This week we examine our fear, Patrick writes a poem on the subject, and we listen to an elder from the past on the nature of fear, which we offer as critical listening for this present moment and immanent future.
Here’s the audio of Patrick’s poem, I am frightened by the culture I was born into (5 min listen). The text of which (with links) is below:
I am frightened by the culture I was born into
Yeah well my phone’s fucked and they won’t give me a new sim until I get vaxxed so I gave in, just got the first shot. I need the phone to log onto my computer for work. Work also breathing down my neck with a deadline of the 17th for declaring my ‘status’. So whatever. I hope the bastard thing kills me. (Melbourne academic, email to Patrick Jones, 1 December 2021)
I am frightened by the culture I was born into. I am scared of scientific reductionism. I fear the aggregation of poisons from industry and the increasing intransigence to heterodox thinkers by governments and universities. I am worried by what the expert class brings to Country. It distresses me few read global development as an extension of colonialism, and in its currency colonialism is again unseen by mob morality.
I feel ill the educated are uncritical of the State-Pharma nexus. I fear the results when doctors and researchers who raise red flags are demoted, disappeared and censored. I’m terrified by the many who don’t question and who in their shame attack the other others. I’m sickened by the profits of patriarchal medicine and how this profit blooms in biomes and inflames bodies. It distresses me medical journals have become “information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.” My gut turns with the lack of consent. Communitarian is bottom up, grassroots consensus not powering over the other from above. I’m dismayed by friends who, having been coerced – having to feed their families – now turn on me parroting, ‘White-supremacist! Conspiracy theorist! Anti-vaxxer!’
Even if I refuse directly what industry brings to Country, the rush now on gene engineering and editing means my family and community are likely not free from the spillovers, mutations and contaminants. Antidepressants are awash in the riparians of Country. Nanoplastics in every cell, every biota, and thus in our food, our bodies. Body and food sovereignty is dying, and how I’m reading it, the single greatest threat to life is the romanticisation of progress leading us all into digital prisons cheered on by the movement I’ve served my whole adult life – the Green-Left – until now. Diversity at all costs, except for Them, the deplorable contagions!
I’m scared that people like us, who will again refuse the coming assault of biotechs, will be further discriminated against. I’m alarmed and shocked at how few want to examine the coercion, intolerance and abuse of the past few years. I’m predicting a future of incarceration for those who resist Pharmacolonisation, and I feel no hope for a society that’s constructed “man-made mass death” as its modus operandi, and this fear is traumatising to me.
I will continue to serve the worlds of the world, and serve the communities of life who stand for life, and in doing so stand against the cult of Scientism, against “patriarchy’s project”. In this continuum of service I will name my fears alongside my shame and grief, and cry out my sacred, old briney waters into the rich, life-bringing humus of Mother Country, for anyone or anything connected to hear. I won’t wield my sword in war-like reaction, even in chains I will dance with it like my old people before me.
We’d like to add to this post a little zooming out. Here is the wisdom of Krishnamurti on the subject of fear, and the possibility of ending it (25 mins):
Your thoughts and feelings at this time are precious to us. What are your current fears? What processes do you employ to face them? And anything related, or not, is most welcome.
Sending spring renewal and warmth to you, or autumnal abundance (if you’re north), Dear Reader.
Dr Patrick Jones examines the current messaging promoting GMOs and reveals that decades of careful legal work concerning GMO use has been undermined over the past three years, green-lighting a potential surfeit of novel GMOs in both food and pharmaceutical products.
This research is dedicated to those who journey beyond the safety of their algorithmic and social niches.
Opening without closing
The world’s populations were informed by authorities, media and experts that Covid is a zoonotic or ‘natural’ virus and the vaccines designed to combat it would never be engineered to be biologically active in the body. It appears that at least one of these stories was untrue, possibly both. What follows is my research, which has scoured the virtual halls of medical journals, philanthropic, media, scientific and academic institutions, and independent websites over the past three years, to find out.
If I’m reading any of the following inaccurately I’d appreciate your considered feedback in the comments. Only I ask you first read through the post carefully, checking the links and what I’m referring to, and adding to this research positively. Please consider this a working document, a collection of useful links and, more broadly, an information ecology, which I hope will be of some use.
I’m not interested in culture war reductionism. I believe the integrity of the human genome and more-than-human genes are too important to bother with ideological warfare. In relation to Covid there has never been ‘scientific consensus’, as this research attests. There has just been voices elevated, voices disappeared, and loads of ‘conspiracies theories,’ some of which have become or are becoming conspiracy facts. I would appreciate hearing from anyone who is taking this subject seriously, regardless of how differently we might be reading the current moment, and I offer this research in this spirit.
For those not familiar with what a GMO is, here’s my short definition: Artificially manipulated in laboratories by processes of genetic engineering, GMOs are ostensibly live organisms whose genetic material has been altered to create fusions of plant, animal, bacteria or virus genes that do not occur in nature or through traditional selection techniques.
Before I get going, here’s a screen grab I’d like you to read from the Australian Government’s Office of the Gene Technology Regulator. I will speak to this later in the piece.
“We’ve all heard the conspiracy theories about COVID-19,” writes Lynas, “[n]ow a whole new set is emerging around COVID vaccines — and spreading as virulently as the pandemic they are meant to control.”
One of the prior conspiracies Lynas was referring to is the lab origin hypothesis. That is, Covid occurred via a genetically altered bat virus that had been engineered to become more pathogenic in people, and it therefore didn’t come from a wet market. The claim goes that this research, called gain-of-function, was carried out in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). “This one at least has the benefit of being plausible,” says Lynas.
Of course, it wasn’t Trump’s theory at all, it was the theory of a group of independent researchers who called themselves DRASTIC – Decentralised Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19. In 2020 DRASTIC triggered a global conspiracy theory which continues to gain traction, evidence and distain.
Perhaps it was expedient of certain factions of the media to paint the lab origin hypothesis as a far right wing conspiracy and associate it with Trump, whereas in actual fact those who first proposed it were anarchists from various fields including mycology, information science and neuroscience. Nonetheless, the lab origin theory was quickly labelled a right-wing conspiracy.
Understandably, from the view of governments and industries involved in such research, there would be a lot of pressure to make the lab origin hypothesis disappear, especially given the claim that US funding dollars was spent at WIV in order to carry it out. While few now deny this research was taking place in 2019 and in the years prior, the case for the WIV being the place of origin for Covid has been hotly contested.
Here’s an example of the firm ‘no’ camp: “The Venn-diagram circles are really starting to overlap between the anti-vaccine movement and the so-called lab-leak movement. I don’t think that’s a coincidence,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan. “Conspiracies beget conspiracies.”
Many scientists like Rasmussen were quick to attack the lab-made pathogen theory, including Peter Daszak who seemingly had skin in the game at the WIV. Three years on, however, more evidence is mounting and the lab-enhanced coronavirus theory is looking increasingly like a conspiracy fact.
Ryan Grim from The Interceptuncovered last month what other journalists have also found, confirming Professor Hamilton’s suspicions three years earlier. Back in May 2021 Hamilton strengthened his argument with a second SMH piece stating the case for a leak of a virus engineered in a Wuhan lab where the research occurring, “ostensibly, was to develop vaccines.”
From the view inside the pharmaceutical industry, vaccine research and development had to be the saviour, not the cause of the pandemic. That wouldn’t look good for an industry with an already long track record of fraudulence and harm.
