In a sane functional society, this would totally dominate the news cycle, even ahead FTX or Arizona! Election fraud is common, so is money laundering, but the level of fraud here, the ramifications and the genocidal consequences are beyond anything I know of. Except maybe the Plandemic itself.
These are just some highlights of a larger feature which I don’t want to “pirate”, but to push. So Head to EpochTV and help it gain traction and enter the main public debate agenda!
“Why is that important beyond Israel?…Because Israel was essentially the first country to launch [a] national vaccination campaign, and it did that under a very unique agreement with Pfizer that essentially made Israel a worldwide lab for the rest of the world. And indeed, if you follow all the approval stages of the FDA of the vaccine, in each one of them, Pfizer is quoting and relying on data from Israel.”
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! Articles can always be subject of later editing as a way of perfecting them
To be continued? Our work and existence, as media and people, is funded solely by our most generous supporters. But we’re not really covering our costs so far, and we’re in dire needs to upgrade our equipment, especially for video production. Help SILVIEW.media survive and grow, please donate here, anything helps. Thank you!
! Articles can always be subject of later editing as a way of perfecting them
I wouldn’t normally waste your precious life with a full Albert Bourla interview, but his latest delivery at Davos 2022 is spectacularly shameless and delusional.
Here are a couple of short take-outs:
“Our vaccines prevent illness & transmission, Efficacy so high not much room for improvement “ SHARE
Same clown spilling the beans in another circus arena not long ago:
BILLIONS FREE PFIZER JABS SIT IN WAREHOUSES, compliance our greatest concern SHARE
This falls in line with what the Moderna CEO, Stephane Bancel, has just revealed on the same stage a few days earlier:
All those sitting jabs are billions lives we saved. Something to be proud of. The cherry top is how much we got to them, their amusement while taking on anti-vaxxers is so badly acted it gave Arnold Schwarzenegger the cringe.
Watch the full thing (33min):
Good job convincing people you’re not utter lunatics, boys! Borat called: “great success!”
Meanwhile, Bourla seems to have problems breathing in our atmosphere with his new genetically engineered gills.
Can someone please explain what is going on with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla's neck and the noises?!
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Every aspect of the Covid crisis has come with evidence of prescience and pre-planning. “Plandemic” is one of the most adequate buzzwords I’ve ever heard. If it’s all planned, the release was planned too, which makes the current debate over the Covid origin retarded. If the cause was a virus (another oxy-moronic debate around “isolation in cultures”), then it didn’t come from animals, it didn’t escape from a lab, it was DISTRIBUTED. Whatever it was, virus, poison, psychosis, EMFs, it was DISTRIBUTED. Better watch the water, the soil and the air!
This first video below was released April 15, 2020. About the same time Trudeau was claiming The Great Reset is a conspiracy theory. Guess when the system was developed and read until the end to find out where it’s at now, I saved you a nice punchline!
How far back does this go? Well, in January 2018, WEF was already spreading this brochure
Among the first to push the Bigger Brother – the Canadian Banksters Cartel, of course.
“The World Economic Forum acknowledges and is inspired by the leadership of our partners whose commitment to this project shows that this future is possible. In particular, we wish to thank Marc Garneau, Minister of Transport of Canada, and the entire team from the Government of Canada for having contributed to ensuring the research and prototype development has been grounded in pragmatic public-sector experience. Together, the World Economic Forum and Accenture, collaborating on Shaping the Future of Security in Travel, hope that this report and the prototype will gain momentum, encouraging public and private parties to pilot and scale this concept in the coming year.”
WEF – Jan, 2018
This quote above, from the aforementioned WEF brochure, shows that WEF’s collaboration with the governments of Canada and The Netherlands on this project extends way before 2018, into the research stages.
From earlier research we know the plan was launched in January 2016:
The Forbes picked up on it, but only in January 2019, yet who was there to care and pay attention? I, for one, was busy enjoying free travel, having nothing and being happy. But Schwab had to take all that from us and replace it with this dumb livestock management app that won’t ever stick on living humans, soulless NPCs only:
Paradigm Shift: Biometrics And The Blockchain Will Replace Paper Passports Sooner Than You Think
Biometrics and blockchain are the keys to the future of traveler identification. GETTY
Crossing international borders without a physical passport may become a reality for some travelers in less than a year. On Wednesday, the World Economic Forum and the governments of Canada and the Netherlands launched a pilot program for paperless travel between the two countries at Montreal’s largest airport.
The new initiative, called Known Traveller Digital Identity (KTDI), is the first platform to use a traveler-managed digital identity for international paperless travel, giving travelers control over when and how their personal data is shared. The identity data normally stored on a chip on a passport is encrypted and securely stored in a digital wallet on a traveler’s mobile device.
Whereas traditional ID systems are managed by centralized authorities, KTDI is based on the blockchain — specifically, Linux’s Hyperledger Indy, a distributed ledger purpose-built for decentralized identity. This is the secret sauce behind the paradigm shift toward a system where travelers — not government agencies or travel brands — control access to their personal data.
“We’re all wildly frustrated by data hacks, data breaches, our identities being stolen — and that’s largely a result of where our identity data is stored today,” says David Treat, a managing director and global blockchain lead at Accenture, the technology advisory partner on the KTDI project.
“The excitement around digital identity underpinned by blockchain and biometrics is that there is now a solution pattern crystallizing where users can be in control of their own data,” says Treat. “They can decide with whom they want to share it, and for how long, and revoke that access at a later point.”
Right now, our personal data is stored many siloed data structures surrounded by supposedly secure perimeters. But if hackers manage to break into them — as they frequently do — they get all the data.
Every time you book a plane ticket, pass through an airport security checkpoint, or reserve a stay at a hotel, your personal data ends up being stored somewhere. By the end of a trip, your information might wind up in dozens of different siloed data stores, where it might remain indefinitely. “Travelers have no control over it. They are essentially handing over a set of data and they have very little visibility as to what happens to it after that,” says Treat.
With KTDI, a traveler might give an airline — or, eventually, a hotel or rental car company — access to specific pieces of personal information for a finite amount of time. When the transaction is finished, the access is revoked.
“It’s very different from today’s world where an airline or hotel will accumulate data over time and hold on to it, and create this big honey pot of information,” says Treat. Instead, the philosophy behind KTDI is more transactional, where information is stored for a user-approved period of time. “When it’s no longer needed, it’s then no longer stored,” says Treat.
So what might a journey might look like for a traveler using KTDI in the future?
To get started, you would download a mobile wallet, enroll for the first time, and establish your profile. Then, in advance of an international flight, you might decide to share your personal information with border authorities and airlines. Now the airport and airline are expecting you. Once you arrive at the airport, you can go through the security checkpoint and board the plane using biometrics to confirm your identity, without any need for a physical passport. After your flight, you might decide to revoke access to your personal data from the airline.
Meanwhile, over time, a tamper-proof digital ledger would be created through the accumulation of authorized transactions by trusted partners such as border agencies and airlines. This establishes a “known traveler status,” which is a reusable digital identity that makes it possible for more streamlined future interactions with governments, airlines and other partners.
This is not just a theoretical concept. Along with the governments of Canada and the Netherlands, partners — including Air Canada, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Montreal-Trudeau International Airport, Toronto Pearson International Airport and Amsterdam Airport Schiphol — will be testing the KTDI initiative throughout 2019, with the first end-to-end paperless journey expected to take place in early 2020.
The Forbes piece actually follows the official launch of KTDI two days earlier, as marked by this WEF press-release published from Toronto:
World Economic Forum consortium launches paperless Canada-Netherlands travel pilot
Jun 26, 2019
The World Economic Forum, in collaboration with the governments of Canada, The Netherlands and industry partners, launches the first ever passport-free pilot project between the two countries.
The Known Traveller Digital Identity (KTDI) initiative addresses rising aviation travel demand – expected to grow to 1.8 billion passengers by 2030
The KTDI pilot offers greater control over personal information, putting passengers in charge of when and how data is shared through a ‘traveller-managed digital identity’
MONTREAL, June 26, 2019 /CNW/ – The World Economic Forum and the governments of the Netherlands and Canada launch the first pilot project for paperless travel between the two countries today at Montreal Airport.
Known Traveller Digital Identity (KTDI) is the first platform to use a traveller-managed digital identity for international paperless travel. It will be integrated with partner systems and tested internally throughout 2019, with the first end-to-end paperless journey expected to take place in early 2020.
The pilot initiative is a collaboration between government and industry – border authorities, airports, technology providers and airlines – to create an interoperable system for secure and seamless travel.
