Malaria Vaccine

"Because the way each person's body deals with the disease is different and we can't predict what you will do if you get exposed to the disease," According to a BBC News report, "the world's first vaccine against malaria will be introduced in three countries - Ghana, Kenya and Malawi - starting in 2018." Three doses are required, spaced three months apart, and then a fourth dose eighteen months later. Without the fourth dose, the benefits decline rapidly. As it is, the vaccine benefits less than four in ten children. The pilot will involve 750,000 children of whom half will get the vaccinations. The funding is coming from the usual suspects:

• Gavi - The Vaccine Alliance (Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation)
• Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria
• Unitaid
• WHO (World Health Organisation)
• GSK (GlaxoSmithKline)

An earlier article in The Guardian dated 30th June 2016 is less positive:

As the vaccine wears off, the study shows that children living in areas where there is high transmission of the disease end up with more infections than those who have never had a jab – known as the malaria rebound effect. Unvaccinated children – if they survive malaria – develop some natural immunity over the years.

One has to be skeptical of yet another vaccine being added to the hefty number that children already receive. How effective will be the collection and collation of the data relating to 750,000 children in these countries? The pilot involves a control group of 375,00 who get no vaccinations and the same number in the vaccinated group whose vaccine regime extends over 27 months.

To quote from The Guardian article again:

Dr David Kaslow, vice-president for product development at Path, a non-profit international organisation that has been a key player with the pharmaceutical firm GlaxoSmithKline, said up to six doses could be needed to maintain the protective effect.

Six doses of a vaccine? With this in mind, one would suppose that this vaccine, rolled out across Africa and South East Asia, would be a big money spinner for the pharmaceutical companies involved. If the benefits are dubious, well so what and given the reported rebound effect, drawbacks may outweigh benefits. GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has a long history of criminal activity so this company's involvement in anything should be enough to raise suspicions.

Developing countries are an excellent venue for testing out new vaccines. GSK was convicted for killing 14 babies during vaccine trials in Argentina in 2012. It was fined less than US $100,000 for the offences (source). The problem with vaccines is not the vaccines themselves but the way they are brought to market. The pharmaceutical companies oversee the trials, there is little independent testing because of the expense involved. They lobby governments to push the vaccines via the healthcare infrastructure in various countries. If they can persuade governments to mandate the vaccine, all the better. They ensure that mainstream media carries news of the supposed benefits of vaccines.

The more sophisticated the health care services of a country, the more warmly vaccines are embraced. In developing countries, there is well-deserved skepticism about the benefits of vaccinations but not so in countries like Australia. The elderly dutifully line up for their flu shots. From neonate to teenager, the young are subjected to a plethora of shots to protect them allegedly from a dangerous, pathogen-filled world. Any reservations about the number of vaccines received or their scheduling is howled down as being a matter for health care professionals to decide. Of course, any criticisms from within the health care community are rare and any person bold enough to voice concerns risks ostracism from her or his fellow professionals. There seems to be no middle ground. One is either for or against vaccines.

ABC News recently carried this news article: Are you an unvaccinated adult? Here's what you need to know about catching up. The article goes on to suggest the following:

• MMR — measles, mumps, rubella — approximately $35.00 per dose
• Varicella (chicken pox) — approximately $80.00 per dose
• Hepatitis B — approximately $20.00 per dose
• Poliomyelitis (polio) — approximately $39.99 per dose
• Tetanus/whooping cough/diphtheria — approximately $45.00 per dose
• Influenza (flu) — approximately $20.00
• Hepatitis A — approximately $65.00 per dose
• Human Papillomavirus (HPV/Gardasil) — approximately $200.00 per dose
• Haemophilus Influenzae Type B (Hib) — approximately $24.95 per dose
• Meningococcal C — approximately $100.00 per dose

This amounts to well over A$600. The government will actually cover these costs for an individual up until the age of 20, which means that taxpayers are footing the bill. One comment by a doctor in the article is revealing: Because the way each person's body deals with the disease is different and we can't predict what you will do if you get exposed to the disease. This observation could be applied equally well to vaccines. It's clear that in certain individuals the reaction to a vaccination can be unpredictable and sometimes catastrophic. The argument always is that the benefits of vaccines outweigh their drawbacks. For those who suffer catastrophic reactions, this is of little comfort.

