COVID-19
New Scandal, Same Story
From the Brownstone Institute
Mr. Bates vs the Post Office tells the sorry tale through the eyes of one brave man, Alan Bates, unflinchingly supported by his wife Suzanne Sercombe, who kept fighting the entire system and establishment to clear his name, exonerate their colleagues, and indict the senior executives.
The UK has been consumed by a scandal involving the use of faulty accounting software, Horizon from Fujitsu, used by the Post Office to accuse postmasters and postmistresses of stealing funds. Under UK law, the Post Office is empowered to prosecute alleged offenders directly. Between 1999 and 2015, an astonishing 700-750 hardworking and conscientious managers of local community post offices, often the pillars of society and the very backbone of small businesses in the country, were convicted.
Their protestations of innocence and suggestions of glitches in the software were dismissed: the computer does not lie, the courts were told, and they accepted the infallibility of technology. Many were coerced into pleading guilty because they could not afford to fight a state behemoth. They lost the respect of their peers, many were ruined financially, several went to jail, and some committed or tried to commit suicide.
It was only in 2019 that High Court Judge Peter Fraser cleared the postmasters and pinned responsibility for the financial discrepancies on the software. The Criminal Cases Review Commission has described the scandal as the ‘biggest single series of wrongful convictions in British legal history.’ But the scandal wasn’t over yet. Their efforts to overturn the wrongful convictions and receive reparations have been painfully slow and around 70 claimants died in the interim with their names still not cleared. As of January 2024, just 93 convictions have been reversed and only 30 people have received any compensation.
Although the scandal has been bubbling away under the radar for more than 20 years, a four-part ITV dramatisation that screened recently finally caught the public’s attention, and then some. Mr. Bates vs the Post Office tells the sorry tale through the eyes of one brave man, Alan Bates, unflinchingly supported by his wife Suzanne Sercombe, who kept fighting the entire system and establishment to clear his name, exonerate their colleagues, and indict the senior executives. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has pledged to introduce a Bill this year to exonerate all the postmasters convicted through the dodgy Horizon-based evidence.
The Metropolitan Police have launched an investigation into potential fraud, perjury, and perverting the course of justice.
There are many parallels of this scandal with the Covid saga over the last four years. In what follows, I draw in particular on comments on the Horizon scandal in two recent articles in the UK Telegraph by columnists Allison Pearson (which attracted nearly 5,000 online comments) and Allister Heath (2,600 comments), and a third article in the Conservative Woman by Professor Angus Dalgleish.
The first obvious parallel is the blind faith in computers and technology that was untested in the real world. The two equivalents in the case of Covid are the elevation of mathematical models to science and the use of unreliable PCR tests, especially with elevated cycle threshold counts. The PCR machine can be made to run multiple ‘cycles’ (like a washing machine) to keep amplifying the target viral material in the sample to make it detectable. The CT value, the number of cycles it takes to detect the virus, becomes increasingly less accurate beyond 25-28 CT yet in some cases it was raised up to 40 and those who tested positive were treated as Covid cases.
Another parallel is in the awarding of state honors and medals to the perpetrators of mass cruelty. The then-CEO of the Post Office Paula Vennells got a CBE for her services to the PO, (she has since bowed to public pressure to hand back the honour) while the number of health officials and scientists receiving honours have been sickeningly high.
A third is in the refusal of ministers and parliamentarians to listen to the ordinary people desperate to get their honour and lives back.
The Post Office minister at the time, Sir (another one) Ed Davy, refuses to accept responsibility and instead blames it all on civil servants: they lied to him on an industrial scale! In fact it is the complicity of all the top institutions and their smug and self-righteous senior personnel – from cabinet ministers to judges, lawyers, executives, investigators, the Post Office board and the Fujitsu board, the engineers, and technicians – that has been so sickeningly repeated in the Covid years.
It seemingly did not occur to anyone to ask why over 750 managers with hitherto unblemished records were suddenly all committing financial fraud at the same time, which coincided with the mass rollout of a new accounting software to post office branches across the country. No one seems prepared to stand up for the victims of the wrongs and the harms.
And no one still today is prepared to inquire into the dramatic explosion of reported adverse events and excess deaths that coincide with lockdowns and mass vaccinations. They too have encountered unconscionable delays in having their cases investigated and compensation awarded. In a related vein, very few countries seem prepared to take back healthcare workers and civil servants dismissed for refusing to comply with vaccine mandates.
A fourth commonality is the role of Andrew Bridgen MP crying in the wilderness in both tragedies that something wrong was happening to the Horizon- and vaccine-injured that needed to be looked at. While his name has become familiar in the time of Covid, he had the conviction and the courage to act on it in trying, in vain, to highlight the plight of the postmasters for many years.
