I consider this book a type of a test: a test of a person's intellectual rigor, a test of one's ability to adjust opinions in the face of new information, and a test of one's willingness to engage with information contradicting his or her existing views.
If you've been following the various debates on COVID early treatment protocols, or the debates on mRNA vaccine safety/efficacy, you'll already know most of the doctors contributing essays to this book: Dr. Malone, Dr. Nass, Dr. Kory, Dr. Marik and many others. And if you haven't heard of any of these doctors and aren't familiar with their stories, you may need to rethink your information gathering strategies.
A few of the most striking themes and topics:
1) Dr. Meryl Nass's story in Chapter 3: if you want to understand the workings of our modern healthcare system, you must understand how the state and national medical board system has evolved into an apparatus for debate suppression and doctor control. We live in a period of disturbing medical Lysenkoism, and this chapter teaches how doctors are much easier to control than you would like to think--and you'll see precisely how it's done. Note also the next chapter, Chapter 4, which discusses the destruction of Dr. Paul Marik's long and storied career, illustrates still more mechanisms of control and is also an important read. A disturbing takeaway here is to recognize that the future doctors to whom we entrust our health will likely be increasingly compatible with such a system.
2) Chapter 16, which is a tight articulation of the bear case on the mRNA vaccines: If you're not ready for the bear case, don't read this book at all. If you are ready for it and you want an excellent summary of everything to think about, this is where to go.
3) Why certain inexpensive, off-patented meds are so useful for treating viral pathogens, and why use of them was brutally suppressed: Clearly, our healthcare system did not, could not, and still cannot handle a pandemic competently. Once again the fourth turning paradigm applies: we need to be as self-sovereign as we can in an increasingly iatrogenic healthcare environment.
4) Dr. Malone's concept of "the administrative state": This phrase is a helpful descriptor for the gigantic, faceless and unaccountable bureaucracies running most government activities today. Malone explores this deeply in the later chapters of the book with impressive historical and legal context.
Dr. Malone writes with a poetic and mournful voice: it's at once calming and intellectually stimulating to read him. And those readers who put the time and effort into this book will come away with sophisticated navigational strategies for many domains, not just in healthcare. This book is a gift on many, many levels.
Finally, a (minor) criticism: Lies My Government Told Me was clearly published quickly--understandably so--and it could use one or two more careful passes by a ruthless editor who would tighten, combine or cut a number of chapters, thereby eliminating some of the book's repetitiveness. This would cut down the book by 100-150 pages with little to no loss. But that's a minor nitpick of an otherwise excellent and wide-ranging book.
I wrote a few paragraphs ago of this book as a type of test, and the low-effort way to handle this book is to reject it out of hand. What was the response of the people around you to it? What was your response?
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[Readers of this blog already know what I'm about to say: read no further! The notes to follow are way too long and you've got a meaningful life to live.]
Notes:
p 12: "I never really allowed myself to confront the possibility that we might not be the good guys."
p 17: "If someone had written a letter describing my life today to the person I was before this outbreak, the old me would have concluded that the author specialized in (improbable) dystopic fiction and should probably be looking for another line of work. Looking back I am struck by how sheltered and naive I was (pre-COVID), and how much my worldview and my role in it have been radically shifted by subsequent events." [Me too, Dr. Malone, me too.]
p 19-20: Fascinating to hear Malone's perspective on what state boards used to do before the COVID era: they never policed off-label prescribing practices and they would never police free speech by a physician, whether it involved politics or prescribing practices. And state boards used to be hesitant even to discipline docs prescribing powerful addictive opioids without a compelling medical indication. "The current practice of hunting physicians by filing complaints with medical boards to withdraw their license to practice medicine for trying to help their patients with new therapeutic strategies or for questioning the safety or effectiveness of a current medical intervention, was unheard of. Dissent and discussion within the medical community was a time-honored tradition with a long history of leading to improvements in medical care."
p 22: January 4th 2020: Malone gets a call to get a group spun up to apply his skills and knowledge towards a new coronavirus on the loose in Wuhan China.
p 24ff: Malone's wife, Dr. Jill Glasspool Malone, writes the first edition of Novel Coronavirus: A Guide for Preparation and Protection, a book to help people navigate the virus, something she planned to update as more data and information became available. "There were no other books available at the time that had been written by medical and scientific professionals." The book went live on Amazon on February 11th 2020. Amazon then censored it in March, stating the book did not meet "community standards." [DK: note that this book is still not available on Amazon] "And at that moment, we knew that something very dark was happening, something we had never seen before. Little did we realize that this was just a very early example of what was to become a large movement over the next two years, a global movement involving collusion between government, corporatized legacy media, social media, big technology, big finance, and nongovernmental organizations to completely control and shape all information and thought concerning the public health response to the novel coronavirus."
p 27: "...my quest to understand how, why, and by whom this global public health event has been weaponized against all of us begin with a simple and inexplicable book banning. Many have since reviewed Jill's book looking for some subtle offense and found nothing."
p 28: "I began feeling in almost overwhelming sense of vertigo while struggling to find truth in the middle of this sea of mis(mal?)information, "fact-checkers," gaslighting, defamation, and chronic falsehoods." [You and me both Dr. Malone: "vertigo" is a great way to describe it.]
p 30: "Who is responsible for all the globally coordinated propaganda, information management, mind control efforts, lies, and mismanagement we have experienced? How has it been globally coordinated, and what can we do to stop this sort of thing from ever happening again?"
p 32: United Nations global communications representative Melissa Fleming openly stated on September 28th, 2022, during WEF disinformation panel discussion: "if you Google climate change, at the top of your search, you will get all kinds of UN resources. We started this partnership when we were shocked to see that when we'd Googled climate change, we were getting incredibly distorted information right at the top. We are becoming much more proactive. We own the science and we think that the world should know it, and the platforms themselves also do." [One thing to think about here: if how the vaccine movement will likely be set back decades--perhaps permanently--thanks to mandate overreach of an observably ineffective therapy, what will happen to climate change as a movement? This heavy-handedness and control will also cause a counter-reaction and make the movement DOA.]
p 33: "Vocal dissident medical professionals have been bombarded by withering and highly coordinated attacks at their places of employment, by their medical licensing boards, on social media, and in a bewilderingly globally coordinated array of corporatized legacy mass-media outlets."
p 34: On how a normal, reasonably-ethical person would not have a mental model or any paradigm to navigate what's happening right now. "The key challenge for any person who seeks to make sense out of the confusing and often mesmerizing flow of information bombarding us during the COVIDcrisis is to develop an extended internal model of the world that can help their own mind process all of this. Unless steeped in the world of biowarfare, pathogen bioengineering, psychological operations, and the "intelligence community" (as I have been), it is normal for humans to instinctively recoil from the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 is an engineered pathogen, that the COVIDcrisis could have been exploited to advance the economic and political interests of a small group of people, or that there may be those who support the concept of global depopulation or culling of 'useless eaters.' [DK: Here Malone is referring to Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari's infamous reference to a superfluous class of "useless eaters."] For most of us, such possibilities are so far from our internal models of the world and of Judeo-Christian ethics that we immediately, reflexively reject them." [I wrote in my review of Ed Dowd's book--and note that this theme also showed up in the novel The Mandibles--that there's a Kubler-Ross like stages of grief you have to get through before you can really perceive what's going on, and those who can't get themselves through denial (much less make it quickly to acceptance) will never be able to comprehend the truth much less handle the ramifications of it. You can even see sophisticated dissident doctors struggling with this problem too: see for example how Dr. Pierre Kory, at first, simply could not handle the ramifications of the appalling "midazolam-gate" controversy in old-age care homes in the UK in the early months of the pandemic. He lacked the mental model to comprehend institutionalized cruelty on such a level.]
p 35-6: on modern wokeism/cancel culture which seeks to eliminate any thinking that causes cognitive dissonance or discomfort; that these "are the intellectual roots that nurture censorship" and if laid down a sort of substrate (my word) for much of the deplatforming and reputational destruction of many of the dissident doctors who spoke up in a spirit of open discussion and debate.
p 37: Plato's cave as a helpful metaphor here, with particular attention on dangers to the person trying to convey the real reality to those chained inside the cave: "For those emancipated from the confines of their old perception of reality, it is natural to hope to share observations and experiences about a new reality, despite the vast difference from the approved narrative. These people, and perhaps you are one of them, have already begun to question what they are being told by the puppet masters. For those who do not accept the official story, the first challenge is learning how to communicate something we believe is essential and vital to the health and well-being of family, friends, and the world at large. The second challenge is how to avoid being treated as a dangerous threat by everyone else still captivated by shadows on the wall."
p 37: Beautiful quote here: "Physicians and other medical practitioners are constantly encountering things that do not make sense. The good ones become a kind of detective, specializing in interpreting the shadows on the wall of the cave that they know best. Most of the rest become masters of naming the shadows. A very few are occasionally able to see outside the cave. But almost inevitably these few are initially rejected, defamed, and ridiculed by their peers. Yet they often persist, armed with conviction that they have seen a new reality, and the knowledge of how other dissenters who came before helped advance the common good. But it is neither easy nor pleasant to enlighten their fellow prisoners, many of whom will never accept that there is something more than the shadows to which they have become attached and familiar." [Times like this bring to mind the story of Ingaz Semmelweis, a famous doctor from history whose career was destroyed after discovering clinical benefits of handwashing between patients. It's amazing how history rhymes.]
p 39: Another takeaway: make sure you have a very very wide Overton Window; somehow you have to program yourself to be amenable and open to new paradigms, not reject them out of hand (or accept them out of hand either), but to hold them in a temporary buffer in your mind, and consider them, pick them up and put them down as necessary! "If we can achieve one thing only, it will be in helping others awaken to the possibility that the models of reality with which we have become familiar and attached just may be deleterious to our health. If, with this book, we can open your 'Overton window' just a bit more, perhaps individuals like you, like me and Jill, and like the contributing authors in this volume can help create a better future for our children and grandchildren."
Chapter 1: How I Got Red-Pilled, and the Gradual Reveal by Robert Malone
p 42: Defamed by the New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, and others.
p 44: Malone learns to his shock that the CDC was trying to stop the release of the majority of data about the vaccines as well as clinical trial data. [DK: Malone repeats the "technically true but not quite accurate" statement that "the CDC went so far as to ask the courts for the papers to be sealed for 55 years." This is actually not quite right: the initial FOIA debate was about the rate of pages to be released per day or week, and the initial offer of the agency was at a rate was slow and would have taken 55 years to get through all the documents: the technicality here is that they were not going to request to seal the information for 55 years, just slow-roll the release of the data. A minor quibble but, still, many in the dissident doctor movement seems to repeat the "they wanted to seal it for 55 years!" claim.]
p 44: "I am a vaccinologist. I invented a core mRNA vaccine technology platform. I have spent much of my career working on vaccine development... I am not an anti-vaxxer in any way, shape, or form." [Sad that everybody--and especially Dr. Malone--has to make the "I am not an anti-vaxxer!" oath in order to say anything about COVID/mRNA therapies. Once again it goes to the power of rhetoric, and the fact that one can effortlessly use the "he's just an anti-vaxxer" epithet to marginalize a legitimate concern about a novel therapeutic. Note that there have been other obvious examples of vaccines that have been ineffective or even dangerous, see for example the swine flu vaccine and the anthrax vaccine as the two most blatant examples. If someone believes a therapeutic is not indicated, does that automatically make that person an anti-vaxxer? No, it doesn't. But if you smear someone with that word it makes that person sound like he wants everybody to contract smallpox or pertussis, and no one listens any further.]
p 46: Note the standardized process of censoring, defaming and disenfranchising doctors by using mechanisms of hospitals medical boards, media, social media.
