This Week's Must Reads - 22-28 April 2024 - Non Pay-Walled Free Read

A summary of this week's most interesting news, studies, reports and articles

I spend a lot of time each day gathering new information and interesting articles. I then pick the most fascinating topic and write about it but that leaves a lot of information that I’m not sharing.

Below is a summary of all the best articles and information from this week. This weekly summary is a slimmed down version for all subscribers but more comprehensive daily summaries will be for paid subscribers only.

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Climate Change

• How Climate Change Narrative Is Preventing Africa From Modernizing and Gaining Prosperity. Farmers like Mr. Machogu can’t get a combine harvester. Even if they could afford one from the meager salaries they make selling crops, Western nations’ climate policies prevent Africans from achieving what the West already has—modernization and prosperity. In November 2023, to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel use, the President of the Republic of Kenya, William Ruto, cut subsidies for fertilizer, fuel, and electricity for the 2023/2024 financial year. He did so at the behest of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), a financial agency of the United Nations (U.N.).

• Climate Change And The Law: The Lunacy Escalates. In an astonishing verdict, Europe’s highest human rights court ruled on 9th April that countries must better protect their citizens from “the consequences of climate change.” In the landmark ruling, setting a legal precedent across 46 member states of the Council of Europe, the court sided with a group of women called KlimaSeniorinnen or “Senior Women for Climate Protection.” Climate policies that cannot get implemented by democratic means are now pushed through by lawfare campaigns backed by the powerful climate-focused foundations.

• Why the polar bears don’t need to worry. NOT A lot of people know, or rather a lot of people don’t want it to be common knowledge, that the maximum extent the Northern Hemisphere sea-ice cover occurs at approximately the same time as the Spring Equinox. This simple fact would undermine the foundations of the ‘warmist’ propaganda, which has focused for the last two months months on how warm the weather has been (especially in the middle-class, metropolitan bubble of SE England), and would scupper the hand-wringing by such luminaries as Saints Attenborough, Packham and Thunberg.

Covid

• SARS-CoV-2 is precisely the virus WIV was hunting for in 2019. Lab leak critics often say that before the pandemic, the Wuhan Institute of Virology would not have considered a SARS2 progenitor interesting. “WIV was only interested in SARS-like viruses that were very close to SARS1,” they say. In actuality, the exact opposite is true — in late 2018, EcoHealth and WIV outlined their updated virus hunting criteria for 2019–2023, which show that they were now looking for SARS-like viruses that were 10–25% different from SARS1 in their spike but could still enter human cells. SARS2 fits those criteria like a glove: its spike is 24% different from that of SARS1, and yet it binds to the human ACE2 receptor even better than SARS1.

• Fauci is set to testify at the Covid Select Subcommittee on 3 June 2024.

  

• The non-science of WHO’s weekly Covid reports. The WHO's Weekly Epidemiological Updates (WEU) during the Covid event were touted as "comprehensive and authoritative analysis" on the global situation. What did they really show? The WEU experience should have taught the WHO to be more cautious about declaring a pandemic, because in doing so millions of lives were ruined and lost without cause. It should also have taught the WHO that rapid global data of a specific disease is impossible to collect, even in a high tech world. And it should have informed the WHO that transparent cost/benefit analyses should be done before sweeping measures are recommended on an unsuspecting world.

• The Smoking Gun in Wuhan: The German-Chinese Lab and the HIV Inserts. Theories of a lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 have largely focused on the presence in the genome of the famous furin cleavage site. Less attention has been paid to other anomalies and, in particular, the presence of the so-called HIV inserts first flagged by the Indian research team Pradhan et al. in late January 2020 and quickly dismissed as untenable conspiracy mongering. Thus, when an Anglosphere group of scientists around Kristian Andersen came to Anthony Fauci at almost exactly the same time with their concerns that the virus had been engineered, their focus was on the furin cleavage site and they took great pains to distance themselves from Pradhan et al. and the HIV inserts. But is that because they did not view them as anomalous or rather because they were worried that the implications of the anomaly were too shocking to be pursued? The content of their FOIA’d e-mails and Slack messages makes clear that it is the latter.