A fifth common theme is the class divide, where the rapacious political, bureaucratic, and business elites got the financial and social rewards but the harms, pain, and suffering were borne by the workers. The rewards – promotions, bonuses, honours – for ruining so many innocent, decent, honourable lives really stick in the craw.
A final common theme is that justice will not be seen to be done and the sense of justice will not be appeased unless many of the top people responsible are put behind bars. There will be no emotional closure for the victims and their families and no effective deterrent to future wrongdoing by jumped-up and condescending members of the ruling class without full and transparent criminal justice accountability. As Heath writes, the postmasters, ‘the best of Britain, were persecuted by the worst of Britain: the overpromoted corporate-bureaucratic class, the useless apparatchiks of Britain’s Kafkaesque bureaucracies, the unaccountable arms-length bodies, the out of control lawyers, the civil servants and the subsidy-hungry corporations.’
What we need to close this particular circle is both a proper inquiry and a human-interest personalised TV dramatisation of the Covid-related injustices inflicted by the unholy collusion between the different components of Big State, Big Pharma, Big Tech, and the mainstream media.
Republished from The Spectator Australia
Author
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Emily Kopp
The letter, exclusively shared with the Daily Caller News Foundation, seeks more details about those deaths and the passive U.S. vaccine safety surveillance system and complacent Food and Drug Administration (FDA) bureaucracy under the Biden administration that delayed their reporting for years.
“Nobody wanted to admit that these things were causing death. This is absolutely a case of willful ignorance,” Johnson said in an interview with the DCNF.
As a nonprofit, we are dependent on the generosity of our readers.
Please consider making a small donation of any amount here.
Thank you!
The letter requests from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) “all records referring or relating to the review of the 96 reports of death following a COVID-19 vaccine … including but not limited to, any memorandum or report created following that review and the data underlying the reports.”
“I am grateful that we now have individuals at our federal health agencies who care about vaccine safety and efficacy. I am, however, disappointed that despite having subpoenaed HHS for the type of data and information described in Dr. Prasad’s memo, it does not appear to have been provided to my office,” the letter reads.
HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“This is a profound revelation. For the first time, the US FDA will acknowledge that COVID-19 vaccines have killed American children. Healthy young children who faced tremendously low risk of death were coerced, at the behest of the Biden administration, via school and work mandates, to receive a vaccine that could result in death. In many cases, such mandates were harmful. It is difficult to read cases where kids aged 7 to 16 may be dead as a result of covid vaccines,” Prasad wrote. “There is no doubt that without this FDA commissioner [Marty Makary], we would not have performed this investigation and identified this safety concern. This fact also demands serious introspection and reform.”
“One reason I’m writing this letter is that this memo needs much greater attention. This should be a blockbuster,” the Wisconsin senator told the DCNF.
Johnson, who has investigated the issue of COVID vaccine-linked adverse events since June 2021, also seeks more clarity about why FDA only examined a fraction of total reports to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). He noted that the 96 deaths scrutinized by FDA staff in its investigation represents a sliver of the raw VAERS reports of 9,299 deaths worldwide within two days of vaccination.
Distinguishing which VAERS reports indicate genuine fatal side effects and which represent mere coincidences requires autopsy reports, which regulators and physicians often do not request because of a ideological reluctance to acknowledge that vaccines can carry risks, Johnson told the DCNF. Johnson said he has spoken to families who suspected a vaccine injury but struggled to obtain autopsies.
“With some of these officials at federal health agencies and within the medical establishment, vaccines are religion. The do not want to muddy the water with facts,” he said.
Johnson’s letter notes that Prasad acknowledged a culture at FDA “where vaccines are exculpated rather than indicted in cases of ambiguity,” and that the true number of deaths is likely higher.
Johnson has as chair of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations investigated the Biden administration’s headlong expansion of COVID vaccines and booster shots to healthy young adults and children.
His committee uncovered internal federal documents showing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention never updated its vaccine surveillance tool “V-Safe” to include cardiac symptoms, despite naming myocarditis as a potential adverse event by October 2020, per a May report. The investigation also found that top officials at FDA obstructed a warning to pediatricians and other providers about the risk of myocarditis after the May 2021 authorization of the Pfizer vaccine for 12 to 15-year-olds, months after Israeli health officials first detected the safety signal in February 2021.
Johnson’s letter highlights missing safety studies that the drugmakers never conducted.
Under the Biden administration, the FDA waived the responsibility of the drugmakers to conduct post-market studies that they had pledged to regulators, scientific advisors on the FDA Vaccines and Related Products Advisory Committee, and the public that they would complete. These uncompleted studies include promised research into subclinical myocarditis, undocumented rates of heart inflammation without obvious symptoms, Prasad’s memo states.
Johnson’s letter reveals the committee has not received any records from HHS about the liability shield for COVID-19 vaccines.
