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COVID-19

House COVID Committee Confirms What We Have Long Suspected — The Feds Really Hate Transparency

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6 minute read

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By ADAM ANDRZEJEWSKI

 

Last week details emerged from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, confirming what government transparency advocates long suspected: Federal bureaucrats are purposefully stonewalling the American people’s right to know about their government.

Republican Kentucky Rep. James Comer, who chairs the full House Oversight and Accountability Committee, read from an email that Dr. David Morens, a top aide to Dr. Anthony Fauci, sent claiming that a staffer inside the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had shown him how to erase records requested by the public.

He was corresponding with Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, the organization that used tax dollars to fund controversial gain-of-function research in Wuhan, where the COVID outbreak began. The Department of Health and Human Services has since suspended funding of EcoHealth Alliance.

Morens wrote: “I learned from our FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) lady here how to make emails disappear after I am FOIA’d, but before the search starts. So, I think we are all safe. Plus, I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to Gmail.”

The implications for government transparency are enormous. How often do NIH staffers conceal what they do with our tax dollars? Why did a FOIA officer feel empowered to assist subjects of FOIA requests? How else do FOIA offers interfere with these requests? Has this behavior spread to the Centers for Disease Control and other agencies?

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com can speak to the problem. We have spent years — and gone to court — to force NIH to reveal the royalties paid to government scientists through medical innovation licensing.

When Americans are considering a drug or therapeutic recommended by public health officials, they deserve to understand all the financial stakes at play. Were any decision makers receiving payments? Were they continuing more lucrative research at the expense of other public health solutions?

For many, the question looming largest has been whether the relentless COVID vaccine push was driven by a potential windfall for NIH and certain scientists there.

When we first filed a FOIA, the agency ignored us and then refused to release the information.

After suing, NIH was required to release the information and began doing so incrementally due to the high volume of data. Tallied from 2009 through 2020, it amounted to an enormous sum–over $325 million paid by private companies to NIH and its scientists over 56,000 transactions.

Previously, we’d also discovered that Dr. Fauci, the face of the nation’s COVID response, was the highest compensated bureaucrat in the country. He out-earned President Biden. He out-earned his own boss, then-Acting NIH Director Lawrence Tabak.

Along with Fauci, who scoffed at concerns about royalty payments, Tabak faced questions from Congress.

In a March 2023 budget hearing, Rep. John Moolenaar told Tabak an obvious truth: every single, secret royalty payment represents a potential conflict of interest.

“To me, one of the biggest concerns people had during this last couple years is: Were they getting truthful information from their government? Could they trust what people were saying about the medicines? To me, that creates a very disturbing appearance.”

“The idea that people were getting a financial benefit from certain research that was done and grants that were awarded, that to me is the height of the appearance of a conflict of interest,” Moolenaar concluded.

The lawmaker urged NIH to make the money trail more transparent.

It was Tabak in the hot seat again last week, as Comer recited Morens’ outrageous email message.

Was the behavior he described consistent with NIH policy, Comer asked? “It is not,” Tabak responded flatly.

Did the FOIA team at NIH help its colleagues avoid transparency? “I certainly hope not,” Tabak offered.

Hope doesn’t suffice in this situation. It demands that lawmakers strengthen transparency law, update it for the 21st century and create some consequences for bad actors.

There are a few primary ways bureaucrats and decisionmakers violate the spirit of the law.

First, they overuse a series of exemptions designed to protect national security secrets or privacy laws. Too much is omitted through these exceptions; the American people deserve the full truth.

When documents are produced, they’re too often rendered useless through excessive redactions. We’re still fighting in real time to get more pieces of the royalty puzzle revealed.

Next, unreasonable delays are blamed on staffing levels, while many FOIA-related roles sit open. Agencies must prioritize filling those seats and Congress should appropriate more of them as needed.

Finally, we have the behavior Morens describes. A post facto effort to simply abscond with the information. It’s not just a policy violation but an affront to the spirit of the Freedom of Information Act. What consequences do these staffers ever truly face?

Until we get serious about protecting transparency, “FOIA lady” will be a duly anonymous symbol of what many have suspected: government employees hustling to cover their tracks.

Adam Andrzejewski is founder & CEO of OpenTheBooks.com, the nation’s largest private database of public spending.

COVID-19

Leaked documents: German gov’t lied about shots preventing COVID, knew lockdowns did more harm than good

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Berlin, Germany – 24 March 2020: The sign in front of the Robert Koch-Institut in Berlin.

From LifeSiteNews

By Andreas Wailzer

Germany’s top health agency privately admitted that the idea of a ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’ is ‘not correct’ but supported it because it ‘serves as an appeal to all those who have not been vaccinated,’ leaked documents revealed.

Leaked documents from a top German health agency show that politicians knew the experimental COVID shots did not prevent the transmission of the virus but advocated for jab mandates anyway.

On July 23, independent journalist Aya Velázquez published the un-redacted miutes of the German Robert Koch Institut (RKI, comparable to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) from its meetings regarding the COVID crisis between 2020 and 2023. Velázquez said she received the un-redacted documents from a whistleblower who used to work for the RKI. Parts of the so-called “RKI files” had already been published in March this year, after the RKI was forced to publish them due to a lawsuit. However, many key parts of the files had been redacted.

Velázquez wrote that the now fully un-redacted files show “that the RKI unfortunately spoke out in favor of both facility-based and general compulsory vaccination despite the knowledge of the lack of protection from transmission and serious side effects.”

The minutes from an RKI meeting on November 5, 2021, demonstrate that the idea of a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” that was propagated by politicians and mainstream media members was made up and not based on any facts.

“The media are talking about a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” the minutes state. “From a factual point of view this is not correct, the entire population is contributing. Should this be taken up in communication?”

The document noted that this phrase, although factually incorrect, “serves as an appeal to all those who have not been vaccinated to get vaccinated.”

It furthermore states that the minister of health “says it at press conference, presumably deliberately, cannot be corrected.”

During the fall and winter months of 2021 and early 2022, German politicians repeatedly used the term “pandemic of the unvaccinated” to blame those who refused the experimental COVID jabs for “the pandemic” and all COVID-related measures. The government also used this line of reasoning to ban the unjabbed from participating in many parts of society, including having certain jobs, attending restaurants, shopping at stores, and many other areas.

Epoch Times Deutsch said that during this time, the unvaxxed faced “a level of exclusionary pressure that is unprecedented in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany.”

During the press conference held by the team around the journalist Aya Velázquez, Professor Stefan Homburg said an entry in the documents from March 19, 2021, showed that the RKI already knew that the AstraZeneca COVID shot had caused several cases of sinus vein thrombosis, barely 11 weeks into the “vaccination” campaign.

Homburg is an emeritus professor of economics who was the head of the public finance department of the Leibniz University in Hannover and who became one of the most well-known and formidable critics of the COVID tyranny in Germany.

Homburg furthermore said that the RKI files showed that the RKI and the Paul Ehrlich Institut (PEI) deliberately gave false testimony in court, for instance, in regard to protecting German soldiers against transmission of the virus. “In this respect, they could now be charged in court for unsworn testimony with reference to these minutes,” said Homburg.

According to the available data, Homburg said that the overall situation can be described as a “deception of the public.”

He told the Epoch Times that “the authorities deliberately deceived the public for years at the behest of politicians.”

Journalist Bastian Barucker told the Epoch Times that the documents showed that when Health Minister Jens Spahn announced school closures in November 2021, the RKI “had long known that this was not correct.”

In parts of the RKI files that were already released in March, the minutes of a meeting from January 11, 2023, show that the RKI knew that lockdowns cause more harm than good. “The consequences of the lockdown are sometimes more severe than Covid itself,” the document stated.

At the conclusion of the press conference, Velázquez said, “The RKI protocols prove it: Our corona policy was not based on rational, scientific considerations.”

“Numerous political decisions, such as 2G [full participation in society only given to vaxxed or recovered individuals], the facility-based and planned general vaccination mandate, or the vaccination of children, were purely political decisions for which the RKI, as an authority bound by instructions, provided an alleged scientific legitimation,” the journalist said

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Brownstone Institute

The Media Refuses to Accept Covid Reality

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From the Brownstone Institute

By IAN MILLER

By late 2020, the media and public health establishment had two obsessions. One of their obsessions involved forcing the public to wear masks, even though the mountains of data and several studies had already confirmed that they don’t stop the transmission of respiratory viruses. The second obsession was forcing everyone to take Covid vaccines, regardless of their actual efficacy, risk of side effects, age or underlying health, or the vaccines’ rapidly waning efficacy.

Neither of those obsessions has abated, though even the most extreme, hardened Covid extremists have acknowledged that the vaccines were flawed, mandates were a mistake, and side effects should be acknowledged.

The media, unwilling to give up on the increased power, influence, and moral judgment it gained during the pandemic, has refused to accept that it effectively ended years ago.

So it’s no surprise that media outlets have noticed that, as we’ve seen every single summer since 2020, cases have increased, predominantly across the Western and Southern United States. Thankfully though, Los Angeles media, of course it had to be Los Angeles, has determined the culprit.

The Media Refuses to Accept Covid Reality

Turns out it’s not seasonality causing the increase, it’s outdated Covid vaccines and a lack of public masking, of course!

NBC Los Angeles “reported” that Covid cases in California and Los Angeles have “doubled” in the last month. This sounds horrifying and scary, doesn’t it? Yet it again, as is so often the case with Covid coverage, is misleading.

Let’s take a look at the current daily average of new cases in Los Angeles County:

Cases are so low they’re functionally indistinguishable from zero.

You can see why the media is scared, given how dramatic this surge appears to be compared to those in the previous four years. And thanks to NBC’s crack reporting and expert analysis, we know why this terrifying increase is happening. Spoiler alert: it’s all your fault that you haven’t controlled an uncontrollable respiratory virus with individual behavior that has no impact whatsoever on the spread of the coronavirus.

“People aren’t necessarily wearing masks; they’re not required to in certain places,” nurse practitioner Alice Benjamin, referenced as an expert by NBA LA said. “We’re traveling, we’re getting out for the summer. We also do have some reduced immunity. The vaccines will wane over time.”

Nowhere in the story is it mentioned that the massive jump in Covid cases in late 2021 and early 2022 happened immediately after LA County Public Health issued a press release celebrating the county for achieving 95+ percent masking rates at indoor businesses. No one seems willing or able to ask this nurse practitioner why she believes wearing masks would reduce this “surge,” if it failed so spectacularly in previous surges.

Endless Misinformation from ‘Experts’

She wasn’t done with the misinformation though. Benjamin warned that not enough Angelenos are getting the “updated” vaccine, which explains the summer increase.

“If you got it in October and later, that’s generally the updated vaccine,” Benjamin said. “If you got it prior to October, double check because if you did get the bivalent which has not been phased out, we recommend you do get an updated vaccine.”

And according to her, everyone should get it. Because the CDC said so.

“Per CDC recommendations, anyone 6 months or older should have at least one of the updated Covid vaccines,” Benjamin said.

Though, of course, no one on the crack NBC Los Angeles team thought to ask Benjamin why the “updated” October vaccine would help against the now common FLiRT variant when it emerged six months after the “updated” vaccine was released. Especially when the “study” process for booster doses is effectively nonexistent anyway. Pfizer and Moderna churn out a “targeted” dose that is supposed to protect against a variant that’s no longer circulating, never has to show any real-world benefit, and the regulatory agencies sign off on it, while the CDC recommends everyone get it.

Rinse, repeat.

Nor did anyone ask her what possible rationale there could be for forcing six-month-old babies to get vaccinated with a booster that has no studied efficacy against the currently circulating variant.

Her comments and the media reaction exemplify the problems with Covid discourse that started in 2020 and will apparently continue forever. A complete and purposeful ignorance of the facts, the data, and the evidence base. A willingness to advocate for the same sort of restrictions and interventions that have already failed. Ignorance of the booster process and endless appeals to public health authorities. Even though those authorities have made countless mistakes and refused to update their findings after being proven wrong.

The obvious question is: How does this type of absurdist discourse ever end? The answer, as we continue to see, is it doesn’t.

Republished from the author’s Substack

Author

Ian Miller is the author of “Unmasked: The Global Failure of COVID Mask Mandates.” His work has been featured on national television broadcasts, national and international news publications and referenced in multiple best selling books covering the pandemic. He writes a Substack newsletter, also titled “Unmasked.”

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