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

• Lockdown to blame for ‘concerning’ surge in number of potentially deadly falls. Figures for 2022 – the latest full calendar year available – show that the number of calls for ambulances because of falls was more than 16 per cent higher than in each of the previous two years, indicating worrying after-effects of the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. Angus Dalgleish, professor of oncology at St George’s Hospital, Tooting, south-west London, said he had “become aware of many people who have fallen over unexpectedly, several with serious injuries” and that “many of these cases are almost certainly related to the detrimental effects of lockdown”. He added: “Immobility, lack of exercise, lack of sunshine and Vitamin D3 all make muscles weaker and the nervous system less able to compensate.”

• Alcohol-related deaths soar to an all-time high in wake of Covid - fuelled by 'concerning' uptick in middle-aged women. Brands deliberately targeting women with clever marketing tactics are believed to have exacerbated the trend. Pandemic-era curbs also likely fuelled dangerous drinking habits for both genders, statisticians suggested. Alcohol-related deaths have been rising for decades. But they rose quickest from March 2020 onwards, after the first national lockdown came into force and got progressively worse. More than 10,000 alcohol-related deaths were recorded across Britain in 2022, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) found. It was a jump of 32.8 per cent on levels pre-pandemic.

  

• The Three Rs of Fear Messaging in a Global Pandemic: Recommendations, Ramifications and Remediation. Using evidence from published documents, the paper shows that UK Independent Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours' (SPI-B) supported the use of fear messaging during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is inconsistent with the extant psychological literature and contrary to the disaster planning literature. The recommendations regarding fear messaging may have had harmful ramifications and impacts, especially for young people. It recommends that a wider multidisciplinary expertise is employed to deal effectively, ethically and holistically with future crises. Plans for future pandemics must include meaningful engagement with the public, particularly children and young people.

• Is WFH Bad for Your Health? The following chart uses data from a Statista Consumer Insights survey to see how reported health differs among people who mostly work from home versus from an office or factory. It found that six in ten U.S. adults who primarily work from home had experienced some kind of pain - be it back pain, joint pain or a headache - in the 12 months prior to participating in the survey. These symptoms occurred marginally more frequently for those working from home than those working from an office environment (59 percent versus 54 percent).

  

• Pupils in England ‘facing worst exam results in decades’ after Covid closures. Children in England could face the worst exam results in decades and a lifetime of lower earnings, according to research that blames failures to tackle the academic and social legacies of school closures during Covid. The study funded by the Nuffield Foundation predicts that national GCSE results in key subjects will steadily worsen until 2030, when it expects fewer than 40% of pupils to get good grades in maths and English.

Economy/Energy/Finance

• Lavrov Says Russia, China Almost Dedollarized Their Trade. Russia and China have almost completely stopped using the dollar in their mutual trade, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in Moscow on Monday, according to Tass. More than 90% of settlements are carried out in the two countries’ national currencies, Lavrov said. Trade and economic cooperation between Russia and China is actively developing despite persistent attempts by Western countries to prevent this, he added. Economic ties between the two countries have boomed since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 and the West imposed sanctions. Trade between Russia and China increased by 26% to $240 billion in 2023.

• America’s sixth largest credit card provider, Discovery Financial, has seen delinquency rates shoot up in recent months.

  

• New York Stock Exchange tests views on round-the-clock trading. The survey by the NYSE, part of Intercontinental Exchange, was put out by its data analytics team rather than its management, but it highlights the growing interest in trading the likes of Nvidia or Apple overnight between 8pm and 4am Eastern time. The issue has become a hot topic in recent years, prompted in part by the 24/7 operation of cryptocurrency trading and the rise in retail investor activity first spurred by coronavirus pandemic lockdowns.

• Worldwide semiconductor shipments have dropped to their lowest levels since the GFC.

  

• Nearly 40% of Homeowners Couldn’t Afford Their Home If They Were to Buy It Today. Nearly two of every five (38%) homeowners don’t believe they could afford to buy their own home if they were purchasing it today, according to a new report from Redfin, the technology-powered real estate brokerage. Nearly three in five (59%) homeowners who answered this question have lived in their home for at least 10 years, and another 21% have lived in their home for at least five years. That means the majority of respondents have seen housing prices in their neighborhood skyrocket since they purchased their home: The median U.S. home-sale price has doubled in the last 10 years, and has shot up nearly 50% in the last five years alone.

