this is by accident, Simons says.

Coordinated communications

“All of these things are important elements and aspects of the bigger picture … There is also a great deal of consistency and similarity in tactics and strategy and especially narratives around the world.”

I ask Simons what he makes of the fact that between 4 January and 6 January, three world leaders made strident attacks on the unvaccinated, using highly defamatory and aggressive language.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the unvaccinated were often also racists and misogynists, and that the country should ask itself if they should “tolerate” unvaccinated people any longer.

French President Emmanuel Macron said he wanted to “piss them off” until they relented, and that the unvaccinated were “not citizens”.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson took a milder approach, but accused “anti-vax” campaigners of spreading “mumbo jumbo”, which is rich coming from a man who clearly doesn’t believe his own rhetoric on covid measures.

“What it is showing you is that the communications are coordinated. Anyone who works or has studied communications understands this is not random, this is not accidental … This doesn’t mean that one says it and politicians from different countries think it’s a wonderful idea. It means whoever is advising them is coordinating with them and it’s as simple as that.”

GB News commentator and presenter Neil Oliver came to a similar conclusion, which he outlines in this video.

Back in October, during the early days of the campaign to scapegoat the unvaccinated, Justin Trudeau and Jacinda Ardern used almost word-for-word the same phrases about rewarding the vaccinated for “doing the right thing”, and keeping them away from “people who are less safe”.

In a paper titled “Media inclusion and exclusion in the era of covid-19: “vaxxers” versus “anti-vaxxers”, Simons wrote that “mass media and journalism played an extremely uncritical, supportive and subservient role to their government’s agenda in the west. This contradicts the rhetoric of their role as a fourth estate, but confirms their role as an engineer of consent.”

Fear-based manipulation of the public by “nudge units”

The use of behavioural psychology, or nudge units, has also been in plain sight. The famous example is the UKs SAGE group saying that people didn’t feel scared enough of covid, and recommending fear based messaging in order to get people to comply with restrictions.

“A substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened … The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging.”

Earlier this months, epidemiologist and one of the main scientific faces of the covid response in New Zealand, Michael Baker, told The Guardian:

“The traffic light system won’t help us very much [with omicron] because it was never designed to dampen down transmission, it was only designed to nudge people towards vaccination.”

That’s right, the Government cast out about 10 per cent of the population from civic life, making an underclass of them through the introduction of vaccine certificates, to coerce them into taking a medical treatment.

But this discriminatory strategy, under which unvaccinated people are unable to eat in cafes and restaurants, get their hair cut, or sit a driving test among other things, was sold to the public on the lie that they are more likely to infect others with covid than a vaccinated person.

One headline read “Your unvaccinated friend is roughly 20 times more likely to give you Covid”, a statement which data out of highly vaccinated places such as Israel, Denmark, Barnstable County, Massachusetts and Waterford in Ireland has proved wrong.

“What is being attempted is communication management, but it is being waged within the fields of information warfare [with] a strong element of psychological operations attached to it. This has been done incrementally, followed by moving the goal posts after the audience has cognitively accepted the old trade – liberty traded for a false sense of security – and then a matter of rinse and repeat the steps,” Simons says.

The man doesn’t mince his words.

Total information domain dominance

Simons goes on to explain that attempts are being made in the information realm to totally dominate the cognitive world of individuals, in most cases by using fear as a quick fix. Fear is also used to create a “herd mentality” among a population.

“If you go back to the writing of people like Wilfred Trotter and Gustave Le Bon at the end of the 19^th, beginning of the 20^th century, they were talking about a ‘herd mentality’ based on fear and emotion, not on reason. The basic premise, if you can get a large audience to form this herd mentality … this makes them easier to control and more inclined to uncritically act against their objective interests through the suggestions made by the primary mainstream sources of information, such as [Jacinda] Ardern and MSM, [Anthony] Fauci, and other key influencers.”

A perception of trustworthiness is the key to the whole thing, he says. It’s not necessary for powerful players to enter into a reciprocal and mutually beneficial relationship with the public to do this. Instead the approach is transactional and asymmetrical.

“The main aim is to create ‘total information domain dominance’, which also excludes anything or anyone that contradicts or questions the official political narrative that is made in the name of science. This is why [we’ve seen] the massive use of catch phrases and slogans to try and solidify and consolidate the message and influence and persuade the audience and gain their compliance.”

He reels off a few as an example: ‘two weeks to flatten the curve’, ‘new normal’, ‘trust the science’, ‘build back better’.

I think of a few others: ‘team of five million’, ‘be kind’, ‘safe and effective’.

“Propaganda is most effective when it’s simple,” he says.

Narrative collapse

But the good news is, Simons believes the wheels are starting to fall off the narrative.

“One of the biggest problems you have in persuasive communication is to keep a lie going because you start getting caught out eventually. This is what is happening now. And this is what they tried in Austria. They tried one step too soon and too much.”

Simons is referring to Austria’s recent decision to impose compulsory vaccination against covid-19 on the entire population over age 12, with the threat of imprisonment for not complying.

“They thought that they had everything under control. But what happened was the division ceased because the vaccinated and the unvaccinated joined together on the streets and said ‘this is garbage’, and supported each other. It failed. And now they are trying to backtrack a bit, for ‘technical reasons’.”

The policy was due to come into effect on 1 February, but has been delayed until April.

Protests in Austria against the draconian policy continue.

Anti-lockdown and mandate protests are increasing in size around the planet, despite receiving very little news coverage.

Another example, he says, is the World Health Organisation now recommending the lifting of travel restrictions, including proof of vaccination, because they are ineffective and contribute to social and economic stress.

“The failure of travel restrictions introduced after the detection and reporting of Omicron variant to limit the international spread of Omicron demonstrates the ineffectiveness of such measures over time. Travel measures should be based on risk assessments and avoid placing the financial burden on international travellers in accordance with Article 40 of the IHR.”

Another clue is the US Supreme Court quashing Biden’s OSHA mandates, due to not being constitutional, he says.

“Our vaccines are working exceptionally well,” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky tells @wolfblitzer. “They continue to work well for Delta, with regard to severe illness and death – they prevent it. But what they can't do anymore is prevent transmission." pic.twitter.com/s83YyBQqeh

— The Situation Room (@CNNSitRoom) August 5, 2021

Further developments in the last week include the CDC admitting that the injections cannot prevent transmission in an interview with CNN, and an admission that prior natural immunity after infection is protective against new variants, both of which destroy the case for certificates and mandates.

Associate Professor Greg Simons is a researcher at the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Uppsala University and a lecturer at the Department of Communication Sciences at Turiba University in Riga, Latvia.

Digital surveillance technologies such as My Vaccine Pass are being used to extract personal data and to impose new forms of social control.

From https://www.thelookingglass.co.nz/

For the last month people all over the country have been busy downloading the new vaccine certificates that the Government is billing as a way to “unlock the things you love”.

But the promotional tagline for the passes is a psychological inversion of what the Government really means – that your rights have been removed and you can only have them back if you go along with certain conditions.

