Excess Cardiopulmonary Arrest and Mortality after COVID-19 Vaccination in King County, Washington

Hulscher, N., Cook, M., Stricker, R., & McCullough, P. A. (2024). Excess Cardiopulmonary Arrest and Mortality after COVID-19 Vaccination in King County, Washington. Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202405.1665.v1

By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH

We previously brought you news from King County, Seattle Washington about cardiac arrests from the elite MEDIC ONE EMS system which has the most accurate data in the country. It also happens to be one of the most heavily vaccinated metro areas in America.

Hulscher et al from the McCullough Foundation led a team of investigators that relied on the annual data reports and integrated them with COVID-19 vaccination and population statistics. This is an ecological analysis without individual case record data, so only broad population level inferences can be made.

“Approximately 98% of the King County population received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine by 2023. Our analysis revealed a 25.7% increase in total cardiopulmonary arrests and a 25.4% increase in cardiopulmonary arrest mortality from 2020 to 2023 in King County, WA. Excess cardiopulmonary arrest deaths were estimated to have increased by 1,236% from 2020 to 2023, rising from 11 excess deaths (95% CI: -12, 34) in 2020 to 147 excess deaths (95% CI: 123, 170) in 2023. A quadratic increase in excess cardiopulmonary arrest mortality was observed with higher COVID-19 vaccination rates. The general population of King County sharply declined by 0.94% (21,300) in 2021, deviating from the expected population size. Applying our model from these data to the entire United States yielded 49,240 excess fatal cardiopulmonary arrests from 2021-2023.”

These data are extremely worrisome given the rise in all-cause mortality observed in the United States that has been thoroughly investigated and reported by analyst Edward Dowd in his book “Cause Unknown”: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 & 2022 & 2023. Hulscher and colleagues found despite a pandemic decline in county population, both cardiac arrest events and fatal outcomes increased with vaccination. These findings among many others strongly support removal of all COVID-19 vaccines from public use and immediate clinical and research programs to stem the tide of vaccine cardiac arrests as they occur over the years after injection.

[…]

Via https://petermcculloughmd.substack.com/p/breaking-publication-excess-cardiopulmonary

‘Unambiguous’: Excess Deaths in Cyprus Tied to COVID Vaccine Rollout

covid-19 vaccine bottle and word "mortality"

Cyprus saw a “substantial, statistically significant,” increase in mortality from all causes in late 2021 and early 2022 following the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines, TrialSite News reported last week.

Researchers from Cyprus, the University of Liverpool and Harvard University found that during the third and fourth quarters of 2021, total deaths in the island nation increased 34.1% and 11.8% respectively. During the first quarter of 2022, total deaths increased 30.7%.

Cyprus began its COVID-19 vaccine rollout in December 2020, but the peaks in monthly vaccination rates occurred in May 2021 and December 2021 and were followed by jumps in the mortality rates.

“We concluded that excess mortality occurs in unprecedented levels in Cyprus,” the researchers wrote. “Our findings raise serious concerns regarding the potential impact of the vaccination campaign and other causes on mortality.”

The authors published their findings in the Journal of Community Medicine and Public Health. Based on the association they identified, they said, “a detailed cause-specific investigation of such a significant excess number of deaths is warranted to explore the potential factors leading to this concerning and unexplained increase in population mortality.”

The researchers analyzed mortality data from 2016-2022, as reported by the Cyprus Ministry of Health to the European Statistical Office, or Eurostat. They also analyzed weekly data on COVID-19 vaccinations and related deaths collected during the pandemic by the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control.

Using that data, they determined average all-cause mortality rates and excess deaths over time, deaths reported from COVID-19 and total COVID-19 vaccines administered for Cyprus by age group.

They compared excess deaths before and during the COVID-19 pandemic and examined how those numbers related to the vaccine rollout.

Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., all-cause mortality researcher and former physics professor at the University of Ottawa in Canada who was not involved in the study, told The Defender:

“There’s clearly a temporal association here between vaccines and excess all-cause mortality. This association is robust, it’s unambiguous, it’s clear, it’s in the data itself.”

Rancourt’s team of scientists at the Canada-based Correlation Research in the Public Interest has also conducted several studies that found strong associations between vaccine rollouts and excess mortality.

He said the mortality rates and the association with the vaccine reported in the Cyprus study are similar to what his team found in their own analysis of Cyprus, which is part of a larger study not yet published.

However, to confirm what caused the deaths, Rancourt said, “You have to dig deeper as the authors correctly point out to find out what is really going on here,” Rancourt added.

Data on excess deaths in Cyprus 

Epidemiologists use all-cause mortality — a measure of the total number of deaths from all causes in a given time frame for a given population — as the most reliable data for detecting and characterizing events causing death and evaluating the population-level effect of deaths from any cause.

Excess death, or excess mortality, refers to the number of deaths from all causes during a crisis above and beyond what would be expected under ‘normal’ conditions.

Excess mortality is a “more comprehensive measure” of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mortality than the confirmed COVID-19 deaths because it captures deaths from other causes, like vaccines, treatment protocols or other factors that are attributable to the “overall COVID-19 crisis,” the authors wrote.

“COVID-19 death data is notoriously not reliable,” Rancourt agreed.

Research also shows that the trends identified in Cyprus are consistent with broader regional and global trends, the authors said. Across the EU, the authors wrote, excess deaths increased in 2020 and continued through 2023, albeit at variable rates.

Cyprus, they noted, was one of the EU member states with the highest excess mortality — in 2022 it had the highest excess mortality rate in Europe, reaching 26.4%.

This was consistent with findings worldwide. For example, a study found the U.S. experienced substantial excess mortality during the pandemic. And the authors’ previously published research showed a substantial increase in mortality in Cyprus in 2021 compared to 2020, even when excluding deaths reported to be caused by COVID-19.

