Brownstone Institute
What’s Really Happening with Mpox
From the Brownstone Institute
The Mpox Emergency
The World Health Organization (WHO) acted as expected this week and declared Mpox a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). So, a problem in a small number of African countries that has killed about the same number of people this year as die every four hours from tuberculosis has come to dominate international headlines. This is raising a lot of angst from some circles against the WHO.
While angst is warranted, it is mostly misdirected. The WHO and the IHR emergency committee they convened had little real power – they are simply following a script written by their sponsors. The African CDC, which declared an emergency a day earlier, is in a similar position. Mpox is a real disease and needs local and proportionate solutions. But the problem it is highlighting is much bigger than Mpox or the WHO, and understanding this is essential if we are to fix it.
Mpox, previously called Monkeypox, is caused by a virus thought to normally infect African rodents such as rats and squirrels. It fairly frequently passes to, and between, humans. In humans, its effects range from very mild illness to fever and muscle pains to severe illness with its characteristic skin rash, and sometimes death. Different variants, called ‘clades,’ produce slightly different symptoms. It is passed by close body contact including sexual activity, and the WHO declared a PHEIC two years ago for a clade that was mostly passed by men having sex with men.
The current outbreaks involve sexual transmission but also other close contact such as within households, expanding its potential for harm. Children are affected and suffer the most severe outcomes, perhaps due to issues of lower prior immunity and the effects of malnutrition and other illnesses.
Reality in DRC
The current PHEIC was mainly precipitated by the ongoing outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), though there are known outbreaks in nearby countries covering a number of clades. About 500 people have died from Mpox in DRC this year, over 80% of them under 15 years of age. In that same period, about 40,000 people in DRC, mostly children under 5 years, died from malaria. The malaria deaths were mainly due to lack of access to very basic commodities like diagnostic tests, antimalarial drugs, and insecticidal bed nets, as malaria control is chronically underfunded globally. Malaria is nearly always preventable or treatable if sufficiently resourced.
During this same period in which 500 people died from Mpox in DRC, hundreds of thousands also died in DRC and surrounding African countries from tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and the impacts of malnutrition and unsafe water. Tuberculosis alone kills about 1.3 million people globally each year, which is a rate about 1,500 times higher than Mpox in 2024.
The population of DRC is also facing increasing instability characterized by mass rape and massacres, in part due to a scramble by warlords to service the appetite of richer countries for the components of batteries. These in turn are needed to support the Green Agenda of Europe and North America. This is the context in which the people of DRC and nearby populations, which obviously should be the primary decision-makers regarding the Mpox outbreak, currently live.
An Industry Produces What It Is Paid for
For the WHO and the international public health industry, Mpox presents a very different picture. They now work for a pandemic industrial complex, built by private and political interests on the ashes of international public health. Forty years ago, Mpox would have been viewed in context, proportional to the diseases that are shortening overall life expectancy and the poverty and civil disorder that allows them to continue. The media would barely have mentioned the disease, as they were basing much of their coverage on impact and attempting to offer independent analysis.
Now the public health industry is dependent on emergencies. They have spent the past 20 years building agencies such as CEPI, inaugurated at the 2017 World Economic Forum meeting and solely focused on developing vaccines for pandemic, and on expanding capacity to detect and distinguish ever more viruses and variants. This is supported by the recently passed amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR).
While improving nutrition, sanitation, and living conditions provided the path to longer lifespans in Western countries, such measures sit poorly with a colonial approach to world affairs in which the wealth and dominance of some countries are seen as being dependent on the continued poverty of others. This requires a paradigm in which decision-making is in the hands of distant bureaucratic and corporate masters. Public health has an unfortunate history of supporting this, with restriction of local decision-making and the pushing of commodities as key interventions.