• UPS reports first quarter earnings declines. First quarter earnings results issued this morning by Atlanta-based global freight transportation and logistics services provider UPS were down. Quarterly consolidated revenue, at $21.7 billion, fell 5.3% annually, and adjusted earnings per share, at $1.43, saw a 35.0% annual decline. Consolidated quarterly operating profit came in at $1.6 billion, which was off 36.5% annually.

• New car loan rates have quickly surpassed levels last seen during the GFC.

  

• Many large U.S. cities are in deep financial trouble. Here’s why. The financial challenges within cities appear to be mounting despite high municipal credit ratings and robust demand for urban commodities like housing. For example, New York City had a total public debt of $177.6 billion at the end of fiscal year 2022, according to researchers at Truth in Accounting. That translates into a per capita taxpayer burden of $61,200, according to the group’s analysis. This comes from pension debt obligations that are underreported and will eventually be pushed on to future taxpayers. “If I don’t pay that invoice, I don’t have to include it in my balanced budget,” said Sheila Weinberg, the group’s founder and CEO.

• The Japanese Yen is trading like crypto currency. The Dollar’s rise versus the Yen yesterday was a rare 3 standard deviation event.

  

• The US economy may be barrelling towards stagflation, an outcome worse than recession. The latest GDP and inflation readings were what investors were least eager to see, and could hint at serious trouble ahead. "This was a worst of both worlds report – slower than expected growth, higher than expected inflation," wrote David Donabedian, chief investment officer of CIBC Private Wealth US. It's also bad news for the economy, as sputtering growth and higher prices are the key ingredients for stagflation, which is characterized by economic listlessness and stubbornly elevated inflation over a prolonged period. Such a scenario that can be even harder to combat than a recession, because of the dynamic outlined above: the Fed's hands are largely tied.

• US government debt is now rising vertically.

  

• Ford just reported a massive loss on every electric vehicle it sold. Ford’s electric vehicle unit reported that losses soared in the first quarter to $1.3 billion, or $132,000 for each of the 10,000 vehicles it sold in the first three months of the year, helping to drag down earnings for the company overall. Ford, like most automakers, has announced plans to shift from traditional gas-powered vehicles to EVs in coming years. But it is the only traditional automaker to break out results of its retail EV sales. And the results it reported Wednesday show another sign of the profit pressures on the EV business at Ford and other automakers.

• The AI bubble is noticeable in the number of companies mentioning the word during Q4 2023.

  

Health

• [Who knew!?] Medical device companies pay millions to NHS while pushing products, says study. An analysis of disclosures by medical device companies found that between 2017 and 2019 they reported €425m (£367m at today’s rates) in payments to healthcare organisations in Europe, according to the study in the journal Health Policy and Technology. James Larkin, one of the authors of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, said the filings did not include consultancy fees for medical staff and many companies did not register their payments. “This is just the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “There is a huge number of payments that are not being disclosed. The descriptions for payments which are disclosed are very vague and it is not completely clear what they are for.” There are concerns that payments from pharmaceutical and medical companies to health organisations can influence clinical decisions to use certain drugs and products.

• This Artificial Sweetener May Harm the Gut. Neotame, a newer type of artificial sweetener used in things like soft drinks, cakes, and chewing gum can damage the intestine and cause health issues like irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and sepsis, according to a new in vitro study published in the Frontiers in Nutrition. It is around 8,000 times sweeter than table sugar and 40 times sweeter than aspartame, another artificial sweetener made by the same manufacturer. It was developed in the 1990s as a derivative of aspartame and was expected to be the sweetener’s potential successor.

• The US fertility rate has fallen to 1.62 births per woman, the lowest since records began in the 1930s.

  

• Conflicts in Cancer Data. The data published by the UK on this topic is contradictory but data from around the world is signifying there is a genuine problem. The first to raise the alarm were those with experience of noticing trends in data in the financial world. Within medicine great emphasis is placed on statistically significant (ie at the 95% level) deviations, a high bar which means that early signals, noticed as a change in direction, get ignored.

  

Middle East

• Kremlin: US military aid to Israel is ‘road straight to escalation’; Medvedev slams package as ‘Russophobia’. The Russian Foreign Ministry says US House of Representatives’ approval of security aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan will “deepen crises throughout the world.” “Military assistance to the Kyiv regime is direct sponsorship of terrorist activity,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova writes on Telegram. “To Taiwan, it is interference in China’s internal affairs. To Israel, it is a road straight to escalation and an unprecedented rise in tension in the region.”