The man who lead the attack on the lab engineered virus origin theory and pushed the zoonotic (natural) one is Peter Daszak, who leads EcoHealth Alliance, and was oddly enough a chief WHO investigator of the lab leak theory. Daszak and his team reported they found nothing at the WIV relating to engineering bat coronaviruses, yet in a 2016 New York Academy of Medicine conference on Pandemics Daszak boasted (1:16:50 – 1:17:30) of the genetic sequencing his “colleagues in China” were doing with bat coronaviruses, aimed at getting them to be “more pathogenic in people.” He was referring to his colleagues at the WIV.
“The research that the National Institutes of Health [NIH] terminated aimed to analyze the risk of coronavirus emergence and help in designing vaccines and drugs to protect us from COVID-19 and other coronavirus threats. In fact, genetic sequences of two bat coronaviruses that we discovered with this grant have been used as lab tools to test the breakthrough antiviral drug Remdesivir.” Bold type mine.
Remdesivir was slammed in Science for causing harm in Covid patients. The authors of the Science piece, Jon Cohen and Kai Kupferschmidt, wrote in late 2020, that “[q]uestions have also arisen about the potential of Remdesivir to do harm. WHO has a regular overview of possible adverse drug events related to COVID-19 treatments. In late August it noted a disproportionately high number of reports of liver and kidney problems in patients receiving Remdesivir compared with patients receiving other [repurposed] drugs for COVID-19.”
It now seems evident that the WIV, helped by US funding, was conducting risky gain-of-function research to engineer the genes of bat viruses to help design vaccines. Whether the WIV is the place of origin for Covid or not, freedom of information requests have shown that GMO viruses and GMO vaccines to combat them were being developed by scientists working on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry.
“In some ways, [the lab origin theory is] quite similar to the Hunter Biden laptop situation,” said Alina Chan, scientific adviser to the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. “Because the central or liberal media refused to cover it properly, it gave free rein to all of the right-wing media to report in the most polarizing, exaggerated way possible and inflame tensions.” Chan, rightly to my mind, calls out the liberal media’s role in the construction of a team sports approach to information.
In my conversations with Tyson Yunkaporta about this, both privately and publicly, I argued that fringe conspiracist groups have no real power by comparison to establishment media, which today acts as a propaganda wing for the state-corporate nexus.
In June this year, a month before Grim’s Intercept article, SMH journalist, Liam Mannix, declared the lab origin theory to be dead and buried in his, COVID-19 lab leak theory ends with a whimper, not a bang. In his piece, Mannix did not find relevant to detail and share the links to US funding for genetic engineering of viruses at the WIV.
Gain-of-function research had been off-shored in 2014 when President Obama banned it on US soil, in another case of ‘yes, but not in our backyard.’
Media and political capture?
It is important to note that behind Mannix’s payslip stands Peter Costello, former treasurer in the Howard government and now the Chairman of the Board at Nine Entertainment, the company that owns the SMH who Mannix is employed by. All of Nine’s extensive media from newsprint like the SMH and The Age, to radio and television stations has been uncritical of the pharmaceutical industry or the public health response throughout Covid. There may be good reason for this.
When Costello was Treasurer in John Howard’s right wing government in Australia, the chief pharmaceuticals advisor was former Pfizer Australia lobbyist, David Miles. Miles established Willard Public Affairs in 2011 after more than six years as Pfizer’s in-house political strategist. His bio on his website states:
“David has an extensive and influential network of political and media contacts including senior politicians and staff from all political parties at federal and state level.”
Why would the Chair of the board of Future Fund – Australia’s Sovereign Wealth Fund – who also presides over media outlets like the SMH and invests billions of dollars in big pharmaceutical corporations, permit negative press about those companies? Wouldn’t that potentially sabotage the investment portfolios he oversees?
The examples of Costello and Miles are what activists mean by ‘revolving doors’ between industry and government. These are not exceptional examples, rather today merely the way of doing business and government. Pharma lobbyists like Miles were typically on the right of politics before Obama’s presidency in the US. Since this time both sides of politics now receive pharmaceutical industry monies as ‘political donations’ in both Australia and in the US. Few have tracked this ethical slide in left-leaning parties.
Mark Lynas’ inflammatory attacks on heterodox thinkers and scientists who are questioning GMOs is an example of how some in the scientific media community work to create an impression of confidence for novel biotechnologies, irregardless of whether the confidence is warranted. However, probably more revealing than his pro GMO agenda is who is funding him.
If you scroll to the bottom of Lynas’ article you can find the institution that pays for his opinion, the institution which is also his publisher. “Alliance for Science, Operating Globally, Boyce Thompson Institute.”
Notably, two main areas of Bill Gates’ financial investments are GMO pharmaceuticals and GMO agriculture, especially targeted at the Global South. Gates-funded Lynas writes:
“As we have reported before at the Alliance for Science, the anti-GMO and anti-vaccine movements substantially overlap. These groups tend to share an ideology that is suspicious of modern science and fetishsize ‘natural’ approaches instead. Whatever ‘natural’ means.”
Perhaps “natural” simply means in this context not synthetic and much-more-than-human in intelligence? Gates is now the largest landholder in the US, and one of the most aggressive proponents against Indigenous lifeways and for the colonisation of land, biology and technologies, as Indigenous food sovereignty activist Vandana Shiva attests. Shiva rightly states a case for being suspicious calling modern science “patriarchy’s project.”
Shiva stated in a late 2022 podcast that “Jeffrey Sachs [the Lancet commission chair on the origins of Covid]… has come out so clearly, saying ‘it was a lab escape,’ … and you’re getting very conservative groups recognising this was genetically engineered and it’s an escape.” Shiva then broadens her argument stating, “it’s a tool of biological warfare to try to actually design viruses that harm… You don’t do it in a society where you don’t want to cause harm…” This is consistent with her views on GMOs for decades and has criticised Bill Gates for being reckless with genetics, continuing the work of Monsanto.
Claire Robinson from GM Watch and Mariam Mayet from the African Centre for Biodiversity write about Lynas that he, “is the product of an industry-led drive to influence agricultural policy in Africa, as part of a well-resourced public relations machinery supported in particular by the Gates Foundation, which funds the Alliance for Science to the tune of USD 12 million. The philanthropic capitalist model adopted by Gates is no more than a new form of imperialism, disguising extractivist approaches behind the argument that Africans are unable to find their own solutions to the agricultural challenges facing the continent.”
In a strategy to capture narratives, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been funding major media outlets around the world for the past decade, especially targeting left and liberal medias.
“Recipients of this cash include many of America’s most important news outlets,” writes Alan Macleod in late 2021 in the left-leaning, The Grayzone, which hasn’t receive funding from Gates. “[I]ncluding,” Macleod continues, “CNN, NBC, NPR, PBS and The Atlantic. Gates also sponsors a myriad of influential foreign organizations, including the BBC, The Guardian, The Financial Times and The Daily Telegraph in the United Kingdom; prominent European newspapers such as Le Monde (France), Der Spiegel (Germany) and El País (Spain); as well as big global broadcasters like Al-Jazeera.”
This goes some way to explain why those whose politics have generally critiqued state and industry collusion, especially the corruption in the state-Pharma nexus, were so fundamentally captured by the messaging reach of Gates, and now seemingly remain silent on these issues. This, for example, is how The Guardian presented the acceptance of Gates’ money for their Global Development site:
“This website is funded by support provided, in part, by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The journalism and other content is editorially independent and its purpose is to focus on global development.” Personally, when I read the term ‘global development’ I see global imperialism. Pharmacolonisation – the overprescription of pharmaceuticals rolled out by the state-Pharma nexus – is just one chapter of it.