For their current study, the authors calculated the average all-cause mortality using pre-pandemic data from 2016-2019 and assessed how mortality deviated from that level. Before 2020, they found very little excess mortality.

They presented their findings in a series of tables and graphs.

Credit: E.C. Economidou, N. Markou, K. Prokopi, D. Avraam and E.S. Soteriades.

They found two peaks in vaccination across Cyprus’s population of 904,705 people. In May 2021, when the first peak happened, 42% of the population was vaccinated. In December 2021 at the second peak, 71% of the population was vaccinated. They found that after each vaccination peak, there was a higher rate of excess deaths, which was more severe after the second peak.

Credit: E.C. Economidou, N. Markou, K. Prokopi, D. Avraam and E.S. Soteriades.

They also noted that excess deaths remained low during the period between the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in Cyprus and the start of the vaccination campaign, only beginning to climb substantially after the vaccine was introduced.

Credit: E.C. Economidou, N. Markou, K. Prokopi, D. Avraam and E.S. Soteriades.

Overall there were approximately 3,000 excess deaths in 2021-2022.

High mortality rate in summer ‘unheard of’

Rancourt said there were a few interesting things in the data that the authors didn’t highlight. Cyprus typically has higher mortality in the winter and low in the summer, he said.

“It’s unheard of to have a high mortality in the summer. But in 2021, just after the main first wave of vaccination rollout, after a large number of vaccine doses had been given, there was a very large summer peak in excess mortality.”

Then, there was another peak in the spring and summer following the winter 2022 vaccine push.

In their study, the researchers again found that when they excluded the reported number of deaths from COVID-19, the increase in all-cause mortality persisted. This finding is also consistent with other studies, the authors reported.

The authors said their study was limited by their inability to explore what caused the documented excess mortality. They blamed a lack of access to detailed death certificates, which haven’t been made available to researchers.

“We call for official authorities to share information on diagnoses and causes of death from corresponding death certificates in order to further explore the underlying causes of these troublesome increased mortality findings,” they wrote.

They did note several issues identified in the existing literature that provide hypotheses about the causes of the rise in all-cause mortality and highlight “the concerns that the vaccination campaign may have contributed to this worldwide observed excess mortality.”

Many researchers have identified links between the toxicity of vaccine batches and adverse events, they noted. Rancourt and his team have linked the vaccine rollouts to unprecedented peaks in all-cause mortality in a study of 17 countries.

Rancourt said they are currently completing a study of 125 countries, including Cyprus, and their analysis of that country produced similar results to the current study.

The study authors also noted that during the pandemic, pressures on the healthcare system undermined access to and quality of care, increasing mortality. They also noted that lockdowns had documented serious health effects including increased mortality.

Rancourt said his work demonstrated that there may be multiple causes of all-cause mortality from different pandemic-response-related practices, including vaccination and the application of different COVID-19 treatment protocols or the psychological stress of lockdowns and isolation.

However, frail, elderly and otherwise sick people were consistently most vulnerable to death.

Algeria Proposes UN Security Council Resolution to ‘Stop the Killing in Rafah’

(Photo Credit: UN Photo)

The Cradle

Algeria proposed a draft to the UN Security Council (UNSC) on 28 May that demanded Israel “immediately halt its military offensive” in Rafah.

Amar Bendjama, Algeria’s UN ambassador, said, following a closed-door meeting of the 15-member UN bloc on Gaza, that the aid for the motion was to “stop the killing in Rafah.”

Algeria’s draft “decides that Israel, the occupying Power, shall immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in Rafah.”

It also expressed “grave concern” over the humanitarian situation in Gaza, “with the famine spreading throughout” the strip.

Algeria’s proposal also calls to condemn the “indiscriminate targeting of civilians, including women and children, and civilian infrastructure,” demanding that all parties must “comply with their obligations under international law … in particular with regard to the protection of civilians and civilian objects, and the imperative to cease depriving the Palestinian civilian population in the Gaza Strip of basic services and humanitarian assistance.”

The draft also calls for an “immediate ceasefire respected by all parties, and also demands the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages, and further demands that the parties comply with their obligations under international law in relation to all persons they detain.”

It also referred back to a ruling given by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that ordered Israel to immediately cease its military operation against Rafah.

The proposed draft also demands the “full implementation” of prior UNSC resolutions, such as 2712 from 2023, which called for “urgent and extended humanitarian pauses and corridors throughout the Gaza Strip”; 2720 from 2023, which called for “safe and unhindered humanitarian access” in and throughout the strip; and 2728 from 2024, which called for an immediate ceasefire during the month of Ramadan.

Diplomats claimed that the UN body could vote on this resolution within days.

Algeria’s draft follows multiple attacks on Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah as Israel continues forward with its military operation.

An attack on Tuesday near Rafah killed at least 20 people, Gaza’s Civil Defense spokesman said four artillery shells targeted tents for displaced Palestinians in the coastal Al-Mawasi area.

On Sunday, Israeli warplanes opened fire on a designated safe area in Rafah, launching over six missiles on tents and killing at least 40 Palestinians.

To be passed, Algeria’s draft needs at least nine votes. Washington has so far protected Israel by vetoing three Gaza war resolutions and one granting Palestine full UN membership status.

[…]

Via https://thecradle.co/articles/algeria-pushes-unsc-resolution-to-stop-the-killing-in-rafah

Dr. McCullough, Australian professor highlight scientific links between vaccines and autism

Dr. McCullough, Australian professor highlight scientific links between vaccines and autism

Dr Eddy Betterman

Last week at a talk in Chattanooga, Tenn., a professor from Australia by the name of Ian Brighthope presented evidence, including from Dr. Peter McCullough, showing once again that vaccines cause autism.

In a “neutral tone,” Brighthope discussed Dr. McCullough’s research along with information from a 2019 corporate media report linking childhood injections to the symptoms commonly associated with autism spectrum disorder.