Yep, the Government has done a swifty – and so far people are going along with it without thinking much about what it means and what the consequences for our way of life will be.

On social media, people have been sharing with excitement their newly minted pass to freedom, and many have been actively using it since 3 December to access cafes and restaurants, hairdressers and shops of all kinds.

The immediate consequence of this is that there is now an underclass of people, the unjabbed, who have been barred from accessing certain goods and services. They can’t eat in restaurants or cafes, swim in public pools or sit driving tests. Unjabbed parents can’t volunteer in schools and unjabbed school kids can’t participate in sports.

But this is just the beginning of how a biometric identity system could be used to deny people access to normal life without strict compliance to Government’s conditions, which can change at any time according to its priorities and goals.

Alongside the introduction of vaccine certificates, there are a couple other things going on in the background in New Zealand (and a lot more at the global level) that should be brought to the public’s attention – The Digital Identity Services Trust Framework Bill and The Reserve Bank’s exploration of a Central Bank Digital Currency.

The timing of these point to a blending of public health initiatives with new digital technologies of surveillance that can be used to extract personal data and to impose new forms of social control.

Vaccination certificates

These dystopian digital passes did not appear out of nowhere, despite being introduced quickly in New Zealand and without public consultation.

Back in 2018, ID2020, the organisation that has been lobbying and working to achieve a biometric digital identity for every person on the planet, first suggested that immunisation was an “entry point for digital identity”. The NGO is closely tied to Bill Gates’ The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisations (GAVI).

“In order to enable digital identity at scale, we will need to identify and leverage many entry points. Immunization service delivery presents a tremendous opportunity to provide children with a durable, portable and secure digital identity early in life, enabling access to a wider range of social services, while also improving access to the health interventions all children need and deserve.”

Since 2018, GAVI has been pushing for the introduction of biometric IDs to be used when children come in for their first round of immunisations through its INFUSE 2018 programme.

“As the child grows, the digital child health card can be used to access secondary services, such as primary school, or financial services, serving as the foundation for a broadly recognised digital identity,” it stated on a promotional GAVI diagram.

ID2020 and Gavi partnered with the government of Bangladesh to pilot their use in 2019.

Similarly, The European Union has been preparing for the passports since 2018, with a timeline that sets 2022 as the year for their commissioning for EU citizens.

Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, has been pushing digital identity and vaccine passports for many years, as has the World Economic Forum.

And then in August 2021, the Word Health Organisation provided technical guidance to governments on the implementation of vaccine certificates in a document that was funded not by member states but notably by the Rockerfeller Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. You can read it here.

NYPD kicks out a child for not having a vaccine passport.

pic.twitter.com/2bkeK0sRnv

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) December 28, 2021

A globally coordinated plan for vaccine certificates has been in the works for some time, then. At a minimum it can be inferred that it’s a topic of great interest to certain philanthropists, advocacy groups and global governance institutions.

The certificates were developed in New Zealand in recent months ready to be rolled out for the newly introduced traffic light system, which has the distinct whiff of punitive nudging rather than a public health imperative.

Under this system, regions that have a less than 90 per cent vaccination rate will operate under more restrictions than those that have reached the Government’s target.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says the vaccine certificates are a way for vaccinated people to feel safe in the knowledge they aren’t sharing a space with any unjabbed people and a way of rewarding them for “doing the right thing”.

She has also proudly admitted that the traffic light system is effectively removing certain rights from unjabbed people.

DC: “So you’ve basically said, this is gonna be like, it’s almost, you probably don’t see it like this but two different classes of people, if you’re vaccinated or if you’re unvaccinated. You have all these rights if you are vaccinated”

PM: “That is what it is, so yip, yip” pic.twitter.com/ggBWbuUzUO

— Viewspot (@viewspotnz) October 23, 2021

After the Government rammed through the legislation underpinning the certificates without due process on 23 November, a volley of responses from civil society was triggered.

The Civil Rights Council of New Zealand called it “disgraceful government secrecy”.

The Human Rights Commission expressed concern and produced a series of briefings on the issue. “The challenge is balancing the duty to protect peoples’ right to health and life while also protecting the right to freedom of movement and assembly,” said Chief Commissioner Paul Hunt.

“It is a difficult and at times contentious balance between competing rights, but we must not shy away from the fact that human rights and Tiriti obligations must not be undermined in times of national emergency.”

Amnesty International also urged the Government to rethink its approach on the legislation due to “serious concerns about the lack of opportunity for public consultation and scrutiny.”

The New Zealand Law Society wrote to the Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins on 26 November with a scathing admonishment for the Governments inscrutable law making and urging wider consultation.

“The Act is perhaps the most significant piece of amendment legislation since passage of the principal Act—the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act 2020 …

“The amendments do not specify any decision-making principles or criteria in relation to the implementation of requirements for vaccinations and testing. Instead, the legislation leaves this to be determined through the drafting of the Orders.

“As such, the amendments confer expansive powers that may be exercised with little or no democratic scrutiny. The Bill providing for these powers passed through the House in 24 hours,” wrote president Tiana Epati.

The Ministry of Justice told the attorney-general when advising on the bill’s consistency with the Bill of Rights Act 1990:

“We have not yet received a final version of the bill. This advice has been prepared in relation to the latest version of the bill (PCO 24238/9.5). This advice has been prepared in an extremely short timeframe due to late receipt of the bill that was not in compliance with cabinet office guidance.” It’s clear the vaccine passes sacrifice equality, privacy and liberty and have no public health benefit, because the jab does not prevent infection or transmission. They are largely about coercing compliance with the Government’s aim of getting a needle in every arm and later to issue digital identities.

Digital Identify Services Trust Framework Bill

This piece of legislation, the Digital Identify Services Trust Framework Bill, is currently at Select Committee phase after its first reading; it sets the rules for the delivery of digital identity services and is likely to pave the way for a cashless society in which citizens access goods and services through a centralised digital authority.

Australia is implementing a very similar piece of legislation with a very similar name. Comedian Russell Brand deftly unpacks the legislation and its marketing in this video.

As he points out, the language used to sell digital identities is framed as helpful, people-centred and trustworthy but comes at a time when trust in Government is being eroded due to disproportionate and harsh covid restrictions.

Just as with the traffic light law, no public consultation was undertaken on this significant piece of legislation. While the Government undertook “targeted consultation”, it did not disclose all of the individuals and organisations that were consulted, begging the question: Were the likes of Google, The World Economic Forum, ID2020 or global philanthropists such as Bill Gates, or Tony Blair’s think tank consulted?

As advocacy group Physicians and Scientists for Global Responsibility and grassroots activist group Voices for Freedom stated in their submissions on the bill, its stated purpose, “to establish a legal framework for the provision of secure and trusted digital identity services for individuals and organisations”, doesn’t take into account the potential for human rights violations, or anticipate new or existing threats from technological developments, such as artificial intelligence and data piracy.

The submissions also note that while the policy documents claim digital identity is voluntary and that citizens can opt-out, it’s clear from observing India and China, which have already adopted digital identity systems, that participating will increasingly become a requirement to do life – for example to receive welfare benefits, or to confirm identity when voting or registering at school.