While it’s permissible today to say such considerable money is neutral or not loaded, is it actually possible to reach journalistic neutrality given this circumstance?
Having witnessed The Guardian throughout the pandemic I would attest that their claiming editorial independence is not accurate. Bias exists. To my mind The Guardian today, on the subjects of public health and global development, is little more than a sophisticated promotions agency for Bill Gates‘s business interests, even referring to him as a philanthropist rather than an aggressive business tycoon who strategically uses philanthropy as both a tax screen and a propaganda tool for his capture of whatever narrative he might be pushing, such as saving the world’s poor.
“I’ve been vaccinated with these mRNA Covid-19 vaccines, and I’ve vaccinated thousands of patients, including my own children,” says Dr Fidge, who currently practices as a GP in Wangaratta. “But I have since become very concerned about the unregulated GMOs in these products, especially in the form of synthetic DNA contamination.”
It was reported that, “[t]he products relevant to the case include both the monovalent and the bivalent Covid-19 vaccines, COMIRNATY (Pfizer) and SPIKEVAX (Moderna). With reference to the legal definition of GMOs per the Gene Technology Act 2000, it is alleged the GMO components of these products are: 1. The LNP-modRNA complexes; and, 2. Synthetic DNA (modDNA) contamination, also in the form of LNP-modDNA complexes.”
The Guardian, The Age, the SMH or any other liberal media has notably not touched this story.
Lawyer Julian Gillespie writes in the InternationalJournal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research, that, “[d]ecades of sophisticated and detailed legislation created to safeguard humanity from exposure to genetically modified organisms was ignored or legislated away in an instant when SARS-CoV-2 arrived.”
Gillespie’s legal work reveals why the legal codes and details for operating novel synthetic sciences are important for the protection of human and ecological health.
“[My] article retraces the steps,” writes Gillespie in his The Canaries in the Human DNA Mine, “in what appears to be a sophisticated deception played out in legal language, technical scientific jargon, and by medical regulatory bodies acting as if they were serving public health.”
A new dawn of GMOs?
In his 2004 book, The Dawn of McScience, Richard Horton, current editor of the Lancet wrote, “Journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.” But today things appear to be much worse.
In early 2021, academics Justus Wesseler and Kai Purnhagen signalled enthusiastically that Covid would be an opportunity for GMO restrictions to be radically weakened in their paper, Is the Covid-19 Pandemic a Game Changer in GMO Regulation? In it they write that, “[t]he Covid‐19 pandemic has the potential to act as a much‐needed trigger for change. The European Parliament and Council agreed in Recital 17 of Regulation 2020/1043 that the approval procedure for GMOs (which aims at health and environmental protection) is ill‐suited to improving public health in the case of vaccination approval in the context of the Covid‐19 pandemic (Recital 17).” Wesseler and Purnhagen’s paper did not include a conflict of interest statement.
In mid 2021, GMO proponent Professor William Reville writing in The Irish TimesScience supplement stated that, “[t]he final nail in the anti-GMO coffin is likely to be the spectacular success of the genetic technology that has just developed several highly effective vaccines against Covid-19 within the miraculously short time frame of one year.”
An article in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) in 2021 questioned the role of financially invested organisations such as the Wellcome Trust and the Gates Foundation in Covid, and exposed their rarely examined conflicts of interest.
“What the pandemic is doing is buffing the reputation of organisations like Gates and Wellcome and the drug companies, when I don’t think they really deserve that buffing up,” says Joel Lexchin, professor emeritus of York University’s School of Health Policy and Management in Toronto. “I think they’re acting the way they always have, which is, from the drug companies’ point of view, looking after their own financial interests, and from the point of view of the foundations is pursuing their own privately developed objectives without being responsible to anybody but their own boards of directors.”
In early 2022, Lynas coauthored a paper in Taylor and Francis online journal, GM Crops and Food called, The state of the ‘GMO’ debate – toward an increasingly favorable and less polarized media conversation on ag-biotech? In the Disclosure Statement at the bottom of their paper, the authors stated there was, “No potential conflict of interest.” Yet in the funding statement they disclosed that The Cornell based Alliance for Science (where their research was conducted) was “funded in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.” Favourable media conversations are today massaged by big money. It is the greatest conspiracy in plain sight.
Former ABC science journalist, Maryanne Demasi, whose job was effectively rendered void after she reported negatively on Pfizer’s biggest drug revenue at the time, Lipitor, wrote this year a review of the evidence of harm caused by Pfizer’s Covid vaccine, called Serious adverse events from Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine are not “rare.” Regarding the often touted call that adverse events are rare, Demasi found, “there has been very little scrutiny of that claim by the media, and I could not find an instance where international agencies actually quantified what they meant by the term ‘rare’ or provided a scientific source.”
In her piece, Demasi cites a study in the journal Vaccine called Serious adverse events of special interest following mRNA COVID-19 vaccination in randomized trials in adults. The authors found that, “[t]he Pfizer trial exhibited a 36% higher risk of serious adverse events in vaccinated participants in comparison to placebo [unvaccinated] recipients.” Demasi recently published an article on two Pfizer executives’ intransigence to questions asked in the Australian parliament concerning vaccine transmission. They effectively ridiculed the democratic process, as well they might.
Gene therapy?
On the National Gene Technology Scheme webpage, the Australian government says Covid jabs, Moderna & Pfizer, are GMOs and they are gene therapies (accessed 16 August 2023). See image below. Yet, in a Guardian piece on podcaster Joe Rogan in early 2022, the global news outlet insinuated he was spreading misinformation about these jabs in August 2021 when he said, ‘mRNA vaccines are gene therapy.’ Actually, it looks clear 18 months later that The Guardian was spreading misinformation by creating an article that set out to smear Rogan from the headline – Joe Rogan’s Covid claims: what does the science actually say? Podcaster has made numerous disputed claims about virus, vaccines and lockdowns. It is little wonder why trust in podcasters like Rogan is surging and trust in legacy media like The Guardian is plummeting.
On their National Gene Technology Scheme webpage, the Australian government says Covid vaccines (Moderna & Pfizer) are GMOs and they are gene therapies. (Accessed 16 August 2023)
Independent Australian journalist, Rebekah Barnett, reported in her subscriber-funded Substack that, “[I]t is a serious criminal offence under the Gene Technology Act 2000 to sell or distribute GMO products in Australia without approval from the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator (OGTR). However, Pfizer and Moderna only sought approvals for their Covid vaccine products from the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), which is not authorised to approve GMO products in Australia.”
In her piece Barnett goes on to state that the Secretary of the Department of Health in Australia, Professor Brendan Murphy, denies Covid vaccines are gene therapies, yet the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator in the Department of Health and Aged Care states on its website that, “Several of the COVID-19 vaccines are either GMOs or made from GMOs.”
In Barnett’s article Professor Murphy addresses a letter from the Australian Medical Professionals Society (AMPS), “You have… incorrectly stated that mRNA vaccines are gene therapies – they are not under the legislative framework which governs the TGA and OGTR. mRNA vaccines do not enter the cell nucleus or interact with DNA and it is misleading to characterise them in this way.”