The 2019 report came from “Full Measure,” a weekly television news program aired every Sunday that is broadcast to about 43 million households.

“A respected pro-vaccine medical expert used by the federal government to debunk the vaccine-autism link, says vaccines can cause autism after all,” it was stated in the report. “He claims he told that to government officials long ago, but they kept it secret.”

“Meantime, CDC – which promotes vaccines and monitors vaccine safety – never disclosed that the government’s own one-time medical expert concluded vaccines can cause autism – and to this day public health officials deny that’s the case.”

A full transcript of the report, which you can also watch on YouTube below, is available here.

Vaccine-induced autism linked to gender dysphoria

Entitled “Who is Winning the Information War?” McCullough delivered his speech at the “Art of War” event. Toward the end of his speech, McCullough shared details about how the rise of vaccine-induced autism corresponds with a similar rise in gender dysphoria.

Back when McCullough was a child, autism was extremely rare – and there were a lot fewer vaccines administered back then as well.

“Autism was one in 10,000 when I was a kid,” he explained. “It’s now one in 36. It’s the biggest epidemic of childhood in U.S. history.”

While a small portion of this increase is due simply to increased screening and detection, there is still “a massive bona fide increase” that has no other explanation besides the massive increase in chemicals, i.e., vaccines and tainted food and water, that occurred during the same time period.

“It has been well demonstrated that if a child gets sick with a big round of shots and they have a seizure, there’s about a 40 percent chance that their brain is injured and that they develop autism,” McCullough said.

“There are 200 studies now linking excessive vaccination in childhood to autism.”

The problem is so serious that even the World Council for Health is urging parents to adopt a “common sense” approach to the ever-expanding childhood vaccination schedule. It is safer to just wait – and even better to just do nothing.

“Five studies show children who take no vaccines, none – they’re born healthy, they take no vaccines, they’re healthier than the kids who take the vaccines,” McCullough says.

“There are lower rates of food allergy … there are lower rates of asthma, allergic dermatitis, need for tympanostomy tubes, lower rates of attention deficit disorder, Asperger disease, lower rates of autism spectrum disorder … massive excessive vaccination is likely harming our children today.”

McCullough also discussed the epidemic of sudden infant deaths, noting that 50 percent of them occur within a week of children “taking a battery of these shots.” Like with autism, the medical establishment refuses to acknowledge any connection between vaccines and sudden infant death syndrome.

Dr. Peter McCullough: Autism, Childhood Vaccines & The Plague Of Transgenderism (Excerpt)

Brighthope also recommends reading the book “Vaccines, Myths and Facts” by Wendy Daniel, which contains a wealth of additional information about childhood injections and what they do to the bodies of innocent little ones.

[…]

Via https://dreddymd.com/2024/05/30/mccullough-australian-professor-science-vaccines-autism/

Making a Modern Mummy

Episode 26: Making a Modern Mummy

The History of Ancient Egypt

Professor Robert Brier

Film Review

In this lecture Brier describes his experience mummifying a cadaver with the help of a surgeon friend. Owing to the absence of historical documentation, it was only in this way he could fulling understand the process.

The natron they used to dehydrate the corpse (for the 36 days recommended in Rhind Bengreal Papyri – see Egyptian Mummification: The Historical Record) from Wadi El Natrun in northern Egypt.* They obtained the frankincense and myrrh from Yemen and Sudan via a Cairo street market. Placing the body in an indoor tent heated to 105 degrees F, they covered it with 600 pounds of natron. After 36 days, their corpse had lost half its body weight, though there was still evidence of moisture in the larger muscle groups. After leaving it in the natron another 25 days, it was totally dehydrated.

Ancient Egyptian Ceremonial Dagger | King Tut NYC: Return of the King | Pinterest | Exhibitions

The replica bronze** daggers they made were too dull to open the abdomen. Instead they used a blade an anthropologist friend flake out  of obsidian for them. They had to increase the abdominal incision to three inches (instead of the 2 1/2 inches Herodotus describes – see Egyptian Mummification: The Historical Record) to remove the liver (the largest organ in the body. Leaving the heart intact, they filled the abdominal cavity with little packets of natron to facilitate further dehydration.

Black Obsidian Knife Agate, 100 Gms at Rs 750/piece in Khambhat | ID ...

They found the only way to remove the brain was to use a nose hook to liquefy the brain and then hang the corpse upside down to let it run out the nose. They then used the hook to repeatedly stuff linen strips into the skull cavity until it came out clean.

 

gancho en cerebro preparación antiguo egipcio momificación respuesta rápida


*Natron is a naturally occurring mineral made up of sodium carbonate, sodium bicarbonate and sodium chloride.

**Current evidence suggests it was the ancient Egyptians who first discovered the chemistry of combining two soft metals (copper and tin) to miraculously form a hard one (bronze). Our word chemistry derives from the Egyptian “kemit (the Egyptian word for Egypt), via the Arabic word “alchemy.”

Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/watch/video/1492791/1492853

Ottawa detective suspended for investigating babies who died from SIDS after mothers took the jab…

https://revolver.news/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/2024.05.28-04.49-revolvernews-66560b047cfb2-1024x536.jpg

Revolver

Chances are, if you’ve been keeping tabs on the COVID “coverup,: you’ve come across this story that began to unfold in 2022. There was a sudden spike in SIDS cases in Ottawa, Canada, where nine babies died shortly after their mothers received the vaccine. One detective, named Helen Grus, took it upon herself to investigate these incidents. Yet, simply for doing her job and delving into the vaccine’s possible role, she found herself suspended and vilified.The Ottawa police settled with one of the families who felt their privacy was breached, simply because a detective was determined to get to the bottom of their baby’s death, and that’s when Grus was suspended and her life was turned upside down.