“The passing of a considerable body of legislation during the Sars-Cov-2 pandemic has revealed that the government can and will swiftly enact draconian legislation removing the rights and freedoms of New Zealanders without appropriate consultation. In addition, when http://www.voicesforfreedom.co.nz/ consultation has been undertaken, the state’s decision has not reflected the perspective or weight of public comment,” the VFF submission stated.

A recent essay from The Grey Zone’s Jeremy Loffredo and Max Blumenthal highlighted the dangers people face from such ID systems. In the long, but beautifully researched piece, the pair describe terrifying real world examples in which people have been denied access to food and even starved to death in India because their biometric identity wasn’t functioning correctly.

This important investigation lays out how digital vaccine passes are accelerating the establishment of global biometric IDs.

“For these elite interests, the digitisation of immunity passports represent a critical tool in a long-planned economic and political transformation,” it states.

In New Zealand, unjabbed people are already unable to access a number of goods and services by virtue of ‘My Vaccine Pass’.

Two other pieces worth reading are Rusere Shoniwa’s excellent three-part Open Letter to Those Not Yet Opposed to Vaccine Passports, which sets out the ethical case against such tools, and a Lithuanian man’s description of life as an unjabbed family in a country where vaccine passes limit access to just about everything for the unjabbed. It’s a heartbreaking read.

It’s also worth noting the New Zealand Government partnered with the World Economic Forum in 2019 to become the test case for building trust in artificial intelligence and its use by Government, which is now in the “scaling” phase.

Central Bank Digital Currency – the end game

Countries all over the world are looking carefully at Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), including the central bank of central banks, The Bank for International Settlements.

As society increasingly moves away from cash to adopt digital currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, central banks have been looking for a way to get in on the action.

CBDCs differ from other crypto currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum in one simple way – they are intended to be centralised, where crypto currencies are based on a decentralised blockchain that can’t be controlled by a central force.

Head of the Bank for International Settlements Agustín Carstens (in a moment of candour that was possibly not intended) explains:

“We don’t know who is using a $100 bill today … a key difference with the CBDC, is the central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability. And also, we will have the technology to enforce that.” (See for yourself in this video at about the 24-minute mark).

There have been warnings from intellectuals and experts for some time about the threat of vaccine passports and CBDCs leading to a Chinese-style social credit system, under which your ability to move freely and do everyday things becomes contingent with your compliance with government rules. Access to funds can be flicked off any time the authorities are unhappy with you, or restrict where, how and when your money can be spent.

Journalist and public intellectual Naomi Wolf has been sounding the alarm at least since last year.

“The vaccine passport platform is the same platform as a social credit system, like in China, that enslaves eight billion people. In China the CCP can find any dissident in five minutes because of the 360-degree surveillance of the social credit system.”

“The vaccine passport platform is the same platform as a social credit system, like in China, that enslaves eight billion people. In China the CCP can find any dissident in five minutes because of the 360-degree surveillance of the social credit system.”

Financial and investment guru Catherine Austin Fitts has done likewise, saying vaccine passports alongside a digital control system will spell the end of human liberty in the west. She advocates for ‘cash Fridays’, asking people to use cash only in their transactions.

On 7 July, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand signalled it was looking at developing a CBDC.

Assistant governor Christian Hawkesby said at the time that government backed cash was an “unspoken promise” that helped to promote trust in banks and the financial system.

“The potential for a Central Bank Digital Currency to help address some of the downsides of reducing physical cash use and services is something we want to explore for New Zealand.  A CBDC, similar to digital cash, might well be part of the solution, but we need to test our assessment of the issues and proposed approach before developing any firm proposals,” he said.

The Reserve Bank ran a consultation on the issue that closed on 6 December and the public can expect the results to be announced by the end of the first quarter next year.

Read the Reserve Bank’s position paper on CBDCs here.

HTL’s Roger Guttridge responds to claims that the unvaccinated are ‘aggressive and selfish idiots’

A reader identifying himself only as ‘BJ of Shaftesbury’ recently wrote to a digital magazine called The Blackmore Vale that it was ‘unbelievable’ that so many people are still refusing the Covid-19 vaccines (https://issuu.com/theblackmorevale/docs/bv_december_21/34).

BJ spoke of ‘aggressive and selfish idiots with no scientific and medical knowledge, who think they know better than the world’s leading medical professionals and scientists’.

So let’s consider the words of a few of these leading medical professionals and scientists.

Top US cardiologist Dr Peter McCullough, president of the Cardiorenal Society of America, said after changing his view on vaccine safety: ‘Covid-19 vaccines are killing huge numbers of people and the government is simply ignoring it.

‘The US government, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and health agencies around the world have all committed to vaccinating the global population while sitting on data showing the Covid-19 vaccines are turning out to be the most lethal vaccines ever created.’

More recently, he added: ‘If a vaccine can’t last a year, it’s a no-go, because all we are going to do is create a dependency on these boosters.

‘A mutant strain is going to find a vaccinated environment maybe more ideal to flourish. So the vaccines are failing those we most want to protect.’

World-famous Belgian virologist Dr Geert Vanden Bossche, who has worked with the World Health Organization, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and the Gates Foundation’s Global Health Discovery team, has repeatedly warned that mass vaccination is driving the variants as the virus seeks ways around the vaccines by mutating.

‘This is not a problem when we vaccinate only a limited part of the population, such as the vulnerable and elderly for flu,’ he says.

‘But if you generate a background of high immune pressure, by vaccinating vast amounts of people in the population, you give a competitive advantage to those variants that are capable of overcoming this immune pressure.’

Dr Robert Malone, inventor of mRNA and author of 100 peer reviewed papers, has been censored by YouTube and Twitter after revealing that instead of staying near the injection site, as he and colleagues expected, the experimental mRNA vaccines are biologically active and lead to blood clots, bleeding disorders, heart problems and neurological damage as well as accumulating in women’s ovaries.

Britain’s Dr Mike Yeadon, long-serving former vice-president and chief scientist of Pfizer, said: ‘Everything your government has told you about this virus is a lie.

‘This systematic process of fear and control is going to culminate, I think, in some very horrible times, and I’m desperate to wake you up.

‘Children are 50 times more likely to die from the covid vaccine than the virus.’

Professor Joel S Hirschborn, medical adviser to the US Senate and House of Representatives, said: ‘The media is largely ignoring the thousands dying from the experimental covid vaccines.

‘A few thousand have died from breakthrough infections because the vaccines are not effective in preventing a new infection.

‘The other causes of vaccine deaths are complex blood problems, namely different kinds of blood clots, the loss of blood platelets and resulting bleed events that are lethal. Think in terms of brain bleeds, strokes and heart attacks.’

Such claims are borne out by official data, such as the UK’s Yellow Card, VAERS in the US and EudraVigilance in the EU.

According to Dr Joseph Mercola, these reports show the Covid-19 vaccines are ‘500 times as deadly’ as the flu vaccines.