Well, this is confusing because on the Australian Government’s National Gene Technology Scheme’s (NGTS) website they write “[a]n example of GMOs as medicines is gene therapy, and they list as examples Pfizer’s and Moderna’s Covid products (see above image). Though, on the other hand, the Genomics Education Programme (GEP) in the UK, contradict the Australian Government’s OGTR and NGTS, arguing in 2021, when people were making up their minds about whether to take the Covid shots, published “Why mRNA vaccines aren’t gene therapies.” So, what’s the truth?
Contrary to Professor Murphy’s unsupported claim that mRNA vaccines do not enter the cell nucleus, a Swiss study, with no reported conflicts of interest, found that Pfizer’s vaccines indeed cross the cell line barrier. The authors state, “[o]ur study is the first in vitro study on the effect of [Pfizer’s] COVID-19 mRNA vaccine BNT162b2 on human liver cell line. We present evidence on fast entry of BNT162b2 into the cells and subsequent intracellular reverse transcription of BNT162b2 mRNA into DNA.” Bold type mine.
Discussing the claim that mRNA-based vaccines cannot alter genomes, Tomislav Domazet-Lošo from the Laboratory of Evolutionary Genetics, Division of Molecular Biology at the Ruđer Bošković Institute in Croatia, finds that the vaccine mRNA genome integration risk studies are “brief and surprisingly incomplete,” and “does not consider the accumulated knowledge on the biology of retroposition.” He states that this is “even more puzzling if one considers previous work on the molecular and evolutionary aspects of retroposition in murine and human populations that clearly documents the frequent integration of mRNA molecules into genomes, including clinical contexts.”
Most tellingly, in a speech by Bayer’s head of Pharmaceuticals at the World Health Summit in October 2021, Stefan Oelrich says, “…the mRNA vaccines are an example for… cell & gene therapy… If we had surveyed [populations and asked:] ‘would you be willing to take gene or cell therapy and inject it into your body?’ we would probably have had a 95% refusal rate.”
In a recent American Society of Gene + Cell Therapy report, the authors boast that, “[i]n the first quarter of 2023, an mRNA vaccine was approved for Covid-19 prophylaxis in China, bringing the number of RNA therapy approvals to 22.” From inside the gene and cell therapy industry in the US, it doesn’t appear anyone has a problem naming Covid mRNA vaccines as gene therapies. So why the contradictions? Is it related to Oelrich’s prediction that few would line up for them?
If you conduct an internet search for “why are people still suspicious of GMOs” the first several pages that appear are all those medias mentioned above that Bill Gates funds all apparently ‘debunking’ the concerns. This is not an accident, this is how Big Tech interacts with Big Ag and Big Pharma to massage the message.
In June this year, Hélène Banoun from the French Institute of Health and Medical Research, wrote in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences, “[t]he mode of action of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines should classify them as gene therapy products (GTPs), but they have been excluded by regulatory agencies. Some of the tests they have undergone as vaccines have produced non-compliant results in terms of purity, quality and batch homogeneity. The wide and persistent biodistribution of mRNAs and their protein products, incompletely studied due to their classification as vaccines, raises safety issues.”
Stephanie Seneff, a Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory – who Lynas has attacked as an anti-GMO/anti-vaxxer in one of his Gates-funded articles – draws on Pfizer’s own study to point out that their Covid injections, which don’t stop transmission, are in fact potentially biologically capable to spread transmission. She writes in the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research:
“A Phase 1/2/3 study undertaken by BioNTech on the Pfizer mRNA vaccine implied in their study protocol that they anticipated the possibility of secondary exposure to the vaccine (BioNTech, 2020). The protocol included the requirement that ‘exposure during pregnancy’ should be reported by the study participants. They then gave examples of ‘environmental exposure during pregnancy’ which included exposure ‘to the study intervention [the vaccine] by inhalation or skin contact.’ They even suggested two levels of indirect exposure: ‘A male family member or healthcare provider who has been exposed to the study intervention [the vaccine] by inhalation or skin contact then exposes his [unvaccinated] female partner prior to or around the time of conception.’”
So who do we trust here? Lynas, who is writing from the perspective of big industries and funded by one of the biggest investors of vaccines in the world, Bill Gates? Or do we trust the interpretation of Pfizer’s own trial reports examined by a skeptic academic who has so much to loose by remaining a heterodox thinker? The weaponised term ‘anti-vaxxer’ is akin today to how the Howard-Blair-Bush Jr moment turned every Muslim on the planet into a terrorist. The media amplified it. People bought it. The US war industry flourished, again.
An uncritical compliance to the pro Vax and pro GMO camps will lead to more suffering, othering and segregation.
Transmission and human rights
In November 2020 Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, speaking on Gates-funded PBS in the US, said that (at 12:55mins) “If you don’t vaccinate, you’re becoming the weak link that will help this deadly virus replicate.”
This comment and other misleading comments like it spawned the most horrendous hate speech against unvaccinated and vaccine-questioning people in 2021-2022 especially, but it continues today. It gave unbridled permission, said a human rights lawyer friend of mine, for people to become discriminatory.
Philosopher Noam Chomsky in October 2021, speaking on the left-leaning Primo Radical YouTube channel, equated people not stopping at a red traffic light as the same selfish people who refuse the novel Covid injections. He said, (at 4:29mins) “If you want to feel free to kill others, go somewhere else.” The journalist then stated that Covid could still be spread by vaccinated people, to which Chomsky confidently stated, (at 4:46mins) “sorry, the probability is extremely low.” He went on to say the unvaccinated, (at 9:00mins) “should have the decency to remove themselves from the community, if they refuse to do that then measures have to be taken…”
Here in the corporate state of Victoria the unvaccinated were removed from the community. In the Hepburn shire, where I live, unvaccinated people were prohibited from entering municipal places (libraries, town halls and swimming pools) and barred from cafés and restaurants, and many other places and events.
“A Pfizer spokesperson confirmed to Reuters Fact Check that the company was not asked by regulators to assess the transmission question in the original trials of the vaccine (known as BNT162b2 while in development and later marketed as Comirnaty).” This raises questions about government’s regulatory offices and their influencers insistent on mandates and promoting discriminatory behaviours.
So, with what authority was Chomsky speaking? The human rights that were subjugated for a vaccine that may have provided some fleeting personal but little community benefit, is now important to understand to prevent these kinds of violations occurring again.
So, what now?
Did Bill Gates let the cat out of the bag at The Munich Security Conference in February 2022, when he said (at 7:07mins), “[t]he virus itself… is a type of vaccine, that is it creates both B-cell and T-cell immunity, and it’s done a better job getting out to the world’s population than we have with vaccines.”? Isn’t that just what people call natural immunity, Bill?
Before Covid the accepted response to pandemics had been, more or less, allow healthy normals to build herd immunity naturally while focus the protection on vulnerable populations. Senior scientists who stood by this were ridiculed, labelled and shouted down by those pushing for mass vaccination, and scientific attacks on natural immunity fired up just as the rollouts began, amplifying public fear ostensibly to push mandates and thus sell more shots.
Our family contracted Covid once in the past three years. We are fully unvaccinated, yet all around us people who have received three or more shots have contracted the virus many times. In the ABC article, Ten positive tests and counting: The mystery of why some people just keep catching COVID, the Australian government reporter, without irony, sets out to give comfort to those who are still investing in the government’s public relations exercise. As one meme recently said, if after three years you are not suspicious...
For many people across the political spectrum, trust in large pharmaceutical corporations, public health institutions and establishment medias has been severely broken. People did not give their consent to GMO Covid vaccines, which led the CDC to change its definition of what a vaccine is. No longer does a vaccine have to offer ‘immunity’ but merely stimulate an ‘immune response,’ which could be read as either positive or negative, supposedly. Most did not give their consent to receive a gene therapy treatment or, going further back, did not give their consent for GMO crops to infiltrate their environments, contaminate their food and produce super weeds and mutant crops.