CTV News:

Grus allegedly contacted the deceased baby’s father on Jan. 30, 2022 to ask about the mother’s COVID-19 vaccination status, according to police documents.

After a complaint was filed against Grus with OPS, Grus was suspended with pay on Feb. 4, 2022.

Lawrence Greenspon, the family’s lawyer, said the case was settled this week for an undisclosed amount.

“Parents are not put on this earth to bury their children,” he told CTV News Ottawa.

“When a tragedy happens, the family’s privacy must be respected.”

Greenspon said the family would like to thank the Ottawa Police Service for acknowledging their grief and recognizing the importance of privacy.

Now, she’s sharing her story, exposing the depths of the biased and dystopian ‘jab coverup.’ Why on earth wouldn’t we want to uncover any potential harm caused by this vaccine? When did people become such mindless, spineless jellyfish that they take the government’s word as gospel? It’s alarming to witness this transformation, especially at a time when our government and so-called ‘experts’ are so widely distrusted and disliked.

[…]

Via https://revolver.news/2024/05/ottawa-detective-suspended-for-investigating-babies-who-died-from-sids-after-mothers-took-the-jab/

Top Medical Journal Slaps Down Scientific American’s Laura Helmuth For Unscientific Trans Activism

Zero Hedge

In a shot across the bow against Scientific American’s continued descent into unscientific twaddle, a BMJ investigation documented over a dozen social media posts by editor-in-chief Laura Helmuth promoting transgender care for children, despite scientific evidence showing such treatment has had “devastating consequences” for minors.

Laws preventing trans kids from getting gender-affirming treatment are dangerous and abusive, as well as against all medical evidence,” Helmuth posted on X in late 2022, one of many examples that The BMJ sent to Scientific American and its publisher Springer Nature, asking them to explain Helmuth’s trans advocacy which runs contrary to medical evidence.

In other social media posts, Helmuth has labeled critics of dangerous trans gender medicine for children “biased,” “bigoted,” “antiscience,” “misinformation,” “cruel,” and compared them to Nazis.

Last year, Helmut promoted false news in Scientific American that argued, “The research is clear and all the relevant medical organizations agree: Gender-affirming care is evidence-based & medically necessary & leads to much better outcomes for trans kids than refusing them care.”

Six days later, The BMJ released an investigation of new research finding that the evidence for trans gender care for children lacked evidence and that medical authorities were urging caution.

England, Scotland, Wales, and Sweden have all ceased prescribing puberty blockers for children, except for research studies, and the Finnish psychiatrist who first founded the field of transgender care for children now calls it “dangerous.” Many countries’ medical authorities have concluded that studies promoting trans treatment for children were either biased or of low quality.

The BMJ’s targeting of Laura Helmuth was a warning, of sorts—an admonition that Helmuth should focus on science, cease the advocacy, and stop saying stupid things. But if you continue to read Scientific American, expect Helmuth to continue saying stupid things.

Last month, Harvard’s Steven Pinker labeled Helmuth a “woke fanatic” on X and promoted an article discussing Scientific American’s descent into progressive ideology. “Another noble American institution run into the ground when clueless trustees handed over the keys to a woke fanatic,” Pinker posted.

The article Pinker promoted appeared in City Journal (“Unscientific American”) and carefully documented the magazine’s decline into a political rag since Helmuth took the reins in early 2020. Other outlets have also cast a disapproving eye on Helmuth’s political crusades.

The Wall Street Journal noted that Helmuth tweeted last year that “sparrows have four different chromosomally distinct sexes,” forcing the community notes on X to correct Helmuth’s error.

“It’s just incredible how far @sciam — a periodical I admired — has fallen from its mission to provide accurate, clear, and vivid coverage of science,” Yale professor and physician Nicholas Christakis, posted on X.

“EXCLUSIVE: unScientific American! Popular magazine is slammed by experts over ‘woke’ article titled ‘Why Human Sex is Not Binary’,” reported The Daily Mail, a few months prior to Christakis’ criticism of Helmuth. Dr Carole Hooven, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University, told The Daily Mail that Scientific American’s unscientific claims could put women in danger.

On average, men are bigger and stronger than women, and commit the overwhelming majority of rapes and murders. Most men could kill most women with their bare hands,” Hooven explained. “These facts have informed the establishment of laws and social policies that protect female spaces, particularly those where women are in vulnerable positions such as where they sleep or shower (prison cells and locker rooms, for example).”

Chicago University emeritus professor of ecology and evolution, Jerry Coyne, has written several times about Helmuth promoting factually inaccurate claims in Scientific American, which he labeled “Scientific Pravda.”

Somebody called my attention to three new articles and op-eds in Scientific American that have no science in them, but are pure ideology of the “progressive” sort.  I agree with some of the sentiments expressed in them, as in the first one. But my point is, as usual, to show how everything in science, including its most widely-read “popular” magazine, is being taken over by ideology. Not only that, but it’s ideology of only one stripe: Leftist “progressive” (or “woke,” if you will) ideology, so that the “opinion” section is not a panoply of divergent views, but gives only one view, like a Scientific Pravda.  Remember that the editor refused when I offered to write an op-ed expressing different (but of course not right-wing) views.

In a previous City Journal article in 2022, science writer Nicholas Wade called Scientific American’s shift away from science a “new Lysenkoism” referring to the Soviet doctrine that forced biologists to ignore evolution and the genetics of plants to conform to political ideology.

And in an investigation I conducted for the BMJ(“The covid-19 lab leak hypothesis: did the media fall victim to a misinformation campaign?”) I noted that Helmuth harassed CDC Director Robert Redfield for telling CNN he thought the COVID virus may have come from a Wuhan lab:

The growing tendency to treat the lab leak scenario as worthy of serious investigation has put some reporters on the defensive. After Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, appeared on CNN in March, Scientific American’s editor in chief, Laura Helmuth, tweeted, “On CNN, former CDC director Robert Redfield shared the conspiracy theory that the virus came from the Wuhan lab.” The following day, Scientific American ran an essay calling the lab leak theory “evidence free.”