They’ve already killed more people than all other vaccines put together over the last 30 years.

Thousands of young, fit and previously healthy people have suffered post-vax heart conditions, some of them fatally, many collapsing on sports fields.

Football’s world governing body FIFA reports a 500 per cent increase in myocarditis, pericarditis and other serious problems among players around the world.

Several Premiership matches have been halted after supporters collapsed with heart issues.

Recent studies have concluded that the risk of myocarditis in young men and boys is 14 times higher after vaccination than after infection.

Professor Brent Taylor, of the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health and a former JCVI members, said: ‘I’m afraid the mass vaccination of healthy children is not based on sound evidence.

‘It is time for the JCVI, the chief medical officer and the government to reassess all the evidence now available and alter their recommendations accordingly.’

French virologist Dr Luc Montagnier, a Nobel Prize winner for his discovery of the HIV virus, has warned that mass vaccination is ‘a scientific and medical error’ which is ‘creating the variants’.

‘In each country the curve of vaccination is followed by the curve of deaths,’ he said.

Germany’s award-winning immunologist, bacteriologist and virologist Dr Sucharit Bhakdi warned: ‘Gene-based vaccines are an absolute danger to mankind and their use violates the Nuremburg codex, such that everyone who is propagating their use should be put before a tribunal.

‘The vaccination of children is so criminal that I have no words to express my horror.

‘We are horribly worried that there’s going to be an impact on fertility. And this will be seen in years or decades from now.’

I could fill many pages with similar quotes but let’s move on.

Another of the many little-known scandals of the Covid-vax saga is the suppression of cheap, safe and effective remedies such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.

In October more than 12,000 doctors and scientists worldwide signed a ‘Physicians’ Declaration’ claiming that ‘thousands have died from Covid as a result of being denied life-saving early treatment’.

Doctors in India turned around an initially rampant pandemic through early use of ivermectin, but they had to defy the World Health Organization to do so.

Now the Indian Bar Association is suing the WHO’s chief scientist, who ordered doctors not to use ivermectin because former manufacturers Merck raised safety concerns.

How strange that Merck apparently had no such concerns during the 40 years when they handed out 3.7 billion doses of ivermectin to treat parasitic diseases.

The clue here is that ivermectin is out of patent so Big Pharma can no longer make much money out of it.

An entire course costs a few pounds.

Meanwhile Merck have fast-tracked a patented alternative treatment which, last I heard, was costing £500 a patient.

Funny that.

BJ of Shaftesbury also attacks shoppers who don’t wear masks and claims that ‘global research has found that masks can slash incidences of coronavirus by 53 per cent’.

While mask-wearing is not a life-or-death issue in the same way as vaccines are, it’s worth pointing out that the vast majority of studies conclude that the kind of masks that most people wear make little or no difference.

In a typical comment, the Center for Infectious Disease Research in Minnesota states: ‘Though we support mask wearing by the general public, we continue to conclude that cloth masks and face coverings are likely to have limited impact on lowering Covid-19 transmission, because they have minimal ability to prevent the emission of small particles [and] offer limited personal protection with respect to small particle inhalation…’

Viruses are, of course, 1,000 times smaller than bacteria – which are themselves pretty small.

A study of 350,000 people in Bangladesh concluded that mask-wearing cut transmission by just 9 per cent.

That’s better than nothing but has to be weighed against the downsides.

These include reduced oxygen intake, an accumulation of bacteria on the mask and psychological effects especially on babies and small children, who rely heavily on facial expressions.

As we all do to some extent.

One admittedly small study of masks worn by Florida schoolchildren found that five out of six were contaminated with bacteria, parasites and fungi.

A total of 11 dangerous pathogens were detected.

In December 2021, governments and the media were once again driving up the fear factor and threatening further restrictions and hugely damaging lockdowns.

And all because of a variant called Omicron, which Dr Malone described as a Christmas present from God and ‘as good as we could possibly want in terms of outcomes’.

He told Fox News as early as mid-December: ‘Omicron blows through the vaccines and through the triple jab. It’s very, very infectious. Both the double and triple vaccines are not protecting you from Omicron.

‘[But] the number of deaths worldwide from Omicron is less than 10 to my last count.

‘According to recent data from Hong Kong University, Omicron has shifted the targeting of where it affects – from the deep lung to the upper airway.

‘We know from influenza that when viruses do that, they are much more infectious but much less pathogenic.

‘So the good news with Omicron is: highly infectious, very low disease.

‘It looks an awful lot to the experienced vaccinologist like a live attenuated virus vaccine that you might design for purpose.

‘It’s going to elicit a strong immune response.

‘It’s good news. I think the media are disappointed with the good news.’

Despite evidence that the vaccines are now driving rather than preventing the spread of Omicron, governments continue to push their booster jabs, in some countries making jabs mandatory.

Meanwhile those of us who do our homework continue to be branded ‘anti-vaxxers’ and ‘selfish idiots’ by everyone from BJ of Shaftesbury to JB of Washington.

In November 2021, a writer in The Lancet criticised politicians (including Joe Biden) for referring to a ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’.

He pointed out the increasing evidence that the vaccinated were not only being infected by covid but playing a major role in transmission.

One study, in Massachusetts, found that 74 per cent of people diagnosed with Covid in July 2021 were fully or partially vaccinated.

Meanwhile numerous studies have found that those who have recovered from Covid have a level of natural immunity that is vastly superior and many times longer lasting than that conferred by any vaccine.

Once recovered, they don’t spread it either. Unlike many of the vaccinated.

Another study in the US concluded that those who’ve had Covid and then ‘taken the shot’ are three times as likely to suffer an adverse reaction.

Yet the unvaccinated continue to be scapegoated by the ill-informed majority.

Politicians, journalists and celebrity doctors repeatedly imply that hospital wards are full of ‘unvaccinated’ Covid patients yet no-one asks how these statistics are collected or how the ‘unvaccinated’ are defined.

In the US, people have been classified as ‘unvaccinated’ until two weeks after their second jab – which on average is about six weeks after the first.

Those six weeks are the time when the vast majority of adverse vaccines reactions occur.

In other words, a large proportion (probably a big majority) of the sick and so-called ‘unvaccinated’ are in fact vaccine victims.

So what happens in the UK? Good question!

In a recent response to a Freedom of Information request, the Office for National Statistics stated: ‘We would be unable to provide you with Covid-19 hospitalisations by vaccination status in the UK.

‘To fulfil this request would require complex data linkage and to use a high level of statistical skill and judgement in order to create a bespoke analysis or table.’

Presumably, then, the claims about the unvaccinated clogging up hospital wards are anecdotal at best.

Which may explain why, in early January, the Prime Minister gave a figure of 90 per cent one day and 60 per cent the next day while others said the true figure was about 40 per cent – and even that comprised mainly under 18s with other conditions.

There is also a vast amount of evidence that doctors, nurses, care home staff and even funeral directors worldwide were ‘encouraged’ or even coerced to record deaths as ‘Covid’ whether they were or not.

There was a clear strategy to spread alarm by pushing up the figures.