Chapter 2: Children On the Back of a Mad Elephant by Gavin de Becker
p 48: "When those in power tell us about the next enemy or danger, it's our--often shirked--responsibility to fully understand what it is we are being encouraged to fear."
p 50-1: de Becker highlights the infamous interview that Fauci did back in the 1980s about AIDS, pointing out the conditional language and caveats that let him say almost anything about anything, yet leaves the listener in a state of heightened fear. Fauci was widely criticized then for making it sound like anybody could catch AIDS very easily, leading to tremendous fear and ostracism of the gay community.
p 52-3: Another disturbing historical example in the US of using fear to manipulate the population: see Woodrow Wilson in 1917-1918 doing everything to brew up "fear of the Hun" to get us into World War I, also shutting down newspapers, imprisoning journalists and arresting citizens for opposing the war. [I wasn't aware of the extent of this at all.]
p 55: "34,000 healthcare workers were fired in New York alone" [Wow. Although I assume he means the state-wide here.]
p 57: Good quote here: "Politicians and media and government encourage us to go to war with death, but it's good to remember their life is a sexually transmitted, always fatal condition."
p 57ff: Based on the numbers he shares here clarifying who died OF COVID versus who died WITH COVID, citing specific data from Italy, the US CDC as well as South Korea and US state prisons (all of this data was only acknowledged much later), it is clear that the actual IFR of the original COVID virus (which had the highest lethality of all variants) was a tiny fraction of what was alleged initially. Note also that the third leading cause of death in the United States is "medical error"...!!
p 60: "...the fear citizens feel is immensely valuable--in dollars, in policy, control, and power."
p 62: "Today, We are challenged to accurately decide which is the bigger risk: is it COVID, or is it the new unchecked power gathered up in the name of COVID?"
p 62ff: "War is the health of the State." --Randolph Bourne.
De Becker discusses some of Bourne's writings; he died in 1918, and holy cow was this guy prescient in seeing what the modern State can do. Per de Becker, today, "'Disease is the health of the State.' after some time, it will be war again, and then something else." [Likely it's worth taking a look at Randolph Bourne's Untimely Papers, and in particular the essay "The State".]
Chapter 3: The Extraordinary Story of a Truth Warrior Persecuted for Advocating and Providing Life-Saving Treatments by Meryl Nass
[If there's any one chapter to read from this book, this is it.]
p 65: Dr. Nass had a role on the children's health defense, and per Dr. Malone's intro here, she was radicalized by her experiences with the US government. She had the courage to talk about early treatment protocols for COVID, and the medical board in the state of Maine suspended her license, despite the fact that no patient filed a complaint against her. This essay is about the suppression of early treatment protocols for COVID, and about the mechanisms used to silence doctors.
p 67ff: Fascinating to hear her history with the anthrax vaccine, and when defense secretary Cohen announced in November 1997 that it would be required of all armed services members, she wrote a paper on it because she knew that the vaccine had never shown to work for inhaled anthrax. Likely this vax also played a role in Gulf War Syndrome. "The same shaming and punishing of vaccine refusers went on then. Even though almost everyone in the military knew how bad the anthrax vaccines were, giving in and getting jabbed became a biological loyalty oath... Nothing was allowed to stop the program even though the vaccine wasn't safe and probably didn't work."
p 68: [Honestly, this story about the anthrax vaccine and the DOD's and FDA's behavior here is almost unbelievable! I guess I have to open up my Overton Window even more...] Nass and a team of colleagues went to court on the anthrax vax mandate and won in 2004, with the judge throwing out the vaccine license which had never met FDA requirements... but as soon as the judge pulled the vaccine license, the DOD slapped an emergency use authorization (!) on the vaccine and then attempted to mandate anthrax vaccinations again. (!!!) And the FDA rubber-stamped the anthrax vaccine license again in 2005, and because the FDA had "deference" an appeal to the courts was fruitless here; ergo the FDA doesn't have to obey its own licensing rules.
First came the chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine suppression
p 69ff: [Very helpful passage here to explain how docs first arrived at the idea that chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine might show efficacy against a novel virus.] "I discovered that the chloroquine drugs had been tested against SARS and MERS (successfully!) and the history behind the logic for using these cheap, repurposed drugs is compelling.... Chloroquine is an interesting drug; it has been used for many decades to both prevent and to treat malaria. It is used as an anti-inflammatory against rheumatoid arthritis, it is used as an antiparasitic by changing the body's pH for malaria and other parasitic diseases and it has antiviral properties. There appear to be multiple mechanisms of action by which chloroquine acts as an antiviral, and one of the leading ones is that chloroquine increases the pH of the lysosomes and the late endosome (endosome uptake being the way that many viruses enter and infect cells), causing the impaired release of viruses from the lysosome or the endosome. This makes the virus unable to release its genetic material into the cell and replicate. Chloroquine also acts as a zinc ionophore that allows extracellular zinc to enter the cell and inhibit viral RNA dependent RNA polymerase. So, it is no surprise that this drug would be considered a viable antiviral treatment against beta coronaviruses, such as SARS-CoV-2."
p 71: There were as many as 66 screened drugs that were affected inhibiting SARS CoV infection.
p 71: Another money quote. "I have to repeat myself, because the information is so shocking and I don't want you to miss it: our governments already knew of options for treating COVID before it appeared, but instead of immediately trying these already identified, safe, cheap, and available repurposed drugs, and offering early treatments, they did everything they could stop people obtaining the chloroquine drugs."
p 72: Note also that the WHO published rigged trials to try to smear the drug, where patients were administered near lethal doses of hydroxychloroquine. Nass calls these "medical crimes against humanity" and they were never investigated by mainstream media or licensing agencies.
p 72: [Again on our Overton Windows] "Many don't have to fortitude to dissect their worldview and rebuild it in accord with the facts that it spilled out over the last two years. But I am about to present some more facts that I hope you can assimilate into your understanding of the world." And now we move on to ivermectin...
Ivermectin
p 74: "...because ivermectin has efficacy in both late and early stages in the disease and is not toxic at several times the normal dose, some of the tricks used against chloroquine (giving it too late in the disease course or overdosing patients) simply would not work with ivermectin."
p 74ff: Interestingly the drug took off in popularity without any publicity, this implies that many doctors out in the field had been talking/sharing therapeutic ideas, and thus many understood ivermectin's tremendous value. Also a government or regulatory authority couldn't just "take the drug off the market" without a long process and a paper trail, so the only option was to scare the doctors by threatening their licenses. This was tried and tested in the Philippines with great success. Also pharmacies were threatened as well if they dispensed it. Nobody knows who gave the order to do these things.
p 76: Notice also the coded language used by the CDC to control distribution and prescribing of meds without directly saying so.
p 77: Then followed a concert of various nonprofits (including the Federation of State Medical Boards, the AMA, the American Pharmacy Association and various specialty medical boards) issuing warnings about ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as well as "misinformation" about COVID vaccines. [An important takeaway for people is to remember these organizations: recognize that they do not care about us, do not care about our health, and that they will participate in consensus groupthink at the expense of our health.]
p 79: "Boards have brought powers to intervene in the practice of medicine, and their members are shielded from liability as agents of the state."
p 80: This part of the book is disturbing, almost impossible to believe. "I was surprised to find that on the day my license was suspended, there was massive national publicity about my case. The story was on the AP wire covered from the San Francisco Chronicle to the Miami Herald. And for some reason, it was not behind the usual paywall. The Hill, Newsweek, The Daily Beast, and many other publications all ran hit pieces about me. I gathered that my situation was bigger than just a Maine renegade medical board: I had been selected to serve as an example to physicians nationwide who might be prescribing early treatment for COVID."
Chapter 4: The Anatomy of a Career-Ending Sham Peer Review by Paul Marik
[DK: This doctor was terminated from a hospital for advocating for early treatment therapeutics for COVID, it was yet another public execution, just like with Dr. Nass. I think what's so disturbing about Dr. Marik and Dr. Nass' story is how easy it turned out to be to silence an entire herd of doctors by making a public execution of just a few.]
[The closest analogy I can come up with for Dr Marik's experience is Kafka's novel The Trial. ]
[Finally: when you learn about the mechanisms of doc employment peer review and how little due process is available to the accused, it makes you realize that medical doctors need to unionize under a model that looks more like teachers or police unions, and they clearly need to organize under an institution separate from the AMA or any state-based organization. It is painfully obvious that the national and state-based doctors associations do not have doctors' (or patients') interests at heart.]
p 82ff: Fascinating intro from Dr Malone about non-pharmaceutical treatments for sepsis, including vitamin C, thiamine and hydrocortisone.
p 84: "What is a sham peer review? Sham peer review is an adverse action taken in bad faith by a hospital for purposes other than the furtherance of quality healthcare...where the truth and the facts do not matter, because the process is contrived to be rigged, and the outcome is predetermined." "Over the years, sham peer reviews have unfortunately become fairly well-known. Hospitals in the United States have mounted these proceedings for at least four decades to rid themselves of physicians who 'get in their way.' Often, they are doctors who don't 'follow the party line' and for whom they consider 'disruptive.' Hospital officials are resistant to physicians who bring patient safety or care-quality concerns to their attention. Some hospitals retaliate against these whistleblowers by instigating these sham peer reviews."
p 85: "...accusations involving behavior or conduct are much easier for a hospital to prosecute."
p 88: Interesting to read about the case of Poliner vs Presbyterian hospital of Dallas, where a jury found the hospital not immune from civil liability and found in favor of the doctor on all claims including breach of contract, defamation, business disparagement, tortious interference, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
p 91: after Marik's hospital privileges were suspended the ICU that he worked at immediately had a doubling of mortality, from the hospital's own data.
[DK: Another absolutely critical thing is to remember the corporation "Sentara Healthcare System" and specifically the Sentara Norfolk General Hospital. This hospital is captured and almost certainly dangerous to go to!]
p 95: "In summary, the sham peer review assault perpetrated by Sentara Healthcare System was immoral, unethical, illegal, and unconscionable."
Chapter 5: Treating Patients and Fighting for Medical Freedom by Pierre Kory
p 98: Do no harm does not mean do nothing.
Many if not most hospitals adopted an approach of not trying any treatments until RCTs could be performed, when they were very well known safe therapeutics that could be used.
p 98: Kory cites the example of Uttar Pradesh: "The history books will (I hope) rightly recognize their efforts as one of the most successful public health interventions ever." See also Itajai in Brazil. Both places clearly showed ivermectin works astoundingly well. See also Mexico, Peru, Argentina, the Philippines, Japan.
p 99: Treating COVID is about more than ivermectin
"It's easy to think of me as "the Ivermectin doctor," but that's only because the drug is so effective in all phases of COVID-19 that it forms the core therapeutic in the protocols developed by the organization I co-founded, the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC)."
p 99: Core therapies are based on methylprednisolone, ascorbic acid, thiamine, heparin, and non antiviral co-interventions (MATH+), also steroids, "initially discouraged by federal health officials, but that has since become a standard of care worldwide."
p 100: "To show how much the US has lost its way in responding to COVID-19, remdesivir is given to nearly every hospitalized patient at a cost of $3,000 per dose. There are 'Narco' states and there are 'Pharma' states, and US is clearly fallen into the latter category."
p 101: Many doctors are too cowardly to speak out
"We could have put an end of this pandemic and saved countless lives of many more physicians had spoken up in their individual institutions, prioritizing early treatment approach as guided by the precautionary principle and sound risk benefit decision-making."
p 102: The powers that be can't keep the truth hidden for long
"A growing number of State attorneys general, including in Nebraska, Louisiana, South Carolina, Oklahoma, and now Tennessee, are moving to protect physicians' ability to use off-label prescribing in the treatment of COVID-19."