Thus, we now have thousands of public health functionaries, from the WHO to research institutes to non-government organizations, commercial companies, and private foundations, primarily dedicated to finding targets for Pharma, purloining public funding, and then developing and selling the cure. The entire newly minted pandemic agenda, demonstrated successfully through the Covid-19 response, is based on this approach. Justification for the salaries involved requires detection of outbreaks, an exaggeration of their likely impact, and the institution of a commodity-heavy and usually vaccine-based response.
The sponsors of this entire process – countries with large Pharma industries, Pharma investors, and Pharma companies themselves – have established power through media and political sponsorship to ensure the approach works. Evidence of the intent of the model and the harms it is wreaking can be effectively hidden from public view by a subservient media and publishing industry. But in DRC, people who have long suffered the exploitation of war and the mineral extractors, who replaced a particularly brutal colonial regime, must now also deal with the wealth extractors of Pharma.
Dealing with the Cause
While Mpox is concentrated in Africa, the effects of corrupted public health are global. Bird flu will likely follow the same course as Mpox in the near future. The army of researchers paid to find more outbreaks will do so. While the risk from pandemics is not significantly different than decades ago, there is an industry dependent on making you think otherwise.
As the Covid-19 playbook showed, this is about money and power on a scale only matched by similar fascist regimes of the past. Current efforts across Western countries to denigrate the concept of free speech, to criminalize dissent, and to institute health passports to control movement are not new and are in no way disconnected from the inevitability of the WHO declaring the Mpox PHEIC. We are not in the world we knew twenty years ago.
Poverty and the external forces that benefit from war, and the diseases these enable, will continue to hammer the people of DRC. If a mass vaccination campaign is instituted, which is highly likely, financial and human resources will be diverted from far greater threats. This is why decision-making must now be centralized far from the communities affected. Local priorities will never match those that expansion of the pandemic industry depends on.
In the West, we must move on from blaming the WHO and address the reality unfolding around us. Censorship is being promoted by journalists, courts are serving political agendas, and the very concept of nationhood, on which democracy depends, is being demonized. A fascist agenda is openly promoted by corporate clubs such as the World Economic Forum and echoed by the international institutions set up after the Second World War specifically to oppose it. If we cannot see this and if we do not refuse to participate, then we will have only ourselves to blame. We are voting for these governments and accepting obvious fraud, and we can choose not to do so.
For the people of DRC, children will continue to tragically die from Mpox, from malaria, and from all the diseases that ensure return on investment for distant companies making pharmaceuticals and batteries. They can ignore the pleading of the servants of the White Men of Davos who will wish to inject them, but they cannot ignore their poverty or the disinterest in their opinions. As with Covid-19, they will now become poorer because Google, the Guardian, and the WHO were bought a long time back, and now serve others.
The one real hope is that we ignore lies and empty pronouncements, refusing to bow to unfounded fear. In public health and in society, censorship protects falsehoods and dictates reflect greed for power. Once we refuse to accept either, we can begin to address the problems at the WHO and the inequity it is promoting. Until that time, we will live in this increasingly vicious circus.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
By 
Anthony Fauci must be furious.
He spent years proudly being the public face of the country’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. He did, however, flip-flop on almost every major issue, seamlessly managing to shift his guidance based on current political whims and an enormous desire to coerce behavior.
Nowhere was this more obvious than his dictates on masks. If you recall, in February 2020, Fauci infamously stated on 60 Minutes that masks didn’t work. That they didn’t provide the protection people thought they did, there were gaps in the fit, and wearing masks could actually make things worse by encouraging wearers to touch their face.
Just a few months later, he did a 180, then backtracked by making up a post-hoc justification for his initial remarks. Laughably, Fauci said that he recommended against masks to protect supply for healthcare workers, as if hospitals would ever buy cloth masks on Amazon like the general public.
Later in interviews, he guaranteed that cities or states that listened to his advice would fare better than those that didn’t. Masks would limit Covid transmission so effectively, he believed, that it would be immediately obvious which states had mandates and which didn’t. It was obvious, but not in the way he expected.
And now, finally, after years of being proven wrong, the White House has officially and thoroughly rebuked Fauci in every conceivable way.