In March 2020, the scientific advisory group SAGE specifically advised the UK government to ‘use media to increase [a] sense of personal threat’ among the public.

Have you ever wondered why news presenters repeatedly refer to Covid deaths as involving people who ‘tested positive within the previous 28 days’ or had Covid mentioned on their death certificates?

Another good question!

In Portugal they use a similar 28-day definition and someone forced the law courts to re-assess all 17,000 alleged covid deaths recorded between January 2020 and April 2021.

The Lisbon court concluded that of those 17,000, a mere 152 actually died of covid.

The remaining 16,848 died of just about everything imaginable including accidents.

If you apply that ratio to the UK statistics, it works out at about the same as the number of flu deaths in an average year.

Of course, officialdom tells us that flu was pretty much eliminated during the Covid pandemic, with social distancing, self-isolation and masks getting the credit.

Or could it be that the much-criticised PCR tests (recently abandoned in the US) could not distinguish between covid and flu, as is generally accepted?

It’s also worth remembering that the average age of these alleged covid deaths is 83 (higher than average life expectancy!) and that the vast majority in these death stats are elderly and have underlying health conditions.

For most people the Covid survival rate is about 99.85 per cent, and even higher for children.

Here’s another good question: how much of the above has appeared in The Times newspaper, which appears to be BJ of Shaftesbury’s main source of information?

The answer will be little or none. You won’t find much of it in any other newspapers either nor on the main TV channels with the notable exception in the UK of GB News on Freeview 236 and Sky 515.

GB News, launched in June 2021, have discovered a forgotten phenomenon called editorial balance.

As a young reporter 50 years ago, I was trained to believe there was another side to every story, that both sides should be covered and that those in authority should be regularly questioned and challenged.

To me as an experienced journalist, it’s shocking that most mainstream media continue to pump out government propaganda while largely ignoring the other side of the narrative.

‘We are following the science,’ we are repeatedly told, yet most of ‘the science’ is widely and hotly disputed.

The media are happy to challenge the government over Dominic Cummings’ lockdown visit to Barnard Castle and Westminster staff parties but overlook the tens of thousands being killed or maimed by vaccines (or more accurately experimental gene therapy) that were developed in months instead of years and not fully tested.

This chronic media imbalance prompted one of my newspaper colleagues to launch Holding the Line: Journalists Against Covid Censorship.

Since releasing our first press release in September, we’ve been joined by other journalists not only in the UK but the US, Canada, France, Italy, Croatia and New Zealand.

We’ve also received fan mail from many members of the public.

Sharon in Hampshire writes: ‘Just stumbled across your website after trying to make sense of the blanket censorship and outrageous propaganda of the mainstream media.

‘What a relief that there is some light in that well of darkness. Thank you for your courage and integrity. I’ll pass on details of your site when and where I can. Good luck and God speed.’

A guy in California says simply: ‘Thank you for being true journalists.’

We know of many journalists who are frustrated that editors, publishers and broadcast organisations will not allow them to present balanced reports.

Many – including some of our members – are under threat of losing their jobs if they fail to toe the line.

Many leading doctors and scientists are among those who’ve been censored by Big Tech companies like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Google, whose algorithms bury sites that offend their covid-vaccine sensibilities.

I and many others now use the search engine duckduckgo.com, which does not track or censor.

Other uncensored sources include Bitchute, Rumble, Odysee, BrandNewTube and Telegram, as well as The Light, the UK’s fastest-growing newspaper, which comes out monthly.

By HTL

Something “mysterious” is going on in Africa that is puzzling scientists, said Wafaa El-Sadr, chair of global health at Columbia University.  “Africa doesn’t have the vaccines and the resources to fight Covid-19 that they have in Europe and the US, but somehow they seem to be doing better,” she told the Associated Press.

“Africa avoids Covid disaster – scientists are mystified and wary,” reads a headline in the New Zealand Herald, over an article that notes that the vaccination rate on the continent is under six percent.

Last June, according to Reuters, the WHO’s top emergency official Mike Ryan told a news conference that while the numbers look good for Africa – slightly over 5 percent of global cases and 2.2 percent of deaths were recorded in the previous week – they are likely underreported.

He concluded: “It’s a trajectory that is very, very concerning.”

Mainstream journalists have largely failed to challenge the prevailing narrative that mass vaccination is the key to ending the pandemic, but a cursory glance at the comparative figures should prompt questions about why Africa has emerged practically unscathed.

Are they missing truths that should be blindingly obvious?

Nineteen of the world’s 20 youngest countries are in Africa – the other is Palestine – with a median age in the teens, compared with over 40 in the West. The median age for all of sub-Saharan Africa was 18.7 in 2020, according to the UN. Might this be a factor in the continent’s vanishingly low Covid death toll, with the exception of South Africa? Even correcting for under-reporting, the numbers are irrefutable: 22 per 100,000 in Africa versus 160 per 100,000 in Europe.

Africans are also low on the world scales of obesity and diabetes, two of the main co-morbidities associated with Covid deaths. A study last year by the National Center for Health Statistics found that only 6 percent of the deaths studied were considered to be from Covid alone.

Obesity generally correlates with prosperity, so it is no surprise that the world’s poorest regions – sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia – are at the bottom of the world obesity scale, according to the online resource Our World in Data.

Africans are also least affected by diabetes, according to the 2019 Atlas of the International Diabetes Foundation. That year, the prevalence of diabetes in Africa (excluding North Africa) was estimated to be 4.7 percent of people aged 20–79, the lowest incidence of any region. This is half of the global prevalence which was estimated to be 9.3%.

And they are also on the bottom rung of human beings suffering from cancer. The rate is 45.9 per 100,000 in Africa, compared with 131.6 per 100,000 in Asia and 587.4 per 100,000 in North America.

Africans’ long exposure to malaria may also help explain the “mystery”.

Researchers in November 2021 presented findings from studies in Uganda and Mali at the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH) suggesting that exposure to malaria could lower the risks posed by Covid.

“We went into this project thinking we would see a higher rate of negative outcomes in people with a history of malaria infections because that’s what was seen in patients co-infected with malaria and Ebola,” said Jane Achan, a co-author of the Uganda study, published in The Lancet.

“We were actually quite surprised to see the opposite — that malaria may have a protective effect,” Achan, a senior research adviser at the Malaria Consortium, told the ASTMH’s annual meeting.

To conduct a meaningful study into the clinical interactions between SARS-CoV-2 and malaria, the researchers understandably chose a region with relatively high malaria exposure. One might also assume that a region with high exposure to malaria would correlate with prophylactic use of anti-malarial medications such as chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine (HCQ).

While not denying the study’s findings, it is not clear from its methods and procedures section how or whether this potential confounding variable was controlled for. Indeed, whether one believes it merits any mention as a potential confounder depends on whether one believes there is evidence for its efficacy in the early treatment and prevention of Covid.