Chapter 6: Beware the Fact Checkers by Leonard C. Goodman
This author wrote a well-researched essay expressing concerns about giving his 6-year-old daughter an mRNA vaccine.
p 104-5: "Opinion columnists are familiar with the traditional role of the fact checker. Prior to publication, an editor checks accuracy of quotes and the sources for factual assertions. Erroneous or unsupported assertions are removed or revised. But times have changed. Today, an entire fact-checker industry has emerged to check your opinions, making sure you have not strayed beyond acceptable limits for public discourse."
p 108: This author is absolutely right: fact check articles are really "opinion check" articles accompanied with word salad.
p 110-111: The circular language and horrendous logic of these fact checking articles is Orwellian and unrigorous, but because there's such a large apparatus in place it is difficult to fight off; one example is you can get fact checked for quoting Dr Malone, because he's not considered a "reputable source" by the sources who are checking your facts!
p 112: Then author Leonard Goodman includes the essay itself: "Vaxxing Our Kids: Why I'm not rushing to get my six-year-old the covid-19 vaccine" "Like many Americans, I have concerns about giving my six-year-old a new vaccine that was not tested on humans until last year." What a tremendously effective lead, both rhetoric and logic.
p 114: H cites the BMJ's highly troubling article about the Ventavia whistleblower; the fact that it was hardly covered in the media, except with lubed headlines like this one from CBS news: "Report questioning Pfizer trial shouldn't undermine confidence in vaccines." [Jesus]
Chapter 7: Mass Formation and the Psychology of Totalitarianism by Mattias Desmet
[This is a useful chapter, it's probably worthy reading Desmet's book. Also this chapter can be paired with Walter Lippman's book Public Opinion and Daniel Boorstin's book The Image: A Guide to Psuedo-Events in America.]
p 118-119: Malone, in his introduction to this essay makes a few money quotes here: "What has been clearly observable with the mass hypnosis is that a large fraction of the population is completely unable to process new scientific data and facts demonstrating that they have been misled... and actively attack anyone who has the temerity to share information with them which contradicts the propaganda that they have come to embrace. ...I believe that one of the most important aspects of Dr. Desmet's profound insights into this phenomenon is that it can help people to understand and (in some cases) to forgive their neighbors, peers, and family members who have become hypnotized by the propaganda, thought, and information control that they have been subjected to during the COVIDcrisis."
From our rationalist view on man to the world of mass formation by Mattias Desmet
p 121: "Expert virologists were called upon as Orwell's pigs... They would run the animal farm with accurate ('scientific') information. But these experts soon turned out to have quite a few common, human flaws. In their statistics and graphs they made mistakes that even 'ordinary' people would not easily make. It went so far that, at one point, they counted all deaths as Corona deaths, including people who had died of, say, heart attacks." "Like Orwell's pigs, they changed the rules overnight" as we went from a two shot dose to multiple boosters, likewise as we were told to "flatten the curve" for two weeks, which suddenly grew longer.
p 122: He hits on an important cheat code right here: you have to have the ability to tolerate uncertainty. This helps you avoid "locking in" to an explanation ("two weeks to flatten the curve"; "the vaccine is 95% effective," etc.) that is likely propaganda anyway.
p 123: "After Robert Malone talked about Mass formation on The Joe Rogan Experience, the term became a buzzword and for a few days was the most searched for term on Twitter."
p 123: "What is mass formation actually? It's a specific kind of group formation that makes people radically blind to everything that goes against what the group believes in. In this way, they take the most absurd beliefs for granted."
p 124: The second characteristic is people in mass formation readily sacrifice individual interest for the sake of the collective. See victims of Stalin's purges and show trials.
p 124: The third characteristic is they become radically intolerant of dissonant voices, and "in the ultimate stage of the mass formation, they will commit atrocities toward those who do not go along with the masses...they will do so as if it were their ethical duty." See behavior during the Iranian Revolution under Khomeini.
p 124: Dr Desmond agrees with Hannah Arendt on two points: first it is a "diabolic pact between the masses and the elite" and the idea that a new totalitarianism is emerging, and per Dr. Desmond it is a "technocratic totalitarianism"
p 126: "Whenever a new object of fear arises in society, there is only one response: increased control.
p 126: Isolating people and turning them into atomized subjects, per Arendt, "this is the elementary building block of the totalitarian state." By disconnecting people it creates a radical absence of meaning and purpose, leading to free-floating anxiety, frustration and aggression, all of which lack concrete mental representation, "people don't know what they're anxious, frustrated and aggressive about." [The idea here is that this free-floating anxiety can be therefore "tied" to something of the State's choosing, e.g.: Hutus/Tutsis, anti-vaxxers, the Jews, or whatever a given regime wants to choose.]
p 127-128: Interesting insights here on the modern political system, comparing it to prior monarchic systems; leaders had to be elected in the modern era, and in order to be elected they had to find out what the masses wanted, and then more or less give it to them, thus leaders actually became followers; but since the masses could not be commanded they had to be manipulated. [Interesting paradoxes nested together here!!] "That's where modern indoctrination and propaganda was born, as it is described in the works of people such as Lippman, Trotter, and Bernays."
p 128: "...it is easy to show that from the beginning of the 20th century, indoctrination and propaganda were also constantly used in virtually every 'democratic' state worldwide."
p 128: [Still more very interesting quotes here.] "Totalitarianism is not a historical coincidence. It is a logical consequence of mechanistic thinking and the delusional belief in the omnipotence of human rationality. As such, totalitarianism is a defining feature of the Enlightenment tradition."
p 129ff: [Unfortunately here Desmet quotes the Solomon Asch experiments, note that much (most?) of Asch's work has been either debunked or identified as fraudulent, and certainly none of it has ever been replicated with effects as significant as Asch found. People always use his experiments because sets up rhetoric of how everyone obeys the majority, but the implicit subtext that the person citing Asch wants to signal that they belong to the "correct" minority!]
p 130: "Surely it can't be that everyone is wrong." "They wouldn't say it if nothing is wrong." This is the kind of circular logic that you get people to submit to if you keep repeating a message over and over again. "Why is a message carried by a crowd, even if it is wrong, so convincingly? How can intelligent people--the experts--send these questionable messages out into the world?"
p 131: "Mass formation often arises in a social climate steeped and unease, fear, and meaninglessness... In such an atmosphere, the population is extremely sensitive to stories that identify the cause of their fear and thus create a common enemy--the virus--that must then be 'destroyed.' This provides psychological benefits. First, the fear that was previously indeterminate in society is now becoming very concrete and therefore more mentally manageable... In more extreme cases, this puts society in a kind of intoxication... Asch's experiment shows the cognitive variant of this: what one thinks does not matter; what matters is that one thinks it together."
p 132: Desmet is correct in noticing that victims who suffer due to the mitigation measures of COVID such as lockdowns or quarantine are given little attention and empathy relative to those who died from COVID itself: nobody notices the indirect victims of the health policies. "These victims fall outside the circle of light."
p 133: "The actual masters of the situation are not the experts, but the stories and their underlying ideologies; the stories own everyone and don't belong to anyone; everyone plays a part in it, nobody knows the full script."
Chapter 8: Shocking Increases in All-Cause Mortality Coinciding with COVID Vaccine Mandates by Ed Dowd
[Dowd and a group of colleagues had authored "The Malone Doctrine" and they introduced themselves to Malone when he was at a group dinner and fundraiser on Maui.]
p 138ff: [It's very interesting to hear Ed Dowd write about how he went through his "mosaic" process: how he mentally assembled various disparate pieces of information, how he put things together to have a world view and later reached a very disturbing set of conclusions. This is exactly how investment decisions are made, the exact same process.]
p 141: The first insurance industry report of excess death came from OneAmerica CEO Scott Davison: "We are seeing, right now, the highest death rates we've seen in the history of this business--not just at OneAmerica. The data is consistent across every player in that business...primarily working age people 18 to 64... death rates are up 40% over what they were pre-pandemic... Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be 10% increase over pre-pandemic, so 40% is just unheard of."
p 142: He worked with Brooke Jackson, the Ventavia Research Group whistleblower; Dowd goes through the unblinding of trial participants and why that is essential for understanding the fraud in the vax trials.
p 142-3: Also citing Josh Stirling, an insurance analyst, highly regarded, who focused on loss ratios at the group life and disability divisions of life insurance companies. Group life loss ratios ranged from 25-45% over baseline levels; CEOs blamed it on a new concept they termed "indirect COVID." The timing is amazing too: because it began in the fall of 2021 when corporate vaccine mandates went into effect nationwide.
p 143-4: The CDC's own data showed two separate spikes of excess mortality: one in the winter of 2020 and then the fall of 2021. They were able to break down the data by age group and look at excess mortality charts over time for each. This independently corroborated the results seen by the group life insurance companies, including an 84% excess death rate above baseline for millennials. "The virus wasn't suddenly killing younger people in the fall of 2021. Suicides didn't magically increase in that 3-month period, nor did overdoses or missed cancer screenings. The only thing that changed was that genetic vaccine products were pushed upon millennial generation via government and corporate mandates."
p 144: See also the mix shift: the shift in excess mortality from old to young between 2020 and 2021. In 2020 older people died from the virus, in 2021 younger people died--not from the virus, but from the vax. The virus would not have suddenly started attacking young people, it was already much less virulent, and the virus only killed larger numbers of people in old age groups with comorbidities. "It's important to note that 45,000 more people under the age of 65 died in year two than in year one. Did the virus suddenly preferentially target younger folks?"
p 145: See Dowd's "smoking gun chart" on page 145
p 146: Still further corroboration came from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, where they tracked disability surveys, now a third source of corroboration.
p 148: A fourth source of corroboration: funeral home results. [I corroborated this myself by tuning into a lot of these companies' quarterly conference call transcripts, and Dowd is totally right with his commentary here.]
p 150ff: Central Bank exploitation of the COVID crisis; on whether covid was a plan or a convenient excuse, how it happened that there was this convenient set of mechanisms like vaccine passports, digital IDs, and even Central Bank Digital Currencies already put in place...
p 152ff: Dowd's also talking about benefits to Cantillon insiders (although he doesn't use that word) as well as neo-feudalism.
Part Two: Diagnosis--Lies and the Damage Done
p 154: On proposed international health regulations that would cede national control to WHO regional directors; note the implied loss of national sovereignty as a result
p 155: A long list of lies the US government has told all of us: ranging from denying natural immunity, exaggerating the IFR of COVID-19, the effectiveness of locking down, the efficacy of mRNA vaccines, etc.
p 157: On the alternatives proposed by Scott Atlas and John Ioannidis; see also the Great Barrington Declaration, October 4th 2020.
p 160: Some of the advocated solutions for restoring trust and science are quite creative. See for example anonymizing reviews of papers and grants; decentralizing research funding.