• Netanyahu’s office hosts emergency talks on feared ICC warrants for PM, ministers. Israel is increasingly worried by the prospect of the International Criminal Court in The Hague issuing arrest warrants against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli political and military leaders for alleged breaches of international law in Gaza, Israeli television reported Thursday. Netanyahu raised the matter in his meetings this week with Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Cameron and Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, and sought their help, the TV report said.

• Mass graves in Gaza show victims’ hands were tied, says UN rights office. Disturbing reports continue to emerge about mass graves in Gaza in which Palestinian victims were reportedly found stripped naked with their hands tied, prompting renewed concerns about possible war crimes amid ongoing Israeli airstrikes, the UN human rights office, OHCHR, said on Tuesday. More bodies had been found at Al-Shifa Hospital which was the focus of an Israeli military incursion to root out Hamas militants allegedly operating inside which ended at the beginning of this month. After two weeks of intense clashes, UN humanitarians assessed the site and confirmed on 5 April that Al-Shifa was “an empty shell”, with most equipment reduced to ashes.

• There is no doubt that Netanyahu is preventing a deal to release the abductees. Haim Rubinstein, until recently the spokesman for the families of the abductees, reveals details about the meetings with Netanyahu, about the pressure exerted by the Prime Minister's Office and the reasons for which he resigned from his life project. In an interview with Gideon Alon, he reveals: In retrospect, we learned that Hamas offered to immediately release all the abducted citizens if the IDF does not enter the Strip, but the government rejected the proposal. Netanyahu knows that the day the hostages are released, Smotrich and Ben Gvir will resign from the government because in their view the price he will pay for the release of the abductees is too high.

Politics

• Jeffrey Sterling: “I witnessed the obsession with Iran in the CIA. Assange? No chance he will receive a fair trial and humane treatment in the US”. Jeffrey Sterling was attempting to serve his country working in the shadowy world of the CIA under cover operations, until he blew the whistle on a botched operation against Iran and paid an immense price. In 2011, he was arrested and charged with Espionage Act violations, accused of having leaked classified information to an American journalist working for the New York Times, Pulitzer Prize winner James Risen. Although the U.S. authorities were unable to bring any incriminating evidence proving that he was the leaker, and although he has always professed his innocence, he was sentenced to three and a half years in prison.

• Poland "ready" to host NATO nuclear weapons, President Andrzej Duda says. Poland, a NATO member and staunch supporter of Ukraine, shares a border with both Russia's Kaliningrad exclave and with Belarus, Moscow's ally. "If our allies decide to deploy nuclear arms on our territory as part of nuclear sharing, to reinforce NATO's eastern flank, we are ready to do so," Duda said in an interview published by the Fakt daily. Moscow in response warned it would take steps to "ensure its security" if Warsaw got the weapons.

• N. Korea says Kim guided simulated nuclear counterattack drills for 1st time. The announcement came a day after South Korea said the North fired several short-range ballistic missiles from the Pyongyang region. They flew about 300 kilometers before falling into the East Sea. The North's main newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, said the drills were conducted within a national nuclear weapons management system as it denounced recent joint military drills by South Korea and the United States.

• The cult of ‘my truth’ - NPR is only the latest institution to fall to woke relativism. It’s never a good sign when a society’s cultural elites start to see facts as an inconvenience. When leading figures in the media describe the truth as an obstacle to ‘getting things done’, you know you’re in serious trouble. These are the words of Katherine Maher, the new CEO of America’s National Public Radio (NPR). During a TED talk in 2022, when Maher was still CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia, she announced that ‘our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that is getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done’.

• Why Indonesia Is China’s New Best Friend in Southeast Asia. When Indonesia’s President-elect Prabowo Subianto chose to visit China months before his inauguration, it caused eyebrows to raise across the region. Jakarta has long sought to balance its relationship with Beijing and its close ties with the US, so to send such a strong message caught many off guard. Yet the blossoming relationship is a sign that these Asian economic giants are finding fresh ways to engage. China and Indonesia’s friendship is being cemented along the lines of increased opportunities for investment, but it’s not just that. Indonesians are increasingly concerned about the Biden administration’s failure to restrain Israel’s actions in Gaza.