What is known is that by April 2020 early HCQ adopters around the world were experiencing dramatic success in the early treatment of Covid using HCQ-based combination treatments. In May 2020, Dr Harvey Risch, Professor of Epidemiology at Yale University and an illustrious world authority on the analysis of aggregate clinical data, published the most comprehensive study to date on HCQ’s efficacy against Covid. His meta-analysis concluded that the evidence is unequivocal for early and safe use of HCQ[1].  

Perhaps not so well known is Big Pharma’s war on HCQ to eliminate it as an alternative treatment to vaccines, thus protecting the Covid vaccines’ emergency use authorisation[2]. The widespread use for decades of chloroquine and HCQ, both safe and cheap off-patent drugs, to treat malaria in Africa is the elephant in the room of Western scientific puzzlement over Africa’s relative success with Covid.

Interestingly, the drugs.com website (slogan: “Know More. Be Sure.”) lists both chloroquine and HCQ among treatments for malaria, but gives no rating for HCQ.

Africa gets infected with the virus of lockdown lunacy

In lockstep with the rest of the world, despite impressively low case numbers, one African government after another imposed lockdowns, depriving millions of their livelihood, as a huge majority of ordinary people work outdoors, living hand to mouth – market vendors and street traders, motorbike taxi drivers, subsistence farmers, and so on. The evidence for the destructiveness of lockdowns can no longer be ignored and their economic cruelty has arguably been most pronounced in Africa.

Some resisted, only to change tack. Tanzania’s late president John Magufuli, who held a PhD in chemistry, encouraged people to continue as normal, sparking widespread condemnation. He had secretly sent samples of engine oil, goat meat and fruit juice for PCR testing, and they came back positive for Covid.

Magufuli died in March aged 61, succeeded by his vice president Samia Suluhu Hassan, who became the country’s first woman president.

Reuters wrote, under a headline describing Hassan as a “team player”: “The calm, measured Samia Suluhu Hassan brings a striking change of leadership style as successor to John Magufuli, a brash populist who drew global attention by playing down the threat of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Africa is being short-changed!

Instead of hailing Africa’s relative success in mitigating Covid, all we hear in the MSM is hand-wringing about its low vaccine uptake. It started early with commentators pointing out that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines required storage at extremely cold temperatures (minus 80-60 degrees Celsius for Pfizer, and minus 25-15 for Moderna), raising questions about whether the continent has the infrastructure to accommodate this highly unusual requirement.

Then we heard about vaccine hesitancy being one of the reasons why available doses languished beyond their use-by dates. This helped advance a narrative that we have seen elsewhere – for example, in France – that public awareness campaigns would resolve the problem.

Vaccine ‘hesitancy’ or legitimate wariness?

Africa still has raw memories of Big Pharma abuses in drug experimentation. For example, Nigerian authorities fought a decades-long legal battle against Pfizer following the death of four local children in the 1990s who had been enrolled in “an illegal trial of an unregistered drug” for meningitis by the drugs firm.

In addition, the rollout has been problematic, with significant doubts raised over the efficacy and safety data of China’s vaccine producers, Sinopharm and Sinovac. An article in the British Medical Journal in April pointed to an absence of phase III trial data.

The groupZimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights threatened to take the government there to court if it did not conduct clinical trials before offering Sinopharm to the public. 

On June 1, the WHO approved the Sinovac vaccine for emergency use, despite an efficacy rate of just 51 percent. The decision cleared the way for Sinopharm to be included in COVAX.

Many African countries that have rolled out vaccines have seen Covid cases and deaths surge afterward – a pattern that has emerged around the world, notably in vaccination champion Israel. In Africa, they include the Seychelles (dubbed “the most vaccinated nation on earth”), Namibia, Zimbabwe, Congo, Angola, Malawi, Kenya and Zambia.

Top of the class

One of the many paradoxes of the global response to Covid is that the continent that was expected to fare the worst has outperformed all other regions.

Two years on, to deny that the virus has spread across Africa and that the continent’s 1.3 billion people have achieved herd immunity is to ignore the basics of epidemiology and the natural history of respiratory viruses. Mass-vaccinating populations with herd immunity is not only unnecessary but could do more harm than good.

Now South Africa, the continent’s hardest-hit nation, has stolen the march on the rest of the world, turning the page on the pandemic. Its Omicron wave was billed by the fearmongers as a tsunami but turned out to be far less severe with ICU admissions 79% lower than their July peak and deaths at 8% of the July peak.

On 16^th December, South Africa’s Ministerial Advisory Committee (MAC) on Covid, a similar body to UK’s SAGE, wrote to the South African Health Minister recommending that all contact tracing and self-isolation of contacts for Covid be stopped because it is unnecessary and ineffective.

On December 20, just in time for New Year’s Eve celebrations, a night-time curfew was lifted allowing bars to revert to their normal alcohol permit terms.

Africa has inadvertently led when it was expected to fail. Borrowing from the oratory skills of that famous American president felled before his time, we might intone: “Ask not what Africa can learn from the world but what the world can learn from Africa.”

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[1] Robert F. Kennedy Jr, The Real Anthony Fauci, New York, Sky Horse Publishing, 2021, Ch 1, pages 21-36

[2] Robert F. Kennedy Jr, The Real Anthony Fauci, New York, Sky Horse Publishing, 2021, Ch 1, pages 24-34

By Rusere Shoniwa

The word ‘Omicron’ had barely fallen off the lips and pens of Big Media’s propagandists when the Mayor of London used it to declare ‘a major incident’ on 17 December.

Meanwhile, the PM and his Minister of Jabbing issued the usual thinly veiled threats to the citizenry to get ‘boosted’ or have the privilege of stepping outside your front door or allowing others to step inside it severely curtailed. Your elected leaders sincerely don’t want to do this, but you give them no choice unless you obey. Your freedom really is in your hands and yours alone: all you have to do to retain it is to continue being a slave to measures that haven’t worked, won’t work and weren’t intended to work. Assuming ‘work’ here means prevent the spread of the Covid virus.

To addicts of the official Covid narrative, it’s welcome to day 634 of ‘flattening the curve’ or ‘protecting the NHS’ or ‘not killing granny’. If you’ve got a prescription for the red pills, it’s welcome to the Christmas panto called ‘The End of the Illusion of Western Liberal Democracy.’

Omicron and shifting the vaccine goalposts

The Omicron variant is the latest fear tool being rolled out in the Western hemisphere and it’s a pretty lousy sequel to the scariant pantos that have come before it. Omicron was first reported on 24 November. Undeterred by the widely accepted fact that the vaccines don’t protect against transmission and infection, Pfizer moved at its customary ‘speed of science’, an imbecilic phrasing belched out by the Pfizer CEO, announcing a mere two weeks later (8^th December) that getting boosted with a third jab is just the ticket for combatting the new variant.

The language it used – “protection against severe disease” – is in line with the new watered-down definition of a vaccine. So, not a vaccine that prevents infection and transmission of the target pathogen. If the new bastardised definition of vaccine sticks, vaccines will no longer have to perform that once foundational function – foundational at least in principle if not always in practice. This choice of language is, I will argue, important, but equally important is that no reliable scientific inquiry (in vivo peer reviewed clinical trials) could possibly have taken place between 24th November and 8th December to confirm Pfizer’s claim about the ‘protective’ power of a third dose against the new variant.