White House Covid Page Points Out Fauci’s Duplicitous Guidance
A new White House official page points out, in detail, exactly where Fauci and the public health expert class went wrong on Covid.
It starts by laying out the case for the lab-leak origin of the coronavirus, with explanations of how Fauci and his partners misled the public by obscuring information and evidence. How they used the “FOIA lady” to hide emails, used private communications to avoid scrutiny, and downplayed the conduct of EcoHealth Alliance because they helped fund it.
They roast the World Health Organization for caving to China and attempting to broaden its powers in the aftermath of “abject failure.”
“The WHO’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic was an abject failure because it caved to pressure from the Chinese Communist Party and placed China’s political interests ahead of its international duties. Further, the WHO’s newest effort to solve the problems exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic — via a “Pandemic Treaty” — may harm the United States,” the site reads.
Social distancing is criticized, correctly pointing out that Fauci testified that there was no scientific data or evidence to support their specific recommendations.
“The ‘6 feet apart’ social distancing recommendation — which shut down schools and small business across the country — was arbitrary and not based on science. During closed door testimony, Dr. Fauci testified that the guidance ‘sort of just appeared.’”
There’s another section demolishing the extended lockdowns that came into effect in blue states like California, Illinois, and New York. Even the initial lockdown, the “15 Days to Slow the Spread,” was a poorly reasoned policy that had no chance of working; extended closures were immensely harmful with no demonstrable benefit.
“Prolonged lockdowns caused immeasurable harm to not only the American economy, but also to the mental and physical health of Americans, with a particularly negative effect on younger citizens. Rather than prioritizing the protection of the most vulnerable populations, federal and state government policies forced millions of Americans to forgo crucial elements of a healthy and financially sound life,” it says.
Then there’s the good stuff: mask mandates. While there’s plenty more detail that could be added, it’s immensely rewarding to see, finally, the truth on an official White House website. Masks don’t work. There’s no evidence supporting mandates, and public health, especially Fauci, flip-flopped without supporting data.
“There was no conclusive evidence that masks effectively protected Americans from COVID-19. Public health officials flipped-flopped on the efficacy of masks without providing Americans scientific data — causing a massive uptick in public distrust.”
This is inarguably true. There were no new studies or data justifying the flip-flop, just wishful thinking and guessing based on results in Asia. It was an inexcusable, world-changing policy that had no basis in evidence, but was treated as equivalent to gospel truth by a willing media and left-wing politicians.
Over time, the CDC and Fauci relied on ridiculous “studies” that were quickly debunked, anecdotes, and ever-shifting goal posts. Wear one cloth mask turned to wear a surgical mask. That turned into “wear two masks,” then wear an N95, then wear two N95s.
All the while ignoring that jurisdictions that tried “high-quality” mask mandates also failed in spectacular fashion.
And that the only high-quality evidence review on masking confirmed no masks worked, even N95s, to prevent Covid transmission, as well as hearing that the CDC knew masks didn’t work anyway.
The website ends with a complete and thorough rebuke of the public health establishment and the Biden administration’s disastrous efforts to censor those who disagreed.
“Public health officials often mislead the American people through conflicting messaging, knee-jerk reactions, and a lack of transparency. Most egregiously, the federal government demonized alternative treatments and disfavored narratives, such as the lab-leak theory, in a shameful effort to coerce and control the American people’s health decisions.
When those efforts failed, the Biden Administration resorted to ‘outright censorship—coercing and colluding with the world’s largest social media companies to censor all COVID-19-related dissent.’”
About time these truths are acknowledged in a public, authoritative manner. Masks don’t work. Lockdowns don’t work. Fauci lied and helped cover up damning evidence.
If only this website had been available years ago.
Though, of course, knowing the media’s political beliefs, they’d have ignored it then, too.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
Brownstone Institute
RCMP seem more interested in House of Commons Pages than MP’s suspected of colluding with China
From the Brownstone Institute
Canadians shouldn’t have information about their wayward MPs, but the RCMP can’t have too much biometric information about regular people. It’s always a good time for a little fishing. Let’s run those prints, shall we?
