New Scandal, Same Story

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

Ramesh Thakur

Ramesh Thakur, a Brownstone Institute Senior Scholar, is a former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General, and emeritus professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University.

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Trump Team names acting NIH Director, moving out senior officials who mislead the public

Published on January 24, 2025

Todayville

Paul D. Thacker

Investigative Reporter; Former Investigator United States Senate; Former Fellow Safra Ethics Center, Harvard University

Trump Team Taps Dr. Matthew J. Memoli as Acting NIH Director, to Control Political Games and Push Aside Lawrence Tabak

“He took risk and stood up to Tony Fauci when no-one else on the inside of NIAID would.” – Dr Robert Malone

The Trump transition team has apparently tapped senior NIH researcher Matthew J. Memoli to serve as acting director to help calm the agency until the Senate confirms Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya to run the NIH. Memoli won the NIH director’s award in 2021 for supervising a national study of undiagnosed COVID cases and runs a research team at the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) formerly headed by Tony Fauci, who Biden pardoned on his last day in office for any COVID-related offenses.

NIH Director Monica M. Bertagnolli stepped down from her position last week, after the Trump transition team advised her to resign, placing Deputy Director Lawrence A. Tabak as the agency’s top official. The new administration and congressional leaders view Tabak as dishonest and manipulative, and NIH insiders contacted for this story complain that Tabak helped Fauci mislead the public about grants Fauci provided to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where some suspect the pandemic started.

“They didn’t take action on the COVID origins question,” an official inside the NIH Director’s office said. “And there’s a continued lack of transparency.”

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The Trump administration sent a memo two days ago to federal health agencies telling them to halt external communications such as issuing documents, guidance or notices, until such documents can be approved by “a presidential appointee.” While all administrations control final approval of agency communications, federal employees immediately leaked the memo to reporters at the Washington Post and NPR.

Although the memo says nothing about halting private meetings, the NIH took the extraordinary step of then shutting down private study sections that review scientific grant approvals, a move that seems designed to harass the incoming administration.

“Researchers facing ‘a lot uncertainty, fear and panic’,” reads a breathless report from Science Magazine.

“The memo doesn’t say anything about private meetings, and they shut down these study sections to scare everyone into believing [research] studies will shut down and labs will shutter,” said an NIH official in the Director’s office. “This is a manipulation tactic by the NIH Director’s office to tar the new administration: ‘This is the fascism we expected.’”

Tabak’s demotion comes after Congress and independent reporters spent years trying to uncover how the pandemic started, only to meet obfuscation and “slow rolling” from Tabak. In one example, House congressional leaders demanded NIH explain funding Fauci provided to EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that was run by Peter Daszak, and which funded gain-of-function virus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The NIH ignored Republican congressional requests for over a year. When Tabak eventually sent a response to Congress on October 20, 2021, he simultaneously leaked the letter to friendly science writers at the New York Times. The letter noted that EcoHealth had failed to report data and research as required by the NIH grant.

“It’s all smoke and mirrors with them at the NIH,” said a congressional investigator. “And then they get friendly media to carry their water.”

Congress sent the NIH a letter a month later demanding NIH explain changes they secretly made to an NIH webpage on October 20, 2021, the day before Tabak admitted that EcoHealth Alliance was out of compliance with NIH grant regulations. The webpage provided the definition for “gain of function research.” However, the NIH had changed the definiton to make it appear EcoHealth Alliance had not performed gain of function research.

Tabak’s name came up again in August last year when reporter Jimmy Tobias released a tranche of NIH emails he got from a public records request. Emails showed Tabak and other NIH officials conspiring to avoid answering questions about EcoHealth Alliance early in the pandemic, from the chairs of several House committees.

“We are going to draft a response to the letter that doesn’t actually answer the questions in the letter but rather presents a narrative of what happened at a high level…” wrote NIH associate director for legislative policy, Adrienne Hallett, in a July 2020 email. Copied in on the exchange is Lawrence Tabak. “The Committee may come back for other documents but I’m hoping to run out the clock.”

“Sounds like a good plan,” responded Francis Collins, then director of the NIH.

“Thanks so much Adrienne!” replied Michael Lauer, the NIH’s deputy director of extramural research. “I’ll draft something today.”