We don’t know what the effects of GMO pharmaceuticals will do in the body, across bodies or in the environment over time, and I’m not confident there’s an independent scientific environment resourced enough to find out. Such is the reality of the corporatised state. The precautionary principle has been in erosion for decades, but Covid took it to another level.
In an era where many once reputable media outlets have been manipulated by outside funding operatives tethered to industry and/or questionable ‘philanthropic’ organisations, confidence in new scientific tools is increasingly less about real world research and more about appearances, data manipulation and spin doctoring. This is not a new thing but rather an old thing on super steroids. As a result the world’s populations, human and much more so, are facing a likely oversupply and overprescription of GMOs in many forms.
Leftists and liberal progressives, who before 2011 were generally those leading the critique against GMOs and Pharma intransigence, would be well advised to return their criticality to the subject of GMOs in both food and pharmaceuticals, and address the real world threats of them by first examining what really took place over the past three years, and examine who is behind the media they are supposedly being informed by.
The pressing question is ‘do we trust big money in science?’ The evidence for doing so doesn’t seem very strong. And given the Australian Government has drafted a misinformation and disinformation bill without first addressing its own contradictory, incorrect and at times totalitarian messaging over the last three years, this likely signals more draconian and discriminatory measures are on their way. Now, more than ever, we need to be vigilant about the corporate state that won’t regulate itself.
Over to you, Dear Readers.
*
Dr Patrick Jones’ critical work spans the ecological humanities. His poetry has been widely anthologised, recently in Groundswell, The Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets 2007-2020, and his critical-collaborative work with Artist as Family was featured as a chapter in the newly published Artists and the Practice of Agriculture (Routledge 2023). He continues to argue that the arts is where broad-ranging societal critique is at its strongest, integrating cosmological, psychosocial, scientific, ethic, cultural and human complexes. He also argues that the deliberate erosion of the arts in the neoliberal universities is a strategy to silence dissent and kill off the heterodoxy in the culture.
We’re feeling pretty despondent about the forthcoming election in the state of Victoria. None of the three major parties have admitted to the harm they helped implement on behalf of the state-pharma nexus. This is unsurprising given the Censorship and Suppression of Covid-19 Heterodoxy.
Yep, many have moved on. The pandemic is over. Except pharmacolonisation hasn’t moved anywhere, it’s digging in and further dragging public institutions and political parties down with it. No Lives Matter is the true creed of the state-pharma nexus.
But out of the despondency comes full moon creativity. Here are three posters you might like to print and paste up in your neighbourhood. While they’ve been crafted with the local state election (here) in mind, feel free to cut and paste to create your own fit-for-purpose paste ups. If you click on each image they’ll take you to a downloadable PDF.
Labor drives the pharmacolonisation program in this state,
Liberals follow along,
and The Greens believe they can grow their influence by rolling out neoliberalism in step with Labor and Liberal.
Written and authorised by Artist as Family in Djaara Mother Country.
What is your message for the politicians and party faithful in the political parties in your area? Accountability? Honesty? Transparency? Apology? What sort of things can we all be doing to ensure that the medical and political tyranny that transpired never occurs again?
Please feel free to post a link to your own creations, messages, letters to editors or pollies, paste ups or notices. As an example, this sign appeared at the entrance of a local restaurant in our town recently…
A collective-consensual grassroots approach to a systemic crisis is always desirable over narrow self-interest, but when a ‘collectivist’ approach is forced onto populations from the top down, and big money is involved, human rights abuses will inevitably follow.
Mandate critical
The discourse concerning the pandemic response for many in Left and ‘progressive’ political camps has fallen into two monocultural fields – you’re either for The Science™ or you’re a Trumpist-conspiracist. Such reductionism has not only contributed to human rights abuses, it has also helped usher in a bleak new period of authoritarianism and unprecedented surveillance.
If the Left isn’t performing its usual tasks of exposing industry capture, revolving door corruption and human rights abuse, who is going to do that work? Throughout the Covid period much of this work has been carried out by those more likely identifying politically as Centrist or on the Right. This has left the Left somewhat groundless with no other place to go than become the inadvertent fan club of aggressive medical globalisation. Rather than examine this phenomenon critically, many in Leftist circles have doubled-down and become apologists for some of the most powerful and ethically dubious corporations in the world.
An article recently written by retired academic Terry Leahy, published in Arena Quarterly #9, exposes all the typical strawman arguments the Left has promulgated about mandate critical dissidents from across the political spectrum. Leahy’s Wayward growths: Permaculture, Low Tech and the ‘Freedom Movement’ is riddled with inaccuracies, conceit and falsities, and is illustrative of a broader Left ideology concerning the pandemic response. Few Leftists have adequately critiqued the pandemic response let alone The Left’s Covid failure.
Leahy refers to an article published in Medium by Heather Jo Floresas a solid reference for his argument attacking the co-originator of permaculture, Dr David Holmgren. However, Flores’ writing was so slanderous and libellous that she deleted all records of it from the internet. Leahy not only omits the fact it was taken down by Flores shortly after it was published, but also omits to mention the backlash for it was overwhelming, regardless of what side of the mandate debate a reader was on. Leahy instead suggests Flores’ writing on this subject was widely supported and is still circulating. This is untrue on both counts.
The science isn’t in regarding masks, lockdowns and vaccines. Anyone who has followed the scientific arguments for and against these enforced measures knows this. For example, a large Danish randomised controlled trial in late 2020 showed there was 1.8 percent of those in the mask group and 2.1 percent of those in the control group became infected with SARS-CoV-2 within a month, with this 0.3-point difference not being statistically significant. So what has been the point of mandating leaky masks and ‘vaccines’?
Leftists generally, but not exclusively, have become some of the most enthusiastic users of the shame label, ‘anti-vax,’ rather than championing the rights of dissidents who have been mask, lockdown and/or vaccine mandate critical. By prioritising base-behaviour language such as ‘anti-vax’ over more nuanced language such as ‘mandate critical,’ the Left has significantly abandoned its post.
Referring to the forthcoming mandatory mask-wearing laws for those Germans who cannot show on-the-spot authorities their current ‘vaccination’ status or ‘test’ results, Berlin-based playwright and satirist, C J Hopkins writes, “What is happening is, a new official ideology is being imposed on society. It is being imposed on society by force. And now, those of us who refuse to conform to it will be ordered to walk around in public wearing visible symbols of our non-conformity. I’m sorry, but the parallels are undeniable.”
Leahy enthusiastically employs the ‘anti-vax’ shame label rather than investigate whether vaccine mandates constitute human rights abuse or are indeed legal. The pejorative use of ‘anti-vax’ is akin to how the term ‘terrorist’ was applied to any person who identified as Muslim in the Howard-Bush-Blair era. Back then this shaming tactic mostly came from the Right.
As Glen Greenwald argues, “The term “anti-vax” has expanded so widely that even vaccine advocates, such as [Jeremy] Corbyn and trade unions, are now included by virtue of defending bodily autonomy.” For anyone who champions human rights, base-behaviour language such as ‘anti-vax’ should sound alarm bells, especially if it is being promoted by government, in news media and in critical journals like Arena Quarterly.