Section 1: Medicine, Science, Philosophy, and Psychology
Chapter 9: Science Versus Scientism
p 162: Note that Malone had never had much respect for Fauci in the first place due to his poor professional integrity over the course of his career. See also the infamous Chuck Todd interview where Fauci equated himself to science. Per Malone: "...it suddenly became clear that Dr. Fauci had lost all perspective and was suffering from what can best be described as megalomania."
p 164-5: What is scientism? Hayek's definition: "the slavish imitation of the method and language of science" while Karl Popper defined it as "the aping of what is widely mistaken for the method of science."
p 165: It's probably worth rewatching the Chuck Todd/Anthony Fauci interview just to get practice at the propaganda techniques used. Ironically they got caught covering up the real story, which is the gain of function/lab leak theory, as well as allegations that Fauci collaborated with Facebook to suppress this story. Both of these things turned out to be precisely true!
p 168: "The CDC itself is a leading purveyor of misinformation about the vaccines." Citing also incorrect assumptions about flu vaccine efficacy too.
p 170: "...a Facebook whistleblower revealed that Facebook censors vaccine-related content based on a secret 'vaccine hesitancy' algorithm... The US government and Facebook have sought to evade scrutiny by keeping the details of their collaboration largely secret." [DK: Pair this with the Twittergate leak, as well as Google and its collaborations, and it's quite sobering what these companies were willing to do to stifle appropriately transparent medical and scientific debate]
p 174: Note the references to two foundational papers that influenced Malone: first, the 1964 paper "Strong Inference: Certain Systematic Methods of Scientific Thinking May Produce Much More Rapid Progress Than Others" and then the 1980 paper "The Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses: With this method the dangers of parental affection for a favorite theory can be circumvented."
p 175: step by step process for doing robust science:
* State the problem or hypothesis that you wish to clarify or resolve
* Come up with as many alternative hypotheses as you can
* Discuss the alternative hypotheses with others, particularly those not invested in the favored explanation
* Design experiments which can eliminate the various alternative explanations
* Perform the experiments and record the data
* Continue until a definitive result concerning the original question is obtained
p 175: "You can see, even without detailed knowledge of clinical trial design, good clinical practices, or knowledge of regulatory affairs, that the process used to determine COVID-19 vaccine policies was not scientifically sound research. The determination of mass policy was even less so. These were examples of scientism in practice--and applied to the global population."
p 175-6: This is a beautifully stated philosophy of knowledge, basically epistemology, from Dr Malone. His views on where science belongs, how it should work, and how we grapple with the mysteries of the known, the known unknown, and the unknown unknown.
p 178-9: Useful insight here: "Cognitive psychology studies... clearly demonstrate that the human mind will reject sensory data that are inconsistent with its internal model of reality. In other words, if our internal models (which can be considered as 'paradigms') are inconsistent with some external sensory reality, we will typically reject the true objective reality and force the incoming sensory data to fit our internal cognitive models... The third problem with the internal models of reality, which we all hold and use to interpret the raw data we receive from our senses, is that membership in communities and organizations often requires sharing models (or paradigms) with others in the community, regardless of their validity... Those who fail to meet a minimal level of acceptance of the paradigms that define a scientific discipline are typically rejected by other members; they are heretics."
p 179ff: Malone cites the use of the "no true Scotsman" fallacy during the COVID crisis:
1) All vaccinologists agree that the COVID genetic vaccines are safe and effective.
2) I am a vaccinologist, and I do not think that these genetic vaccines are safe and effective.
3) Therefore, you are not a true vaccinologist.
p 181: note that Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions noted that breakthroughs in thought (like discovering that the Earth is round, the Copernican model for the planets, or the double helix structure of DNA, etc.) were heretical in some sense, and all came from outsiders our newcomers to a scientific discipline, not existing members of the discipline. That's one of the problems: once you're a member of "the guild" you constrain in yourself the ability to see reality and you're stuck with the limits of the models/paradigms used by the guild. Thus "outsiders and heretics are essential."
Chapter 10: Repurposed Drugs
p 183: "...if you are admitted to a western hospital located in an economically developed country with a COVID-19 diagnosis your risk of death during that hospitalization has been amazingly high. In contrast, countries with low COVID-19 mortality are often economically underdeveloped, with Haiti and many African nations providing notable examples."
p 183: Remdesivir is "globally nicknamed by nurses and orderlies 'run, death is near.'"
p 184: Dissident COVID protocols to keep in mind:
FLCCC
Zelenko
Fareed and Tyson
See also Dr. Didier Raoult: hydroxychloroquine plus azithromycin
p 185: "How and why journalists with no medical training working for the Washington Post became arbiters of medical truth continues to elude me. Who knows how many lives could have been saved if the corporate press had just focused on doing solid reporting rather than trying to influence clinical treatment practices while attacking physicians who were just trying to do their jobs."
p 190: "There is no doubt in my mind that the concerted and coordinated propaganda and information control efforts of the United States Government Department of Health and Human Services, acting in alignment and as sponsors of big tech and corporate media censorship, have caused large amounts of unnecessary death and disease due to both iatrogenic causes during hospitalization as well as by suppression of life-saving early treatment protocols."
Chapter 11: mRNA Vaccines: The Largest Human Experiment Ever
p 192: 5.4b vaxxed, 70% of the world's population. In the US 265 million residents have received at least one dose, 226 million have completed the initial protocol out of 335 million, 67.5%.
p 192: Never tested for transmission, data emerging since the rollout of the vaccine indicate that it is unable to affect transmission, this thereby negates the idea of COVID vax passports.
p 193: Note the idiosyncrasies in legal liability when marketing a vaccine under EUA. Vaccine makers have not distributed or marketed their products in the United States yet! "A single purchaser (the US government) provides complete liability indemnification, a guaranteed market with very little oversight, and manages both the distribution and marketing."
p 195: "We are not just talking about grinding the First Amendment into the mud; we are talking about an avoidable mass casualty event caused by a mandated experimental medical procedure--for which all opportunities for the victims to inform themselves about the potential risks have been methodically erased from both the internet and public awareness by an international corrupt cabal operating under the flag of the "Trusted News Initiative" while systematically silencing physicians who raised concerns via a globally coordinated censorship and defamation campaign."
p 196ff The first gene therapy therapeutic was in 1990, a four year old girl with adenoside deaminase deficiency; the treatment failed and she was not cured. The second was an 18 year old patient named Jesse Gelsinger who had a genetic disease of the liver, he died during another mRNA clinical trial.
p 197ff: What is wrong with the original gene therapy vax concept?
1) You can't efficiently get genetic material into the nucleus of the majority of cells of the human body,
2) The immune system recognizes "good proteins" or "bad proteins" and so will summon an immunologic attack against any attempt to introduce the gene to complement a genetic birth defect: the immune system would thus kill the cells that would now have that "good gene."
3) virtually all gene therapy methods are inefficient and deliver the genetic material randomly to a small subset of cells; there's no practical way (surgically or otherwise) to remove them,
4) What if the "good gene" lands in a bad place in your genome? This is why there's concern about the potential for mRNA-like particles travel into cell nuclei and recombine with DNA: normally with DNA based gene therapy technologies there is genotoxicity studies, but these studies were not done for the MRNA vaccine technologies.
p 199: Pfizer and Moderna have claimed that the injected mRNA lasts only a few hours after injection; it turns out that in reality the mRNA incorporates a synthetic nucleotide called pseudouridine that "can persist in lymph nodes for at least 60 days after injection." "In addition they seem capable of producing large amounts of protein for extended periods and evading normal immunologic mechanisms for eliminating cells that produce foreign proteins."
p 200: What is pseudouridine? [DK: This would be a useful technical discussion for anyone with a medical education] It controls how long mRNA stays in your body, much is unknown, it has effects to the immune system explaining immunosuppression or vAIDS, which is sometimes observed after multiple mRNA doses.
p 202: There was a paper in 2008 that anticipated many of these problems, Malone bemoans the fact that our regulatory and toxicology overlords failed to consider these findings before the EUA, willful ignorance.
p 203: "These products do not use natural mRNA, and referring to them as mRNA vaccines is misleading. I recommend that these products, which employ a synthetic unnatural polymer, should be designated using a different term such as Psy (for pseudouradine)-mRNA genetic medicines."
p 203ff: Spike protein and cytotoxicity: "The pseudo mRNA vaccines are associated with a wide range of adverse events." Also events from polyethylene glycol used to coat the MRNA. What fellows here is a highly technical discussion on spike protein toxicity suited for medical practitioners. What's also stunning here is how little was known or studied before these vaccines were deployed.
p 205: Does the spike protein cross the blood-brain barrier? Yes it does: verified in the 2021 paper on rodent studies.
p 206: See a series of fact checkers mentioned by name (Catalina Jaramillo, Tom Kertscher and Beatrice Dupuy) claiming that the spike protein is not toxic/cytotoxic; note also these factcheckers are not trained in medicine in the least.
p 206: Discussion of the bivalent booster [otherwise known as the "the eight mouse booster"]: never tested on humans, then approved by the FDA for EUA despite no human clinical data.
p 207: "From the standpoint of the approved narrative, one of the major unresolved COVIDcrisis mysteries has been why so many who are fully vaccinated (whatever that means) against SARS-CoV-2 still develop infection and COVID disease." The data points towards negative effectiveness of the vaccines.
p 209: Interesting also to see Malone defamed as a liar and a spreader of misinformation when he made the claim that vaccines do not prevent Omicron infection and do not prevent spread to others, that the vaccines are "leaky" and have poor durability, these claims later were found to be true and Malone was essentially maligned for "stating an inconvenient truth before it became widely accepted." Malone should be furious about this; it's amazing how calmly he writes about it and talks about it in interviews!
p 210: Five potential hypotheses for why there's negative effectiveness of this or any vaccine:
1) antigenic or immune imprinting (also known as original antigenic sin)
2) antibody dependent enhancement (ADE)
3) other forms of vaccine enhanced disease
4) VAIDS vaccine-induced acquired immunodeficiency of one type or another
5) leaky vaccines create selection pressures that produce new escape variants
p 211: Original antigenic sin/immune imprinting defined: "We define immune imprinting [OAS] as a lifelong bias and immune memory of, and protection against, the strains encountered in childhood. Such biases most likely become entrenched as subsequent exposures back-boost existing memory responses, rather than stimulating de novo responses. By providing particularly robust protection against certain antigenic subtypes, or clades, imprinting can provide immunological benefits, but perhaps at the cost of equally strong protection against variants encountered later in life... The 'original antigenic sin' concept refers to the impact of the first influenza virus variant encounter on lifelong immunity. Although this model has been challenged since its discovery, past exposure, and likely one's first exposure, clearly affects the epitopes targeted in subsequent responses."
p 212: "The data concerning immune imprinting [OAS] demonstrate that vaccinating very young children with a genetic vaccine that expresses a spike antigen from a virus that has not been circulating for a very long time is either malevolence or madness--or both."
p 213ff: Note the discussions of these issues has progressed from fringe journals to now mainstream medical journals, culminating in a June 2022 bombshell paper in Science stating "immune imprinting by infection with the earlier [Alpha] variant resulted in less durable binding antibody against [Omicron]." Likely Omicron is evolving to escape prior neutralizing antibodies from vaccination but also infection with Omicron reduces T cell and B cell antibody responses to itself. The paper goes on to cite "considerable escape" and "striking antibody evasion" of Omicron.
p 216: Note that booster timing is important: too late and you become as susceptible to infection as the naturally infected, too early and the antibodies from the prior inoculation interfere with the boost.
p 217-8: Another paper studying B cell immunity found that if you were first infected with Wuhan, then vaccinated, then infected with Omicron, your antibodies against the spike would be lower than those who have never been infected. See also a paper studying T cell immunity that found that many of these same subjects had no T cell response at all. (!!!) Basically you're kind of fucked if you had the original Wuhan infection, then got vaccinated and then came across Omicron or later variants; this is evidence for OAS/immune imprinting.
p 222ff: All of this may explain the widespread COVID illness in mandated triple-vaccinated healthcare workers when Omicron happened. See specifically Houston Methodist Hospital, which was under severe stress, first because it had fired unvaccinated workers, and then when Omicron hit, producing tremendous sick time and positive tests from vaccinated employees... "the hospital was under severe stress as it sought to find staff, and that it had to reduce qualification requirements for many positions in order to remain in operation."
p 226: See also the August 2022 paper "Covid-19 Vaccine Boosters for Young Adults: A Risk-Benefit Assessment and Five Ethical Arguments Against Mandates at Universities": The study said "using CDC and sponsor-reported adverse event data, the study demonstrates that booster mandates may cause a net expected harm: for each COVID-19 hospitalization prevented in previously unaffected young adults, the data indicate that 18 to 98 serious adverse events are likely to occur... it is clear that the risks of these mRNA booster inoculations greatly outweigh the benefits in this age group."