Can it be that vaccines are less about public health and more about private profits? What happens when we follow the money trail? The following quote from ENCOGNITIVE.COM is revealing:

The vaccine industry was worth about $23 billion in 2014 and expected to reach $42 billion by 2020. That's big business. The pharmaceutical industry as a whole is BIG Business, thus the moniker Big Pharma. Below are some of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, as of October, 2014. After looking at these numbers, you'll understand why they're called BIG Pharma and how it is that they're able to steer and dictate public health policies. Almost every single public policy pertaining to drugs and vaccines was drafted by the pharmaceutical industry--it is able to do this by showering money on those it seeks to influence.
Big Pharma's sphere of influence extends from journalists to doctors: 

• TV Networks (advertising),
• Scientists (research grants),
• Researchers (research grants, salary),
• Doctors (kickbacks, consulting fees, prescriptions, legal bribery),
• Government Bureaucrats (revolving door, stock options),
• Universities and Colleges (endowments, research grants, tuition sponsorships)
• Public Health Officials (revolving door, stock options),
• Politicians (campaign contributions, revolving door),
• Journalists (paid stipends, through TV network owners)
• Consumers (mass advertising, fear-mongering/scare tactics through media).

Of course, if fears of a pandemic can be heightened to the point of hysteria, then vaccines can be fast-tracked and administered to all who are gullible enough to take them. Here are the big players in the pharmaceutical game (from ENCOGNITIVE.COM):

Big Pharma by the Numbers 

Sanofi
Approximate 2014 revenue (USD): $42 billion
Market capitalization (total market value of stocks, USD): $138 billion
Headquarter: Paris, France
Stock exchange: NYSE (ADR), Euronext 

GlaxoSmithKline
Approximate 2014 revenue (USD): $24 billion
Market capitalization (total market value of stocks, USD): $106 billion
Headquarter: Brentwood, England
Stock exchange: NYSE (ADR), London 

Merck
Approximate 2014 revenue (USD): $42 billion
Market capitalization (total market value of stocks, USD): $156 billion
Headquarter: Whitehouse Station, New Jersey, USA
Stock exchange: NYSE 

Johnson & Johnson
Approximate 2014 revenue (USD): $76 billion
Market capitalization (total market value of stocks, USD): $280 billion
Headquarter: New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA
Stock exchange: NYSE 

Eli Lilly and Co.
Approximate 2014 revenue (USD): $21 billion
Market capitalization (total market value of stocks, USD): $70 billion
Headquarter: Indianapolis, Indiana, USA
Stock exchange: NYSE 

Novartis
Approximate 2014 revenue (USD): $56 billion
Market capitalization (total market value of stocks, USD): $237 billion
Headquarter: Basel, Switzerland
Stock exchange: NYSE (ADR), SIX (Swiss Exchange) 

Astellas
Approximate 2014 revenue (USD): N/A
Market capitalization (total market value of stocks, USD): 3.52 trillion Yen
Headquarter: Chuo-ku, Tokyo, Japan
Stock exchange: TKO (Tokyo Stock Exchange) 

Roche Holding Ltd.
Approximate 2014 revenue (USD): $90 billion
Market capitalization (total market value of stocks, USD): $246 billion
Headquarter: Basel, Switzerland
Stock exchange: OTCMKTS, SIX (Swiss Exchange) 

Pfizer Inc 
Approximate 2014 revenue (USD): $47 billion
Market capitalization (total market value of stocks, USD): $177 billion
Headquarter: New York, New York, USA
Stock exchange: NYSE 

The first legal duty of a public listed company: maximise profit for shareholders.

Assad Gas Attack

An article on Quartz (link) began as follows:

In the aftermath of reports suggesting Syrian president Bashar al-Assad had once again unleashed a deadly chemical weapon on civilians, at least one Western leader—embattled by human rights criticism at home—immediately responded with class and clarity. Issuing a bullish statement on Twitter, this leader called for a full investigation and declared, “there can be no future for Assad in a stable Syria.” 