In short, Helmuth is a political fanatic who doesn’t care much for science, unless it’s science that fits her personal politics.

The BMJ’s investigation highlighted the Cass Review which found little evidence to support Helmuth’s claims that the puberty blockers or other trans therapy for children are safe, including surgery. Dr. Hilary Cass is a British physician and former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, who spent three years examining the evidence for treating gender questioning young people.

In a recent interview with the New York Times, Dr. Cass said that doctors in the United States are “out of date” with understanding trans care for children. “But what some organizations are doing is doubling down on saying the evidence is good,” Dr. Cass told the New York Times. “And I think that’s where you’re misleading the public.”

And in podcast for the BMJ, Dr. Cass noted that of the 100 studies for puberty blockers and hormone treatment, only two were of passable quality. She also dismissed claims by activists such as Helmuth that trans care lowers risk of suicide in children.

“There, unfortunately, is not evidence that gender affirming treatment in its broadest sense reduces the suicide risk,” Dr. Cass said, during The BMJ podcast.

Below are several social media posts by Laura Helmuth crusading for trans care for kids—many of them dangerous messages for children, all lacking quality medical evidence.

[…]

Via https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/top-medical-journal-slaps-down-scientific-americans-laura-helmuth-unscientific-trans

 

Surveillance and Interference: Israel’s Covert War on ICC Exposed

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, seen with Yossi Cohen, then-head of the national security council, at a press conference at the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem, October 15, 2015. (Miriam Alster/Flash90)

(Miriam Alster/Flash90)

Yuval Abraham and Meron Rapoport

Top Israeli government and security officials have overseen a nine-year surveillance operation targeting the ICC and Palestinian rights groups to try to thwart a war crimes probe, a joint investigation reveals.

For nearly a decade, Israel has been surveilling senior International Criminal Court officials and Palestinian human rights workers as part of a secret operation to thwart the ICC’s probe into alleged war crimes, a joint investigation by +972 Magazine, Local Call, and the Guardian can reveal.

The multi-agency operation, which dates back to 2015, has seen Israel’s intelligence community routinely surveil the court’s current chief prosecutor Karim Khan, his predecessor Fatou Bensouda, and dozens of other ICC and UN officials. Israeli intelligence also monitored materials that the Palestinian Authority submitted to the prosecutor’s office, and surveilled employees at four Palestinian human rights organizations whose submissions are central to the probe.

According to sources, the covert operation mobilized the highest branches of Israel’s government, the intelligence community, and both the civilian and military legal systems in order to derail the probe.

The intelligence information obtained via surveillance was passed on to a secret team of top Israeli government lawyers and diplomats, who traveled to The Hague for confidential meetings with ICC officials in an attempt to “feed [the chief prosecutor] information that would make her doubt the basis of her right to be dealing with this question.” The intelligence was also used by the Israeli military to retroactively open investigations into incidents that were of interest to the ICC, to try to prove that Israel’s legal system is capable of holding its own to account.

Additionally, as the Guardian reported earlier today, the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, ran its own parallel operation which sought out compromising information on Bensouda and her close family members in an apparent attempt to sabotage the ICC’s investigation. The agency’s former head, Yossi Cohen, personally attempted to “enlist” Bensouda and manipulate her into complying with Israel’s wishes, according to sources familiar with his activities, causing the then-prosecutor to fear for her personal safety.

Our investigation draws on interviews with more than two dozen current and former Israeli intelligence officers and government officials, ex-ICC officials, diplomats, and lawyers familiar with the ICC case and Israel’s efforts to undermine it. According to these sources, initially, the Israeli operation attempted to prevent the court from opening a full criminal investigation; after a full probe was set in motion in 2021, Israel sought to ensure that it would come to nothing.

Moreover, according to several sources, Israel’s underhanded efforts to interfere with the investigation — which could amount to offenses against the administration of justice, punishable by a prison sentence — have been managed from the very top. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is said to have taken a keen interest in the operation, even sending intelligence teams “instructions” and “areas of interest” regarding their monitoring of ICC officials. One source stressed that Netanyahu was “obsessed, obsessed, obsessed” with finding out what materials the ICC was receiving.

The prime minister had good reason to be concerned: last week, Khan announced that his office is seeking arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, as well as three leaders in Hamas’ political and military wings, in relation to alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed on or since October 7. The announcement made clear that additional warrants — which expose prosecuted individuals to arrest should they visit any of the ICC’s 124 member states — may yet be pursued.

For Israel’s top brass, Khan’s announcement was no surprise. In recent months, the surveillance campaign targeting the chief prosecutor “climbed to the top of the agenda,” according to one source, thus giving the government advance knowledge of his intentions.

Tellingly, Khan issued a cryptic warning in his remarks: “I insist that all attempts to impede, intimidate, or improperly influence the officials of this court must cease immediately.” Now, we can reveal details of part of what he was warning against: Israel’s nine-year “war” on the ICC.

‘The generals had a big personal interest in the operation’

Unlike the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which deals with the legality of states’ actions — and which last week issued a ruling seen as calling on Israel to halt its offensive in Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah, in the context of South Africa’s petition accusing Israel of committing genocide in the Strip — the ICC deals with specific individuals suspected of having committed war crimes.

Israel has long held that the ICC has no jurisdiction to prosecute Israeli leaders because, like the United States, Russia, and China, Israel is not a signatory to the Rome Statute which established the court, and Palestine is not a full UN member state. But Palestine was nevertheless recognized as an ICC member upon signing the convention in 2015, having been admitted to the UN General Assembly as a non-member observer state three years prior.