Forget the members of Parliament who may have colluded with foreign governments. The real menace, the RCMP seem to think, are House of Commons pages. MPs suspected of foreign election interference should not be identified, the Mounties have insisted, but House of Commons staff must be fingerprinted. Serious threats to the country are hidden away, while innocent people are subjected to state surveillance. If you want to see how the managerial state (dys)functions, Canada is the place to be.
In June, the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) tabled its redacted report that suggested at least 11 sitting MPs may have benefitted from foreign election interference. RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme cautioned against releasing their identities. Canadians remained in the dark until Oct. 28 when Kevin Vuong, a former Liberal MP now sitting as an Independent, hosted a news conference to suggest who some of the parliamentarians may be. Like the RCMP, most of the country’s media didn’t seem interested.
But the RCMP are very interested in certain other things. For years, they have pushed for the federal civil service to be fingerprinted. Not just high security clearance for top-secret stuff, but across government departments. The Treasury Board adopted the standard in 2014 and the House of Commons currently requires fingerprinting for staff hired since 2017. The Senate implemented fingerprinting this year. The RCMP have claimed that the old policy of doing criminal background checks by name is obsolete and too expensive.
But stated rationales are rarely the real ones. Name-based background checks are not obsolete or expensive. Numerous police departments continue to use them. They do so, in part, because name checks do not compromise biometric privacy. Fingerprints are a form of biometric data, as unique as your DNA. Under the federal Identification of Criminals Act, you must be in custody and charged with a serious offence before law enforcement can take your prints. Canadians shouldn’t have information about their wayward MPs, but the RCMP can’t have too much biometric information about regular people. It’s always a good time for a little fishing. Let’s run those prints, shall we?
It’s designed to seem like a small deal. If House of Commons staff must give their fingerprints, that’s just a requirement of the job. Managerial bureaucracies prefer not to coerce directly but to create requirements that are “choices.” Fingerprints aren’t mandatory. You can choose to provide them or choose not to work on the Hill.
Sound familiar? That’s the way Covid vaccine mandates worked too. Vaccines were never mandatory. There were no fines or prison terms. But the alternative was to lose your job, social life, or ability to visit a dying parent. When the state controls everything, it doesn’t always need to dictate. Instead, it provides unpalatable choices and raises the stakes so that people choose correctly.
Government intrudes incrementally. Digital ID, for instance, will be offered as a convenient choice. You can, if you wish, carry your papers in the form of a QR code on your phone. Voluntary, of course. But later there will be extra hoops to jump through to apply for a driver’s licence or health card in the old form.
Eventually, analogue ID will cost more, because, after all, digital ID is more automated and cheaper to run. Some outlets will not recognize plastic identification. Eventually, the government will offer only digital ID. The old way will be discarded as antiquated and too expensive to maintain. The new regime will provide the capacity to keep tabs on people like never before. Privacy will be compromised without debate. The bureaucracy will change the landscape in the guise of practicality, convenience, and cost.
Each new round of procedures and requirements is only slightly more invasive than the last. But turn around and find you have travelled a long way from where you began. Eventually, people will need digital ID, fingerprints, DNA, vaccine records, and social credit scores to be employed. It’s not coercive, just required for the job.
Occasionally the curtain is pulled back. The federal government unleashed the Emergencies Act on the truckers and their supporters in February 2022. Jackboots in riot gear took down peaceful protesters for objecting to government policy. Authorities revealed their contempt for law-abiding but argumentative citizens. For an honest moment, the government was not incremental and insidious, but enraged and direct. When they come after you in the streets with batons, at least you can see what’s happening.
We still don’t know who colluded with China. But we can be confident that House of Commons staffers aren’t wanted for murder. The RCMP has fingerprints to prove it. Controlling the people and shielding the powerful are mandates of the modern managerial state.
Republished from the Epoch Times
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