In the Biden administration’s final week, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) finally debarred EcoHealth Alliance and Peter Daszak “to protect the Federal Government’s business interests” after congressional investigators uncovered NIH wrongdoing.

Acting Director Memoli

While in his role as Acting Director, Memoli will likely continue his studies of respiratory viruses and their vaccines. In late 2021, Memoli led a debate inside the NIH on the ethics of the COVID vaccine mandates, putting him at odds with Fauci, who promoted the vaccines for the White House during a time when the media denigrated any COVID vaccine critic as an “anti-vaxxer.”

“I do vaccine trials. I, in fact, help create vaccines,” Memoli told the Wall Street Journal in 2021. Memoli said blanket vaccinations of people at low risk of severe disease with the COVID vaccines could hamper the development of more-robust population immunity from acquired infection. However, he supported COVID vaccination in the elderly, obese, and other high-risk. “Part of my career is to share my expert opinions, right or wrong.…I mean, if they all end up saying I’m wrong, that’s fine. I want to have the discussion.”

Trump transition team members say they may be replacing other senior NIH officials, such as Renate Myles, who runs the agency’s communications department and coordinates activities across all the NIH’s 27 institutes and centers. Myles is known in the NIH Director’s office as a loyal foot soldier to Fauci and someone who helped to spread the media myth that it was a “conspiracy theory” to question if the pandemic started in Wuhan lab that Fauci funded.

“They politicized the issue but then attributed the politicization to Republicans or anyone who questioned them—anyone but themselves,” said the NIH official.

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COVID-19

‘That Science Should Not Have Been Done’: Former CDC Director Compares Fauci To Oppenheimer

Published on January 23, 2025

Todayville

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Mariane Angela

Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Robert Redfield appeared Wednesday on Newsmax to discuss Dr. Anthony Fauci’s preemptive pardon by former President Joe Biden.

“I hope that it gives Fauci an opportunity to try to be more honest and transparent about the decisions that he made and what he did. I’m not confident that that’s going to happen,” Redfield said during an appearance on “Rob Schmitt Tonight.”

“You know, I also think it’s odd for Biden to pardon him prospectively when he hasn’t been accused of any direct crime. I know if I was in that position that I wouldn’t like that because it does imply that I actually did something wrong.”

Former CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield appeared Wednesday on Newsmax to discuss Dr. Anthony Fauci’s preemptive pardon

Redfield also talked about events portrayed in the 2023 film “Oppenheimer.”

The former director said he hopes — similar to J. Robert Oppenheimer’s eventual realization of his impact on global warfare — Fauci might come to terms with the ramifications of his decisions before and during the pandemic.

“You know, when I watched the ‘Oppenheimer’ movie and I watched the scenes when Oppenheimer finally realized what happened with the science that he gave to the world, particularly when President Truman decided to use the atomic bomb a second time, and he realized that he had opened up really a big problem in terms of giving science to create a weapon that could kill hundreds of thousands of people. I don’t know if Tony realizes, and he’s very sensitive to this issue,” Redfield said when asked if Fauci recognized his responsibility.

Redfield said he wonders whether Fauci acknowledges the full extent of his actions, particularly what Redfield said was Fauci’s role in funding gain-of-function research.

“I do think Tony did mislead the nation, and he did mislead the Congress. He did make some bad decisions when it came to funding the research and gain-of-function research in China,” Redfield said.

Redfield said he hopes Fauci would act transparent and accountable in his actions.

“I think it’s really important. If one good thing comes from this is we get a moratorium on gain-of-function research. I do hope Tony takes advantage of this opportunity to basically be more transparent and let people understand why he made the decisions he did and also admit some accountability for the negative consequences of those decisions,” Redfield said, adding “that [that] science should not have been done.”

During the last hours of his presidency on Monday, Biden issued preemptive pardons to Fauci, Gen. Mark Milley, and the members of the Jan. 6 committee and said that they should not be subjected to “unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions.” The pardon spans back to 2014, encompassing Fauci’s role on the White House Coronavirus Task Force and his position as the chief medical advisor to Biden.

Accusations against Fauci include lying to Congress and circumventing requests under the Freedom of Information Act. Fauci has consistently described COVID-19 as a “natural occurrence” and denied any link between his agency’s subawards to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origins of the virus. Several experts have accused Fauci of committing perjury during his congressional testimonies, particularly in his denials that the viruses he supported could have evolved into COVID-19.