“By 2030, international air travel is expected to rise to 1.8 billion passengers, up 50% from 2016. With current systems, airports cannot keep up,” says Christoph Wolff, Head of Mobility, World Economic Forum, “This project offers a solution. By using interoperable digital identities, passengers benefit from a holistic system for secure and seamless travel. It will shape the future of aviation and security.”
KTDI provides a frictionless travel experience for passengers while allowing them to have greater control over their personal data. The identity data that is usually stored on a chip on a passenger’s passport is instead securely stored and encrypted on their mobile device. Passengers can manage their identity data and consent to share it with border authorities, airlines and other pilot partners in advance. Using biometrics, the data is checked at every leg of the journey until arrival at the destination, without the need for a physical passport.
Passengers establish a ‘known traveller status’ over time through the accumulation of ‘attestations’ or claims that are proven and declared by trusted partners, such as border agencies and recognized airlines. The result is a reusable digital identity that facilitates more streamlined and tailored interactions with governments, airlines and other partners.
“Canada is pleased to collaborate with the World Economic Forum, the Government of The Netherlands and our industry partners to enhance aviation security and make international air travel safer by testing new and emerging technologies,” said the Honourable Marc Garneau, Canada’s Minister of Transport. “The Known Traveller Digital Identity pilot project will help facilitate seamless global air travel and benefit the world economy by enhancing the traveler experience, while ensuring that cross-border security is maintained.”
“This KTDI pilot project is a perfect example of the importance of public-private partnership in implementing innovations in the aviation sector and border management and I am honoured that we are engaging in this pilot from the Netherlands,” said Ankie Broekers-Knol, Minister for Migration, The Netherlands.
The governments of Canada and the Netherlands are joined by Air Canada, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, YUL Montreal-Trudeau International Airport, Toronto Pearson International Airport and Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. This pilot group is supported by technology and advisory partner Accenture, with Vision Box and Idemia as technology component service providers.
KTDI technology
KTDI is based on an interoperable digital identity, linked directly to government-issued identity documents (ePassports). It uses cryptography, distributed ledger technology and biometrics to ensure portability and to safeguard the privacy of personal data. The system’s security relies on a decentralized ledger platform that all partners can access. This ledger provides an accurate, tamper-proof record of the travellers’ identity data and authorized transactions.
Once international travel resumes, self-serve check in terminals like these at Ottawa International Airport will become part of a more hands-free travel experience. (The Canadian Press/Justin Tang)
Just as the 9/11 attacks did 20 years ago, the COVID-19 pandemic will transform the way people travel internationally — with hundreds of millions of dollars in new government spending planned for modernizing border security and updating public health measures at airports.
In the recent federal budget, the federal government announced $82.5 million to fund COVID-19 testing infrastructure at Canadian airports and another $6.7 million to buy sanitization equipment for the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority.
Ottawa also has earmarked $656.1 million over five years to modernize Canada’s border security.
Daniel Gooch, president of the Canadian Airports Council, said the country’s flight hubs still have no clear idea of what is expected of them.
…
At the heart of the move to touchless travel is a trial the federal government is undertaking with the World Economic Forum and The Netherlands called the “Known Traveller Digital Identity” project, or KTDI.
The project began with the publication of a white paper back in 2018 and was seen as a way to modernize air travel by moving passengers through airports faster. That white paper said that a new, touchless system was needed as the number of international air arrivals was expected to increase 50 per cent from 2016 to 2030.
With international travel almost at a standstill now, the technology is seen as a way to facilitate a return to pre-COVID levels of air traffic.
The touchless travel experience
Under the KTDI plan, a digital form of identification is created that contains the traveller’s identity, boarding passes, vaccination history and information on whether they’ve recovered from COVID-19. Travellers with KTDI documentation would still have to face a customs officer, but all other points of contact in an airport could become touchless.
“We’re still talking about a world where you’ll need to carry your passport because it is an international border,” said a senior CBSA official, speaking on background.
“We’re not talking about replacing your passport. But the number of times you have to take out that document, or your boarding pass, to substantiate who you are and where you need to be, gets reduced.”
Passengers wear face masks as they wait to go through security at Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport in Montreal. (Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press)
The official said the KTDI program is still in its early stages and technological issues are still being worked out. He said that privacy protections would have to be in place before any such system could be launched.
“It’s not like the Government of Canada holds that information in a central place, or airlines hold it in a central place, or border agencies hold it in a central place,” the official said. “It’s the traveller themselves that holds their own information.”
Vaccinated vs. unvaccinated travellers
A CBSA spokesperson told CBC News that the $656.1 million federal investment in border security modernization over five years will fund other “digital self-service tools” that will “reduce touchpoints” and create more “automated interactions” at Canadian airports
The CBSA said more information on those measures will be released to the public “in the coming weeks.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is attending the G7 summit in the United Kingdom this weekend, where leaders are expected to discuss international vaccination certification — a so-called “vaccine passport”.
The federal government has signaled already that Canadians who have been fully vaccinated will be allowed to re-enter the country without having to stay in a government authorized quarantine hotel. Confirming the validity of those travellers’ vaccination status will require some kind of vaccine passport like the KTDI program. Canada’s airports like that idea.
Fully vaccinated Canadians can soon skip hotel quarantine
The federal government says it will soon ease restrictions for fully vaccinated Canadians and permanent residents returning from international travel. 2:14
“We’re really leaning on vaccinated vs. unvaccinated. That’s a place where you can have some differentiation of the travel experience to make it a little smoother, a little bit more pleasant for those who have been vaccinated. But we don’t know yet what the government’s plans are for that,” Gooch said.
Once a traveller’s vaccination can be verified, Gooch said, they can be treated differently — perhaps by giving them a single test upon arrival or before they depart, rather than the multiple tests required now.
While the exact changes to international travel are still being worked out, Gooch said the travel experience going forward will be very different from the past.
“Maybe you don’t see an individual at all as you walk through the customs hall,” he said. “Your verification is done through your facial ID, which is connected to your Known Traveller Digital Identification, which is connected to your digital health information and your digital travel documentation.
Tucker Carlson / Ben Dichter:
"Yesterday was my 1st time crossing the border with my digital passport, I held my phone to border agent to give him my QR code, you know what he said? It’s okay I don’t need it! Your phone already popped up & correlated your vaccine passport.” pic.twitter.com/HsXlQlQf9G
Paperless Travel Pilot Outlines Best Practices for Digital Travel Experience
18 Oct 2021, by Madeleine Hillyer, Media Relations, World Economic Forum, mhll@weforum.org
World Economic Forum releases findings from its three-year Known Traveller Digital Identity pilot for paperless, cross-border travel
COVID-19 has heightened the need for digital travel credentials, such as vaccination or COVID test certificates, that can be verified across borders
The pilot indicates that a fully digital travel experience is possible but further progress is needed in the areas of governance, legal, global public-private collaboration and technology standards to drive wider adoption
Read more on the Known Traveller Digital Identity pilot findings here
New York, USA, 18 October 2021 – The World Economic Forum today releases findings from its digital passport pilot project which indicate that a fully digital travel experience is possible. However, further collaboration is needed to progress towards globally accepted and verifiable digital travel credentials.
The Known Traveller Digital Identity (KTDI)initiative, which was started in 2018, has worked with the governments of Canada and the Netherlands plus private-sector partners to pilot digital travel credentials for paperless travel between two countries. Lessons from this pilot are particularly relevant today as COVID-19 has underscored the need for verifiable digital credentials in cross-border travel.
A new white paper, Accelerating the Transition to Digital Credentials for Travel, is the result of collaboration between the World Economic Forum, Accenture and industry and government partners. It draws on lessons from the KTDI pilot and is intended to serve as a playbook to guide decision making and help assess important considerations in the use of verifiable digital travel credentials across borders.
“Creating digital travel credentials that work across borders is not an issue of technology but an issue of governance,” said Lauren Uppink, Head of Aviation, Travel and Tourism, World Economic Forum. “The learnings from the Forum’s KTDI consortium demonstrates that while the technology for the next stage of digital-first travel is ready, thoughtful collective action is what truly enables the design and effective implementation of global governance structures, ensuring that digital travel credentials are easy to use, trustworthy and verifiable across borders.”
“The pandemic has highlighted the urgency for trusted, widely-accepted, privacy preserving digital travel credentials,” says Christine Leong, Global Lead for Blockchain Identity & Biometrics, Accenture. “Leveraging digital travel credentials would provide a much more secure way of sharing verifiable information, leading to greater assurance for travellers, shorter airport processing time, and greater efficiency for airline and border staff. To achieve this, governments and private sector organisations must collaborate to bring about a seamless, paperless and contactless travel continuum for all. The time to work together is now.”