Chapter 12: Preventable Deaths and Vitamin D3
p 228ff: On the therapeutic effectiveness of vitamin D3 in reducing death due to COVID and other respiratory illnesses. "The effectiveness of vitamin D3 as an immune system boosting prophylactic treatment for influenza and other respiratory RNA viruses was first discovered in 2006."
p 229ff: Malone talked to a DOD scientist who saw tremendous evidence in the DOD database that higher baseline vitamin D levels helped reduce severity and death from influenza; this researcher then went to Dr. Fauci back in 2006 with this information and Fauci replied "US policy is to control influenza in the USA with vaccines, not therapeutics."
p 233-4: Good argument here for why there's no point to vaccinating influenza for herd immunity, and that there's a set of logical fallacies underlying the idea:
1) influenza is constantly mutating to escape existing vaccines
2) there's a large seasonal unvaccinated world population and travelers constantly bring new strains to the US
3) flu vaccines are at best 40% effective (and often much less) at preventing influenza
4) there are enormous animal reservoirs that harbor and constantly develop new influenza virus strains.
[Note also that most people don't understand that fast mutating pathogens are completely different problem for vaccines than slow mutating pathogens, like smallpox, measles, etc]
Chapter 13: Scientific Fraud at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
p 239: Malone alleges the CDC is withholding data, specifically age-stratified data for COVID, further claiming that if it were released "it would be clear that a vaccine is not necessary for most if not all Americans." Likewise the CDC is not releasing safety data on the vaccines. "We are deep into outright scientific fraud territory."
p 243: CDC and US HHS repeatedly denied the value of natural immunity until the "reorganization" of August 22, when the CDC began acknowledging natural immunity as a risk reduction factor. [These are excellent examples of modern medical Lysenkoism; we are politicizing medical recommendations and healthcare "truths" now.]
p 244ff: On the VAERS system: a Lancet paper documented 7.9% severe adverse effect ratio, including deaths; this is unbelievably high, yet media stories reporting on this paper claim that vaccine effects were mild and there was no link between COVID vaccines and death.
p 247ff: "One out of every eight reported adverse events were classified as serious! But 'somehow' what the Medscape headline concludes is that the side effects are 'mild and short.' This is just not accurate." Also digging deeper into the Lancet paper methodologies: this paper only covered the first six months after the vaccine rollout (!); the search strings used in the Lancet metaanalysis were limited; Malone's own team uncovered many papers that they should have also reviewed but didn't; the authors also are CDC employees but this was not seen as a conflict of interest despite the fact that "the CDC is now a political organization that has been hiding data from physicians, public health officers, and the public" in order to maintain a climate without vaccine hesitancy; also the VAERS system has a tremendous underreporting factor; adverse events and deaths and hospitalizations for the vaccine increase with dosage but the paper didn't pick this up; finally the Lancet paper claims that there's no pattern to heart-related deaths but the authors don't share their methodology or data analysis for this conclusion. (!)
Chapter 14: Bioweapons, the Future Is Here
[As we get deeper into the book some of the chapters could use a little bit more "red pen." Malone is writing in sentence fragments]
p 257: noting the "coordinated pivot" from legacy media pushing the COVID fear-porn to pushing the Ukraine-Russia conflict.
p 258ff: On human augmentation as the next horizon in modern warfare.
p 261: Malone puts two and two together and realizes what the US is doing in Ukraine is analogous to what Russia would have done in Cuba in the '60s; also interesting to hear the testimony of a US Assistant Secretary of Defense about there being no "offensive" biologic weapons in Ukraine, thus not saying that there aren't defensive biologic weapons!
p 263: Note that the actual biological weapons treaty itself has a tremendous loophole that any government "could drive a train through."
p 264: It's also fascinating how well connected Malone is, he has a lot of confidential sources in the military dating from a lot of his DoD work in the past.
p 267: Interesting discussion here of how a wide range of information and media articles about US biolabs in Ukraine was memory-holed from multiple mainstream news sources; also interesting comments about a Wikipedia editor named Philip Cross (likely a pseudonym for a team of British civil servants who have curated the Wikipedia page on DoD activity in biolabs in Ukraine, including claiming it's a conspiracy theory), this is the same Wikipedia editor who has defamed Malone on his Wikipedia page; all of this is just "evidence that government(s) and corporations are interfering with what is knowable on the web."
p 268: On how far genetic and molecular biology techniques have advanced since the original biological weapons treaty in 1972. "The ability to create truly horrific new viruses is no longer 'rocket science.' It is something scientists in most laboratories... using reagents easily available worldwide, can readily achieve."
p 272ff: Extended discussion on the bioweapons treaty and what should be done about it, how it should be tightened, etc.; a lot of this is just outside the purview of this book.
Chapter 15: Most Journalists are Scientifically Unqualified [Holy cow is that ever true!]
p 275: "Why does anyone rely on reporters to interpret scientific articles? They lack the necessary training, experience, and competence to interpret scientific publications and data, a skill that typically requires decades to master." Malone cites the technique of corporate media falling back on interpretations of studies provided by those who are allegedly fair but are actually captured or politicized or have an angle, thus "...the corporate media have become willing vehicles for distribution of biased interpretations promoted by authority figures presented to the public is credible sources, but who actually practice the pseudopriesthood of scientism masquerading as science."
p 277: [Interesting insights here into systemic problems of large-scale government, on certain types of scale problems with the State.] "There is an organizational paradox that enables immense power to be amassed by those who have risen to the top of the civilian scientific corps. These bureaucrats have almost unprecedented access to the public purse, are technically employed by the executive [branch of government], but are also almost completely protected from accountability by the executive branch of government that is tasked with managing them--and therefore these bureaucrats are unaccountable to those who actually pay the bills for their activities (taxpayers)." Malone makes an analogy to Machiavelli's The Prince, with each federal health institute functioning as a semi-autonomous city-state with administrators and their courtiers running it, while Congress functions like the Vatican during the 16th century, with each Prince vying for funding and power. Very helpful analogy to help grasp the incentives and the structure here!
p 278: Next, the Biden administration, through the CDC, deployed $1 billion worth of taxpayer funded money to multiple corporate media outlets to push positive coverage about COVID-19 vaccines and also to censor any negative coverage. "With this action, the corporate media behemoth has functionally become a fusion of corporate and state-sponsored media."
p 280: Fauci has a "proven ability to actually have reporters fired who write or broadcast stories that he does not like." Some quite interesting examples follow here. Also note the structural problem of reporters needing to write flattering stores in order to maintain access to their subjects.
p 282ff: Malone then goes over an example of a technically difficult paper in Nature that was butchered by a reporter named Nancy Lapid, with no understanding of the paper; she wrote a tremendously misinformed and inaccurate article on it for Reuters, which is another captured corporate media outlet that shares a board member with Pfizer.
Chapter 16: COVID-19 Vaccines and Informed Consent by John Allison, JD
p 288: "Most Americans have long assumed that they have a fundamental right to make decisions about their own bodily health and the medical treatments they receive or decline. To be able to give informed consent, a person needs to be informed about the risks and benefits of, and alternatives to, the proposed treatment."
p 288ff: He essentially concludes:
* there is no informed consent for these vaccines,
* that effective alternatives exist,
* there's no long-term/short-term safety or efficacy criterion,
* that the precautionary principles been ignored
p 288ff: He then goes over a very tight summary of vaccinated individuals' higher rate of contracting Delta as well as Omicron, higher rate of hospitalization, various problems resulting directly from vaccination as well as the problems that emerged from the adjuvant in the vaccines, also problems that emerge from lipid nanoparticles (which are discovered in many parts of the body including the liver spleen bone marrow brain and reproductive organs), and finally a discussion of the Society of Actuaries data on group life insurance policies and excess mortality among young working-age people. All of this undermines claims that these vaccines are safe and effective. [This is a tremendously helpful and tight articulation of the bear case on these jabs.]
p 295: Note the conclusions of Bhakdi and Burkhardt: the COVID-19 vaccines cannot protect against infection because the antibodies do not effectively protect mucous membranes that line the respiratory tract, and breakthrough infections among vaxxed individuals "merely confirm the fundamental design flaw of the vaccines."
p 298ff: Discussion of low and declining efficacy of the jabs, as well as the fact that they're far less effective against Omicron than they were against Delta.
p 301ff: "In addition to limitations on their effectiveness, the COVID-19 vaccines cause demonstrable harm to the human body." Here follows a good list of direct as well as indirect harms: cardiac damage, vascular damage, weakening of a person's immune system (perhaps permanently), drops in CD8 killer T-cells, an increase of certain cancers, increase in viral infections (herpes, shingles, etc.) after vaccination, also increasing susceptibility not just to COVID in the longer run but to other respiratory infections, etc.
p 306: Dr Peter McCullough testified under oath in Florida: "The COVID-19 genetic vaccines skipped testing for genotoxicity, mutagenicity, teratogenicity, and oncogenicity. In other words, it is unknown whether or not these products will change human genetic material, cause birth defects, reduce fertility, or cause cancer."
p 308: On June 25th, 2021, the FDA announced revisions to the fact sheets accompanying the vaccines, adding warnings about myocarditis and pericarditis.
p 308ff: Good discussion of the VAERS system and the massive increase in reports on it, also discussion of the underreporting factor.
p 311: The "hot lots" phenomenon: 80% of the vaccine batches accounted for only one or two adverse events per batch, but certain batches had far, far higher adverse events... The lack of uniformity of the vaccine batches has obvious implications for quality control and manufacturing process practices.
p 312: The infamous DMED military database whistleblower release: 20x increase in hypertension, 1,000% increase in nervous system problems, 400-900% increase in different types of cancer, 472% increase in female infertility, etc. [This database is tremendous tremendous red flag, the author doesn't go into this, but after this report came out the Defense Department retroactively manipulated their database, increasing the rates of disease in the prior baseline in order to make these post vax spikes look less significant. Ironically, the cover-up here turned out to be even more embarrassing, as now our military--per their own database!--is the sickest segment of society!]
p 316ff: Good review here of the FOIA request data including the "post marketing" document that acknowledged 1,223 fatalities within the first 3 months that the fires are job was on the market. This important and compelling document can be found here at the Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency website.