The BBC, acting on the signal from Big Pharma, relayed the warning of ‘scientists’ that “two doses of a Covid vaccine are not enough to stop people catching the Omicron variant, but a booster dose prevents around 75% of people getting any symptoms.” [emphasis added]. (I’ve put ‘scientists’ in ‘ ’ because when I click through on the claim, I can’t find the names of the scientists who have made this claim.) One amusing aspect of this claim is that research shows that 86% of people who test positive for Covid have no symptoms anyway. So it’s valid to ask how it’s possible to know that the absence of symptoms in 75% of those ‘boosted’ can be credited to the booster when 86% of them wouldn’t have symptoms anyway.

Another important aspect of this claim is the BBC’s choice of words. Look at the deceitful elision, in a single sentence, of the concepts of ‘catching the Omicron variant’ (infection) and symptom reduction. At two doses they admit the vaccine is ineffective as a vaccine (infection and transmission) but, at three doses, they claim it morphs into an effective symptom reducer. If Omicron is the mildest of the variants that have emerged so far, and the evidence for that is mounting, the symptom people should care about most is death. This claim is not supported, either by a recent clinical in vivo trial to weigh the vaccine against Omicron or by the original vaccine trials which never proved that the jabs would improve your chances of surviving Covid, which in any case were around 99.85% and even higher the healthier and younger you are.

All of this helps to confirm that we have arrived at a point where no one – not the BBC, not the government, not Pfizer – is claiming that these ‘vaccines’ do what vaccines are, or more accurately were, supposed to do, namely prevent transmission and infection. Instead, recognising the power of the word ‘vaccine’ in the mind of the general public, the definition of a vaccine has been bastardised to accommodate the failure of the Covid ‘vaccines’. The infection and transmission narrative has been shot down in a ball of flames by independent media but, rising like a phoenix from the ashes, it has morphed into a symptom reduction narrative while the ‘vaccine’ has illogically been permitted to retain its title as a vaccine through semantic sleight of hand.

There are at least two blowback consequences of this deceit. Firstly, as the editor of the BMJ, Dr Peter Doshi, pointed out, if claims about the Covid ‘vaccines’ have been reduced to symptom alleviation, some irritatingly rational questions surface: would you take a dose of this drug every six months for possibly the rest of your life if that’s what it took for the drug to stay effective? Or would you choose instead to use other available medicines – the kind we take when we’re sick and want to get better? And crucially, why would you mandate it?

The second blowback consequence of changing the definition of vaccines to accommodate Covid vaccine failure is that those who have claimed for decades that vaccines don’t create immunity to targeted pathogens have been handed a white flag by a leading global vaccine licencing authority. In dropping the claim to immunity and replacing it with fuzzy ‘protection’ language, the CDC has effectively admitted that ‘anti-vaxxers’ were right all along. Vitamin D3, vitamin C, zinc and a whole host of other nutraceuticals make compelling claims to protection against a wide variety of illness including Covid while also having immune protective characteristics.

While trying to claim that a vaccine is a unique ‘preparation’ with magical properties not possessed by other preparations, the new definition is in fact a broad tent for thousands of other ‘preparations’.

Meanwhile, the Daily Sceptic’s analysis of the latest UK ONS data on Omicron infections reveals that:

“According to early data published on Tuesday by the ONS, the triple-vaccinated are 4.5 times as likely to test positive for a probable Omicron infection than the unvaccinated. The double-vaccinated, meanwhile, are 2.3 times as likely to have a probable Omicron infection.”

No matter. Minor details like this did not stop the WHO from stepping into the fray in its role as equal vax enforcer, telling the West to let go of its supplies and spread some of that vaccine joy to Africa.

So, this is the story of Omicron in most of the Western world. Tonnes of fear porn and massive coercion to get ‘vaccinated’ accompanied by dubious claims that ‘vaccination’ will ‘protect’ against Omicron. The narrative is a leaky boat riddled with contradictory holes. But there is another glaring contradiction which takes the form of a parallel Omicron universe in which the variant is not being treated with the fear and awe accorded to it in the West. A universe in which the variant is eliciting a rational response. That parallel universe is South Africa, the so-called original epicentre of the Omicron outbreak.

A parallel universe

On 16^th December, South Africa’s Ministerial Advisory Committee (MAC) on Covid, a similar body to UK’s SAGE, wrote to the South African Health Minister recommending that all contact tracing and self-isolation of contacts for Covid be stopped because it is unnecessary and ineffective. Highlights of the memo are :

• Strongly hinting that Covid has reached endemicity, it points out the limitations of quarantining stating that it “does not generally have a role for endemic diseases, where control is not possible.”
• Levels of immunity to Covid are now “exceeding 60-80% in several serosurveys.”
• It states: “Crucially, it appears that efforts to eliminate and/or contain the virus are not likely to be successful. Therefore, it is critical that the role of containment efforts like quarantine and contact tracing is re-evaluated.” [bold emphasis added]
• Referring to the ineffectiveness of testing it said that “testing is heavily skewed towards detecting symptomatic cases” but that as much as 84% of cases are asymptomatic. (That is supported independently by a study to which I have referred earlier in this article.) It added that “among the small proportion of symptomatic cases, testing is far from universal, since patients may not seek testing when their symptoms are mild and when testing would be burdensome and expensive.”
• Referring to the unreliability of testing it added: “Furthermore, the SARS-CoV-2 test sensitivity is suboptimal, sometimes leading to false negative results.”

It reads like a diplomatic, firm, rational and scientific two-fingers-up at the Covid containment debacle.

ICU admissions in South Africa are 79% lower than their July peak and new data from Denmark finds the hospitalisation rate from Omicron 60% lower than from other variants. All the evidence so far points to Omicron being less severe than previous variants and more contagious – the ideal combination for hastening herd immunity with minimal population health impact.

So what’s going on?

They lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying. And yet still the sick charade continues. Why? What is the real purpose of the charade?

The charade itself consists of the Covid containment policies together with a barmy narrative riddled with holes you could drive a lorry through. So far, we can see that these policies have not worked if we define ‘worked’ as successful virus containment. On the other hand, if you define ‘worked’ as the implementation of vaccine passports, then all of this has in fact worked since the government has introduced them, albeit in limited form so far.

The ‘vaccines’ are the delivery system for vaccine passports. Whether the vaccines ‘work’ from a medical standpoint is not relevant to the goal of rolling out vaccine passports, although such a dramatic failure in vaccine safety and efficacy can’t have helped the government’s main aim of implementing digitalised biometric ID systems of population control. To the extent that people remain unconvinced of the merits of the ‘vaccines’, the deprivation that might accompany not having a passport serves as coercion to get vaccinated.

Only 75 years ago, Nazi doctors were tried and hung for forced experimentation on Jews. These trials produced the Nuremberg code, which was used by countries across the Western world to enshrine the right to bodily autonomy by espousing the principle of voluntary informed consent in medical practice – the right to refuse a treatment without fear of punishment in any way.