Lessons from the KTDI pilot
The KTDI project established that two major, often misleadingly polarized, technology approaches to verifiable digital identities can work together. Working with governments and technology partners, the consortium found that public key infrastructure (PKI) and decentralized digital identity can co-exist and address the digitalization of various parts of a travel journey.
Furthermore, the pilot project found that these technologies can and must be integrated within existing systems to accelerate adoption and scale.
Interoperability and collaboration were other key areas for progress identified during the KTDI pilot. For paper passports, interoperability already exists as all participating member states agree to follow the specifications through the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO)’s governance and trust frameworks.
Such an agreement for the specifications of digital travel credentials is not as widespread yet, but the adoption of traditional passport specifications shows that the benefits of using digital credentials in travel cannot be realized through isolated or one-off approaches.
The KTDI project
The first cross-border pilot for digital travel identification, the Known Traveller Digital Identity (KTDI) project, has been piloted with government partners from Canada and the Netherlands, along with a consortium of technology, private sector and other partners. The KTDI partners have designed and built the first government-led, public-private ecosystem to test the vision of safe and seamless cross-border travel. This vision aimed to reduce touchpoints by using emerging technologies, including biometrics and decentralized identity, and inform the future development of a globally accepted decentralized identity ecosystem.
Although the COVID-19 pandemic has affected KTDI pilot efforts, it has also created an opportunity to further analyse how decentralized digital identity and PKI-based approaches could work together or work in sync. Although the initial pilot employed a decentralized identity approach to trial trusted digital credentials, KTDI could in the future expand to incorporate additional verifiable credentials such as COVID-19 vaccination certificates, as well as PKI-based digital credentials.
Moreover, while government officials claimed that vaccine passports only included details pertaining to whether someone has received a COVID vaccine, some claim it functions as a tracking app, with border patrol receiving notification of one’s estimated arrival time well before a traveller gets there. Liberals in Canada have also suggested utilizing tracking via digital IDs to hunt down the unvaccinated during future pandemics to get them their shots.
At a Feb. 1 government event on digital ID an assistant deputy minister asked panelists how they could use the technology to better handle future pandemics.
One panelist suggested it could be used to track people to be vaccinated or to identify if they're due for a second dose. pic.twitter.com/eKgBz4lEwX
Travelling from one concentration camp to another will be as joyless as the camps. You can’t escape if there’s no “outside”.
Alongside @ACI_EUROPE, we call for countries to remove remaining intra 🇪🇺 restrictions, including all testing, vaccine certificates, and passenger location forms.
New evidence shows travel restrictions failed to prevent the spread of #COVID19.
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! Articles can always be subject of later editing as a way of perfecting them
This damning op ed just came out on the most prestigious British Medical Journal (BMJ) and shocked a lot of people. But, as I’ll show you, there’s been even more shocking and more based research out there pointing the same direction ages ago, and it’s been largely overlooked. So maybe it’s time to stop the awe and start going after the blind sentinels we’re paying to safeguard our body of knowledge that keeps us alive.
Oh my, oh my! How do these academic fucktards (don’t excuse my accuracy) expect anything “evidence-based” to fare in a post-truth world where men are pregnant and virus isolation is done “in cultures”?! I mean, evidence was an endangered species on Planet Science even before woke science and the macarenavirus… What can the price of evidence be in an economy where “a patient cured is a customer lost”?! How do they discover hot water in 2022 and expect to maintain a prestige?!
Whatever the answers may be, we can use this and the references I’ll add after to awaken any NPC that still exhibits signs of intelligent life trapped inside:
Evidence based medicine has been corrupted by corporate interests, failed regulation, and commercialisation of academia, argue these authors
The advent of evidence based medicine was a paradigm shift intended to provide a solid scientific foundation for medicine. The validity of this new paradigm, however, depends on reliable data from clinical trials, most of which are conducted by the pharmaceutical industry and reported in the names of senior academics. The release into the public domain of previously confidential pharmaceutical industry documents has given the medical community valuable insight into the degree to which industry sponsored clinical trials are misrepresented.1234 Until this problem is corrected, evidence based medicine will remain an illusion.
The philosophy of critical rationalism, advanced by the philosopher Karl Popper, famously advocated for the integrity of science and its role in an open, democratic society. A science of real integrity would be one in which practitioners are careful not to cling to cherished hypotheses and take seriously the outcome of the most stringent experiments.5 This ideal is, however, threatened by corporations, in which financial interests trump the common good. Medicine is largely dominated by a small number of very large pharmaceutical companies that compete for market share, but are effectively united in their efforts to expanding that market. The short term stimulus to biomedical research because of privatisation has been celebrated by free market champions, but the unintended, long term consequences for medicine have been severe. Scientific progress is thwarted by the ownership of data and knowledge because industry suppresses negative trial results, fails to report adverse events, and does not share raw data with the academic research community. Patients die because of the adverse impact of commercial interests on the research agenda, universities, and regulators.
The pharmaceutical industry’s responsibility to its shareholders means that priority must be given to their hierarchical power structures, product loyalty, and public relations propaganda over scientific integrity. Although universities have always been elite institutions prone to influence through endowments, they have long laid claim to being guardians of truth and the moral conscience of society. But in the face of inadequate government funding, they have adopted a neo-liberal market approach, actively seeking pharmaceutical funding on commercial terms. As a result, university departments become instruments of industry: through company control of the research agenda and ghostwriting of medical journal articles and continuing medical education, academics become agents for the promotion of commercial products.6 When scandals involving industry-academe partnership are exposed in the mainstream media, trust in academic institutions is weakened and the vision of an open society is betrayed.
The corporate university also compromises the concept of academic leadership. Deans who reached their leadership positions by virtue of distinguished contributions to their disciplines have in places been replaced with fundraisers and academic managers, who are forced to demonstrate their profitability or show how they can attract corporate sponsors. In medicine, those who succeed in academia are likely to be key opinion leaders (KOLs in marketing parlance), whose careers can be advanced through the opportunities provided by industry. Potential KOLs are selected based on a complex array of profiling activities carried out by companies, for example, physicians are selected based on their influence on prescribing habits of other physicians.7 KOLs are sought out by industry for this influence and for the prestige that their university affiliation brings to the branding of the company’s products. As well paid members of pharmaceutical advisory boards and speakers’ bureaus, KOLs present results of industry trials at medical conferences and in continuing medical education. Instead of acting as independent, disinterested scientists and critically evaluating a drug’s performance, they become what marketing executives refer to as “product champions.”
Ironically, industry sponsored KOLs appear to enjoy many of the advantages of academic freedom, supported as they are by their universities, the industry, and journal editors for expressing their views, even when those views are incongruent with the real evidence. While universities fail to correct misrepresentations of the science from such collaborations, critics of industry face rejections from journals, legal threats, and the potential destruction of their careers.8 This uneven playing field is exactly what concerned Popper when he wrote about suppression and control of the means of science communication.9 The preservation of institutions designed to further scientific objectivity and impartiality (i.e., public laboratories, independent scientific periodicals and congresses) is entirely at the mercy of political and commercial power; vested interest will always override the rationality of evidence.10
Regulators receive funding from industry and use industry funded and performed trials to approve drugs, without in most cases seeing the raw data. 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? Unconcerned governments and captured regulators are unlikely to initiate necessary change to remove research from industry altogether and clean up publishing models that depend on reprint revenue, advertising, and sponsorship revenue.
Our proposals for reforms include: liberation of regulators from drug company funding; taxation imposed on pharmaceutical companies to allow public funding of independent trials; and, perhaps most importantly, anonymised individual patient level trial data posted, along with study protocols, on suitably accessible websites so that third parties, self-nominated or commissioned by health technology agencies, could rigorously evaluate the methodology and trial results. With the necessary changes to trial consent forms, participants could require trialists to make the data freely available. The open and transparent publication of data are in keeping with our moral obligation to trial participants—real people who have been involved in risky treatment and have a right to expect that the results of their participation will be used in keeping with principles of scientific rigour. Industry concerns about privacy and intellectual property rights should not hold sway.
Footnotes
Competing interests: McHenry and Jureidini are joint authors of The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine: Exposing the Crisis of Credibility in Clinical Research (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2020). Both authors have been remunerated by Los Angeles law firm, Baum, Hedlund, Aristei and Goldman for a fraction of the work they have done in analysing and critiquing GlaxoSmithKline’s paroxetine Study 329 and Forest Laboratories citalopram Study CIT-MD-18. They have no other competing interests to declare.