That leader, of course, was British prime minister Theresa May. While usually one would expect such a strong statement to come from the US—the traditional leader of the free world—it was the leader of the UK who set the tone on Tuesday.

This nausea-inducing article was written by Max de Haldevang who reports on Quartz's global politics desk. His obsessions include Cities & Urban Development, and Global Corruption. He has reported in Mexico and London for Reuters, in Russia for The Moscow Times and worked for NBC at the Rio and Sochi Olympics. He speaks Russian and Spanish, and has degrees from Cambridge and Columbia. Source.

It's hard to stomach phrases like responded with class and clarity to describe someone like May and the traditional leader of the free world to describe a country like the United States. So who is Max de Haldevang, the author of such idiotic comments? Well, he's clearly not very old so we shouldn't be too hard on him. He's just trying to make his mark in the world of mainstream journalism. He's the guy on the right and looks like a teenager but must be older.

The article from where the photo was taken describes him as having been awarded a Reuters Fellowship from the Overseas Press Club Foundation at the Foundation’s 2015 Annual Scholar Awards Luncheon held at the Yale Club in New York City. The other guy in the photo is the Pulitzer-Prize winning David Rohde, now of Reuters. 

Further investigation shows that Rohde has more than a Pulitzer Prize as a claim to fame:

While in Afghanistan, Rohde was kidnapped by members of the Taliban in November 2008, but managed to escape in June 2009 after seven months in captivity. While he was in captivity, The New York Times collaborated with a number of media outlets, including al-Jazeera and Wikipedia, to remove news of the kidnapping from the public eye.

Rohde has reported on detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the US government's roundup of Muslims following 9/11. While clearly mainstream, he seems to have a reasonable track record. Aspiring journalists like de Haldevang must establish their reputations in a very competitive arena. He was one of 15 aspiring foreign correspondents selected by a panel of leading journalists from a pool of 175 applicants from 50 different colleges and universities.

His LinkedIn account shows him as having finished a B.A. (Hons) in Modern Languages at Cambridge between 2009 and 2013. He's since completed an M.A. in Russian Studies at Columbia University 2014-2016. This would put him in his mid-twenties I guess. It's a pity talented individuals like him are forced into mainstream journalism where their motivation to delve behind the scenes of world events will be actively discouraged by those who decide whether stories will be published or not.

The real story about the alleged Assad gas attack is why he would have launched it at such an inopportune time. Here is a video in which Ron Paul discusses the event:

As for Theresa May, her barking about the need to remove Assad is no different from Tony Blair's barking about the need to remove Saddam Hussein before he could unleash his non-existent weapons of mass destruction. May has no class whatsoever. However, Reuters is head-quartered in London and maybe de Haldevang is hoping for a posting there. After all, following his Reuters Fellowship he was assigned to Mexico City. Maybe he's still there and his fatuous article for Quartz is a ploy to garner British friends in high places who will put in a good word for him at the Reuters desk in London.

Clif High versus the GoogleBeast

I've only recently stumbled across Clif High, his predictive linguistics and his ALTA reports. This is what he says about his predictive linguistics:

Predictive Linguistics is a field that I pioneered in 1993. The software and lexicon has been in continual change/update mode since. This is due to the constantly changing nature of language and human expression. Predictive Linguistics works to predict future language about (perhaps) future events, due to the nature of humans. It is my operating assumption that all humans are psychic, though the vast majority do nothing to cultivate it as a skill, and are likely unaware of it within themselves. In spite of this, universe and human nature has it that they 'leak' prescient information out continuously in their choice of language. My software processing collects these leaks and aggregates them against a model of a timeline and that information is provided in this report. The ALTA report is an interpretation of the asymmetric trends that are occurring even this instant as millions of humans are typing billions of words on the internet.