• The Wikipedia fundraising scam. Wikipedia, and its parent organization Wikimedia, has been making the rounds on Twitter. This seems to be because Chris Rufo is attacking the new CEO of NPR (US public ‘radio’), Katherine Maher. It turns out that Maher previously served as the CEO of Wikimedia. This got a lot of people looking into her behavior there, and this brought up the Wikipedia fundraising scam into the limelight. It’s another anti-European (and anti-USA), anti-male, quasi-Marxist organization. This is what your donations to Wikipedia are going to. Wikipedia spends more money on left-wing causes than actually running an encyclopedia, and by a very long-shot.

• Russia vetos UN resolution to prevent nuclear arms race in space. The resolution, sponsored by the United States and Japan, would have called on all countries not to develop or deploy nuclear arms or other weapons of mass destruction in space, which are already banned under a 1967 international treaty. Russia’s UN Ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, dismissed the resolution as “absolutely absurd and politicised,” and said it didn’t go far enough in banning all types of weapons in space. The vote in the 15-member Security Council was 13 in favour, Russia opposed and China abstaining.

• Now We Are Supposed to Cheer Government Surveillance? They are wearing us down with shocking headlines and opinions. They come daily these days, with increasingly implausible claims that leave your jaw on the floor. The rest of the text is perfunctory. The headline is the takeaway, and the part designed to demoralize, deconstruct, and disorient. A few weeks ago, the New York Times told us that “As It Turns Out, the Deep State Is Pretty Awesome.” These are the same people who claim that Trump is trying to get rid of democracy. The Deep State is the opposite of democracy, unelected and unaccountable in every way, impervious to elections and the will of the people. Now we have the NYT celebrating this.

• Washington has lost touch with reality. If it doesn't adapt, the world will pay. The US-led rules-based international system is a more recent evolution of American political thinking: a self-referential mindset twisted to the interests of Washington and its allies. The global order is shifting from a unipolar configuration centred on the US to a multipolar one. Throughout history, empires have risen and then collapsed. US policymakers would be wise to adjust to these rules of history and give up on the notion of their indispensability. They now face a binary choice: accept history’s verdict, as the UK has progressively done since 1945, or catastrophically resist it.

• On Donald Trump’s ‘Truth Social’ he writes his views about JFK Jr - “I lived with RFK Jr. in New York and watched him convince Governor Cuomo to make Environmental moves that were outright NASTY. Upstate New York was not allowed to drill or frack as Ohio, Pennsylvania, and others ripped off New York Energy. Because of this, prices have skyrocketed all over that part of the Country, but especially Upstate New York and New England. Their Energy Costs are the highest in the U.S., with the exception of California, run by Gavin Newscum, the Worst Governor in the State’s History. I’d even take Biden over Junior’, because our Country would last a year or two longer prior to collapse - But it would be dead either way. His Views on Vaccines are FAKE, as is everything else about his Candidacy. Let the Democrats have RFK Jr. They deserve him!”

• The strange death of the family - The world is sleepwalking towards a depopulation crisis. Last year’s global population growth was the smallest since 1950. Far from humans breeding themselves out of existence, today almost half of the world’s people live in countries with fertility rates well below replacement level. This week, the US Census announced the lowest birthrate in American history. Rather than relentlessly continuing to rise, as per Ehrlich’s prophecies, the UN predicts that the world’s population will peak between 2053 and in 2086. By 2100, the rate of growth will have virtually stalled. We are entering demographic territory not seen since the plague-cursed Medieval period.

Science

• It’s ‘irresponsible’ to ignore widespread consciousness across animal world, dozens of scientists argue. There is good reason to believe fish, amphibians, molluscs and insects are sentient, according to a new declaration signed by three dozen scientists. Many scientists and philosophers have argued that humans’ limitations — as a species with a dense internal monologue, a reliance on sight and a culture built on spoken language — can blind us to how sentience might work in other species.

• Study suggests that cells possess a hidden communication system. For decades, scientists have viewed DNA as the sole source of cellular information. This DNA blueprint instructs cells on how to build proteins and carry out essential functions. However, new research at Moffitt led by Dipesh Niraula, Ph.D., and Robert Gatenby, M.D., has discovered a nongenomic information system that operates alongside DNA, enabling cells to gather information from the environment and respond quickly to changes.