Provenance and peer review: Not commissioned, externally peer reviewed
Landefeld CS. Narrative review: the promotion of gabapentin: an analysis of internal industry documents. Ann Intern Med2006;145:284-93. doi:10.7326/0003-4819-145-4-200608150-00008 pmid:16908919CrossRef PubMed Web of Science Google Scholar
Topol EJ. Risk of cardiovascular events associated with selective COX-2 inhibitors. JAMA2001;286:954-9. doi:10.1001/jama.286.8.954. pmid:11509060 CrossRef PubMed Web of ScienceGoogle Scholar
Mansfield P. Clinical trials and drug promotion: Selective reporting of Study 329. Int J Risk Saf Med2008;20:73-81doi:10.3233/JRS-2008-0426. CrossRefGoogle Scholar
↵Schafer A. Biomedical conflicts of interest: A defense of the sequestration thesis—Learning from the cases of Nancy Olivieri and David Healy. Journal of Medical Ethics. 2004;30:8-24.
Howick J. Exploring the asymmetrical relationship between the power of finance bias and evidence. Perspect Biol Med2019;62:159-87. doi:10.1353/pbm.2019.0009 pmid:31031303 CrossRefPubMedGoogle Scholar
As you can see, their references range mostly from classical to old. Experienced tinfoil hats must already be yawning by now, but they’re not the primary target for this piece.
Here are some really good comments on this from Bret Weinstein:
Now let me provide some more reading recommendations along this line.
“Twisted together like the snake and the staff, doctors and drug companies have become entangled in a web of interactions as controversial as they are ubiquitous (box). As national drug bills rise at rates that vastly exceed those of inflation (fig 1), this entanglement and the subsequent flows of money and influence are attracting increasing public and academic scrutiny.
Studies from several countries show that 80-95% of doctors regularly see drug company representatives despite evidence that their information is overly positive and prescribing habits are less appropriate as a result.1 2 Many doctors receive multiple gifts from drug companies every year, and most doctors deny their influence despite considerable evidence to the contrary.3 Industry interactions correlate with doctors’ preferences for new products that hold no demonstrated advantage over existing ones, a decrease in the prescribing of generics, and a rise in both prescription expenditures and irrational and incautious prescribing, according to a recent analysis of the ethics of gift giving.4 The number of gifts that doctors receive correlates with beliefs that drug representatives have no impact on prescribing behaviour.3
Accepting meals and expenses for travel or accommodation for sponsored educational meetings is common despite evidence that this is associated with an increase in formulary requests for and prescribing of the sponsor’s drug.2 3 Most doctors attend company sponsored events providing continuing medical education, 2 yet evidence shows that these preferentially high-light the sponsor’s drug.3 Many professional societies rely heavily on industry sponsorship, …”
Institutional Corruption of Pharmaceuticals and the Myth of Safe and Effective Drugs
Over the past 35 years, patients have suffered from a largely hidden epidemic of side effects from drugs that usually have few offsetting benefits. The pharmaceutical industry has corrupted the practice of medicine through its influence over what drugs are developed, how they are tested, and how medical knowledge is created. Since 1906, heavy commercial influence has compromised Congressional legislation to protect the public from unsafe drugs. The authorization of user fees in 1992 has turned drug companies into the FDA’s prime clients, deepening the regulatory and cultural capture of the agency. Industry has demanded shorter average review times and, with less time to thoroughly review evidence, increased hospitalizations and deaths have resulted. Meeting the needs of the drug companies has taken priority over meeting the needs of patients. Unless this corruption of regulatory intent is reversed, the situation will continue to deteriorate. We offer practical suggestions including: separating the funding of clinical trials from their conduct, analysis, and publication: independent FDA leadership; full public funding for all FDA activities; measures to discourage R&D on drugs with few if any new clinical benefits; and the creation of a National Drug Safety Board.
Most scientists ‘can’t replicate studies by their peers’
Image caption,Scientists attempting to repeat findings reported in five landmark cancer studies confirmed only two
Science is facing a “reproducibility crisis” where more than two-thirds of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments, research suggests.
This is frustrating clinicians and drug developers who want solid foundations of pre-clinical research to build upon.
From his lab at the University of Virginia’s Centre for Open Science, immunologist Dr Tim Errington runs The Reproducibility Project, which attempted to repeat the findings reported in five landmark cancer studies.
“The idea here is to take a bunch of experiments and to try and do the exact same thing to see if we can get the same results.”
You could be forgiven for thinking that should be easy. Experiments are supposed to be replicable.
The authors should have done it themselves before publication, and all you have to do is read the methods section in the paper and follow the instructions.
Sadly nothing, it seems, could be further from the truth.
After meticulous research involving painstaking attention to detail over several years (the project was launched in 2011), the team was able to confirm only two of the original studies’ findings.
Two more proved inconclusive and in the fifth, the team completely failed to replicate the result.
“It’s worrying because replication is supposed to be a hallmark of scientific integrity,” says Dr Errington.
Concern over the reliability of the results published in scientific literature has been growing for some time.
According to a survey published in the journal Nature last summer, more than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments.
Marcus Munafo is one of them. Now professor of biological psychology at Bristol University, he almost gave up on a career in science when, as a PhD student, he failed to reproduce a textbook study on anxiety.
“I had a crisis of confidence. I thought maybe it’s me, maybe I didn’t run my study well, maybe I’m not cut out to be a scientist.”
The problem, it turned out, was not with Marcus Munafo’s science, but with the way the scientific literature had been “tidied up” to present a much clearer, more robust outcome.
“What we see in the published literature is a highly curated version of what’s actually happened,” he says.
“The trouble is that gives you a rose-tinted view of the evidence because the results that get published tend to be the most interesting, the most exciting, novel, eye-catching, unexpected results.
“What I think of as high-risk, high-return results.”
The reproducibility difficulties are not about fraud, according to Dame Ottoline Leyser, director of the Sainsbury Laboratory at the University of Cambridge.
That would be relatively easy to stamp out. Instead, she says: “It’s about a culture that promotes impact over substance, flashy findings over the dull, confirmatory work that most of science is about.”
She says it’s about the funding bodies that want to secure the biggest bang for their bucks, the peer review journals that vie to publish the most exciting breakthroughs, the institutes and universities that measure success in grants won and papers published and the ambition of the researchers themselves.
“Everyone has to take a share of the blame,” she argues. “The way the system is set up encourages less than optimal outcomes.”
Image caption,Scientific journals can play a role in helping improve the reliability of reporting
For its part, the journal Nature is taking steps to address the problem.
It’s introduced a reproducibility checklist for submitting authors, designed to improve reliability and rigour.
“Replication is something scientists should be thinking about before they write the paper,” says Ritu Dhand, the editorial director at Nature.
“It is a big problem, but it’s something the journals can’t tackle on their own. It’s going to take a multi-pronged approach involving funders, the institutes, the journals and the researchers.”
But we need to be bolder, according to the Edinburgh neuroscientist Prof Malcolm Macleod.
“The issue of replication goes to the heart of the scientific process.”
Writing in the latest edition of Nature, he outlines a new approach to animal studies that calls for independent, statistically rigorous confirmation of a paper’s central hypothesis before publication.
“Without efforts to reproduce the findings of others, we don’t know if the facts out there actually represent what’s happening in biology or not.”
Without knowing whether the published scientific literature is built on solid foundations or sand, he argues, we’re wasting both time and money.
“It could be that we would be much further forward in terms of developing new cures and treatments. It’s a regrettable situation, but I’m afraid that’s the situation we find ourselves in.”
The number of retracted scientific publications has risen sharply, but it is unclear whether this reflects an increase in publication of flawed articles or an increase in the rate at which flawed articles are withdrawn.
Methods and Findings
We examined the interval between publication and retraction for 2,047 retracted articles indexed in PubMed. Time-to-retraction (from publication of article to publication of retraction) averaged 32.91 months. Among 714 retracted articles published in or before 2002, retraction required 49.82 months; among 1,333 retracted articles published after 2002, retraction required 23.82 months (p<0.0001). This suggests that journals are retracting papers more quickly than in the past, although recent articles requiring retraction may not have been recognized yet. To test the hypothesis that time-to-retraction is shorter for articles that receive careful scrutiny, time-to-retraction was correlated with journal impact factor (IF). Time-to-retraction was significantly shorter for high-IF journals, but only ∼1% of the variance in time-to-retraction was explained by increased scrutiny. The first article retracted for plagiarism was published in 1979 and the first for duplicate publication in 1990, showing that articles are now retracted for reasons not cited in the past. The proportional impact of authors with multiple retractions was greater in 1972–1992 than in the current era (p<0.001). From 1972–1992, 46.0% of retracted papers were written by authors with a single retraction; from 1993 to 2012, 63.1% of retracted papers were written by single-retraction authors (p<0.001).