Section 2: Public Health--Utilitarianism and Informed Consent
Chapter 17: Tyranny of the Modelers
p 319: on "...the grossly overestimated modeling projections of likely disease and death due to the virus."
p 320ff: Quick review and discussion of the philosophy of Utilitarianism as well as the parallel approach of Malthusianism, in order to arrive at the philosophical basis of the "depopulation agenda" of the WEF etc, all "for our own good of course."
p 323: Contrast this with the Hippocratic oath "first do no harm" and an amusing joke that illustrates the difference between a Hippocratic standard and a Utilitarian standard:
"A man walks into his doctor's office for a health check up. After completion of the exam, he asks, 'Doc, how am I doing?' His Utilitarian MD-MPH turns and says, "You are in perfect health. Your heart is perfect, your liver is perfect, and your kidneys are perfect. And I have four other patients who will die in the next week if they do not get transplants requiring a donated heart, liver, or kidney. So, I will be preparing you for surgery in one hour."
p 325: Note also the hubris of public health modelers who think they know all of the data and inputs necessary to make utilitarian calculations. [In other words, not only is the philosophy incorrect, the underlying data is incorrect, so they can't even calculate the maximum good for the greatest number in the first place!! It's wrong upon wrong, pure hubris.]
p 325: See in particular Neil Ferguson, the physicist at Imperial College London who created the main epidemiological model behind the lockdowns, predicated on exaggerated death tolls; later his team would claim credit for saving millions of lives through the policies they used, comparing them to the exaggerated predictions he had made in the first place! "...using its own hypothetical projections as a counterfactual of what would happen without lockdowns." Nice. Note also that Sweden provided an actual counterfactual that showed a tiny fraction of the deaths predicted.
p 326: Malone suggests ditching Utilitarian-based philosophies in public health and instead substituting Judeo-Christian values.
Chapter 18: The Moral Right to Conscientious, Philosophical, and Personal Belief; Exemption to Vaccination by Barbara Loe Fisher (author of A Shot in the Dark and advocate of informed consent and free choice for medical procedures particularly vaccines)
p 329: The first paragraph of Chapter 18 is an excellent articulation of a very reasonable "moderate's position" on the vaccine debate. "Many parents are not philosophically opposed to the concept of vaccination and do not object to every vaccine. However, they are philosophically opposed to government health officials having the power to intimidate, threaten, and coerce them into violating their deeply held conscientious beliefs in the event they conclude that either vaccination in general or, more commonly, a particular vaccine is not appropriate for their children."
p 329: "The right to informed consent is an overarching ethical principle in the practice of medicine, for which vaccination should be no exception. We maintain this is a responsible and ethically justifiable position to take in light of the fact that vaccination is a medical intervention performed on a healthy person that has the inherent ability to result in the injury or death of that healthy person."
p 330: On rejecting the "traditional paternalistic medical model"
p 331ff: Interesting discussion here on the history of ethical philosophy, starting with Aristotle and culminating with Aquinas and Martin Luther and Kant; then sidetracked by Jeremy Bentham and Utilitarianism, which took form in cost benefit analyses in modern healthcare policy, which are direct descendants of classical Utilitarianism.
p 333: Out of the doctors' trial in Nuremberg came the Nuremberg Code advocating the protection of individual inviolability. "The first principle of the Nuremberg Code is: The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential."
p 334: See also the Christian ethical tradition that protects the individual right "to exercise freedom of conscience even if it conflicts with a secular law of the state."
p 335: "Humans are not objects or means to an end."
p 336: Be sure to read philosopher Hans Jonas' essay "Philosophical Reflections on Experimenting with Human Subjects", "one of the most brilliant and moving essays ever written on the subject of bioethics."
Chapter 19: Bioethics and the COVIDcrisis
p 339: Malone cites a doctor from back in June 2021 who told him that he saw "six highly unusual clinical cases of post vaccination adverse events that he had personally observed in his practice involving vaccination of his patients with the Pfizer mRNA vaccine product, all within the first couple of months from the initial vaccine rollout." The story about this doctor is interesting because he reported each case, but each was "summarily determined to not be vaccine-related without significant investigation," and this doctor was since harassed, threatened with loss of medical license, and had his office broken into and computer destroyed by the Canadian government. (!) This is what happens to doctors when they go public with any concern about vaccine safety.
p 340ff: "But what are official public health leaders afraid of? And why is it necessary to suppress discussion and full disclosure of information concerning mRNA reactogenicity and safety risks? One would expect that the governmental public health and regulatory affairs infrastructure would be committed to analyzing the vaccine-related adverse event data rigorously.... Please follow along and take a moment to examine the underlying bioethics of the situation." These jabs are experimental, we're supposed to be doing rigorous science on them and if we don't have rigorous and transparent evaluation of them we play right into the hand of anti-vaxxer memes and validating their arguments!! "The suppression of information, discussion, and outright censorship concerning these current COVID vaccines, which are based on gene therapy technologies, casts a bad light on the entire vaccine enterprise."
p 341: "And now some national authorities have called for widespread dosing of EUA vaccines to adolescents and the young, which by definition are not able to directly provide informed consent."
p 344: "...even physicians have not been privy to the data that would allow true informed consent."
p 345: Verrrrrrry interesting point here. "If I were to propose a clinical trial involving children and entice participation by giving out ice cream to those willing to participate, any Institutional Human Subject's Safety Board (IRB) in the United States would reject that protocol. If I were to propose a clinical research protocol where in the population of a geographic region would lose personal liberties unless 70% of the population participated in my study, once again, that protocol would be rejected by any US IRB based on coercion of subject participation. No coercion to participate in the study is allowed."
p 346-7: "With the rollout of the vaccine, the federal government overlooked the doctrine of informed consent and ignored state laws. Physicians and their patients could not participate in full informed consent because information was censored or hidden... In my opinion, a line has been crossed."
Chapter 20: The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine
p 350: "The [evidence-based medicine] initiative appears to have been subverted, co-opted, and weaponized to advance the financial and political interests of those who can pay for large, expensive randomized controlled trials... The COVID-19 crisis of 2020-2022 has exposed for all to see how evidence-based medicine has been corrupted by the governments, hospitalists, academia, Big Pharma, academic journals, tech, and social media. They have leveraged the processes and rationale of evidence-based medicine to corrupt the entire medical enterprise."
p 351: "Industry suppresses negative trial results, fails to report adverse events, and does not share raw data with the academic research community." Universities "have adopted a neoliberal market approach, actively seeking pharmaceutical funding on commercial terms. As a result, university departments become instruments of industry."
p 354ff: "What confidence do we have in a system in which drug companies are permitted to 'mark their own homework' rather than having their products tested by independent experts as part of a public regulatory system?" "The government has a moral obligation to the public to conduct clinical trials in ways that are nonbiased by industry."
Chapter 21: ARPA-H, Intelligence Community Within NIH
[Note that this chapter merely touches on a topic that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. goes much deeper on in his book The Real Anthony Fauci.]
p 358: "The intelligence community infiltration into the healthcare research bureaucracy continues."
p 358: "'Peer review' is largely a sham, and what and who actually gets funded is pretty much completely at the whim of the top bureaucrats who run the place."
p 361ff: ARPA-H, Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health: basically a new bureaucracy to work on a newer, faster grant vehicle, also likely working on biometric identification, run by a spook, likely from DARPA.
Section 3: Corporate Media, Censorship, Propaganda, and Politics
Chapter 22: Inverted Totalitarianism
p 368: On the growing power of corporations and also the regulatory capture of the government; why technically this is a type of fascism, which is a "political science term for the fusion of the interests of corporations and the state to yield a hybrid governance structure." The administrative state serves corporations instead of the citizenry, and "the term that best describes this system of government is called inverted totalitarianism. This political science terminology was first coined in 2003 by the political theorist and writer Dr. Sheldon Wolin."
p 369: More on inverted totalitarianism. "The consequence is the establishment of this new form of totalitarianism, which (unlike classical totalitarianism) does not have an authoritarian leader. Instead, inverted totalitarian governments are run by a non-transparent group of managers and elites who manage the country from within... In effect, our democracy has been turned upside down while being captured by corporate interests than endorse authoritarian policies--hence 'inverted totalitarianism.'"
p 370: "As a nation we are once again confronted by the historic conflict that goes back to Jefferson and Hamilton and the founding of this country. Simply stated, this is the old issue of whether capitalism is a tool of democracy or is democracy a tool of capitalism."
p 370ff: And to go one step further, there's a new threat to democracy which is the international or transnational organizations like the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, and the "Party of Davos" which "has yielded an emerging system of inverted to totalitarianism on a global scale."
p 373: "Regulatory and operational capture of the hospitals, health insurance, and physicians is almost complete now."
Chapter 23: Behavioral Control and the End of the American Dream
p 376: "World leaders, governments, big media, big pharma, and tech giants are busy planning out the next pandemic response."
p 376ff: On psyops and how our government and military uses it; on "nudging"; on Malone's appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast, episode #1757 [it's also worth noting how difficult Google search makes it to find this episode, creepy] and what happened after, particularly the coordinated response in the media to deny the existence of "mass formation psychosis" as a thing. [I remember this vividly and it was quite striking to see.] This included one factchecker who denied that mass formation exists while also writing about it in scientific literature!
p 381ff: Psyops as messaging designed to address vaccine hesitancy: Yale University, published in the journal Vaccine, initiated a clinical trial to optimize persuasive messages for covid-19 to reduce vaccine hesitancy. This is an interesting study without clear declaration of funding sources, which is in itself unusual. "...and then these results were used to guide the subsequent federal US (and global) propaganda campaign to promote uptake of a poorly tested, unlicensed, experimental use authorized medical procedure and product." [Note that the messages that were tested in this study are all gross, really gross, from an ethical standpoint. I don't know what it is that is so disgusting to me about this study: perhaps it's the fundamentally unself-aware arrogance and condescension necessary to "test market" propaganda to later use.]
p 391ff: "Behavior control of civilians by their own government is the new normal." "What we have experienced during the COVIDcrisis is full-on modern political and information warfare, which consists of effectively using social and MSM media to control the narrative. But this is asymmetric warfare. The practitioners have the resources, the power, the money, mainstream media, Big Pharma, tech giants, and social media supporting their efforts. When Biden decided by executive order to enforce mandates, which are political in nature (the science does not support mandates as the vaccine do not stop spread of the disease and may create vaccine escape mutants), then mandates became a censored topic. When the government decided that they would not support the use of ivermectin and HCQ, despite our laws that allow such usage, these also became censored topics and taboo to discuss."
p 392: "Will Democrats lose the next generation because of their draconian public health responses to COVID-19?"
p 392: "Senator Ron Johnson, the ranking member for the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, has lost the right to publish on YouTube. That should scare and shock anyone with a functioning brain... Articles on such subjects as the lab leak are removed from search engines and are not allowed to be republished by The Trusted News Initiative." [The lab leak thing also was a good example of "whatever is being censored is likely true."]
p 393: "...more recently, one of the largest newspapers in Denmark apologized for its journalistic failure during COVID-19, for only publishing the official government narrative without question."
p 393: "For me, this is a battle that has completely changed my life, my way of thinking, and my perspective on my government and world leaders. There is no going back for me."
