Earlier this week Mark Zuckerberg rocked the world of information with the news that Facebook, Instagram, and his other Meta properties would no longer use third party fact checking groups to censor information.  As the week wraps up, Zuckerberg sits down for an extended conversation with Joe Rogan.  For anyone interested in the world of information, this is a must see / listen.

From the Joe Rogan Experience

Mark Zuckerberg is the chief executive of Meta Platforms Inc., the company behind Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp, Meta Quest, Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, Orion augmented reality glasses, and other digital platforms, devices, and services.

From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

The grand jury commissioned by Gov. DeSantis has released its long-awaited final report on the manufacture and rollout of the COVID shots, finding no actionable crimes under current law but still identifying ‘profound and serious issues involving the process of vaccine development and safety surveillance in the United States.’

A Florida grand jury has released its final report on the manufacture and rollout of the COVID-19 shots, finding no actionable crimes under current law but still identifying “profound and serious issues involving the process of vaccine development and safety surveillance in the United States” for policymakers to resolve.

In December 2022, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis petitioned the Florida Supreme Court to approve a grand jury to determine whether pharmaceutical companies and other medical organizations “engaged in criminal activity or wrongdoing” pertaining to the controversial and harmful shots.

In February 2024, it released its first interim report, which decided that before assessing the shots it first had to understand the risk posed by COVID itself, and so concluded that the 2020 lockdowns did more harm than good, masks were ineffective at stopping the virus, COVID was “statistically almost harmless” to children and most adults, and it was “highly likely” that COVID hospitalization numbers were inflated.

On Tuesday, the grand jury released its final 144-page report. It opens with the somewhat surprising declaration that two conflicting statements – “COVID-19 vaccines were a triumph of science, technology and public health that saved countless lives”; and “COVID-19 vaccines were heedlessly licensed, excessively recommended, and even mandated to broad swathes of people that did not need them, placing their health-and sometimes their lives-at unnecessary risk” – are “both true.”

READ: Peer-reviewed study finds over 1,000% rise in cardiac deaths after COVID-19 shots

The grand jury maintains that the first Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed initiative “produced an effective vaccine in early 2021 that dramatically reduced many of the risks associated with SARS-CoV-2,” but “all the goodwill generated by that amazing achievement was squandered in the following years, as sponsors and federal regulators collaborated to push out booster after booster based on shallow, inaccurate safety and efficacy data, sidelining their own ombudsmen to get doses of these vaccines into the arms of every American, regardless of their underlying risk from the SARS-CoV-2 virus.”

“Our investigative efforts in both of those categories were directed in large part towards Pfizer and Modema, whose rnRNA-based vaccines were the primary focus of our investigation,” the report adds. “Suffice it to say that while we are certain we have not seen everything these companies created with respect to these products (Pfizer essentially admitted this fact), we did receive a lot of relevant information from them, more than we could ever hope to meaningfully review in our limited term. Many of our conclusions are informed by documents we received or on testimony given by their representatives.”

The report condemns Big Pharma’s reluctance to shed light on the full extent of the problem, and the lack of recourse when the worst does happen.

“It is frustrating to this Grand Jury, as it should be frustrating to everyone who reads this report, to know that these sponsors have taken in billions of taxpayer dollars for creating and selling their vaccines; they cannot be sued if something goes wrong with them; they have access to critical information about deaths related to a side effect of their products; and the public does not have access to that information,” it says. “Instead, we are left to speculate, and the research community is left to draw inferences as one-off or two-off histopathological reports detailing the events of this death or that death that trickle into scientific journals slowly, year after year. Somehow, withholding this valuable safety information is not a crime. It certainly should be.”

While its conclusions will be thoroughly dissected by many experts and activists in the days to come, the report’s most immediate takeaway is that current law is inadequate to cure the problems investigators uncovered.

“While we did not find criminal activity, we did find a pattern of deceptive and obfuscatory behavior on the part of sponsors and regulators that often straddled the line between ethical and unethical conduct,” the report says. “More importantly, however, not finding any indictable criminal activity does not mean we did not find any problems. On the contrary, there are profound and serious issues involving the process of vaccine development and safety surveillance in the United States. Some of those are acute, COVID-19-era problems that are unlikely to occur outside the context of another once-in-a-hundred-year pandemic. Others, however, are systemic; they will occur over and over until someone fixes them.”

The report says “it was genuinely striking to us just how many of the problems we found occurred at either the direction or acquiescence of the FDA [U.S. Food & Drug Administration], CDC [Centers for Disease Control & Prevention] and other federal regulators. Nearly every time we found an issue with MRNA-1273 [the Moderna shot] or BNT162b2 [the Pfizer shot], the fingerprints of these agencies were all over the scene, advising that the flagship and surrogate clinical trials be performed in specific ways, authorizing dose after dose and formulation after formulation based on out-of-date immunogenicity comparisons and observational results, and even running interference for sponsors by misleading the American public about validated safety signals.”

To the federal government, the grand jury recommends new clinical trials of both mRNA-based COVID shots, reinstatement of the FDA’s old ban on direct-to-consumer advertising of therapeutics, new controls on the hiring of medical industry insiders and lobbyists for health regulatory positions, restructuring the Vaccines & Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) for greater accountability, mandatory disclosure of anonymized individual patient data as a condition of FDA licensure, and making safety data transparency a condition of liability protection. To the state of Florida, it recommends a series of changes to strengthen grand juries’ ability to obtain the information they seek, as well as more widespread monitoring of wastewater for pathogens.

DeSantis said Tuesday that while his office was still reviewing the report’s details, it was clear that “Big Pharma brought in billions of dollars in profit, and the federal government amplified bogus ‘studies,’ all while suppressing any opposition that went against their preferred narrative. Instead of federal agencies acting as a backstop to bad incentives, they worked closely with Big Pharma as they cut corners, even becoming unpaid advertisers on their behalf.”

“The Grand Jury has made a number of recommendations that should be followed,” the governor declared. “The status quo cannot continue. The American people deserve transparency on how Big Pharma is using their federal tax dollars, and they deserve regulating entities that operate as watchdogs, not cheerleaders.”

The report follows a large body of evidence that identifies significant risks to the COVID shots, which were developed and reviewed in a fraction of the time vaccines usually take under the first Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed initiative.

The federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports 38,190 deaths, 219,170 hospitalizations, 22,082 heart attacks, and 28,769 myocarditis and pericarditis cases as of November 29, among other ailments. CDC researchers have recognized a “high verification rate of reports of myocarditis to VAERS after mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccination,” leading to the conclusion that “under-reporting is more likely” than over-reporting.

An analysis of 99 million people across eight countries published February in the journal Vaccine “observed significantly higher risks of myocarditis following the first, second and third doses” of mRNA-based COVID injections, as well as signs of increased risk of “pericarditis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, and cerebral venous sinus thrombosis,” and other “potential safety signals that require further investigation.” In April, the CDC was forced to release by court order 780,000 previously undisclosed reports of serious adverse reactions, and a study out of Japan found “statistically significant increases” in cancer deaths after third doses of mRNA-based COVID-19 shots and offered several theories for a causal link.

All eyes are currently on returning President Donald Trump and his health team, which will be helmed by prominent vaccine critic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his nominee for Secretary of Health & Human Services. Trump has given mixed signals as to the prospects of reconsidering the shots for which he has long taken credit and has nominated both critics and defenders of establishment COVID measures for a number of administration roles.