Conclusions
The increase in retracted articles appears to reflect changes in the behavior of both authors and institutions. Lower barriers to publication of flawed articles are seen in the increase in number and proportion of retractions by authors with a single retraction. Lower barriers to retraction are apparent in an increase in retraction for “new” offenses such as plagiarism and a decrease in the time-to-retraction of flawed work.
Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications
A detailed review of all 2,047 biomedical and life-science research articles indexed by PubMed as retracted on May 3, 2012 revealed that only 21.3% of retractions were attributable to error. In contrast, 67.4% of retractions were attributable to misconduct, including fraud or suspected fraud (43.4%), duplicate publication (14.2%), and plagiarism (9.8%). Incomplete, uninformative or misleading retraction announcements have led to a previous underestimation of the role of fraud in the ongoing retraction epidemic. The percentage of scientific articles retracted because of fraud has increased ∼10-fold since 1975. Retractions exhibit distinctive temporal and geographic patterns that may reveal underlying causes.
The number and frequency of retracted publications are important indicators of the health of the scientific enterprise, because retracted articles represent unequivocal evidence of project failure, irrespective of the cause. Hence, retractions are worthy of rigorous and systematic study. The retraction of flawed publications corrects the scientific literature and also provides insights into the scientific process. However, the rising frequency of retractions has recently elicited concern (1, 2). Studies of selected retracted articles have suggested that error is more common than fraud as a cause of retraction (3–5) and that rates of retraction correlate with journal-impact factor (6). We undertook a comprehensive analysis of all retracted articles indexed by PubMed to ascertain the validity of the earlier findings. Retracted articles were classified according to whether the cause of retraction was documented fraud (data falsification or fabrication), suspected fraud, plagiarism, duplicate publication, error, unknown, or other reasons (e.g., journal error, authorship dispute).
“Pharmaceutical companies often manipulate the word innovation for rhetorical purposes and seldom develop clinically superior drugs, thus corrupting the R&D process. He cited studies indicating that over the past 30 years, on average fewer than 2 major clinical advances and 7-13 superior drugs were developed each year, compared with the 85-90 drugs that are developed with few or no advantages. With 113,000 deaths a year caused by adverse drug reactions just in hospitalized patients and 2.5 million serious reactions, Professor Light believes there is an epidemic of harmful side effects from drugs that often have few offsetting advantages.”
“A staggering 94% of surveyed physicians acknowledged receiving financial compensation of some form from pharmaceutical companies, ranging from small perks such as free gifts and meals to stipendiary speaking invitations and salaried positions as industry consultants.”
Some 1500 documents revealed in litigation provide unprecedented insights into how pharmaceutical companies promote drugs, including the use of vendors to produce ghostwritten manuscripts and place them into medical journals.
Dozens of ghostwritten reviews and commentaries published in medical journals and supplements were used to promote unproven benefits and downplay harms of menopausal hormone therapy (HT), and to cast raloxifene and other competing therapies in a negative light.
Specifically, the pharmaceutical company Wyeth used ghostwritten articles to mitigate the perceived risks of breast cancer associated with HT, to defend the unsupported cardiovascular “benefits” of HT, and to promote off-label, unproven uses of HT such as the prevention of dementia, Parkinson’s disease, vision problems, and wrinkles.
Given the growing evidence that ghostwriting has been used to promote HT and other highly promoted drugs, the medical profession must take steps to ensure that prescribers renounce participation in ghostwriting, and to ensure that unscrupulous relationships between industry and academia are avoided rather than courted.
Introduction
In recent litigation against Wyeth, more than 14,000 plaintiffs brought claims related to the development of breast cancer while taking the menopausal hormone therapy Prempro (conjugated equine estrogens [CEEs] and medroxyprogesterone acetate [MPA]). Some 1500 documents revealed in the litigation provide unprecedented insights into how pharmaceutical companies promote drugs, including the use of vendors to produce ghostwritten manuscripts and place them into medical journals. These documents became public when PLoS Medicine and The New York Times intervened in the litigation. Both intervenors successfully argued that ghostwriting undermines public health and that documents proving the practice should be unsealed.
In this Policy Forum article, I use these documents, which are available through PLoS at http://www.plosmedicine.org/static/ghostwriting.action or at the Drug Information Document Archive at http://dida.library.ucsf.edu/documents.jsp to show how industry uses ghostwriters to insert marketing messages into articles published in medical journals. As a paid expert witness, I had access to these documents during the litigation but I have received no payment for researching or writing this Policy Forum.
Hormone Therapy History
In 1942, Premarin (CEE) became the first FDA-approved treatment for hot flashes. Promotional efforts implied that estrogen could preserve youth and health. By the early 1970s, physicians, under the mistaken impression that menopause was an endocrine disease similar to hypothyroidism, were prescribing estrogen to millions of asymptomatic women. In 1975, an eight-fold increase in endometrial cancer was linked to estrogen use, and estrogen sales decreased [1].
After adding a progestin pill to counteract estrogen-induced endometrial cancer, hormone “replacement” therapy (HRT; now properly termed menopausal hormone therapy, or HT) became popular in the 1980s. Through the 1990s, HT was touted to prevent cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s disease, colon cancer, tooth loss, and macular degeneration [1]. Prempro, which combined CEE and the progestin Provera (medroxyprogesterone acetate), was approved in the U.S. in 1995. In 1998, the Heart and Estrogen/progestin Replacement Study (HERS), a randomized controlled trial (RCT) in women with cardiovascular disease, found no benefit of HT for preventing cardiovascular events [2]. In 2002, the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI), a large RCT in healthy women, demonstrated conclusively that HT failed to prevent cardiovascular disease, increased the risk of breast cancer and stroke, and reduced fracture risk [3],[4]. Later analyses revealed that HT increased the risk of dementia [5] and incontinence [6].
Today, despite definitive scientific data to the contrary, many gynecologists still believe that the benefits of HT outweigh the risks in asymptomatic women [1],[7]–[8]. This non-evidence–based perception may be the result of decades of carefully orchestrated corporate influence on medical literature.
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This document has been published by NASA in July 2001, only a few months before 9/11. And it took 12 years to get some spotlight. Ten more years and we see it coming to life. And now it dwarfs the Great Reset in terms of revelations and implications.
Figuring out The Great Reset was like in those cartoons where some people celebrate killing Godzilla just to discover it was a baby Godzilla, and a raging Godzilla-mom is approaching fast. This is how I felt bumping into this:
Dennis M. Bushnell, “Future Strategic Issues/Future Warfare [Circa 2025]” (sic), NASA Langley Research Center (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), July 2001, 113 pp.; PDF, 1400357 bytes, MD5: c833f3fbc55d07fe891f5f4df5fb2f57. The aforesaid PDF was found on the US Department of Defense’s Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) website, as archived by the following Internet Archive URL: http://wayback.archive.org/web/20031224161719/http://www.dtic.mil/ndia/2001testing/bushnell.pdf
Dennis M. Bushnell is the Chief Scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center. The following is a biography page for him:
Bushnell’s above presentation was given on August 14, 2001 at the 4th Annual Testing and Training for Readiness Symposium and Exhibition organized by the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) and held at the Rosen Centre Hotel (formerly the Omni Rosen Hotel) in Orlando, Florida. For information on that, see the following page in which the above presentation is available:
“The 4th Annual Testing and Training for Readiness Symposium & Exhibition: Emerging Challenges, Opportunities and Requirements, 13-16 August 2001”, Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC).
See also the following announcement page for this conference:
“4th Annual Testing and Training Symposium and Exhibition: A National Partnership, on August 14-16, 2001 in Orlando, FL at the Omni Centre Hotel”, National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA).
The following is the conference proceedings:
Testing and Training for Readiness Symposium and Exhibition (4th Annual): Emerging Challenges, Opportunities and Requirements Held on 13-16 August 2001 (on CD-ROM), National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA), Aug. 2001; National Technical Information Service (NTIS) Issue Number: 1014.
The text on each page stating “Future Strategic Issues, 7/01” within the above PDF refers to the document’s finalization date of July 2001. The creation date of the above PDF is given as Thu 13 Dec 2001 08:48:04 AM EST, which possibly refers to when the PDF was created from a Microsoft PowerPoint file (.ppt), as it looks like the document was perhaps originally a PowerPoint file.Addeddate 2014-02-11 00:44:28Identifier FutureStrategicIssuesFutureWarfareCirca2025Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t05x4vt08Ocr ABBYY FineReader 9.0Ppi 300Scanner Internet Archive HTML5 Uploader 1.5.1Year 2001
Dr. Dennis M. Bushnell is the Chief Scientist at NASA Langley Research Center. He is responsible for Technical Oversight and Advanced Program formulation for a major NASA Research Center with technical emphasis in the areas of Atmospheric Sciences and Structures, Materials, Acoustics, Flight Electronics/Control/Software, Instruments, Aerodynamics, Aerothermodynamics, Hypersonic Airbreathing Propulsion, Computational Sciences and Systems Optimization for Aeronautics, Spacecraft, Exploration and Space Access . 44 years experience as Research Scientist, Section Head, Branch Head, Associate Division Chief and Chief Scientist. Technical Specialties include Flow Modeling and Control across the Speed Range, Advanced Configuration Aeronautics, Aeronautical Facilities and Hypersonic Airbreathing Propulsion . Author of 252 publications/major presentations and 310 invited lectures/seminars, Member of National Academy of Engineering , Selected as Fellow of ASME, AIAA and the Royal Aeronautical Society, 6 patents, AIAA Sperry and Fluid and Plasma Dynamics Awards , AIAA Dryden Lectureship, Royal Aeronautical Society Lanchester, Swire and Wilber and Orville Wright Lectures, ICAS Guggenheim Lecture, Israel Von Karman Lecture, USAF/NASP Gene Zara Award, NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement and Outstanding Leadership Medals and Distinguished Research Scientist Award, ST Presidential Rank Award,9 NASA Special Achievement and 10 Group Achievement Awards, University of Connecticut Outstanding Engineering Alumni, Academy of Engineers ,Pi Tau Sigma and Hamilton Awards, Univ. of Va. Engineering Achievement Award , service on numerous National and International Technical Panels and Committees and consultant to National and International organizations. DOD related committee/consulting assignments include USAF Rocket Propulsion Laboratory, BMDC, ONR, Intelligence Community/STIC, AFOSR, NRAC, NRC, WL, LLL, HASC, NUWC, DARPA, AGARD, ARL, IAT, AEDC, JANNAF, NAVSEA, Air Force 2025, AFSOC, Sandia, SAB, Army War College, ACOM Joint Futures, SOCOM, TRADOC, SEALS, JFCOM, IDA, NDU, DSB and Army After Next. Reviewer for 40 Journals and Organizations, Editor, Volume 123 of AIAA Progress Series “Viscous Drag Reduction in Boundary Layers.” Responsible for invention/ development of “Riblet” approach to Turbulent Drag Reduction, High Speed “Quiet Tunnels” for Flight-Applicable Boundary Layer Transition Research, Advanced Computational Approaches for Laminar Flow Control and Advanced Hypervelocity Airbreathing and Aeronautical Concepts with revolutionary performance potential. Contributions to National Programs include Sprint, HSCT/SST, FASTSHIP, Gemini, Apollo, RAM, Viking, X15, F-18E/F [patent holder for the “fix” to the wing drop problem],Shuttle, NASP, Submarine/Torpedo Technology ,Americas’ Cup Racers, Navy Rail Gun, MAGLEV Trains and Planetary Exploration. B.S. in M.E. degree from University of Connecticut with Highest Honors, Distinction, University Scholar (1963), M.S. degree in M.E. from University of Virginia (1967).U.S. Govt. ST.
Dennis Bushnell sits in front of a wall filled with his awards and recognitions in Building 1212.
A voracious reader, Bushnell casually tosses around those kinds of facts. The shelves in his office are jam packed with titles like “The Singularity Is Near,” “Warped Passages,” “The Elegant Universe” and “The World in 2050.” One of his hobbies is to go to thrift stores and buy big bags of cheap books. Fiction, non-fiction: he reads whatever he can get his hands on. “It’s just more input,” he said. “I’m an info junkie.”
Besides these “very military” preoccupations, Bushnell is also obsessed with climate change, which seems to be the focus of about half his scientific efforts. “From Moon landing to Climate change.”.. Quite some title for a bio!
The only notable mention of this paper that I’ve found so far in media is this one from 2020 Counterpunch:
Neoliberalism benefits the few and makes life for the many increasingly impossible. Big data and blanket surveillance give state and corporate intelligence confidence that they can pre-empt and manage mass, social reactions to neoliberalism. This article is an excerpt from my new book, The War on You.
TARGET: “EVERYONE”
In 1997, the U.S. Space Command published its Vision for 2020. The Visionsays that military force is necessary to “protect” U.S. trade and investment. Colonial forces repelled Native American attacks, Navies enforced sea-based commerce, the Air Force had the advantage of the “high ground.” In modern times, space is an additional domain of warfare. The technologies that we take for granted—cargo tankers, computers, e-commerce, drones, GPS, the internet, jet aircraft, touchscreens, and the satellites that make these things possible—were developed in the military sector with public treasure before their transfer to private, for-profit corporations. This, says the Space Command, will lead to “Full Spectrum Dominance.”
A few years later, Dennis M. Bushnell, the chief scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center, gave a presentation based on the work of a host of powerful U.S. (and other) institutions, including: the Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Joint Forces Command, the National Research Council, and many others.
Entitled Future Strategic Issues/Future Warfare [Circa 2025], the PowerPoint presentation anticipates: a) scenarios created by U.S. forces and agencies and b) scenarios to which they might have to respond. The projection is contingent on the use of hi-technology. According to the report there are/will be six Technological Ages of Humankind: “Hunter/killer groups (sic) [million BC-10K BC]; Agriculture [10K BC-1800 AD]; Industrial [1800-1950]; IT [1950-2020]; Bio/Nano [2020-?]; Virtual.”
In the past, “Hunter/gatherer” groups fought over “hunting grounds” against other “tribal bands” and used “handheld/thrown” weapons. In the agricultural era, “professional armies” also used “handheld/thrown” weapons to fight over “farm lands.” In the industrial era, conscripted armies fought over “natural resources,” using “mechanical and chemical” weapons. In our time, “IT/Bio/Bots” (robots) are used to prevent “societal disruption.” The new enemy is “everyone.” “Everyone.”
Similarly, a British Ministry of Defence projection to the year 2050 states: “Warfare could become ever more personalised with individuals and their families being targeted in novel ways.”
The war on you is the militarization of everyday life with the express goal of controlling society, including your thoughts and actions.
A U.S. Army document on information operations from 2003 specifically cites activists as potential threats to elite interests. “Nonstate actors, ranging from drug cartels to social activists, are taking advantage of the possibilities the information environment offers,” particularly with the commercialization of the internet. “Info dominance” as the Space Command calls it can counter these threats: “these actors use the international news media to attempt to influence global public opinion and shape decision-maker perceptions.” Founded in 1977, the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command featured an Information Dominance Center, itself founded in 1999 by the private, veteran-owned company, IIT.
“Information Operations in support of civil-military interactions is becoming increasingly more important as non-kinetic courses-of-action are required,” wrote two researchers for the military in 1999. They also said that information operations, as defined by the Joint Chiefs of Staff JP 3-13 (1998) publication, “are aimed at influencing the information and information systems of an adversary.” They also confirm that “[s]uch operations require the continuous and close integration of offensive and defensive activities … and may involve public and civil affairs-related actions.” They conclude: “This capability begins the transition from Information Dominance to Knowledge Dominance.”
“Copy/paste NPC from fact-check website can’t find anything” is a debunk these days. On Planet Tardia. This thing is in dude’s official bibliography. With the NASA logo on it and the timestamps in the document. What else?
Now let’s compare our notes with what more aware people warned us long ago.
TruthStream Media never disappoints, here they are, as far back as 2013, and it’s pretty guaranteed to blow your mind:
Dated same year, when this kinda broke out in the public attention for the first time, there’s interview with Deborah Tavares made by actor Trevor Coppola for Anthony J. Hilder. It was posted on Hilder’s YouTube channel on July 23, 2013. The video was filmed at Conspiracy Con 2013, which was held over the weekend of June 1-2 that year in Milpitas, California.
Next, in 2017, former Navy Seal and scientist turned occultist and friend of Timothy Leary, Dr Richard Alan Miller uses the NASA documents as starting point for an even wider and more mind-blowing discussion. It seems all over the place ag times, but it all comes together nicely and there’s a few very interesting connections, prophecies and revelations for everyone, worth going through all of it even when we don’t buy all of it. Anyway, you know our motto: Trust no one, research everything.
Perfect for longer car trips:
“Remember: If you want to now what’s gonna happen next, watch Hollywood!”