While it is shocking to see no less a figure than the European Commission President unashamedly encouraging the trashing of the Nuremberg code, the unjustified and demonic fury with which governments in the formerly liberal West are ganging up on unvaccinated citizens must be seen as the overzealous attempts of freshly qualified tyrants desperately trying to embed vaccine passports in the everyday life of citizens.

The West’s newly minted despots understand only too well that vaccine passports themselves play no role in virus containment, as a parliamentary committee confirmed back in June 2021, before the vaccine narrative had collapsed in a heap of smoking rubble. The little Hitlers know that, like the ‘vaccines’ themselves, the vaccine passports have not worked to contain the virus in any country that has introduced them. They know that vaccine passports are an affront to human dignity, but it is human dignity they seek to crush.

A government whistleblower told Laura Dodsworth that ‘masks were a softening up exercise for Plan B’ – Covid passports. And because totalitarian control can’t work unless it’s total, the government will continue to push for maximum population coverage with all the levers of fear and coercion at its disposal, courtesy of the draconian Coronavirus Act 2020.

The tried and tested method for getting people to willingly give up freedom is to terrorise them. And so the organ grinder’s monkeys in the media continue to screech incoherently about Omicron, testing, severe disease and boosters.

Obedient citizens will get boosted and flash a QR code to gain access to increasingly wider aspects of life. Compliance will make life easier. And there’s the added feel-good bonus of ‘keeping others safe’ – just one more little lie in a lifeboat constructed out of lies to prevent mental drowning if reality were allowed to flood in. This act of compliance instils the citizen with the glow of goodness, the kind that comes from ‘knowing’ that you’re saving granny.

In time and with sufficient take-up, the passport app will be tethered to other systems and technologies that will morph into a total system of financial and social control. But you might not actually mind it because by then, your capacity for independent thought and engaging with difference will have been destroyed. You won’t want difficult thoughts, ones that you have to work for, wrestle with, argue and fight about. Thoughts which, if entertained, may require you to take real risks. Our culture is all about eliminating risks, down to zero. You’ll only want the thoughts that have been approved and given to you by the tightly controlled web.

The future, as Paul Kingsnorth hauntingly describes it, is “a QR code flickering across a human face forever”. Except that this doesn’t quite convey the relentless attempt to stamp out what makes us human – being inquisitive, curious, and seeing where that curiosity can take you.

While I believe that the Covid vaccination programme is the springboard for technocratic control through biometric ID passports, right now it is hardly a remote possibility that mandated (polite language for forced) vaccination will become a permanent feature of life. For one thing, Big Pharma has perhaps just experienced the single biggest injection of profit into its bank accounts from one product in its history. It is hooked on easy vax cash and it wants us, needs us, to be hooked on the vax. Any vax will do. Just give it a name and a good story. And there are 7.5 billion human pin cushions at its disposal to continuously siphon off billions in taxpayer funds, aided and abetted by their marketing arms, government medicines regulatory bodies.

And then of course there’s the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a.k.a The Great Reset, of which Klaus Schwab speaks so fondly and for which his billionaires’ club, the World Economic Forum, is the driving force that has world governments in its thrall. The Fourth Industrial Revolution envisages a world in which human beings will own nothing and be happy nodes in the matrix of the internet of things. Is it too far-fetched to imagine that ‘vaccines’ could morph into vectors of technology that promote the transhumanist aspirations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution? With one quick website update in September, they morphed from ‘providing immunity’ to ‘providing protection’. Vaccines could morph at Warp Speed into anything Big Pharma and its government partnership wants them to morph into.

You are not a passive bystander in all of this

If this interpretation of the government’s bad, mad, and contradictory pursuit of vaccines and vaccine passports seems too fanciful for you, why not think of it as just plain good old-fashioned bullying.

How so? Well, on the government’s own terms and by its own admission, nothing has ‘worked’, if we define ‘worked’ as successful virus containment. Lockdowns, masking, vaccination were all supposed to contain the virus and yet, after we have endured these humiliations for nearly two years, the government is telling us that cases are still rising, the vaccine doesn’t stop infection and transmission, the NHS is within a hair’s breadth of being overwhelmed and Covid deaths might skyrocket if we don’t behave ‘responsibly’. And despite the NHS being on the verge of collapsing, the government will sack 100,000 NHS employees who refuse to take a vaccine that won’t stop them or their patients from being infected with Covid.

And to address these failures, their plan is to apply the definition of madness – piling on more and more of what has been proven, by their own standards and definitions, not to work.

If Covid containment policies have not worked but continue to be applied in the full knowledge that they are not working, then the government is just humiliating you. It is simply exercising power for its own sake, otherwise known as bullying. The thrill of control over the victim is the psychological reward for bullying and submission by the victim is confirmation of control.

I’ve written about why every single pillar of the Covid narrative from lockdowns, masking, testing to mass vaccination is nothing short of voodoo garbage. And it doesn’t require lengthy references to long lists of scientific studies to demonstrate this although that must and is being done to seal the coffin of the government’s response measures. But a fool-proof shortcut to understanding that the government and the chiefs of its medical bureaucracy have played one hell of a number on us is to understand that the politicians and bureaucrats who have analysed and understand all the information about Covid don’t believe in the medical efficacy of the policies they are enforcing.

That is the only kernel to grasp from the Cabinet Office 2020 Christmas party scandal. If you’re upset because they broke the rules while you dutifully obeyed them, you’re missing the point. You should be upset because they never believed in the rules. The people deciding on the minutiae of your ritual humiliation understood that, unless you were elderly and frail, there was no reason to be unduly frightened or to put your life on hold in the way they were telling you to.

They acted in accordance with their beliefs. It’s almost impossible not to. So, they did not put their lives on hold. But you did because you acted in accordance with their instructions. Which should be a good argument for developing your own beliefs before following anyone’s instructions.

Huge amounts of power and control have been transferred to politicians and the medical bureaucracy and they are not about to be relinquished voluntarily. Power is never surrendered. It must be taken back. The bullying ends when the victims collectively dig into their reserves of self-respect and take the decision to stop cooperating with the humiliation. If you want to delve deeper into the psychology of bullying, the dance between the victim and the bully and how it ends, listen to this conversation between Charles Eisenstein and Tessa Lena.

Life at its worst is possibly a game of competing fears. Understanding that the senior ministers and heads of SAGE aren’t anywhere near as afraid of the virus as the nation seems to be may allow us to collectively replace the fear of Covid with the fear of a not-too-distant future in which everything you do and say is tracked and traced by algorithms that reward or punish you depending on whether you have acted and spoken in accordance with government policy and the consensus of the day.

It’s a future in which most rebellious or dissenting thoughts are blocked from ever reaching you. A future in which any remaining such thoughts that might accidentally seep through the guarded gates are voluntarily emptied from your mind because to do otherwise would jeopardise your ability to live. In such a ‘life’ I would suggest you needn’t bother taking out a life insurance policy because you would already be dead.

You can find more of Rusere’s work at https://plagueonbothhouses.com