So what should we expect from the sanctions? Western pundits and commentators have little doubt: the sanctions will hamstring the Russian economy, sow discontent among the Russian people and elites alike, and possibly even cause the downfall of the Putin regime. At the very least, we’re told, they will hinder Russia’s war efforts. But history suggests otherwise: see Iraq, or more recently Iran. Far more likely is that this turns out to be the latest Western strategic miscalculation in a long list of strategic blunders, of which the United States’ inglorious withdrawal from Afghanistan is just the most recent example.
After all, Russia has been preparing for this moment for quite some time. Following the first wave of Western sanctions, in 2014, and partly in retaliation against them, Putin embarked on what analysts have dubbed a “Fortress Russia” strategy, building up the country’s international reserves and diversifying them away from US dollars and British pounds, reducing its foreign exposure, boosting its economic cooperation with China, and pursuing import substitution strategies in several industries, including food, medicine and technology, in an effort to insulate Russia as much as possible from external shocks.
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Dr. Philip McMillan interviews vaccine developer Geert Vanden Bossche and Robert Malone MD, inventor of mRNA vaccine platform.
Interview highlights
- Geert Vanden Bossche (GV) at 17m: Massive surges of the infection rates, especially in countries with an aggressive mass-vaccination policy, was predictable.
- Robert Malone (RM) at 23m: The Israeli data is a concern: we are seeing signs that the durability of the [Pfizer vaccine] is very poor.
- RM at 26m: The vaccinated are a higher risk of becoming superspreaders because they’re replicating virus at the same or higher levels than the unvaccinated but they feel better.
- GV at 28m: The effect of mass-vaccination is an ideal breeding-ground for more infections spread. However, if still have a substantial proportion that is non-vaccinated, you will see a reduction of infectious pressure.
- GV at 31m: The unvaccinated are ‘the vaccum cleaners’ who will eliminate a lot of virus from the population by mounting long-lived immunity and contribute to the reduction of infectious pressure. The vaccinated cannot contribute to the infectious pressure.
- RM at 33m: The truth is that it’s the vaccinated that are creating the risk, not the unvaccinated. The unvaccinated are serving as virus sinks. The probability of them having significant disease and death is minute. The real risk is the vaccinated who have received very focused spike proteins.
- GV at 35m: It is not a problem of individuals being vaccinated. The problem is a policy of mass-vaccination. That is how the more infections variant can adapt to the population and become dominant.
- GV at 58m: Young people are now getting the disease pretty fast because of the increased infectious pressure [due to mass-vaccination].
- RM at 1h10m: There are disincentives to asking questions about data for vaccine-enhanced replication and antibody-dependent enhancement; no-one wants fund the studies.
- GV at 1h12m: Regulators have no experience with the current situation where there are very many unknowns when deploying a new vaccine to the public.
- RM at 1h17m: The FDA is not structured to detect adverse advents and have admitted they cannot evaluate safety. Two of the top [US] regulators resigned because the FDA is no longer independent from the policy-making apparatus which exists in the Executive Branch [of US Government].
- RM at 1h24m: There is an intrinsic conflict of interest in the CDC in that it is funded to promote vaccines but also has the under-funded mission of evaluating their safety.
- RM at 1h25m: Policy recommendations together with Peter Navarro (American economist and author):
- Reserve vaccines for the high-risk population and make it available globally.
- Make early interventions [like Ivermectin and Vitamin D] widely available. Many are very effective when administered early and aggressively.
- Make home-test kits available (acknowledging that they have a bias to false positives) and make more specific tests in physicians offices.
- Address the fear by showing that currently most people are not at risk.
- GV at 1h30m: The most important thing is to reduce the infectious pressure. This is a huge threat to all those who were naturally protected, such as young people. The worst thing to do is to vaccinate the younger age groups because they are ‘the buffer’ of long-lived immunity. They are our hope for herd immunity. We will not get herd immunity from mass-vaccination.
- GV at 1h39m: We need to compare the ratio of severe disease of deaths in vaccinated and unvaccinated. We are seeing more case fatalities in the vaccinated but the numbers are not being made available.
- RM at 1h41m: There is a persistent signal in the UK data that there seems to be an excess deaths in the vaccinated and yet a relative deficit in the vaccinated. This is paradoxical.
- GV at 1h47m: Discrimination against the non-vaccinated is complete scientific nonsense. We should care about susceptibility. What is relevant is how can we protect ourselves best.
Slides:
Backup mirrors:
Rob Verkerk, Founder, Executive and Scientific Director of the Alliance for Natural Health International, a scientist who has for 30 years been exploring positive ways to span the gulfs between science and the law, between academia and industry, and between governments and their people.
Backup mirror:
A presentation made to the National AEFI (adverse event following immunisation) Committee on March 31 recorded that there had been 180 deaths till that time and three-fourths of the deaths happened within three days of the shot.
In other serious adverse events too, the overwhelming majority took place in the three-day window. Even as AEFI deaths are reported daily, causality assessment by the National AEFI Committee appears to be lagging with information about just 10 deaths in the public domain.
From Security Magazine, 29 January 2020, citing the Maplecroft Civil Unrest Index.
A quarterly Civil Unrest Index reveals that over the past year 47 jurisdictions have witnessed a significant uptick in protests, which intensified during the last quarter of 2019.
This includes locations as diverse as Hong Kong, Chile, Nigeria, Sudan, Haiti and Lebanon.During this period, Chile and Hong Kong have plummeted in the ranking of 198 countries, from 91st to 6th and 117th to 26th highest risk respectively, says the Maplecroft Civil Unrest Index. Other hotspots, including Nigeria (ranked 8th), Lebanon (13th) and Bolivia (21st), have also recorded some of the biggest negative swings in the index.
https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/91622-in-2020-47-countries-witness-surge-in-civil-unrest
Scientists are trying to work out why coronavirus cases in India are falling when at one point it looked like the country might overtake the US as the worst-hit nation.
In September the country was reporting some 100,00 new cases per day, but that went into decline in October and is now sitting at around 10,000 per day – leaving experts struggling to explain why.
While the Indian government has been keen to put the apparent success down to its mask-wearing and social distancing laws, few believe these measures alone are responsible for the dip.
Instead, experts believe it may be down to the fact that India’s largest cities have reached herd immunity, meaning the virus has moved to rural areas where it spreads slower and where cases and deaths are far less likely to be tested and logged.
https://www.accuweather.com/en/gb/kensington/w8-7/minute-weather-forecast/323272
In a first, India has demonstrated an offensive swarm drone system that simulated taking down a range of targets, ranging from tanks, terror camps, helipads and fuel dumps at the annual Army Day parade in the capital.
The demonstration, which consisted of 75 drones working autonomously to identify and take down targets with Kamikaze missions, is an early peek into future technology being developed by the Army in partnership with the private industry.