Chapter 24: Propaganda, Corporatism, Journalism, Advertising, and the Noble Lie
p 394: Examples of noble lies: masking (even masking children), the six foot social distance rule which was arbitrary, etc.
p 394: Goebbels and his gift for propaganda, something studied carefully by many as he famously said, "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic, and/or military consequences of the lie. It does becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."
p 396: See also the concept of the "submissive void" of the German public during during the Nazi era, making the people ripe for manipulation, see the comments of Leni Riefenstahl, one of the Nazi regimes leading propagandists and filmmakers, did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie, yes especially them... [Note that Erich Fromm discusses this in helpful detail in Escape From Freedom]
p 397: See also Harold Pinter, playwright, commenting when accepting the Nobel Prize for literature in 2005: "The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis."
p 398ff: Interesting discussion here about Gustav LeBon (author of The Crowd), who articulates various "useful idiot" type functions of the crowd; where an idea must be "dumbed down" to a level that the entire crowd can understand... Malone gives an example: "socially engineering acceptance of the vaccine would require this new concept for vaccination to be thoroughly simplified before the idea could become the focus of a hypnotic single-minded belief in the solution." The "LeBon model"
p 399: [Impressive to see the mastery Malone had to develop on the relatively difficult subject of propaganda; on propaganda models, on various examples in history, on psyops, etc.; clearly he's been doing a lot of work to learn about these domains, domains that he probably didn't even believe existed before. Same for me!] See the work Propaganda and Persuasion by Garth Jowitt and Victoria O'Donnell; Malone also offers an abstract of Hitler's basic principles:
* Avoid abstract ideas. Appeal to the emotions
* Constantly repeat just a few ideas. Use stereotyped phrases.
* Give only one side of the argument.
* Continuously criticize your opponents.
* Pick out one special enemy for special vilification.
p 400: Examples from US history include: Operation Mockingbird by Alan Dulles in 1950, with the CIA using 3,000 CIA operatives and 400 journalists, this domestic operation supposedly closed in 1976 but less than half of the media operatives were let go. It is rumored the British Intelligence picked up many of these duties. See also The Trusted News Initiative, the BBC-led organization that actively censors doctors, academics and dissenting voices from the official COVID-19 narrative. "In many ways the TNI currently functions as a monopolistic trade organization designed to suppress competition from non-traditional information sources..."
p 402: Regarding social credit systems like those used in China: "...financial institutions such as PayPal and GoFundMe, as well as some more mainstream banking systems, are actively deciding who can use their services based on a social credit scoring system."
p 403: It's equally creepy to see how many WEF Young Leaders Program graduates are in various governments worldwide: Pete Buttigieg, Gavin Newsom, Chelsea Clinton, Huma Abedin, Nikki Haley, Paul Krugman, Larry Summers, Tulsi Gabbard, (CNN medical analyst/propagandist) Leana Wen, Andrew Ross Sorkin, Tom Friedman, George Stephanopoulos, Anderson Cooper, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Elon Musk, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Mark Zuckerberg, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, Canada's PM Justin Trudeau, New Zealand former PM Jacinda Ardern, etc. Creepy. It's very interesting to look at the coordinated pandemic response as well as coordinated censorship and propaganda movement in light of this.
p 408ff: Note that Canada's Justin Trudeau and Canadian finance director Chrystia Freeland were supposed to be the tip of the spear for piloting a digital ID system, the trucker protest caused them to weaponize the banking system, which caused near-bank runs across Canada as an unintended effect.
p 410: It's likely that wealthy Chinese citizens have placed money offshore to escape their own social credit system by buying real estate in Canada, the US and elsewhere.
p 411: [Excellent quote here] "And now we have not only profoundly damaged the vaccine mission and public health in general, but we have destroyed public trust in physicians, academic medicine, and the entire hospital system. That damage is going to take decades to rebuild, and I hardly know where to start or how to think through what steps will be required."
p 412ff: Thoughts on cancel culture and how it's just a more palatable word for censorship, that we should just use the word censorship instead. "Censorship and propaganda as tools for population control are being normalized. We should call it what it is, using real words and avoiding soft euphemisms." [Unfortunately when you call a thing by what it is, people can see what it is; if you call a thing by a palatable euphemism, people can't see what that thing is.]
p 414: Disturbing chart here from the UK government, from their own database, revealing that the "triple vaccinated" account for 9 out of every 10 COVID deaths.
p 418ff: On "lawless" marketing of EUA-authorized and unlicensed medical products; see for example the Ad council's and Sesame Street's Big Bird campaigns to promote mRNA vaccines. Malone goes over the current rules and regulations on disseminating information on unlicensed healthcare products or products under clinical investigation, and concludes that what was done for the jabs was way beyond the pale. "In my opinion, the FDA and CDC have continued to bypass well-established regulatory norms and have permitted outright lawless activities (including prohibited marketing of unlicensing medical products) and they're rushed to deploy genetic vaccine products for a disease that is readily managed using a wide variety of early clinical treatment protocols."
p 426ff: On advocacy journalism. "Over the last two years, I have come to realize that 'journalism' and 'journalists' seem to have changed in some fundamental way." Examples include media consulting firms writing pre-baked articles that were fed to journalist at targeted publications, etc. Malone cites an example where he saw this process used to place an article into The Economist, calling it his first "you are not in Kansas anymore" moment. Note also that journalism is being taught differently now, the Gates Foundation is making grants to journalism schools. "To be blunt, this is yet another story of the gradual erosion of integrity due to the pernicious influence of massive accumulations of wealth by a few who weaponize that wealth to advance both their own power and various social agendas."
p 437ff: On the concept of an Overton Window: who moves it, the fact that politicians first need to detect "where the window is" and then move to be in accordance with it, how certain highly charismatic leaders or media personalities can move the Overton Window; likewise propaganda organizations like The Trusted News Initiative or governments will close or limit the Overton Window (see Fauci's FOIA leaked emails about takedowns of "fringe epidemiologists").
p 441: On Fauci's use of the "noble lie", on the noble lie idea (originally from Plato's The Republic) which was supposed to make citizens care more for their city-state. "This is essentially Plato's justification for state-based propaganda." Fauci's first noble lie was claiming that masks were not effective, rather than admitting that the USA had a mask shortage. Afterwards he recommended people wear one or even two masks. Another example was Fauci's position on gain-of-function research, and also the lab leak hypothesis, starting with "it never happened" ... he knew about it all along, and agreed to fund this research. A third example is the change in Fauci's position over what percent of the population needed to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity: starting at 60%, then ramping through 70% 85-90% and then 100% with boosters. "At one point, in a moment of honesty, he admitted that he nudged up the ratios needed with the implication being that he wanted people to take the vaccine and was trying to guilt-trip them into the jab."
p 444ff: When Omicron exploded onto the scene in December 2021, this by itself moved the Overton Window, because at the same time governments began saying a third, fourth or even fifth booster would be mandatory, yet this was in total conflict with the emerging data about Omicron being closer to a mild cold than a dangerous virus; per Malone, suddenly government statements and propaganda sounded much more hollow, much more outside the Overton Window than they could get away with: a good example here was the infamous Biden White House quote: "For the unvaccinated, you're looking at a winter of severe illness and death for yourselves, your families, and the hospitals you may soon overwhelm." This was a flawed attempt to move the Overton Window, it totally didn't fit with the disease backdrop, and it was met with widespread derision then and later when it became clear it was completely wrong.
p 445: "Of course, for those caught in the mass formation psychosis, Omicron still has not been enough to shake their obsession with the vaccines and mandates. However, for the persuadable third--there is a shifting of perspective."
Chapter 25: Mendacious New York Times Warning About Censorship
p 447: On the New York Times and how it "has gradually eroded the separation between editorial and news to the point where they now routinely inject government propaganda, mis- and disinformation, and political opinion into their daily reporting."
p 447ff: On the "hit piece": "a standard part of the platforming playbook." Malone shares his experience of being hit with a hit piece by reporter Davey Alba in the New York times, sharing the reporter's totally mendacious email.
p 450: Holy shit, Malone was the whistleblower about the death of Jesse Gelsinger at the hands of University of Pennsylvania gene therapy guru James Wilson!!! It turns out the reporter he worked with then, Sheryl Gaye Stolberg, spoke for Davey Alba, claiming "I've worked for the Times for 25 years and I know that we demand accuracy and fairness." She was oblivious to the changes in her own newspaper.
p 451: "We do not republish lies in our paper." Davey Alba. Per Malone, "Ms. Alba used tactics that are morally indefensible--treachery and deceit--to attack me personally and misrepresent my views." A guy like Malone really should have been savvy enough to know to follow the simple heuristic of "Do not talk to the media. Ever."
Section 4: Follow the Money--Economics
[The chapters in this part of the book tend to be weaker]
Chapter 26: Lockdown Harms and the Silence of Economists by Mikko Packalen and Jayanta Bhattacharya
p 459: Interesting that one of these writers is a Canadian professor of economics and the other is a Stanford professor of medicine, you'd think both of these guys would be in the matrix.
p 459: "Given the evident and predictable harms of lockdowns to health and economic well-being, we expected economists to raise the alarm when lockdowns were first imposed." This is an unfortunately unpersuasive essay, isn't clear who "these economists" might be; as if there ought to be a census of the ones who are positively or negatively biased towards lockdowns, etc.
p 472: "We have seemingly forgotten that scientists merely produce knowledge about the physical world, not moral imperatives about actions that involve trade-offs."
p 473-4: Claiming further that economists are becoming technocrats in support of the regime. "Much of what economists have done in the past year has been in the service of the rich and the ruling class at the expense of both the poor and the middle class." [These essayists should talk to Michael Hudson!!]
Chapter 27: Debt Versus Sovereignty: The Unresolved Conflict Between Jefferson and Hamilton Enables WEF Hegemony
p 479: "Policies and practices designed to drive either individuals or nation-states into debt have long been a preferred method for political coercion, co-optation, enslavement, incremental dominance, and control. A form of subtle, creeping indentured servitude." Definitely another important concept from Michael Hudson right here: debt peonage. See doctors and their incredible debt loads from medical school, which is another form of debt peonage making docs easier to co-opt or coerce.
p 484: A key source of free floating anxiety and mass formation is "loss of faith in the economic transactional infrastructure": see things like inflation of the money as a primary example.
p 486: The tension at the heart of the American experiment, Jefferson versus Hamilton, on limited government versus centralized government, populist-led versus elite-led.
p 488: Unfortunate to see a non-financial writer like Malone include Vanguard, the index fund shop, (!) lumped in with all the other alleged bad guys. I guess once you see a conspiracy somewhere, you see the conspiracy everywhere...
p 488-9: "Get out of debt." It's interesting to hear Malone's experience of rebuilding farms across Virginia, finally finding their current property, clearing their own lives free from debt; he's right: this is fundamental aspect of self-sovereignty. You cannot be self-sovereign if you are indebted to someone else.
Chapter 28 The World Economic Forum, a Trade Organization on Steroids
p 491ff: On "Davos man", also the WEF's international corporatism. See also Mussolini's definition of corporatism; "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." Also a definition from National Review's Andrew Stuttaford: "...the conviction that society should be organized by and for its principal interest groups--let's call them 'stakeholders'--intermediated by, and ultimately subordinate to, the state. The individual does not get a look in."
Part Three: Treatment Plan--Synthesis and Conclusions
p 498: "Everywhere I travel, during almost every interview or podcast, I get asked some form of the question 'How do we move forward from this?' Indeed. Most were like I was, living life in a sort of reality bubble, consuming corporate 'mainstream' media. Most of us believing for the most part that the United States government was far from perfect, but also far better than most others. That the NIH, FDA, and CDC had some issues with pharmaceutical industry capture, some issues with corrupted leadership, but for the most part were committed to the mission of protecting citizens' health. Then during the COVIDcrisis, it became as if I, and most of us, had actually been living in a darkened room. Living in Plato's cave. And we backed into a light switch, or somehow stepped out into the light, and we can never see things the same way again."
Chapter 29: What to Do with a Problem Like HHS? Defining the Problem: HHS and the Administrative State
p 501ff: "I believe that Dr. Fauci represents a symptom, not the cause of the current problems within HHS... The underlying problem is a perverted bureaucratic system of governance that is completely insulated from functional oversight by elected officials... Resistance to any form of control or oversight has been a consistent bureaucratic behavior throughout the history of the United States government, and this trend is accelerated since the end of the Second World War."
p 502: [Interesting comments here about legal battles over powers of the administrative state] Note that the Supreme Court majority decision concerning Roe v. Wade (which was also leaked by the way): the debate on that case was the constitutionalist logic of the "authority to define rights not specifically defined in the US Constitution as being federally granted vests with individual states." This debate was played out on the turf of the abortion debate. Likewise the case in West Virginia versus the EPA "in which the court determined that when federal agencies issue regulations with sweeping economic and political consequences, the regulations are presumptively invalid unless Congress has specifically authorized the action." Both of these court decisions are battles over the power of the administrative state and the centralization of power.
p 502: "Administrative law rests on two fictions. The first, the nondelegation doctrine, imagines that Congress does not delegate legislative power to agencies. The second, which flows from the first, is that the administrative State thus exercises only executive power, even if that power sometimes looks legislative or judicial."
p 506: See also the constant extension of the national medical emergency, which gives HHS bureaucrats extensive powers, allows the selling of emergency use authorized medical therapies, and is a type of war profiteering in a way. (!!) [Note that David Halberstam discussed some of these problems in his book The Best and The Brightest as they reared their heads in the 50s and 60s.]
p 521ff: Trump attempted to create an executive order that would have weakened the employment protections of federal government employees and would have limited administrative state power; it was overturned by the Biden administration. This was called the "Schedule F strategy" which basically would make many federal employees at-will employees.
p 524: On corporate-administrative collusion and corruption through a symbiotic alliance between (for example) the medical-pharmaceutical complex and HHS bureaucracy.
p 524: On the Orwellian reframing of things: "The face of modern fascism is often stereotyped by the corporate press as a group of tiki torch waving proud boys in uniforms" while in reality the revolving door symbiosis of the bureaucratic agencies of the government with major corporations is literal fascism in the Mussolini form. [These are tremendously helpful insights from Malone here. Very useful to navigate reality.]
p 525ff: Malone outlines steps he thinks should be taken to limit the power of the administrative state; [Note that most of these things are way outside my circle of control, and some of the steps even he doesn't have any idea how they can be done: for example, solving the revolving door between regulator and industry.]
p 526: "Vaccine liability indemnification is another legislative strategy that has clearly failed to meet its intended purpose. The vaccine industry has become an unaccountable monster that is consuming both adults and children."
Chapter 30: Groupthink and the Administrative State
p 529: "The tendency of many is to focus on one of these as the root cause, and to overlook the complex global interplay of all factors, a very human bias to seek out a single factor or individual that should be held accountable" e.g.: Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab, Larry Fink, etc.
p 530ff: On avoiding groupthink: "Groupthink has now permeated the administrative state, to such an extent that the methods used to combat groupthink have all but disappeared from the mind-set of group managers" in favor of the norming techniques of the Tuckman stages of group development ("norming, storming, forming and performing") which literally leads to group think.
p 536: Per Irving Janis (author of Victims of Groupthink): "the members consider loyalty to the group the highest form of morality.... That loyalty requires each member to avoid raising controversial issues, questioning weak arguments, or calling a halt to soft-headed thinking." See also the extremely unethical and cruel behavior to out-members or non-members of the group that is typical of groupthinking groups, you see this in the behavior of COVID insiders towards dissident doctors for example.
p 541ff: See Irving Janis's nine recommendations for preventing groupthink here.
Chapter 31: Don't Be Brain Dead (Think For Yourself)
p 544: Discussion of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect
Chapter 32: Defend Your Sovereignty
p 550: "As most federal employees at the top-tier are well aware of their future career opportunities, they have no incentives to try to change the status quo and upset their potential future employers. Government institutions that are intrinsically controlled by outside interests cannot be reformed from within, so it is important to not waste too much energy trying."
p 552: "The CDC has spent a billion dollars on propaganda and censorship to ensure vaccine compliance through media buys, and one has to wonder just what sort of propaganda will be pushed on the American people in the future."
p 554: Note the federal government's admonishment of Florida and criticism of DeSantis's disputes with Federal COVID policies; second, note the federal government's decision to federalize or monopolize the distribution of monoclonal antibodies; these are two highly interesting "retaliatory tools" of the federal government, despite the fact that the 10th Amendment of the Constitution authorizes states to establish laws and regulations on the health, safety and general welfare of State citizens. "Biden refusing to send lifesaving medicine is a clear abuse of federal power." [It's also fascinating here to see, in reaction to these extraordinary overreaches in federal government power, so many journeys away the political left--to where (politically speaking) I don't know, but anything that's away from the "centralizing left": see Dr Pierre Kory and Dr Malone for example, both clearly lifetime Democratic voters, they are both now championing things like states rights, both are completely disillusioned with the groupthink and censorious behavior of the national Democratic party.]
p 566ff: Note how the federal government uses funding for things like roads, schools, also hospitals and media in order to "harmonize" rules across states and overstep what would be normally the constraints of states rights.
Chapter 33: IppocrateOrg: People Helping One Another by Mauro Rango and Irina Bourtourline
[This is an Italy-based movement to assemble a volunteer international network of physicians, researchers and health and social workers to help patients "with nowhere else to turn" as the "Italian State endorsed medical establishment was offering patients nothing other than nihilist inpatient hospital protocols with unacceptably high mortality rates." Basically Italy spontaneously created its own FLCCC-type organzition early on in its COVID emergency.]
p 565: See this organization's handbook "Healing at Home from COVID-19; A Manual for Early Tailored Therapy."
p 566ff: Note that the Italian government attempted to smear and shut down doctors and subunits of this organization, there was also a concerted media campaign to try to smear the organization as well, this only led to a Streisand Effect of word getting around about it, increasing the organization's popularity.
p 570ff: Now this organization is evolving to set up a sort of parallel system to the established Italian Healthcare System, of a system of medical clinics, a code of ethics, etc. [Note also: this is how a Fourth Turning gets replaced by a First Turning]
Chapter 34: The Victory Garden
p 578: "Many have become alarmed about the odd rash of fires breaking out in food processing plants during 2022. Whether by intent or coincidence, these fires are adding fuel to growing fear that the winter of 2022 may see widespread and somewhat idiosyncratic global food shortages."
p 578: "Go old school--grow your own food." [He's right! This is one tremendously important element of self-sovereignty] Malone goes through a history of the "war gardens" in the UK and the US in World War I and II.
p 580: "Growing a garden is a victory over the globalist agenda--victory over those who wish to control every aspect of consumerism as well as every aspect of our lives."
[This is quite a cute chapter, I totally agree with the satisfaction you get out of growing vegetables and greens for yourself.]
p 582: "A vegetable garden is also a political statement. To commit to breaking out of the supply chain network, to living without store-bought food, is an act of resistance."
Chapter 35: How Does It Feel To Be Vindicated?
p 584: "An excellent commentary summarizing the stunning self-owning admissions of incompetence and culpability for massive unnecessary loss of life has been provided by Thomas Harrington writing for The Brownstone Institute, titled 'Drs. Walensky and Offit: It's All in Good Fun.' Personally, I can hardly bear to watch their breezy smugness as the casually chat with friends. I am reminded of the famous Hana Arendt phrase 'the banality of evil.'"
p 586: [Tremendously moving quote here] "I have not spoken out because I sought attention; I have done this because it was the right thing to do, and I seemed to have a unique window of opportunity to speak for those whose voices were so actively suppressed. But I certainly have had to take hits for it... The biomedical world that I thought I was living in has been revealed to be a sham. The legitimacy of the industry and discipline that I have committed my entire professional life to is in shambles. I am now embarrassed to call myself a vaccines and biodefense expert, because the fundamental corruption inherent in those domains has been so clearly revealed. I cannot unsee what I have seen... I chose to not pursue the careers of my father and father-in-law, which were spent building weapons of war. Only to find that I had inadvertently played a significant role in enabling one of the most tragic medical follies in the history of man."
p 587: "We have experienced extraordinary efforts to delegitimize us, to rewrite history, to deny us credit for intellectual and technical contributions, to slander and defame. They have destroyed the consulting business that we had built up together over decades... I have been labeled a 'right-wing extremist' and 'Nazi.'"
Chapter 36: Letter From a Coerced Mother by Anonymous
[This likewise is quite a touching, beautiful chapter.]
p 591: Vermont required that in order to end masking requirements more than 80% of the school students needed to be vaccinated against COVID-19; this is at the high school level, where there are obvious negative trade-offs for these experimental therapies. Note that the disease doesn't cause any harm for children; furthermore, the vaccines don't impair or inhibit transmission.
p 592: "Vermont is interesting because we were among the first states in the country to reach the 80% vaccination rate in adults that was expected to confer herd immunity, and here we are in 2022 coming off the worst case surge we've experienced yet. But apparently we somehow still think that vaccination is going to keep schools safer?" This mother is concerned about "vax coercion" of her school age children because "everybody's doing it."
[DK: Speaking of reaching out to educational institutions: I personally (and repeatedly) wrote to the senior administration of Cornell University about the dangers of its student, staff and faculty COVID vaccine mandates (which were put in place in late 2021).
I first wrote to the University in March 2022, after two things happened:
1) It became obvious that there were significant dangers and downside risks with this novel biotherapy, especially for young people, and that those risks almost certainly outweighed the benefits, and
2) In the academic semester following Cornell's enforced mandate (and after the University achieved a 99% vax uptake rate among students), there was an order of magnitude more COVID cases among the student body compared to the prior semesters pre-vax mandate, and the source on this was the University's own COVID dashboard. Thus we had a mini-Israel on our hands! The exact opposite result that you'd want or expect from a supposedly effective vax.
My response from the seven or eight senior administrators that I contacted? None. I never heard anything back from anyone. The only "response" I got was an out-of-office auto-reply from the university's Associate Vice President Deputy General Counsel.
Note that Cornell waited until the end of May 2023 to finally lift the COVID vax mandate.]
To Read:
Plato: The Trial and Death of Socrates
Gavin de Becker: The Gift of Fear
***Randolph Bourne: Untimely Papers (see in particular the essay "The State")
Mattias Desmet: The Psychology of Totalitarianism
Wilfred Trotter: Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War
Wilfred Trotter: Crystallizing Public Opinion
***T.C. Chamberlin's famous1890 (!) paper "The Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses: with this method the dangers of parental affection for a favorite theory can be circumvented."
Joost Meerloo: The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing
Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Dr. George Fareed and Dr. Brian Tyson: Overcoming the COVID-19 Darkness: How Two Doctors Successfully Treated 7,000 Patients
Barbara Loe Fisher: A Shot in the Dark
***Bonnie Steinbock, John D. Arras, Alex John London: Ethical Issues in Modern Medicine: Contemporary Readings in Bioethics
***Hans Jonas: "Philosophical Reflections on Experimenting with Human Subjects" (seminal essay on bioethics)
***Sheldon Wolin: Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism
***Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco: Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt
Gustave le Bon: The Crowd
Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O'Donnell: Propaganda and Persuasion
Caitlin Johnstone: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Caitlin Johnstone: Woke: A Field Guide For Utopia Preppers
Ashley Rindsberg: The Grey Lady Winked
***John Morse: The Federal Reserve Cartel: Rothschild, Rockefeller and Morgan Families
***Irving Janis: Victims of Groupthink
Voltaire: Candide--or Optimism
The works of Harold Pinter (playwright)