Ministries of truth
Leahy’s views about which news medias can be trusted shines a light on who has shaped his thinking over the past few years. He suggests to his readers that in order to get to the truth about the pandemic they would be best served by taking out subscriptions with The Age, The Guardian and/or the New York Times. I have also read these medias throughout the pandemic and referenced them alongside many others, as well as hundreds of papers, opinion pieces, scientific articles and commentators from across political, scientific and social spectrums.
In Artist as Family’s video, How do we solve a problem like the unvaccinated?, we take a critical look behind the curtain of Fairfax media, and understand why The Age has been so enthusiastically bugling the same tune as the global vaccine lobby.
The Age is owned by Nine Entertainment, and the former conservative politician that is most influential on that governing board is Peter Costello, who is also Chairman of the Board of Guardians of the Australian Future Fund where he has, in recent years, invested in pharmaceutical companies to the tune of AUS$2 billion, including equity holdings in Pfizer worth AUS $188M. Costello is a managing partner of BKK Partners, a boutique corporate advisory group run by former Goldman Sachs JBWere managers, and in 2008 Costello was appointed to the World Bank’s Independent Advisory Board.
When we read any Fairfax media today we are duty bound to know who the influencers are behind the curtain. This example of conflict of interest – that the politically savvy board chair of Nine/Fairfax also invests in Pfizer – is what Leftists should ordinarily consider a revolving door between state and corporate interests, and a place of likely corruption. It’s the kind of subject Left authors and readers would have traditionally scrutinised.
It’s depressing and frightening to witness the level of capitulation among Leftists who have instead championed the paternalistic white boys of the pandemic – Gates, Fauci, Bourla, Schwab, Biden, Andrews, Trudeau, Macron, Morrison et al – and attacked the likes of Artist as Family and Holmgren who have nothing to gain or maintain – except our integrity – for signalling likely corruption and deceit.
Alex Berenson, a former New York Times journalist who reported on the pharmaceutical industry for that media outlet, has been another source we’ve followed who gives an antithesis view to his old employer. Berenson, who The Atlantic labelled The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man, has been consistently more accurate on the subject than any writer on that so-called ‘progressive’ platform. On 2 August, 2021 Berenson was removed from Twitter for posting:
“It doesn’t stop infection. Or transmission. Don’t think of it as a vaccine. Think of it – at best – as a therapeutic with a limited window of efficacy and terrible side effect profile that must be dosed in advance of illness. And we want to mandate it? Insanity.”
The truth of this tweet has, arguably, become undeniable and a few weeks ago Berenson was reinstated on Twitter after that platform settled in court with him, and his tweet was reinstated. No evidence could be found to maintain this was “misleading,” though The Atlantic or any other corporate media who slandered him, haven’t as yet apologised for the misinformation they promulgated. The “safe & effective” misinformation campaign has rightly eroded the public’s trust.
Until the pandemic, in my naivety, I was unaware of any conservative like Berenson who could be bothered to expose regulatory capture or corruption in the pharmaceutical industry, which to my mind is structurally Right wing. Leftists like Western Sydney University’s Paddy Rawlinson were the ones sounding alarm bells with pieces like Immunity and Impunity: Corruption in the State-Pharma Nexus (2017).
From Artist as Family’s Covid research it has become clear the vaccine lobby has been working hard for at least two decades to silence any public debate, even concerning what should be fairly uncontroversial – overprescription and the profit motivations for that. As we investigated in our November 2021 video, Fact check: Covid vaccines work, they are safe and are stopping transmission, Pfizer and other pharmaceutical companies wine and dine doctors and nurses around Australia, paying for conferences and lunches. This is what is meant by industry capture. We argue throughout our Covid video series that industry capture is in such plain sight today that no one even sees it.
Israeli Professor Shmuel Shapira MD MPH, who received three Covid jabs before being seriously injured by his third, is now attempting to raise concerns about Pfizer’s synthetic biology. Shapira was a leading scientific champion of the Covid vaccines when he served as Director of the Israel Institute for Biological Research between 2013 and 2021.
Twitter, who has no expertise in biology let alone vaccinology, is now censoring Shapira as it has with countless antithesis doctors, medical scientists and science journalists over the past two years. Twitter recently threatened Shapira with being removed from the platform if he did not delete a post which stated: “Monkey pox cases were rare for years. During the last years a single case was documented in Israel. It is well established the mRNA vaccines affect the natural immune system. A monkey pox outbreak following massive covid vaccination: *Is not a coincidence.”
You won’t find Shapira’s perspective, or others like his, shared in The Age, The Guardian or the NYT, although we did report in one of our Covid videos an article that got through the editorial gates of the NYT back in December 2021 titled, Israel Considers 4th Vaccine Dose, but Some Experts Say It’s Premature, where the journalist reported that some senior Israeli scientists are warning too many shots might actually harm the body’s ability to fight the Covid-19 virus, leading to “immune system fatigue” and thus making the vaccinated more susceptible to Covid. We are surely seeing this unfolding now in the most vaccinated countries.
Since 2010 The Guardian has accepted at least US$13 million from vaccine investor and promoter Bill Gates, according to Gates’ own website. Money with which The Guardian was able to set up their Global Development site for the express purpose of communicating global health and development awareness and analysis. Did Leahy ask his readers to observe a possible conflict of interest between someone who profits from new vaccines being the same person who is giving significant amounts of money to a global media organisation supposedly reporting on them without bias?
So rather than promoting these three media platforms and entertainment businesses – The Age, The Guardian and the NYT – shouldn’t Leahy be inviting his readers to investigate the long demise of them as reputable places for journalism? As the ‘vaccines’ came into the public sphere, the NYT insisted they would stop people from getting Covid. President Biden, who has had four doses and contracted Covid twice, said the same, and worse, when he called it “…a pandemic of the unvaccinated”. Instead of this politically motivated rhetoric being denounced by Leahy’s ministry of truth, they parroted and amplified it.
The NYT radically exaggerated the efficacy of the Covid jabs, but instead of investigating who was behind the poor scientific modelling their journalists referred to, the fraudulent trial set-ups and data recording, and what potential corruption was occurring in the public health institutions that have so evidently lied to the public, the NYT instead double-downed on the scapegoated fringe – those of us refusing to participate in this global experiment. The Age and The Guardian followed suit, and in his Arena Quarterly pieceLeahy unsurprisingly carries on with this same position.
Furthermore, the ABC has also been a grave disappointment. Emergency porn is the ABC’s specialty and for fires and floods and like-crises they have grown a dependable track record over the decades. However, their Covid analysis broke our trust. The slow demise of the ABC has occurred through increased levels of political interference, more so from the coalition but from Labor as well, in Labor’s failure to protect the ABC’s independence.
A former ABC investigative science reporter, Dr Maryanne Demasi, who was silenced for exposing the lucrative overprescription of statins from the pharmaceutical industry, namely Pfizer, has been one of many independent sources we’ve followed throughout Covid to aid our research. We refer to a little of her research in various videos though feature her work in our December 2021 video, Can we trust the ABC and the FDA? where we expose conflict of interests with senior ABC Covid spokesman Dr Norman Swan in relation to his medical advertising and his Chemist2U pharmaceutical delivery businesses.
Industrial medicine, contiguous with industrial civilisation itself, is not and can never be sustainable because it is almost completely reliant on non-renewable materials. Why would anyone invest in medicines that ultimately have no long-term future for populations, thus making us dependent on therapeutics that probably won’t be around after the short life of the next and final mining boon that is the 4th Industrial Revolution? Why would we not take an innate immunity approach to SARS-CoV-2 for the majority of people for which the disease is mild and thus develop herd protection through engagement and participation with the living of the world, rather than go along with the domination (or mass mining) approach to medicine?