Technology

• NASA's Voyager 1 resumes sending engineering updates to Earth. For the first time since November, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems. The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again. The probe and its twin, Voyager 2, are the only spacecraft to ever fly in interstellar space (the space between stars). Voyager 1 stopped sending readable science and engineering data back to Earth on Nov. 14, 2023, even though mission controllers could tell the spacecraft was still receiving their commands and otherwise operating normally.

• LAW AI-BIDING Cops testing AI body camera that ‘writes its own police reports’ in five minutes and boast it’s ‘exceeded expectations’. Security tech giant Axon says its Draft One is revolutionary. And the company hopes that it could give police more time to focus on other parts of their jobs. Police have already been trialing the system. And Axon says that it's saving roughly an hour of a day per office. It works by uploading the audio from body camera footage. This will be automatically transcribed and processed into a police report.

• Claude 3 Opus has stunned AI researchers with its intellect and 'self-awareness' — does this mean it can think for itself? Claude 3 is impressive in more ways than simply acing its benchmarking tests  — the LLM shocked experts with its apparent signs of awareness and self-actualization. While the hype and excitement behind Claude 3 is somewhat justified in terms of the results it delivered compared with other LLMs, its impressive human-like showcases are likely to be learned rather than examples of authentic AI self-expression. That may come in the future – say, with the rise of artificial general intelligence (AGI) — but it is not this day.

Ukraine

• The House Ukraine package is a defeat for populists. With a price tag of almost $100 billion, a package of military aid to Ukraine, Israel, and other American allies has just passed the United States House of Representatives. The triumph of this bill exemplifies how a politics of burn-it-all-down outrage actually blocks populist policies. Many “based” Republicans on the Hill have inveighed against funding for Ukraine and insisted on the need to stop the border crisis. Instead, the Republican-controlled House has now passed a bill that realises the principal foreign policy aims of the Biden administration — and populists got nothing on immigration.

• Russian court orders seizure of $440mn from JPMorgan. The move highlights some of the fallout western companies are feeling from the punitive measures against Moscow. It is also further evidence of the difficulties western lenders are encountering when trying to follow through with pledges to close their Russia operations since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The seizure order, published in the Russian court register on Wednesday, targets funds in JPMorgan’s accounts and shares in its Russian subsidiaries, according to the ruling issued by the arbitration court in St Petersburg. The assets had been frozen by authorities in the wake of the western sanctions.

• The US secretly sent long-range ATACMS to Ukraine — and Kyiv used them. The Biden administration last month secretly shipped long-range missiles to Ukraine for the first time in the two-year war — and Kyiv has already used the weapon twice to strike deep behind Russian lines. In March, the U.S. quietly approved the transfer of a number of Army Tactical Missile Systems with a range of nearly 200 miles, said a senior Biden administration official and two U.S. officials, allowing President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s forces to put at risk more Russian targets inside Ukrainian sovereign territory. The administration will include additional long-range ATACMS in a new $1 billion package of military aid President Joe Biden approved on Wednesday, one of the U.S. officials said.

Vaccines

• Pfizer ‘Chose Not To’ Tell Regulators About SV40 Sequence in COVID Shots: Health Canada Official. A senior Health Canada official says pharma giant Pfizer made a conscious decision not to advise regulators that its mRNA COVID-19 vaccine contained a DNA sequence from the Simian Virus 40 (SV40). This information appears among multiple emails between staff from key drug regulators, including Health Canada (HC), the U.S. Food and Drugs Administration (FDA), and the European Medicines Agency (EMA). The information was obtained through an access-to-information request.

• Vaccines, autism and an epidemic of official lies. AUTISM rates have escalated from 1 in 10,000 in the 1970s to 1 in 36 today, according to 2024 figures released by the US public health agency Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). As you might expect with such a worrying statistic, the CDC acted promptly and decisively: they renamed April’s ‘Autism Awareness Month’ and are now calling it ‘Autism Acceptance Month’. The horrific increase might have been halted if the government had acted when the vaccine-autism link was first made but they did not. Children’s Health Defence say they have uncovered an alleged fraud used to dismiss the vaccine-autism link and filed a motion on National Autism Day, April 2, to compel the government to release the facts.