[…]

Immediately after becoming a member of the court, the PA asked the prosecutor’s office to investigate crimes committed in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, starting from the date on which the State of Palestine accepted the court’s jurisdiction: July 13, 2014. Fatou Bensouda, the chief prosecutor at the time, opened a preliminary examination to determine whether the criteria for a full investigation could be met.

Fearing the legal and political consequences of potential prosecutions, Israel raced to prepare intelligence teams in the army, the Shin Bet (domestic intelligence), and the Mossad (foreign intelligence), alongside a covert team of military and civilian lawyers, to lead the effort to forestall a full ICC investigation. All this was coordinated under Israel’s National Security Council (NSC), whose authority is derived from the Prime Minister’s Office.

“Everyone, the entire military and political establishment, was looking for ways to damage the PA’s case,” said one intelligence source. “Everyone pitched in: the Justice Ministry, the Military International Law Department [part of the Military Advocate General’s Office], the Shin Bet, the NSC. [Everyone] saw the ICC as something very important, as a war that had to be waged, and one that Israel had to be defended against. It was described in military terms.”

The military was not an obvious candidate for joining the Shin Bet’s intelligence-gathering efforts, but it had a strong motivation: preventing its commanders from being forced to stand trial. “The ones who really wanted to [join the effort] were the IDF generals themselves — they had a very big personal interest,” one source explained. “We were told that senior officers are afraid to accept positions in the West Bank because they are afraid of being prosecuted in The Hague,” another recalled.

According to numerous sources, Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, whose stated goal at the time was to fight against the “delegitimization” of Israel, was involved in the surveilling of Palestinian human rights organizations that were submitting reports to the ICC. Gilad Erdan, head of the ministry at the time and now Israel’s representative to the UN, recently described the ICC’s pursuit of arrest warrants for Israeli leaders as “a witch-hunt driven by pure Jew-hatred.”

‘The army dealt with things that were completely non-military’

Israel’s covert war on the ICC has relied centrally on surveillance, and the chief prosecutors have been prime targets.

Four sources confirmed Bensouda’s private exchanges with Palestinian officials about the PA’s case in The Hague were routinely monitored and shared widely within Israel’s intelligence community. “The conversations were usually about the progress of the prosecution: submitting documents, testimonies, or talking about an event that happened — ‘Did you see how Israel massacred Palestinians at the last demonstration?’ — things like that,” one source explained.

The former prosecutor was far from the only target. Dozens of other international officials related to the probe were similarly surveilled. One of the sources said there was a large whiteboard with the names of around 60 people who were under surveillance — half of them Palestinians and half from other countries, including UN officials and ICC personnel in The Hague.

Another source recalled surveillance on the person who wrote the ICC’s report on Israel’s 2014 Gaza war. A third source said Israeli intelligence monitored a UN Human Rights Council commission of inquiry into the occupied territories, in order to identify what materials it was receiving from the Palestinians, “because the findings of commissions of inquiry of this kind are usually used by the ICC.”

In The Hague, Bensouda and her senior staff were alerted by security advisers and via diplomatic channels that Israel was monitoring their work. Care was taken not to discuss certain matters in the vicinity of phones. “We were made aware they were trying to get information on where we were with the preliminary examination,” a former senior ICC official said.

[…]

Because Palestinian human rights groups were frequently providing the prosecutor’s office with materials about Israel’s attacks on Palestinians, detailing incidents they wanted the prosecutor to consider as part of the probe, these organizations themselves became key targets of Israel’s surveillance operation. Here, the Shin Bet took the lead.

In addition to monitoring materials that the PA submitted to the ICC, Israeli intelligence also monitored appeals and reports from the human rights groups that included testimonies of Palestinians who had suffered attacks by Israeli settlers and soldiers; Israel then surveilled these testifiers, too.

[…]

Omar Awadallah and Ammar Hijazi, who are in charge of the ICC case within the PA’s Justice Ministry, also discovered that Pegasus had been installed on their phones. According to intelligence sources, the two were simultaneously targets of different Israeli intelligence organizations, which created “confusion.” “They’re both super impressive PhDs who deal with this subject all day, from morning to night — that’s why there was intelligence to be gained [from tracking them],” said one source.

Hijazi isn’t surprised that he was surveilled. “We don’t care if Israel sees the evidence we submitted to the court,” he said. “I invite them: Come, open your eyes, see what we presented.”

[…]

“People are afraid to file a complaint [to the ICC], or to mention their real names, because they fear being persecuted by the military, of losing their entry permits,” Hamdi Shakura, a lawyer at PCHR, explained. “A man in Gaza who has a relative sick with cancer is scared the army will take his entry permit and prevent his treatment — this sort of thing happens.”

[…]

Soon after Bensouda announced that her office was opening a preliminary examination, Netanyahu ordered the formation of a covert team of lawyers from the Justice Ministry, Foreign Ministry, and Military Advocate General’s Office (the Israeli army’s highest legal authority), which regularly traveled to The Hague for secret meetings with ICC officials between 2017 and 2019. (Israel’s Justice Ministry did not respond to requests for comment.)

[…]

According to the source, the goal was to “feed [Bensouda] information that would make her doubt the basis of her right to be dealing with this question. When Al-Haq collects information on how many Palestinians have been killed in the occupied territories in the past year and passes it on to Bensouda, it’s in Israel’s interest and policy to pass her counterintel, and to try to undermine this information.”

[…]

In 2021, the court’s judges ruled that the ICC does have jurisdiction over all war crimes committed by Israelis and Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territories, as well as crimes committed by Palestinians on Israeli territory. Despite six years of Israeli efforts to forestall it, Bensouda announced the opening of a formal criminal investigation.

[…]

Among the dozens of incidents currently under investigation by the FFAM are the bombings that killed dozens of Palestinians in the Jabaliya refugee camp last October; the “flour massacre” in which more than 110 Palestinians were killed in northern Gaza upon the arrival of an aid convoy in March; the drone strikes that killed seven World Central Kitchen employees in April; and an airstrike in a tent encampment in Rafah that ignited a fire and killed dozens last week.