Dr Richard Alan Miller u
Hollywood and CIA News Network, I’d add…
To be continued? Our work and existence, as media and people, is funded solely by our most generous supporters. But we’re not really covering our costs so far, and we’re in dire needs to upgrade our equipment, especially for video production. Help SILVIEW.media survive and grow, please donate here, anything helps. Thank you!
! Articles can always be subject of later editing as a way of perfecting them
To be continued? Our work and existence, as media and people, is funded solely by our most generous supporters. But we’re not really covering our costs so far, and we’re in dire needs to upgrade our equipment, especially for video production. Help SILVIEW.media survive and grow, please donate here, anything helps. Thank you!
! Articles can always be subject of later editing as a way of perfecting them
When I was a young lad, we used to call this BTL – Below The Line advertising. Now excuse me for a little while, I need to use the bathroom.
To be continued? Our work and existence, as media and people, is funded solely by our most generous supporters. But we’re not really covering our costs so far, and we’re in dire needs to upgrade our equipment, especially for video production. Help SILVIEW.media survive and grow, please donate here, anything helps. Thank you!
! Articles can always be subject of later editing as a way of perfecting them
This week, diplomats from around the world are meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, as part of an annual gathering of state parties for the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). The BWC has an important mandate: It prohibits the 182 countries that have signed on and ratified the convention from developing, producing, and stockpiling biological weapons.
The BWC, and the biosecurity community broadly, has historically been more focused on existing pathogens with clear potential to be used as biological weapons, such as anthrax and the agents causing botulism and Q fever. In addition, health security experts are worried about the “next big one” — the next global pandemic. Pandemic diseases are often zoonotic, meaning they jump from animals to humans. Zoonotic diseases like Ebola, Zika, SARS, and HIV are created when, say, the wrong pig meets up with the wrong bat — and then meets the wrong human.
The emergence of such diseases depends a great deal on spontaneous genetic mutations and circumstantial factors. So here’s a scary thought: Possible future pandemics may not depend on the chance meeting of different animal species and chance mutations, but may be deliberately designed instead. New tools from the field of synthetic biologycould endow scientists with the frightening ability to design and manufacture maximally dangerous pathogens, leapfrogging natural selection.
The threat is very much on the minds of security officials. This past May, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (CHS) led an exercise involving former US senators and executive branch officials on how the country would respond to an international outbreak of an engineered pathogen. In this fictional scenario, a terrorist group constructed a virus that was both deadly and highly contagious. More than a year into the made-up pandemic, the worldwide death toll was soaring past 150 million, the Dow Jones had fallen by 90 percent, and there was a mass exodus from cities amid famine and unrest.
In biotech, the story of the past several decades has been one of exponential progress. Just 75 years ago, we were not even confident that DNA was the primary material governing genetic heredity. Today, we are able to read, write, and edit genomes with increasing ease.
But biotechnologies are dual-use — they can be used for both good and ill. We fear that with even just current capabilities, an engineered pandemic could join the growing list of seismic changes made possible by biotechnological advances. Sufficiently capable actors could work to resurrect the deadliest pathogens of the past, like smallpox or Spanish flu, or modify existing pathogenssuch as bird flu to be more contagious and lethal. As genome engineering technologies become more powerful and ubiquitous, the tools necessary for making these modifications will become increasingly accessible.
This leads to the terrifying specter of independent actors intentionally (or unintentionally) engineering pathogens with the potential to inflict worse harm than history’s deadliest pandemics. No obvious physical or biological constraints preclude the construction of such potent biological weapons. According to biosecurity expert Piers Millett, “If you’re deliberately trying to create a pathogen that is deadly, spreads easily, and that we don’t have appropriate public health measures to mitigate, then that thing you create is amongst the most dangerous things on the planet.”
Mitigating this risk is shaping up to be one of the major challenges of the 21st century — not only because the stakes are high, but also because of the myriad obstacles standing between us and a solution.
The technologies that help us might also hurt us
Natural pandemics can be horrific and catch us completely off guard. For example, three years elapsed between the first officially documented US AIDS cases in 1981 and the identification of HIV as its cause. It took another three years to develop and approve the first drug treating HIV. While antiretroviral treatments now allow those living with HIV to manage the disease effectively (that is, if they can afford the treatment), we still lack a promising HIV vaccine.
Yet as ill-equipped as we may be to fight newly emergent natural pathogens, we are even less prepared to cope with engineered pathogens. In the coming decades,it may become possible to create pathogens that fall well outside the range of infectious agents modern medicine has learned to detect, treat, and contain.
Worse yet, malicious actors might build disease-causing microbes with features strategically tailored to thwart existing health security measures. So while advances in the field of synthetic biology will make it easier for us to invent therapeutics and other technologies that can defend us from pandemics, those very same advances may allow state and nonstate actors to design increasingly harmful pathogens.
For example, new gene-synthesis technologies loom large on the horizon, allowing for the automated production of longer DNA sequences from scratch. This will be a boon for basic and applied biomedical research — but it also will simplify the assembly of designer pathogens.
A technician at the Smartman Laboratory facility at the US Army’s Dugway Proving Ground on August 15, 2017, in Dugway, Utah. Workers at this facility handle some of the deadliest biological and chemical agents on earth.
Compared to other weapons of mass destruction, engineered pathogens are less resource-intensive. Although malicious actors would currently need university-grade laboratories and resources to create them, a bigger obstacle tends to be access to information. The limits of our knowledge of biology constrain the potential of any bioengineering effort. Some information, like how to work proficiently with a specific machine or cell type, can be acquired only through months or years of supervised training. Other information, like annotated pathogen genome sequences, may be easy to access through public databases, such as those maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information.
If information such as pathogen genome sequences or synthetic biology protocols is available online, this could make it much easier for malicious actors to build their own pathogens. But even if they’re not online, hackers can also steal sensitive information from the databases of biotechnology companies, universities, and government laboratories.
Preventing damage from engineered pathogens is complicated by the fact that it takes only one lapse, one resourceful terrorist group, or one rogue nation-state to wreak large-scale havoc. Even if the majority of scientists and countries follow proper protocols, a single unilateral actor could imperil human civilization.
And some wounds can be self-inflicted. Between 2004 and 2010, there were more than 700 incidents of loss or release of “select agents and toxins” (i.e., scary stuff) from US labs.In 11 instances, lab workers acquired bacterial or fungal infections. In one instance, a shipment of a harmful fungus was lost — and, according to the FBI, destroyed — in transit. In a world in which well-meaning but sometimes careless biologists are creating dangerous organisms in the lab, such accidental release events could prove even more frightening.
A global problem
Like naturally occurring pandemics, engineered pandemics will not respect national borders. A contagious pathogen released in one country will emigrate. Actions that protect against engineered pathogens are an example of a global public good: Since a deadly engineered pathogen would adversely affect countries around the world, doing something to prevent them is a service that benefits the whole world.
A fundamental challenge of global public goods is that they tend to be underprovided. With global public goods, individual countries prefer to free ride over unilaterally providing global public goods if they can get away with it.
This doesn’t mean that countries won’t do anything to provide global public goods; they just won’t do as much as they should. For example, a country such as the United States will consider the potential damage an engineered pathogen could wreak on its 325 million people, and it will take actions to prevent this from happening. However, the actions it takes won’t be as extensive as they would be if it were to consider the toll an engineered pathogen could take on the planet’s 7.6 billion people.
To address this dilemma, world leaders created the Biological Weapons Convention in the 1970s. The BWC has the important goal of constraining bioweapons development; in practice, it has been ineffective at verifying and enforcing compliance.
And bioweapons have specific characteristics that make verification and enforcement difficult compared to chemical and nuclear weapons.
Consider nuclear technology. Nuclear power plants require low levels of uranium enrichment (typically around 5 percent), whereas nuclear weapons require highly enriched uranium (typically above 90 percent). Highly enriched uranium requires large industrial facilities with precise centrifuges. When granted access, it is comparatively easy for inspectors to determine when a facility is being used for the production of highly enriched uranium.
Partly for these reasons, no country has ever developed nuclear weapons while being a party to the NPT. Of the nine nuclear weapons nations, the US, USSR (whose weapons are now exclusively owned by Russia), UK, France, China, and likely Israel had nuclear weapons before the treaty was enforced. India (first test in 1974) and Pakistan (first test in 1998) never signed the NPT. North Korea withdrew from the treaty in 2003, three years before its first nuclear test in 2006.
In contrast, bioengineered organisms require fewer resources and smaller facilities to make, and it is harder to readily distinguish between organisms that are being developed for scientific purposes from those that are being developed with malicious intent.