It's an intriguing idea but does it work? Well, I've read through his 2017 ALTA report and I'll wait and see how things pan out. Regardless of that however, his latest YouTube video about the way Google is surreptitiously undermining revenue to alternative news sites is quite illuminating. Of course, it's what we expect Google would be doing but it's interesting to have how it's doing it explained so clearly. He writes as an accompaniment to his video:

The masters of the big G spot have instructed the working metal heads in the bowels of the googlebeast to ratchet down the valves on alt media under the guise of a plan that we call here the 'golden showers' such that traffic dries up and we all blow our way into history. One of my thoughts, as this is all being done with algo's that have to work on linguistic structures, is to deliberately alter our own language patterns in videos and written material. Now, please note, this tactic is NOT trying to escape their algo, but rather, in a guerrilla 'fighter' fashion, we use this approach to derail the intent of the algo, and to co-opt it into 'being our bitch'. 

The Secret History of Britain

A friend put me onto Stephen Oppenheimer who has an alternative take on the history of British migration and settlement, namely that "everything you know about British and Irish ancestry is wrong. Our ancestors were Basques, not Celts. The Celts were not wiped out by the Anglo-Saxons, in fact neither had much impact on the genetic stock of these islands". Controversial stuff indeed. Wikipedia introduces him as follows:

Stephen Oppenheimer (born 1947) is a British paediatrician, geneticist, and writer. He is a graduate of Green Templeton College, Oxford and an honorary fellow of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. In addition to his work in medicine and tropical diseases, he has published popular works in the fields of genetics and human prehistory. This latter work has been the subject of a number of television and film projects.

Of interest are the books he has written:

• Eden in the East
• The Real Eve (documentary and US book title) / Out of Eden (UK book title)
• Origins of the British

I've downloaded from this site, a six page PDF file that summarises his views about the origins of the British and have placed it in my e-library. His books are not available in the local library; however, they are available on Amazon. If what he says is true, then it's another example of the falsification of history in which fictions turn into facts. Here is a quote from the PDF file:

Many archaeologists still hold this view of a grand iron-age Celtic culture in the centre of the continent, which shrank to a western rump after Roman times. It is also the basis of a strong sense of ethnic identity that millions of members of the so-called Celtic diaspora hold. But there is absolutely no evidence, linguistic, archaeological or genetic, that identifies the Hallstatt or La Tène regions or cultures as Celtic homelands. The notion derives from a mistake made by the historian Herodotus 2,500 years ago when, in a passing remark about the "Keltoi," he placed them at the source of the Danube, which he thought was near the Pyrenees. Everything else about his description located the Keltoi in the region of Iberia. 

The late 19th-century French historian Marie Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville decided that Herodotus had meant to place the Celtic homeland in southern Germany. His idea has remained in the books ever since, despite a mountain of other evidence that Celts derived from southwestern Europe. For the idea of the south German "Empire of the Celts" to survive as the orthodoxy for so long has required determined misreading of texts by Caesar, Strabo, Livy and others. And the well-recorded Celtic invasions of Italy across the French Alps from the west in the 1st millennium BC have been systematically reinterpreted as coming from Germany, across the Austrian Alps. 

De Jubainville's Celtic myth has been deconstructed in two recent sceptical publications: The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention by Simon James (1999), and The Celts: Origins, Myths and Inventions by John Collis (2003). Nevertheless, the story lingers on in standard texts and notably in The Celts, a Channel 4 documentary broadcast in February. "Celt" is now a term that sceptics consider so corrupted in the archaeological and popular literature that it is worthless. 

I'll keep an eye out for any of his books and they certainly of interest to seekers of truth in history. Here is a YouTube video, divided into two parts, in which Stephen Oppenheimer is talking about the British migration:

Wikispooks and Anthony C. Sutton

Today I came across a site called WikiSpooks that was hosting three books by Anthony C. Sutton here. On the WikiSpooks website, it's claimed that:

People up to no good don't generally advertise the fact. Wicked deeds are done in secret, but for those which cannot be kept secret - such as assassinations or full scale wars - alternative explanations are concocted and aggressively promoted. Aware of this, WikiSpooks aims for a genuinely dispassionate analysis of what is going on in the world, refusing to blindly take the "official narratives" of nation states and powerful institutions at face value.