[…]

Via https://libya360.wordpress.com/2024/05/28/surveillance-and-interference-israels-covert-war-on-the-icc-exposed/

US and Europe Take Steps to Vaccinate Workers Exposed to Bird Flu

CHICAGO/LONDON, May 27 (Reuters) – The United States and Europe are taking steps to acquire or manufacture H5N1 bird flu vaccines that could be used to protect at-risk poultry and dairy workers, veterinarians and lab technicians, government officials said, moves influenza experts say could curb the threat of a pandemic.
U.S officials last week said they were moving bulk vaccine from CSL Seqirus (CSL.AX)
, opens new tab that closely matches the current virus into finished shots that could provide 4.8 million doses of vaccine. European health officials told Reuters they were in talks to acquire CSL’s prepandemic vaccine.
Canadian health officials said they have met with GSK (GSK.L)
, opens new tab, maker of Canada’s seasonal flu shots, to discuss acquiring and manufacturing a prepandemic bird flu vaccine once its seasonal flu production capacity is freed up.
Other countries, including the UK, are discussing how to proceed on prepandemic vaccines, scientists said.
The actions follow the explosive spread of a new strain of bird flu that emerged in late 2020 and has caused unprecedented numbers of deaths among wild birds and domestic poultry and has begun infecting many mammal species.
In March, U.S. officials reported the first outbreak of the virus in dairy cattle, which has infected dozens of herds in nine states and two dairy workers. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has estimated that 20% of the U.S. milk supply shows signs of the virus, indicating a wider spread is likely.
Human exposures to the virus in poultry and dairy operations could increase the risk that the virus will mutate and gain the ability to spread easily in people.

Some healthcare analysts have raised their annual sales forecast for weight loss drugs by around 50% to about $150 billion by the early 2030s.

“All of our efforts need to be focused on preventing those events from happening,” said Matthew Miller, co-director of the Canadian Pandemic Preparedness Hub at McMaster University. “Once we have widespread infections of humans, we’re in big trouble.”
Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan, said she has been in discussions with U.S. and Canadian officials about using vaccines to protect workers following the virus’ spread into new mammal species.
[…]

What Are the Risks and Benefits of Each Vaccine?

Story at a Glance:

•The blatant dishonesty of our drug regulators throughout COVID-19 has led to many realizing they can’t trust that other recommended vaccines are “safe,” “effective” and “necessary.”

•Since many people have asked me about this topic, I’ve worked to produce an independent assessment of each recommended vaccine.

•This is a surprisingly challenging calculation to make which is extremely prone to the assessor’s bias, and remarkably, in many cases, the data we need to determine the risk and benefits of each vaccine accurately does not exist.

•In this article, I attempted to provide the best assessment I could of each CDC recommended vaccine. In some cases, it is very clear the risks outweigh the benefits of a vaccine, while in other cases, it is less clear. For those on the fence about vaccinating, I believe it is best to initially pay attention to avoiding the worst vaccines.

Note: due to the immense interest in the initial version of this post, I have significantly revised it and added a lot of initial information for those interested in this topic.

One of the common questions I get from readers is “Which vaccines should their kids get?” This is surprisingly difficult to answer because it requires accurately weighing the likelihood of an adverse event from a vaccination vs. the likelihood of suffering a complication from the disease that the vaccine would prevent you from getting, and each of those figures is a fairly complex calculation. If you do however begin to dig into it, you’ll often discover the data necessary to answer this question simply doesn’t exist and instead has been replaced with the blind declaration that each vaccine is “safe and effective.”

This touches upon what I believe is one of the greatest issues our society faces. Most human beings (regardless of their expertise) will selectively filter their perception of reality so that they ultimately only see what conforms to their pre-existing biases. In the case of vaccines, the media trains us to hyper-focus on the rare cases of an unvaccinated individual becoming ill from a disease a vaccine could have prevented while simultaneously ignoring the large numbers of people who develop severe or chronic complications from vaccines.

Fortunately, COVID-19 provided a once in a lifetime opportunity to actually answer this question, and in turn, we’ve been able to determine that:
•The COVID-19 vaccine has a significantly greater rate of complications than the disease it prevents.
•The vaccine is only partially effective in preventing COVID-19, and that efficacy rapidly declines with time.
•The large studies of the vaccine show once deployed, it makes things worse not better.

In short, it’s very hard to argue that the benefits of that vaccine outweigh its risks. Remarkably, this has not deterred all the federal health agencies from recommending (or mandating it), even to those who have no risk at all of dying from COVID-19 (e.g., children), irrespective of the public protest they’ve faced. This in turn raises a fairly simple question—does that conduct suggest we can blindly trust their recommendations on the other vaccines (which in almost all cases those agencies rubber stamp and push upon America)?

The Risks and Benefits of Vaccines

From looking into this question at length, much as is in the case for the COVID vaccines, I have concluded that for many of the widely used vaccines:

•Many of the benefits attributed to a vaccine (e.g., preventing the disease, preventing transmission of it, or preventing severe complications of it) are much less than the public (or the medical field) is led to believe.

•Many of the justifications used to justify vaccination are based on historical realities that no longer apply today.

•In cases where a vaccine actually “works” natural selection will quickly make the vaccine stop working.

•Side effects from vaccination are so frequent and varied that any assessment of a vaccine’s risks will inevitably miss many of the actual problems vaccination entails.

In short, I feel a very high bar must be met for vaccination, but as we saw with COVID-19, it often is not.