Historically, the BWC does not have a good track record of preventing the possession of bioweapons. The Soviet Union maintained a large bioweapons program after it signed on to the BWC in 1975. The South African apartheid regime held bioweapons in the 1980s and ’90s while being a party to the BWC.
Fearing that invasive verification by the BWC could compromise sensitive intellectual property and hurt the competitiveness of its cutting-edge biotechnology sector, the US chose to withdraw from negotiations at the BWC’s Fifth Review Conference in 2001. The US later rejoined those negotiations, but serious measures to improve the BWC’s verification and enforcement mechanisms have not been implemented, and the agreement remains largely ineffective.
Despite this concern about the invasiveness of verification, there is a growing consensus that the BWC must become more effective. The 2015 Bipartisan Report of the Blue Ribbon Study Panel on Biodefense, chaired by Joe Lieberman, the 2000 Democratic vice presidential candidate, and Tom Ridge, the first secretary of homeland security under George W. Bush, called for the vice president and the secretary of state to chair a series of meetings with relevant Cabinet members and experts to come to an agreement on verification protocols that would satisfy US concerns while adequately enforcing compliance with the treaty. The study led to the introduction of the National Biodefense Strategy Act of 2016, which is still awaiting a vote.
In September 2018, the Trump administration released a National Biodefense Strategy, though this document contained little specific information on how the US would strengthen the BWC and didn’t mention Cabinet-level meetings chaired by the vice president, as was recommended by the blue ribbon panel.
Emergency personnel walk down the aisle of an Amtrak train during a biological preparedness drill being led by members of the Chemical Biological Incident Response Force (CBIRF), a unit in the United States Marine Corps, at Penn Station during the early morning hours on September 22, 2012, in New York City.
Some have questioned the seriousness of the threat posed by bioweapons. For example, in his recent book, Harvard University professor Steven Pinker suggests that “Bioterrorism may be [a] phantom menace.” He claims that terrorists wouldn’t weaponize pandemic pathogens, since their goal is typically “not damage but theater.” Others have suggested that even if terrorists wanted to engineer a pathogen as a weapon, they’d lack the requisite biological knowledge and practical know-how to get the job done.
While it is true (and quite fortunate) that these factors reduce at least the present risk of a biological attack, it is cold comfort. In the coming decades, it will only become easier for nonstate actors to acquire and deploy powerful biotechnologies for ill. And beyond terrorists, state actors also pose serious risks.
For example, Japan launched devastating bioattacks against China during World War II. Japanese Unit 731 dropped bombs filled with swarms of plague-infested fleas on Chinese cities, likely killing hundreds of thousandsof civilians. The unit’s commander, Shiro Ishii, found plague to be a potent weapon because it could present itself as a natural epidemic and kill large numbers of people through person-to-person transmission.
In addition, the US had a bioweapons program from 1943 to 1969 that, among other things, made propaganda videos bragging about testing biological weapons on human subjects. The Soviet Union’s covert bioweapons program that it maintained after signing on to the BWC had more employees at its peak in the 1980s than Facebook currently has.
We don’t know what we don’t know — but here’s what we can do
Many questions remain unanswered when it comes to the potentially catastrophic risks posed by engineered pathogens. For example, what is the full spectrum of microbes that cause human disease? And which types of microbes would most likely be used as bioweapons? Research centers such as the Center for Health Security at Hopkins, the Future of Humanity Institute, and the Nuclear Threat Initiative are working hard to answer such questions.
But just because we don’t have answers to all the questions — and don’t even know all the questions to begin with — doesn’t mean there aren’t things we can do to mitigate our risks.
Thinking and acting globally
For starters, we should develop a process to address advancements in biotechnology in the BWC.Currently, the BWC lacks a dedicated forum where the treaty implications of new developments in biotechnology can be discussed. Other international agreements like the CWC have dedicated scientific advisory boards to track and respond to new science and technological changes. The BWC has no such board.
There’s some movement on this issue — the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security hosted an event in Geneva earlier this week to discuss how the BWC can evolve to address rapid advances in biotechnology. Still, it is crucial to establish a permanent institutional capacity within the BWC to address biotechnological change.
This all connects to another priority: give the BWC’s Implementation Support Unit more resources.The four-person implementation support unit, the convention’s sole administrative body, has immense responsibilities that far exceed its current resources. These responsibilities include supporting and assisting nations as they implement the treaty, administering a database of assistance requests, facilitating communication between the parties, and much more.
But the resources remain minuscule, especially compared to other international treaties. The annual cost allocated to BWC meetings and its implementation support unit is less than 4.5 percent of the cost allocated to the CWC. This inadequate budget sends a grim signal about how seriously the world is currently taking the growing risks from bioweapons.
Another global priority should be finding ways to regulate dual-use gene synthesis technologies. To facilitate their research, biologists regularly order short, custom pieces of DNA from companies that specialize in their manufacture. In 2009, the International Gene Synthesis Consortium proposed guidelines for how gene synthesis companies should screen customers’ orders for potentially dangerous chunks of DNA, such as those found in harmful viruses or toxin genes. Most companies voluntarily follow these guidelines, and they represent 80 percent of the global market.
However, even companies currently applying recommended screening procedures only test whether ordered sequences match those of known pathogens. An engineered pathogen with a novel genome could potentially slip past this filter.
Presently, the gene synthesis market is expanding internationally and synthesis costs are falling. It is urgent that governments both independently and multilaterally act to mandate proper screening of sequences and customers. As Kevin Esvelt of MIT writes, “adequately screening all synthesized DNA could eliminate the most serious foreseeable hazards of biotech misuse by nonstate actors.”
Dealing with biorisk on the ground and in the lab
Beyond developing new global standards and practices, we need to adopt more flexible countermeasures to face off the threat of bioengineered pathogens. As noted in a recent CHS report, “One of the biggest challenges in outbreak response, particularly for emerging infectious diseases, is the availability of reliable diagnostic assays that can quickly and accurately determine infection status.”
Diagnostics based on cutting-edge genome sequencing methods could provide detailed information about all the viruses and bacteria present in a blood sample, including even completely novel pathogens. Meanwhile, as genome sequencing technology becomes less expensive, it could be more widely applied in clinics to provide unprecedented real-time insights into genetic diseases and cancer progression.
We also need to invest more in developing antivirals that hit a wider range of targets. Such broad-spectrum drugs may stand a better chance of slowing the proliferation of an engineered bug than treatments specific to single known pathogens.
And we should also develop “platform” technologies that allow rapid vaccine development.Currently, the process of designing, testing, and manufacturing a vaccine to prevent the spread of a new pathogen takes years. Ideally, we could immunize all at-risk individuals within months of identifying the pathogen. Accelerating vaccine development will require us to innovate new and likely unconventional technologies, such as vectored immunoprophylaxis or nucleic acid vaccines.
Even as we pursue and accelerate such research, we should also be mindful of the possibility of self-inflicted wounds. To avert a terrible accident, the international biomedical community should establish firmer cultural guardrails on the research into pathogens.
Currently, career advancement, financial gain, and raw curiosity motivate biologists at all levels to push the envelope, and we all stand to gain from their efforts. However, these same incentives can sometimes lead researchers to take substantial and perhaps unjustified risks, such as evolving dangerous strains of influenza to be more contagious or publishing instructions for cultivating a close cousin of the smallpox virus. It’s important for biologists to do their part to promote a culture in which this adventurous intellectual spirit is tempered by caution and humility.
Encouragingly, synthetic biology luminaries like Esvelt and George Church of Harvard University are doing just that, pioneering technologicalsafeguards to mitigate accidental release risks and advocatingpolicies and norms that would make 21st-century biology a less perilous pursuit. As the tools of synthetic biology spread to other disciplines, their example is one that others should follow.
Underlying the prescriptions above is the need to approach the problem with the sense of urgency it warrants. As our biotechnological capabilities grow, so too will the threat of engineered pathogens. An engineered pandemic won’t announce itself with a towering mushroom cloud, but the suffering of the individuals it touches will be no less real.
R. Daniel Bressler is a PhD candidate in the sustainable development program at Columbia University. His research is at the intersection of dual-use technologies, environmental change, and the capacity for collective action in the international system to deal with these issues. Find him on Twitter @DannyBressler1.
Chris Bakerlee is a PhD candidate in molecules, cells, and orgamisms at Harvard University, where he uses genetic engineering to study how evolution works. Find him on Twitter @cwbakerlee.
Some of the stealth edits that Vox made to its article debunking "conspiracy theories" that Covid-19 originated in a lab leak between its original publication in March 2020 and now. pic.twitter.com/RYxZ2B81mc
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