A public health media personality reported on Dec. 11 that FDA staff had downgraded the certainty with which it can attribute some the deaths to the vaccine in the weeks since Prasad received their top line results — echoing prior leaks from career officials aimed at undermining FDA’s new bosses.
Center for Drug Evaluation and Research Acting Director Tracy Beth Hoeg first concluded in a separate analysis that there were in fact deaths in children in the summer, but career staff leaked the results to reporters who “portrayed the incident as Dr. Hoeg attempting to create a false fear regarding vaccines” soon after, per Prasad’s memo.
Johnson’s letter seeks documentation of Hoeg’s meeting, including “a list of all attendees.”
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
China is escalating its legal fight with Missouri after the state secured a massive court victory earlier this year over Beijing’s role in the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the state attorney general’s office.
Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway announced Tuesday that the People’s Government of Wuhan Municipality, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Wuhan Institute of Virology have filed a $50 billion lawsuit against the state, claiming Missouri poses an “economic and reputational threat” to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The suit comes as Missouri moves to seize Chinese-owned assets to collect on a historic federal court judgment the state won in March.
Missouri first sued China in 2020, seeking $25 billion in damages “for causing and exacerbating the COVID-19 pandemic” and for hoarding critical medical supplies while the virus spread, according to the state attorney general’s office. China and several affiliated entities were ordered to pay Missouri roughly $24.49 billion, plus post-judgment interest. Senior U.S. District Judge Stephen Limbaugh ruled that China and the other defendants “failed to appear or otherwise answer after being properly served,” resulting in the default judgment.
As a nonprofit, we are dependent on the generosity of our readers.
Please consider making a small donation of any amount here.
Thank you!
Missouri maintained that China was attempting to shield itself from legal consequences by relying on proxy organizations to speak on its behalf — an accusation Beijing now disputes in its own lawsuit against the state.
In its lawsuit, China alleges that Missouri’s actions have had “negative effects on the soft power” of Wuhan and have “belittled the social evaluation” as well as adversely affected the “productivity and commercialization of scientific and technological achievements” of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The filing further alleges that Missouri’s “vexatious litigation” has “defamed Plaintiffs’ reputation, resulting in huge economic losses of the Plaintiffs, and deeply endangering sovereignty, security and development interests of China.”
The suit names the state of Missouri, Republican Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt and the former Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey as the defendants.
China’s lawsuit demands the defendants “issue public apologies on New York Times, CNN, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, YouTube and other American media or internet platforms, and People’s Daily, Xinhuanet and other Chinese media or internet platforms.”
Hanaway rejected the demand and said the state remains focused on enforcing the federal judgment.
“I find it extremely telling that the Chinese blame our great state for ‘belittling the social evaluation’ of The Wuhan Institute of Virology. This lawsuit is a stalling tactic and tells me that we have been on the right side of this issue all along,” Hanaway said in a statement. “We stand undeterred in our mission to collect on our $24 billion judgment that was lawfully handed down in federal court.”
Schmitt described China’s suit as “frivolous lawfare, attempting to absolve themselves of all wrongdoing in the early days of the pandemic.”
“This is their way of distracting from what the world already knows, China has blood on its hands. China lied about the origins of COVID virus, they tried to cover it up, and they upended the world by creating a global pandemic that resulted in immense human loss,” Schmitt added.
Missouri, Hanaway said, is continuing efforts to obtain certification that would allow the state to seize Chinese-owned assets, including real estate, financial interests, and other holdings tied to the defendants.
Death by a thousand clicks – government censorship of Canada’s internet
Schools should go back to basics to mitigate effects of AI
Danielle Smith slams Skate Canada for stopping events in Alberta over ban on men in women’s sports
Chinese Billionaire Tried To Build US-Born Baby Empire As Overseas Elites Turn To American Surrogates
-
Alberta2 days ago
Danielle Smith slams Skate Canada for stopping events in Alberta over ban on men in women’s sports
-
International1 day agoTOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE: Trump cuts off Venezuela’s oil lifeline
-
Crime2 days agoThe Uncomfortable Demographics of Islamist Bloodshed—and Why “Islamophobia” Deflection Increases the Threat
-
COVID-191 day ago
Senator Demands Docs After ‘Blockbuster’ FDA Memo Links Child Deaths To COVID Vaccine
-
Business21 hours agoCanada Hits the Brakes on Population
-
Daily Caller10 hours ago‘Almost Sounds Made Up’: Jeffrey Epstein Was Bill Clinton Plus-One At Moroccan King’s Wedding, Per Report
-
Energy2 days agoLiberals Twisted Themselves Into Pretzels Over Their Own Pipeline MOU
-
COVID-191 day ago
China Retaliates Against Missouri With $50 Billion Lawsuit In Escalating Covid Battle