Further along in the site:

While commercially-controlled media generally present official narrative-friendly perspectives of events in inexplicable isolation, framing them psychologically for their own purposes, Wikispooks seeks to shine an unbiased light in dark places and so to establish and trace important connections between events based on objective evidence. Behind a range of distractions from sports to celebrity culture or even party politics ("...the entertainment division of the military industrial complex" as Frank Zappa once opined) lies a set of hidden truths, parts of a wholly unacknowledged reality which can be discerned behind the misinformation fog that aims to hide it. 

Source 

Sutton is an interesting character. As Wikipedia quotes him as saying: 

In a few words: there is no such thing as Soviet technology. Almost all — perhaps 90–95 percent — came directly or indirectly from the United States and its allies. In effect the United States and the NATO countries have built the Soviet Union. Its industrial and its military capabilities. This massive construction job has taken 50 years. Since the Revolution in 1917. It has been carried out through trade and the sale of plants, equipment and technical assistance.

I've downloaded his books now and added them to my library. There are YouTube videos available in which he talks about some the issues raised in his books. In the following embedded video, Sutton talks about Western involvement in the Bolshevik Revolution.

ZeroNet for Uncensorable Websites

Consonant with the theme of decentralisation via P2P and BitTorrent is ZeroNet which claims to offer "open, free and uncensorable websites, using Bitcoin cryptography and BitTorrent network".

I was first alerted to this idea via a Corbett Report video on YouTube that was uploaded on the 12th January 2017 but is dated March 28th 2014. The MeowBit.com website mentioned in this video hasn't been updated since that time and any YouTube videos also date to 2014. ZeroNet seems to have now taken over as the driving force behind the popularisation of this technology. 

AceLewis has a YouTube channel with many instructional videos, the most recent of which was posted only a month ago. I've linked to the website above. Here is the first in his series of instructional videos, titled Introduction to ZeroNet and posted 11 months ago:

However, after downloading ZeroNet to my Mac, it doesn't open even after I watched his instructional video and followed all the steps. I need to investigate further but I've made a start at least.

Bitchute: YouTube Alternative?

While I was watching the latest episode of mediamonarchy.com, mention was made of a new startup called bitchute as an alternative to YouTube. It is powered by WebTorrent and relies on P2P sharing on data instead of vast numbers of centralised servers. Here is what the site's founders have to say about how the idea came about:

Throughout 2015 and 2016 several prominent YouTubers reported a loss of video monetization when covering certain topics or for having particular opinions. YouTube claimed this was due to tighter enforcement of existing rules, even if true this will restrict the type of content that gets made and is a form of censorship. 

Here we believe people should be able to express their opinions and choose their topics. If existing services cannot allow that, then let's make some that will. The question is, how to disrupt a platform as well established as YouTube? It cannot be on their terms; we think we might have an answer, decentralization by torrents and tailored matchups for monetization. *More on the monetization to come soon. 

Rather than needing massive data centers with humongous bandwidth costs, torrents depend on many people sharing videos from their home computers. While this has been possible for many years through bit torrent, bit torrent applications have steep learning curves; this site aims to make the torrent experience seamless by working entirely in the web browser.

On the WebTorrent site, things are explained by its creator, Feross Aboukhadijeh, as follows:

What is WebTorrent? 

WebTorrent is the first torrent client that works in the browser. YEP, THAT'S RIGHT. THE BROWSER. 

It's written completely in JavaScript – the language of the web – and uses WebRTC for true peer-to-peer transport. No browser plugin, extension, or installation is required. 

Using open web standards, WebTorrent connects website users together to form a distributed, decentralized browser-to-browser network for efficient file transfer. 

Why is this cool? 

Imagine a video site like YouTube, where visitors help to host the site's content. The more people that use a WebTorrent-powered website, the faster and more resilient it becomes. 

Browser-to-browser communication cuts out the middle-man and lets people communicate on their own terms. No more client/server – just a network of peers, all equal. WebTorrent is the first step in the journey to redecentralize the Web. 

In the following video, Feross explains how WebTorrent will work:

Finally, here's a Speaker Deck slide presentation about WebRTC from Feross: