From the Brownstone Institute

BY DANIEL NUCCIO  

As documented in a 2023 report from the Electronic Privacy Information Center, more than seventy local governments used ARPA funds to expand surveillance programs in their communities

If you ever had the vague sense that Covid relief funding worked in a manner akin to US aid packages in failed Middle Eastern dictatorships, your instincts weren’t wrong.

First off, there were cases of just outright fraud nearing the $200 billion mark with drug gangs and racketeers collecting Covid unemployment benefits from the US government, with some recipient fraudsters not even having the common decency of being honest American fraudsters.

Even worse, though, were some legitimate uses of Covid funds that actually counted as legitimate despite being laughably frivolous or clearly unrelated to nominal goals connected to public health or helping communities deal with the economic impact of the virus – or, more accurately, the lockdowns.

One of the most should-be-satirical-but-actually-real examples of a legitimate use of Covid cash was a researcher at North Dakota State University being awarded $300,000 by the National Science Foundation through a grant funded at least in part through the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 to aid her in her 2023 efforts to reimagine grading in the name of equity. (If none of that makes sense, please don’t hurt yourself with mental pirouettes.)

Other more mundane projects pertained to prisons and law enforcement using Covid relief money for purposes that extended well-beyond simply paying salaries or keeping the lights on. In 2022 The Appeal and The Marshall Project  reported on how large sums of Covid money went to prison construction and expansion projects and to outfit police departments with new weaponry, vehicles, and canines. Regardless of how you feel about law enforcement or our prison system, these probably did little to stop the spread of Covid or keep out-of-work bartenders afloat while public health bureaucrats consulted horoscopes or goat entrails or their equally useful models to divine the proper time to let businesses reopen safely at half-capacity to diners willing to wear a mask between bites but too afraid to leave their homes.

Yet, of course, that didn’t stop people from trying to make the case that these expenditures absolutely were essential to slowing the spread. Often coming off like precocious children explaining to their parents how a new puppy would help teach them responsibility or an overpriced pair of sneakers would facilitate their social-emotional development by ensuring the cool kids would like them, local sheriffs and city managers were reported as claiming prison expansions could help prisoners social distance from each other, new tasers would help officers social distance from suspects, and new vehicles would allow officers to take their cars home with them rather than share one with another officer who might end up contaminating it with their Covid cooties.

But even worse than the funds that were outright plundered or just snatched up as part of a cash grab were those that were used on projects that helped further erode the freedoms of American citizens.

As documented in a 2023 report from the Electronic Privacy Information Center, more than seventy local governments used ARPA funds to expand surveillance programs in their communities, purchasing or licensing gunshot detection systems, automatic license plate readers, drones, social media monitoring tools, and equipment to hack smartphones and other connected devices.

Sometimes EPIC reported that this was done with little, if any, public debate over the civil liberties and privacy concerns inherent to these tools. In one case from a town in Ohio, approval for ARPA-funded ALPRs – cameras that can create a searchable, time-stamped history for the movements of passing vehicles – came after only a 12-minute presentation by their police chief.

Similarly, schools also likely used money from ARPA, as well as the 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, for their own surveillance purposes, although documentation of how schools used their Covid money is said to be somewhat spotty at best.

Vice News in 2021 reported how Ed Tech and surveillance vendors such as Motorola Solutions, Verkada, and  SchoolPass marketed their products as tools to help reduce the spread of Covid and allow schools to reopen safely.

Some attempts such as Vice’s description of SchoolPass presenting ALPRs as a means to assist with social distancing come off like police departments explaining the social distancing benefits of tasers.

Others, however, such as Motorola plying schools with lists of behavioral analysis programs that “monitor social distancing violations” and room occupancy while “automat[ing] the detection of students who are not wearing face masks,” seem to offer a glimpse of the dystopian future into which we are heading – as do the other surveillance tools bought with Covid cash.

Maybe at some point Disease X, about which our ruling class has been warning us, will hit and the additional drones, ALPRs, and social media monitoring tools bought by the law enforcement agencies reported on by EPIC will be used to monitor adults for social distancing violations and automatically detect who isn’t wearing a mask. Maybe those tools will just be used to keep a digital notebook of the daily activities of everyone while police reassure us that they promise only to look at it when they really really need to.

In either case, though, if you currently have the vague sense that post-Covid America is a little more like a Chinese surveillance state than in the Before Times, your instincts are dead-on.

MP Andrew Bridgen

From LifeSiteNews

By Frank Wright

British MP Andrew Bridgen called for an immediate suspension of ‘all mRNA treatments in both humans and animals,’ saying that excess deaths in 2022 and 2023 was ‘the greatest medical scandal in this country in living memory, and possibly ever.’

With three years of excess deaths still mysteriously unexplained, Dr. John Campbell devoted an entire video to a House of Commons debate on what MP Andrew Bridgen has called the “greatest medical scandal in this country in living memory.”

Introducing Bridgen as “a hero of the people,” Campbell’s report from April 18 shows footage of the “COVID-19: Response and Excess Deaths” debate of the same day.

Led by MP Andrew Bridgen, who was expelled from the Conservative Party for his outspoken criticism of the so-called vaccines and the political culture which enabled the disastrous lockdown measures, the opening speech was heard by a mere handful of MPs in a largely empty chamber.

His full speech can also be viewed here on the U.K. Parliament website, beginning at 14:33:21.

The public gallery was packed, however, with Bridgen’s summary call for the government “to immediately suspend the use of all mRNA treatments in both humans and animals” met with resounding cheers and applause.

Bridgen opened with a denunciation of a scandal whose dimensions he explored with forensic detail.

We are witnesses to the greatest medical scandal in this country in living memory, and possibly ever: the excess deaths in 2022 and 2023. Its causes are complex, but the novel and untested medical treatment described as a COVID vaccine is a large part of the problem.

The independent MP warned of the verdict of history on the actions of a government which had “gaslit” its people into compliance.

Future generations, who will be genuinely agog that the evidence has been ignored for so long, that genuine concerns were disregarded, and that those raising them were gaslit, smeared, and vilified.

The scandal of excess deaths, which the U.K. and other governments still refuse to connect to the “safe and effective” mRNA injections, is one dimension of a politically charged culture of silence, says Bridgen.

Data hidden

Noting that he is one of the few members of Parliament with a science degree, he said:

One does not need any science training at all to be horrified by officials deliberately hiding key data in this scandal, which is exactly what is going on.

He went on to recount how data on excess deaths was being withheld from the public, and had now been recalibrated to downplay the figures.

The public are being denied that data, which is unacceptable; yet again, data is hidden with impunity.

He notes how Professor Jenny Harries, the U.K. Health Security Agency chief, has “said that this anonymized, aggregate death by vaccination status data is “commercially sensitive” and should not be published.”

Bridgen records how “Professor Harries has also endorsed a recent massive change to the calculation of the baseline population level used by the ONS to calculate excess deaths.”

Data model changed

This new model is “now incredibly complex and opaque,” he claimed, “and by sheer coincidence, it appears to show a massive excess of deaths in 2020 and 2021 and minimal excess deaths in 2023.”

The implication is that the modeling has been altered to suit the narrative, which routinely denies any connection between the “vaccine” rollouts and excess deaths, as well as soaring heart conditions and rising cases of aggressive cancers.

Yet the “old calculation method, tried and tested for decades” showed “the [U.K.] excess death rate in 2023 was an astonishing 5 percent.”

Bridgen points out that these deaths came “long after the pandemic was over, at a time when we would expect a deficit in deaths because so many people had sadly died in previous years.”

Due to Harries’ changes in data capture, he said, “some 20,000 premature deaths in 2023 alone are now being airbrushed away through the new normal baseline.”

Harries attracted derision for her claim that 2,800 excess deaths over the summer of 2022 were due to climate change.

Safe and effective?

Earlier that day, Bridgen had called on Parliament to compel the ongoing COVID-19 inquiry to investigate directly the claim that the so-called vaccines, were “safe and effective.”

He said, “I asked the house to support the motion today for Baroness Hallet’s inquiry to open module four on the safety and efficacy of the experimental COVID-19 vaccines.”

This inquiry has lately been criticized by a group of U.K. public health scholars and academics for its lack of impartiality. The signatories include Oxford zoology Professor Sunetra Gupta, infectious medicine specialist Dr. Kevin Bardosh of Edinburgh University, and over 50 others including legal, sociological, and medical experts.

TikTok dance of death

In their March 12 open letter published on the website Collateral Global, it is claimed that “the [COVID] inquiry is not living up to its mission to evaluate the mistakes made during the pandemic,” being “fundamentally biased” in its “preferential treatment to scientific advisers … who have a vested interest in maintaining the justification for their policy recommendations.”

[T]he format of the Inquiry is impeding investigation into the key scientific and policy questions.

These policy questions include the confusing means by which deaths were recorded, alongside the further scandal of “iatrogenic deaths” – caused by medical intervention. The use of drugs which restricted breathing, such as morphine and midazolam, was condemned by Bridgen.

“The result is that people died who didn’t need to die while nurses performed TikTok dances,” he said.

Death by medical protocol

Pointing out that “the body clears all the viruses within around seven days,” Bridgen noted “very few people will know that the average time to death from COVID symptoms and testing positive was 18 days.”

He says this is due to the fact that “doctors abandoned the standard clinical protocols.”

Instead of using former antibiotic and steroid treatments, he says, “they sent people home … then when they returned to the hospital, they sedated them, put them on ventilators and would watch them die.”

Bridgen says this was done due to new “protocols for COVID-19 treatment” – which have now been deleted from the public record.

“The body responsible for this protocol (NG1 163) is called the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence – NICE.”

Bridgen says that a key passage – recommending the use of the respiratory depressant midazolam – had been removed from the updated guidelines. 

Can the minister explain why midazolam was then removed from the same updated guideline on the 30th of November 2023?

His next question was one which no one in government has been willing to answer.

If legal cases are brought for unlawful killing – can the minister tell us who’s going to be taking the blame?

Will it be NICE? Will it be NHS England – or will it be the individual doctors and nurses who will be held to account?

A cover-up?

Suggesting a cover-up of deaths which contributed to the excess seen in the lockdown period, Bridgen pointed out, “NICE has now removed these alternative protocols including NG1 163 from their website, although every other historic protocol is still there.”

Could the minister tell us why they have removed this protocol from their website?

Are they ashamed of the harm that they caused? They certainly should be.

Bridgen went on to note the contrast in recording “deaths and illnesses” after vaccination compared to those attributed to COVID.

There’s a huge stark contrast in how deaths and illnesses after vaccination have been recorded compared to COVID.

He said:

After a positive COVID test any illness and any death was attributed to the virus, [whereas] … after the experimental emergency use vaccine was administered, no subsequent illness and no death was ever attributed to the vaccine.

Recalling the mantra that governments were “following the science,” Bridgen added that “these are both completely unscientific approaches and that’s why we have to look at other sources of data excess deaths to determine if there is an issue.”

Noting that the notorious drug Thalidomide was also once described as “safe and effective,” he demanded rules be put in place to prevent the “government and other authorities” becoming the “Big Pharma’s marketing department,” as he claims it was under the COVID regime.

‘They knew’

Citing the millions of pounds paid to the vaccine-injured and the fact that the prime minister himself could not defend the “safe and effective” claim when it was put to him personally, Bridgen stated that “those who imposed these vaccines knew very well that they could never prevent infections from a disease of this kind.”

Referring to data from Australia, he stressed the unwillingness of governments to make the obvious connection between excess death, heart injuries, and cancer rates with the “novel mRNA vaccines.”

Calls for a ban

He closed with an appeal which condemned the fact the injections contained DNA and disrupted that of the host receiving the injections, also against former assurances to the contrary.

Madam Deputy speaker the evidence is clear: these vaccines have caused deaths … serious harm and they will have raised the risk of cancer to many more.

I ask the House – it’s time to take the politics out of our science and … to put some actual science back into our politics.

With this, he called for an immediate ban on the experimental treatments.

I call on the government once again to immediately suspend the use of all mRNA treatments in both humans and animals.

The science ‘was not followed’

One of only 12 other MPs in the almost empty chamber, Sir Christopher Chope, spoke in support of Bridgen’s call, which was met with resounding cheers from the public gallery. The speaker threatened to clear the public gallery, saying “the clapping must stop.”

Graham Stringer, Labour MP for Blackley and Broughton, is one of those few MPs with a scientific background. He said the claim made by the U.K. government and others to be “following the science” was simply false.

The science was not followed.

Stringer cites the change in public health advice, which contradicted earlier statements by public health officials such as the government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, and the government’s chief medical adviser, Chris Whitty.

If you go back and look at the early statements, you will see … people from the NHS, Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty saying masks were a waste of time and that lockdowns were ineffective.

The U.K.’s Independent reported in March 2020 that “[c]hief medical officer tells public not to wear masks – Chris Whitty instead advises people to regularly wash their hands.”

He told Sky News in an interview that “wearing a face mask if you don’t have an infection … really reduces the risk almost not at all.”

"Wearing a mask if you don't have an infection reduces the risk almost not at all."

Chris Whitty tells @KayBurley the only people advised to wear masks are those with an infection to prevent further spread.#KayBurley

Get the latest on #coronavirus: https://t.co/NdI5p1vKfk pic.twitter.com/GZNFsfKcfy

— Sky News (@SkyNews) March 4, 2020

Stringer says, “That advice changed very quickly under political pressure.”

If this pressure did not come from following the science, where did it come from?

The U.K. government now appears to be following a policy of silence, given its own COVID inquiry in 2023 confirmed that the government knew that there was “no point” to wearing masks, which had “very little effect on the spread on [sic] COVID.”

Evidence was submitted from a government official at the prime minister’s residence, Number 10 Downing St., in February 2023. Parties at Number 10 during lockdown were captured on film.

Junior Downing St official:
"Wine Time Fridays continued throughout, social distancing not enforced, mask wearing not enforced…wider culture of not adhering to any rules.
"No.10 was like an island oasis of normality"

Following rules for the cameras, continuing as normal inside pic.twitter.com/7rabZp9NM8

— Tristan Kirk (@kirkkorner) June 15, 2023

In his own diaries, Vallance himself condemned the then Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s decision to mandate mask-wearing in schools as a “totally political” decision, according to a Daily Telegraph report from March 12. According to him, the decision was “not based on medical advice.”

It was instead a result of her political ambition to present a policy distinct from that in England to fortify a renewed call for Scottish independence.

It is obvious that political pressure has played a role in shaping the lockdown era. It is also now apparent that the obvious is excluded from the news, with governments still refusing to acknowledge any connection between the novel mRNA treatments and the entirely predictable side effects seen in the vaccine-injured and the otherwise inexplicable rate of excess deaths.

If you want to know where the truth of the matter lies, just follow the silence. It’s not coming from the public gallery.