To accurately determine the risks and benefits of a vaccine, you need to consider all of the following

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To accurately determine the risks and benefits of a vaccine, you need to consider all of the following:

Disease Risk

If you review the vaccine schedule, very few of the diseases in it have both a significant likelihood that you will get them and a significant likelihood that they will develop into a severe condition. Many of the diseases believed to fall into this category are no longer an issue in the United States (e.g., polio or smallpox). Unfortunately, people who look at this question are often fixated on the past presentations of the disease when it was far more pathogenic or when we did not have a way to treat it. Let’s now look at some of the specific questions one might ask to evaluate this question.

 How likely is it for a person to get the disease?

Some diseases we vaccinate against are incredibly rare (e.g., tetanus or polio) while others are now non-existent (e.g., diphtheria).

How likely is the disease to cause a negligible, minor, moderate, severe, or fatal complication?

It is very important to distinguish between these categories because, for most infections, the risk of catching it and then subsequently getting a severe case of the condition is extremely low. For example, a Neisseria meningitidis infection (which can cause septic meningitis) is really bad and can progress very quickly, but also very rare for people to develop (one in ten people are asymptomatic Neisseria meningitidis carriers whereas approximately one in a million get septic meningitis from it each year).

Likewise, we vaccinate everyone against chickenpox despite the fact it almost never causes issues (e.g., only 1 in 100,000 children who get it die from it, many of whom are individuals with pre-existing immune suppression).

How likely is it that the severity of the disease can be improved with an existing medical treatment?

Most of the infections we vaccinate against (e.g., pertussis) are very easy to treat. Unfortunately, the focus is always on vaccinating against the disease rather than providing treatment for it (especially if the treatment is something more unorthodox than an antibiotic). In the case of COVID-19, while severe complications represent the minority of cases, they (and the more minor ones) can in most cases easily be prevented by early outpatient treatment. Unfortunately, the Federal government has refused to sanction effective treatments for COVID-19 and instead keeps pushing an endless number of unsafe and ineffective boosters for the disease.

How likely is it that you will have access to the necessary treatment before you get seriously ill?

While I have many criticisms of the vaccine approach, I have to acknowledge that this area is one of the strongest arguments for it. With rapidly progressing diseases, those in isolated areas, those unable to recognize their need to seek medical care, and those of limited economic means, often cannot get the necessary treatment for the disease before it is too late to prevent a severe complication. Hence, if the disease can be “prevented” through mass immunization, it mitigates the unfortunate circumstances that arise when care for a dangerous infection is not immediately available.

Vaccine Efficacy

How likely is the vaccine to be effective in preventing the disease, and does the presence of vaccine antibodies correlate with a decreased risk of the disease?

Many vaccines fail to do one or both of these. COVID-19 has provided the greatest red pill in history on this topic, especially since successive COVID-19 vaccines, despite increasing antibody levels, actually increase your risk of catching the disease.

[…]

How long does the vaccine’s protection last following immunization?

Many vaccines suffer from declining immunity, hence needing repeated boosters, which re-expose the recipient to the vaccine’s risks. COVID-19 again has provided the greatest red pill in history on this topic, as immunity from it wanes approximately three months after the most recent injection. Many other vaccines also suffer from this issue, which must be taken into account when assessing their risk to benefit ratio.

To illustrate, if something has a 10% chance of injuring you and only protects you for 3 months after which point it must be taken again, it’s hard to justify taking it, whereas if something has a 10% chance of injuring you but it protects you for life, the justification is stronger. Unfortunately, many vaccines that only provide temporary immunity are marketed in a manner that implies they provide permanent immunity (e.g., this is what was initially done with the COVID-19 vaccines).

How likely will it be for the vaccine to prevent you from getting the disease when you need to be protected?

The hepatitis B vaccine is routinely given at birth, and then twice more very early in life. This is nonsensical for two reasons. First, at the time of birth, infants lack an immune system that can mount a proper antibody response to the vaccine. Second, hepatitis B is spread by blood-to-blood contact (e.g., sharing heroin needles or having unprotected sex), both things are very unlikely to happen in early childhood. This is important because the hepatitis B vaccine typically only lasts for around 6-7 years (estimates vary). The best explanation I have seen for why the vaccine is given immediately following birth (despite being completely unjustifiable) is that it habituates parents to come in for regular well-child vaccination visits starting at two months of age.

[…]

Vaccine Side Effects

An explosion of chronic illness (particularly of neurological and autoimmune nature) in our society has paralleled the mass vaccination of society. This has been most apparent at three times in history: the period of the smallpox vaccines, after 1986 when Congress passed legislation to shield manufacturers from liability for producing dangerous vaccines (which led to a rapid increase in the number of childhood vaccinations and no motivation to ensure their safety), and following the COVID-19 vaccines. In each case, we’ve tragically become acclimated to an increase in baseline levels of chronic illness which never existed in the past, and we have simply assumed that the current disease burden is normal, when in reality it is not.

[…]

Does the vaccine priming your immune system to target one pathogen reduce its ability to respond to other pathogens or cancerous cells within the body?

Off-target immunity is a frequent but under-appreciated consequence of vaccination (discussed further here). As far as I know, the worst offender in this regard has been the COVID-19 vaccines, which have been linked to an explosion of cancers and unusual diseases typically only seen in immune-suppressed individuals.

[…]

Does the vaccine cause the immune system to attack the body and give rise to chronic illnesses?

All vaccines work by provoking the immune system to go into overdrive to attack the vaccine antigen that is present. The downside to this is that it typically also causes the immune system to attack other proteins in the vicinity (e.g., a mice study showed that mice develop allergies to pollen that is in the air at the time of their vaccination). Autoimmunity is especially likely to happen if the vaccine shares antigen sequences with human tissue (homologies) and contains a very strong adjuvant (the vaccine component that stimulates the immune system). Before the COVID-19 vaccines (which have a remarkable number of homologies with human tissue), Gardasil (the HPV vaccine) was the greatest offender here as it had to use a very strong adjuvant and had homologies to human tissue.

[…]

Via https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/what-are-the-risks-and-benefits-of