The far Right strawman
In his Arena Quarterly piece Leahy attempts to bind any Covid antithesis thinking to the far Right. He uses Artist as Family and David Holmgren as examples, though doesn’t refer to a single argument or investigative video of ours, and barely quotes from Holmgren. Leahy instead amplifies a single social media post of a photo of David Holmgren, permaculture elder Su Dennett and our youngest son Blackwood attending an anti-mandate march in Melbourne, holding a large permaculture banner.
Early on in his piece Leahy himself admits, “It would take weeks of research to consider all of Holmgren’s points…” referring to Holmgren’s extensive essay, Pandemic Brooding: Can the Permaculture movement survive the first severe test of the energy descent future? (Sept 2021). So, rather, Leahy “[b]oiled” it down for his reader, removing the complexity thinking and nuance that this subject so obviously requires and deserves, and putting it in the same ideological camp as the far Right.
This is why we consider Leahy’s article a personal attack; it doesn’t want to engage with the ideas. At least this is how it appears to those of us subject to his discriminations. But before beginning to write this piece, Ulman and I wanted to be sure we were reading him correctly, so we invited Leahy to discuss his contention with us in a face to face public video. Our intention was to take the reductive argument out of it and open up to generative discussion. Regrettably, Leahy declined.
Born out of social media, cancel culture feeds on insults and attacks and abhors engagement and generative debate. The impact of this on slower forms of media is evident. In Leahy’s attempt to conflate Holmgren’s and our antithesis thinking as being somehow associated with the far Right, he radically departs from any reasonable logic.
This attack on those of us well-versed in critiquing state-corporate collusion, and more specifically the revolving door between government, Big Pharma and the medical industry, cannot be taken seriously. Rachel Goldlust is another who combines social media hubris and poor scholarship to craft hit pieces on antithesis permaculturists including Artist as Family, even before the pandemic. Like Leahy, Goldlust doesn’t bother to interview the subjects she attacks.
To sharpen his attack, Leahy draws on the anti-semitic threads of the far Right yet chooses to leave out that two of the three of us he attacks are Jewish – Holmgren and Ulman. Additionally he doesn’t want to inform his readers that we have been vilified throughout this pandemic in parallel ways to political dissidents, Roma and Jews of 1933-1935 Nazi Germany. We’ve experienced economic enclosures and social stigmatisation, and we’ve been blocked from entering public swimming pools, public libraries and our local council’s public events.
Not forcing you, just removing your rights until you comply,is one of many placards we made for a small protest we held outside our town hall when we ‘unvaccinated’ residents were locked out of this year’s International Women’s Day (IWD) event. Ulman herself has served on the organising committee of the annual IWD event, and Su Dennett is an inductee on the IWD honour roll for her work locally in the community and her work globally as an environmental pioneer. Our video, Forbidden women – International Women’s Day in segregated Australia, captures some of the pain felt by we deplorables, and remains another historical marker of the medical apartheid, segregation and discrimination we’ve experienced. Another placard at that protest read, Please stop othering the control group.
Lab leak
The evidence that Covid was lab-engineered through joint US and Chinese funding and accidentally escaped the Wuhan Institute of Virology from where the research was being conducted, is greater now than for any other likely origin story. Not that you’d know it in Australia, or at least in the medias Leahy quotes as reputable.
That is, with the exception of two opinion pieces published in the Sydney Morning Herald by Professor Clive Hamilton back in May and July 2021 respectively. Hamilton states back then that the virus most likely came from the Wuhan lab, just a stone’s throw from the Wuhan wet market. In referring to the gain-of-function research that many world virologists knew was taking place at this lab, Hamilton states “[t]he ambition, ostensibly, was to develop vaccines.” In other words the objective was to make a bat coronavirus intentionally pathogenic in humans and work out how to make vaccines to counter them. Since Hamilton’s opinion pieces were published, Lab Leak theory has been essentially shut down in this country, but in almost every other continent it is still the most plausible theory.
In our provocative Covid coming out video, Jab the kids, we end with a 2016 clip of Peter Daszak, director of New York based EcoHealth Alliance, who worked closely with the Wuhan Institute of Virology to secure US government funding for the research. In this clip Daszak boasts about gain-of-function (1:17:03) research that he refers to as “sequencing” being conducted by his “colleagues in China.” He states at the conference, “…we found other coronaviruses in bats, a whole host of them, and some of them looked very similar to SARS[-CoV-1]. So we sequenced the spike protein, the protein that attaches to cells, then we…well, I didn’t do this work but my colleagues in China did the work… you create super particles, you insert the spike protein from those viruses, simply bind to human cells, and each step of this you move closer and closer to: this virus could really become pathogenic in people.”
A member of the audience then asks Daszak and the panel whether this type of research could lead to a man-made pandemic.
Four years later in 2020 the WHO put Daszak in charge of an investigative team to research whether Covid originated in the Wuhan lab. Daszak reported that there was no correlation with Covid-19 and denied gain-of-function research was being conducted there. He also put together a Lab Leak hit piece in the esteemed medical journal, The Lancet, and got a handful of virologists to sign it. The piece originally omitted Daszak’s conflicts of interest and tried to turn the heat away from Lab Leak theory, calling anyone who questioned the zoonotic origin theory a conspiracy theorist.
If Covid came from a lab, can we imagine how much better the response to the pandemic would have been if scientists had access to the gene sequencing that took place in Wuhan that Daszak was boasting about in 2016? But by acknowledging that all fingers point to Lab Leak would require an almighty admission – that science itself caused the pandemic. In a culture where science is the unspoken orthodox religion of the day, that isn’t going to happen without a whole lot of resistance, and probably explains why Lab Leak theory is still consistently attacked.
Rather than critique dubious research projects occurring in contemporary science that few of us have consented to, a scapegoat class needed to be developed to take the heat and turn peoples’ attentions away from the likely source of the pandemic.
Vandana Shiva insightfully states in the documentary The Seeds of Vandana Shiva (2021), “[w]hat we call science is a very narrow patriarchal project for a very short period of history.” For those of us reading the pandemic response as smug paternalism that has benefitted disaster corporatism, the wisdom of her quote resonates.
Breadcrumbing
Leahy utilises the twisted allegory ‘breadcrumbing’ in his attempt to describe how people are wooed by the far Right. In the actual folk story of Hansel and Gretel, where the allegory originates, the bread crumbs signal a rites of passage, a stepping into the underworld of the witch, with gifts of foresight that Hansel initiates. While the forest birds ruin his path making by eating the bread crumbs that he’s left behind, there is autonomy, and an independent child-led approach that Gretel goes on to develop in order to help them escape the incarceration of the witch.
So in the story the children are not lured by breadcrumbs but by the gingerbread house of the witch. It’s interesting to note here that Pfizer was founded by two men in 1849 – a confectionist and an entrepreneur-chemist, ushering in a new era of drug luring and profiteering. Leahy’s use of the twisted breadcrumbing allegory is akin to the same poor scholarship as his ‘anti-vax-far-Right’ polemic.
Because I don’t live in a world where medical science is free from the powerful influences of big money, and because I’m a farmer-gardener who understands that overdosing a soil ecology with any given nutrient or mineral can have disastrous effects, let alone bringing synthetics into that biome, I believe in bodily autonomy. I also believe in the rights of children to be free from the clutches of globalised corporatism and nefarious billionaires. I believe in the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship, and Do no harm as the first and foremost principle of medicine.
Leahy’s doctoral work – his gateway to a career in academia – perhaps gives more context for why our values part ways so radically. Leahy’s thesis, Negotiating Stigma: Approaches to Intergenerational Sex (1991), which is now only available on the International Pedophile and Child Emancipation (Ipce) forum site, has been removed from all records at UNSW, from where he was awarded his doctorate.
Leahy advances pedophilia emancipation and describes the taboo of pedophilia as a “social construction” that is unfairly “stigmatised,” rather we should call it “intergenerational sex.” His research posits that the social stigmatisation of pedophilia traumatises the child rather than adult sexual interests infiltrating the child or adolescent, and he exclusively interviews adults who speak of “positive experiences” of pedophilia reflecting back to when they were children or adolescents encountering “intergenerational sex.” He continues this activism in, Sex and the Age of Consent: The Ethical Issues (1996), where he finds “samples” in his personal “social network” who have had positive “child/adult” sexual experiences.
Some politics of permaculture
At a book launch in Castlemaine earlier this year for Leahy’s, The Politics of Permaculture, where David Holmgren, Su Dennett, Artist as Family and others were refused entry due to our medical choices, I asked Leahy and the associated panel (from out on the footpath), whether they thought the Left could take any responsibility for the growth in the far Right? Leahy didn’t bother to answer, however Pam Nilan, who was simultaneously launching her book Young People and the Far Right, gave it a stab though effectively didn’t answer the question either, saying, “I’m not sure I answered your question; I couldn’t really hear you.”
Artist as Family documented this event in Castlemaine in our video, Some politics of permaculture (from inside and outside the tent). It appears the Arena Quarterly piece Leahy assembled after this event is an attempt to keep us perennially out on the footpath when in actual fact, for the preservation and health of the Left, and society more broadly, folk like us need to be inside the tent alongside many other diverse thoughtsmiths from across the political and cultural spectrums, to avoid the tent becoming an echo chamber.
The more difficult project now, especially for the Left, is attending to the human rights abuses that have occurred throughout the pandemic because of the state-corporate collusion, the state overreach, and the absence of critical Left and progressive investigations. We look forward to Arena Quarterly and other Left journals and progressive medias addressing these abuses in the future with proper scholarship and commitment to human rights, especially in relation to those workers who lost their jobs due to mandates and those who have been harmed by the ‘vaccines.’
The ‘collectivist’ approach to Covid, as meted from the top down, demanded we rolled up our sleeves for vulnerable people. What we’ve seen instead is Moderna, Pfizer and profiteers like Bill Gates make a lot of money while vulnerable and previously not-vulnerable people become increasingly harmed and economically shafted by this “very narrow patriarchal project,” some call The Science™.
In summary
Artist as Family, David Holmgren and Su Dennett are not right about Covid, just as we are not wrong. Many things we have been accurate about. Chiefly, not to trust long-established corporate criminals with our complex biology – biology that is not static nor remains trapped in our fields or bodies. But biology that is intimately connected to composts, to soils and rock, to nearby creeks and trees, to wattle birds and honeyeaters, to earthworms, goats and air currents, to snake, bee and microbe.
We’re very grateful we trusted our intuition not to follow the directives of nudge units as employed by governments and roll up our sleeves for Uncle Pfizer’s little prick. Our solidarity remains with those like us who resisted, those who were coerced in order to save their jobs, those who have been injured and have started to ask questions, those who got jabbed but can see the human rights abuse, and those who, although initially seduced by the propaganda, now openly admit they were foolish to trust the public health messaging.
Over the past 17 years our household has been shapeshifting from industrial mind to ecological mind. That is, from money to gifts, from car to foot, from competition to relationships, from pollution to compost. This, we figure, has been appropriate adaptation for the future we all face. We’re not working towards a future where there’s a million hectares of medical waste spread across the world’s continents, alongside every other kind of toxic waste hypertechnocivility produces. Until Covid, we were respected, even honoured for our radical degrowth-neopeasant transitioning.
Because we had changed the shape of our economic forms – living richly, well below the poverty line in walked-for relationship with the Djaara land we love and call home – when Covid hit we were empowered and resourced enough to say NO to Uncle Pfizer and co. Holmgren, Dennett and Artist as Family have not had Covid throughout this pandemic, and this is in large part attributed to how we live, what we eat, and the post-industrial health protocols we put in place.
All around us ‘vaccinated’ people have fallen ill with Covid, many contracting it twice. This is unsurprising because in Pfizer’s six month trial data, Covid itself was listed as one of the significant adverse events included in a field of thousands of adverse reactions ranging from cardiovascular, neurological and reproductive injuries, and beyond. It is no wonder Pfizer and the FDA attempted to lock up this data for 75 years, which of course went unreported in Leahy’s three ministries of truth. It took about six months before the ‘vaccines’ started to be significantly administered in Australia, imagine if people had Pfizer’s trial data then.
For those of us across the jab and non-jab spectrum who are mandate critical and continuing to resist the coercive state-Pharma nexus, the heat may well be turned up on us again shortly. If the social costs of the state-Pharma pandemic response are not thoroughly examined, and the nefarious actors not held responsible for human rights transgressions, we will find ourselves vilified again and we’ll see the escalation of state violence put onto mandate critical dissidents.
The Left has a role in guaranteeing this doesn’t occur. Individuals and small cultural groups can’t cause much harm to others on a mass scale, but governments and corporates who lie and deceive populations can, especially when they encounter little resistance from the privileged classes. When important decisions are placed in the hands of those who are not held responsible for them, we are surely living in dangerous times.
This is by no means a comprehensive breakdown of all the subjects that need to be included in exposing the corruption and misinformation of the pandemic response. A more comprehensive analysis would include the smearing of long-standing therapeutics known to work against Covid in order to greenlight emergency-use authorisation for the fast-tracked Covid jabs, and fabricating the myth of asymptomatic ‘silent’ transmission in order to justify mask, lockdown and ‘vaccine’ mandates. I hope, however, this serves as a useful document for those interested in the Left’s Covid failure and what we can all learn from it.
As always we invite your insights, questions and comments, and please share this post if you think it advances the discussion.
It was the effects of Dave’s second Pfizer shot that provoked him to look further into the State-Pharma nexus, and notice that even as a double jabbed fella vilification can occur just for raising questions, or offering an antithesis view.
Listen to the audio-only version:
YouTube has dropped our ban (for now), so if you’d like to watch and/or share from there, please head here. YT has the added bonus of streaming to your available bandwidth, but they mine your data and manipulate your algorithm for the convenience.
Many thanks to Dave for sharing his story so gracefully, and to Miles for his two-camera craft and generosity once again. As always we appreciate your comments and your support. If you haven’t already subscribed please do, so we can let you know of new posts as they are published.
If you’re a doctor or a nurse or work in a related field and you have a story you’d like to share with us that isn’t merely colouring neatly inside the lines of the offical public health messaging, we’d love to hear from you. We value science and society, and therefore we value robust enquiry and diverse inputs. Perhaps you’ve lost your job because of the mandates or for speaking out, and you’d like to come on camera and publicly tell your story. Please get in touch by sending us a message.
Health practitioners are obliged to ensure their views are consistent with public health messaging. This is particularly relevant in current times. Views expressed which may be consistent with evidence-based material may not necessarily be consistent with public health messaging.
Over to you Dear Subscriber, sending much love and solidarity, and please beware the Moneypox.